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Comment by Amezarak | Hacker News Reader

Similarly, there are many public school horror stories. For example, despite spending $21k/student, making it the third-highest funded school system in the country, 23 Baltimore schools failed to produce a single student with basic math proficiency.[1]

One of my friends went to a school where she was beaten every day and the teachers had totally given up and most of them did not teach.

Unfortunately, we need much more data than we have. The article mentions school quality is often not the driving reason for homeschooling, but you can definitely imagine public schools where almost any level of homeschooling is a better alternative.

[1] https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/state-test-r....

My children are in public school, but I am not sure if they will stay there. Even in "good" schools, there's many problems (especially in middle schools) and a lot of time is wasted if your kids have any academic ability at all.

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School is parents + school. I would say about 60% parenting and 40% school. If you don’t push your kid academically nothing is going to happen.

Peer groups matter. In “good” schools you’re optimizing the peer group. A good/bad school rating has little to do with teacher capability.

Just a personal anectode: I'm pretty sure that this wasn't true for me. I think some humans have an instinct for survival, maybe all of them, if a persons emotional needs are met then developing, advancing, learning is a natural byproduct without any external pressure. Just like we learn to talk and walk without someone telling us to do.

All the push just hurt me in the end, I would be a lot better off without traditional school, rarely I learned anything useful there.

Push for me isn’t edicts. It’s providing support and opportunity. I send my daughter to extra math lessons. She didn’t need them she was solidly an average. But getting those has really improved her level. I have to spend time with her, make learning fun, help with homework, coax reasoning out of an opinionated 12 yr old, etc, etc.

It’s not a “do this or else”. It’s basically let’s do it together.

I love to do homework with my oldest. But it's still like pulling teeth. I've had to do less of it this year because the teacher is actually keeping track of how kids are doing. Last year I would get back classwork with a giant star at the top where literally everything was wrong.

So when do we start blaming parents instead of schools? And saying, “this is what you get, take it or leave it, you have to put effort in too”? Parents treat themselves as customers expecting a turnkey service, when instead they are stakeholders with their own book of work and responsibilities they need to be accountable for to deliver the environment and education their child will need to become a functioning member of society.

It sounds like the article is about parents holding themselves fully accountable for their children’s education.

The problem is what you do with the parents who do not care at all. People making these statements that “it’s about the parents” - well, it has some truth to it. But when 10% of the students are running the halls, screaming and fighting, beating random kids, having sex and doing drugs in the bathrooms, and assaulting teachers who don’t care anymore, then it doesn’t matter what the other 90% of the parents are doing.

We started blaming parents long, long ago and never stopped. Unfortunately that's not effective in many cases. A lot of parents are ineffectual, apathetic, or shameless. Blaming them might make the rest of us feel morally superior but it doesn't improve outcomes for their children.

And for older children, peers tend to influence them more than parents anyway. Turning around a failing student will often require separating them from their current friends. Tough to do when you can't afford to move to a better school district.

This aspect is so different from South and East Asian society. We expect little from the teachers (not to say they’re bad), the majority of the onus and blame lies with the parent.

I would guess it’s 90% parenting and 10% school.

If you search niche.com, you can see proficiency scores correlate exactly with household income. Same school systems, same new facilities, same teacher compensation, same class sizes.

And I would say that 50% of parenting is getting your kid into the right school. I don't know about you, but suburban life as I know it is organized entirely around the importance of a good school district.

And are you saying they have per-student household income data? Or they just have the household income data for the school district as a whole? Or maybe the household income data for the student body as a whole? Those are very different things.

I assume niche.com is using household incomes for a specific school’s surrounding neighborhoods, although I cannot attest to how accurate it is compared to actual school boundaries.

I think we might be saying the same thing though, since “right” school generally means a school where a large proportion of the other kids have parents who are throwing a lot of resources at the kids (including the parents’ time and attitudes towards academic learning). It just so happens that this group of parents is higher income, so the easily visible statistic will be neighborhoods with higher income households will have higher academic proficiency percentages in the schools.

There is also this old map:

https://opportunityatlas.org/

I doubt if homeschooling would work in Baltimore either.

What "different" schools allow parents to do is pull the top 1% of lucky students out to escape. Maybe most of the parents in the low cost of living areas can't give any time to their children because they've got three jobs, but there are always going to be the few that can. The same goes for a few who can one way or another afford private school. It's better that three percent get through than none.

Well, unless having the three percent get through makes it impossible to improve the condition of the other 97%. Survivorship bias is our favorite logical fallacy here in the US.

Yeah, if you reduce the number of frogs in the pot while keeping the burner setting constant, the ones remaining will boil sooner.

Baltimore’s government has been corrupt af for years for some reason or another. In this circumstance, they should be treated as an outlier imo

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