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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6390 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024

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There's probably a dynamic where better teachers like teaching better students, and will move to the charter or private or high income schools disproportionately.

R/teachers indicates that there's a lot of this going on, but how much of an effect 'better teachers' actually has seems very up in the air. Like part of Catholic school's secret sauce is surely that if you just cannot behave you are asked to leave(nicely at first, but to be reframed as Not A Request if needed) and a single misbehaving student can ruin things for everyone. But they also have better teachers(more experienced mostly, but also higher percentage of in-subject graduate degrees for high school teachers) and better instructional curricula(phonics over whole word etc). I'm not sure you can really distinguish the two effects, either- experienced teachers with masters degrees in their subjects strongly prefer teaching positions which exclude the bottom quintile as students.

But they also have better teachers(more experienced mostly, but also higher percentage of in-subject graduate degrees for high school teachers)

This reminds me that it's probably a good idea to optimize for different things in primary vs secondary education. As far as I can tell, in lower elementary it's fine to do Montessori or Waldorf or unschooling or whatever else will deliver a pretty good childhood experience. The teachers should teach phonics, but otherwise it's mostly important for them to be able to get all the kids settled and not constantly bothering each other. There are a few elementary students who are so wild even a decent teacher can't get them to cooperate, but it's pretty rare.

Then in high school the quality of peers and academic ability of teachers becomes a lot more important.

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