early on in the bush (ii) administration, they passed a bill called "no child left behind" that would cut funding from schools that couldn't achieve desired standardized test scores.

while this may seem to align incentives, in reality a school that has struggling students needs MORE resources, not less.

the outcome, in reality, is an extreme desire to "teach to the test," where developing actual skills is secondary to learning the structure of test problems and how to answer them correctly enough to keep the school from being obliterated.

teachers are one of the most valuable, most undervalued positions in society. my mother taught elementary school for 20 years; when she retired, i was making 3 times her salary doing my computer job. this is the sad but inevitable outcome from the policies put in place by a class of people that can afford to educate their children outside of the systems forced upon the working class.

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m00x 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

The Obama administration reversed this in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in 2015.

Many of the schools with the most funding per student, like Washington D.C. and NYC currently underperform.

NYC has a spending of $36-40k per student with only 56% ELA, ~47% Math. Washington DC has $27k-31k of spending per student and only 22% proficient in reading and 16% in Math.

Charter schools have been the best bang for the buck. The best all-income schools are catholic schools, averaging at 1 grade level higher. Then private schools do even better, but aren't accessible to everyone, and then the top spot is left to selective high-performing schools, unsurprisingly.

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bluGill 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

> The best all-income schools are catholic schools, averaging at 1 grade level higher. Then private schools do even better

These are not equal comparisons. People who send their kids to a private school are choosing that, and thus care about the education their kids get. While Catholics are all income and choosing for religion reasons, generally catholic implies cultural care for education. Public schools take everyone including those who don't care about education.

In general public schools in the US are very good. However a small number in every school are kids that would be kicked out of private (including catholic) schools. There are also significant variation between schools with richer areas of a city doing better - despite often spending less on education.

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FireBeyond 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Charter schools have been the best bang for the buck.

That is a lot easier when you can require a transcript from the prospective student, review it, and say, "Uh, no thank you".

There's a private technical college near here that offers EMT and paramedic training. They "guarantee" "100% success in certification and registration" for their students.

How do they get there? They boot students out after they fail (<80%) their second test in the class.

I'm not necessarily opposed to such a policy. It is, however, intellectually dishonest of them to try to tout it as a better school for that reason. Charter schools are free to reject students who will bring their grade averages down.

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m00x 5 days ago | parent [-]

Yeah, that's very selective. Catholic schools on the other hand just require you to be Catholic and be somewhat involved in the Parish and score much higher.

I believe this is not only restricted to Catholic schools though they are the most common. Most religious schools have higher scoring students.

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toast0 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

If nothing else, parental involvement correlates with higher test scores and being enrolled in a non-default school correlates with parent involvement. So it's no surprise that being enrolled in a non-default school correlates with higher test scores.

IMHO, we always hear about such and such school (system) has X% kids proficient with $Y/year per pupil. But what I would really want to know about a school is how does a year change at the school change the proficiency of the class. If the class of 3rd graders starts the year at 20% proficient at 2nd grade level, and ends at 22% proficient at 3rd grade level, that might be a good school, even though a single point in time check says 22% proficient. But the numbers we get aren't really useful for that; a cohort analysis would be better; there's real privacy implications, but that doesn't make the numbers we get useful. :P

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emmelaich 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Catholic schools in Australia don't required you to be Catholic. Although, I'm sure most kids are. And enrolling there will expose you to Catholic teaching.

I wonder if USA schools are similar. It's next to impossible to require belief.

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phil21 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The vast majority to all Catholic schools in the US have no requirement of you being Catholic.

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m00x 5 days ago | parent [-]

Correct. Your chances of getting in are just much better if you are, then even better if you're in the Parish.

	▲	phil21 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		At least around me, it's pretty easy to get into one due to enrollment not being very full in most if not all. They will of course give automatic enrollment for anyone in the parish, but I can't really argue with that since these schools are usually subsidized by the parish and local dioces. You need to test to an academic standard of course, as they definitely want to keep the bar rather high. So they won't take all comers. But if you are either just starting out or come with an academic track record/high percentile test scores you shouldn't have much of a problem at all. When I went even 30 years ago there were plenty of low income kids who were not academic superstars. The only real metric that was universal across the board was the requirement for involved parents. I'm sure other areas are different, but Catholic schools in my region have really suffered in recent years with a lot of them closing down.

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username332211 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The no child left behind act was enacted in 2001. If you check the article, it has a nice little chart, showing a decline that starts in 2015. Prior to 2013, the results show a clear trend of improvement (in regards to the percentage of students achieving a minimum level of proficiency).

How would you explain that temporal gap? If the No Child Left Behind Act is the problem, why was the trend positive for the first 12-14 years of the time it's been in force?

	▲	programjames 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Gifted programs dropped from ~72% of elementary schools to ~65% by 2013, and probably have continued declining. Given it takes 10+ years to educate a child, the school culture to change, and so on, we should expect to see quite a lag between policy and outcomes.

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chrisco255 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm sorry but some F rated schools getting closed down needed to happen. There are institutions either so toxic at the administrative level or so heavily populated with kids with behavioral issues that it's impossible to fix without divvying up the student population into other schools that can better handle the load.

NCLB had some flaws but that wasn't one of them. Before NCLB you were stuck in the poor school district your likely single parent could afford to live in, inevitably doomed to poor education.