Why Do Public Schools Suck and What Should We Do About Them? Live With Corey DeAngelis and Connor Boyack
Join Reason on YouTube and Facebook on Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern for a live discussion with the authors of Mediocrity: 40 Ways Government Schools Are Failing Today's Students
Forty years ago, the National Commission on Excellence in Education published A Nation At Risk: The Imperative For Educational Reform, a scathing indictment of public K-12 schools in America. "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war," announced the report's authors, who included Nobel Prize–winning chemist Glenn T. Seaborg and Yale University President A. Bartlett Giamatti. The report catalyzed massive increases in per-pupil spending, yet by almost every measure, educational outcomes are worse now than in 1983.
In Mediocrity: 40 Ways Government Schools Are Failing Today's Students, the Libertas Institute's Connor Boyack and the American Federation for Children's Corey DeAngelis outline what's wrong with the ways our public schools function—and they offer concrete solutions to improve outcomes for children.
Join Nick Gillespie this Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern for a live interview with Boyack and DeAngelis on the burgeoning school-choice movement.
Watch and leave questions and comments on the YouTube video above or on Reason's Facebook page.
- Producer: Bess Byers
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Government control and unions.
Eliminate them.
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Government schools are inherently government. You cant' get rid of government control without taking the schools private.
Perfect plan.
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“Why Do Public Schools Suck”
– Activist ‘educators’ who were indoctrinated with Marx, and want nothing more to pass it on
– A significant increase in gender-studies backgrounds among teachers who have significant pathology and pass this on to students in an attempt to get some validation of their mentally ill, depressed, lifestyle
– Teacher’s union shielding incompetent teachers from being fired, incentivizing them to be lazier by the day
– A shift away from grades and meritocracy in the name of equity, which allows racial quotas to be maintained (taking away from asians/whites to give to blacks)
– ^in short, Democrats^
“What Should We Do”
Shut them down (ideal), or set up funding such that the money goes with the kid, encouraging some sort of results based incentive (second choice)
Yeah, pretty much this. Ideally government schools don't exist. But they tend to be seen as a basic function of government by most normal people. Getting rid of the unions and guaranteed employment and creating some kind of performance based incentives seems a bit more realistic.
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Agreed as well.Yes getting ridof the unions will help but as long as the Dept. of Ed., another useless waste of taxpayers money, continues to bungle everything it touches, like all bureaucracies, makes it difficult to address the inherent problems brought on by D.C. interference. If local tax payers are being used to fund local schools, they should have the power and will to decide what does and what does not belong in schools, even if they make the mistake of continuing to allow transgender or any other of this type of rubbish, let them pay for it and then reap what they sow.
close the conformity factories. end social security. give people their own money to spend on all the emerging private schools.
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They suck because:
- Public Sector unions
- One-size-fits-all approach
- Over-administration
I'd add:
- Few incentives for success
- No disincentives for failure.
The federal department of education
– No disincentives for failure.
There's a myth that schoolteachers are impossible to fire.
Turns out, they're pretty easy to fire if they commit the wrong infraction.
"And I said, 'Are you asking me to lie to parents?' And they said 'Yes,'" Tapia said outside Jurupa Valley High.
AB 1266 was passed in 2014. It says schools can't tell parents about their children's gender identity without first asking the student.
I had no idea this happened in California. I'm not surprised, I just do not recall AB1266 making the news.
I just do not recall AB1266 making the news.
There's Ron DeSantis stories hissing in the inbox.
Don't forget teachers having massive grade inflation in colleges giving degrees to some of the dumbest people on the planet.
Entrance scores consistently show education majors with near bottom GPA/test scores yet the colleges have some of the highest GPA on graduation. Their pairing with Humanities departments to indoctrinate SEL and critical theory as required classes is jusy the cherry on top.
One of my college roommates was an education major.
My other roommate and I (both architecture students) would come home late at night from studio to work on bending moment calculations for our next structural exam and find his 'study group' in the living room wearing PJ's watching Spongebob while they made up their mock 'lesson plans' using white card paper boards and Crayola markers.
So, I have a fair idea of the relative amount of rigor involved in that area of study.
I remember tutoring math 302a and b for the education majors. Theory of counting. They struggled to understand non base 10 and Roman numerals.
That's going to make 'learning to code' a bit difficult, isn't it?
Not if "code" means using the feelings of colors and numbers.
When I tested for college they wanted to put me through the education courses. I never wanted to be a teacher and glad I left that curriculum.
Later on, I went to a local community college for a degree in electronics tech. Much more interesting and I found it to be challenging as well.
Grade inflation is a problem in public middle and high schools too. Lots of DC public schools inflate their grades, and some schools won’t allow teachers to give 0’s on anything.
They just need more per-pupil money, of course.
Michelle Ree tried to bring some sanity and accountability to the DC schools, and got run out of town for her troubles. I don't know if Wilson High still offers a decent education to those students interested in learning, but I can't remember any other DC public school ever being mentioned in the Post for anything other than sports or violence.
I mean, I would just make them fire me if I couldn't give out a zero to students not completing their work.
Grade inflation happened because the whole education system forgot what the fuck grades even are.
Grades are a tool for assessing subject mastery. They're not some reward students get for doing well. They're not something students are ever owed for putting in the effort. It's essentially showing the percentage of the subject material you successfully mastered. That's why 60% is a failure-it's not an even distribution. If you're barely grasping half of what you're supposed to, you're failing to learn what is being presented.
Nobody is ever owed a 100. You aren't required to treat a class like a normalized distribution and give As to a certain number of students. If you have a crappy class, you shouldn't give out a single one. If you have an excellent class, you could have EVERY student get an A. Both of those scenarios are entirely possible without it necessarily meaning anything beyond the random chance of getting that type of class population.
Lowering standards such as in N.Y. City and Oregon.
Jeff is going to lose his shit seeing DeAngelis get interviewed.
Huh.
Ok then.
The average German household's electric bills went up by approximately 45% at the same time.
https://twitter.com/energybants/status/1647581891485392897
I have some German friends that I am very fond of; which is the only reason I don't say let them freeze their asses off, and then determine how much they want to let their overreaching government run their lives.
Of course, given my experience with Germans, the will most likely choose freezing. Their lives have been run like this for generations.
I thought they had made the decision to keep a couple of the plants still running, because otherwise they have to get most of their energy from eebil Russia.
Any climate change activist who takes nuclear energy off the table is NOT serious about climate change. Period.
I heard this from another source that tracks this stuff closely (reliable) that something like 20 years ago, polls showed only 3% of German voters were in favor of expanding nuclear energy, Now it’s 40%, so I’m not sure why the Greens have such a stranglehold on German energy policy.
Green shirts, brown shirts, or any other color--Germans fall in line behind snappy uniforms.
They did, but only for a few months.
Watch and leave questions and comments on the YouTube video above or on Reason's Facebook page.
Pushing traffic from your website to other websites seems like a winning strategy.
yet by almost every measure, educational outcomes are worse now than in 1983.
This should tell people something important: that you're not measuring what schools prioritize. More aligned "measures" include:
1. How many trannies are we producing?
2. What percentage of students graduate incapable of understanding the political positions of those who disagree with them?
3. What percentage of students hate free markets enough that they refuse to engage in productive work?
4. What percentage of students believe they can make a living through political activism and government handouts?
Once you start to measure what the schools prioritize I suspect you'll find their achievement is exemplary.
2023 Report: Seattle was the third-fastest growing metropolitan region in the country in the 2010’s, the authors note, trailing only Austin and Fort Worth, Texas. Without zoning changes and other interventions, it appears housing growth will continue to lag population growth with disastrous implications for housing affordability, homelessness, and a whole host of other related issues.
Always be careful what you wish for.
Remember, Sex School is School.
"Bitch School" as well -- https://youtu.be/Sq3YD7fNZTI
It appears the Believe-all-women thing is well behind us.
"...city attorneys contend Price then drove her to a North Seattle parking lot, where he again put his hand on her neck and proceeded to drive “doughnuts” with her in the car.
Can a Tesla do doughnuts? When I say "doughnuts", I mean roasting the rear tires, billowing white stinky burnt rubber smoke, while the car's ass end spins around the front end. I don't mean driving around in small concentric circles.
Good question. It surely has the power to do them, but with the way the electric motors work, not sure if they're even rear wheel drive in that way.
The funny thing about this dude and his situation is, I'm kind of familiar with it. I don't have any strong thoughts about whether or not he's guilty-- even though it fits right in my personal narrative that he is. No one deserves to be weighed down with false accusations and run out of his own company over false allegations. But there are other allegations not related to this against him.
At this point, if he were a friend of mine AND I really thought he were innocent of all these allegations, my advice to him would be: You need to find a better class of friends, and a class of friends in a completely different ideological framework.
That last part is probably going to be a tough one for him, what with all his Social Justice activism and profile in that world.
Herpetologist's handshakes and all.
Public (ei. government) schools used to work. Used to be the best in the world. And within my lifetime, nonetheless. What happened?
The answer is not "government" because government schools were always government. But there are some key differences between the 1950s public schools and 2020s public schools:
1) Radical decentralization. Local schools were run by a local school board, in a largely rural America. But even in urban centers they were still mostly locally controlled. And these local schoolboards were largely comprised of parents and not professional politicians that seem to be the norm in big city school districts. Basically, schools were run at the county and city level.
2) Parental involvement. This is a cultural thing, not a government thing, but perhaps government crowded out the parental involvement a bit. Even as late as my own childhood, PTAs were common and parents joined and attended them. Local PTA meetings at my elementary school had the majority of parents represented.
2a) Closely related, there was a significant change in parental attitudes. I come from a family of teachers and I saw this first hand. Used to be parents were concerned with how their children were doing. Education was a teacher/parent partnership. Then it shifted over the seventies. Parents were suddenly more concerned with why the teacher was not passing out top marks to their children. Why did Johnny get an F on his homework?
3) Unions. Okay, schools have been unionized for longest time, and only recently have they been freed from unions by the SCOTUS. But over time this led to the union attitude that the world owes the worker. Teachers started becoming real assholes and bitches. I have classmates who became teachers and a couple of them are the most entitled snowflakes you ever met. But I'm not going to fully blame unions for this, as this mindset seems to be more recent thing, and was not present when unions were the national religion of the 70s.
4) Administration. This is a biggie. Probably largest single cause. The number of administrators per teacher or student has skyrocketed. And not just in public schools, but anything that has the government finger on it: colleges and hospitals are drowning in admins as well. Growing up my district of five elementary schools, one junior high, and one high school, was all administered from one small building, a residential home that was converted to the school district building. We knew the superindentent, he lived down the street. My own elementary school had one principal, one vice principal (my dad, who spend 98% of this time teaching in a classroom), one secretary, one school nurse, and one janitor. That was it. Today there are probably three times that number with a satellite building to hold them all. And the school district itself has a big building.
4a) The above was just local. Country control over schools expanded greatly as well. And then the state. All of which had their own administrative edifice. Then we got the Department of Education and it all exploded. None of this administrative juggernaut helps the students in any way. Other than the very basics to get the schools funded and running, it's pointless.
The question is, do we just toss it all out including the baby and the bathwater? Or try to reform it? I still think that a decent voucher system, or other "backpack" system, where taxes follow the student rather than the brick buildings, is the way to go. But I also fear we're very near the point of just letting the whole thing burn down. Even in the Red States where Red State governors are imposing curricula restrictions on fully private schools. The idea that politics should run education is a virus that is killing the patient.
You point out some fundamental problems with public schools; I would add that the loss of local control and the intervention of the feds is also a detriment. Initiatives like Common Core and No Child Left Behind mandated that students be instructed to garner higher test scores; learning, not so much.
I have arrived at the belief that schools, along with a lot of institutions, are going to have to burn before anything better can be created. There is too much self interest and opposition for that to happen otherwise.
The problem is when parents get involved, so does the FBI. They show at parents home at 5:00AM with three SWAT teams, Bearcats and heli with CNN in tow.
Merrick Garfinkle labels them as domestic terrorists and they sit in jail for two years waiting for trial. The children are removed from the parent's home and placed in an abusive foster home.
I agree with all the essential reasons given above, but will offer one more: the industrialization of teaching. Politics aside, teachers lost all autonomy and professionalism. My wife taught elementary school for years, and experienced the change from her early days, when the district set general goals to her last years, when most teaching was supposed to be done from a standardized script. It might be circular, but smart people left (or never started) the teaching profession as the job got dumber, which then attracted people who felt more comfortable in the new mode.
If you read the forty reasons in the Table of Contents of the new book, you can boil almost all of them down one reason: because public school districts are not about education of children. If a child becomes educated while being enrolled in a public school, it's purely coincidental and incidental to the purposes of the "educators."
It IS war, and always has been. The only difference is that one side doesn’t acknowledge or recognize it as such.
Demunists made their first bold move under Woodrow Wilson, inverting our Constitution from a document defining strictly limited powers, taxation, and spending to a document of unlimited power, spending, and taxation. All of it was accomplished unconstitutionally, illegally, by audacious assumption. Americans were complacent, it went seriously unchallenged, and became the de facto law of the land.
We sold ourselves out - for a Ponzi scheme.
The public schools cannot possibly be fixed, because they are broken by design. Central planning is always the enemy of Liberty and prosperity. Give parents something like an EBT card usable for traditional type schools, one room school houses, home schooling, or totally aka carte studies. A system like Uber in which the identities of all parties (parents, children, prospective teachers) are verified and student scores from controlled test centers recorded would allow parents to shop for the right education for their children. 360 degree feedback would allow parents (and students, in a separate category) to rate teachers, and for teachers to rate both students and parents. Any parent could bid on a class / teacher combination, accepting the student would be entirely up to the teacher’s discretion. For unteachable students, perhaps there would be a remnant of the public school system - or perhaps business models would spring up to work with them.
Real solutions are easy; Demunists do not want real solutions.
I dunno, I think central planning might work in schools case, if it were competent (which of course is generally the catch with central planning).
If students were expected to be proficient in certain things and teachers who had classes were rewarded and who weren't were penalized or fired
But instead it's basically just tenure. You can be a 65 year old teacher who rambles and falls asleep in class, but because you've been teaching for 40 years you make more than anyone else at the school.
I think it should be noted that the public school districts only became battlegrounds after the socialists had been successfully pushing their agenda there for a very long time. They pushed their social agenda there so successfully, so far for so long that eventually they overplayed their hand, pushed it a little too far a little too fast and it finally triggered a reaction from “the right.” Although I won’t try to excuse reactionary social positions here, when “the left” plays with matches, it should not surprise them when not only do they end up burning their fingers, but the petrol they threw on the flames ends up blowing up in their faces and, maybe, burning the house down.
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Mostly teacher's unions. But pretty much all government jobs are inherently corrupt, because there is almost never any penalty for doing the job poorly.
There needs to be accountability and that's not something found in government anymore. Hell, maybe in the private section, at least higher ups, with all this DEI stuff that judges you only how woke you are, not ability or what you do to make the company money.
“never any penalty for doing the job poorly”
Hey! You’re not robbing me in a adequate way!.
Problem being; Government is funded by Gov-Guns not by people’s choice.
And as such; should be LIMITED to very specific and of top-importance subjects (enumerated powers of the US Constitution). The “Perfect Plan” has been there all along. There’s no need to keep re-inventing the wheel that keeps failing. Just a dire need to resort to the OLD Supreme Law that has a proven history of building the most successful nation on the planet.
Just word it correctly and it should make complete sense. “Why does Commie-Education suck”…
Duh, uh, meh — 1,000 Years later and people still cannot come to grips with the fact that Communism Sucks and that the only asset to humanity for government (the monopoly of Gov-Guns) is to ensure Liberty and Justice for all. I mean common already; what idiot thinks a GUN can make sh*t? Or thinks Government isn't just Gun-Force?
Just a little more Communism and/or Socialism will fix it!!! F’En morons keep advertising against the very founding of the USA.
And how did they get so stupid? Selfish greed…. The ‘hope’ of getting to use Gov-Guns to STEAL benefits from those other ‘icky’ people. Democrats; Still the party of slavery just hiding their existence under the Gov-Platantion owner.
Public schools cannot be fixed. The true purpose of public education is to brainwash children into being obedient workers. People who can be trained just enough to run a machine, fill out the time card and vote for whom they're told to vote. They're not trained to ask questions....we can't have that. What the government wants are obedient robots, who will march off to war, somewhere in the middle east or elsewhere for some nebulous reason but it's always about saving "demockracy".
The ultimate failure of public education can be witnessed in cities like Chicago, Baltimore, N.Y. City and Detroit, or in states like California and Oregon.
I teach science at the high school level at a really great school. In my experience, one of the biggest detriments to public schools is the anti-discrimination laws. (AKA-the government) Yes, all people deserve an equal opportunity at education, but because emotional disorders are covered under the anti-discrimination laws, schools are legally unable to discipline students who are genuinely a threat to themselves and others, even when they have previously caused actual physical harm.
I have had to completely redo a science curriculum to remove dissections because I was warned that a student with “special needs” would steal the scalpels and harm nearby classmates with them. Let’s see-who do I sit him next to… Little Emily? Maybe the big guy could handle him? Whose child’s life do I put in jeopardy because of a law that is being abused by the system? And I teach at a GOOD school. What’s happening in dangerous areas?
REASON reader since the Virginia Postrel days...
Would it surprise anyone that public schools DON'T "suck" in high-income, high-education, high-rates of 2-parent family zip codes?
But, somehow, in neighborhoods where poverty, low-parental-education, and single-parenthood prevail, it's the school's fault?
Limiting retention and instead grouping students by age instead of ability and requiring government schools to accept every low-IQ/poor behavior/learning-disabled student the upper-income, private, charter and parochial schools don't want to serve doesn't exactly create a level field for comparison.
Kindergarten Readiness Assessment scores (given before every child begins kindergarten) in upper-income elementary schools are highly correlated with the top-performing public high schools in the same district.
Good students start school with high readiness scores. Low students begin school with low readiness scores.
Good families generally produce good students. Lousy families generally produce lousy students.
"Good schools" and thus also "bad schools" are largely a myth.