cross posting from another forum:

Kurtster wrote:


So if this wealthy district has high school completion rates (90 plus percent) and college attendance rates (roughly 90 percent) that are well above average for the nation (both national figures are around 70 percent*), I'd say they are a good indication of how wealth and resources can provide educational advantages to public school students, wouldn't you?

* (Accurately comparing high school "graduation" or completion rates is very difficult due to different formulae that are used from state to state to arrive at these numbers, admittedly.)

The advantage that wealth and resources bestow is not limited to school spending.  As some of the data you cited indicates, wealthy neighborhoods and school districts tend to have households that are literate and have lots of college-educated parents. These children have early access to books and absorb vocabulary by exposure that helps them do very well on standardized tests used for educational measurements these days, since the teachers who write test items tend to have the same social and cultural background.  They would still tend to do well even if you decided to cut school spending by, for example, reusing ten year old textbooks and increasing class size 10 percent (if you did this, for example, teacher to student ratios in Shaker Heights would still be below the Ohio average of 16:1.

The thing that is worrisome to me about school spending cuts, though, is that the students who can most afford to weather belt tightening (the children of college educated, middle class professional parents) are often the least likely to suffer when budget cuts happen.  Parents of students like these are the most likely to attend school board meetings and most savvy in applying political pressure to steering cuts away from programs and such that will directly affect their children.  Programs that affect the politically less savvy, minorities, special needs students, ESL children, etc, often take the brunt of funding cuts because they have few if any champions to fight for them when the budget cutting process occurs.

Will a ten percent reduction in school funding produce ten percent poorer education?  Not if you ask most politicians and economists (who have somehow decided that they are educational experts), because the metric they use for measuring educational quality is the standardized test.  Standardized tests, from the SAT to the Stanford 9 to various state tests like TAAS, etc. mostly measure your parent's income and education levels.  Cuts to programs that are targeted at the most vulnerable or at-risk student populations often don't get reflected in standardized test score reporting, because administrators and politicians figure out ways to exclude these sorts of students from testing.

Measuring educational quality in a meaningful way is a challenging thing.  Calculating the educational costs of failing to do the most we can to give at-risk children a chance to succeed, and break out of a cultural cycle of poverty and lowered expectations, is a difficult thing.  How do you quantify something like that?  You can give at-risk children chances, you can bus them to a wealthy school, and they may still end up being incarcerated, or dead, before they reach adulthood. I'm not wise enough to have all the answers, but from reading and discussions I've had with teachers and staff who work with at risk kids, and from hearing stories of at-risk kids who overcame the obstacles they faced in childhood, I know that if we focus spending cuts on programs aimed at these sort of children for political motivations, we are taking away what might be one of the few chances they will have to show their true potential.

But the educational reform discussion really needs to be broadened to a social reform discussion.  As James Traub and Richard Rothstein have pointed out, there is only so much schools can do by themselves.  Do we sincerely want children stuck in poverty to not be left behind?  If so, we need to acknowledge and address the deficits in early child care, health care, nutritional, and other disadvantages that these children bring with them to school.

A LOOK AT THE HEALTH-RELATED CAUSES OF LOW STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT

cross posting from another forum:

Kurtster wrote:


So if this wealthy district has high school completion rates (90 plus percent) and college attendance rates (roughly 90 percent) that are well above average for the nation (both national figures are around 70 percent*), I'd say they are a good indication of how wealth and resources can provide educational advantages to public school students, wouldn't you?

* (Accurately comparing high school "graduation" or completion rates is very difficult due to different formulae that are used from state to state to arrive at these numbers, admittedly.)

The advantage that wealth and resources bestow is not limited to school spending.  As some of the data you cited indicates, wealthy neighborhoods and school districts tend to have households that are literate and have lots of college-educated parents. These children have early access to books and absorb vocabulary by exposure that helps them do very well on standardized tests used for educational measurements these days, since the teachers who write test items tend to have the same social and cultural background.  They would still tend to do well even if you decided to cut school spending by, for example, reusing ten year old textbooks and increasing class size 10 percent (if you did this, for example, teacher to student ratios in Shaker Heights would still be below the Ohio average of 16:1.

The thing that is worrisome to me about school spending cuts, though, is that the students who can most afford to weather belt tightening (the children of college educated, middle class professional parents) are often the least likely to suffer when budget cuts happen.  Parents of students like these are the most likely to attend school board meetings and most savvy in applying political pressure to steering cuts away from programs and such that will directly affect their children.  Programs that affect the politically less savvy, minorities, special needs students, ESL children, etc, often take the brunt of funding cuts because they have few if any champions to fight for them when the budget cutting process occurs.

Will a ten percent reduction in school funding produce ten percent poorer education?  Not if you ask most politicians and economists (who have somehow decided that they are educational experts), because the metric they use for measuring educational quality is the standardized test.  Standardized tests, from the SAT to the Stanford 9 to various state tests like TAAS, etc. mostly measure your parent's income and education levels.  Cuts to programs that are targeted at the most vulnerable or at-risk student populations often don't get reflected in standardized test score reporting, because administrators and politicians figure out ways to exclude these sorts of students from testing.

Measuring educational quality in a meaningful way is a challenging thing.  Calculating the educational costs of failing to do the most we can to give at-risk children a chance to succeed, and break out of a cultural cycle of poverty and lowered expectations, is a difficult thing.  How do you quantify something like that?  You can give at-risk children chances, you can bus them to a wealthy school, and they may still end up being incarcerated, or dead, before they reach adulthood. I'm not wise enough to have all the answers, but from reading and discussions I've had with teachers and staff who work with at risk kids, and from hearing stories of at-risk kids who overcame the obstacles they faced in childhood, I know that if we focus spending cuts on programs aimed at these sort of children for political motivations, we are taking away what might be one of the few chances they will have to show their true potential.

But the educational reform discussion really needs to be broadened to a social reform discussion.  As James Traub and Richard Rothstein have pointed out, there is only so much schools can do by themselves.  Do we sincerely want children stuck in poverty to not be left behind?  If so, we need to acknowledge and address the deficits in early child care, health care, nutritional, and other disadvantages that these children bring with them to school.

A LOOK AT THE HEALTH-RELATED CAUSES OF LOW STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT

cross posting from another forum:

Kurtster wrote:


So if this wealthy district has high school completion rates (90 plus percent) and college attendance rates (roughly 90 percent) that are well above average for the nation (both national figures are around 70 percent*), I'd say they are a good indication of how wealth and resources can provide educational advantages to public school students, wouldn't you?

* (Accurately comparing high school "graduation" or completion rates is very difficult due to different formulae that are used from state to state to arrive at these numbers, admittedly.)

The advantage that wealth and resources bestow is not limited to school spending.  As some of the data you cited indicates, wealthy neighborhoods and school districts tend to have households that are literate and have lots of college-educated parents. These children have early access to books and absorb vocabulary by exposure that helps them do very well on standardized tests used for educational measurements these days, since the teachers who write test items tend to have the same social and cultural background.  They would still tend to do well even if you decided to cut school spending by, for example, reusing ten year old textbooks and increasing class size 10 percent (if you did this, for example, teacher to student ratios in Shaker Heights would still be below the Ohio average of 16:1.

The thing that is worrisome to me about school spending cuts, though, is that the students who can most afford to weather belt tightening (the children of college educated, middle class professional parents) are often the least likely to suffer when budget cuts happen.  Parents of students like these are the most likely to attend school board meetings and most savvy in applying political pressure to steering cuts away from programs and such that will directly affect their children.  Programs that affect the politically less savvy, minorities, special needs students, ESL children, etc, often take the brunt of funding cuts because they have few if any champions to fight for them when the budget cutting process occurs.

Will a ten percent reduction in school funding produce ten percent poorer education?  Not if you ask most politicians and economists (who have somehow decided that they are educational experts), because the metric they use for measuring educational quality is the standardized test.  Standardized tests, from the SAT to the Stanford 9 to various state tests like TAAS, etc. mostly measure your parent's income and education levels.  Cuts to programs that are targeted at the most vulnerable or at-risk student populations often don't get reflected in standardized test score reporting, because administrators and politicians figure out ways to exclude these sorts of students from testing.

Measuring educational quality in a meaningful way is a challenging thing.  Calculating the educational costs of failing to do the most we can to give at-risk children a chance to succeed, and break out of a cultural cycle of poverty and lowered expectations, is a difficult thing.  How do you quantify something like that?  You can give at-risk children chances, you can bus them to a wealthy school, and they may still end up being incarcerated, or dead, before they reach adulthood. I'm not wise enough to have all the answers, but from reading and discussions I've had with teachers and staff who work with at risk kids, and from hearing stories of at-risk kids who overcame the obstacles they faced in childhood, I know that if we focus spending cuts on programs aimed at these sort of children for political motivations, we are taking away what might be one of the few chances they will have to show their true potential.

But the educational reform discussion really needs to be broadened to a social reform discussion.  As James Traub and Richard Rothstein have pointed out, there is only so much schools can do by themselves.  Do we sincerely want children stuck in poverty to not be left behind?  If so, we need to acknowledge and address the deficits in early child care, health care, nutritional, and other disadvantages that these children bring with them to school.

A LOOK AT THE HEALTH-RELATED CAUSES OF LOW STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT

Shaker Hts, Oh. is not exactly a poor community.

TED talk by Salman Khan, founder of Khan Academy, a computer-aided math teaching tool. This looks like a huge breakthru in both pedagogy and (indirectly) a window into how minds develop.

Holding a cold wrench outside in a Colorado winter helped me a lot.

You and I did it ass-backwards; we learned engineering/physics/science stuff, and only belatedly connected it to real life useful things, like diagnosing and fixing broken cars and explaining to Lazy8 why libertarianism won't do my laundry.

Indeed. That book is just full of gems, ain't it?

I think some of it is just plain maturity level. That said, there is nothing like mowing lawns all summer, in the Deep South, to focus concentration on one's studies...

And as a fan of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance you probably remember that Pirsig made this same suggestion.  Rather than forcing unmotivated kids to go to college and sleepwalk through four pointless years, get out and get a trade job so that you might discover why learning all that college stuff could be useful to you.  You and I did it ass-backwards; we learned engineering/physics/science stuff, and only belatedly connected it to real life useful things, like diagnosing and fixing broken cars and explaining to Lazy8 why libertarianism won't do my laundry.

Indeed. That book is just full of gems, ain't it?

I think some of it is just plain maturity level. That said, there is nothing like mowing lawns all summer, in the Deep South, to focus concentration on one's studies...

And as a fan of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance you probably remember that Pirsig made this same suggestion.  Rather than forcing unmotivated kids to go to college and sleepwalk through four pointless years, get out and get a trade job so that you might discover why learning all that college stuff could be useful to you.  You and I did it ass-backwards; we learned engineering/physics/science stuff, and only belatedly connected it to real life useful things, like diagnosing and fixing broken cars and explaining to Lazy8 why libertarianism won't do my laundry.

I did it all - screwed around right out of high school until I figured out that I wanted a good job instead of serving people with good jobs. Went to school for a while util I ran out of money, so stopped for a bit and worked trade jobs while saving and going to night school. A couple years of sore back and frozen toes and an office gig looked pretty good.  A few years into my "career" layoffs and recession 1.0 (or maybe 2.0 depending on where you start) landed me in entrepreneur land.  All in all, it's been the most rewarding learning experience that I never planned on. 

I've always thought that trades don't get the respect/ legitimacy they deserve. After years in various industries, I also think that degrees/certificates get more respect/ legitimacy than they deserve. The ratio of good/bad/average/slacker/rockstar in each is about the same.  I think a lot of people would be happier if they realized that they had options, and that they tried some of them out. I've often felt that I would like to send some of my younger employees away for a  month or two at the competition or the local restaurant/labor shop. I think the exposure would help them a lot on many fronts.

But life goes the way  it goes. Plan all you want, life will get in the way. In the end Hunter Thompson sums it up best:

Buy the ticket, take the ride.  - HST 

 

And as a fan of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance you probably remember that Pirsig made this same suggestion.  Rather than forcing unmotivated kids to go to college and sleepwalk through four pointless years, get out and get a trade job so that you might discover why learning all that college stuff could be useful to you.  You and I did it ass-backwards; we learned engineering/physics/science stuff, and only belatedly connected it to real life useful things, like diagnosing and fixing broken cars and explaining to Lazy8 why libertarianism won't do my laundry.

Point is, the time and money spent on college, might be better spent pursuing a technical trade, at least in the short term. Get a marketable skill, make some money at it, develop your knowledge and abilities, and if you still want to go to college after that, okay.

How true. We've got a ludicrous situation over this side of the pond where c. 50% of kids go on to do degrees, yet 20/30 years ago there were only just sufficient graduate jobs for 5 to 10% of youngsters - and that's when we had industry and all the opportunities go with it (now all but gone). Rather than having 50% graduating, magically somehow creating jobs for all the graduates which seems to be the theory, jobs that are little more than office juniors are now requiring degrees. Apart from the expense, it must be soul destroying for the graduates to find that they would have been far better off, financially and probably career-wise, to have trained to be a plumber etc.

Food for thought, contrary to conventional wisdom.  I will cross post this in economx since it concerns both topics.

THE OVERSELLING OF EDUCATION

(SNIP)

A better-educated workforce is widely touted as the panacea for every economic problem. Education is said to be the cure both for unemployment and income inequality. To hear leaders of the financial sector talk, the underlying problem with the economy has not been a runaway financial sector but an unqualified workforce. In a recent Reuters special report on the U.S. economy, Diane Swonk, an oft-quoted financial-sector economist, said, "The recession merely revealed a reality that has been with us for a long time. We faced a growing gap in education and skills that we tried to fill with debt and credit, which gave us the illusion of growth . . .

This is very comfortable reasoning for the very comfortable class. It identifies "failing" schools and dumb workers for the economic calamity actually caused by a deregulated financial sector following a massive redistribution of income and wealth. This shift was driven by corporate political power that allowed the top 1 percent to capture some 56 percent of all the income growth over the two decades preceding the Great Recession . . .

It is remarkable that anyone can claim that today's high unemployment is primarily due to a mismatch between the skills of the unemployed and the available jobs. After all, most of those who are unemployed today were productively employed just a year or two ago. The notion that production processes have radically changed is hard to square with the absence of a surge in productivity or investment. There have been roughly five unemployed people for every job opening, roughly twice the ratio at the worst moments of the last recession, which, recall, was considered a jobless recovery . . .

Moreover, the percentage of unemployed who have been out of work for at least six months is the same across all education groups. In other words, unemployed college graduates bear the same risk of long-term unemployment as those with high school degrees. In sum, we do not have unemployment because of weak skills or poor schools: Rather, we have a serious shortfall in demand due to a loss of housing and stock wealth and recession-caused income losses compounded by the de-leveraging of our household and business sectors . . .

Despite frequent claims, it is simply untrue that we have seen a three decades-long radical increase in employers' demand for four-year college graduates. The widespread (even before the recession) utilization of college students and graduates working as unpaid (many unlawfully so) "interns" is evidence enough — if employers desperately needed these workers, they would pay them . . .
(SNIP)