[Xenophon]

Originally Posted by nekokami

In New Hampshire, where I live, we don't yet have kindergarten in many communities. All schools are paid for by local (town or city) property taxes. Some towns have larger tax bases than others. Their schools are better. The state sets requirements for public education, but does not provide the funding. There have been a string of lawsuits about this over the years.

Additionally, the proportion of available money allocated toward schools in a specific town is likely to be heavily influenced by the age of the town's population. In towns with predominantly retired or single adults, schools get very short funding indeed.

I recall reading that there are a number of rural counties in either New Hampshire or Vermont (I don't remember which) whose school-age populations are too small to support a high school. Those counties already provide vouchers for the per-pupil cost of high-school (and have done so for decades); students are free to use them at any public or private school of their choice. IIRC, the article said that most of the vouchers are used in the school districts of neighboring counties (and they coordinate to make sure that the voucher is large enough to pay the bill). But each year there're a few students who do something quite different. Like go to Eton, or Harrow. Or Phillips Andover Academy (perhaps the highest-prestige private high school in the US). Given their lack of population, it seems like a reasonable approach.

Originally Posted by nekokami

We have evidence that smaller student-teacher ratios (and smaller classes in general) help students learn better. But many urban schools can't afford to hire enough teachers, so we still see 30-40 kids in a classroom with one teacher.

The smallest class I had in public school (from grades 2-12, except 11 when I attended the Interlochen Arts Academy instead) was 35 students. Small classes may matter (I couldn't say from my experience, because I never had one that small). My experience was that teachers who knew their subject and engaged the students mattered a lot; I didn't particularly notice suffering from class size. But of course I don't have the experience of smaller classes to compare with! And I have no idea how folks on the outside of the classroom can measure teacher knowledge and ability to excite and engage students.

Originally Posted by nekokami

Finally, for the past 8 years, we've had a system that evaluates schools by comparing this year's students to last year's students (rather than each group of students to their own performance the previous year), using tests that tend to measure rote memorization rather than problem-solving skills, and punishes schools with underperforming students by withdrawing funding. There is more and more pressure to provide a "voucher" system to allow schools to "compete," when those vouchers will certainly not pay enough for a child to be able to go to the best schools, leaving the most disadvantaged students in a bankrupt public education system, while children whose parents can afford better compete to get an adequate education.

What seems to be going on here in Pittsburgh is that the public schools are offering a broad spectrum of specialty schools at the middle school and high school levels in addition to the ordinary schools. These schools generally come about by converting an existing school into a specialty school. "Specialty" in this context means International Baccalaureate, or Creative and Performing Arts, or Foreign Languages, and so on. The result here is that parents who care enough to do anything at all about their children's education put them into one of the specialty schools.

Strangely enough, all of the specialty schools are providing better results than any of the non-specialty schools -- with one exception: Taylor Alderdice High School. And Taylor Alderdice has effectively been a specialty school for decades -- it's a nationally ranked public high school.

Originally Posted by nekokami

In short, we have two strong statistical correlations: one shows that level of education correlates strongly with income (though not at the doctoral level). The second shows that children of poor families have significantly lower academic achievement, all else being equal. But we highlight the unusual success stories and try to pretend that every child has an equal chance (or at least a reasonable chance) to "succeed" in our country.

There's one big problems with both of these correlations: correlation is not causation! (Our old friend post hoc ergo propter hoc. Even the Romans knew.) But sometimes correlation is all you've got...

That said, it seems quite possible that (a) there is something done by families who value education that is not done by families who do not value education and that (b) either the education or the something (or both!) is the key factor both in academic achievement and also in determining income later in life. And that something may be more frequent in higher income families.

I have no proof of what that "something" might be, but I do have a guess -- parental involvement in (and value of) the children's education. But it's just a guess with no better proof than the correlations Neko pointed out. Which are real, by the way. Part of my reasons for thinking this might be it are the results I mentioned above in our local school district.

Originally Posted by nekokami

As I said, I don't have the answers. [and SNIP a bunch of quite sensible observations and a request for folks elsewhere to describe their systems]

Xenophon