What's new
Fantasy Football - Footballguys Forums

Welcome to Our Forums. Once you've registered and logged in, you're primed to talk football, among other topics, with the sharpest and most experienced fantasy players on the internet.

Public Schools are getting worse (1 Viewer)

As a former BMore city resident, there would be no way of doing that without some legitimate equity / diversity concerns, assuming you broke them up geographically into 4 districts. It's a non-starter IMO.
Please explain as this may be the exact reason to separate them and it may be the exact reason things are failing.
 
But like I said upthread, there are schools that were built in the 50s and 60s that lack adequate facilities. Poor heating, pipes freezing, flooding, rodents, no AC, roof leaks, etc. These facilities were not maintained over the last 60 years due to lack of investment, poor resource allocation, and general ineptitude, or even graft. That can be addressed by putting dollars into the facilities. And because the teaching of kids that come extreme poverty can be very challenging, it often costs more in teacher salary to retain the teachers willing to work in that space.
If you don't change who is allocating resources or causing the ineptitude and/or graft, nothing is going to change by throwing more money at it and that's what I think is happening now. If we dump a pile of money on the problem, it will go away when in reality all it does is stuff pockets of people that have no interest in making it better for the kids.
if he had the authority to run it he would shut the entire thing down and reboot the public school system in Baltimore. The level of waste was off the charts and the admin made one bonehead decision after another. Every year his incredulity grew as the system got more and more top-heavy and wasteful with no real benefit in the kids' learning.
This, only way to effect the change needed is to burn it to the ground and start from scratch. It ain't gonna happen but that's the only way you are going to fix it right.
 
The only metric worth discussing on that link is the ">$21,000 per pupil funding." However, we need to know much more information about the overall budget, population, and costs before understanding if the number is high.

My guess would be that there are too much Administration costs (which would be expected for a city), though I would imagine the underlying problem is administration has over decades kicked-down-the-road infrastructure costs. Passing the buck on hard choices like infrastructure is typical with poor leadership.
I'm about to throw a large monkey wrench in this conversation- cap ex is not captured in the per pupil funding calculation.
 
The only metric worth discussing on that link is the ">$21,000 per pupil funding." However, we need to know much more information about the overall budget, population, and costs before understanding if the number is high.

My guess would be that there are too much Administration costs (which would be expected for a city), though I would imagine the underlying problem is administration has over decades kicked-down-the-road infrastructure costs. Passing the buck on hard choices like infrastructure is typical with poor leadership.
I'm about to throw a large monkey wrench in this conversation- cap ex is not captured in the per pupil funding calculation.
If that is a working assumption, $21k is a reasonable amount of money per pupil. Not a ton, its less than ours, but its not something to shake a stick at.
 
The question at the start was "what is causing overcrowding", to which some brought up funding as the answer. When I was a kid there were 240 million people in the US. Now there are 340 million people. That's a 42% increase. Yet in my town between those two times there has been a 0% increase in the number of schools, and I haven't seen any major renovations that would add a large number classrooms (they were already decked out with portables even back when I was a kid).

So we're more crowded now than we were back then, simply because the number of kids has increased at a rate faster than the amount of funding to build new schools.
There may be more humans now then a few decades ago, but it's because we're living longer, not because there's more kids. There are a lot less kids now vs prior generations. The birth rate declined every year from 1989-2018 and it declined significantly from 2009-2013, these are today's elementary and middle schoolers.
 
As a former BMore city resident, there would be no way of doing that without some legitimate equity / diversity concerns, assuming you broke them up geographically into 4 districts. It's a non-starter IMO.
Please explain as this may be the exact reason to separate them and it may be the exact reason things are failing.
Geographically, the children that come from higher income areas would be clumped into 1 or max 2 of the 4 districts. There would certainly be at least 1 district with huge huge levels of poverty and structural deficiencies. Unless those districts got the vast majority of the funding, they would whither and be even worse for the kids than it is now.

FWIW, the current BCPSS system has middle school choice and high school choice, where kids (read: parents that are paying attention and care) can move away from their local catchment to a school with fewer problems. But this also concentrates the kids that are high achievers into certain, well performing schools. My kids were set to go to one of these middle schools before we moved.
 
If that is a working assumption, $21k is a reasonable amount of money per pupil. Not a ton, its less than ours, but its not something to shake a stick at.
It depends. Intuitively, I suspect it's inflated, but would need more details. The sprinkling of what I read from you all may just be scratching the surface. Excess dollars into schools in this public ed environment is not how you address the real problem. Gonna be careful with this comment given forum rules and this thread's been great- these communities need more funding, but via these means? There are better ways.
 
The question at the start was "what is causing overcrowding", to which some brought up funding as the answer. When I was a kid there were 240 million people in the US. Now there are 340 million people. That's a 42% increase. Yet in my town between those two times there has been a 0% increase in the number of schools, and I haven't seen any major renovations that would add a large number classrooms (they were already decked out with portables even back when I was a kid).

So we're more crowded now than we were back then, simply because the number of kids has increased at a rate faster than the amount of funding to build new schools.
There may be more humans now then a few decades ago, but it's because we're living longer, not because there's more kids. There are a lot less kids now vs prior generations. The birth rate declined every year from 1989-2018 and it declined significantly from 2009-2013, these are today's elementary and middle schoolers.
The birth rate may decline, but that doesn't mean there are fewer kids total. As long as the replacement rate is above zero and we have immigration, every generation will be numerically larger.
 
Any idea what caused the overcrowding? It seems to me (outside observer) that our local school board has done a pretty good job looking at our demographics a few years down the road and staying ahead of predictable changes to incoming classes. Was this a case of something happening by surprise, or just folks being asleep at the switch?
I'm going to go out on a limb and say a lack of funding. This is what happens when people continuously vote against levies. What do you want them to do, build another building with no money?
It seems like you're here for an argument. Please leave me out of this.
IK - its a pretty solid response. Voting against increasing the amount of money a town can tax will inhibit its ability to grow at the appropriate rate.
How much does the US spend on its public schools relative to other first-world countries?
I have no idea. I only have my personal, real world, in-depth, first-hand experience.
Okay. If a person is going to lead off with "it's a lack of funding," it seems like we would need to start with a surface-level understanding of what public school funding is actually like. For example, does the US spend more, less, or about the same on its public schools as Germany? Japan? Canada? Surely if we're going to say that our schools are under-funded, we should have a general idea of what their funding level actually is, right?

I'll speed this up and get to the point. "US schools are underfunded" is one of those things that everyone thinks is so, but just isn't so. It's an urban legend. The US spends more per-capita on its public school students than pretty much anybody. No doubt there are individual school and school districts in various parts of the US that funded worse than others, but lack of funding is definitely not a system-wide problem. Or, it's a problem that must be really bad in other countries if it's causing a problem here.
Baltimore seems to be a case study in how funding, on its own, is not very correlated with results.

Baltimore
Those metrics are a bit misleading.
I understand that The Wire is a fictional program, but its depiction of Baltimore is generally considered pretty spot-on, or at least it was pretty spot-on when it aired.

Do you really think the problem with Baltimore schools is that we're not spending enough money on them?
My uncle taught middle school math for a few years in the 70s then went into business for himself (auto mechanic) for about 30 years before returning to the classroom to teach again. He was in the Baltimore school system for about ten years in the aughts and told me that, as a business owner, if he had the authority to run it he would shut the entire thing down and reboot the public school system in Baltimore. The level of waste was off the charts and the admin made one bonehead decision after another. Every year his incredulity grew as the system got more and more top-heavy and wasteful with no real benefit in the kids' learning.
Yes, as a teacher I see waste. A lot of it has to do with schools not having enough control . The district forces programs/ curriculum that aren't needed that are expensive.
 
The question at the start was "what is causing overcrowding", to which some brought up funding as the answer. When I was a kid there were 240 million people in the US. Now there are 340 million people. That's a 42% increase. Yet in my town between those two times there has been a 0% increase in the number of schools, and I haven't seen any major renovations that would add a large number classrooms (they were already decked out with portables even back when I was a kid).

So we're more crowded now than we were back then, simply because the number of kids has increased at a rate faster than the amount of funding to build new schools.
There may be more humans now then a few decades ago, but it's because we're living longer, not because there's more kids. There are a lot less kids now vs prior generations. The birth rate declined every year from 1989-2018 and it declined significantly from 2009-2013, these are today's elementary and middle schoolers.
The birth rate may decline, but that doesn't mean there are fewer kids total. As long as the replacement rate is above zero and we have immigration, every generation will be numerically larger.
Couple things- I over estimated the number of students enrolled in public ed from prior generations. I'm now wondering if that's because private ed enrollment was that much higher, but that's a separate issue. Fact is, public ed enrollment increased steadily until ~20 years ago. We sat on ~49m for about a decade starting around then and finally tipped over 50m in 2013. We stayed at that level until 2019 when we dropped below 50m again. We've been under ever since and projections indicate we'll (hopefully?) bottom out ~47m in a few years.
 
Geographically, the children that come from higher income areas would be clumped into 1 or max 2 of the 4 districts. There would certainly be at least 1 district with huge huge levels of poverty and structural deficiencies. Unless those districts got the vast majority of the funding, they would whither and be even worse for the kids than it is now.
Higher income already have more choices and if the schools are bad, they prolly are already going to private and/or getting tutor/extra help. I find this a false dichotomy.

Split the districts up and make each of them great. Obviously some will need more help then others, but some will need less help and that help can be funneled elsewhere.

For example, if I have a problem area, I want to contain those specific problems so they do not bleed everywhere else nor do the masses flatten actual problems. Then, only then, can you concisely articulate the problems so that you can properly address each and every one of them. It should also be said that this large district may be great for 60% of the kids. So what about the other 40%, how are they being served?
 
If that is a working assumption, $21k is a reasonable amount of money per pupil. Not a ton, its less than ours, but its not something to shake a stick at.
It depends. Intuitively, I suspect it's inflated, but would need more details. The sprinkling of what I read from you all may just be scratching the surface. Excess dollars into schools in this public ed environment is not how you address the real problem. Gonna be careful with this comment given forum rules and this thread's been great- these communities need more funding, but via these means? There are better ways.
Money is the answer, but money without a plan, measurement, and accountability is not the right approach.
 

Paywall, so I didn't get to read it all. Troubling trend.

Young people just aren't wired to read books now and schools/parents aren't forcing them to.
Pretty tough to force kids to read in school. The freshman ELA class at the HS I work at has a mandatory 10 minute silent reading to start each class and the kids log what they read, how many pages, etc. I would say maybe 20% are genuinely reading, the others are just staring, trying to get on their phones, trying to communicate without being caught.
 

Paywall, so I didn't get to read it all. Troubling trend.

Young people just aren't wired to read books now and schools/parents aren't forcing them to.
Pretty tough to force kids to read in school. The freshman ELA class at the HS I work at has a mandatory 10 minute silent reading to start each class and the kids log what they read, how many pages, etc. I would say maybe 20% are genuinely reading, the others are just staring, trying to get on their phones, trying to communicate without being caught.
We were very happy with the public schools that our kids attended, but I did notice that they weren't reading as many books as what I remember reading in high school. We read Crime & Punishment, for example, and nothing that either of our kids brought home came anywhere close to that in terms of difficulty. In fairness, they did read a little Shakespeare.
 

Paywall, so I didn't get to read it all. Troubling trend.

Young people just aren't wired to read books now and schools/parents aren't forcing them to.
Pretty tough to force kids to read in school. The freshman ELA class at the HS I work at has a mandatory 10 minute silent reading to start each class and the kids log what they read, how many pages, etc. I would say maybe 20% are genuinely reading, the others are just staring, trying to get on their phones, trying to communicate without being caught.
We were very happy with the public schools that our kids attended, but I did notice that they weren't reading as many books as what I remember reading in high school. We read Crime & Punishment, for example, and nothing that either of our kids brought home came anywhere close to that in terms of difficulty. In fairness, they did read a little Shakespeare.
Yeah we read Shakespeare too but it’s a struggle to get kids to read. Even social media has very much gone away from reading. A lot of the communication kids do on snap is just sharing pictures.
 
This isn't school related per se, but in that vein I am not a huge reader like I don't read books at all, but it annoys me if I want to read a news article or sports article and it's only a video I don't want to watch the video
I use to read a lot but fell out of the habit.... but I am 100% behind you on this. The only thing that is worse than a video after hitting a link is if it is one of those damn slide show things.
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Top