Loren Pechtel

I don't know if the quote is accurate or not. I was just pointing out the effect of making that position law.

ohwilleke

This is precisely the problem that I struggle with. Parental income and socio-economic status is by far the best predictor of stduent academic success by any reasonable measure. It is the overwhelming predictor of performance at every age group. Very few schools are outliers from this trend. Many poorly funded rural schools with few kids from families who are in poverty, routinely have strong performance academically. Many extemely well funded urban schools with many kids in poverty routinely have miserable performance academically.

When you consider the factors that seem like they ought to matter, school pay differentials between districts within a state, funding levels, teacher experience, teacher certification rates, etc. the impact is extremely modest. In the current environment in which everyone has access to at least mediocre public education opportunties, even significant efforts beyond that to get better results with better inputs into the system don't seem to produce many results.

There are outliers, which, it seems to me, should be the focus of a huge amount of attention. In Colorado, the two notable exceptions are the City of Pueblo schools, which have high academic performance despite having many children in poverty; and the Denver School of the Arts, a magnet school in Denver that is probably successful in part because it is able to cherry pick many of the most academically promising poor students in the large urban district (even though auditions rather than academic tests are the basis for doing so), although motivation and a good school are likely important as well.

The corrolations between poverty and academic performance really are stunning. A very simple model (admittedly not an accurate reflection of the facts) that says that all kids who receive free school lunch will be rated "not proficient" on statewide tests, and that all kids who do not get free school lunch will be rated "proficient" is a quite accurate predictor of the actual results.

A prediction of high school completion class rank made when kids enter the first grade in practice, will not be grossly off in most cases. The predictive power by third grade or so, is even greater.

Admittedly, most states have quite inequitable school funding systems, that leave great disparities between districts. But, even if the holy grail of "equality in school funding" by some reasonable measure were achieved, I don't think that it would really change the disparities in academic performance between rich kids and poor kids.

The only way that disparity can be closed, it seems to me, is with first, a really close examination of the rare outlier districts that perform well despite having poor students (some of which will no doubt be cases where lots of parents are economically poor but have high socio-economic status, such as graduate students). Second, I think that the only way you might get greater equality in academic performance is by spending grossly more (I'm talking several times as much per student) on schools with many poor students (many of which have very poor academic performance) than you do on schools that lack that problem. But, I'm not sure if there will ever be the political will for those kinds of "reverse" spending inequalities. If extra money helps poor students, then rich students parent's will want extra money spent on their kids too and the difference between the rich and the poor in terms of political clouts is far greater than their differences in economic clout.

I also think that, for all the criticism that books like the Bell Curve receive, that a meaningful part of academic ability is inherited and that absolutely no amount of effort from the education system (short of unethical and deliberate deprivation of the academic environment of the rich kids a la the Khemer Rouge purges) will ever wipe out the differences in academic performance between rich kids and poor kids.

Acknowleding that equal opportunity is probably never going to be capable of ending class based distinctions in academic performance and that rather than getting everyone to go to college, that the system needs to serve the realistic educational aspirations of every child, I believe, must ultimately be a part of successful education system reform. At some point, I think our education system need to recognize that sometimes Johnny needs vocational education so that he can have higher earnings when he graduates from high school, instead of trying to force feed him a college prepatory curricula because we don't want to limit his aspirations, only to have him turned out into the world with no skills other than burger flipping. Johnny is better off as a skilled carpenter or bodyshop painter, out of high school, who learns academic topics as they relate to his chosen career, than he is as a burger flipper with lots of course work in English literature, American history, precalculus, and botany.

(I like the express "God knows" by the way, since it is synonmous with "No one knows" which suggests a deep secular mindset).

ohwilleke

[QUOTE]Originally posted by cheetah
Are there inequalities? Yes.
What are they based on (race, money, sex, hair color...)? There are funding inequalities based mostly on property values, there are performance inequalities based mostly on family income. Race also has an impact, as does whether or not your first language is English and how often you move from school to school. But, these impacts are buried in and coroloated with differences in family income.

How did this result? Hard question to give a good short answer to, I punt.

Is it okay to have the inequalities? Some inequalities are inevitable. Some are not.

How may it be rectified? I don't think anyone has a good answer to that right now.

Does affirmative action adequately address this inequality (if you agree it exists)? If not, should affirmative action be replaced or reconfigured?

Affirmative action exists at the K-12 level only in a small number of large urban centers subject to desegregation orders; it is mostly a post-secondary phenomena. This is likely to remain the same for the foreseeable future, except that fewer and fewer cities will be subject to desegregation orders. Desegregation may have had some impact on inequality on the basis of race, but it also had costs (lots of time on buses, loss of contact with communities, destabilization of solid urban neigborhoods that happened to be in poor urban school districts) and wasn't nearly as successful at reducing segregation in schools as had been predicted -- white flight to the burbs and private schools dramatically reduced the effectiveness of desegregation and magnet schools remained quite segregated within themselves.

Affirmative action in funding, might be more successful, but I suspect that the differential would have to be very great to lure vountary desegregation of our currently highly segregated school system and I'm not sure that the political will exists to do that, or that it ever will.

cheetah

I agree very much with what you say about the Bell Curve. There is a certain amount of standing on the shoulders of parents/ancestors. If your parents didn't make it very far, for whatever reasons, that will almost surely affect your own performance. I have some trouble with that, what with the American Dream being that anyone can do anything and all. It's hard to just accept that. You're right that everyone shouldn't have to go to college. I mean, we definitely still need people who work on cars, maintain landscapes, and other things that don't require a college degree, but for those who do want college, I still feel they are at a disadvantage and it's hard to accept.

HaysooChreesto!

One thing that no one seems to be really hitting on is the invovement of parents in their child's education. It's been mentioned, but only in passing. I don't care how much funding a school gets, how much whiz bang computer gadgetry, or how enigmatic any given teacher may be.
Rich or poor, if a parent is involved with their child, cares about their education, and is a good disciplinarian, then that kid will have every chance to suceed.

On the other hand, if a parent is too self absorbed or flat out just doesn't give a damn, then that kid will go down the crapper. So many parents of all classes simply consider the public school system to be a babysitter. "It's the schools job to teach, so if my kid is failing, it's not my fault". And that's bullshit that borders on criminal negligence.

What about the asian kids whose parents are immigrants? These are parents with nary a pot to piss in yet their children are excelling in school. Is it because asians are genetically superior? I think not.
One of my best friends is a woman who teaches high school english. Her general opinion of Asian parents is very high. She believes that it is the insistence of these parents that their kids do well that makes them better students. When there's an open house night at school, there are more Asian parents than any other, even though their kids are in the minority. This speaks volumes about their commitment to their child's education.

Personal responsibility and parental involvement are key to a child's success in school. Not government dollars and finger pointing.
You can cite study after study, you can spend millions upon millions of dollars, but if a kid's parents are apathetic, then it doesn't mean a damn thing. All these other things are just symptoms of a core problem.

repoman

I think something can be taken from both Ohwileke's and Lamma's posts, and then reassembled.

Ok, here goes, first the asian immigrants may in many cases be a brain drain from their countries, way smarter than average. At the least they probably are more movitated than average. And of course this motivation will follow through to involvement in their kids education. Of course this doesn't take into account the educational tradition from where they emigrated.

Whereas here in America it seems that Jerry Springer retards are having bunches of kids while more educated people are having less. This can't be a good trend. And the kids from parents who don't have good positions in life learn the bad habits and distrust of the power structure. They can't believe they will have a shot at a comfortable life. Of course racial tension and belief of future options based solely on race can add to this.

But one thing I remeber from high school is that there were so many times that race and gender were brought up as topics and conversations in class that no one ever could let the tensions subside and get to the business of just learning to think. Only in math and science class did I get none of it. I remember getting static from a mom of a black student trying to tell me that the SAT math section was biased against her son (while the son was there!!), I told her she was full of it. Its math for crying out loud! I did admit the verbal "could" be biased, but didn't know the facts about it. She was the albatross on her son's neck, and I think she wasn't uncommon.

Ab_Normal

I feel like a schmuck, I never did get that research done. Crap, all I have to offer are personal opinions and anecdotes. I hope you all will accept my apologies.

I've seen kids come from financially poor families and excel in school, and I think it was the parent's involvement in school which made the difference. Being involved in your kid's education can be a pain in the ass... it can be hard to get time off from work to attend events during the school day, and finding time for afterschool meetings can also be a challenge.

The attitude of teachers and administrators toward parental involvement is key, I think. We're in a public school program where the parents sign a contract, pledging to volunteer a certain number of hours with the children, and to provide a certain amount of financial support. We've been in this program for four years, and for two of the years I was the nerd in charge of tracking the volunteer hours. At least half of the families did not meet their commitment, and the principal would not let us pursue it, using the excuse that it wouldn't be fair to the children to kick them out of the program because their parents were dead-beats. (My opinion is she was afraid of losing families, which would decrease the size of her fiefdom, but I don't really like her, so I'll admit to my bias.)

The first, second, and third grade teachers in the program were excellent at finding opportunities for parents to volunteer in the classroom, and I think the children benefitted from having more adults on hand to help them learn, though the parents never did receive any training in how to interact with the children. However, the fourth, fifth, and sixth grade teachers are not so helpful, so I can understand why the parents of older students couldn't meet their obligation.

We've tried to bring these issues up with the principal, and we've been consistently blown off. District administration was even less helpful.

And don't get me started on the (non-existant) program for the gifted students, or we'd be here all day.

How would I structure a school to make it easier for parents to be involved? I don't know. But I get tired of being told on the one hand, "Your child needs you to be involved", and on the other, "Shut up, we're the education professionals and you're just a parent."

HaysooChreesto!

Very accurate observations. But what's the solution? The only realistic thing I've heard from my teacher friend is to start teaching kids about parenting when they hit 6th or 7th grade.
There needs to be something taught to kids about personal responsibility at every level from K-12.
Maybe down the line it will yield better educated kids and more responsible parents.
Throwing gobs of good money after bad will only take the focus off of parental apathy. It will only create more destructive excuses for future generations.

Another issue that goes hand in hand with this are those of irresponsible "minority leaders" who continue to tell the kids they speak to that because they're not white or because they don't come from already wealthy families that they can't succeed, or that someone else is to blame. But I don't want to hijack this thread. It's a good one.

cheetah

I hate to resort to cynicism but you guys are right about parent's involvement and just plain attitudes/parenting skills. I think (here's the cynicism) that people should have to take classes and get permitted to have children. OK, but seriously, what's something that we could implement that would ahve the same effect but wouldn't be such a blatant violation of rights? I don't think teaching them parenting in 7th grade is enough (more sex ed might be helpful, though!). Believe me, I was forced to waste my time on one of those classes and we spent the whole semester planning this stupid mock wedding. Such a waste of my time...But, if people could be required to get certain units, or put certain hours in for parenting skills, like classes we have to take to get a degree to get a job, that could be helpful. I can't think of any possible ideas that wouldn't violate rights, though...

Loren Pechtel

Originally posted by Lamma
One thing that no one seems to be really hitting on is the invovement of parents in their child's education. It's been mentioned, but only in passing. I don't care how much funding a school gets, how much whiz bang computer gadgetry, or how enigmatic any given teacher may be.
Rich or poor, if a parent is involved with their child, cares about their education, and is a good disciplinarian, then that kid will have every chance to suceed.

I consider this part of culture, I simply didn't break it out.