I spent 13 years in public schools and was one of the better students. I felt then as I do a now a quarter century later: the majority of my time there was wasted.
The week of my 18th birthday and a few days before graduation, I left. On principle.
You left so close to the end of classes that you were still guaranteed to graduate? That’s a pretty hollow statement. If anything, it looks like a case of senioritis.
This is, of course, amazing news. Public schools in the US have been lethargically churning out rapidly declining outcomes for decades, as well as attacking gifted students in the name of equity & inclusion.
2020 threw gas on the fire of homeschooling numbers, and I can't wait to see what they are like now (the 2023 survey that will reveal them is currently running).
Homeschooling produces better outcomes, even when you include unschooled students and religious curriculum.
Literally, a random person off the street can do better at teaching a child 1:1 than a teacher in a classroom of 25 students where excellence is punished severely.
That's not even considering the fact that teachers unions routinely protect sexual predators, and that teachers are statistically more likely to abuse children than priests. [1]
Teachers unions were also the most vocal proponents of school lockdowns, which irreparably damaged millions of students.
School was a massive waste of time for me and most people I know. It's also the only place I've ever experienced physical violence. They're just a mess.
“Socializing” children in schools is an oxymoron. School is where children are prevented from becoming socialized by being placed into an age-segregated situation with only one authority figure present. It’s only a slight improvement on Lord of the Flies.
This doesn't make a lot of sense: classrooms are full of other children, who socialize with each other. Classrooms empty into lunchrooms and schoolyards, which are not segregated by year.
> Classrooms empty into lunchrooms and schoolyards, which are not segregated by year.
In my experience, in elementary school our class had assigned tables for lunch and a specific time when we had the playground and blacktop. YMMV. But at any rate a half hour in the cafeteria and a half hour in the yard aren't the best places a child could learn to interact with other children; the characteristics of these activities are constrained by the form of the institution.
My schools (all of them) had open seating and free-for-alls in their open areas; at my high school, they didn’t even bother trying to keep us inside the grounds (which meant that we could, and did, go socialize with the neighborhood.) This is in a school system that contains roughly a million students, and (AFAIK) didn’t impose significant differences between individual schools.
I can’t imagine assigned seating working very well, except for at a very small school in a small district. Yours might not be a representative case.
I remember school as a massive waste of time, but it definitely helped me develop social skills.
That said, I'm really not seeing this effect with my kids in the SF Bay Area. They have few opportunities to socialize on school grounds, and are then whisked away by parents and taken to after-school classes or back home to sit in front of a computer. "Socialization" boils down to kids hanging around on social networks on their phones. And even these seem to be shifting from chat to passive consumption (TikTok, etc).
Any decent-sized town or city will have homeschooling groups that organize regular activities to address that issue. Often parents will also form small homeschooling groups or pods that provide socialization opportunities during "class". Plus there are classic extracurriculars like sports teams, music, etc. Social media has also helped a lot with organizing and coordinating these sorts of groups.
Probably not fair to single the schools out. You could look at other factors like single parent households, which are very strongly associated with negative outcomes and on the rise since like... 1950. Dual-income households which fall between the "we can't afford private tutors" and "we can't afford extracurriculars" income brackets but solidly in the "we've maximized our minimal time with our child" category. Not to mention the huge wealth disparity in some metros. Rapidly growing metropolitan areas that simply can't accommodate the masses. There's also all the federal benchmarks, and that's shit that rolls downhill, but from my experience the teachers I personally know don't like the system as it is - it's just that their bosses and on up demand quantifiable results on standardized tests because continued funding is contingent on it. In a lot of cases hands are tied by legal and ethics.
I also expect the unions are representative of their constituents. Where I live all the teachers wanted to be back, and we were among the earliest states back in action. Coincidentally highly conservative and rural (mostly one and the same).
But I don't disagree with the more general statement as things stand, and funding is dealt with by a headcount of students - this might provoke positive reactions in the market.
As someone who was homeschooled for most of my childhood, I would say the results of it are as much or more of a mixed bag than public schooling is. It depends largely on how much time and energy the parents pour into it, and it's very easy for them to not be doing enough even if they have intentions otherwise.
Additionally, homeschooling has a tendency to produce adults who lack real world experience and perspective due to the unavoidably sheltered nature of such arrangements. This is something that has taken me many years to overcome to become a functional person, and if I'm being honest, is still a work in progress even in my mid-30s. It's not something I'd want to saddle any potential children of my own with.
It’s not just socialization I’m talking about, though that was an issue too in my case (in college and early adult life I was awkward and socially inexperienced in a way nobody else around me was).
It’s also exposure to people from different backgrounds and walks of life, exposure to different points of view and ways of thinking, street smarts, etc… homeschooling kept me in a tiny bubble that became apparent when I started talking with people on the internet and especially when I went to college, and it would take many years to remedy the resulting utter cluelessness about the real world.
I have no power to improve public schools on a timeline where it helps my kids (it will take years, if not decades, to move the needle on outcomes from improving public education institutions; politics, funding, internal systems in school systems and schools themselves). I can and do homeschool today (not by choice, but I felt it was the least worst option based on constraints). If you can’t, I’m sorry the system failed you. Still try to plant trees whose shade you won’t sit in, but if you need shade now, build your own shade.
Donating towards and voting for political candidates who have communicated effective measures of education reform as part of their platform. For what its worth, I'm not really interested in grandkids, so that's not what I'm optimizing for (rather, a high functioning educational system for any child who needs exposure to one, broadly speaking). I am a fan of civilization and contributing to its improvement within my influence sphere.
That WSJ article is an opinion piece. From 2012. And literally nowhere does it claim that teachers are statistically more likely to abuse children than priests; the word priest does not appear in the article. You may need to provide evidence for your claim.
Examining further, that WSJ opinion piece claims that 97 teachers were charged with sexual misconduct over 5 years, including remarks made to students. The NYC Public School system had 75,000 teachers in 2019. [1]
In contrast, there are 37,000 catholic priests in the US [2], with 2700 individual catholic clergy members accused of gross sexual abuse of children [3].
Additionally, the NYC Department of Education charged their wrong-doers, while the Church continues to protect criminals and avoid restitution, going so far as to dissolve dioceses to avoid paying lawful judgements.
There appears to be a massive disparity between the 2 situations, natch. Pinch of salt, and all that.
The week of my 18th birthday and a few days before graduation, I left. On principle.
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