The research on smaller class sizes seems mixed, so I don’t think class size is the main factor here (assuming it’s within reason; national average is 19). I think our charter school (about the same class size as our state average) self-selects families where at least one parent is invested in education. You have to apply for the lottery, coordinate dropoff and pickup, kids need uniforms, and the school expects parents to volunteer 40 hours over the course of the school year. That’s a lot of hoops to jump through when you could otherwise just have the kid take the bus. So kids are likely getting better support at home vs public schools.
Perhaps smaller class sizes matters more in poorer areas (i.e. teachers are providing the support instead of parents). What seems to be important is teacher quality, and what that means varies by child. So matching children with the right teacher/teaching method may prove more impactful than just reducing class sizes.
Sir Ken Robinson argues that giving kids a say in what they learn dramatically improves outcomes because people learn faster when they’re interested/excited about a topic. To do that, teachers need more control over their curriculum, and to do that, they need their leadership on board.
They also want to shift the burden of training
Schools teach principles, businesses teach application of those principles to their particular domain. Businesses expect you to show up with a solid foundation, and they’ll train you in their particular processes.
And that’s where high school specialization comes in. I’d like to see kids have the option between college prep and a vocation in their last two years. College prep would get them college credit for courses or even an Associates Degree, whereas a vocation would teach them a skill to make something like $20+ instead of $10-12 per hour straight out of high school. The vocation track wouldn’t prevent them from going to college, so kids could work a vocation while attending college to minimize or eliminate student loans.
The goal should be to provide a range of options so most (ideally all) kids have better options than what they’d otherwise get with a regular highschool diploma. But to make room for that, K-12 education needs to be more efficient, and you get that by getting kids interested in school, and how that happens is different for each child. Hence the need for different approaches.
The Silver Legion
Huh, I’d never heard of them, and a quick search shows no correlation with libertarianism. Every source (and I browsed several) just calls them fascist, pro-Hitler, anti-Semitic, etc, but never “libertarian” or anything similar.
The only similarity I see is opposition to FDR, but they attacked him for very different reasons. They were a relatively small org, though I guess big enough to be mentioned in It Can’t Happen Here.
August Invictus
This seems like a failure of the Florida Libertarian Party, not an actual symptom of rot in libertarian ideology. Fringe groups attract weirdos, especially if that group is so supportive of free speech. He lost the nomination by a landslide and switched to the Republican Party, so that tells me the nomination process at least is working in this case.
That said, the national Libertarian Party in the US is moving right, and I think that’s troubling for the reasons you’ve outlined. If we use the political compass as a reference, here’s where I place things:
Invictus - top right corner
Javier Milei - bottom right corner
Libertarian Party - center of bottom right quadrant, moving right with the Mises caucus
Dems and Reps - top right quadrant
me - bottom center
Public prescription seems to put libertarians hugging the right edge top to bottom, and that seems consistent with what you’ve said. But libertarianism is a big tent, covering the entire bottom half of the chart. So my definition here is anyone who fits in the bottom half, which excludes people like Invictus and includes socialists like Noam Chomsky.
The reason we got stuck with federal loans is because in order to get more people into college
And that’s the problem, the goal was misplaced. The goal should be to get people into better jobs, not get people more education. More education generally leads to better jobs, but here are lots of ways to achieve that end goal.
It’s kind of like the idea behind EV subsidies: we want less dependence on oil, EVs don’t depend on oil, so we subsidize EVs. But there are tons of alternatives, such as investing in mass transit, hydrogen fuel cells, or cycling infrastructure. The solution shouldn’t be to pick a winner and pump money into it (in this case, college), but to design a system that benefits all favorable alternatives at the expense of the thing we want to discourage. For energy, this probably means carbon taxes (discourage fossil fuels), and for energy it means changing the focus of K-12 from “college or bust” to different paths depending on interest.
We need broad, academic, education.
Sure, and that’s what K-10 should be about (or even K-8), and we should expect more from it.
I think the pace of education is way too slow and that we could cover the same ground as K-12 currently does (and maybe more) in fewer years. I was constantly bored in school and finished my Associates Degree while in high school (mostly did it because it took less time per day vs high school), and I’m not particularly smart, I just had good parents that helped keep me engaged. And that was in a progressive state that invested a lot in education (near top in the nation for teacher pay as percent of salaries, top half for total spending).
Expanding options in teaching style should allow us to increase the pace of education. To get there, we need a mixture of:
increases to teacher salaries - my dad went back to school after teaching for one year because of pay
give individual schools more control over curriculum and teaching methods
improve access to transit to different schools for kids - could be as simple as buses between schools initially
But all the “solutions” I’ve seen are:
free college
more tech in classes
new buildings
They all seem to miss the point.
is just another way to kill critical thinking
I think it gives a context for those discussions.
Like for a vocation, class work could include comparing pay and obligations for self employment vs working under someone, deciding whether to buy or build something, comparing the impact of spending more to do a good job vs going cheap to get it done fast. Or factoring safety costs and benefits, identifying potential hazards, etc. That’s probably a lot more interesting to a teenager who just wants to work than analyzing Macbeth.
Having a college degree increases the average lifetime earning by about 1.5 million dollars
These kinds of statistics are super misleading though. College degrees are all but required for a lot of high income jobs, but a lot of degrees are completely worthless (at least from an earning perspective). So you’re getting a lot of upward skew on the data from doctors, lawyers, etc. Those lucrative fields are very competitive since there’s a limited number of spots available, so my guess is that increasing the number of people in college will largely increase the number of people in less lucrative fields.
And yeah, trades don’t pay as well as degrees, but they pay a lot more consistently. A lot of college graduates don’t get a job in their field, and many resort to vocations anyway. It’s a lot better to find out that a vocation is right for you in high school than after trying college.
If you’re interested in STEM, you’re probably not interested in a vocation anyway. I’m talking about the rest of students who are told to get any degree.
In the long run the average individual with a “useless” degree will make more over their life time than anyone without a college degree. Even when controlled for familial wealth.
Are you talking about averages here? Because I’m wondering if it’s comparing to all people without a degree, when it should be comparing vs people in the trades. If you don’t get a job in your field, what are the chances that you’ll go to even more school to finish an apprenticeship or something? You’ll probably take what you can get (management role at a restaurant or something) because those loans need to be paid. We shouldn’t be comparing against GED only here, but other skilled professions.
I don’t think we need free college. If you’re going to college, you should be expecting to get value from that investment. But we do need to get prices back to being reasonable, a lot of your tuition isn’t going to your professors, but all the other nonsense schools do (probably a lot of it ironically dealing with financial aid).
Even public schools are in heated competition
Kind of, but they’re competing for test scores, not student satisfaction, actual achievement, etc. Growing up, we had an important state assessment, so we spend a lot of class time studying specifically for it. That sucked, and I don’t think it was very productive, but it probably helped the school secure better funding or something.
That’s not constructive competition because it leads to teaching to the test. Teachers don’t want to do that, but they need to in order for their school to look good and get funding.
IDK, maybe?
The research on smaller class sizes seems mixed, so I don’t think class size is the main factor here (assuming it’s within reason; national average is 19). I think our charter school (about the same class size as our state average) self-selects families where at least one parent is invested in education. You have to apply for the lottery, coordinate dropoff and pickup, kids need uniforms, and the school expects parents to volunteer 40 hours over the course of the school year. That’s a lot of hoops to jump through when you could otherwise just have the kid take the bus. So kids are likely getting better support at home vs public schools.
Perhaps smaller class sizes matters more in poorer areas (i.e. teachers are providing the support instead of parents). What seems to be important is teacher quality, and what that means varies by child. So matching children with the right teacher/teaching method may prove more impactful than just reducing class sizes.
Sir Ken Robinson argues that giving kids a say in what they learn dramatically improves outcomes because people learn faster when they’re interested/excited about a topic. To do that, teachers need more control over their curriculum, and to do that, they need their leadership on board.
Schools teach principles, businesses teach application of those principles to their particular domain. Businesses expect you to show up with a solid foundation, and they’ll train you in their particular processes.
And that’s where high school specialization comes in. I’d like to see kids have the option between college prep and a vocation in their last two years. College prep would get them college credit for courses or even an Associates Degree, whereas a vocation would teach them a skill to make something like $20+ instead of $10-12 per hour straight out of high school. The vocation track wouldn’t prevent them from going to college, so kids could work a vocation while attending college to minimize or eliminate student loans.
The goal should be to provide a range of options so most (ideally all) kids have better options than what they’d otherwise get with a regular highschool diploma. But to make room for that, K-12 education needs to be more efficient, and you get that by getting kids interested in school, and how that happens is different for each child. Hence the need for different approaches.
Huh, I’d never heard of them, and a quick search shows no correlation with libertarianism. Every source (and I browsed several) just calls them fascist, pro-Hitler, anti-Semitic, etc, but never “libertarian” or anything similar.
The only similarity I see is opposition to FDR, but they attacked him for very different reasons. They were a relatively small org, though I guess big enough to be mentioned in It Can’t Happen Here.
This seems like a failure of the Florida Libertarian Party, not an actual symptom of rot in libertarian ideology. Fringe groups attract weirdos, especially if that group is so supportive of free speech. He lost the nomination by a landslide and switched to the Republican Party, so that tells me the nomination process at least is working in this case.
That said, the national Libertarian Party in the US is moving right, and I think that’s troubling for the reasons you’ve outlined. If we use the political compass as a reference, here’s where I place things:
Public prescription seems to put libertarians hugging the right edge top to bottom, and that seems consistent with what you’ve said. But libertarianism is a big tent, covering the entire bottom half of the chart. So my definition here is anyone who fits in the bottom half, which excludes people like Invictus and includes socialists like Noam Chomsky.
And that’s the problem, the goal was misplaced. The goal should be to get people into better jobs, not get people more education. More education generally leads to better jobs, but here are lots of ways to achieve that end goal.
It’s kind of like the idea behind EV subsidies: we want less dependence on oil, EVs don’t depend on oil, so we subsidize EVs. But there are tons of alternatives, such as investing in mass transit, hydrogen fuel cells, or cycling infrastructure. The solution shouldn’t be to pick a winner and pump money into it (in this case, college), but to design a system that benefits all favorable alternatives at the expense of the thing we want to discourage. For energy, this probably means carbon taxes (discourage fossil fuels), and for energy it means changing the focus of K-12 from “college or bust” to different paths depending on interest.
Sure, and that’s what K-10 should be about (or even K-8), and we should expect more from it.
I think the pace of education is way too slow and that we could cover the same ground as K-12 currently does (and maybe more) in fewer years. I was constantly bored in school and finished my Associates Degree while in high school (mostly did it because it took less time per day vs high school), and I’m not particularly smart, I just had good parents that helped keep me engaged. And that was in a progressive state that invested a lot in education (near top in the nation for teacher pay as percent of salaries, top half for total spending).
Expanding options in teaching style should allow us to increase the pace of education. To get there, we need a mixture of:
But all the “solutions” I’ve seen are:
They all seem to miss the point.
I think it gives a context for those discussions.
Like for a vocation, class work could include comparing pay and obligations for self employment vs working under someone, deciding whether to buy or build something, comparing the impact of spending more to do a good job vs going cheap to get it done fast. Or factoring safety costs and benefits, identifying potential hazards, etc. That’s probably a lot more interesting to a teenager who just wants to work than analyzing Macbeth.
These kinds of statistics are super misleading though. College degrees are all but required for a lot of high income jobs, but a lot of degrees are completely worthless (at least from an earning perspective). So you’re getting a lot of upward skew on the data from doctors, lawyers, etc. Those lucrative fields are very competitive since there’s a limited number of spots available, so my guess is that increasing the number of people in college will largely increase the number of people in less lucrative fields.
And yeah, trades don’t pay as well as degrees, but they pay a lot more consistently. A lot of college graduates don’t get a job in their field, and many resort to vocations anyway. It’s a lot better to find out that a vocation is right for you in high school than after trying college.
If you’re interested in STEM, you’re probably not interested in a vocation anyway. I’m talking about the rest of students who are told to get any degree.
Are you talking about averages here? Because I’m wondering if it’s comparing to all people without a degree, when it should be comparing vs people in the trades. If you don’t get a job in your field, what are the chances that you’ll go to even more school to finish an apprenticeship or something? You’ll probably take what you can get (management role at a restaurant or something) because those loans need to be paid. We shouldn’t be comparing against GED only here, but other skilled professions.
I don’t think we need free college. If you’re going to college, you should be expecting to get value from that investment. But we do need to get prices back to being reasonable, a lot of your tuition isn’t going to your professors, but all the other nonsense schools do (probably a lot of it ironically dealing with financial aid).
Kind of, but they’re competing for test scores, not student satisfaction, actual achievement, etc. Growing up, we had an important state assessment, so we spend a lot of class time studying specifically for it. That sucked, and I don’t think it was very productive, but it probably helped the school secure better funding or something.
That’s not constructive competition because it leads to teaching to the test. Teachers don’t want to do that, but they need to in order for their school to look good and get funding.