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Some of the most behind students I saw in my teaching career were "home schooled". Now, I know your head will explode with that so I'll add that the parents in those cases doing home schooling should have had their kids taken from them years earlier for neglect. The same thing happened during the Covid shutdowns, many of the kids being "home schooled" were running the streets 20 hours a day.
There have numerous times I've walked into classrooms and picked out kids who had been home schooled or went to small Christian schools and were now in public schools. I think home schooling can work in some cases. I coached a boy in basketball who was home schoold. He was the most mature player on the team, but had trouble relating to his teammates.
I wonder about all the criticism of school going online during Covid but it seems like some of the same people are proponents of home schooling. Home schooling will not work for a large number of students for the same reason that many students struggled online from home. They just do not have the support structure at home to allow them to learn without being in school.
I think most students who thrive with home schooling would also do well in school, and the same is true with students who do well in school. They would also do well in a home school environment. The question is what makes people think that a student who is struggling in school would do well schooled at home?
If there's no solution to the problem, why do we **** away billions of dollars trying to solve it?
Maybe the solution is to stop looking for solutions if that's true. Stop throwing good money after bad.
You can look at it like Muscular Dystrophy. Damm, how many dollars did we donate to Jerry and his kids over the years? I have family with the disease and it just hasn't been solved.
But I remember another disease from my lifetime that was practically a death sentence if you had the diagnosis: AIDS. People are somehow leading normal lives now, it seems.
Why are some puzzles harder to solve than others? I don't know. Which horse do you stop betting on? No idea.
Me must shut down the schools the teacher’s union said. What a bad idea that was. There’s no denying it was the primary driver in the drop in standardized test scores. And I’m not crapping on all teacher plenty of teachers were calling for the schools to remain open but the leadership was not.
You can look at it like Muscular Dystrophy. Damm, how many dollars did we donate to Jerry and his kids over the years? I have family with the disease and it just hasn't been solved.
But I remember another disease from my lifetime that was practically a death sentence if you had the diagnosis: AIDS. People are somehow leading normal lives now, it seems.
Why are some puzzles harder to solve than others? I don't know. Which horse do you stop betting on? No idea.
I'm happy to stop betting on the government or any agency thereof.
Governments have a notoriously long history of throwing good money after bad.
We were considered to have one of the best gifted programs in the state, and -- at least at the time -- there were two different gifted programs in our school. The first was "gifted center"; in that program students had all 4 core classes with ONLY students identified as being gifted. In electives and PE, everything was mixed. In the "gifted base" program, students were identified as being gifted in EITHER science/math OR English/history, and whichever 2 subjects they had been identified in as being gifted, the classes were only students who were identified as gifted. It was a top notch program. I understand that since I left (but not because I left) that it has been watered down, although I don't really know the details.
How do you compare an exemplary art teacher to an exemplary business teacher to an exemplary P.E. teacher to an exemplary chemistry teacher to an exemplary learning support teacher?
One alternative is you don't. You have them in different pay bands. Perhaps, to use your example, an Art pay band; a PE/Rec/Band/Chorus/Theatre pay band, and a STEM pay band. Each of these pay bands would have different pay ranges associated with them and teachers would only compete/compare within their pay band.
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Originally Posted by RamenAddict
We did that in the past and had large institutions where people with developmental disabilities were warehoused. When I worked at a social service organization that helped this group of people, we were told that at that time, the annual cost of institutionalization was something like $85K a year. So there you have it- $85K a year in ~2010 dollars to institutionalize a person for life. That’s millions of dollars for just one person that the taxpayers have to fund after that child ages out of school. Now assume you can get that person to be self sufficient so they don’t cost $85K a year from 21-75. Instead, they are working as a bagger or cashier at Publix or Kroger, making a modest but otherwise self-sufficient living. Even just using the millions of dollars saved can go a long way to help other people later on. My agency served 50K people a year. People who were actually able to work were not eligible for services, so that’s 50K people who would otherwise be institutionalized at the cost of $85k. They didn’t actually get that much each, but the agency’s annual budget allotment was over a billion dollars. That was just for one state.
Contrast this with schooling and the average spending per student in that state is only $10K. So yeah, I do think it makes more sense to spend more on the neediest folks in the K-12 years to avoid spending. $85K a year in 2010 dollars on that same person.
The problem is, most of this discussion is not about those with true disabilities that would limit/prevent learning, but about those whose only "disability" is lack of the give-a-damn gene in themselves or their parents. How much of each teacher's class time is wasted each day trying to teach these students?
Going back to your specific example, how much of the $10K average cost was driven by the various special program? Special services for a few, spread across a lot can still add up to a metric boat load of money.
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Originally Posted by albert648
Exactly.
If there's no solution to the problem, why do we **** away billions of dollars trying to solve it?
Maybe the solution is to stop looking for solutions if that's true. Stop throwing good money after bad.
Why throw billions at unsolvable problems? Because the general public demands it. Talk about an unsolvable problem, you have a third of the population voting for more "free money"; another third voting to cut it; and another third voting both ways. And somewhere around half can't find their way to the voting booth.
How do you compare an exemplary art teacher to an exemplary business teacher to an exemplary P.E. teacher to an exemplary chemistry teacher to an exemplary learning support teacher?
1. Why would I compare a PE teacher to a chemistry teacher? Why not compare a PE teacher to other PE teachers?
2. But then again, it's not really comparing teachers to one another (there was no quota system), as it is comparing performance of a teacher to pre-stated standards.
Some of the most behind students I saw in my teaching career were "home schooled". Now, I know your head will explode with that so I'll add that the parents in those cases doing home schooling should have had their kids taken from them years earlier for neglect. The same thing happened during the Covid shutdowns, many of the kids being "home schooled" were running the streets 20 hours a day.
Even back in my day...the early 2000s...I very occasionally had a parent tell me they were taking their children to a private school or to home schooling, and my answer was always the same: "Thank you!"
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