Watch a school board discussion on the academic achievement gap and you will hear members of black advocacy groups say “we just need more resources!” They repeatedly claim that other schools have high levels of academic proficiency because they receive “more resources” or are “hoarding resources.” But is this true?
In 2008, 9 and 10 the Obama DOE dumped truckloads of ARRA money into schools, spending 50 plus million on the “School Improvement Program” at nine low performing SFUSD schools while spending billions on the same program across the country. The principal at one of the schools and a long time school board member said he didn’t know what to do with all the money. At that time I did a deep dive into its implementation and results over a period of years. It was very much akin to what Diane described about Kansas. The end result was about a third of schools did marginally not significantly better, third the same and a third worse than their baseline achievement scores per California’s standardized testing. Computers were disappearing and private education contractors were getting rich. After it was all over there were many national articles written about how the SIP (School Improvement Program) was a total bust. Diane may have been at Lowell at this time and probably didn’t follow this debacle at that point in her young life.
She is really awesome! I love her candid attitude apparent in her writings. She never shies sway. She never bothers to fear her opponents. She is courageous enough to stand against the political bigotry.
Too many smart people fail to see the truth because of their stupid political belief; Diane Yap simple doesn't. She has the brain of a visionary, capable of weaving complex ideas into tangible realities, and the heart of a poet, deeply empathetic and endlessly passionate about the world and its myriad mysteries.
In my case, I'm just a coward who are extremely worried about my own safety and well-being. In this society, you could ruin your life by a few "mistaken" remarks. I am going to keep my life as a coward; but I just secretly want to support her. We need more people like her for the advancement of humanity.
I have argued this for years. The best example is how much work scholars have put in to show that busing in the 1970's had any positive impact. If you look at the studies, they will show you increased income for male students with one parent who is male, or increased life expectancy for female students who qualified for a special program in 1972,...., and all these outrageous figures that proved how much data mining they had to do to find any improvement, anywhere, at all.
In the end, school funding does not matter. Students success is based upon ability and parental promotion of school work. Everything else is irrelevant. Asian refugees in poverty will do better than rich black and white children, not because of any special reason, just because their parents care about education.
Now here is a crazy idea, why don't we promote the values Asian parents have so everyone else can benefit??? Why not? I am waiting for an answer.
More broadly, the states that spend more on education have better results. Massachusetts, New York Vermont, and New Jersey spend in the top 5 and have 4 of the top 5 NEAP scores. But then there is Utah which also has a very good score but near the bottom in spending. So it isn't always true that spending more leads to better outcomes but there is a correlation.
If you dig deeper, you will have an extremely difficult time finding any stable indicator that displays funding improving student results. The same is true for class size. I have gone on serious deep dives into various data sets, and it is simply not there. FYI, I do that sort of thing for a living, and no field is more delusional and resistant to data-driven changes than education. If there were ever a field to be designated as broken, it would be education. Almost every suggestion for improvement is demonstrably bad (smaller class sizes, funding, computers in schools,...).
Show me the evidence. Preferably a peer reviewed research paper but any well reasoned essay will do. I know that class sizes don’t matter much - up to a certain size. What do *you* think leads to better education outcomes?
I do not trust 90% of US education research papers as they will do anything to support bad conclusions. You can see this with papers supporting former bussing efforts. There are zero academic benefits, so they went data mining to find obscure statistics to support busing. There are hallmark signs of this, such as using the metric "went to college" which is useless.
I base my position on successful schools in Taiwan with 40-50 students, although they did have smaller classes for troubled students. Hard-working students do not need a lot of close attention. This is why universities have large basic classes and smaller seminars for more advanced students. Even in more successful European school systems there are frequently class sizes above thirty students.
You will never see such research in the US because it goes against the established view, and one can NEVER publish in today's academic education world because they are terrifyingly tyrannical with regards to what is appropriate to research and what conclusions are acceptable. The graduate-level educational teaching and research system in the US is corrupt and broken. I dropped out of a graduate education degree because of it, walking away from a fully-supported program out of disgust. Criticism of modern American educational systems is not a joke. I thought it was just a bunch of hysterical Republicans complaining, but their criticism is actually real. The crazies are running the asylum.
In general, be EXTREMELY suspicious of any report where the metric is anything other than improved test scores. They have become masters at mining bizarre stats, or worse, making up metrics that can easily be gamed, such as asking students whether or not they plan on going to university some day. Our public schools were intentionally trashed by radicals, and they will do anything to justify their poor choices.
Test scores are mostly a proxy for family income and to a lesser degree, innate intelligence and probably a few other inherited factors. Combine that with the influence from parenting, especially from 0-5 years and I am personally skeptical of the ability of schools to move the needle much on educational outcomes. It’s a pessimistic view, but one that I came to after a lot of research into the subject. That’s why I was interested in anything you might have to add to my personal discovery process on this.
Are you familiar with Freddie DeBoers take on this?
I did not until just now, but from reading his substack for a an article and a half, I agree with every word that he says. Charles Murray has gotten into so much trouble for this, but ultimately they are probably correct. Richard Haier would be my go-to guy. His interview with Lex Friedman is the best explanation I have ever seen, but it will obviously upset teachers and parents, especially of the progressive type.
My greatest concern is how we disadvantage the best and brightest who grow up poor. We currently screw them out of a misplaced understanding of "fairness" or inclusion. it sucks. Every kid should have the right to be in a classroom dedicated to real learning. There is no reason we cannot have separate classes or even schools for kids who are working hard and those who are not. I find it disturbing how we can allow bad students to hold everyone else back, when the most intelligent move is to simply put the difficult kids in the same room and police them as much as necessary.
I can’t find it but one of the most interesting graphs I have seen is one that ranks PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) score by county and then breaks it down by race. Singapore, Macau, Taipei and Hong Kong are on top if you rank by country but if you break US scores out by race Asian-Americans beat any country. I think the quality of education in the US okay probably better than average internationally.
I see a lot of steering of top performing high schools into magnet, AP and other similar systems where they can have the chance to be challenged, but not much for the lower grades. I agree with you on the need for more opportunity to challenge potentially high performing kids who don’t have the opportunity.
And this doesn’t consider the post-secondary education system in the US, which is one of the best in the world.
The data is interesting and correct, but ignores the fact that wealthy white people overwhelmingly put their children in expensive private schools with 2-3x the resources per student than even the best funded public school. If resourcing doesn't matter, why do these schools do so well and why do people pay upwards of $60,000 per year to get their children access to the small classes and specialized instruction that private schools allow?
You don’t pay private school fees for quality of instruction. You pay for your children to be part of a group that can afford to pay.
Handwaving a bit, but I’d assume that parents are an immense influence on their children’s educational outcomes. Any factors which can correlate to the degree of investments (both time and money) that parents make for their kids should have high correlation to outcomes.
I’m half certain Diane has already written about this.
It's rare and refreshing to see someone to openly state that the reason they send their kids to private schools is to support segregation (by class of course, not race). I doubt that the investment in private high schools is measurable, after adjusting for the cofounding variables, but if you have the money, why not?
University is a different matter entirely. Though you would be amused to see that the most expensive private schools don't graduate the students who make the most: schools that focus on engineering and science do. Of course MIT is at the top, but Harvey Mudd is #2 and a number of state schools are right behind it.
Elite institutions are about networking. You don't pay the money to go to Harvard because the education is significantly better than staying in state and going to the University of Michigan. You go to Harvard to network with the other students. You have a real chance of creating a relationship with a future founder/CEO of a major company, or you could be roommates with a future senator or even President of the United States.
In high school, more important factors include having like-minded peers who are serious about their academic progress and teachers who are able to teach at a good pace because everyone's serious about school. Minimizing the possibility of distractions in class, violence in the hallways, and bad influences can make a huge difference in a teen's life.
For big cities it is huge. In most other places it is more about getting into the honors classes with other over-achievers so your mind is in the right place (more studying, less drugs). But in big cities, the elite high schools are like Ivy League colleges in networking opportunities.
Do you have any data on how common that is? Because expensive, elite private schools are pretty rare outside of very big cities. I think there's one, maybe two, in my metro area (pop 1.2m). There are more private Catholic schools with lots of white students, and which aren't exactly known for strong academics.
So I doubt it impacts these overall numbers very much at all.
That is simply not true. Most private schools spend LESS money that public ones. The parents put there children there to keep them away from poor people. Quality is irrelevant.
Public schools in California spend about $12,000 per student and even in well funded states it’s about $20,000. Private school tuition is many times that number.
Also, the real difference in spending is that private schools spend very little on non-teaching payroll (jobs for administrators, diversity specialists, ...) while public schools in big cities are packed full of friends and relatives doing little work. Most high-tax states spend $20k or so per pupil, but very little of that goes anywhere near a student. We could easily pay teachers more if we had leaner public school system administration along with larger class sizes. We SHOULD be doing this. Furthermore, classes should be segregated by desire to learn along with aptitude, so students who want to learn more can. Such tracking of students is often unjustly criticizes.
I am curious where you have found that $12,000 number. I cannot believe that number to be correct. I was looking at figures from the US Census. and that California number would make them lower than almost every state. Utah and Arizona were stated as spending $10k each (fyi, great schools in both states), with high-tax states such as Connecticut and New Jersey spending almost $30k. The same source said Los Angeles was spending $24k, and San Francisco more.
Diane Yap is probably my favorite human being right now. I love this broad!
In 2008, 9 and 10 the Obama DOE dumped truckloads of ARRA money into schools, spending 50 plus million on the “School Improvement Program” at nine low performing SFUSD schools while spending billions on the same program across the country. The principal at one of the schools and a long time school board member said he didn’t know what to do with all the money. At that time I did a deep dive into its implementation and results over a period of years. It was very much akin to what Diane described about Kansas. The end result was about a third of schools did marginally not significantly better, third the same and a third worse than their baseline achievement scores per California’s standardized testing. Computers were disappearing and private education contractors were getting rich. After it was all over there were many national articles written about how the SIP (School Improvement Program) was a total bust. Diane may have been at Lowell at this time and probably didn’t follow this debacle at that point in her young life.
As the US population declines schools will get better.
She is really awesome! I love her candid attitude apparent in her writings. She never shies sway. She never bothers to fear her opponents. She is courageous enough to stand against the political bigotry.
Too many smart people fail to see the truth because of their stupid political belief; Diane Yap simple doesn't. She has the brain of a visionary, capable of weaving complex ideas into tangible realities, and the heart of a poet, deeply empathetic and endlessly passionate about the world and its myriad mysteries.
In my case, I'm just a coward who are extremely worried about my own safety and well-being. In this society, you could ruin your life by a few "mistaken" remarks. I am going to keep my life as a coward; but I just secretly want to support her. We need more people like her for the advancement of humanity.
I have argued this for years. The best example is how much work scholars have put in to show that busing in the 1970's had any positive impact. If you look at the studies, they will show you increased income for male students with one parent who is male, or increased life expectancy for female students who qualified for a special program in 1972,...., and all these outrageous figures that proved how much data mining they had to do to find any improvement, anywhere, at all.
In the end, school funding does not matter. Students success is based upon ability and parental promotion of school work. Everything else is irrelevant. Asian refugees in poverty will do better than rich black and white children, not because of any special reason, just because their parents care about education.
Now here is a crazy idea, why don't we promote the values Asian parents have so everyone else can benefit??? Why not? I am waiting for an answer.
More broadly, the states that spend more on education have better results. Massachusetts, New York Vermont, and New Jersey spend in the top 5 and have 4 of the top 5 NEAP scores. But then there is Utah which also has a very good score but near the bottom in spending. So it isn't always true that spending more leads to better outcomes but there is a correlation.
If you dig deeper, you will have an extremely difficult time finding any stable indicator that displays funding improving student results. The same is true for class size. I have gone on serious deep dives into various data sets, and it is simply not there. FYI, I do that sort of thing for a living, and no field is more delusional and resistant to data-driven changes than education. If there were ever a field to be designated as broken, it would be education. Almost every suggestion for improvement is demonstrably bad (smaller class sizes, funding, computers in schools,...).
Show me the evidence. Preferably a peer reviewed research paper but any well reasoned essay will do. I know that class sizes don’t matter much - up to a certain size. What do *you* think leads to better education outcomes?
I do not trust 90% of US education research papers as they will do anything to support bad conclusions. You can see this with papers supporting former bussing efforts. There are zero academic benefits, so they went data mining to find obscure statistics to support busing. There are hallmark signs of this, such as using the metric "went to college" which is useless.
I base my position on successful schools in Taiwan with 40-50 students, although they did have smaller classes for troubled students. Hard-working students do not need a lot of close attention. This is why universities have large basic classes and smaller seminars for more advanced students. Even in more successful European school systems there are frequently class sizes above thirty students.
You will never see such research in the US because it goes against the established view, and one can NEVER publish in today's academic education world because they are terrifyingly tyrannical with regards to what is appropriate to research and what conclusions are acceptable. The graduate-level educational teaching and research system in the US is corrupt and broken. I dropped out of a graduate education degree because of it, walking away from a fully-supported program out of disgust. Criticism of modern American educational systems is not a joke. I thought it was just a bunch of hysterical Republicans complaining, but their criticism is actually real. The crazies are running the asylum.
In general, be EXTREMELY suspicious of any report where the metric is anything other than improved test scores. They have become masters at mining bizarre stats, or worse, making up metrics that can easily be gamed, such as asking students whether or not they plan on going to university some day. Our public schools were intentionally trashed by radicals, and they will do anything to justify their poor choices.
Test scores are mostly a proxy for family income and to a lesser degree, innate intelligence and probably a few other inherited factors. Combine that with the influence from parenting, especially from 0-5 years and I am personally skeptical of the ability of schools to move the needle much on educational outcomes. It’s a pessimistic view, but one that I came to after a lot of research into the subject. That’s why I was interested in anything you might have to add to my personal discovery process on this.
Are you familiar with Freddie DeBoers take on this?
I did not until just now, but from reading his substack for a an article and a half, I agree with every word that he says. Charles Murray has gotten into so much trouble for this, but ultimately they are probably correct. Richard Haier would be my go-to guy. His interview with Lex Friedman is the best explanation I have ever seen, but it will obviously upset teachers and parents, especially of the progressive type.
My greatest concern is how we disadvantage the best and brightest who grow up poor. We currently screw them out of a misplaced understanding of "fairness" or inclusion. it sucks. Every kid should have the right to be in a classroom dedicated to real learning. There is no reason we cannot have separate classes or even schools for kids who are working hard and those who are not. I find it disturbing how we can allow bad students to hold everyone else back, when the most intelligent move is to simply put the difficult kids in the same room and police them as much as necessary.
A great Rich Haier clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hppbxV9C63g
I can’t find it but one of the most interesting graphs I have seen is one that ranks PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) score by county and then breaks it down by race. Singapore, Macau, Taipei and Hong Kong are on top if you rank by country but if you break US scores out by race Asian-Americans beat any country. I think the quality of education in the US okay probably better than average internationally.
I see a lot of steering of top performing high schools into magnet, AP and other similar systems where they can have the chance to be challenged, but not much for the lower grades. I agree with you on the need for more opportunity to challenge potentially high performing kids who don’t have the opportunity.
And this doesn’t consider the post-secondary education system in the US, which is one of the best in the world.
The data is interesting and correct, but ignores the fact that wealthy white people overwhelmingly put their children in expensive private schools with 2-3x the resources per student than even the best funded public school. If resourcing doesn't matter, why do these schools do so well and why do people pay upwards of $60,000 per year to get their children access to the small classes and specialized instruction that private schools allow?
You don’t pay private school fees for quality of instruction. You pay for your children to be part of a group that can afford to pay.
Handwaving a bit, but I’d assume that parents are an immense influence on their children’s educational outcomes. Any factors which can correlate to the degree of investments (both time and money) that parents make for their kids should have high correlation to outcomes.
I’m half certain Diane has already written about this.
It's rare and refreshing to see someone to openly state that the reason they send their kids to private schools is to support segregation (by class of course, not race). I doubt that the investment in private high schools is measurable, after adjusting for the cofounding variables, but if you have the money, why not?
University is a different matter entirely. Though you would be amused to see that the most expensive private schools don't graduate the students who make the most: schools that focus on engineering and science do. Of course MIT is at the top, but Harvey Mudd is #2 and a number of state schools are right behind it.
I do not know what planet you are from, but EVERYONE who puts there children in private schools who is not Catholic says that.
Could it possibly be that these private school students are motivated to get an education and don’t want to waste their time
Elite institutions are about networking. You don't pay the money to go to Harvard because the education is significantly better than staying in state and going to the University of Michigan. You go to Harvard to network with the other students. You have a real chance of creating a relationship with a future founder/CEO of a major company, or you could be roommates with a future senator or even President of the United States.
Does high school networking matter that much? I believe that college networking is important, but high school?
In high school, more important factors include having like-minded peers who are serious about their academic progress and teachers who are able to teach at a good pace because everyone's serious about school. Minimizing the possibility of distractions in class, violence in the hallways, and bad influences can make a huge difference in a teen's life.
For big cities it is huge. In most other places it is more about getting into the honors classes with other over-achievers so your mind is in the right place (more studying, less drugs). But in big cities, the elite high schools are like Ivy League colleges in networking opportunities.
Do you have any data on how common that is? Because expensive, elite private schools are pretty rare outside of very big cities. I think there's one, maybe two, in my metro area (pop 1.2m). There are more private Catholic schools with lots of white students, and which aren't exactly known for strong academics.
So I doubt it impacts these overall numbers very much at all.
That is simply not true. Most private schools spend LESS money that public ones. The parents put there children there to keep them away from poor people. Quality is irrelevant.
Public schools in California spend about $12,000 per student and even in well funded states it’s about $20,000. Private school tuition is many times that number.
Also, the real difference in spending is that private schools spend very little on non-teaching payroll (jobs for administrators, diversity specialists, ...) while public schools in big cities are packed full of friends and relatives doing little work. Most high-tax states spend $20k or so per pupil, but very little of that goes anywhere near a student. We could easily pay teachers more if we had leaner public school system administration along with larger class sizes. We SHOULD be doing this. Furthermore, classes should be segregated by desire to learn along with aptitude, so students who want to learn more can. Such tracking of students is often unjustly criticizes.
I am curious where you have found that $12,000 number. I cannot believe that number to be correct. I was looking at figures from the US Census. and that California number would make them lower than almost every state. Utah and Arizona were stated as spending $10k each (fyi, great schools in both states), with high-tax states such as Connecticut and New Jersey spending almost $30k. The same source said Los Angeles was spending $24k, and San Francisco more.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2024/public-school-spending-per-pupil.html