Ironically, private schools are more likely to pitch anti-union and anti-worker ideas to kids. These places are all conservative think tanks and anyone who doesn't see that is an idiot. The liberation of the common man will never include a private school.
>Ironically, private schools are more likely to pitch anti-union and anti-worker ideas to kids. These places are all conservative think tanks and anyone who doesn't see that is an idiot. The liberation of the common man will never include a private school.
I was thinking more on the lines of the sort of how they never really teach critical thinking, gloss over any and every historical mistake and perhaps how to spot and avoid them and generally do their hardest to create what shortsighted small scope government silos see as model citizens at the expense of not creating people capable of sort of long term thinking and ability to connect disparate concepts that result in a more performant society.
Yeah, the rich part of society. Building towards private schools is like building the titanic without enough lifeboats. Make an education system that works for everyone or awful things will keep happening to private schools because everyone understands how fundamentally unfair they are.
Or, hear me out, it's because they've been underfunded from the start. PTA, Volunteer Coaching, Parent involvement in fundraisers, etc. all helped make the underfunded schools of the 1990's and 2000's run smoothly despite lack of funding. The reality is that there were never enough resources in the first place, and parents used to shoulder a lot more of the burden. Parents no longer have time for these things, which when combined with an even smaller budget results in very lackluster schools. Maybe, just MAYBE, if we took the 60k signing bonus and absurd salary away from ICE and started giving it to teachers, we'd see change in a meaningful way.
It's a huge mistake to continually use the frame about the work of teachers around pay -- rather it is a terrible job.
I know a high school music teacher who's been assaulted by students multiple times. The teacher who inspired me to learn physics took me to the school after hours to see what his classroom looked like after hours and it was so stuffed with chairs that I asked "Has the fire marshal been here?" Every teacher I've known in the public schools has had times when they came home crying because of the moral injury of knowing that they can't help many of their students.
That music teacher has five years to go to retirement with a full pension but with the stress he's under I don't know if he'll make it. Private schools can pay teachers less because it's a better job to teach in private schools not least that private schools can evict the bottom 20% of students (in terms of behavior) who consume 80% of the teacher's time.
I would bet the statistics suggest no matter how much a teacher is paid, no matter how small the class size, or how fancy the school, no one can make a kid care about learning if that isn’t reinforced from the beginning at home and amongst the kids’ peers.
Obviously, education should be properly funded, and many places do not pay competitively, especially considering many teachers these days have to baby sit mentally ill kids. But the bigger problem is that the kids who can and want to excel have been deprioritized in favor of the those who can’t or don’t want to learn.
>Or, hear me out, it's because they've been underfunded from the start.
Compare the funding per student to any other country in Europe... they've been hilariously overfunded for longer than either of us have been alive.
>The reality is that there were never enough resources in the first place, a
That's not reality. That's "spin". There were always enough resources for high achievement from those capable of high achievement... but then equal amounts of money wouldn't be wasted on low achievers.
>Maybe, just MAYBE, if we took the 60k signing bonus
This is just bad math. You need how many teachers nationwide? 1 million-ish? Go ahead and split those $60k bonuses over that many teachers (and over the next 20 years), and the few tens or hundreds of dollars that it ends up being, per teacher, is supposed to make a difference?
Yeah, "underfunded schools" is a talking point that bears no relation to reality but was great for pulling at people's heartstrings, because "think of the children!" But taxpayers have learned better, because they can look at their property tax bills and see how the bulk of it goes to schools. They can look up the per-pupil cost and see that it just keeps climbing faster than pretty much anything else but health care.
They can see that the corollary talking point (schools in disadvantaged areas get less funding) is a lie too. From an MIT study: "The distribution of spending experienced by children living in poverty (figure 1a) is nearly indistinguishable from that of children not living in poverty (figure 1b)."[1] People who make that claim usually only count state and local funding, ignoring federal Title I which makes up for it.
The "underfunded schools" dog just won't hunt anymore. People who are worried about their next paycheck don't want to hear it, especially when it often comes from school administrators who make more than they do.
> if we took the 60k signing bonus and absurd salary away from ICE and started giving it to teachers, we'd see change in a meaningful way.
Give the money to the people (parents) and let them choose whether to spend it on school fundraisers or anything else.
Garbage in, garbage out. Schools are shit because inputs are poor (literally and figuratively) and inputs are poor because most people in this country lose half their paycheck to the government and interests that are in bed with government[1]. As other commenters have pointed out, the actual level of funding per student is by no means the bottleneck here.
[1] E.g. a landlord who's rent price is a reflection of constrained supply which is constrained partly by law but partly by the supply of component parts (materials, labor, design work) of competing goods which themselves are subject to yet more artificial constraints, etc, repeat infinitely)
Less of a "can't handle" and more of a "won't accept". Younger millennials and older Gen-Z are not entering the workforce with the same naivety as their older counterparts, partly due to the information age highlighting all the realities of wealth inequality and worker exploitation. These young workers are more than capable and willing to work, but they're not willing to sell their labor short beyond what is needed to survive. Their governments and companies they work for won't (not can't) promise them the same privileges that came with busting your butt even 20 years ago. Add on a precarious and divisive time for local and global politics, and it's no wonder they refuse to work for the promise of nothing but hell. The vast majority people in this demographic that manage to succeed are those inheriting money or connections.
This reads like it was written by a childless 30 year old trust fund baby. Considering that his entire philosophy centers around doing things he likes doing, how does this apply to the average person? How can this article be digested into useful fuel for thought or action for normal people? It can't, and that might be the takeaway.
Author here, thank you for the feedback. I am very fortunate to be able to do stuff that I like, but I also aspire to be useful. It pains me that I am not reaching that standard yet, I will think more about how to improve.
I feel it's worth noting that while the outcome of these changes to teaching reading is a huge win for childhood education, this does not mean that Mississippi has a great education system. They are still in the bottom 10 states annually for ACT scores and although they have improved learning outcomes for students the issues of equity within their schools still exist. It's also worth noting that the state is a net consumer of federal tax dollars year after year, using $2.34 in federal aid for every dollar they give in taxes. I'll give MS it's props when they deal with the hate crime in their colleges and set up a good free meal program that their state can fund on its own.
> I'll give MS it's props when they deal with the hate crime in their colleges and set up a good free meal program that their state can fund on its own
I don't think the success of a literacy program is negated by the existence of crime on college campuses. I also don't think it's the fault of MS that its citizens generally produce less tax revenue than Californians or New Yorkers.
The expression is "credit where credit's due" and I'd say in this case, credit's due. Well done Mississippi.
Re: "I'll give MS it's props when they deal with the hate crime in their colleges and set up a good free meal program that their state can fund on its own." - you have your priorities, other people have their priorities. My priorities for example are reading and math proficiency.
Well done Mississippi on your students' reading progress!
Unsurprisingly, educational reform in Mississippi that started in 2013 has yet to percolate up to high schools.
As to equity, Mississippi is doing better for black students than almost anyone else:
> Black students are as likely to be basic-or-above readers in Mississippi (where the median Black household income was $37,900 in 2023) as in national top performer Massachusetts (where the median Black household income was $67,000 in 2022.)
As to your other point, Mississippi receives the same amount of federal spending per person as New York: https://rockinst.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Balance-of-P... (page 11). New York of course pays more in taxes—because it has Wall Street and Mississippi doesn’t.
Litigate the company, not the individual. The hiding of the data was almost certainly a result of company ethos and most likely involved multiple levels of people. The maintenance tech was probably the lowest paid of everyone involved.
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