Comment by Scubabear68

Comment by Scubabear68 4 days ago

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So we chose private school over home schooling, for both time reasons, educational reasons, and social reasons.

But the important thing is we choose to take our kids out of public school. The trigger was Covid, but what really happened was suddenly millions of parents could directly see what their schools and teachers were like because we watched our kids work remotely all day for a year.

We did not like what we saw. A few teachers were really good. Many never bothered to show up, “class” was a note to do homework or something. Others were just plain terrible teachers who didn’t know their subjects well and couldn’t really teach.

More and more our district was also relying on computers and software to make tactically replace books and teachers, and not surprisingly that did not work so well.

Yes, remote learning and covid and all that was a shock to everyone, and all schools took a hit during that time. But this was a window directly into schools, and seeing how well yours did in the face of adversity.

The truth is, at least for our school district here in NJ in the US, schools suck in massive amounts of money, give them to largely incompetent people (to whit, our school superintendent started his career as a gym teacher), who unsurprisingly waste a lot of it.

There has also been the constant creep over the years to turn schools into social welfare systems. This is well intentioned, but in reality is just another bureaucratic money suck.

I could go on. But in short, home schooling and private schools both have risen in popularity because Covid revealed just how bad many public schools in the US have become.

munificent 4 days ago

> what really happened was suddenly millions of parents could directly see what their schools and teachers were like

Well, you got to see what they were really like while they were in the midst of dealing with a traumatic global pandemic in their own personal lives while also trying to deal with an essential job that looked nothing like what they had trained for while trying to support a virtual classroom full of children who were also in the middle of a traumatic global pandemic.

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  • Scubabear68 4 days ago

    Yes.

    And many made it work in the face of adversity.

    Many others did not make it work just due to bad luck or timing.

    But districts like ours completely failed at it because the entire leadership is incompetent and teachers never got the support they needed from the administration to make it work (including monitoring teachers to ensure they were actually working).

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e12e 4 days ago

> give them to largely incompetent people (to whit, our school superintendent started his career as a gym teacher), who unsurprisingly waste a lot of it.

Seems like a bit of a non sequitur? If anything one could hope that a gym teacher would value play and movement over chaining kids to a desk all day?

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  • Scubabear68 4 days ago

    In NJ, the School Superintendent is effectively the CEO of the district.

    Many of them had advanced degrees in education, management, and finance. They control tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.

    Ours has a BA in health, was a gym teacher then an admin person, eventually a principal and then we hired him out of desperation when covid hit and our superintendent was retiring.

    He has been a total disaster because he lacks leadership skills, does not understand finance and hides behind the hodgepodge of technical jargon that public education has become.

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    • huehehue 4 days ago

      My old gym teacher also taught science because we just couldn't find another teacher, and was genuinely surprised to learn there were forms of matter smaller than atoms.

      My health teacher was a "permanent substitute" situation where we just watched movies the whole semester and got A's.

      One of my math teachers died and we just...never hired a replacement, so nobody learned anything that semester.

      Bonus: my driver's education teacher was arrested for a DUI (but not terminated)

      These situations were all in different schools in different US states, so the lack of quality control in admin that you describe definitely resonates.

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      • potato3732842 4 days ago

        My best history teacher was the gym teacher who was really hired as loophole because they couldn't hire a basketball coach which is what he really was.

        Anyway, he didn't give a crap about teaching to the curriculum and he taught us how to think critically and read between the lines of history.

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      • Scubabear68 4 days ago

        I know a large number of teachers who have been campaigning for years to eliminate all forms of teacher evaluations, with the claim that “you can’t measure what we do!”.

        Which is utter horse shit, but it’s where we are today.

        The result is that many schools don’t really track teacher performance, and as you indicate you can get wild inconsistencies.

        The best parents can do (other than leaving) is to aggressively direct kids into the better teachers’ classrooms. We see that all the time - one class has kids who’s parents are “in the know” and gets the good teacher, the other class is where the kids get dumped who’s parents don’t complain. The district knows who is bad and who is not, but is afraid to anger the union, so anything short of actual violence by a teacher against a student won’t have any consequences.

        Our school district local enrollment as a result has declined from around 900 kids to just 650 in just a few years as a result. The kids left are those too poor to go private or home school, those not lucky or connected enough to go to a “choice” school, and a small number of die hard loyalists reliving their glory days through their kids at the same school they went to.

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      • wedn3sday 4 days ago

        Amusingly I had the exact inverse of this experience. My senior year I signed up for the AP Bio course, but we only got 22 students signed up out of the 25 required to allow the class to happen (a very stupid system in of itself). Because the class was canceled, and the very competent well educated biology teacher had a slot free in his schedule, he was forced into teaching the gym class (which I also had to take since I'd been avoiding PE for the last few years). He knew the situation, and after the first week handed me the advanced bio textbook after class one day, and then turned a blind eye to me sitting on the bleachers reading instead of running laps for the rest of the semester (dont come at me for physical fitness, I was a skateboarder and in better shape than 90% of the kids already).

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    • e12e 4 days ago

      > (...) then we hired him out of desperation when covid hit and our superintendent was retiring.

      I guess the board is at fault here?

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plussed_reader 4 days ago

"The trigger was Covid, but what really happened was suddenly millions of parents could directly see what their schools and teachers were like because we watched our kids work remotely all day for a year."

This kind of myopyic outlook that conflates the then-traditional instruction period to the remote instruction paradigm greatly cheapens every other point of your argument.

None of the teaching staff that had to adapt to that period of time were trained to make that experience 1:1 for the prior expectations and to use that as a basis to judge their entire ability is petty as fuck.

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  • programjames 4 days ago

    GP mentioned they were totally incompetent in their subject areas. It doesn't matter what medium they are transferring information through if they have no information to transfer.

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  • yeahwhatever10 4 days ago

    I think you are seeing through the trend that many people disagree with you.

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aaroninsf 4 days ago

"millions of parents", "their schools" should be "me", "my school."

If your school isn't good, I recommend improving if for every other kid, who didn't pull the lottery ticket of affluent parents with flexible jobs.

School boards benefit from parents who care and are competent.

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  • renewiltord 4 days ago

    This is nonsensical advice. In San Francisco, the school board wants to delay learning algebra to 9th grade. I can't "improve" this place because it's not that the place just needs advice. It's because they have "experts" with "years of experience" that want to do different things. And I'm just a techie who thinks he knows everything.

    No thanks. Not interested in spending years of my life arguing with morons who rejected the only gay guy applying to help because he was a White male (this isn't some right wing thing - it was real and explicitly the reason).

    When people say "we don't need your help; we know what we're doing" then not helping is doing the right thing.

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    • AnimalMuppet 4 days ago

      > When people say "we don't need your help; we know what we're doing" then not helping is doing the right thing.

      Not helping is doing the only thing they allow you to do. But also, removing yourself from the consequences of their folly is a wise thing to do.

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  • Scubabear68 4 days ago

    I had to rewrite my response a few time to remove all the curse words.

    At least in NJ, you have no idea what you are talking about. Our school laws are completely broken. Just so you know I have spent about 300 hours a year for the past three years fighting with, dealing with, trying to improve our district.

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    • dani__german 4 days ago

      The Hard-core History podcast had a very similar exchange.

      American: well if your communist government is mistreating you, simply vote for a different president!

      Cue a million responses just like yours showing how it just isn't possible.

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  • programjames 4 days ago

    The people you hear giving up today have tried to fix the system. It's rather insulting to insinuate otherwise.

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foobarian 4 days ago

How did you choose the private school? There are so many choices around us but it seems hard to figure out their quality without actually sending a child there, or having close connections. Wish there was a review forum of some sort.

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  • Scubabear68 4 days ago

    We live in western central NJ so the options are pretty limited. There were only a handful to pick from, and there were roughly two price tiers: tier “A” was around $15,000 a year per student, tier “b” elite schools were $50,000 and up per student per year. Our choices were down to only three schools, one was out because it was all-boys, and we chose out of the other two based on meeting teachers and staff.

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stanford_labrat 4 days ago

My family has lived in 4 states and 3 countries and the only time we ever homeschooled…was in NJ back in the early 2000s.

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