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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: KyrosL who wrote (230484)	8/31/2013 11:44:46 AM
From: epicure	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 542945

As a teacher in the trenches I'd agree with you- but our schools do far more, and educate a much more diverse group of students, than most other countries. First and foremost, we have much more special ed spending than any other country. And we diagnose kids at a much higher rate. This comes from a good impulse- not long ago we didn't accept children in to public school who were uneducable, or who caused too many problems. Now the schools babysit the profoundly retarded, provide one to one aids for students, and provide services for the profoundly autistic and children with severe behavioral problems. The costs of these services tend to be extremely high, and probably represent a great deal of the cost differences (outside of inflation) that we see in the price of education back in the 60's versus the price of education now. I am not sure public schools really ought to be the special needs providers of the country. Especially not when people point to huge spending budgets in education, and don't factor in all the other services the educational establishment now provides which it did not provide in the past. Here's a little editorial I found on this: njspotlight.com

To: KyrosL who wrote (230484)	8/31/2013 12:13:24 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542945

Any teacher down in the trenches, as opposed to up in the ivory tower, will tell you that a supportive home environment is key to a good education. It's good that you know "any" teacher but, given that statement is an unsupported generalization, I suspect it's far more true than not. I, for instance, don't know any teacher who would disagree with it. But it's the wrong question to ask. The right one is what can good schools do to overcome the wide variety of the effects of poverty and of dysfunctional families (at all income levels) on children. I don't think, however, there is any question that kids from difficult backgrounds who are able to attend good schools do much better than kids from the same backgrounds who do not. The real question then is what sorts of policies would enable more kids to overcome difficult backgrounds. Incidentally, single parent homes would, by themselves, definitely not qualify as a difficult background. I know from my participation in local public schools that, at least on an anecdotal level, it really doesn't matter. The town is small enough to know, roughly, which families don't work well for the kids and which do. There are more than a few that are dysfunctional on this score that are surprising--two parent families with all the advantages, etc. We all, of course, know those families in our own lives. But, back to your charges. Does poverty make it more difficult for kids to do well at school? In my mind, the answer is a definite yes. Do the children from single parent families do worse, on average, than those from two parent families, controlling for the obvious variables? I don't know in any serious sense but the answer is not a no-brainer. My guess is that it's a very mixed outcome, depending heavily on the income and education of the parent(s). But that then means we are back to my basic point--it's not the number of parents but their income and education level.