Something that is not often mentioned is that professional parents are typically better educated than most teachers. I gave principals grief arguing for my daughter - she was an Aspie and hated the social environment at school - she asked me to get her out of it as fast as I could and agreed to work hard. I am a Physcist with a Ph.D. in Engineering and my wife has a MS in Teaching English as a Second Language. We were definitely capable of home education - but I wanted the schools to do most of the work. Afterall, I had to do my work as well. I did oversee my daughter's Geometry and PreCalculus correspondence sessions over two summers as she worked her way ahead.
In my kids high school honors / IB classes something on the order of 2/3's of the students were the children of highly educated South and East Asian immigrants. My son can adopt a very good Bangalore accent when he wants to, something he picked up in Middle and High School.
When I lived in Princeton I knew one neighbor, a teacher, who home schooled her kids when they were in Junior High, but sent them to public school for Elementary and High School. The Princeton public schools were very good, but Junior High / Middle School tends to be problematic for social reasons.
Our daughter begged us to put her in public school because of what she saw on Disney and Nickelodeon so we agreed. In half a year she was begging to come back home. She was bored, failing math, and considered half of her peers to be obscene. The SeaTac area is degenerating into collapse.
Yes, not good. But de Blasio had very similar ideas on education and he failed to follow through. In fact, creating universal pre-k was likely best thing he did. My guess is Mandami does not get this done either.
When the DC schools dropped the college track ~ 1965 my family moved out of the city. ~ 2 years ago Atlanta announced that they were droping their gifted program and my daughter and her husband put their kids in a private school. You can not expect professional parents to willfully neglect their kids education the way politicians and educators seem to expect. They will vote with their feet, their money, or both. I have a co-worker who is considering abandoning Seattle due to the abandoning of gifted education there.
And anybody who thinks that a normal classroom teacher can adjust the level of instruction for the level of the student past the first few grades is willfully delusional. My co-worker's son went into kindergarden with a 3d grade reading level. That was several years ago. He is very advanced, even for his current gifted class.
It is not uncommon for smart kids to have 12th grade reading levels by late elementary school, and the situation with respect to math is worse - it is consecuctive, and the gap between the slower and the faster students grows each year. I worked with my kids on their math - and at times told them that they had to learn two ways of doing things, my way and the teacher's way. When my daughter was in 7th grade she had to go to the high school for 1st period math class - the middle school did not have the appropriate level class for her - and this was in an excellent surban school disctrict. Some kids are ready for college level calculus by the start of 10th grade.
The article about Cambridge's ending 8th-grade Algebra I sugarcoats the Kafkaesque policies. It was our school district from 2015-2020, which included the year (2018) when they ended Algebra 1. Of course, I fought it how I could, but it was pointless.
Their main goal seemed to be to dumb down public-school students, and they wouldn't let go.
The district replaced, for grades 6-8, an excellent curriculum, Singapore Math (for years the only correct curriculum in English), with Illustrative Mathematics, where the more you use it the less math you know. They made that change alongside ending Algebra 1 (both changes were announced in the same letter to parents in summer 2018).
So now they could say, and did say, that most students aren't ready for Algebra 1 in 8th grade. But they don't mention that, by using Illustrative Mathematics, that outcome is guaranteed.
Meanwhile, they complain about the inequity of private-school students having more options. But the district's policies ensure that outcome. In 9th grade, the first year of the CRLS (the high schhool), students had to take Algebra 1 if they hadn't taken Algebra 1 in 8th grade. Otherwise, they could take Geometry.
Of course, taking Algebra 1 in 8th grade became impossible for the public-school students. There was a placement test. But the district mostly only let students coming from other districts or from private schools take the placement test. Their own students were told, "Show us a certificate of Algebra 1 from another course provider, or take it in 9th grade." The obvious result was that most of the 9th-grade Geometry students were from private schools.
Eventually this discriminatory and menticidal policy produced so much parent anger, even among the obedient-to-authority Cambridge parents (it's the home of TheScience[TM]), that the district offered the summer class mentioned in the Globe article.
But they kept fighting for years to keep Algebra 1 out of 8th grade. Since emigrating, I haven't followed as closely the latest in those math wars, but I think that the school board finally is slowly forcing the district to put back Algebra 1 in 8th grade.
The whole saga is ludicrous, especially for a district with two of the world's leading universities, Harvard and MIT. And don't get me started on the reading "teaching."
NYC spends $40k per kid per year. If you gave that directly to parents people would flock to NYC and have like ten kids.
But instead we have to give it to the same teachers union that elects the democrats.
Tracking is just re-arranging the deck chairs on the titanic. These people don’t give a fuck about your kids. They took a two year vacation because of the flu, what would being in a gifted program do to solve that.
This is a complex issue. First of all Gifted and Talented students are the most neglected form of special education. In my 35 years of teaching, I have taught many gifted students who got mediocre grades. I took it upon myself to create a special education plan for them. Also, I have had many parents pressure teachers, administrators to have their high achieving kid as gifted. Being gifted is not about high grades. Lost in all this talk about higher standards (which I agree with) is what about the socio-emotional development of the kids.
Late to the party by a few days. I don't understand. If parents are upset that their kids don't have access to enough advanced coursework, why argue for protecting a program that limits access to advanced coursework by design? Gifted kids are like 5% of NYC school kids. Even if Mamdani changed nothing, 95% of these kids still aren't getting on the gifted track. Isn't the better argument one for expanding access to advanced classes?
Those kids that are capable of the most advanced classes should end up in them. Kids who are not should land in whatever tracks they can handle; tracking is a boon to education, done right.
That can certainly be true but is beside the point. I think we have to remember Vaites main point here: access to these advanced classes is important to parents who leave NYC’s schools. She’s arguing that parents are leaving NYC because their kids can’t get into advanced classes. Protecting a system that strictly limits access seems incongruous given the data she cites. Why not advocate doing a better job of identifying kids who could succeed in these classes and expand the program? This is why I’m confused by the post.
I think it'd require a reason to believe that the schools are doing a bad job at putting kids into the right track; My understanding of her argument is that she's arguing for tracked classes, and sees Mamdani as opposing tracking.
Where I grew up (not NYC), there were 3 tracks from 2nd grade up to middle school, then 5 tracks in high school, for most topics. It seemed to work pretty well overall, although I know very little about how kids were assigned to the track; I think most kids were in the middle track and the lower two were forms of special ed. The top two were advanced and challenge, with the latter often designed to prep kids for AP testing and college credit, and generally offering a wider range; I had statistics and calculus in my high school as part of those tracks.
My school district (Brecksville-Broadview Heights, Ohio) was pretty well-off though. I don't know if it would work without modification here, but I am an advocate of having a highly tracked system wherever possible.
A broader lesson — we have to figure out waits to sharpen our intuitions about the right and wrong ways to achieve more equitable outcomes. Leveling down will always be unpopular, and yet many unflinchingly advocate for it in situations outside of taxation.
Accelerating the unenrollment of almost any student is a win. American public schools are a failed experiment. Gifted programs are mostly bells and whistles. I've heard from parents with kids in special ed and a lot of those programs are not helpful. We need to break up the criminal cartel that is American public schools and stop strip mining the public for money that goes into systems that continue to graduate illiterates. And hire illiterates.
If American public schools are good, then let's create a standardized test that all teachers have to pass before they can pull a paycheck. AND let's get rid of unions. No person pulling a salary from the public purse should be allowed to have another skilled criminal cartel advocate for them regarding their salary and benefits.
This is nonsense; public schools are necessary to have an educated population, and while they’re not perfect (in many cases far from it), there is no real alternative model that does what schools should do.
There are alternative models now. Private schools. Charter schools. Home school coops. There are few systems that do a worse job at fulfilling their purpose than American public schools. "Cartel: a group of similar independent companies who join together to control prices and limit competition." That's from the Cambridge dictionary. The American public school system is a cartel. And to the extent that it steals from the taxpayer and does not deliver a decent product, it is a criminal cartel.
The alternatives are usually worse, often used by parents who want to avoid exposing their kids to ideas they don't approve of. Home schooling should be banned, as should most alternatives to public school.
Public schools are not a cartel - they're not companies, and they are not operating in a real market to provide economic limits to competititopn. They're not criminal. They don't steal from the taxpayer - taxation is not theft.
You are absolutely full of weird misunderstandings.
Ah yes……”Plan the perfect crime”…..this was a 6th grade assignment in the school in my neighborhood a few years ago. Such excellent ideas that children should be exposed to!
Nothing quite like trying to ban any competition to your cartel to prove you are a cartel and nothing like using the power of the government to do it to prove you have a criminal mindset.
I’ve worked in education reform for over 30 years. I’ve interviewed people like you who were teachers. We don’t hire people who don’t have critical thinking skills and just spout the ed propaganda.
What, you've never seen Hitchcock's 1943 film "Shadow of a Doubt"? It's a classic. Kids should be exposed to quite a lot of varying ideas as part of growing up. To send a kid to a Yeshiva or homeschool them is deeply misguided and produces adults whose horizons are limited by fearful parents.
Your term "cartel" just doesn't work. Doesn't fit the facts. With this motivation, your activism is spending a lot of time making education worse. Universal public education is a good, and it's part of that good to give kids access to far more perspectives than their parents or community provide.
I've read well over 1500 teacher resumes. If you want most of these people teaching your kids, go ahead. I don't. And most of the thoughtful parents I know don't either once they realize how ignorant most ed school grads are.
Kids are most properly socialized by intelligent, thoughtful adults, and a small set of other children. Putting room temp IQ teachers in front of children simply because they know more than a third grader has turned out a nation of semi-illiterates. If you can't spell, and form a coherent thought that wasn't generated by an AI, then you shouldn't be allowed to pull a paycheck from the public purse.
The public schools will not resolve this issue. School choice is the only way to keep families in cities with such schools. NYC at least has some of this, but hopefully others will continue to push for empowering parents over entrenched public workers.
We are categorically failing our students and this hits those with the lowest mobility options hardest. Wherever we are seeing success, we must rapidly analyze and adopt those attributes, looking at Mississippi.
So far as I know Mamdani only spoke about getting rid of G&T for four year olds. Having gone through the process with my four-year-old son, I can tell you that the filter as actually implemented is pretty random, and it's pretty silly to track kids at 4 in any case.
I think there should be advanced classes and kids should be able to get into them, but until more is said about the actual plan I think we should withhold judgement.
So far as I know Mamdani only spoke about getting rid of G&T for four year olds. Having gone through the process with my four-year-old son, I can tell you that the filter as actually implemented is pretty random, and it's pretty silly to track kids at 4 in any case.
I think there should be advanced classes and kids should be able to get into them, but until more is said about the actual plan I think we should withhold judgement.
Karen, great article! But you can’t believe the increase in ELA test scores because the NYSED changed the standards again so the results are not comparable over time. I wrote about how City Hall and the Chancellor knew they couldn’t make this claim but did it anyway for some positive headlines.
I looked into that, but it didn’t seem to hold water. I’m cautiously optimistic that things are working. Probably more cautious than this piece implies, but I do think NYC has forward momentum on early reading.
I live in Seattle and EHC types here don’t even consider Seattle Public Schools any more. You can’t fix that with marketing.
Something that is not often mentioned is that professional parents are typically better educated than most teachers. I gave principals grief arguing for my daughter - she was an Aspie and hated the social environment at school - she asked me to get her out of it as fast as I could and agreed to work hard. I am a Physcist with a Ph.D. in Engineering and my wife has a MS in Teaching English as a Second Language. We were definitely capable of home education - but I wanted the schools to do most of the work. Afterall, I had to do my work as well. I did oversee my daughter's Geometry and PreCalculus correspondence sessions over two summers as she worked her way ahead.
In my kids high school honors / IB classes something on the order of 2/3's of the students were the children of highly educated South and East Asian immigrants. My son can adopt a very good Bangalore accent when he wants to, something he picked up in Middle and High School.
When I lived in Princeton I knew one neighbor, a teacher, who home schooled her kids when they were in Junior High, but sent them to public school for Elementary and High School. The Princeton public schools were very good, but Junior High / Middle School tends to be problematic for social reasons.
Our daughter begged us to put her in public school because of what she saw on Disney and Nickelodeon so we agreed. In half a year she was begging to come back home. She was bored, failing math, and considered half of her peers to be obscene. The SeaTac area is degenerating into collapse.
Yes, not good. But de Blasio had very similar ideas on education and he failed to follow through. In fact, creating universal pre-k was likely best thing he did. My guess is Mandami does not get this done either.
When the DC schools dropped the college track ~ 1965 my family moved out of the city. ~ 2 years ago Atlanta announced that they were droping their gifted program and my daughter and her husband put their kids in a private school. You can not expect professional parents to willfully neglect their kids education the way politicians and educators seem to expect. They will vote with their feet, their money, or both. I have a co-worker who is considering abandoning Seattle due to the abandoning of gifted education there.
And anybody who thinks that a normal classroom teacher can adjust the level of instruction for the level of the student past the first few grades is willfully delusional. My co-worker's son went into kindergarden with a 3d grade reading level. That was several years ago. He is very advanced, even for his current gifted class.
It is not uncommon for smart kids to have 12th grade reading levels by late elementary school, and the situation with respect to math is worse - it is consecuctive, and the gap between the slower and the faster students grows each year. I worked with my kids on their math - and at times told them that they had to learn two ways of doing things, my way and the teacher's way. When my daughter was in 7th grade she had to go to the high school for 1st period math class - the middle school did not have the appropriate level class for her - and this was in an excellent surban school disctrict. Some kids are ready for college level calculus by the start of 10th grade.
The article about Cambridge's ending 8th-grade Algebra I sugarcoats the Kafkaesque policies. It was our school district from 2015-2020, which included the year (2018) when they ended Algebra 1. Of course, I fought it how I could, but it was pointless.
Their main goal seemed to be to dumb down public-school students, and they wouldn't let go.
The district replaced, for grades 6-8, an excellent curriculum, Singapore Math (for years the only correct curriculum in English), with Illustrative Mathematics, where the more you use it the less math you know. They made that change alongside ending Algebra 1 (both changes were announced in the same letter to parents in summer 2018).
So now they could say, and did say, that most students aren't ready for Algebra 1 in 8th grade. But they don't mention that, by using Illustrative Mathematics, that outcome is guaranteed.
Meanwhile, they complain about the inequity of private-school students having more options. But the district's policies ensure that outcome. In 9th grade, the first year of the CRLS (the high schhool), students had to take Algebra 1 if they hadn't taken Algebra 1 in 8th grade. Otherwise, they could take Geometry.
Of course, taking Algebra 1 in 8th grade became impossible for the public-school students. There was a placement test. But the district mostly only let students coming from other districts or from private schools take the placement test. Their own students were told, "Show us a certificate of Algebra 1 from another course provider, or take it in 9th grade." The obvious result was that most of the 9th-grade Geometry students were from private schools.
Eventually this discriminatory and menticidal policy produced so much parent anger, even among the obedient-to-authority Cambridge parents (it's the home of TheScience[TM]), that the district offered the summer class mentioned in the Globe article.
But they kept fighting for years to keep Algebra 1 out of 8th grade. Since emigrating, I haven't followed as closely the latest in those math wars, but I think that the school board finally is slowly forcing the district to put back Algebra 1 in 8th grade.
The whole saga is ludicrous, especially for a district with two of the world's leading universities, Harvard and MIT. And don't get me started on the reading "teaching."
NYC spends $40k per kid per year. If you gave that directly to parents people would flock to NYC and have like ten kids.
But instead we have to give it to the same teachers union that elects the democrats.
Tracking is just re-arranging the deck chairs on the titanic. These people don’t give a fuck about your kids. They took a two year vacation because of the flu, what would being in a gifted program do to solve that.
Home schooling is bad for kids; it fails to provide a balancing perspective from what the kids grow up with (parents, communioty).
Tracking is essential to do education right, and teachers actually typically care about their kids, often more than parents do.
Your deranged ideas on Covid are an illustration of the problem - important kids don’t grow up with only those dumb ideas in their head.
They are not generally as you describe; they generally care about their students.
Your views on Covid are nuts. Same with your suggestion.
This is a complex issue. First of all Gifted and Talented students are the most neglected form of special education. In my 35 years of teaching, I have taught many gifted students who got mediocre grades. I took it upon myself to create a special education plan for them. Also, I have had many parents pressure teachers, administrators to have their high achieving kid as gifted. Being gifted is not about high grades. Lost in all this talk about higher standards (which I agree with) is what about the socio-emotional development of the kids.
Late to the party by a few days. I don't understand. If parents are upset that their kids don't have access to enough advanced coursework, why argue for protecting a program that limits access to advanced coursework by design? Gifted kids are like 5% of NYC school kids. Even if Mamdani changed nothing, 95% of these kids still aren't getting on the gifted track. Isn't the better argument one for expanding access to advanced classes?
Those kids that are capable of the most advanced classes should end up in them. Kids who are not should land in whatever tracks they can handle; tracking is a boon to education, done right.
That can certainly be true but is beside the point. I think we have to remember Vaites main point here: access to these advanced classes is important to parents who leave NYC’s schools. She’s arguing that parents are leaving NYC because their kids can’t get into advanced classes. Protecting a system that strictly limits access seems incongruous given the data she cites. Why not advocate doing a better job of identifying kids who could succeed in these classes and expand the program? This is why I’m confused by the post.
I think it'd require a reason to believe that the schools are doing a bad job at putting kids into the right track; My understanding of her argument is that she's arguing for tracked classes, and sees Mamdani as opposing tracking.
Where I grew up (not NYC), there were 3 tracks from 2nd grade up to middle school, then 5 tracks in high school, for most topics. It seemed to work pretty well overall, although I know very little about how kids were assigned to the track; I think most kids were in the middle track and the lower two were forms of special ed. The top two were advanced and challenge, with the latter often designed to prep kids for AP testing and college credit, and generally offering a wider range; I had statistics and calculus in my high school as part of those tracks.
My school district (Brecksville-Broadview Heights, Ohio) was pretty well-off though. I don't know if it would work without modification here, but I am an advocate of having a highly tracked system wherever possible.
A broader lesson — we have to figure out waits to sharpen our intuitions about the right and wrong ways to achieve more equitable outcomes. Leveling down will always be unpopular, and yet many unflinchingly advocate for it in situations outside of taxation.
Accelerating the unenrollment of almost any student is a win. American public schools are a failed experiment. Gifted programs are mostly bells and whistles. I've heard from parents with kids in special ed and a lot of those programs are not helpful. We need to break up the criminal cartel that is American public schools and stop strip mining the public for money that goes into systems that continue to graduate illiterates. And hire illiterates.
If American public schools are good, then let's create a standardized test that all teachers have to pass before they can pull a paycheck. AND let's get rid of unions. No person pulling a salary from the public purse should be allowed to have another skilled criminal cartel advocate for them regarding their salary and benefits.
This is nonsense; public schools are necessary to have an educated population, and while they’re not perfect (in many cases far from it), there is no real alternative model that does what schools should do.
Your calling them a cartel is just nutjobbery.
There are alternative models now. Private schools. Charter schools. Home school coops. There are few systems that do a worse job at fulfilling their purpose than American public schools. "Cartel: a group of similar independent companies who join together to control prices and limit competition." That's from the Cambridge dictionary. The American public school system is a cartel. And to the extent that it steals from the taxpayer and does not deliver a decent product, it is a criminal cartel.
The alternatives are usually worse, often used by parents who want to avoid exposing their kids to ideas they don't approve of. Home schooling should be banned, as should most alternatives to public school.
Public schools are not a cartel - they're not companies, and they are not operating in a real market to provide economic limits to competititopn. They're not criminal. They don't steal from the taxpayer - taxation is not theft.
You are absolutely full of weird misunderstandings.
Ah yes……”Plan the perfect crime”…..this was a 6th grade assignment in the school in my neighborhood a few years ago. Such excellent ideas that children should be exposed to!
Nothing quite like trying to ban any competition to your cartel to prove you are a cartel and nothing like using the power of the government to do it to prove you have a criminal mindset.
I’ve worked in education reform for over 30 years. I’ve interviewed people like you who were teachers. We don’t hire people who don’t have critical thinking skills and just spout the ed propaganda.
What, you've never seen Hitchcock's 1943 film "Shadow of a Doubt"? It's a classic. Kids should be exposed to quite a lot of varying ideas as part of growing up. To send a kid to a Yeshiva or homeschool them is deeply misguided and produces adults whose horizons are limited by fearful parents.
Your term "cartel" just doesn't work. Doesn't fit the facts. With this motivation, your activism is spending a lot of time making education worse. Universal public education is a good, and it's part of that good to give kids access to far more perspectives than their parents or community provide.
I've read well over 1500 teacher resumes. If you want most of these people teaching your kids, go ahead. I don't. And most of the thoughtful parents I know don't either once they realize how ignorant most ed school grads are.
Kids are most properly socialized by intelligent, thoughtful adults, and a small set of other children. Putting room temp IQ teachers in front of children simply because they know more than a third grader has turned out a nation of semi-illiterates. If you can't spell, and form a coherent thought that wasn't generated by an AI, then you shouldn't be allowed to pull a paycheck from the public purse.
The public schools will not resolve this issue. School choice is the only way to keep families in cities with such schools. NYC at least has some of this, but hopefully others will continue to push for empowering parents over entrenched public workers.
We are categorically failing our students and this hits those with the lowest mobility options hardest. Wherever we are seeing success, we must rapidly analyze and adopt those attributes, looking at Mississippi.
So far as I know Mamdani only spoke about getting rid of G&T for four year olds. Having gone through the process with my four-year-old son, I can tell you that the filter as actually implemented is pretty random, and it's pretty silly to track kids at 4 in any case.
I think there should be advanced classes and kids should be able to get into them, but until more is said about the actual plan I think we should withhold judgement.
So far as I know Mamdani only spoke about getting rid of G&T for four year olds. Having gone through the process with my four-year-old son, I can tell you that the filter as actually implemented is pretty random, and it's pretty silly to track kids at 4 in any case.
I think there should be advanced classes and kids should be able to get into them, but until more is said about the actual plan I think we should withhold judgement.
Karen, great article! But you can’t believe the increase in ELA test scores because the NYSED changed the standards again so the results are not comparable over time. I wrote about how City Hall and the Chancellor knew they couldn’t make this claim but did it anyway for some positive headlines.
I wrote about the problems with the state test results claims here https://open.substack.com/pub/families4newyork/p/so-many-questions-about-ny-state?r=kg901&utm_medium=ios
I looked into that, but it didn’t seem to hold water. I’m cautiously optimistic that things are working. Probably more cautious than this piece implies, but I do think NYC has forward momentum on early reading.