What is going to happen to schools in trouble?

[ApatheticNoMore]

The peers might be just as important as the parents though, so hence the competition to get your kids into a good schol district or private school so than can be around motivated peers etc. ect. Ugh this world is nuts.

[JaneV2.0]

The peers might be just as important as the parents though, so hence the competition to get your kids into a good schol district or private school so than can be around motivated peers etc. ect. Ugh this world is nuts.

That's particularly true as they get older; you can only watch and worry, I guess.

[ApatheticNoMore]

Apparently the Feds are trying to push a whole new set of education standards. Lovely, the last time the Feds pushed a bunch of standards (No Child Left Behind), it caused some teachers to quit the profession (they wanted to teach people to think, not "teach to test"). How much role does No Child Left Behind play in the reports people have of lousy education these days I wonder? (No, I don't think everything was wonderful before it, doesn't mean NCLB isn't a problem).

Apparently according to the new standards teachers should teach fact and should stop teaching fictional works. Some of this stuff sounds absurd on the face of it (though I'd have to research more). It sounds like the utopians (or perhaps more accurately dystopians - this is to prepare kids for the marketplace allegedly - and it seems almost an asian not a western model) are just running any old idea up the flagpole again, not that they don't have a larger agenda.

My education did not leave me with a good factual framework to understand the world it is true - which is why I did decide to read a lot of non-fiction and analysis as an adult. Yea of course to understand the world you need both. Facts without analysis are pretty useless - to state the obvious.

[JaneV2.0]

The old "education as vocational prep" sets me off no end. Meat widgets, that's us.

[Gregg]

The peers might be just as important as the parents though...

In a lot of ways even more so. Peer pressure is very real and very powerful. Our kids were lucky, they had a combination of good schools, involved parents and peer groups who at least wanted to do well in school. Remove any one and its like trying to ride a trike with only two wheels. Unfortunately I think there are a lot more kids with no wheels than with three.

[Spartana]

So every day it seems there is an article about a school district having layoffs. Obviously, some areas like Detroit are in serious trouble. But even areas that are doing ok seem to still be laying off or having hiring freezes. Surely some of what was initially cut was waste or duplication but we are way beyond that it seems. What does the future hold? Taxes certainly can't be raised high enough to cover the education, pension and health care they promised to retirees and other rising costs? You never hear about what a crisis this is. I can't really figure it out.

Calif just re-vamped their entire public employee retirement benefits plan to reduce expenses (more employee costs towards pensions and healthcare, older retirement age by 10 years to get a pension, etc...). They also raised sale txes and some other taxes. Now there is a BIG surplus in revenue and I assume much of it will go to schools.

Calif also has a large population of students who are illegal immigrants and they cost quite a bit. This 2004 article from About.com:

Among the key finding of the report are that the state's already struggling K-12 education system spends approximately $7.7 billion a year to school the children of illegal aliens who now constitute 15 percent of the student body

[pinkytoe]

Peer pressure is very real and very powerful.

DD went to public science/math "magnet schools" for middle and high school. The magnet programs were held at low-performing schools that were primarily low-income, minority kids - I guess they thought the good stuff would rub off on them. The magnet kids hung out among themselves where being smart was cool. The regular students never integrated, kept to themselves and shunned academics. Not sure that experiment had the intended effect.

[Gregg]

DD went to public science/math "magnet schools" for middle and high school. The magnet programs were held at low-performing schools that were primarily low-income, minority kids - I guess they thought the good stuff would rub off on them. The magnet kids hung out among themselves where being smart was cool. The regular students never integrated, kept to themselves and shunned academics. Not sure that experiment had the intended effect.

Another kind of forced gentrification...it just never works because it never addresses the root problems. It is, however, a typically American response.