I’m a teacher, currently at a charter school. School choice is not a magic fix to the educational “problems” facing poor and dysfunctional neighborhoods. Urban charters (and charters are mostly urban) most often serve a specific, and highly sympathetic, demographic: poor families in poor neighborhoods with bad, disorderly schools who do …
I’m a teacher, currently at a charter school. School choice is not a magic fix to the educational “problems” facing poor and dysfunctional neighborhoods. Urban charters (and charters are mostly urban) most often serve a specific, and highly sympathetic, demographic: poor families in poor neighborhoods with bad, disorderly schools who do actually value education. The reason these families are in this position in the first place, though, is that their neighbors usually do not, which is an underrated and significant reason why the local schools exist in the state that they do. Education is simply not a priority.
Most of the laws in our education system are explicitly designed to help society’s current and future downtrodden. No Child Left Behind was designed, in the public-facing first instance, “for” poor, minority students in “failing” inner city schools. IDEA was designed “for” children with “disabilities,” a category (or series of categories) which has, unsurprisingly, expanded dramatically since IDEA’s passage. Any teacher working in public education today could tell you about how every spare minute and dollar and then some are spent on squeezing marginal gains out of the struggling students. The average elementary school teacher nationally gets about 4 hours of prep time per week (~45-50 minutes per day); middle and high school teachers, closer to an hour. The average IEP, which is an annual report written “for” each special education student, takes between 1-3 hours to write. 18% of all public school students have IEPs (think about that: 1 in 6 students is diagnosed as “disabled”). Think of the opportunity cost this presents to a single teacher: writing the annual IEP is but one of the dozens of paperwork obligations teachers have, virtually all of which are for students who struggle the most. Obviously, when a teacher’s planning time is spent on such tasks, they have less time and energy to devote to planning effective and stimulating instruction for the other 82%.
One does not need to debate how “real” various SPED diagnoses are in order to recognize the terrifying long-term implications. It is completely insane for a society to focus all of its educational firepower on the segments of the populace least likely to be able to support itself in the future, let alone others. Public education is a race to the bottom, which drags down the middle, hence the existence of college freshmen who cannot write a grammatically sound paragraph.
On another note: I also don’t understand why people view America’s PISA (international test) score stagnation as failure. In 1995, 65% of American public school students were white and 13.5% were Hispanic. In 2023, those numbers had changed to 45% white and 30% Hispanic. The country has undergone absolutely massive demographic change over the course of the last generation. White students score higher on average on standardized tests, in the U.S. and internationally, compared to Hispanic students. One does not need to engage in speculation about the cause of that achievement gap in order to recognize that, under the circumstances, it is actually perhaps an admirable accomplishment that American test scores haven’t experienced a greater decline.
I’m a teacher, currently at a charter school. School choice is not a magic fix to the educational “problems” facing poor and dysfunctional neighborhoods. Urban charters (and charters are mostly urban) most often serve a specific, and highly sympathetic, demographic: poor families in poor neighborhoods with bad, disorderly schools who do actually value education. The reason these families are in this position in the first place, though, is that their neighbors usually do not, which is an underrated and significant reason why the local schools exist in the state that they do. Education is simply not a priority.
Most of the laws in our education system are explicitly designed to help society’s current and future downtrodden. No Child Left Behind was designed, in the public-facing first instance, “for” poor, minority students in “failing” inner city schools. IDEA was designed “for” children with “disabilities,” a category (or series of categories) which has, unsurprisingly, expanded dramatically since IDEA’s passage. Any teacher working in public education today could tell you about how every spare minute and dollar and then some are spent on squeezing marginal gains out of the struggling students. The average elementary school teacher nationally gets about 4 hours of prep time per week (~45-50 minutes per day); middle and high school teachers, closer to an hour. The average IEP, which is an annual report written “for” each special education student, takes between 1-3 hours to write. 18% of all public school students have IEPs (think about that: 1 in 6 students is diagnosed as “disabled”). Think of the opportunity cost this presents to a single teacher: writing the annual IEP is but one of the dozens of paperwork obligations teachers have, virtually all of which are for students who struggle the most. Obviously, when a teacher’s planning time is spent on such tasks, they have less time and energy to devote to planning effective and stimulating instruction for the other 82%.
One does not need to debate how “real” various SPED diagnoses are in order to recognize the terrifying long-term implications. It is completely insane for a society to focus all of its educational firepower on the segments of the populace least likely to be able to support itself in the future, let alone others. Public education is a race to the bottom, which drags down the middle, hence the existence of college freshmen who cannot write a grammatically sound paragraph.
On another note: I also don’t understand why people view America’s PISA (international test) score stagnation as failure. In 1995, 65% of American public school students were white and 13.5% were Hispanic. In 2023, those numbers had changed to 45% white and 30% Hispanic. The country has undergone absolutely massive demographic change over the course of the last generation. White students score higher on average on standardized tests, in the U.S. and internationally, compared to Hispanic students. One does not need to engage in speculation about the cause of that achievement gap in order to recognize that, under the circumstances, it is actually perhaps an admirable accomplishment that American test scores haven’t experienced a greater decline.