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boner confessor
Apr 25, 2013

by R. Guyovich

wateroverfire posted:

That's all possible. Then again, that's cold comfort to the parents of the students you condemn to poverty, and to the students' eventual children, for the sake of bringing up the average of the students for whom a good outcome is simply not ending up in an institution. How sure are you about the cost/benefit analysis?

Ah yes, poverty is both genetic and contagious. We should read the head-bumps of the poor and categorize them accordingly.

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JeffersonClay
Jun 17, 2003

by R. Guyovich

wateroverfire posted:

That's all possible. Then again, that's cold comfort to the parents of the students you condemn to poverty, and to the students' eventual children, for the sake of bringing up the average of the students for whom a good outcome is simply not ending up in an institution. How sure are you about the cost/benefit analysis?

I don't think anyone is sure about the cost benefit analysis, we don't have enough data to conclude either way. I'd caution you against going with your gut here, however. The cost of a lifetime of institutionalization can approach a million dollars. The social costs of violent and property crime that could be prevented with education are much larger, and would be borne by communities with the fewest resources available to do so.

woke wedding drone
Jun 1, 2003

by exmarx
Fun Shoe

tbp posted:

I've attended two public schools in my life, the former which was real bad, poverty etc. and nobody gave a poo poo about school, there were a lot of fights and everyone was rowdy as hell and also dumb as poo poo, you were encouraged not really to achieve lol I was in all the gifted classes and when I moved to the wealthier school i was definitely average so idk maybe there is something to the environment that you are in, and if there are a ton of bad kids doing drugs, fighting, etc. its not really good to become a scholar, there.

That kind of proves my point, you did OK at that school (gifted classes) because you had more advantages. And I have a feeling that it wasn't the school you came from that made you unexceptional.

Zeitgueist
Aug 8, 2003

by Ralp

wateroverfire posted:

Can't save everyone but putting the promising students in good environments would probably go a long way toward pulling them out of poverty.

It's funny that rich schools are full of promising students but poor schools less so.

Man how do all the promising students know to go to rich areas. :negative:

tsa
Feb 3, 2014
Boo loving hoo that some administrators got 7 years for making 100+k while engaging in a multi-year conspiracy.

Zeitgueist
Aug 8, 2003

by Ralp

tsa posted:

Boo loving hoo that some administrators got 7 years for making 100+k while engaging in a multi-year conspiracy.

Boo loving hoo some guy got to be governor of Florida for making millions on a multi-year conspiracy that cost the government billions.

tsa
Feb 3, 2014
Is that the sound of crying?

JeffersonClay
Jun 17, 2003

by R. Guyovich

Zeitgueist posted:

It's funny that rich schools are full of promising students but poor schools less so.

Man how do all the promising students know to go to rich areas. :negative:

Poverty is bad because it has deleterious effects on human development. Rich children are able to buy advantages their poor peers cannot. Are these controversial statements?

tsa
Feb 3, 2014

JeffersonClay posted:

Poverty is bad because it has deleterious effects on human development. Rich children are able to buy advantages their poor peers cannot. Are these controversial statements?

Only to non-thinking leftists that populate these boards.

Zeitgueist
Aug 8, 2003

by Ralp

JeffersonClay posted:

Poverty is bad because it has deleterious effects on human development. Rich children are able to buy advantages their poor peers cannot. Are these controversial statements?

I'm more making fun of the idea of taking what few folks manage to perform well in a bad school out of that school, rather than fixing the underlying problem. It's not as if we don't have research saying that money will improve schools, and moreso than charters do. People just aren't interested in that, because it's not about fixing schools, it's about funding charters.

tsa posted:

Only to non-thinking leftists that populate these boards.

:qqsay:

PERPETUAL IDIOT
Sep 12, 2003

JeffersonClay posted:

"Bad kids around you make it harder to learn" is not a controversial statement in the education world. It's also the best line of attack against statistical research that indicates charters are more effective.

There is none.

Zeitgueist
Aug 8, 2003

by Ralp

PERPETUAL IDIOT posted:

There is none.

Every study I've ever seen says charters perform roughly the same as public schools despite being able to pick and choose students.

Also I like this post on the subject.

Rent-A-Cop
Oct 15, 2004

I posted my food for USPOL Thanksgiving!

Zeitgueist posted:

Boo loving hoo some guy got to be governor of Florida for making millions on a multi-year conspiracy that cost the government billions.
The lesson here is that if you're gonna cheat, cheat big.

sat on my keys!
Oct 2, 2014

Zeitgueist posted:

Every study I've ever seen says charters perform roughly the same as public schools despite being able to pick and choose students.

Also I like this post on the subject.

Is there anyway you could quote it for low-achieving non-archives-havers?

on the left
Nov 2, 2013
I Am A Gigantic Piece Of Shit

Literally poo from a diseased human butt

Zeitgueist posted:

We need to consider public schools basically a farm system for the top 1% of students

This is a good thing though. If the goal is to create an educated society, schools should allow full development of all students. If some students can move many times faster than the slower students, it makes sense to separate the slow and the fast students.

Baronjutter posted:

Where I live there aren't really good schools or bad schools because our schools are not funded at the city or neighbourhood level. Obviously a school in a poorer area will be seen as slightly worse than one in a richer area, but the difference is not extreme enough that anyone but the most driven tiger mom would send their kid to anything but the closest school. It's also sometimes tricky to send your kid to the wrong school, you need a good reason and they can deny the request.

In Asia, schools in one metro area are given the same funding, but some schools are clearly better since they feed into top universities and attract better faculty/have better management. The students take a competitive test to get into these top schools, and the top schools are definitely better than the middling or low schools.'

Popular Thug Drink posted:

Ah yes, poverty is both genetic and contagious. We should read the head-bumps of the poor and categorize them accordingly.

Schools are so proactive about protecting the right to an education that they will not remove a student for impacting the rights of other students to get an education.

boner confessor
Apr 25, 2013

by R. Guyovich

on the left posted:

Schools are so proactive about protecting the right to an education that they will not remove a student for impacting the rights of other students to get an education.

This is not true, and also you're retarded.

Zeitgueist
Aug 8, 2003

by Ralp
Low achieving posters pulling down this thread.

Zeitgueist
Aug 8, 2003

by Ralp

bartlebyshop posted:

Is there anyway you could quote it for low-achieving non-archives-havers?

GrandTheftAutobot:

Arkane and charter schools you say?

Arkane posted:

Charter schools aren't some gigantic expense. The ones running in Harlem cost the same per student as their public counterparts. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I'm about 99% certain that is correct. So in fact we wouldn't be throwing money at the problem at all, just re-allocating resources.

And what is this assertion based on? You're 99% certain but don't have "it" in front of you? What is "it" exactly? Is it a paper? Are you sure it's a paper? Are you sure it isn't nothing?

Charter Schools and Voucher Programs are enormously expensive. They are also relatively ineffective compared to many other educational interventions. The crucial third factor is that many of the other more effective interventions are also less expensive, which actually makes Charter Schools and Voucher Programs extremely Cost-Ineffective. In the following Megapost I will demonstrate that Charter and Voucher interventions are not only ineffective policies in raising student achievement, but they are also many magnitudes of order less cost-effective than myriad other educational interventions. I will draw the majority of my arguments and technical analysis from the following papers by Dr. Stuart S. Yeh of the University of Minnesota.

Yeh, Stuart S. "The Cost Effectiveness of 22 Approaches for Raising Student Achievement." Journal of Education Finance. Summer 2010. 38-75.
Yeh, Stuart S. "The Cost-Effectiveness of Five Policies for Improving Student Achievement." American Journal of Evaluation. 2007 28: 416.

I continually hear it brought up when discussing education policy that Charter Schools and Voucher Programs are no great expense and that there are actually savings to be found by redistributing kids from public schools to Private Schools (Vouchers) or to Charter Schools (Charter). There is a second contention, that these interventions raise student achievement. Third, there is an implicit argument, drawn speciously from the preceding points, that Charters and Vouchers are cost-effective interventions and worth public expenditure.

I will address these points in 3 stages. First, I will demonstrate that charter schools and vouchers are actually extremely expensive, even to the point of being among the most expensive kinds of educational interventions. Next, I will demonstrate that these interventions are inconclusively effective at raising student achievement, and even when granted the high end estimates they are still less effective than many other, cheaper educational interventions (such as: Rapid Assessment, Increasing Teacher Salaries, Decreasing Class Sizes, and many others). Finally, I will demonstrate that Charters and Voucher Programs are extremely Cost-Ineffective, and will argue that if you actually give a poo poo about increasing educational quality you should abandon Charters and Vouchers and instead promote the adoption of one or several of the other Cost-Effective interventions.

Stuart Yeh posted:

Significant costs to society would arise to the extent that voucher programs pull students at random from public school classrooms, making it difficult (if not impossible) for public schools and districts to reduce expenditures at the same rate that students use vouchers to switch to private schools. For example, in the study by Howell et al. (2002), very small numbers of students were offered vouchers in the baseline year: 1,300 in New York, 809 in the District of Columbia, and 515 in Dayton, Ohio. If these 2,624 students were randomly pulled from 1,427 public schools in those three cities (1,213 in New York, 165 in District of Columbia, and 49 in Dayton; National Center for Education Statistics, 2000, 2001) and, within each school, were randomly pulled from an average of four grade levels, only 0.46 students per grade level, per school used vouchers to transfer to private schools. Similar calculations suggest that the same issue arises in each of the major voucher programs.

As of January 2006, 5,734 students participated in Cleveland’s (Ohio) voucher program (Belfield, 2006). Based on the proportion 921%) of students who transferred from Cleveland’s public schools during the 2000-2001 school year (Schiller, n.d.), I estimate that 1,204 of the 5,734 students transferred from Cleveland’s 122 public schools, an average 9.87 students per school or 2.47 students per grade level, per school (assuming an average of four grade levels per school).

He also calculates the average numbers of students per grade drawn from public schools in Milwaukee and the state of Florida, but I won’t quote the whole thing. At this foundational point of the cost analysis you should be able to anticipate the argument. The argument is that all the people who say “Charter schools aren’t some enormous expense!” don’t know loving anything about conducting a cost analysis.

Stuart Yeh posted:

On average, therefore, very few students (between 0.05 and 3.27 students per grade level, per school) used vouchers to transfer to private schools in the city of New York, the District of Columbia, Dayton, Cleveland, Milwaukee, and the state of Florida. This would not have allowed any of the public school-building principals to eliminate teaching positions in response to the transfers, and there would have been no decrease in overhead, facilities, or administrative costs. At the same time, there are far fewer private schools, and thus voucher programs funnel public school students into a small number of classrooms that quickly fill up and require more buildings, teachers, and administrators in proportion to the ratio of public to private school students (i.e. 9:1; see National Center for Education Statistics, 2005b). If public school students enroll in private schools, the private school classrooms fill up 9 times faster than public school classrooms are depleted. Thus, voucher programs typically create a need for private schools to add teachers, administrators, and facilities without corresponding reductions in Public School costs. These inefficiencies increase the total costs of teaching the same number of students (both public and private).

Although the real cost of educating the remaining public school students barely declines, state funding declines by a fixed amount every time a student uses a voucher to transfer to a public school (Miles & Roza, 2004). By law, school districts must balance their budgets: When revenues are reduced, expenditures must also be reduced. When building principals are unable to save costs by consolidating classrooms and reducing teaching positions, the reduction in revenue associated with declining enrollment is typically offset by reducing other services – art, music, extracurricular programs and other support services (e.g., see Horn & Miron, 2000, who identified the same issue when students transfer to charter schools). These reductions in expenditures can be mistakenly attributed to cost savings, for example, when expenditures are regressed on factors including student enrollment (see e.g. Gottlob, 2004). However, expenditures decline because of the forced reduction in services, not because of savings generated through reduced enrollments.

B-b-b-b-b-b-but those are still cost savings!!! Au contraire, you shithead. According to Yeh and the Pennsylvania Economy League Eastern Division, the Philadelphia School District was only able to recover 17.38% of the additional costs of educating the transfer students, including administrative and transportation costs. That means that the Philadelphia charter experience threw 82.62% of its additional costs onto society.

Stuart Yeh posted:

The real social cost of educating large numbers of students in private schools (who are currently educated in public schools) is difficult to estimate for several reasons: Private school tuition figures exclude costs that are offset by corporate and noncorporate subsidies, as well as the costs of services that would be required by many students (and by law are currently required by public schools but not by private schools), including transportation, free and reduced meals, special education, vocational education, and services for students with disabilities and limited English proficiency (Belfield, 2006; Levin, 1998; Levin & Driver, 1997). Although comprehensive cost data are not available for private schools, such data are available for charter schools.

Charter schools are subject to the same competitive pressures as private schools. The result is teacher salaries that are substantially lower than traditional public school teacher salaries. Yeh uses charter school information, combined with estimates of cost savings resulting from students switching to private schools, and cost estimates for transportation, record keeping, information systems to monitor and assess voucher eligibility, and adjudication services that would be required by a voucher system, to obtain an estimate (adjusted for inflation) of the annual per pupil cost to society when typical public school students use vouchers to transfer to private schools and receive comparable services. This estimate is $9,646.01 per pupil.

That is one expensive loving program. Next, let’s deal with charters.

Stuart Yeh posted:

In the simplest case, if a regular public school is converted to a charter school, and if revenues and expenditures (which are measures of resources expended by society on charter schools), as well as enrollment and educational services remain identical; there are no additional costs (or savings) to society as a result of implementing the charter school.

However, to the extent that charter schools are not simply converted public schools, but instead are newly created schools that require new facilities, new administrators, and new teachers, and pull students from widely scattered classrooms in traditional public schools, society pays for the creation and maintenance of a larger number of school-level administrative units, facilities, and teachers (Nelson, 1997). As illustrated by the calculations regarding voucher programs, only a fraction of these costs are offset through savings in the sending public schools and districts. The cost to hire charter school teachers will largely be a new cost with very little offset due to reduced need for teachers in the sending schools, which will rarely be able to reduce their own costs in proportion to the costs of establishing and maintaining the new charter schools.

Got that? You spend more money to educate the same number of children. What the gently caress? That’s more teachers, more facilities, more administrators, and more staff to educate the same number of students. Charter Schools cost a gently caress lot of money. On top of that, they impose additional costs to society in another way.

Stuart Yeh posted:

Horn and Miron (2000) found that when regular public schools lose scattered students to a charter school, there are no cost savings. However, each lost student took away $6,000 of state funding. The loss of this revenue was absorbed by the local district, typically through reduced funding of art, music, and extracurricular programs and support staff and services.

Yeh estimates the annual per pupil cost of educating charter transfers was slightly lower than a voucher program (because of reduced administrative costs). The annual per pupil cost of charters is $8,086.30, which is still a loving buttload of money. Especially compared with interventions that actually loving work. Which charters and vouchers loving don’t.

Stuart Yeh posted:

The best studies of voucher programs used random assignment and lottery-based assignment designs. At most, these studies suggest small positive effects on student achievement for students who received vouchers.

Ideally, large-scale randomized experiments comparing the achievement of students who were randomly accepted into charter schools with the performance of students who were randomly rejected and attended traditional schools would be used to estimate the effect of charter schools on student achievement. However, no true random-assignment studies have been completed thus far, and the two lottery-based studies that approximated a random-assignment design only involved a total of four charter schools, which is inadequate for estimating the average impact of charter schools. Averaging the effect sizes of these two studies suggests an effect of approximately 0.018 Standard Deviations, but no generalizations can be made to the larger population of charter schools.

A prime concern when random assignment is not used is controlling selection bias. However, this threat can be controlled through the use of panel data with multiple observations of performance for each student who switches between a traditional school and a charter school (or the reverse). Thus, students serve as their own controls, and the benefit of charter schools is estimated by comparing achievement gains while attending a charter school to achievement gains while attending a regular public school. Three large-scale studies used this method, which controls for student maturation and history effects as well as selection bias and, therefore, has many of the key strengths of a random assignment design.

Here’s a table of these studies on Vouchers and Charters. As you can plainly see, Vouchers and Charters are relatively ineffective at raising student achievement, posting only very moderate standard deviation increases. The average SD increase for Charters is 0.005. For Vouchers it is 0.057.



That’s laughably lovely. But wait, it gets even better.

Remember when Arkane said this?

Arkane posted:

To be completely honest with you, I don't care about these charter schools. For my part, my interest in this topic is fixing education in poor neighborhoods. Kids shouldn't be cut off at the knees in their education opportunities simply by virtue of being born into a bad situation. This is a problem that isn't going to fix itself, and throwing money at it as we have done in the past has been a colossal waste of resources.

Well, it turns out that “throwing money at it” is actually a lot more cost-effective than charter school or voucher interventions. Get a load of this:



I mean, :cmon: increasing spending by 10% is literally 119.661 times more cost-effective than charter school interventions. Let that poo poo sink in. Throwing money at the problem is literally more cost-effective than your dumb little idea. Much more to the point, you could do almost all of the following interventions and get much better, cheaper results than you could by implementing a charter intervention.



Basically, if what you actually cared about was increasing student achievement you wouldn’t be in this and every other education thread trotting out your charter school bullshit. You’d be advocating for some combination of interventions like: Paying Teachers More Money, Rapid Assessment, Reducing Class Sizes, Increasing Funding by 10%, Cross Age Tutoring, Longer School Days, Computer-Assisted Instruction, Full Day Kindegarten, Head Start, Summer School, or some other poo poo. But no, you’re in here with Charters because you have an agenda and that agenda has fuckall to do with anything besides Right Wing social engineering.

Arkane posted:

Charter schools aren't some gigantic expense. The ones running in Harlem cost the same per student as their public counterparts. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I'm about 99% certain that is correct. So in fact we wouldn't be throwing money at the problem at all, just re-allocating resources.

Zeitgueist fucked around with this message at 03:02 on Apr 18, 2015

on the left
Nov 2, 2013
I Am A Gigantic Piece Of Shit

Literally poo from a diseased human butt

Popular Thug Drink posted:

This is not true, and also you're retarded.

How is it not true? Tons of low-performing schools just end up tolerating the background noise of disruptive students because kicking them out would hurt funding.

PERPETUAL IDIOT
Sep 12, 2003

on the left posted:

How is it not true? Tons of low-performing schools just end up tolerating the background noise of disruptive students because kicking them out would hurt funding.

How's it not true? I just said it!

JeffersonClay
Jun 17, 2003

by R. Guyovich

on the left posted:

How is it not true? Tons of low-performing schools just end up tolerating the background noise of disruptive students because kicking them out would hurt funding.

Public schools don't kick out disruptive students because it's very difficult and because it's a terrible social strategy. Charter schools have far more tools to deny these students admission in the first place or to convince parents to direct their school choice somewhere else once they realize the kid is a behavior problem.

Blue Raider
Sep 2, 2006

Zeitgueist posted:

GrandTheftAutobot:

Arkane and charter schools you say?


And what is this assertion based on? You're 99% certain but don't have "it" in front of you? What is "it" exactly? Is it a paper? Are you sure it's a paper? Are you sure it isn't nothing?

Charter Schools and Voucher Programs are enormously expensive. They are also relatively ineffective compared to many other educational interventions. The crucial third factor is that many of the other more effective interventions are also less expensive, which actually makes Charter Schools and Voucher Programs extremely Cost-Ineffective. In the following Megapost I will demonstrate that Charter and Voucher interventions are not only ineffective policies in raising student achievement, but they are also many magnitudes of order less cost-effective than myriad other educational interventions. I will draw the majority of my arguments and technical analysis from the following papers by Dr. Stuart S. Yeh of the University of Minnesota.

Yeh, Stuart S. "The Cost Effectiveness of 22 Approaches for Raising Student Achievement." Journal of Education Finance. Summer 2010. 38-75.
Yeh, Stuart S. "The Cost-Effectiveness of Five Policies for Improving Student Achievement." American Journal of Evaluation. 2007 28: 416.

I continually hear it brought up when discussing education policy that Charter Schools and Voucher Programs are no great expense and that there are actually savings to be found by redistributing kids from public schools to Private Schools (Vouchers) or to Charter Schools (Charter). There is a second contention, that these interventions raise student achievement. Third, there is an implicit argument, drawn speciously from the preceding points, that Charters and Vouchers are cost-effective interventions and worth public expenditure.

I will address these points in 3 stages. First, I will demonstrate that charter schools and vouchers are actually extremely expensive, even to the point of being among the most expensive kinds of educational interventions. Next, I will demonstrate that these interventions are inconclusively effective at raising student achievement, and even when granted the high end estimates they are still less effective than many other, cheaper educational interventions (such as: Rapid Assessment, Increasing Teacher Salaries, Decreasing Class Sizes, and many others). Finally, I will demonstrate that Charters and Voucher Programs are extremely Cost-Ineffective, and will argue that if you actually give a poo poo about increasing educational quality you should abandon Charters and Vouchers and instead promote the adoption of one or several of the other Cost-Effective interventions.


He also calculates the average numbers of students per grade drawn from public schools in Milwaukee and the state of Florida, but I won’t quote the whole thing. At this foundational point of the cost analysis you should be able to anticipate the argument. The argument is that all the people who say “Charter schools aren’t some enormous expense!” don’t know loving anything about conducting a cost analysis.


B-b-b-b-b-b-but those are still cost savings!!! Au contraire, you shithead. According to Yeh and the Pennsylvania Economy League Eastern Division, the Philadelphia School District was only able to recover 17.38% of the additional costs of educating the transfer students, including administrative and transportation costs. That means that the Philadelphia charter experience threw 82.62% of its additional costs onto society.


Charter schools are subject to the same competitive pressures as private schools. The result is teacher salaries that are substantially lower than traditional public school teacher salaries. Yeh uses charter school information, combined with estimates of cost savings resulting from students switching to private schools, and cost estimates for transportation, record keeping, information systems to monitor and assess voucher eligibility, and adjudication services that would be required by a voucher system, to obtain an estimate (adjusted for inflation) of the annual per pupil cost to society when typical public school students use vouchers to transfer to private schools and receive comparable services. This estimate is $9,646.01 per pupil.

That is one expensive loving program. Next, let’s deal with charters.


Got that? You spend more money to educate the same number of children. What the gently caress? That’s more teachers, more facilities, more administrators, and more staff to educate the same number of students. Charter Schools cost a gently caress lot of money. On top of that, they impose additional costs to society in another way.


Yeh estimates the annual per pupil cost of educating charter transfers was slightly lower than a voucher program (because of reduced administrative costs). The annual per pupil cost of charters is $8,086.30, which is still a loving buttload of money. Especially compared with interventions that actually loving work. Which charters and vouchers loving don’t.


Here’s a table of these studies on Vouchers and Charters. As you can plainly see, Vouchers and Charters are relatively ineffective at raising student achievement, posting only very moderate standard deviation increases. The average SD increase for Charters is 0.005. For Vouchers it is 0.057.



That’s laughably lovely. But wait, it gets even better.

Remember when Arkane said this?


Well, it turns out that “throwing money at it” is actually a lot more cost-effective than charter school or voucher interventions. Get a load of this:



I mean, :cmon: increasing spending by 10% is literally 119.661 times more cost-effective than charter school interventions. Let that poo poo sink in. Throwing money at the problem is literally more cost-effective than your dumb little idea. Much more to the point, you could do almost all of the following interventions and get much better, cheaper results than you could by implementing a charter intervention.



Basically, if what you actually cared about was increasing student achievement you wouldn’t be in this and every other education thread trotting out your charter school bullshit. You’d be advocating for some combination of interventions like: Paying Teachers More Money, Rapid Assessment, Reducing Class Sizes, Increasing Funding by 10%, Cross Age Tutoring, Longer School Days, Computer-Assisted Instruction, Full Day Kindegarten, Head Start, Summer School, or some other poo poo. But no, you’re in here with Charters because you have an agenda and that agenda has fuckall to do with anything besides Right Wing social engineering.

i disagree

woke wedding drone
Jun 1, 2003

by exmarx
Fun Shoe

on the left posted:

How is it not true? Tons of low-performing schools just end up tolerating the background noise of disruptive students because kicking them out would hurt funding.

What do you think "kicking them out" entails? Here's a hint, it's worlds more expensive.

sat on my keys!
Oct 2, 2014

Zeitgueist posted:

quoted archives post

Thank you very much! This was quite informative.

JeffersonClay
Jun 17, 2003

by R. Guyovich
This is for your own good goons: read em and weep. Charter schools do get results.

https://credo.stanford.edu

I don't like charter schools and I don't think they are a solution to educational inequity, but the debate isn't about whether charter schools work, because on the aggregate they do show modest improvements in standardized test scores over traditional public schools in some pretty damned well constructed research studies. The debate is about why they show those results, and the implications for education on a macro level. Peer effects, creaming, and hyper focus on test prep are the best arguments against expanding the charter model. hth

boner confessor
Apr 25, 2013

by R. Guyovich

on the left posted:

How is it not true? Tons of low-performing schools just end up tolerating the background noise of disruptive students because kicking them out would hurt funding.

Public schools kick students out all the time, and you're still retarded and a bad poster.

boner confessor
Apr 25, 2013

by R. Guyovich

JeffersonClay posted:

This is for your own good goons: read em and weep. Charter schools do get results.

https://credo.stanford.edu

I don't like charter schools and I don't think they are a solution to educational inequity, but the debate isn't about whether charter schools work, because on the aggregate they do show modest improvements in standardized test scores over traditional public schools in some pretty damned well constructed research studies. The debate is about why they show those results, and the implications for education on a macro level. Peer effects, creaming, and hyper focus on test prep are the best arguments against expanding the charter model. hth

nice splash page

JeffersonClay
Jun 17, 2003

by R. Guyovich
Read literally any study on that page. That's the point.

Space Skeleton
Sep 28, 2004

Yeah, charter schools produce similar results as a public school when looked at in a specific and potentially misleading way.

Meanwhile, increasing funding to public schools dramatically increases their performance.

Why would we want to go with charter schools and not just boost public school funding by ~10% for the massive increase in performance?

Mandy Thompson
Dec 26, 2014

by zen death robot
I don't know what the most just answer to the question of peer effects. I benefited from white privilege and class issues. I got an incredible amount of abuse at my home school for being smart and being gay. If I had continued in that school, I would have killed myself. Instead, I lucked out and went to a magnet school that had a much better attitude towards gays and lesbians and smart people and didn't have to put up with constant bullying, having my school work stolen, and being too scared to go to school, thus missing days and such. At the same time, for my opportunity to get out, other people were not so lucky.

The underlying problem though to me, is not even in the school, its where these kids are being raised and the opportunities they have. Kids who act like bullies come from homes and neighborhoods where they are raped, where they experience high level violence, where nutrition, love, and supervision are in short supply, where health care, including mental healthcare is not availible. Thing is, there doesn't seem to be any political will to attack these underlying problems so we are left with choosing between two wrong answers, leaving kids like me in dangerous schools to elevate disadvantaged kids, or letting some of us go be successful. Both options are bad.

Mandy Thompson
Dec 26, 2014

by zen death robot
I would venture another thing. We need a living wage for everyone in this country. I'm going to come out and say it. Not every kid has the aptitude or interest for school, at least not the rigor that secondary school requires. Whether its because of how they were raised or individual variation, or that pesky free will that may or may not exist, not everyone is cut out for Algebra 2 or reading Shakespeare. It's not what God has called them to do. We need options and choices for those people to still contribute even if they aren't book smart. They may be another kind of smart. So many schools have ditched vocational education and art in favor of testing math. Kid might not be able to do exercises with 3rd degree polynomials but is good at getting engines working. We need that as an option. And we need living wage jobs for people working in food service too.

PT6A
Jan 5, 2006

Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

Mandy Thompson posted:

I would venture another thing. We need a living wage for everyone in this country. I'm going to come out and say it. Not every kid has the aptitude or interest for school, at least not the rigor that secondary school requires. Whether its because of how they were raised or individual variation, or that pesky free will that may or may not exist, not everyone is cut out for Algebra 2 or reading Shakespeare. It's not what God has called them to do. We need options and choices for those people to still contribute even if they aren't book smart. They may be another kind of smart. So many schools have ditched vocational education and art in favor of testing math. Kid might not be able to do exercises with 3rd degree polynomials but is good at getting engines working. We need that as an option. And we need living wage jobs for people working in food service too.

I don't know what it's like in the States, but in Canada, the graduation requirements for high school were far from rigorous. For university admission, you'd need the university-stream classes, plus anything that your specific program requires, but the other options available didn't require you to be an amazing student by any means. You basically had to be literate, and somewhat able to do math (probably up to pre-algebra or something). We even had the Registered Apprentice program so that you could get all your required courses done in a compressed block, and then you'd receive credit for your hours worked as an apprentice. So, while I agree that there need to be options available for people who aren't academically inclined, I still think high school should probably be mandatory, and kids shouldn't be pushed one way or the other "just because."

Zeitgueist
Aug 8, 2003

by Ralp

Wee Tinkle Wand posted:

Why would we want to go with charter schools and not just boost public school funding by ~10% for the massive increase in performance?

because there is massive money in privatizing education?

Mandy Thompson
Dec 26, 2014

by zen death robot
I know this is going to sound like it contradicts my previous point but there is something that does bug me. As I said, we need options for people who are not book smart so that they can still make a living wage. At the same time though, I've seen the meaning and significance of a high school diploma become diluted. A lot of times kids who spent most of high school loving around, causing problems, bullying others, skipping school and making things difficult for everyone, sometimes are put in to programs for the sole purpose of keeping them from dropping out. They didn't learn the content but at the tail end, they go to school for 3 hours a day, take a diluted, dumbed down version of the course work, on a computer, and still get to walk at graduation and get a regular diploma. That to me is kind of an insult to the people that did the work, did have the aptitude, and puts them in a position where their accomplishment doesn't mean much and they have to go to college to set themselves apart from people who didn't do the work and were disruptive jerks to everyone else.

Its one thing to be able to meet the standard in a different way, its another thing to be given a free ride and get the same slip of paper.

Space Skeleton
Sep 28, 2004

Zeitgueist posted:

because there is massive money in privatizing education?

Well, yeah, but I meant beyond "gently caress you, let's make money!"

IMO being profitable isn't and shouldn't be a defensible position for education, it's too important for basically everything else.

Space Skeleton
Sep 28, 2004

Mandy Thompson posted:

I know this is going to sound like it contradicts my previous point but there is something that does bug me. As I said, we need options for people who are not book smart so that they can still make a living wage. At the same time though, I've seen the meaning and significance of a high school diploma become diluted. A lot of times kids who spent most of high school loving around, causing problems, bullying others, skipping school and making things difficult for everyone, sometimes are put in to programs for the sole purpose of keeping them from dropping out. They didn't learn the content but at the tail end, they go to school for 3 hours a day, take a diluted, dumbed down version of the course work, on a computer, and still get to walk at graduation and get a regular diploma. That to me is kind of an insult to the people that did the work, did have the aptitude, and puts them in a position where their accomplishment doesn't mean much and they have to go to college to set themselves apart from people who didn't do the work and were disruptive jerks to everyone else.

Its one thing to be able to meet the standard in a different way, its another thing to be given a free ride and get the same slip of paper.

There are technical alternatives to High School sometimes but (in my area at least) they are looked down on as some form of Special Education, as in for people with learning disorders or mental issues. It doesn't help that the facility near me started as that before becoming what it is now.

In the program near me they cover the basics like reading/math/science/history but focus more on teaching things useful to enter a trade of some sort so lots of automotive repair, carpentry and plumbing types of courses. As you get higher up in grade you can choose a focus, but you don't have to, the focus gets you a certificate from some entity which says "hey I know a lot about <x> trade" and apparently bumps you to the head of the line for applying for an entry position in that trade.

woke wedding drone
Jun 1, 2003

by exmarx
Fun Shoe

Wee Tinkle Wand posted:

Yeah, charter schools produce similar results as a public school when looked at in a specific and potentially misleading way.

Meanwhile, increasing funding to public schools dramatically increases their performance.

Why would we want to go with charter schools and not just boost public school funding by ~10% for the massive increase in performance?

Because if we continue to gut public schools, eventually charter schools' performance will look like excellence in contrast.

Arglebargle III
Feb 21, 2006

Otoh poverty is cool and good.

computer parts
Nov 18, 2010

PLEASE CLAP

Mandy Thompson posted:

I would venture another thing. We need a living wage for everyone in this country. I'm going to come out and say it. Not every kid has the aptitude or interest for school, at least not the rigor that secondary school requires. Whether its because of how they were raised or individual variation, or that pesky free will that may or may not exist, not everyone is cut out for Algebra 2 or reading Shakespeare. It's not what God has called them to do. We need options and choices for those people to still contribute even if they aren't book smart. They may be another kind of smart. So many schools have ditched vocational education and art in favor of testing math. Kid might not be able to do exercises with 3rd degree polynomials but is good at getting engines working. We need that as an option. And we need living wage jobs for people working in food service too.

Continuing to send all the black people to food service isn't a solution even if they have a "living wage".

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Grand Theft Autobot
Feb 28, 2008

I'm something of a fucking idiot myself

JeffersonClay posted:

This is for your own good goons: read em and weep. Charter schools do get results.

https://credo.stanford.edu

I don't like charter schools and I don't think they are a solution to educational inequity, but the debate isn't about whether charter schools work, because on the aggregate they do show modest improvements in standardized test scores over traditional public schools in some pretty damned well constructed research studies. The debate is about why they show those results, and the implications for education on a macro level. Peer effects, creaming, and hyper focus on test prep are the best arguments against expanding the charter model. hth

Nobody is disputing that many studies show small improvements from implementing Charters or Vouchers. What we're disputing is that those improvements are worth the cost of the intervention. Charters and Vouchers are massively expensive with small improvements, especially relative to a ton of other interventions, which makes Charters and Vouchers extremely cost-ineffective.

Grand Theft Autobot fucked around with this message at 15:01 on Apr 18, 2015

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