49 thoughts on “What should a parent do about school?”

1. “That diet of gooey, progressive sentiment starts in K-12, and that is probably what makes me most hesitant about advising parents to stick with public schools. However, the ideological stuff isn’t really different in the better private schools–it’s not like a Quaker school is going to be a libertarian hotbed. So the only way out on that score is home schooling, and I think that requires a special set of circumstances to work.”

   Yeah

2. I went to a regular middle class public school till high school then a magnet school.

   I would defiantly consider the magnet school a complete transformation of my education compared to public school, but it was a very unique model. In demographics (top 1% math ability to get in) and teaching style (rather experimental compared to anything you would find public or private). I’m not sure sending me to Bergen Catholic or some other private school would have made a difference (their backup plan if I didn’t get in to the magnet). Neither the demographics nor the teaching style would have been that different.

   One other thing I’d note. The expensive private schools are very marinated in the moral narcissism Arnold writes about above. It’s probably even more intense then regular public school.

   My magnet was immune by virtue of being dominated by fresh off the boat Koreans, who are a bunch of racist shitlords.

3. In terms, of private school, our family struggled with the opposite having a high function handicap child. We found the private schools in the area would simply feed into the handicap and the ‘uncaring’ public schools were better training for his future.

   In terms of college, maybe we should teach more moral narcissism that capitalism is good but you have to compete extremely hard to win in our economy. Capitalism does not give a care if you are a good moral person.

   • The idea that people need to “compete extremely hard to win in our economy” is one that I want to encourage, but it’s not actually true. By all means, you should chain yourselves to the treadmill of work and career, because I’ve got stocks, and I sincerely thank you for everything you’re doing to make me better off. But for your own sake, you work too hard.

     It’s not even just because of my investments. It’s all the products you guys come out with, and the innovations in delivery methods, and inventory. Who was this Justin Time person toiling away at Toyota, or was it Walmart? Whoever you are: Nice work. Steve Jobs suffered so that I don’t have to. All the ambitious, driven, high-testosterone people: Keep at it.

4. “Public” Schools are now GOVERNMENT Schools; hence subject to political determinations not related to the causes for the origins of primary and secondary learning facilities.

   Suggested: the “Applications” in “On Liberty” by J S Mill.

5. As asdf suggested in that thread, when my girls graduate the local Montessori K-2 school, we’re moving to a nicer suburb 10 miles away, even if it means a smaller house. The elementary school around the corner is ranked 3/10 on greatschools.org, has 1% white students and 1/3rd of the pupils have been formally disciplined for conduct (suspensions and expulsions), with (obviously) no stats for informal disciplinary measures. So, yeah, that’s not an realistic option.

   • The typical rich kid has twice as many parents as the typical poor kid. If a kid’s got two parents, he’s already won the lottery.

     If you’ve got two parents, and your parents are prepared to move house, that’s gravy, but having two parents is a privilege and a real boost to your prospects.

     • ” If a kid’s got two parents, he’s already won the lottery.”

       It’s actually nothing like winning the lottery: odds of winning the lottery here in CA are about 1 in 40 million; odds of a white child having two parents is about 7 in 10.

6. My strategy has been to allocate a larger portion of my assets and income into real estate, and more free time into commuting, than most people would be conformable with, in order to select for neighbors and public school peers.

   I also try to interrogate for bad messages received in school and push back and encourage a sense of skepticism in notions relayed by teachers, while also insisting that their non-intellectual authority ought to be respected out of propriety.

   • Trend of the future: Longer and longer commutes, with people tapping away at their phones the whole time. People love tapping away at their phones.

     Alternatively, the great cardiovascular work-out of taking the bike into town. Who needs a gym? Gives you time to catch up on all the podcasts that people are talking about.

     • That’s already the present.

7. The moral narcissism article takes a rather strange turn when he tries to apply it to conservatism.

   For example:

   “Here certain beliefs work at cross-purposes, as in the opposition to gay marriage when the impulse that gays have to formalize their union is often highly bourgeois and essentially conservative. Similarly, social conservatives, putatively strong adherents of small government, veer equally strongly to the side of government intervention where abortion is concerned, wanting it forbidden by the state.”

   I find it baffling that *he* is baffled that conservatives would look skeptically at the the re-definition marriage, the nature of which many conservatives understand as unchangeably grounded in Natural Law, Divine Law, or both. Likewise the opposition to abortion, which has similar Natural Law or religious roots.

   I for one cannot imagine any conservative saying, “I wish the government would stop making laws against murder! It is so intrusive!” or “I wish the government would make it so anyone could marry anyone or anything at any time! Getting married is so bourgeois!”

   I think this is one of those cases where the author seems to have spectacularly failed the Caplan/Turing-test of being able to sound like the camp he is describing.

   • FWIW, the article was pretty good up until that part at the end.

   • It is sensible for social conservatives to defend the term ‘marriage’ on conservative grounds as belonging to the Church. Fair enough, I say.

     It is also sensible for social conservatives to allow gays to formalize their relationship in a ‘civil union’, if they can stomach the concept of gay relationships or partnerships at all, and those who can’t deserve pity and worse.

     Any social conservative still reading should further **encourage** gays to formalize their relationship at the appropriate stage. This is the very essence of family values and building a strong, neighborly household with voluntary partnership and association.

     So I think Simon has a reasonable point here, even if it’s tough to see through the traditional conservative lens.

     • Gay marriage isn’t about formalizing committed monogamous relationships, nor about bourgeois values. The number of gays for whom that is true are an incredibly small minority or a minority, which you could easily find from looking at the statistics of the matter. Nor does a “more accepting environment” seem to cause any positive change in behavior, as was used to sell the practice.

       For those to whom such positive ideals apply, most were already shaking up and doing their thing for decades before gay marriage. Nobody stopped them, and they didn’t need permission. I don’t really buy the civil union argument either, because its obvious now that nobody was going to settle for civil unions.

       What its about is re-affirming the gay lifestyle, which is incredibly hedonistic and promiscuous. Anyone could have figured this out from going to a gay pride parade, and that was indeed my first experience that made me question my youthful embrace of gay rights. Nobody watches dudes in g-strings covered in glitter making out on a float and thinks “family values, just like us!”

       It also comes out in the various witch hunts. Crushing florists, outing Brandon Eich, etc. Nothing says #lovewins like destroying peoples lives to satisfy your own ego.

       In a world where marriage is under threat, and I mean the real heterosexual kind that makes babies and keeps society going, you would think something as destructive as championing hedonism, narcism, adultery, drug use, and promiscuity would be incredibly irresponsible and selfish. It doesn’t surprise me that all of those things are more approved of by those that support gay marriage then those that oppose it.

       I’ve also not seen those I know that hang around gays ever come to a good end as a result. Many of my religious friends, after trying to do outreach to the “gay community” got burned upon realizing what goes on there is nothing like what you see on TV.

       But hey, maybe this last conquest of the sexual revolution might make it slightly easier for you to get laid, so I guess marriage has got to go.

       • What its about is re-affirming the gay lifestyle, which is incredibly hedonistic and promiscuous.

         One could just as easily say that what gay marriage is about is CHANGING the gay lifestyle. The “forsaking all others” and “we’re in it for the long haul.” Along with (for males, at least), “I was pretty wild in my youth but now I want to settle down.”

         Indeed, many gay “leaders” were originally against gay marriage because they feared it was too bourgeois, that “the essence of being gay is constantly being open to new relationships.” But in one of those wonderful instances of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” the well-publicized opposition of social conservatives turned “marriage equality” into a gay crusade.

         In a world where marriage is under threat, and I mean the real heterosexual kind that makes babies and keeps society going, you would think something as destructive as championing hedonism, narcism, adultery, drug use, and promiscuity would be incredibly irresponsible and selfish. It doesn’t surprise me that all of those things are more approved of by those that support gay marriage then those that oppose it.

         You are certainly right that those who support gay marriage are less likely to publicly oppose those things. But they are very likely to oppose those things when it comes to their own families, and to effectively oppose them in “their people.” I think it was Bryan Caplan who pointed out when Charles Murray’s Coming Apart was published, that American elites don’t preach what they practice.

       • “gay marriage is about is CHANGING the gay lifestyle”

         Do you have any evidence this is true?

         It’s one thing to assert, its another to prove. Gay marriage has been legal in some areas for a long time. On the Accela line its practically a holy rite.

         I’ll believe this “marriage will change gays” narrative when I see it in the statistics. I haven’t yet. To me its just another evidence free meme like “Hispanics are natural conservatives.” Wake me up when they vote 50%+ for a conservative.

         The destruction that gay attitudes have on straights I can see. Both statistically or just seeing how fag hags behave.

         “But they are very likely to oppose those things when it comes to their own families, and to effectively oppose them in their people.”

         A lot of this is just IQ. Once you control for IQ, liberals and gay marriage supporters are more likely to engage in poor life choices then conservatives and traditional marriage supporters. Liberals tend to be high IQ, and high IQ people have more impulse control. This leads to the idea of this preach/practice gap, but that’s just poor social science.

         I don’t necessarily buy Murray’s argument, which is often quite confused. He should know how to not let IQ be a confounding variable. Relative to their IQ, there really isn’t a preach/practice gap. High IQ people that preach liberalism are more likely to practice what they preach relative to high IQ conservatives.

         Similarly low IQ liberals have worse practices then low IQ conservatives. There the gap even widens.

         Think of it this way. When you preach liberalism, your more likely to practice it. The lower your IQ, the worse you are at the marshmallow test, the more likely you are to practice what you preach and do so quite poorly.

         High IQ people tend not to end up in the gutter because they are good at the marshmallow test. But they are likely to waste their lives away. They don’t get divorced, but they don’t ever get married in the first place. They don’t go broke, but they also don’t have any children. Marshmallow test passing liberals avoid terrible outcomes by avoiding life itself. It’s a sterile and pointless existence.

         • “gay marriage is about is CHANGING the gay lifestyle”
           Do you have any evidence this is true?

           No broad-based statistical evidence, no.

           But I also haven’t seen any good evidence that, successful people who will not publicly condemn getting pregnant without a long-term relationship, dropping out of school, or doing a lot of drugs also do not condemn it privately when it comes to relations (especially children) and members of their peer group.

         • High IQ people tend not to end up in the gutter because they are good at the marshmallow test.

           Is this all marshmallow test? I am guessing High IQ can fail the marshmallow test but other strengths to cover their failures. Look at Bush Jr. who was life was ‘At Sea’ for years, but learned to turn it around in his late 20s. A poor person with low IQ does not have that advantages. (And look at Trump!)

           What I see the biggest problem of conservative ideas is that it is a lot easier to control lower IQ poors if you have defined benefits, say a 1950s union card than our current economic system where jobs are only an economic decision. (It should also be noted that minority dysfunction is falling a lot more than white dysfunction in 2017. In California the group with the highest increase in crime the last several years is the white population.)

     • Well, I wasn’t really making the argument for/against gay marriage above, just that he was mistaken to think conservatives would/should/could see the re-definition of such a fundamental institution as an essentially conservative undertaking.

       As regards your point about formalizing the relationship, I suppose this might have something to it if the conservatives were mainly interested in some sort of state recognition of relationships, but they aren’t.

       The better question is why the state has historically recognized this kind of relationship and not others. The state has no general interest in solemnizing emotional ties, and I doubt most people, conservative or liberal, are waiting for the state to bless their friendships, no matter how strong.

       The answer is that marriage is not simply a friendship or an emotional bond, but a society that by its nature has and rears children.

       Altering the definition of marriage such that it no longer requires a man and a woman would be an attempt to formally change what the institution is and what it is for, removing any essentially tie to the procreation and the education of children, and placing the full weight of the definition on the romantic feelings of spouses.

       (A short comment is not the spot to address all edge questions such as men and women that can’t have children, adoption, etc.)

       Marriage from the perspective of the state, in any traditional sense, has nothing to do with love or feelings (though from the perspective of the spouses it may well), but has to do with the nature of a relationship which is ordered to having and raising children, and the various commitments and responsibility that entails.

       • So that comment was an argument against gay marriage, basically that is a metaphysical impossibility, and that the state has not, in the past, thought it within its power to define what marriage is, as to recognize it as a preexisting reality.

         • Of course, if you define marriage as “concerned solely with bringing up the biological children of the husband and wife and having nothing to do with companionship or love or any of those things, or ‘edge questions such as men and women that can’t have children, adoption, etc.’,” then gay marriage is “a metaphysical impossibility.” But in that case, I don’t care that it’s a metaphysical impossibility.

         • You use quotation mark like you are quoting something that I wrote, but in fact you are only quoting some straw-man yelling in your head.

           Quite bluntly, I never said solely, I never said it had nothing to do with companionship or love, and in philosophy and argumentation there is such a thing as the privilege of the normal case.

           If I were going to describe what it meant to walk, I would not start off by describing the various kinds of accidents and injuries that could make someone limp. In a more in depth discussion, we would get to that, but only once we covered the essence of the thing.

           In the normal case, marriage leads to and is ordered to having and raising children. There are cases where that end is hindered, but that is not the normal case.

           Returning to your mistake about love and companionship as an example, what I said was that from the state’s perspective it had nothing to do with love and feelings.

           Do you think it should? Should the state go around interrogating people about their feelings? Should it create some kind of Federal love-test to see who should and should not get married? Or who is really married to whom? (Or to what?) What if their feelings change? Should we have yearly or quarterly feeling sessions where they decide who is and isn’t married as marked on official Federal Love and Feelings Form L3657? Or perhaps it is a state-level issue and each state should come up with its own Love & Feelings standards…

           Of course that is all absurd, and I am sure not just absurd to me, but absurd to you as well, which basically brings the comment back to the beginning. I can only suggest that you stop listening to the straw-man inside your own head and listen to and engage with the arguments that your interlocutors are actually making.

         • Sorry if I mis-stated your argument. I must not understand it.

           You seemed to say that the one thing that made marriage a metaphysical possibility was the possibility of producing offspring. Other things might go into it–companionship, love, etc.–but they were not necessary. Similarly, the couple might be sterile–from disease, age, etc–but that would not change the metaphysical status; we can’t require federal form L3656 which certifies that a battery of tests has proved the possibility of offspring. Similarly, lack of biological children but adopting others does not affect the metaphysical possibility or impossibility. I assume that having an out-of-wedlock kid that was adopted into the family also leaves the possibility unchanged.

           However, having two men or two women “marry” would not be metaphysically possible, even if, say, they adopted, or if one had a child through artificial insemination or surrogacy or old-fashioned intercourse that was adopted into the family.

         • Perhaps I am confusing two tracks of argument in your posts: one a metaphysical argument about what marriage can be, the other a factual argument about what the state cares about.

         • Roger,

           It was the latter, two tracks. They are related only in the sense of answering the question, “Why has recognizing who is married to whom been a concern of the state as compared to other relationships?”

           And the answer pointed back to the first track, that there is something unique about the marriage relationship.

           Cheers.

   • In my faith it is impossible for there to be a same-sex marriage. But that makes it easy for me to accept same-sex secular marriages. Why get worked up over it? My wife and I feel no threat to our hetero marriage in it and I know nobody that acts like it is a threat. A few talk as if it might be, but when asked exactly how the responses are pretty fluffy.

8. Collin, you wrote: “In terms, of private school, our family struggled with the opposite having a high function handicap child. We found the private schools in the area would simply feed into the handicap and the ‘uncaring’ public schools were better training for his future. ”

   Can you explain this a bit? In what way did the public schools train him better for his future?

   • Easy, struggling in with a somewhat uncaring environment gives him better practice for an average working job in the USA. Knowing you have success in your job (or class) with an uncaring employer, is great practice for the job market. In reality, the public schools in our area are fairly good despite being a minority heavy environment.

     The private schools focused on handicap children will more likely to feed in the handicap. (Otherwise they are ungodly expensive and school vouchers will drops in the bucket here.)

     • Thanks for explaining, Collin. I had never looked at it in this light!

9. I sent my kids to the nearest public school. They both turned out fine. Never worried much about it.

   I would’ve worried if the schools had a reputation for violence or drugs. But none of the places they attended was unusual in that regard.

   Picking the best school is roughly like picking the best stocks. On average, the best you can do is average. Bet on that.

   • Rich kids have better drugs, but they also wait until the weekend. So it’s this well-behaved, middle-class attitude: Homework first, and then the binge, and when the bender’s over, it’s back on the corporate track.

     • That wasn’t my experience back in the day. At the local private school the kids did coke in chemistry class.

       My approach was similar to Handle’s. Moved to one of the top 2-3 districts in the area, sent the kid to public school, and closely monitor progress, friends, and messages. Some I can de-program, some not. But even there I’m trying to insert a kill switch by saying ‘you’ll hit a point in early adulthood where you’ll have to decide for yourself what is true and what isn’t…choose wisely’. Might work or might be counterproductive, but that will be her choice.

       Seems to be working so far.

       • It also helps to stick to a few basic rules. For instance, we have a strict “no screens in bedrooms” policy, which besides being a good idea, also has the added benefit of being extremely simple to articulate and understand at a very young age. Any entertainment or browsing happens in a public area, which of course means no smartphones for the kids.

         A mostly disabled smartphone that sends all activity to the parents would be a great product and one I would definitely buy. But I haven’t seen anything like that available.

         There is also the tricky issue of what constitutes ‘kid friendly’ (ie maturity / age-based sequestration from messages the parents deem appropriate only for older kids, or adult-only). In other words, can you trust a company’s version of a kid filter to match what you would do if you were the censor?

         Just a year or two ago, LGBT-themed content would have been excluded by the mainstream kid filters. But various advocates have predictably pressured the major content companies to drop that criteria, with no ability for customers or parents to turn it on as an option. I don’t mean to focus on the LGBT thing really, only to use it as a salient example of a broader problem, since decisions on insulation must be values-based judgements, and that implicates tough culture war issues. But increasingly, any attempt at moderate filtration seems untenable, and one is effectively left with an all or nothing choice. And on my view, ‘nothing’ wins, since the vast majority of stuff out there is simply junk.

         As it is, I end up being a kind of home librarian, and when the kids want to know or research something, they kind of put in a request. This is not a well-developed system for me, just some ad hoc improvisation, trial and error experimentation, and gradual refinement by learning from experience.

         • ” I end up being a kind of home librarian, and when the kids want to know or research something, they kind of put in a request.”

           Seems like a fine enough model. To wit, when I was a child, if I was curious about X, I would ask my dad about it. He’d tell me what he knew of X, and then we’d visit the library on the weekend and check out books on X.

         • Yeah, I wish I’d have gotten in front of the smartphone thing more than I did. We got her one early because she was in a couple extracurriculars and we wanted her to have a phone for safety reasons.

           Didn’t all internalize the degree to which social media would be all-consuming.

10. Interesting there are not than many believers in the null hypothesis in the comments. Probably reveals that the null hypothesis may be useful for public policy making, but has limits when it comes to parenting.

    My advice: If your kids don’t have any meaningful uniquenesses (e.g., +/- 2 sigmas due to disabilities or gifts), then at the elementary level, pretty much any safe school will do. You can easily make up for poor instruction on the nights and weekends. And at the Middle and High Levels, pick school that has a critical mass of students (50 or more) you’d feel good about influencing your kid. If that means public fine. But in 90% of suburban and urban situations, that probably means private.

    • The null hypothesis simply states that their 40 year old SES will end up about the same no matter what. However, there is a lot more to life then that.

      I think your second paragraph is pretty spot on. I felt weird in school but I was +3SD. Elementary school was fine (as you say), but I felt really weird in middle school, and needed a high school with lots of other +3SD kids to function well.

      If your in an urban environment and UMC or lower then its probably private as the only safe option. Let’s say your UMC though, everyone faces the usual options:

      1) Pay an extra few hundred grand for a house so you get a “high end” public school.
      2) Don’t pay extra for house but send to private school because your public school is middling.
      3) Don’t pay extra and just live with middling.

      And of course every XX min of commuting each day makes those tradeoffs slightly easier at the expense of your time.

      I think the null hypothesis says that #3 is good enough, unless as you say the child has some kind of special talent that warrants special investment.

      Of course another wrinkle is that in certain Great Centralization cities #3 has risen to the price of #1, which means your fucked.

      Oh and #1-#3 all mean your kids will be taught to hate you by the school curriculum.

11. Do rich people think that poor people are contagious? That if rich kids are exposed to poor kids, they get infected with Poor Person’s Disease?

    I don’t know that rich kids can contract, through the germs on door handles, a higher level of impulsivity. The results of the Marshmallow Test are pretty stable over time. IQ tests aren’t a measure of whether a kid’s friends are rich or poor.

    I’m being uncharitable. I understand that teachers in bad schools spend most of their time putting out fires. It doesn’t leave a lot of time for education if the other students won’t stay in their seats. But still, professional parenting is out of control. Parents: Stop trying to control everything. Ease up.

    Unless the whole point is to impress and compete with the other wealthy, professional parents on Instagram. In which case: Keep bidding up the price of real estate so that even your kids, the alpha kids, can’t afford a home of their own when they leave the nest. Keep bidding up the price of higher ed. Make it an education in class markers and ever-finer distinctions between the different strata of rich people, so that the really rich kids, and only the really rich kids, know to talk like “one of us,” exquisitely sensitive to micro-aggressions and eager to be offended by the new wrong word.

    Which suggests one sense in which poor people really are contagious: The language we use. One wrong word would give the whole game away.

    • Brooking’s 3 rules to stay out of poverty:
      (1) Finish high school
      (2) Don’t have kids until (a) you’re married and (b) over 21
      (3) Have a full time job

      Of those, the first two can be influenced by peer social pressure in high school. So yes, poverty can be contagious.

      And ‘good kids don’t do that’ is not a counter-argument. No teen is entirely, or even mostly, rational.

      • Brooking’s 3 rules to stay out of poverty:
        (1) Finish high school
        (2) Don’t have kids until (a) you’re married and (b) over 21
        (3) Have a full time job

        Not anymore….(1) Finnish High School with some secondary education (2) Dont have kids until married and OVER 25 (3) Have a full time job in which you an irreplaceable talent.

        • Agree with #1 and #3. #2 is questionable for women. If you want kids or especially more than one start earlier than later. A lot of my friends wound up with 1 kid only or one biological and one adopted because they waited too long. We never got the second.

          Makes the strategies harder for women (kids vs. career balance). But reality is what it is.

          • The question was how to stay out of poverty not whether it was a good life choice. And I believe this primary reason for low fertility rates.
            Outside of Utah, I believe you decrease your chance of poverty by staying away from marriage and motherhood until 25. That does not mean there are exceptions (see Mormons in Utah) or you will avoid poverty.

            In general the divorce rate for first marriage reaches a lowpoint for people married 28 – 30 but that does not main a couple getting successfully married at 23 disproves stats. It is just later marriages (28 – 30) tends to have lower divorce rates (25%) versus 23 years old with divorce rates of 35%.

        • > (2) Dont have kids until married and OVER 25

          …unless you’re Mormon, in which case you can start when the wife is 18 (right after getting married) have 4-5 kids, and still be solidly middle-class and have the most photogenic family on Facebook.
          I jest, but not completely. Of course, I clarify that the wife is 18 because the men usually go on mission for a few years straight out of high school before they settle down.

    • In a not so bad public middle school I got the shit kicked out of me daily and the education was a joke. I had unusual things against me (major reconstructive surgery in fifth grade), but I think it would have been miserable nonetheless. One of our smart friends ended up doing drugs in middle school and became a failure. The biggest argument we got in with the administration is they weren’t willing to admit about the drug problems. And we didn’t live in some kind of ghetto.

      I was lucky to get into a magnet high school. I really do think it changed my life.

      At a minimum, being out of place leads to misery, and why should your child’s life be miserable.

      More generally, even if they end up with the same 40 year old SES due to their IQ, there is a lot more to life. What are their habits and attitudes? How do they date and who do they marry? How do they get to that same 40 year old SES, though a rewarding career or just a career?

12. I live in an area where many high schools have a tremendous range of SES. Title I schools with about 30% UMC, for example. Relatively few rich districts can completely wall themselves off from poor families. And yet it’s an area where the private schools aren’t considered significantly superior to the best publics, and mid-tier publics are considered pretty good.

    My son went to a mid-tier public HS, took eight AP courses and passed all the tests, got into a mid-tier public university (like me, he doesn’t care much about grades). I had little ability to change neighborhoods, and the peer group ranged from excellent to a tad terrifying. More relevant to his outcome was his IQ and his temperament–smart but not terribly willing to impress teachers. I don’t know where he gets it from.

    Worrying about public school indoctrination is pretty pointless. First, indoctrination is going to be far, far worse at private schools. The latter is far more likely to *mandate* liberal dogma than public, and private school teachers don’t have tenure so they have to comply. So your odds of getting a teacher interested in teaching or at least considering all views are better at public school.

    Reality is, most English and history teachers are liberal. A lot of them are going to teach liberal nonsense. Some of them are going to give poor grades to kids who don’t swallow their swill. Most won’t, though. And they won’t convince any kid that doesn’t want to be convinced.

    I’m GOP, Trump voter, mostly math teacher but currently also teaching US History at a Title I very diverse school in a deep blue district of a deep blue state. I design my own curriculum and no one tells me what to do. FWIW.

    Here’s an example of a class I taught:
    https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2016/12/24/teaching-us-history-in-the-trump-era/ . I doubt many private schools, reeling from the Trump win, would have allowed it. Intended as illustration, not proof.

13. Those who don’t know about the null hypothesis send their kids to ‘good’ schools because they want their kids to get a ‘good’ education. They don’t know that means that ‘good’ schools are good because they have a higher proportion of kids from families who value education. It’s self-fulfilling.

    I don’t think it’s bad to send you kids to a ‘good’ school. I think it may be a little better if you send them there knowing it’s good because others there value education, which generally means a safe environment with less disruption from learning and less peer pressure to underachieve.

    It’s also good to know that ‘good’ schools also have poor students so you don’t fall into the trap that the school solves everything.

14. Our kids are too young for school just yet, but we are planning to home-school. There’s a lot to say on the topic, but I’ll just try and focus on two main things:

    1. Contrary to common opinion, I assert that home-schooled kids are, by 18, actually better socialized than public or even private school kids (I say this as someone who went through public then entire way). My guess is that they tend to see more adult-adult social interaction, and that the behavior modeled tends to be more mature.

    2. You take on responsibility for their education, but that doesn’t mean you have to (or should) do it by yourself. There are lots of home-school groups and resources out there.

15. We also live in Montgomery County, and while not necessarily on the wrong side of the tracks, certainly not in the Potomac or Bethesda public school districts. After looking around a bit we settled on a parochial school in the area–the local Quaker school seemed to quixotic. A lot of the secular private schools are no better than the public schools on a number of these dimensions, but an old Sol Stern article was very persuasive that the cheaper parochial schools still taught a basic, hard-work ethos that wasn’t geared just to winning today’s status competition. So far we’ve been pretty impressed.

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