On Education reform, choice, vouchers, selection etcetera

[solicitr]

Sweden, the most notably socialist European country, embraced a school choice scheme in which parents could use state funding in new, non-state schools.

The number of independent schools there rose from 90 in 1992 to 585 in 2006; studies have shown that this has boosted the standards in existing state schools, which now have to compete for pupils.

[Primula Baggins]

There is probably no question of inadequate funding for the state schools in the tax hell known as Sweden, right? Or the resultant rigid biennial budgets. So they are actually able to change to respond to market pressure, as most U.S. schools could not.

[solicitr]

Whereas of course private schools can respond to market pressure....

[Primula Baggins]

Yes. They control their budgets and curriculum, and presumably if they need more money they can simply raise the tuition.

[solicitr]

At the risk of losing pupils, especially if they raise it above the voucher sum.

[Primula Baggins]

That's market forces for you.

They still get to decide how they spend the money they have.

[solicitr]

Yep.

Whereas the government-monopoly schools can't.

Rather my point.

[Primula Baggins]

Whereas if they had adequate funding, they could, as they did for many, many years. Magnet schools, specialty schools, programs for the gifted, arts programs, music programs, theater, sports that aren't independent moneymakers . . . they all existed when I was in public school, and they all got the chop, most places. Frills, you know. Waste, fraud and abuse.

[Jnyusa]

I would be very much in favor of a scheme that simply relieved all parents with children of paying the school tax while they kids were in school, scaled to the number of children in school. When they no longer had children in school their taxes would resume again. That would effectively end the constitutional aspect of this debate once and for all.

Specialization and division of labor, you know? Good ol' Adam Smith style. When your kids are little, you put your resources into raising them well, and the rest of us will pick up the tab for their education. When you've finished that job, you go take your place in the other roll and help everyone else.

We also have to change the tax base, which everyone realizes but no one hs the political guts to implement. (And we have to convince Americans that 'helping everyone else' is not something that only suckers do.)

But we can't get rid of public education. If all ed were private there would be too many kids who received no education at all. The reason the country as such barely funds education is because vast numbers of us don't believe in it at all.

[solicitr]

Oh, dear Prim. When did these excellent public schools exist? The mantra seems to be 'spend more money and they'll be fine.' Well, they aren't and won't be fine no matter how much money you spend. It is a fatally defective system, which has trailed the systems in the rest of the developed world for decades. In OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment 2003, 15 year olds ranked 24th of 38 in mathematics, 19th of 38 in science, 12th of 38 in reading, and 26th of 38 in problem solving. And that isn't anything new.

Is it because of underfunding? Not hardly:

Spending per student capita, from OECD (USD)

United States 12,092
Switzerland 11,883
Norway 10,721
Austria 9,803
Denmark 9,766
Sweden 9,085
Iceland 8,264
Japan 8,148
Australia 8,053
Belgium 8,019
Netherlands 7,999
France 7,880
Germany 7,802
Finland 7,798
Italy 7,723
United Kingdom 7,270
OECD average 7,061



Jny: now take it a bit farther: allow schools to specialize. "One size fits all" doesn't work- and I note that UK Labour's attempt to abolish the selective 'grammar schools' in favor of universal comprehensives will likely fail in Parliament due to public outcry. The Germans, whose system is excellent, track students into one of four different classes of secondary schools.

After all, it's senseless duplication for every single high school to all the facilities conceivable: far better to offer (and concentrate expenditures on) science, or performing arts, or athletics, or languages and let the parents decide.

[yovargas]

far better to offer (and concentrate expenditures on) science, or performing arts, or athletics, or languages and let the parents decide.

But than jocks wouldn't have any geeks to bully!!!!

[solicitr]

Turn it around, Yov: 'geeks' in an academic-oriented environment would be free to be geeks, so to speak: they wouldn't have to worry about the pressure to be cool or unintellectual (or about getting beaten up).

[River]

The problem with German model is it's very hard to change tracks once you're on one. Yugoslavia had a system like that pre-civil war (I have no idea what they do now). S thought he didn't want to go to university so he took the technical track...and then decided he wanted to go to university after all. He made it in because he's smart and stubborn like a mule and if he had to find a tutor and spend months not sleeping so he could play catch up with all the people who went to gymnasium and win himself a slot in the engineering school, well, that's what he would do. But S is a well-defined nutcase - most people just rode their tracks to the finish, no matter how they felt.

Seattle did have a sort of specialization program going on within its district. It was born out of their bussing system, but the upshot was this: you applied to a high school. If you were into music, you tried to get into certain schools, if you were into science you went somewhere else and so on. But the Supreme Court weighed in on that and I'm not sure what Seattle's doing now. Too bad - Garfield had an AMAZING orchestra.

[axordil]

So long as it's not too hard to transfer from one HS to another if the specialization doesn't pan out as expected, specialized High Schools are OK in my book. Expecting 13-14 year olds to know precisely what they want to do with their education/career/life is asking a lot of them.

[solicitr]

Well, yes: the watchword is "choice."

[axordil]

Here's my own pedagogic heresy: even though I took them myself, I don't see the value of science classes as they are usually constituted before college. There's a tremendous amount of stamp-collecting and very little introduction to actual science. The result is that people who might have been drawn into the field are turned off, and people who might have been at least engaged are actually made to actively hate what they think is "science."

[Primula Baggins]

I really resist the track idea. And all my kids have gone through a magnet program (we still have them because they get no extra funding). But the thought that choosing to focus on science means you will not be able to continue in music (when high schools are almost the only places that still have music performance groups such as band), or drama, or art, or foreign language—how completely dreary. And no kid of 13 or 14 should have to make that choice.

As for the public schools, I gather you didn't go to any? Ask anyone your age who did (who doesn't have an ideological axe to grind) and they'll tell you about what was available then that isn't now. It shouldn't be hard to find them; in this country, most people went to public school.

Part of the problem public education faces now is the result of loss of local control of funding. Oregon is one of many states that passed a ballot measure that forbids local communities to choose to pay local taxes to support better schools. This is in the name of statewide equity—not with urban schools so much as rural ones—but of course the result was handing funding control to the state, which inevitably brought all the programs down to the level of the cheapest one.

I'll never persuade you of this, soli, because you don't seem to believe any public school ever was or ever could be anything other than lousy; you've made your unshakable revulsion clear. Yet there there are some fine public schools, and used to be more.

But the groundswell against public education (fading away now, thank God) helped ensure that in the many schools where there was excellence, anything special, it got choked off. At least any aspect that couldn't pay for itself—football prospers.

[axordil]

But the thought that choosing to focus on science means you will not be able to continue in music (when high schools are almost the only places that still have music performance groups such as band), or drama, or art, or foreign language—how completely dreary. And no kid of 13 or 14 should have to make that choice.

It doesn't have to be either-or even in specialized programs. In fact, it shouldn't be: given that all decent college degree programs I know of require at least one foreign language, for instance, not having some language instruction at (say) a science-intensive school is silly. That's far from the only example, of course.

[River]

Yes, and then a lot of people never really progress beyond HS science, end u with a poor understanding of the scientific method, and we end up with arguments like we've seen on this board.

I'm not sure how to address that though - there are certain things you need to know regarding science and HS science classes spend most of their time on that. The method gets short-changed...and as a result hug chunks of the population are left with factoids but no understanding of what science is.

Edit: x-posted with Ax and Prim. Got distracted by science.

[axordil]

I think for most people, a survey course of the science(s) concentrating on how the scientific method is applied in different contexts would be not only sufficient but vastly superior to what they get now. You just don't need to know about the minerals that make up granite or what an endoplasmic reticulum is or what WOBAFGKMRNS stands for that bad until later.