It's not very clear to me, but the way I read it is that the school should say "if your parents help you at home, you don't need us at school". "So we'll just focus on those kids whose parents don't help them, because, you know, they have two jobs". Did I get that right?
My last Uber driver was a Pakistani, he told me his oldest son got into the Stuyvesant High School. He is one of those kids who needs to be challenged. Should he not be, because he's got "rich parents" ?
No, that's not what I'm saying at all. I'll try again:
Schools should aim to maximize learning for every child, irrespective of their starting point or their parents' resources.
If schools have everyone go at the same pace, some kids won't learn anything at school. Parents with resources can always pay for private tutors or, if that's not enough, pay for private school.
I'm glad you brought up Stuyvesant. Imagine if Stuyvesant didn't exist, and all students at all public high schools in NYC went through math at the same pace. Imagine further that your Uber driver can't afford private tutors or private school, and is too busy working to tutor his kids himself. Would it be fair that his smart kid has to go slow whilst an equally smart kid with rich parents will be doing Calculus BC in 11th grade?
The UK education system has the concept of "Progress 8" aka P8. It's somewhat controversial but tries to assess the progress a school makes with students between the ages of 12-16, compared to "baseline" - or the average for students with similar starting positions/demographics. It's a somewhat helpful way of assessing which schools are making a difference, but is quite blunt - eg you don't get a separate P8 score for high vs low performing students.
In the US, teachers' unions are in general against any objective measure of student progress.
The unions are powerful beyond what you'd expect (with a UK perspective) because, in many cases, the body on the other side of negotiations (school board) is comprised of teachers' friends (often ex-teachers and even former union leaders) or family members.
If you're interested in this topic, you might enjoy the book 'Race to the bottom'.
Thank you. I fully agree with what you are saying, but for some reason from your first post I came out with the opposite understanding.
> Imagine further that your Uber driver can't afford private tutors or private school
That's not hard to imagine. In fact I'm almost sure that indeed he can't afford private tutors (he told me he has 3 sons). As for private school, he even told me what school his eldest son was going to; it was a public one. I just googled it now, and US News ranks it as #1 among NYC's public middle schools [1]. I'd take that ranking with a solid grain of salt, but still, it's probably a very good middle school.
Now, here's the funny thing: 3 years ago, when his son moved from elementary to middle school, there were still selective public middle schools in NYC. Just one year later all selection was changed to lottery based. In the name of equity.
Thanks for your recommendation downthread for "Race to the bottom". I'll read it.
> Schools should aim to maximize learning for every child, irrespective of their starting point or their parents' resources.
Lets say you have two kids at opposite ends of the natural talent spectrum and you have $30,000 per year to spend on educating them. Do you spend $15k on each knowing that you'll get very unequal results? Or do you spend the bulk of they money on the one that needs the most help at the expense of the one who has the most natural talent?
Schools are making these types of decisions all the time. The average school does not spend 25% of their budget on the top 25% of their students.
1. The availability of money is an important constraint on the ability of schools to support each student.
2. Schools (or those who run them: principals) have wide discretion to make the type of decision you present.
In my local school district (San Francisco Unified - SFUSD), neither of these is true, because:
- SFUSD's budget is about $27,000 per student per year[0]. Assuming teachers make no more than an average of $135k/year, and that average class size is at least 20, only 25% of that budget is required to pay for a teacher per class. There's a lot of headroom.
- Budgets (set by the district, not by individual schools or principals) are not designed to maximize learning for children, but to maximize employment for adults.
For that reason, I don't think your question makes sense.
Let me ignore that for now, and assume your question does make sense. What would it mean to allocate budget differently for kids at opposite ends of the natural talent spectrum? It sounds like the two kids would be in different classes, being taught by different teachers, perhaps with different class sizes. But that approach (which detractors call 'tracking') is disliked by many of the folks who control public education in the US.
Let's say you thought that the top 5% of students should be taught in separate classes, and that those classes should have larger class sizes, so these students only took 2.5% of the total budget. If you were to propose such a scheme, you'd be told it's unfair. Not unfair to the gifted students because they're receiving a lower per-capita share of resources, but unfair to everyone else because 'equity'.
It's not very clear to me, but the way I read it is that the school should say "if your parents help you at home, you don't need us at school". "So we'll just focus on those kids whose parents don't help them, because, you know, they have two jobs". Did I get that right?
My last Uber driver was a Pakistani, he told me his oldest son got into the Stuyvesant High School. He is one of those kids who needs to be challenged. Should he not be, because he's got "rich parents" ?