I May Have Been Wrong

Perhaps liberal, educated, reasonably affluent parents could be allowed to advocate for a world in which stay-at-home parents are not a ‘luxury’ and the homeschooling option exists for everyone? Admittedly it is a bit utopian, but your vision of pouring more resources into this institution in the hope that it will somehow make itself easier for kids and their parents to accommodate to is too bleak even for my taste.

Tedra, if you haven’t followed Laura McKenna’s ups and downs with her two boys and the public school system where she lives in New Jersey, you really should. Harry Brighouse and some other regular commenters here know her situation well, and know that she’s a very strong public school advocate. But she also ultimately got to a point where she realized that it was better for her children for her and her husband to decide to give up on their school district and search for education elsewhere. This latest post of hers summarizes many of her feelings…

http://www.apt11d.com/2012/03/a-tale-of-two-school-districts.html

…but in the long run, she has no simple solutions to the problem of how one turns education into a priority for all the children of “the public” either.

First a piece of maybe unwelcome advice. Build a record that an evaluator (HS or college) can look at and figure out whether PK meets or exceeds their requirements. As someone who has looked at a lot of applications for summer programs, it is pretty much impossible to figure out whether the home schooling is any good or not, or what the talents of the kid are and where they fit without this. These can be portfolios rather than tests, but there has to be something.

Second, go out and look for a classroom in a trunk. Many years ago a friend brought two kids and a curriculum trunk on sabbatical. The kids worked through the stuff on a regular schedule. It worked pretty well. Of course you have to be careful and find real educational material not cultish stuff, and maybe there is someone in the Ed School at your place who can help. The material should match or exceed the curriculum guidelines of your local school board.

In spite of what we think, parents in general know very little about how to educate kids

This is only indirectly related to the post. But, when I was in middle school bullying meant getting beat up, sometimes frequently. But, I do not recall any parent ever removing their children from public school in response. It was considered the normal run of things. If things were persistent over years then eventually some of the bullies ended up in reform school, but that took hundreds of violent incidents usually. Have things dramatically changed in the last 30 years in American middle schools? Because the examples in the post seem extremely mild compared to my memory and my own experiences in OC California were not anywhere near the really bad stuff that took place in places like Grant District, CA where my uncle used to teach. There bullying meant pretty severe beatings. If the worst thing that occurs in middle schools today is verbal taunting then a huge amount of progress has been made.

On the same point as 4 and 6 (which is completely peripheral to the post. On the post generally, my sympathies): Something that might make the ‘showing your work’ less pointlessly tedious feeling for him is explaining it as a variety of communicative writing. You couldn’t write a persuasive essay consisting of just a conclusory sentence, you need to work through your reasoning so that the reader believes you. Same with a math problem: ‘showing your work’ is communicating with the reader, not solely an aid for the problem solver to get the right answer. I’ve had some success with impatient students (my own kids and back when I was teaching) with that explanation of why it’s necessary.

Peggy Kohn wrote a piece in Dissent not long ago called “If you’re an egalitarian why do you send your kids to private school?”

She makes the argument that we liberals should actually be supporting some form of school choice, since it’s essentially what we are demanding for ourselves.

Don’t beat yourself up for doing what’s right for your kid. Just because your kid isn’t in public school now doesn’t mean you’re not an advocate for public school, for better public school, for public school that serves all kids.

Gifted kids really, truly are different from other kids, in the ways in which they take information and ideas in, process them, work with them. They often don’t function well in a mainstream educational environment, and it’s not just because of worksheets. Think about the possibilities of having a kid in the lowest 1 percentile in a mainstream classroom without accommodations, and now think about a kid in the highest 1 percentile in that same classroom. Why is it assumed the latter is fine? Good luck with researching.

I don’t see where you’ve been hypocritical. It may be that public schools fit most kids but not all — it’s hard to see how it could be otherwise. In which case, the large majority liberal, affluent, educated parents will will advocate for public schools, and keep their own kids in the system, and do fine. I think LAE folks also tend to advocate for public transportation, and to use it — but if the bus route that goes by your house gets canceled, then the actual service provided is no longer a fit for you, and you drive to work (because you are fortunate enough to have the resources to do so, instead of losing your job) and there’s no hypocrisy there.

What your experience _does_ emphasize is that advocacy for public schools ought to include advocacy for alternative schools, so that the number of kids poorly served by the system ends up being small as possible.

Finally, speaking as a guy who teaches math for a living, I tend to be in favor of requiring students to show work, for the reasons given above and for one more: when the student _does_ get an answer wrong, I have a much clearer picture of what has gone astray in their reasoning.

School choice isn’t the issue here, surely. The OP is clear that we are talking about what is called a ‘good’ school.

Sometimes destroying a system is exactly the right thing to do with it.

Tedra, perhaps you feel like a hypocrite, but you shouldn’t. The fact that you are committed to improving the public school system (or publicly provided goods more generally) does not mean that you are normatively committed to make your own child a foot soldier in that battle. In fact, there are several good arguments to the contrary.

1. When fighting against a dysfunctional institution, sometimes “exit” is a better option than “voice”. (As you have probably discovered, “voice” often doesn’t work very well with public school bureaucracies.)

2. In the long run, if your own children are to be effective foot soldiers in the fight for social justice, they need the best education possible.

3. When fighting for social justice, you have the right to impose upon yourself whatever sacrifices you want. However, it is not clear you have the moral right to impose sacrifices on other people —especially people who are both powerless and not yet capable of giving informed consent. (For example, you have the right to donate your own retirement savings to OxFam if you want. But arguably, you do not have the right to donate your child’s college fund to OxFam.)

4. Pulling your child out of public school does not constitute a blanket condemnation of “the public system” in general. It is a condemnation of an underfunded, overcrowded system, with undereducated, overworked, over-regulated teachers and administrators who are incapable of coping with unusual children, because they can already barely cope with their baseline workload.

5. Pulling your child out of the public system does not itself damage that system. You are still paying taxes, I presume? In fact, by removing your child, you have infinitesimally improved the per capita resources available to other students in the public system. (The real problem is how you will afford the time/money to educate your own child.)

Good luck.

developing the habit of doing things in your head and not showing working really is going to lay up problems for later life in terms of mastering maths at more advanced levels.

Yes – I always insist on students showing their working for exactly this reason, also because I am a Good Teacher and I want to know which bit they’re all getting wrong so I can explain it and (with any luck) they won’t keep getting it wrong. If they’re getting it right then it’s not really necessary, but the problem is that you can’t say to pupils “you only have to show working if you’ve got the answer wrong”.

Pete@20 the local public in fact get the school they want

Might what the local public in fact want be influenced by class at all? Might this possibly show a problem with the line that it is the noble duty of middle-class parents to remove themselves and their children from the state education system?

Public school special ed teacher here chiming in on the chorus to support showing his work. Middle school kids–gifted and sped alike–HATE showing their work in math, but it is crucial. One way around it is that often teachers will give partial credit for correct process even if the calculations are wrong.

My son (who was very similar to your son in middle school, though it was a parochial school he blew out of into a public school which was multiple times better with fewer suspensions and problems) fought showing his work all the way through Algebra II in high school. It’s biting his butt seriously in college work. When I’d share my struggles to get my kids to show their work, especially the bright kids with learning disabilities, he’d earnestly tell me to tell them to get over it. And offer up examples of his own college math work to share with them.

And the bullying piece–sadly, until parents of the bullies get serious and work with the school to shut it down in their own kids, it’s not going to go away. I’m contemplating writing an article about the teacher’s eye view of the bullying process and the ongoing battle with those behaviors in the classroom–and how so much of it is fueled by complicit behaviors from society. Kids who think movies such as “The Hangover” and “Jackass” are acceptable for school viewing…shakes head. And yes, I’m serious.

Without strong adult modeling that bullying is unacceptable, it’s going to happen in middle school. Without strong adult support for school authority from parents and society as a whole, bullying is going to get worse. In a culture where teachers are being blamed for all that is wrong with public schooling, it’s hard to kill bullying behavior.

i was one of those gifted types in my younger days – and i had to get over my prejudice against showing my work, too.

it was all so simple when 2x + 3 = 7, but once things got harder, doing things in my head wasn’t so easy (smart kid yes, dick feynman no) and because i’d pissed around just writing down the answers i’d never actually learned the process to solve for x.

My wife was among the first children legally home-schooled in Virginia, and I’ve spent a lot of time around homeschooled children and homeschooling parents. (And we are very likely to homeschool our children.) My brother teaches in California, including some tutoring of homeschoolers.

A few suggestions (which may be completely useless):
1) Check out your state’s homeschool association (HomeSchool Association of California). There’s a massive amount of resources out there.
2) California is a cover school state[1]; the one I know about from my brother is Sunland. It costs about $600 a year.

1) In Virginia, you can homeschool; in California, children must be enrolled in a school. The work-around is to enroll them in a school that does tests and keeps records, but delegates the actual teaching to the family–that’s a “cover school”.

I’ve taught my university’s writing seminar, and I can tell you that many of these students did not know The Standards. Many times I wished that it wasn’t I, but their middle and high school teachers, who were teaching them about “supporting evidence” and “structure.” Maybe there’s a better way than the rote-learning of 5 paragraph essays, but so many college students can’t even get the basics of an argumentative essay. Heaven forbid I want to talk about something more interesting, like the importance of incorporating counterarguments.

@ Steve LaBonne. I have spent a bit of time in a NY max-security women’s prison teaching family law. The first time I visited I couldn’t get over why it felt vaguely familiar. Then I realized that it reminded me of school. The architecture, the regimentation, the petty (and not so petty) bureaucrats…
@ Tedra. I am so sorry that PK is having such a rough time. I have loved reading about him for years, and I hope that you and he come through this phase with spirit and mental health intact.

Surely we need to separate bullying and behavioural issues from worksheets and showing your maths work? Learning to deal with tedium and negotiating institutional environments is most definitely an underestimated life skill, no?

Fancy private schools are often not so great at dealing with former either, and have their own problems with things like drugs, etc etc. I am dumbfounded about the cops, though – is this some kind of compulsory post-Columbine risk management?

I’ve already plugged it here recently, but Astra Taylor is worth watching/ reading on this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwIyy1Fi-4Q and at n+1 mag.

i suppose you’d prefer that option over say an education savings account where poor people could also afford private tutors because then “public money goes into private pockets.”

Wake me up when right-wing nostrums like charter schools are anything but scams. I supported the charter school movement until it turned out to be one. And the data on that are crystal clear.

Also, other right-wing “solutions” like teacher “accountability” via stupid standardized tests have actually made the problems worse. Few of the proponents of these things actually care about education and none of them know anything about it.

We COULD have public schools that provide a humane learning environment for all kids if we were willing to learn from other countries.

Whether or not it applies to Tedra (and I don’t assume it does), one of the messages here is not to let a general unfamiliarity, phobia, or dislike of math dictate its pedagogy. I had a strenuous argument with a professor at super fancy school once about whether or not an unsimplified answer is correct. He said it wasn’t. But of course it is. He was just trying to express that there is a convention that math teachers prefer answers for which no work remains, or that are expressed with the fewest remaining operators possible.

This should not be confused with not being able to demonstrate how to set up and work through problems of growing complexity. Not doing this is analogous to studying literature by reading only the beginnings and ends of books. It may work for Corduroy, but not for Moby Dick. Progress in basic math comes from successfully setting up problems, understanding the symbols contained in them as well as the relationships they entail, and manipulating all of this correctly into a more simplified format that expresses the simplest relationship possible. Often, that final expression is nothing more than a number. Indeed, up until about high school, that’s all it will be. But memorizing relationships is important, and this comes from rote. Once these are in hand, the discovery and understanding of other, more complex relationships is imminent. This is learning math, in my opinion. It takes a bit of work.

I waver on the bully problem, especially when its moderate bullying, as described here. Life is full of bullies, at all stages, in its insidious ways. Insulating a smart, sensitive idealistic child from the low-grade ambient bullying described above strikes me as similar to insulating a child from germs. There is no getting away from them, anywhere, even in Norway, and so exposure and building up some resistance and coping mechanisms seems necessary.

The worry is that PK will remain a smart, sensitive idealistic person still unable to deal with the bullies that will confront him in middle school… high school… college… the workplace… the bar… etc. I am not talking about the physical menacing and wedgies, but exactly the type of “what’s wrong with fish?” comments here. There are a million ways to ask that question, throughout life, and people will continue to ask it.

#37 (Ted)– American schools are very well funded. New York City spends 17,000 per student. (Newark spends 22,000 per student.) But we should be honest about how that money is spent. In NYC’s case, only 5,500 for each general education student goes to teachers’ salaries.

This discussion reminds me of UK in the ’70s (my Dad was in teacher training). Comprehensive education was becoming mainstream and Ivan Illich was railing against old-style education. The end result on the left did sound like “Traditional education is hierarchical, conformist, and stultifying! And there’s so little of it!”

I suspect that Tedra is right that “What we’re doing isn’t scalable, and it isn’t an acceptable solution to have a system that’s so standardized there’s not enough room on the margins for non-standard kids”. But which parent believes they have a standard kid?

As a college math teacher, I feel there are significant misconceptions about mathematical education in general. Take the example of “showing your work”. It seems like if you have more efficient way of getting the answer (intuition, often), you shouldn’t be forced to use the standard method. That is true IF your purpose is to find answers to a question. That is not the purpose of mathematical education. The purpose of mathematical education is to give people a way to find answers and being able to check the correctness of the answer without any outside help. That is why the work is important, it is a means to ensure the correctness of the answer.

My second point concerns with the “standardized test” in general. A “uniform” test, in the sense that everybody takes the same test, is important. This is simply to ensure we compare apples to apples. However, the test itself, at least ideally, should never be standard. The point of a test is to evaluate the students when they are faced with new questions. The value of a test is diminished when the students can rely on memory or intuition to solve the problems. A majority of the college students I taught seem to have a deeply ingrained concept, that only problems they have already seen should be on the test. Hence, passing a test become a simple task of training oneself to perform a certain known procedure. In this sense, the American system has already been “teaching to the test” without ever admitting it.

It’s not just the schools. I think we need a different kind of agora, but this is a major change in the way we do things in the workplace as well as school and other social loci, one some of us are working on. Meanwhile, home schooling might be a good option for many people.

I am pretty sure rote work destroyed my ability to do mathematics, but it’s a long story and my contribution to the mathematics world would probably not have been very great anyway. Instead I became a slut for computer programming.

I was your kid. It’s how I ended up at an expensive private school that accommodated my needs, had no / little teasing, and focused on fostering a love of learning in its students rather than demanding rote work. I did great there and ended up in the Ivy League, law school, etc. I doubt I would have even finished at a typical high school. It’s a sad statement on education in this country that that’s so often the only option, but your kid only has one life.

Tedra, this is why my family helped found California charter school #1, to have a school that accommodated square pegs, used constructivism where possible, integrated school-day and after school care, required parent participation and fostered a culture of lifelong learning (students, educators, parents, community members). Please don’t make the mistake of lumping all charter schools together. The idea of the charter school, at least in California, is to allow schools based on different philosophies to be created and tried out.

Re math, I concur with suggestions about Khan Academy…I have used it in tutoring, and it has the merit of ensuring that each concept is mastered to form a good platform for the next. It also allows a student to plunge ahead if they are interested. The teacher/coach gets good tools to watch the student’s progress as well.

Perhaps we could work on school size. Were we to limit the size of every primary and middle school campus to 300 students, and the size of every secondary school campus to 500 students, teachers and other adults would know the kids’ names, kids would face less competition to participate in extra curricular activities, and therefore to become recognized individuals, and the prison qualities of the schools would be reduced.

The one-room schoolhouses of American lore weren’t successful because of skilled or enlightened teachers, or testing, or traditional values. They were successful because they were small communities.

@41, what I learned from bullying is that suicidal ideation can be a relief. Turns out that spending your childhood anxious and depressed takes years off your life. I wish instead I’d learned to drop out of school.

JSE @ 52 – heartily seconded.

Schools with over a thousand kids sound horrific. How can teachers get to know the kids, or the kids to know each other? I understand they may seem a good idea for policy reasons, or to pool resources like swimming pools and libraries. But I would far prefer my public convent school with barely facilities for half an hour of sport a week, no library, but where every teacher in the school knew me and my classmates and could tell you at the drop of a hat how well any of us were doing. In truth, it was kind of mediocre academically, we had class sizes of 40, limited subject choice and no central heating. (And I walked 10 miles to school and did my homework on the back of a shovel, etc. etc. ) But there was almost no bullying and odd-ish kids such as yours truly made out just fine.

Tedra, I hope your situation resolves. PK is lucky to have parents with both the resources and the courage to pull the pin out for him.

And as to calling the cops on an unhappy kid – I can’t even begin to parse how stupid and wrong that is. Though it makes me wonder, has there ever been a school shooting in schools of, say, 500 pupils or less?

@45 – Public schools worked well for my daughter, and they worked well for my son at the elementary level. A charter school was an absolute lifesaver for him at the high school level. If there was a non-charter public alternative with a similar model we would have chosen that. I appreciate Tedra’s point – that a humane system must have room for how children vary so much.

to have a school that accommodated … required parent participation

At least here in Richmond, that’s been exactly and explicitly the reason for the opposition to charters–that by requiring parent participation, they’re “”tak[ing] the best and brightest from … other elementary schools where those types of parents are desperately needed, it will have a negative effect on the schools they left behind.”

Delegate Jennifer McClellan

Tedra,
I feel for you and understand the choices you had to make. My daughter has oral-motor apraxia, which is a neuro-muscular condition typified by delays in speech, motor coordination issues, and often reading delays, but otherwise normal intelligence. As is often the case with apraxia, my daughter had receptive language skills in the 95+percentile, and expressive language skills below the 10th.

Our local school district has a special program for kids with apraxia, which involves putting kindergarteners and 1st graders at little desks and drilling incessantly with little worksheets. “We have had to sacrifice most art, music, and phys. ed. in order to really focus on making sure they stay up with reading and math.” There was no additional speech therapy or specialized services other than what is the normal district IEP. It was a mill to try to keep them from dragging down district scores. My daughter is a tough kid and would persevere, but it was the perfect formula for making her hate school.

We were in the fortunate position to be able to put her in a private Waldorf school with a curriculum that suited her much better. I believe in public schools and all the arguments for it, and respect that we had privilege that most kids with similar challenges are not in the same position. But I also couldn’t see putting her through that kind of mind-deadening situation. If we can afford food, we shouldn’t starve our kids because other kids are starving.

(As an aside, we were lucky on more counts than financial – very few private schools, with the exception of a specialty schools, will take children with any sort of learning disability. We were there with the understanding that we had to find ways to provide the extra support she needed, that there was no expectation she would ever be “at grade level”, and that her presence at the school was up for evaluation year-by-year).

Now she (and my son) are back in the public schools, in an option K-8 that has a project-based social justice curriculum and she is thriving. Despite being a natural target for teasing and bullying (awkward, unusual speech patterns, academic delays) she reports that there has been no teasing at all. I wish we had found it sooner, though it is unclear whether the district would have let her go there in Kindergarten.

One of the challenges of parenting – actually with most parts of life – is that we are faced with these conflicts between the needs of our specific children and the changes that we would like to see in our society as a whole. I wish the world were one where every child had access to an appropriate, liberatory education, but until then we have to work with what we have, and advocate for the change we can.

@ many of the posts above
“She makes the argument that we liberals should actually be supporting some form of school choice, since it’s essentially what we are demanding for ourselves.”

The devil is in the details. Conservative versions of “school choice” are simply designed to destroy public education, not to improve it.

There are versions school choice that do not mean destroying public education. Our school distric has a number of “Option Schools”, which offer alternative curriculum within a fully public-school setting, and are open to any student in the district (though transportation options are more limited). In some cases they are little more than private-school models in the public schools (and some cluster in higher-income neighborhoods with extensive parent fundraising – which is a whole other problem). But it also means there is a small arts-oriented high-school for students who don’t fit into the usual 1500-student behemoth, a couple Montessori K-5s, and both a K-8 and an alternative high-school that are built around a social justice curriculum (much to the chagrin of the school board, who has on occasion been faced with a room full of activist high-school students).

The choice should not be between one-size-fits-none institutional education and privatized charter-schools for the upper-middle-class. Progressive education reform should stress equal access and elimination of disparities as well as a multitude of flexible humanized educational models that treat all students as human beings. Equal access and progressive pedagogy should be hand-in-hand, not opposed, and we should not give up the ground of having a choices over how we and our children are taught to the right.

If PK is out of school for medical reasons, then the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act may apply, and you may be able to get reimbursed for your private education costs.

ADHD is one of the medical conditions that are covered under the IDEA. There’s a lot more info at the cde website

http://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/se/

…but I should add that trying to get services from public schools under the IDEA (or section 504) is an exhausting and frustrating experience.

I could definitely support giving parents and students more options within the context of the public school system, e.g. smaller schools, specialized curricula for students who want it, etc., but that’s going to take 1) resources and 2) political will (among other things) and those two in particular seem to be lacking. Not to mention that in a lot of areas, schools serve as de facto social service centers which taxes their resources even further.

As an anecdotal aside, I do have to say that I went through a “traditional” comprehensive public school system and I think it suited me well. I had my ups and downs and certainly had days when school was the last place I wanted to be, but on the whole, I liked school and I liked being in school. Much more so than I liked being at home, frankly. And when I consider how well I do in unstructured situations, i.e. not all that well, the more regimented aspects of my primary and secondary education were probably healthy for me. Just a note to say that public schools aren’t necessarily a soul-crushing prison-like experience.

Delurking to say, Please do not negotiate with your school system by yourself. Find a professional advocate. You do not know special ed law, you do not know all the progams and options that exist. I mean, why would you? But the school does, and so has the upperhand — and they like keeping it that way.

I’ve been doing this for years and I NEVER go into an official school meeting unarmed as it were. Even if that means just calling and chatting with the staff member at the local special ed agency (with whom I’ve cultivated a long, friendly relationship) on the issues du jour. And I live in a fabulous school district that’s generally pretty responsive!

In my state, parents with children who have special needs (and these include mental health issues) can get free advice about and help with school issues from a number of different sources, among them a state legal aid agency and a mediator program through the state board of ed. There are als0 (pricey) advocates in private practice and attornies specializing in education law. Obviously, I don’t know what’s available in your state.

Yes, finding out what is available means one phone call after the other, endless phone trees, time on hold and being disconnected during phone transfers. As a result, you’re excused from worrying about the state of public education and whether or not you are inadvertantly contributing to its dismantling. Your best source will probably be other mothers with kids who have similar issues to your kid’s. That’s why goggle was invented.

Good luck. Off to pick up my kid now.

Tedra Osell: On math education, I agree with you on the peril of “you must do this”, although it is important not to feel as if the teacher is forcing the students to do useless stuff. This type of thinking seem to be one of the main conflicts between a teacher and the students/parents. A good teacher (not just good in teaching, but good in math) will recognize a student’s individual need. To me, a good measure for a good math teacher is in whether she can recognize good mathematical thinking even if the student gives an unconventional solution. Unfortunately, many teachers are not up to this standard, and resort to very dull methods of teaching. These are serious problems and every effort should be made to improve the quality of teachers. But to me, these problems are not evidence against school education as a format. It would of course be very nice if one has an excellent teacher in a home school environment. But wouldn’t it be a better use of resources to let her teach more students?

It would of course be very nice if one has an excellent teacher in a home school environment. But wouldn’t it be a better use of resources to let her teach more students?

Taking myself as a prime example, the answer to this is an emphatic no, you can’t assume this makes sense or extrapolate in this way; sorry, but it is a big oversimplification to think you can. My kids were mostly homeschooled, and I was asked this question more than once over the years. And it was rarely really a question, it was almost always a judgment thinly disguised. But I won’t get started on the presumption, condescension, and patronizing judgment-passing I encountered about homeschooling during those years.

I was very capable of helping my kids with a lot of things, math in particular, but it doesn’t follow that I would have been able to do that with strangers, and it especially doesn’t follow that I would have been any good whatsoever at handling a classroom of kids. Nor would I have wanted to; I knew that about myself even when I was a kid in school myself. I’ve done a little teaching at the college level and I’ve enjoyed it a lot, but I am not effective in dealing with more than a handful of people at a time if they haven’t chosen to be there themselves. (And even that is a big oversimplification.)

@76 I want to +1 K Zhang’s remark that to be a really good math teacher, you need to understand mathematical thinking.

@75 There is a very familiar kind of ‘laissez-faire’ logic to the whole ‘make them work it out themselves’ ethos, as if children are fully-autonomous subsistence farmers who can always go off and find more land over the horizon. I say I’ve met ‘a lot’ of teachers who are real believers in it, but that really just amounts to a handful, and not all of my teachers had that attitude. Is there anyone here who is in the teaching profession, or well-informed about the profession, that can comment on how prevalent this ‘let them work it out’ approach actually is? Is it a kind of conventional wisdom, something more part of the professional norms that everybody gets told in teaching school (or work environments), or just one of a range of common approaches?

Adam Hyland: “But please for the love of pete don’t discount the virtues of rote work in areas like mathematics! Unless you’re raising Hardy or Ramanujan the path to a strong foundation in mathematics is almost invariably through years of tedious work and laborious practice.”

Oh, help! The path to math anxiety and revulsion is through years of tedious work and laborious practice. Galois thought that his examiners were idiots because they asked him to explain how he got his answers. (Not that he was right to do so, but tedium is not the royal road.) John Conway, no slouch in the math department, always makes a big hit when he visits schools because he makes math fun. :)

I also want to express my regrets for the difficulty your son has been going through. My own experience from public schools suggests that some of these scars can last a lifetime; minimizing them makes good sense. Regardless of whether you continue to homeschool or not, it would be a good idea to check out the HomeSchool Association of California. They have a lot of information from very informed people, including legal counsel, and you can subscribe to their Yahoo Group at no cost. There are definitely homeschool groups in your area.

It’s actually a misconception to think that homeschooled kids are completely shielded from unpleasant social interactions. My own son had some very difficult experiences with bullies in various homeschool groups we participated in when he was young. The thing that struck me at the time was that 1) he did not have to deal with those people every goddamned weekday of his life and 2) because he didn’t have them in his face on a daily basis, we could talk about what was going on and think of ways he could try to cope with it. And I’ve always thought that while it’s true that people can be unpleasant, and there will always be unpleasant people in one’s life, it’s better to have grown and matured and developed some emotional maturity before tackling the problems they present. Why should a bunch of kids, immature themselves, get to negatively influence your child’s sense of who he is?

Regarding math, while I agree that showing work is a good idea, an alternative that I’ve settled for with my own son (sometimes) is to have him demonstrate why the answer that he has arrived at is correct. One benefit to showing work that hasn’t actually been mentioned so far is that when the student is tackling more complex problems, then they themselves may be able to find the error once it is clear to them that the answer they have reached is incorrect.

Lastly, if you’re concerned about demonstrating proficiency with an eye to returning to the mainstream sooner or later, I would recommend participating in STAR testing. I understand that standardized testing sucks, but it’s also a fact of life in our country, and I would bet that PK could ace these tests standing on his head.

Perhaps not relevant to PK’s situation at all — I can’t pretend to know enough there and trust everyone responsible for PK just to do their best — and that things will turn out well in the end.
But as for the “rote” concerns. Do terms like “rote” and “mere memorizing” and “discipline” and “practice” and “imagination” and “creativity” tend to get thrown around unthinkingly? With the latter two somehow (and wrongly) assumed to be opposed to the former? In my experience they do.
All children, not least very bright children, will thrive when provided opportunities for exploration and mastery. Memorizing and practicing (sometimes with a bit of tedium involved — if it happens in the right context, it can teach the virtue of “delayed gratification”) are the tools of imagination and creativity, or can be. Without such tools, imagination and creativity atrophy.
Which is not to endorse poor teaching that stultifyingly relies on “rote learning” and uselessly repetitive exercises. Just want to insist that the imagination and creativity are not opposed to some “rote learning,” to memorizing, to sometimes tedious practice.

Also want to agree with ajay (I think it was) way back: an old argument (at least back to the 1920’s and 1930’s) for public education is socialization, that is, different classes, different levels of intelligence or preparation provided by background, different races and ethnic groups. Somehow that element of public education too often gets lost in these discussions.

We COULD have public schools that provide a humane learning environment for all kids if we were willing to learn from other countries.

Sounds great! Finland spends 18% less than the US per student.

Tedra “The primary thing this is making me rethink isn’t charter schools, but vouchers, actually. Though as with charters, currently the voucher solutions on offer mean draining the public system, rather than adding options. ”

This is great, and I completely think you are right. But why is that the case? I think it might be the case because of way we have allowed the school wrangling to play out. Are committed liberals pushing hard for GOOD voucher systems, designing GOOD methods and making it work? No. The only people designing voucher systems are conservatives who get demonized for “trying to destroy our schools”. They weren’t trying to destroy the schools of course. They want good education for students, they just don’t agree with the current methods. The problem is that we have spent so much time demonizing each other that we refuse (not can’t see, actively REFUSE) to learn anything from each other.

“It would cost money, though. And I still think that our biggest problem is the refusal to acknowledge that educating everyone in America—because we all go through childhood, after all—is an enormous national project, at least as big as health care or social security, and that we need to invest in it accordingly.”

I find this frustrating, because it is so horribly out of date. It was an excellent criticism of US schooling in the 1970s, but in the 2000s (especially in California) we spend more per pupil than most Western countries. Only a very few European countries even spend as much as we do per student. It isn’t about the amount of money. It is about how we spend it. It used to be that we didn’t spend enough. Now we have other problems.

“Schools in other countries don’t have to provide health insurance or pensions (in many cases) so naturally the figures are skewed.”

What? Schools in other countries definitely provide pensions, and I’m pretty sure they provide health insurance too in states that go through the insurance model (Germany).

Official expenditures per student from the OECD

[From your source, California average per student in elementary/secondary education is $8826]

Average OECD spending $7401, average US [10,768]
Various OECD slackers compared to California are Australia [7590], Canada [8045], Finland [7216], France [8070], Germany [7243], Israel [5345], Japan [8012], Korea [6663].

Pretty close to California (though still under) Sweden [8773], UK [8622].

So your link is correct, California doesn’t spend as much per pupil as much of the rest of the US. But it spends more, and in many cases MUCH more than countries with generally excellent education systems. (See especially Germany, Korea, Japan).

I can’t find the historical links, but your criticism of spending USED to be correct compared to other countries. Back in the 70s you would have been right. But it isn’t anymore. Average US spending per pupil is thousands above even VERY advanced countries.

We COULD have public schools that provide a humane learning environment for all kids if we were willing to learn from other countries.

Sounds great! Finland spends 18% less than the US per student.

Eh, suppose the variable is that California students are less likely to remain in the same district which could be more true in 2012 than 1970 and that is having an effect on performance. How do you isolate all the possible variables?

For that matter, how does one even know all the possible variables?

It is my impression that pensions and healthcare in European countries are generally not paid for by local property taxes but are pooled. I may be wrong, of course. In any case college tuition is generally free.

We thought pretty seriously about the homeschooling option, for broadly similar reasons, but decided against. Our son had some tough times with school, similar to what you describe, but has pretty much put them behind him now. The standard arguments pro-con we went through were
* sooner or later you have to learn to deal with group dynamics that invariably involve some elements of bullying/exclusion, subtle or otherwise, particularly if you are a bit different and unwilling to change too much
vs
* the middle school version of this is peculiarly awful

Italics fail. Everything from “eventually” to “wardrobe” is Steel, not me.

Sebastian,

The OECD report you cite includes ” expenditures per student from both public and private sources”. Thus it might be skewed by spending on private schools, but probably not too much. Some spend a lot, but the local Catholic school spends much less per student than the local public school. I spent a few minutes with a search engine and found this report on state spending on public education which gives similar numbers for per pupil spending

http://www2.census.gov/govs/school/09f33pub.pdf

This cite suggests that per pupil spending has risen in the United States since the 1960s, though perhaps it should have risen more

http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66

This is not my area, and I have no idea if these numbers are trustworthy. I don’t normally comment here, but I have some interest in our subject as we are debating whether to send our son to public or private school.

But it spends more, and in many cases MUCH more than countries with generally excellent education systems. (See especially Germany, Korea, Japan).

I would be very cautious about comparing education spending in the US to Korea and Japan because both those countries have incredibly extensive networks of private after-school education (juku in Japan and hagwon in Korea) that would probably send their per pupil expenditures way over the US. This section( from google books) says that spending on juku alone is about $3,150 a year, and home tutoring is even more expensive. It also points out that households accounted for 21% of spending on educational institutions before outlays for juku. Your pdf says that private sources include household expenses such as tuition, book rental and food services, but I don’t think it includes the money that goes to juku and katei kyoshi (home tutoring), because if it did, then the total expeditures without this would be around $3,500, higher than only Chile, Mexico and the Slovak Republic.

Here is a blog post that details how big that industry is in Japan and notes that juku are considered so important that some prefectures actually subsidize low income families. It also notes how many families receive ‘supplemental assistance’. I suspect that these totals are not reflected in your pdf.

Deleting as obnoxious but saving the post #.

Deleting, with apologies, since it no longer makes sense and was irrelevant, though provoked.

Here are some graphs about comparative expenditures on higher education and privatization in the USA :
http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2012/03/02/zunguzungu-on-privatization-and-brutalizing-campuses-my-favorite-graph-juke-of-the-week-oecd-education-edition/

@ Arwen

To what extent is standardisation made worse by No Child Left Behind and all that? That particular Bush program seemed to me to have three objectives: (i) turning the scholls into sausage factories for industry, rather than being about creating well-rounded citizens, (ii) creating fake ‘metrics’ for education because this helped the case of the private schooling industry and (iii) punishing the poor, just Because.

In Ireland we have the much-loathed Points Race to get into college.

A++ to Mark Steel.

I’m not sure how different the system is in the US than the UK, but surely the problem here is concerns the fallacy of composition. Many a liberal middle class parent will come to the conclusion that the rational decision is that their children should get the “best” education – which is not in the public system. But when you aggregate that, you get a self-fulfilling prophesy, and even more middle-class flight.

It’s notable that some of the best and happiest public system schools in the UK are in small market towns of a size that only accommodates one secondary school – so there is no choice unless you have the money to ship your children miles away each day or board. Then you find that the commitment of middle class parents to ensure little Tarquin gets on helps the whole population.

The backstory to this is really class segregation and fear, the persistent underfunding of the public sector, and misguided educational policies such as testing.

“In any case, though I do think that there are things to be learned from comparing different systems (including different expenditures), I think it’s a mistake to use either the “they spend less!” or “look at how awesome Finnish schools are!” argument to criticize US schools. ”

I agree with you here, but I think it is possible that you’re misunderstanding why I brought it up. I *didn’t* bring it up to talk about how much US schools suck (though I think they have some very serious systemic problems). I brought it up to counter the frame you are using to talk about the issue. [i.e. “And I still think that our biggest problem is the refusal to acknowledge that educating everyone in America—because we all go through childhood, after all—is an enormous national project, at least as big as health care or social security, and that we need to invest in it accordingly.”]

That kind of statement combined with quite a bit of your December post make me think that the frame of your whole approach regarding this topic is wrong, or maybe the more proper thing to call it is ‘dated’. You seem to be making the kind of argument that was going on about US schools in the 1960s and 1970s. At that point in time there was an excellent argument that a lot of what was wrong with US schools was a lack of funding. There was a lack of overall funding (the total level was really very low compared to the rest of the modern world) and a lack of fair funding (the school specific level was very uneven, fucking over schools in poorer neighborhoods). The first issue just flatly isn’t true anymore. Even in the ‘worst’ spending US states we spend more, quite a bit more than peer nations. The second issue is greatly mitigated compared to the 1970s. Big states like California and New York have gone to various schemes to better distribute funding for schools (that is extra-especially true of California where very little of the revenue stream comes locally anymore).

And even charter schools, which you don’t seem to like much, are very much a second choice for most critics of the modern US school system. Vouchers were always a higher priority choice (and it is interesting that you seem to be settling onto them) but there was immense pushback against them from the entrenched system.

And a similar frame can be seen from others in the discussion here, see for example the idea that NCLB was a Bush thing, instead of remembering that it was an important pet project of such noticeable Democrats as Edward Kennedy and George Miller. (And remember that its method of failure was known in advance, Kennedy wanted it to play out a few years and then revisit it by implementing the strategies of the best working schools–something that never happened).

I guess my point is that maybe the part you are wrong about IS NOT the specific question of whether or not progressives should let themselves pull their kids from public schools. You are caught in an old frame of thinking about schools and the questions/battles surrounding them, which led to you to get that question wrong, which was revealed when you had to actually interface with the school system as it exists.

The fact that you are leaning toward the answer *very most hated by the system*, might suggest that your understanding of the system up to now wasn’t quite right.

= = =
Cranky @ 3:57 “Kennedy and the other neoliberal supports of that bill ”
= = =

That was poorly phrased. Kennedy of course was a real liberal, not a neoliberal, but NCLB had strong support from the neoliberal crowd.

Cranky

I find that the biggest problem with discussing the quality of the American educational system is that everyone asssumes a consensus on the meaning of “quality”, when in fact that consensus is simply nonexistent. The discussion here in this comments thread illustrates the problem nicely: slipping in every now and again are casual asides that actually betray huge, glaring disagreements over such questions as the proper balance between “core” subjects, like language and math, and more peripheral areas such as the arts, athletics or practical life knowledge; the relative importance of academic achievement vs. “character development”–socialization, moral development, love of learning, and so on; and the relative value to society of raising the achievement levels of the least academically successful tier, vs. raising the overall median, vs. raising the top tier.

This is, I believe, the very root of the problem of education in America. Large, universal systems work best when their goals and means are a matter of solid societal consensus, and worst when they are subject to widespread disagreement. In America, no neighborhood–let alone an entire school district–contains even an absolute majority of residents concurring on the answers to some of these basic questions about the purposes and methods of the educational system.

One result, of course, is that many parents simply remove their children from the public system, and find an alternative private community in which consensus is reached by voluntary participation. Another result is that among those who stay in the public system, none is the slightest bit embarrassed about campaigning relentlessly for his or her particular preferred outcomes–they’re not afraid to buck the consensus approach to dealing with their child, because there is no such consensus approach. In the face of such a cacophony of conflicting pressures, it’s no wonder that the public education system ends up accomplishing very little.

Unfortunately, this is not a hopeful analysis, since the American people are not likely to unite suddenly around a single educational philosophy anytime soon. But I think it’s important to view decisions such as Tedra’s in this context. It’s easy to conclude from her experience that the public system isn’t for everyone after all–but the more important lesson is that by trying to be “for everyone”, in a country where “everyone” is as diverse and fractious as in America, the public school system usually ends up being for just about no one.

@118

The way I see it, in the past you were advocating that people should choose to be worse off themselves (keep your kid in a public school instead of a better private one) in order to benefit society as a whole (public schools will become better if those kids are not sent to better private ones).

When it came to making the choice yourself however, you rather quickly (and understandably) sided with the wellbeing of your family over that of the public school system and society as a whole. Of course you still think that “as a nation” we ought to do SOMETHING to improve public education. But you or your family not so much.

I am sure that if you take a stroll through the rest of your economic and political convictions you will find a plethora of ideas whose point in the end is that some people should (be forced to) be worse off so that others are better off.

The question is, since you chose contrary to your prior convictions on this case, what other situations can you think of where you would discard these ideas to the benefit of you and your family, and to the (alleged) loss of society as a whole?

@Sebastian:

Echoing Tedra, I would be interested in hearing you lay out what you feel the issues/problems are surrounding public schools and how they are orthogonal to issues of funding or cost.

surely the problem here is concerns the fallacy of composition. Many a liberal middle class parent will come to the conclusion that the rational decision is that their children should get the “best” education – which is not in the public system.

This is halfway there. As I explained at some length in my comment above, I’ve got no interest in getting my kids The Best Education; I want them to have an education that will suit their particular needs & learning styles, which as it happens are highly academic. This should be good, what with schools being academic institutions and everything, but in practice it can be a very mixed blessing. They were both top of their classes throughout primary school; another seven years of that would have got pretty boring pretty quickly.

There is a problem of social sorting, I’ll grant you – arising mainly from the fact that the only available Freakishly Academic Minority schools trade on social elitism and have high snob value. But what I’m not getting from your comment is any recognition that the aggregate problem may arise from individual decisions which actually are correct, rather than seeming correct or being in line with people’s prejudices. I’m sure my kids would have got a good education in the public system; I’m also sure that it wouldn’t have been as good a fit for them as the educations they’re getting now.

The backstory to this is really class segregation and fear, the persistent underfunding of the public sector, and misguided educational policies such as testing.

And we’re back to square one, with those awful middle-class parents who are scared of their kids mixing with the oiks. Much simpler.

I have no idea what goes on, or doesn’t, in Chicago or NYC. I’ve only been to the States a couple of times, and I never visited either of those places unless you count a stopover at JFK. As far as the schools in Manchester, England, England are concerned, I’ve described my thought processes reasonably fully in comment 102.

Phil @131

No I think I’m with you pretty much all the way. The point about the fallacy of composition is that the micro decisions are entirely rational. It’s the macro result that is disastrous. So public policy should never reinforce the micro, but try to frame policy to wards a better macro result.

Of course getting from A to B is rather problematic, especially politically, and especially in extremely unequal societies.

Apologies if you took the last paragraph personally, it wasn’t meant to be.

Sebastian H: “It used to be likely that we just weren’t spending enough. Now that we spent the entire 1980s-2000 era drastically pumping money into the system, we might want to start asking if maybe there are other things we need to look for.

“Philly teachers scramble for supplies“, Philly.com, 3/2/2012: “It’s been a good week for Aileene Halligan. The social studies teacher at Kensington Urban Education Academy just got funding for five cases of paper, enough to last her school through the end of the school year.
Sounds like no big deal, right?
It’s actually a major deal.
Ask any teacher, especially any Philadelphia School District teacher, how much money they have to spend out of their own pocket to keep their kids in paper and notebooks and other supplies, and the answer is usually in the hundreds. Or thousands. Halligan, a second-year teacher, has spent at least $1,000 so far this year…

This is precisely why I was wondering about the hostility toward charter schools. If the school is horribly wrong for your child and they are suffering what do you do?

Most people can’t homeschool or bring anyone in to tutor. You simply subject your child to a miserable situation day after day and hope they survive with a minimum of self esteem and ability to manage higher levels of education they will need to have any sort of decent job–or any job whatsoever.

When the parents are educated and have time to pay attention and/or are not afraid to be assertive in institutional contexts then the kid has a better shot. If the parents aren’t, they have a much tougher road. How many brilliant criminals and their not-very-brilliant sidekicks result from that latter situation I often wonder.

I am very surprised anyone would criticize parents for seeking options when things get so bad for their children. But parents can be incredibly vicious toward one another about the success or behavior of other children. And people who don’t have children assume so much about why one’s children are this way. There is almost no understanding for children with hidden emotional or cognitive disabilities and children and parents experience so much judgment and cruelty on the part of teachers and other parents.

The saddest thing is this is happening to sweet kids, smart kids, kids with potential, kids with disabilities they can’t do anything about, etc., etc.–in short, all kinds of kids with all kinds of parents. Many times the problems are due to cognitive differences that the children are born inclined toward or even hardwired to have.

I would homeschool PK or send him to private school and never look back. Don’t let people guilt trip you. If he is happy and learning it is worth the money. You tried public school and you shouldn’t subject your kid to years of misery simply because public school is so vitally important to our society. Support public school some other way.

@Omega: My child seems very intelligent. It’s hard to say right now as these are early grades. A Tier 2 with straight A’s? I will cry for joy. I’m not saying I don’t empathize but boy the ability to modulate and manage in the school environment (which is probably even *more* stultifying at the college level)–it feels like you’ll never get there if you have a child who can’t master the ins and outs of school. Meanwhile, my kid immediately understood the idea of algebraic variables from reading about them in some comic book but can’t manage the 2nd grade classroom. It’s hard to know where we’ll end up.

Dan S. ““Philly teachers scramble for supplies“, Philly.com, 3/2/2012: “It’s been a good week for Aileene Halligan. The social studies teacher at Kensington Urban Education Academy just got funding for five cases of paper, enough to last her school through the end of the school year.”

Here is the thing about anecdotes like that. You clearly want me to believe that this means we aren’t spending enough money on schools. (Though for all I know Philly is the worst place ever). Why couldn’t this anecdote be explained by the idea that we are spending plenty of money, but doing it wrong?

Steve: “The hostility in most cases is directed not at the idea, but at the (great majority of the) actually existing implementations thereof, and the motives and agendas of most of the actually existing proponents. ”

Funny, that is exactly what lots of people think about the existing school system. Common ground at last!

Right, it was at the idea (which came from people within our community) and yes, it was terrible hostility directed right at those people. Frankly, it was insane. My kid’s in the public school and we probably would never have sent her to the charter school because we don’t want to uproot her from her friends. The reason I was unnerved by it was because it got so ugly and because the kinds of education they proposed probably would have been good for my child and other kids like her.

It was a closed argument: Any charter school is terrible so those posing such an idea must be evil elitists and must be absolutely demolished so no charter school ever comes to this town, ever. The proposed charter was *completely* a home grown thing of local progressive parents and demolished by a wave of fury like I’d never seen. I’m not involved in local politics and I had no fish to fry of any kind. The reaction to these parents was outrageous–they were shunned and barred from local events, for example. The scariest part was that everyone was pitted against everyone else–everyone fighting for crumbs and people were claiming that these neighbors were now a threat to their children’s education.

The city’s schools are not good, to put it mildly. The arguments against the charter were not good–they were deceptive and amounted to name-calling. People had gotten a little innovative cluster at another school and it had been stomped out. That was part of the impetus. They had a project-based learning thing at a local school and they wanted more creative teaching for kids who are withering under the current regime of teaching for the test and who were only looked at as a drag on test scores by local schools, who always have abysmal scores.

Maybe it was a bad idea, I don’t know. I couldn’t help but think this charter school thing is more complicated than it looks though.

It is hopeless for parents to work within the school system as far as I can tell and charter schools don’t seem to work as a larger solution. So what’s a parent to do?

I don’t blame teachers. It seems that the schools are a barometer for our whole winner take all society where we’re all at each others’ throats just for a space to be a cog in the machine and to make sure our kid gets a place somewhere. The testing mania seems like a symptom of that–we quantify everything now. Will a visit to the art museum raise reading scores? Will reading scores ensure a place at a 1st tier university? If not, don’t bother with the art museum for all working and middle class kids–what’s the point? We don’t want them their aspirations to torture them as they toil away in their cubicle (if they get lucky and get a desk job).

I think things *must* have gotten worse since the 70s. I was in an experimental gifted program in my public school. They had programs for artistic talent also. Those things had to have cost the moon–constant field trips, dark rooms, film shops, art supplies up the wazoo. I am sure they spent much more money–we had everything–music, art, PE, home ec, shop, super cheap lunches and free breakfast, a nurse always on call, a school counselor always on call…I was in the economically poorest district in my entire city and plenty of upper middle class people sent their kids into that district’s schools. I am sure half the class was on food stamps (me included). NO ONE sent their kids to private school. I would bet anything that that exact demographic doesn’t do that now. What happened?

The worst part of the managerial/corporate paradigm in schools, to me, is that “quality” is measured as the percentage who meet some minimum standard. A school that teaches 90% of its kids basic reading and math is judged better than a school that teaches 89% of its kids basic reading and math, never mind what happens to the top 50% of the students.

Just remember, adolescence sucks for everyone. Anger at the system is pretty normal for an 11 year old boy, not that you should encourage it. As a former gifted kid myself, I know that he just has to learn a basic rule of life: the world is made by and for average people. It sucks, but there you have it. Corollary: geniuses and idiots both do unusual things, and the system can’t tell the difference between them.

‘But that is, to a great extent, because I am the receipient of much societal priviledge and assume that I, and my children, will have an unfair advantage in life and that social justice requires I work to undermine that advantage.’

Thanks for that, ragweed; I didn’t quite understand that anyone actually had that attitude, it’s very far outside my individual experience. And, given my own honestly-held beliefs (warning; not very sосial-democratic), ascribing what you say your position is to anyone without them saying so, would feel like constructing a straw man.