Harry identifies two reasons this should worry us:
I think it is more worthy of attention than Laura says, for two reasons. First, these schools are typically lavished with public money, relative to other schools which could make much better use of that money. States should be shifting money from such schools to schools with high-need students, and using at least part of that money to fund reform and improvement efforts. Second, these schools typically have some, and sometimes have a good number, of students from low-income families; and these students are typically seen just as problems, and are in the lousy situation of being in a school where their achievement doesn't matter much. KTM points to this excellent paper by Paul Attewell arguing that in affluent "star" schools attention is lavished on those most likely to attend Ivy League colleges, at the expense of all lower-achieving students. (Attewell's paper was written prior to implementation of NCLB, and it would be interesting to see whether the dynamics he identifies have changed at all).
I'd add a third reason: those schools are often the model for schools in poor districts. The affluent assume that what works in their school district, for their children, must be what works, and vote, and donate, accordingly.
Actually, these schools AREN'T lavished with public money, if you define public money as coming from the state or the feds. Most of their money (at least in New York State) actually comes from property taxes from homeowners who reside within the school district and who vote on the school budget every year. So although the money is funnelled to the schools as "public" funds coming from taxes, it's really coming from the parents and other homeowners who want to pay to have their schools the best.
The funding formulas in NYS actually lavish the public money on the poverty schools, with no appreciable effect.
Same in Virginia. The Fairfax County schools are funded with property taxes, which are 1%, IIRC. When a 1950s vintage, Levittown style, house in an inexpensive neighborhood costs $300k you have lots of money for schools.
When a 1950s vintage, Levittown style, house in an inexpensive neighborhood costs $300k you have lots of money for schools.
Not necessarily. A Grandparent passed away three years ago, who lived in one of the five boroughs that make up NYC. It was even older than a 1950's vintage(and looked it). After the death, the house was sold for $450,000. Do you know how much the property taxes were on the house until then? $500/yr. Yeah, they had lived in the house for the past 50 years, but that is the whole point. We couldn't remember the last time the house had been appraised or anything. So basically NYC was losing out big time. And I bet it was happening all over the city, too.
A Grandparent passed away three years ago, who lived in one of the five boroughs that make up NYC. It was even older than a 1950's vintage(and looked it). After the death, the house was sold for $450,000. Do you know how much the property taxes were on the house until then? $500/yr.
Residential property taxes in NYC are very low, thanks to the huge commercial property tax base. Property taxes in the suburbs are far higher.
Although that contradicts Harry B's point, I still think it's a problem: tax dollar waste is still waste. If the increased revenue due to higher property values and/or tax rates isn't leading to increased educational value, that's worth knowing, too.
But Harry's claim seems to be that that money should be taken away from these wealthy schools and given to poorer schools. Because the bulk of school funding is local (and is usually put to public vote!), that's not going to happen. Ever.
Besides, the dirty little secret of education funding is that more money does not equal better results (beyond a certain minimum for new books and decent plumbing). Some of the poorest performing schools are also among the best funded (because of state and federal programs that fling money to no result).
Sorry KTL, I'm just echoing your point. If only I'd seen that three minutes ago...
To the extent that well-to-do schools are better funded, it's often because they can raise the money and the taxes because the citizenry signs off on it because they know where the money is going and how it will benefit. Start shipping that money off to different schools and you'll start seeing a lot more resistance.
But how true is it that wealthier school districts actually have more money? Washington DC's well-funded, poor school district is oft-cited but considered by many to be an outlier. However, in the city where I'm from, the metropolitan hub spends the most per-student and the smaller, tonier suburbs spend less per student. It's not true that if you cut expenditures for the city (absent some other change) quality will improve (there are loads of other factors at work here), and a strong argument could be made that inner city schools need an even bigger gap than currently exists to do their jobs, but I don't think it's accurate to say that the wealthy schools have all the money.
Of course, maybe my hometown is an outlier like DC is. If anyone has statistics that demonstrate such, I'll back off this point. Of course, if that's true, I'm not sure that evening the money (or economically favoring inner-city schools) will necessarily help. It may be necessary to affect other changes that would help, though.
I can think of a couple reasons why this might even be a sensible difference:
a. Wealthier parents can probably more easily afford tutors for their kids, and will more often be able to help their kids out with hard homework problems. By contrast, poorer parents will have a hell of a time coming up with money for private tutors, and may not have the time or ability to do the one-on-one tutoring of their kids in (say) algebra that is needed.
b. It's quite possible that differences in performance among wealthy kids is more closely correlated to differences in innate ability than such differences among poorer kids. (Nesbit makes more-or-less this argument in his recent book.) I'd break this down into two parts:
(i) A lot of bad home-environment is correlated with poverty, ranging from obvious stuff like not having enough food or a safe place to play outside all the way to stuff like not having many books in the house, or seldom hearing big words used. That stuff is quite variable even among people in poverty, though, so a lot of observed unevenness of performance may be transient environmental stuff. In that case, it makes sense to press on, help the kid make up his lost ground, and to do what can be done to make up for some of the environmental problems.
(ii) Obvious interventions have probably often been made for wealthier kids, as with the private tutors. So if you see a poor kid whose problems might be innate or might be fixable with some private tutoring, you're pretty sure nobody's tried the tutoring yet. A rich kid in the same situation may very well have already had the tutoring, with no effect.
Minor point, it's "Nisbett" not "Nesbit" (and the book is titled Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count if people are interested). I haven't finished it so I won't respond to the substance of your comment.
This roughly squares with my experience being educated at one of the top public school districts in Ohio. High-achieving students got the best teachers, lots of extracurricular support and sometimes very small class sizes in order to offer things like AP instruction in a few subjects that otherwise wouldn't be justified in a 500-student high school. Low-achieving students got less, all-around.
On top of that, every single one of us was expected to go to college, and very nearly everyone at least enrolled in a college.
FWIW, this was over 20 years ago.
Orange High School? It sounds like you're discussing my high school. Class of '84. Something like 95% of the students went on to college and most who didn't went into the military.
Does anyone know of accessible to a nonspecialist results that explain how much of the performance differences in schools can be attributed to properties of the students, vs how much to the teachers? For all the obvious problems with an observational study, it would be interesting to try to get some sense of this. For example, if you know the race, income, and language spoken at home for each student in the school, how much can you predict (assuming no additional selection) of its performance? I know schools full of middle-class whites and Asians tend to do well, and schools full of poor blacks and hispanics tend to do poorly, but I haven't seen anyone really spell that out, as would be necessary to (for example) see how much of the problems with bad schools is really fixable within the school system.
Does anyone know of accessible to a nonspecialist results that explain how much of the performance differences in schools can be attributed to properties of the students, vs how much to the teachers? ...
Within the range of schools found in the United States performance differences in schools are basically almost entirely due to differences in the student bodies. Things like the quality of the teachers or the faculty are at the noise level.
For an individual student the most important predictor is the properties of the student (IQ, family social class etc.). Peer effects are also significant in that there is a tendency for students to perform like the average student at the school. The faculty makes little difference.
Albatross, there is considerable research into schools' effectiveness (not just teacher's effectiveness, a lot happens in a school that can affect how well students learn but are outside the teacher's control).
See for example this research into what are called 90-90-90 schools - "schools where 90% of students were eligible for a free or reduced lunch, 90% were ethnic minorities, and 90% were meeting the district or state academic standards in reading or another area." http://www.sabine.k12.la.us/online/leadershipacademy/high%20performance%2090%2090%2090%20and%20beyond.pdf
So clearly there are schools that can drastically improve the performance of their students, given the students' race, income and language spoken at home. I don't however know why bad schools aren't copying the success of those 90-90-90 schools, let alone how much of that problem is fixable within the school system.
Why shouldn't schools put their best teachers to teach those students that try hardest? Isn't it a better use of teachers (whom are much less likely to burn out)
I really don't understand the complain, aside from an effort to dress education in shades of class warfare
I think Megan's 3rd reason is the only legitimate one: education for stragglers is not at all the same thing as education for overachievers and the lessons from one cannot be easily applied to the other. The rest is, IMNSHO, bunk. First, achievement-based segregation works for both overachievers and underachievers. Second, school districts are funded locally first and at the state/federal level only second. When I am paying [high] school-district property taxes, I do hope they'll be spent primarily on the opportunities for my kids and not on the greater good for society however it is currently understood by the superintendent.
With that in mind, I don't think class warfare here is window dressing. It's the way of looking at the world :-(
And you're quantifying effort how? I am willing to bet the retards in my school tried much harder in school than I did (and I ended up going to one of the top public universities in the US and will soon be going to grad school).
If we're spouting off hypothetical solutions a potential problem, why not have teachers do both? Yes, you have to teach the remedial math class AND you have to teach the AP Calculus class.
Fine, I'll qualify merit instead of effort.
Consider if you have two kids, ones math is at a hypothetical 80 math skill points, the others is at 40. You also have two math teachers. One is capable of increasing the students skill by 20%, while the other by 40%, and for the sake of the exercise, we have to keep a one to one student teacher relationship.
If you assign the stronger student to the weaker teacher, you'll have one student with a 96 skill, and another with 56. They are closer to being equal (but still far off) and your "society" has a combined skill of 152. If you pair the stronger student with the stronger teacher, you'll end up with one student with a 112 and another with a 48. Your students are more unequal now, but your "society" is ahead at 160.
Its very over simplified and gamish, but I hope that gets the point across. Give resources to those who can do the most with them, and everyone comes out ahead, but unequally. Give the most resources to those who can do the least, and you have more equality, but everyone has to take a step back.
First, let's not forget the basics:
Intelligence correlates strongly with income. Smart people tend to make more money.
Smart people tend to marry smart people, and have smart kids.
Affluent communities, therefore, tend to be sending better "raw material" to the teachers. Compound this with societal issues, like a lower divorce rate for the parents of these children, and the advantages grow.
How large of an advantage of this?
Harry at Crooked Timber should Google "Abbott Districts."
It appears as if his hypothesis has been fully tested in a statewide Social Experiment in NJ... and it failed completely.
It seems as if throwing money at the problem, once again, is a waste of both money and time. The amount of cash thrown at Abbott students is mind-blowing... and yet Johnny still can't read.
http://www.hoover.org/pubaffairs/dailyreport/archive/3719171.html
That was 2006. Three years later and there are several Abbott Districts spending well over $20,000 per student - about twice the average, and certainly more than "the rich" are spending at their public schools - to virtually no effect.
My experience with my kids (Poway, CA) is:
1) An area gets a reputation for good schools.
2) Parents who care about good schools move into that area.
3) New residents get involved in the schools, and make them better (volunteering, etc)
4) Go back to step #1.
This is what the Economist likes to call a "virtuous cycle", the opposite of a "vicious cycle".
I think you nailed it on the head. From my experience in Catholic schools, the generally high quality of education isn't due to rich parents with superior breeding stock (many less than affluent students, with parents who sacrifice heavily for the tuition), or superior teaching talent.
The major difference is that almost everyone who pays the extra money for tuition truly cares about their kids education and watches what goes on, and puts extra effort into the school.
I've always suspected that there would be a high correlation between attendance at parent-teacher conferences and student success.
The key is here:
"Elmore observes that so-called high performing schools in affluent communities that he works in often seem very similar to low-performing schools in low-income communities, and very unlike successful schools in low-income communities."
It's that critical "so-called." The fallacy is that the thought that these first 2 types of schools are actually influencing the students at all. The students are succeeding or failing largely on non-school related things, such as environment, parents, and all the other things you can find.
The logical answer is in what Harry quotes:
"First of all, you should not rely on your schools to educate your kids."
Bingo. But this is merely a de facto statement. You should be able to, it's just that our current system, for nearly everyone, fails completely at doing so.
My experience at Evanston Township (high ranking public north of Chicago) was largely the same, although I think his claim that it comes "at the expense of all lower-achieving students" is probably a little off. ETHS lavished resources and great teachers on those in the AP classes (my AP physics teacher's previous job was on the team at Fermi who discovered the Top quark - many AP level teachers were PHDs). However, there were also a tremendous amount of resources for those were at a specific disadvantage - here I am thinking of special education and English as a second language students). The ones who really fell through the cracks were those in the middle - I guess because they were seen as having no excuse.
The fallacy is that the thought that these first 2 types of schools are actually influencing the students at all. The students are succeeding or failing largely on non-school related things, such as environment, parents, and all the other things you can find.
That, I think, is the key. I'm willing to bet that students in low performing schools are presented the same information as the kids in higher performing schools. The difference is kids in poorly performing schools were brought up to belive that type of information has little value and therefore dont' pay attention.
That would basically say that the quality of teaching is irrelevant, which seems pretty hard to swallow. Teacher's (hopefully) don't just present the information like holding up cards, but rather engage the students by connecting new material to old material through the use of appropriate metaphors and analogies that make learning easier.
Yes, all those factors you mentioned affect learning, but the teacher quality has to be worth something.
I'm not sure how easy it is to generalize from university to early school education, but here at a major university, I see a pretty wide range of teaching abilities and there is some effect on student learning.
I could speculate and say that teaching might be more important for younger learners because capturing children's attention with the right presentation might be especially crucial, but it would just be speculation.
There's a programme called Direct Instruction that has shown to be very effective in eduating all kids, including kids from backgrounds that traditionally perform badly in schools.
The differences are in how the information is presented and what use is made of it:
- the lessons don't assume anything about the starting kids' knowledge. Eg the start of reading is touching each word as the teacher reads it. Well, there's a preliminary lesson before that for the kids who don't know the word "touch".
- the lessons have been field-tested to remove any ambiguities from learning. For example, if the definition of verbs is being taught, then the example sentences have been checked to make sure that it's not the case that all the verbs are the third word in the sentence, as some kids could learn the wrong rule ('verbs are the third word in the sentence', not 'verbs are the "doing" word').
- the lessons are integrated into an overall sequence, so what kids learnt in previous lessons they keep using in future ones, so kids learn that what they have learnt has uses, and also they get a lot of practice.
- in the lessons, students are providing about ten responses a minute on average, so they almost have to pay attention (the developers have interventions for actively-disruptive students).
See http://www.projectpro.com/ICR/Research/DI/Summary.htm.
- students are positively reinforced, eg with teacher praise, or fun (and secretly instructional) classroom games, for providing correct responses, and the lessons are set up so most of the time it's very easy to provide correct responses. This encourages paying attention.
Kids from low-socio-economic backgrounds tend to have less vocabulary when they start schools than students from richer backgrounds, or at least less of the vocabulary that textbook writers tend to assume.
It's pretty clear that above a certain level of funding, more money doesn't help schools perform well. Order and expecting performance seems to do more.
My daughter attended a nationally known high school in Houston that had very large numbers of National Merit Semi-finalists (including her) and many AP classes. It was a jungle. She couldn't visit her locker at lunch because it was in the territory of one of the several gangs. The couple of times she tried, she was tripped, pushed, and had racial epithets hurled at her ("honky c***" was one of the milder ones). They had a murder in a stairwell a couple of years ago. This in a high school surrounded by $700k houses. And $700k buys a lot of house in Houston. Of course, there were middle class houses and cheap apartments filled with a mix of low income, illegal immigrant, and (later) Katrina DPs in the school's zone.
The AP classes were large and staffed with experienced teachers, who didn't seem to give a damn. My daughter had some severe academic problems that we were never informed of - despite giving the teachers phone numbers and email addresses they requested for that purpose at parent nights. The only teacher that seemed to care was a coach that also taught US history. The rest were punching the clock and had retired in place, expecting the students' high ability and the intense competition for class ranking to get the work out of them. This was very different than what I saw at a middle-ranked school in the same district in the early 70s.
It is telling that talented and gifted students have about the same dropout rate as other students. I hear that the major effect of NCLB in elementary and middle schools is the diversion of resources from the smart kids to the low performers. We have seen such being explicitly proposed by the Houston school district - they want to close many magnet programs. Jerry Pournelle, the blog grandfather - if Insty is the blog father, is married to the woman who was the teacher of last resort in LA for reading. He comments much on his blog about education policy. He says NCLB should be called "No Child Gets Ahead". He's very concerned that Bill Gates, et.al. want to give every kid a world-class college prep education. Why? Because as a PhD psychologist, he knows that a good 50-60% of the school population can't do that kind of work. 50% of all kid are, after all, below average in intelligence. If you are not very good at abstract reasoning, you can't do that kind of work.
"The AP classes were large and staffed with experienced teachers, who didn't seem to give a damn."
What were they experienced at, being horrible teachers? If a teacher can't come across as the caring, that's a major strike against them because it reduces the motivation for the student to learn the material.
As a one of those 'talented and gifted' students who dropped out (and went on to get degrees in physics and mathematics) I am not at all surprised that their dropout rate is the same as other students: high school has nothing to offer.
Talented and gifted students are, typically, not talented across the board. The math whiz might suck at English, for instance. With enormous spikes/lags in ability, many talented and gifted students have a really difficult time in school, and it's not surprising that many give up and drop out.
"That would basically say that the quality of teaching is irrelevant, which seems pretty hard to swallow."
Not at all, just that the quality of the teachers in the high performing school isn't high enough to explain the difference in student achievement. You will have a wide range of teaching ability in both affluent and in poor schools.
I would venture to argue that pedagogical differences between schools amount for no more than 20% of the overall difference in academic outcome.
jmo3,
As an experiment, I'm willing to bet that if you bused the kids from Greenwich to the Bronx and from the Bronx to Greenwich every day, I doubt you would see much of a change in academic performance for each group. The Greenwich kids would continue to do well and the Bronx kids would continue to struggle.
My money is on jmo3.
I'd bet with jmo3 here, too.
Aside from the "nature" arguments I've already made, above, what about the nurture arguments?
What % of poor kids come from never-married single-moms?
What % of them come from divorced households?
How many of these kids eat dinner with their families, and have either parent ask them "what did you do in school today?"
How many of these kids are even monitored at night? How man of them come and go as they please, when they please, from wherever they please?
Etc.
Does anyone really want to waste their time by debating that these things don't have a *huge* impact on these kids, their academic performance, and even their propensity to gravitate towards gangs?
Teachers teach subject matter. To ask them to be surrogate parents is not only a fool's errand, but is horribly unfair.
I don't know Greenwich public schools (though I gather they don't use an explicit synthetic phonics program to teach reading - or didn't 7 years ago).
I do know my own district ($28K per pupil funding next year), and I am willing to bet that if we did a student body swap with Yonkers, our kids would do the same they're doing now (or better) while the Yonkers kids would collapse.
In Texas, ALL school tax goes to the state where it is redistributed. Before this change, there was a lot of controversy over school funding and it was found that funding did not correlate to performance. Not that the politicians cared, they still redistribute the money to be more "fair"...
Not exactly. If school districts collect more money per pupil over some threshold, then the state takes some percentage of the money from the "rich" district to distribute to "poor" school districts.
School choice works. You just need to be able to afford a house in a good neighborhood to get that choice.
Why is jmo3 talking to himself in third person?
Someone forget to log in as his sock puppet!
Sorry - typo :-(
Well, I can give you my experience.
I have children who attend a public high school. I can monitor their grades online - tests, quizzes, and weekly homework scores - and believe me, I do. I have informed them that less that straight A's is unacceptable, and we're working to get there. Hard. Not everybody does this. Believe me.
Also, there's a language teacher in the school who is horrible, has basically given up. He doesn't assign homework, gives very difficult tests, flunks a lot of students, and tells the students that they're stupid and unmotivated. Parents hate his guts and are driving the school crazy to get rid of him, I give the guy maybe another year. I don't know, but I suspect this isn't typical of your average underperforming school.
I've always wondered what would happen if you increased class size by 50% , but increased teacher's salaries by 50% to entice highly motivated and successful teachers. Of course, you'd have to fire a lot of the existing slacker teachers, so this would only work in a new school.
Personally, I think a motivated and creative teacher could easily do better with 50% more students than much of the dead wood that exists out there with the current class size.
Also, with 50% more in salaries, I don't think we'd need the teacher's union as much with their tendency to produce crappy teachers
I heard a teacher an NPR from Detroit who had this response to the idea of merit pay...
"I am 100% against it because it assumes that every teacher isn't already doing their best".
It was a ridiculous objection to an obviously good idea. Ridiculous because
1) he was wrong, many teachers slack hugely
2) if your best is still crappy, then you don't deserve to teach.
The Secret ingredient, as someone mentioned above, is order, or discipline. The students have to accept an honor shame economy in which their teachers occupy a high status role. Formation and reinforcement of that economy is dependent upon the the parents and the administration of the school. This is where low performing schools differ from high performing schools. Read Geoffry Canada's work.
Part of what makes this difficult, is that many teachers are not deserving of that high status.
I was continually flabbergasted as a child that people who would not normally be trusted to pet sit were given dictatorial control over 25 humans.
One of the most challenging experiences in life is realizing that you are smarter than the adults who are nominally in charge of you.
The idea you prescribe remind me of the Chinese school system, in which the parents and administration cede all power over the kids to the teachers for the single-minded pursuit of scoring a place at a top ranked school. Talk about teaching to the test! In the year leading up to my middle school entrance exam, my elementary school language and math teachers abolished all other subjects and doubled school hours so we were coming home well after dark and on the weekends too. Talk about honor and shame! Our tests were passed back by the teacher calling out your name and you'd have to stand up there behind the person called before you. The tests were ranked in descending order by the score received.
The trouble, as you can discern from these examples, is that an "honor shame" economy would never be widely accepted in a culture that extols the ideas of individuality and individual freedom. Americans want education to be an experience in which their kids can "find themselves" and in my observation, are more likely to attribute their kids not doing well in school to the teacher not having "reached out" to their kids. What you might call discipline in other words, is someone else's grounds for a lawsuit.
But there are rich districts and there are rich districts. Read Elinor Burkett's bok on Prior Lake, MN high school--Another Planet: A Year in the Life of a Suburban High School (ISBN 0-06-050585-0). The school was heavily white, affluent and invested in self-esteem classes and athletics. Not academics, although there were lots of electives, and rampant grade inflation.
Or look at San Marino High in Southern California. The school is something like 85% Asian, and even if the family is living in a 1 bedroom apartment, they expect the kids to get straight A and get into the Ivy League, or at the very least, UCLA. Contrast and compare Pasadena Unified, right next door, where busing destroyed the system, and anyone with two nickels fled for the private schools.
More affluent parents might be able to afford tutors, but they also might have higher expectations for their kids. If other parents feel the same way, the peer group expects to do well, go to college, etc. If your social circle expects to have a baby at 17, well, it's hard not to feel out of place.
Bingo on the variability between districts. My wife and I paid 875,000 for our house in west Los Angeles. There is no way in hell we our sending our daughter to the public school we are zoned for. If we lived less than a mile away, we could send her to a good elementary school. The true irony is that this other zone includes apartment dwellers (that sounds kind of perjorative, but is not intentional) who make 1/4 as much as we do, but they can send their kid to that elementary school. This other zone is slightly nicer than my area, but not a quantum leap by any stretch. The LA school system is a true tragedy and ridiculously unfair in terms of the quality of the education.
Discipline is necessary, but not sufficient. I agree strongly that teachers need the authority (as supported by the school and/or parents) to discipline kids out who really disrupt the learning environment of the other kids. But that's not the whole answer -- the teacher still has connect the children to the material and many teachers just can't do that due to lack of intelligence, imagination or motivation.
Steve,
No, it's not the whole answer, but it's a basic requirement without which you're just pissing in the wind. It's amazing how few determined unruly kids in a classroom can make it impossible to teach anyone.
No, it's not the whole answer. But that's like saying that making sure that students can read and write and do arithmetic at grade level isn't the whole answer - no, it's not, but if they can't do this, there's not much point in doing anything else.
rhinoman,
I said - "I agree strongly that teachers need the authority (as supported by the school and/or parents) to discipline kids out who really disrupt the learning environment of the other kids.".
We agree, but you seem to imply that we don't.
I also strongly agree with your previous post that hits another central problem -- the horrible teacher that everyone know is horrible and yet it takes years to get rid of him. Until the system changes that allows that teacher to keep teaching, our education system is in deep trouble.
There should be someone pointing out the obvious--different types of education work for different school bodies and levels.
For one obvious on-topic point, many affluent high schools can be more liberal artsy and less disciplined because the kids are already pretty orderly to begin with. This isn't the case in low-performing urban schools, where the first step is restoring order (the best NY charter schools impose tons of discipline and order, far more than at any typical suburban high performing school.)
Similarly, at a high performing school, the administration can somewhat trust that outlying low performers will get parental help. At a less affluent urban school, the administration has to assume that the kids aren't getting any useful academic education outside of school hours.
Here's another shocking fact: The best community colleges have very different curricula from Ivy League universities. The differences have very little to do with funding, and everything to do with the inappropriateness of expecting community college students to have the same goals, personal qualities, and abilities as Ivy Leaguers.
Similarly, at a high performing school, the administration can somewhat trust that outlying low performers will get parental help.
Which is rather miserable for those low performers who, for whatever reason, aren't getting parental help. Which was Harry's point.
The best community colleges have very different curricula from Ivy League universities. The differences have very little to do with funding, and everything to do with the inappropriateness of expecting community college students to have the same goals, personal qualities, and abilities as Ivy Leaguers.
This is of course after 12 years of education during which a lot of schools have been relying on their students' parents to make up any deficits in parental teaching.
My mother crashed out of mathematics at about age 15, in part I suspect due to a high school teacher who did not believe that girls could do mathematics, and a father who'd had to drop out of school at age 14 and a mother from a time where girls really weren't expected to do well at mathematics. By the end of high school Mum did not have the same goals and abilities as my father, and while she went to university, there she did a very different curricula from what he did.
Community colleges have their places, given the state of the compulsory education sector, but they don't tell us much about what the world would look like if earlier schools were peforming at the top of their game.
New Jersey has been doing this for years, with gusto, as a result of a state supreme court decision. Today, we spend significantly more per student (about $16k per year) in our poorer school districts than we spend statewide (about $13k per year). Something tells me that if I look up the performance data, I'll still find a yawning achievement gap between the students in, say, Newark, and Tenafly. Money is a red herring, for the most part.
I'm a grad student at a very expensive and fairly exclusive private university. I just tutored a girl for a school year and turned her from a 2.00 student to a 4.00 student. It took A LOT of time to do that, but her Dad makes $15 million a year and could easily afford the price tag I attached to that level of time commitment.
Considering how much the university charges to educate his daughter, he actually got a great deal. I charge way less than the university and definitely taught her way more. Of course, in the end, they're paying for the degree - something I can't offer.
I'd imagine things weren't much different for her at the high school level either. Expensive tutors are common tools of the rich.
How much time? And for how many credit hours?
How much did you charge? And how much does the university charge per credit hour plus fees?
You seem to be saying that in extremely small class sizes with no discipline problems and no problems with a work ethic, you can produce gold from straw. I'm interested as to whether or not you can beat the numbers for the university you teach at when it comes to cost as well.
Harry's claim here is rather dubious:
First, these schools are typically lavished with public money, relative to other schools which could make much better use of that money. States should be shifting money from such schools to schools with high-need students, and using at least part of that money to fund reform and improvement efforts.
Actually, since a nationwide wave of school equity lawsuits in the 1980s and 1990s, there are many states that give more per-pupil funding to high-poverty districts and/or schools, or that at least fund them equally. In other words, it isn't true that the suburban schools are "lavished with public money," not as a general matter (there are always exceptions, of course).
For a bit of the scholarship here, see:
Schwartz, Amy Ellen. 1999. “School Districts and Spending in the Schools.” Selected Papers in School Finance, 1997-99, pp. 59-83. (studying data on 586 districts and 3,284 schools in Ohio during the 1995-96 academic year; finding that "controlling for the differences between districts, greater spending is directed at schools with more poor children," and that all sizes of districts "direct more resources to schools with a greater proportion of non-white students").
Rubenstein, Ross, Schwartz, Amy Ellen, Stiefel, Leanna, & Amor, Hella Bel Hadj. 2007. “From districts to schools: The distribution of resources across schools in big city school districts.” Economics of Education Review 26: 532-545. (finding that in New York City, "elementary schools with higher proportions of poor pupils receive more money and have fewer pupils per teacher but the teachers tend to be less educated and less well paid," and that spending in the schools with the most poor students was "over a thousand dollars higher per pupil as compared to spending in the bottom quintile" of poor students).
The finding that schools in poor neighborhoods have less qualified teachers is typical . . . these schools often end up being given more money, but they aren't as able to hire the well-trained and experienced teachers (who have the right to transfer elsewhere), and they thus end up hiring more teachers who are less qualified. It's not clear whether this is a net plus or minus (lower class size vs. less qualified teachers).
They clearly need to prevent the better teachers from choosing the schools they want to teach in.
Or better parents?
Or better students?