3-year degrees/race to the finish

[pgher]

The funding model for K-12 is a big part of the problem — basing it on the local property taxes. I went to a very bad high school in a poor neighborhood. The school had almost no resources. The pay was pitiful. Of course most of the teachers were the kind who couldn't get a job in a better school district. (Along with a few noble souls trying for the greater good.) Crumbling building, ancient books and not enough for each class, students who often came from poverty-stricken and chaotic homes, violence in the neighborhood that made students inclined to stay home so they wouldn't get beaten up on the way in, bad teachers with large classes — why would anyone think this school would produce upwardly mobile successful students? As I have mentioned before, a kid in my math class sold drugs — in class — to the teacher. I was one of the very few who got out and up, and that was because my parents were affluent middle-class professionals who just happened to build a house in a bad neighborhood. The people from struggling families hardly stood a chance in that school.

That funding source is largely over. Within States, expenditures per pupil tend to be equalized. In addition, there are federal money injections aimed at poor neighborhoods. Expenditures per pupil in Boston, New York City, Chicago, DC, LA and Atlanta are the highest.

In the state where I work, state funding is "equalized." And, schools with more affluent parents sell a lot more gift wrap, cookie dough and high-end silent auction prizes, not to mention additional local taxes they pay towards their schools.

There is a body of research that says additional expenditure doesn't matter for outcomes. Other research says the opposite.

NYC spends over $31K per pupil, or over three quarters of a million dollars per class of 25 per year. How much do you want?

The most expensive private schools in NYC cost over $50K per year. Someone thinks it's worth it to pay teachers, tutors, books, supplies, building repair and maintenance... you name it.

I can't imagine what research methods would find spending per student didn't have an impact on student outcomes.

Here in Missouri, the state is supposed to levelize funding across the state, but never allocates adequate funds from the state budget to actually do so. The issue is particularly stark in St. Louis:
The St. Louis Region's Education Funding Landscape is Highly Uneven and It's Not an Accident
It seems to me that the state provides a floor but no ceiling. As a result, wealthier districts are able to pour money into their schools that poorer districts simply don't have.

[dismalist]

Interesting.

But St. Louis may well be an outlier.

This Think Again is a summary of distribution of money for education within States. It has been equalized, but there are exceptions by race. It has a quite thorough bibliography.

[Langue_doc]

...
Talk to people who've taught remedial courses for several years and have also taught ENG 101 courses in the city who will tell you that for any kind of learning, students need to know the basics--sentence structure, grammar, basic vocabulary--in order to benefit from context-based courses. As for well-written prose, even students in non-CUNY intro courses don't know how to recognize, let alone appreciate it. These are native speakers of American English! I teach writing, as do most of my colleagues, and speak from experience. I used to score ACT essays for CUNY (you didn't need to be CUNY faculty to do so) before CUNY transitioned to the CUNY written essay tests, and found it rather depressing, because these were essays written by students who had graduated from high school. I understand that standards have fallen and continue to fall since then.

The schools, unfortunately, cannot do much about teaching students to read and write because of time constraints. I learned from my students one year that the English teacher has consecutive classes all day with at least 25 students in each class, so grading/commenting on any kind of writtten work is not feasible. The first time some of these students get practical feedback on their writing is in college, especially in remedial courses for students who were passed through the school system without being taught to write a simple correct sentence.

I sympathize.

But broader questions are:

--Why can't kids write after 12 years in school?
--If they can't, why are they in college?

The relevant kids are likely bored out of their minds and might be better off doing some kind of hands on training instead of college. As for the writing part, if schools fail at something, shorten its duration! Failure would be less costly in time and money.

When I was a kid in New York city about a billion years ago, there were three types of High School, vocational, commercial, and academic. [I don't know what the criteria were for matching kids with schools.] That seems a lot more useful to the kids than what we have now. I'm guessing that in a commercial High School one could do a lot of what's in a college Business degree. :-)

Household income.

The research also shows that corequisite courses with a mainstream FY comp class are far more effective than strictly remedial classes. Mainly because students may need remediation for a lot of reasons, and they are more likely to identify and focus on their key issues than if they are in a broad-brush fix-everything class. Half is stuff they already know so it's a waste of time. Half is stuff they need to work on, but they don't have time because of the other half.

Not in NYC. Most of the students in the specialized high schools come from low-income families; admission to these schools is based on a test where personal information such as name, age, gender, ethnicity, language spoken at home, etc is not available to the graders of these tests:

Half the students at the specialized high schools qualify for free or subsidized school lunches, including 47 percent at Stuyvesant and 48 percent at Bronx Science—figures that have increased correspondingly with Asians' rising numbers at these schools. Based upon these figures, Stuyvesant and Bronx Science (as well as four of the other six specialized schools) are eligible for federal Title I funding, given to schools with large numbers of low-income students. Think about that: two public high schools that, along with half their students, are officially classified as poor by the federal government rival the most exclusive prep schools in the world.

Recently these students have been in the news because our former mayor and his school administration complained that there were too many Asians in the specialized schools despite the fact that most of these students came from very poor families. I recall a NYT article about three or four years ago on the student body which included a Bangladeshi cab driver's child, Chinese students whose parents worked in menial jobs, and children of non-affluent but hard-working parents. There was a case of the NAACP suing either the school district or the school because they decided that the student in this article was privileged.

For the ethnic composition of our schools, just google "NYC school ethnic composition" for the results, which are roughly

As the Composition of NYC Public School Students chart below shows, 40% of students identified as Hispanic, 26% as Black, 16% as Asian/Pacific Islander (PI), and 15% as White during the 2017-2018 school year2.

I've had affluent students who are probably in college because of their parents' insistence, and hard-working students in my evening classes who work in construction, as child-care providers, and a host of other low-paying jobs, but come to class, do their assignments, and are a just a pleasure to have in my class.

The research appears to be out of touch with reality; perhaps the researchers concentrated on only the affluent schools, or talked to students who were willing to sit down with the researchers. There's also academic fraud, so it isn't clear how the research was conducted, how the researchers could access student data, and also interview students.

[Wahoo Redux]

Interesting.

But St. Louis may well be an outlier.

This Think Again is a summary of distribution of money for education within States.

This is a publication from the ideologically conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

Bibliography notwithstanding, how objective is it?  Can we trust it?  Or is it a publication for a niche readership?

[Parasaurolophus]

Isn't a big part of the answer to why kids leave high school unable to read and write the abandonment of phonics education for the so-called "balanced literacy" approach  ? They're taught to guess from context and pictures, not to... well, read.

[Langue_doc]

Isn't a big part of the answer to why kids leave high school unable to read and write the abandonment of phonics education for the so-called "balanced literacy" approach  ? They're taught to guess from context and pictures, not to... well, read.

The NYC schools had, for decades, relied on the so-called reading guru at Columbia, only to find out that kids weren't learning to read. The first three paragraphs from the article:

Call it the end of an era for fantasy-fueled reading instruction. In a move that has parents like me cheering, Columbia University's Teachers College announced last month that it is shuttering its once famous—in some circles, now-infamous—reading organization founded by education guru and entrepreneur Lucy Calkins.

For decades, the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project was a behemoth in American education. As many as 1 in 4 U.S. elementary schools used Calkins' signature curriculum. But that number is dwindling as a growing chorus of cognitive scientists, learning experts, and parents—many amplified by education journalist Emily Hanford via her 2022 podcast Sold a Story—argue that the Calkins approach to reading is ineffective at best, actively harmful at worst, and a large part of why more than half of our country's fourth graders aren't demonstrating proficiency on reading exams.

It's common knowledge that never learning to read well damages children's self-esteem, their life prospects, and our country's future workforce. What's less talked about is how, when schools fail to teach reading, it harms the public's trust in schools. An unspoken contract between public schools and parents is that schools will teach their children to read. In many places, that contract was broken when schools adopted Calkins' methods, kids didn't learn to read, and responsibility for teaching reading transferred onto parents and guardians.

The NYT article:

In the Fight Over How to Teach Reading, This Guru Makes a Major Retreat
Lucy Calkins, a leading literacy expert, has rewritten her curriculum to include a fuller embrace of phonics and the science of reading. Critics may not be appeased.

There were several reports, mostly negative, on the Calkins/Columbia approach. Just google Columbia, phonics.

[marshwiggle]

The NYT article:

In the Fight Over How to Teach Reading, This Guru Makes a Major Retreat
Lucy Calkins, a leading literacy expert, has rewritten her curriculum to include a fuller embrace of phonics and the science of reading. Critics may not be appeased.

There were several reports, mostly negative, on the Calkins/Columbia approach. Just google Columbia, phonics.

Interesting that even having had her methods debunked, she still gets the title.