Asymmetrical Information

LB is not saying "the public schools must be better," she is saying "it is wrong to describe all inner city public schools as worthless," as you are attempting to do.

So I'm clear on How Not to Be a Racist - saying 'urban areas' when talking about gun violence is no good, but dividing people into 'poor, brown' and 'paler, more affluent,' that's ok, right?

Yes, we are using a different definition of "inner city". LizardBreath's definition is closer to that used by most of the people I went to business school with: if there is a significant number of poor, brown people in a neighbourhood, it must be the ghetto.

Nice implicit accusation of racism for calling Washington Heights the inner city; very courteous of you. Your description of Washington Heights as globally gentrified is simply inaccurate.

LizardBreath is a great blogger and undoubtedly a fine mom. But she's also a well-paid lawyer. Her kids should not be getting more out of the public system than some kid growing up in a Bronx housing project.

My point throughout this conversation has been that there are good schools that poor inner city children attend in significant numbers, among which is the school my children attend. My kids are in school with kids from Washington Heights housing projects. While there are certainly effectively segregated urban schools attended only by children of the upper middle class, those aren't all of the well-functioning urban public schools.

Your initial posts on this suggested that the public school system was bad enough that any change had to make things better, and that just isn't true; even for poor kids, there's a lot that works about the system we have. This isn't a reason not to make things better, but it means that we have to pay attention to how we change things for fear of making them worse.

If the problem you see that can only be addressed by vouchers is limited to those schools in neighborhoods that are literally on fire at all times, what makes you think that vouchers will make better schools available in those neighborhoods?

LizardBreath, you have been assuring me that your children attend an inner city school because it is overwhelmingly minority, and has a large low-income population. I was working off what seems to be your definition of "inner city". What, then, is your definition, such that Washington Heights qualifies?

We had a natural experiment with large populations shifting from public schools to private schools in this country some 40 years ago. By doing so they eliminated union and other political problems you claim ruin schools. The natural experiment I am talking about is the shift to private academies to avoid segregation in many southern states.

There is zero evidence that this natural experiment achieved a single one of the objectives you claim vouchers would achieve. It clearly did not improve the education the children got.

Face the facts, parents have a strong propensity to sort themselves out in this country. Just as in housing if a single school starts to integrate -- by socioeconomic background rather the race in this case -- the parents that provide a stronger
socioeconomic background will desert the school in droves just as they desert neighborhood that start to deteriorate.

You have a theory that has no evidence to support it--not even common sense.

If you want to achieve your goal of saving a few poor kids throw your support behind some scheme to bus a few inner city kids to good schools but keep the number going to any one school very low.
At least this would save a few kids, but your claims that vouchers would achieve widespread
improved education for poor kids is pure pie in the sky that has no support in fact.

As a matter of fact it probably counterproductive.
Liberals like Drum and you would love to achieve the same objective. However, because they believe your advocating of vouchers is just some scheme to destroy unions they will not cooperate with you to achieve the objective you both want.

http://www.choicetrust.org/Home.asp

For someone claiming to support vouchers
I would expect to find your name on the
donor rolls at one of the many private
voucher foundations?

The above link is one such organization.

Do you really "Care about the children"
Or is your support of vouchers just a
political stance?

bgates, you misunderstand me. It is not racist to acknowlege that:

1) Brown people in America are on average poorer than white people in America
2) Browner, poorer people commit more crimes, have worse educational outcomes, and higher levels of varying social problems, than whiter, richer people.

On those facts, liberals and conservatives can agree. What I object to is saying that *therefore*, browner poorer people can't be trusted with guns, or *therefore*, any neighbourhood with poor, brown people in it is a slum, etc.

Lizard, about a third of New York City's schools are failing; those failing schools are concentrated in failing neighbourhoods. That seems like a better definition of "inner city" to me than what I take to be yours, especially since it generalises beyond New York to the rest of the country, where there's very little gentrification upping school quality.

How is the definition just offered not completely circular?

Well, for definitions of inner city, I start with the fact that Washington Heights is located in the center of quite a large city. Clearly, what people mean by 'inner city' is to exclude those urban neighborhoods that are segregated enclaves of the upper middle class and wealthy; most of downtown Manhattan, Brooklyn Heights, Park Slope and so on. But a neighborhood like Washington Heights, that is literally in the center of a city and has a substantial poor and low income population is an 'inner city' neighborhood.

I grew up in New York just like you did -- I'm not fainting at the sight of non-white faces on the street.

It's not literally in the center of a city; it's actually rather on the periphery, if you measure New York geographically, rather than socially. Hell's Kitchen has a substantial poor and low income population; is it the inner city? How about the housing projects running up and down Columbus on the UWS?

Whoa, how is Washington Heights the ghetto? My mother and her sisters grew up there and they are still involved with their alma mater. People there are brown now but they're basically the same people as when my family lived there one generation ago. The difference isn't the population; it's the presence of the drugs and inadequate policing. Saying "my children actually go to school with people FROM THE PROJECTS" is pretty relevatory. Sorry, that's just not that big a deal. That just means "my children go to an urban public school."

If I were convinced that vouchers would improve the quality of education in the inner city (however defined), I'd support them without equivocation. I'm just not sure that the rules and regulations that would get accumulated over time wouldn't end up weighing down the voucher schools, and ultimately making them about as bad as the government schools are today.

That just means "my children go to an urban public school."

Exactly. A school that poor urban children attend, and yet it works just fine. My point throughout this is that it is a dangerous oversimplification to think that our public school system is so messed up that poor children have nothing to lose from change -- they have schools like the one I'm talking about to lose.

As I said before, this isn't a reason not to make things better at all, but it means that making things worse is something we do have to worry about.

P.S. 75 was certainly no home to the geeky white kid back in 1978, when I was in the 2nd grade. But that's where I went. The decidedly mixed number of races, creeds and colors was a benefit to the school. It was a good enough to make the cover of New York Magazine that year as one of the 10 best public schools in the city that school year (My friend Emily was one of those on the cover).

Jane seems to have a very narrow view of what an "inner city" school is. And I disagree with her assessment. I went to an inner city elementary and High School. The kids were socioeconomic ally diverse, rules static, the classes large, and the pest problem unpleasant. But I wouldn't trade my experiences there for anything. The relief of getting out of my predominantly white upper middle class private junior high school (even with it's scholarship program)was palpable and the number of things I learned from the students alone I couldn't fit in a book.

There are myriad reasons I oppose vouchers but to say that only bad schools are inner city is preposterous and wrong. I'm with LizardBreath on this one.

Why is this so complicated? Lizardbreath, everyone who has any knowledge of Washington Heights is rejecting your categorization. Your school is not the kind of school Jane is talking about. You only think it is because you're impressed that there are actual children from the projects in it.

even for poor kids, there's a lot that works about the system we have. This isn't a reason not to make things better, but it means that we have to pay attention to how we change things for fear of making them worse.

I am in no position to parse NYC's neigborhoods. But what I love about this comment--with which I agree in principle--is its application to medical care, which is what kicked off this series of posts and comment threads. We have a lot to lose by scrapping the current medical system, too. It's foolish to change things for 100% of the people if only 10-15% are going to benefit from the change, and everyone else is going to get hurt.

Hence my generally conservative bent: if it is not necessary to change, then it is necessary not to change.

"Inner city public school" is not co-extensive with "failing ghetto school." If you want to say that all inner city schools are failing, on the face of it, you seem to be wrong; LB's blogged about her kids and their good, heavily immigrant populated, generally low-income Washington Heights public school in the past.

If you want to define "inner city public school" to mean "failing ghetto school in a poor area", you're well within your rights.

But that makes your claim flat-out tautological: failing ghetto schools are failing ghetto schools. With such methodology, it's no wonder every so-called inner city school is a failure; if it's a success, then it's no longer counted, no matter the income of the community.

Look, I take you to be attempting to make an interesting claim about public schools and ways of improving education; but your argument's severely weakened if you cherry-pick only the failing schools as representative of the urban public school system.

Has everyone argued themselves into believing that the public school system actually functions now? I laugh so I do not weep.

Take one of your claims for example.

You claim vouchers would allow schools in poor neighborhoods to retain good teachers and these good teachers would not transfer to better schcols as soon as they get the experience to qualify.

Now remember, you are not spending more money with vouchers then without them. So are you going to pay them more-- where will the money come from. I know, you will eliminate fraud and corruption. Guess what that sounds like -- a politician making pie in the sky promises. Are you going to provide them an enriched environment where their students
will be so good that it will be a pleasure to teach them. Not likely.

Provide me some details about how vouchers will keep good teachers from moving to better schools.

Who is Common Reader citing up there with "everyone who has any knowledge of Washington Heights is rejecting your categorization." Near as I can tell, the only people who have done so are Jane, with her question-begging def, and C R. Wow, what a quorum.

I'm pretty sure the geographical center of NYC is somewhere near Flatbush.

Jane Galt, what is your definition of a failing school?

It's swell that LizardBreath has found a good inner-city-New-York-public-school, but let's not forget that NYC as a whole (along with several other urban areas) has an on-time graduation rate of under 40%. (I'd provide the link, but this site has been dropping my posts into a black hole somewhere.)

As I said before, this isn't a reason not to make things better at all, but it means that making things worse is something we do have to worry about.

Well, what's the reason for worrying about "making things worse"?

If NYC offered a voucher aimed at poor children (which is typically the case with all American voucher programs), one of the impoverished black or Hispanic families in your school might finally get the chance to send their kid to their parish school. Incidentally, studies of vouchers offered in NYC by the School Choice Scholarship Foundation found that black kids who got a voucher ended up doing 4 to 8 percentage points better on the Iowa tests. (See Howell and Peterson, "Latest Results from the
New York City Voucher Experiment").

But even if test scores don't increase, the parents and the kid may be happier. And what harm has been done? Has income stratification increased? Has racial segregation increased?

I have a definition of "inner city", which I gave in the post--it's an area without a middle class. That's what the term was coined to describe, as whites and affluent blacks fled American cities after desegretation rulings. In those neighbourhoods, almost all the schools are failing, but they're not inner city neighbourhoods because the schools are failures; the causation runs the other way. You could have a successful charter school or private school in East New York (and for all I know, someone does), and that would still be an inner city school, because it would be in an inner city neighbourhood, with inner city parents, and inner city problems. PS 75 is not an inner city school, nor was PS 166, because our neighbourhood was not characterised by the kind of social and economic chaos, among either the poor or the rich, that the term "inner city" was originally invented to describe.

Yes, JRoth, that's true. That's the point; LB is trying to make some sort of weird geographical/non-geographical distinction by which a gentrifying neighbourhood can be placed in the inner city. Geographically, it is not the inner city. Nor is it socially or economically what the term usually means--a neighbourhood with severe social and economic problems, whose residents are physically isolated from economic opportunity. Washington Heights fits none of these definitions. Its lower income residents may not have a lot of money, but they're not dysfunctional.

None of the poor residents in Washington Heights are dysfunctional? All of the residents in your "inner city" neighborhoods are dysfunctional? I doubt it.

I just got called out by Jane in an email so I need to disclose here. I went to Stuyvesant High School. It is a free public school for which you have to pass a very hard exam. It has been said it is more competitive to get into than Harvard (which I think is misleading. At least at Harvard the applicant pool is by definition not stupid whereas any idiot can take the exam for Stuyvesant).

I think that your definition of an inner-city is bad Jane. And I would venture to say that when we grew up the schools we went to were inner-city by your definition. The UWS was NOT a nice neighborhood. The simple addition of a few young white people with kids hardly changes that fact.

I'll give you that my high school wasn't inner city but I'm shocked that your elementary school sounds that much better than PS 75.

Hasn't this discussion wandered from the central issue of vouchers? Most of us don't care about the geography of Manhattan! It seems to me that the main issue concerns the administration of schools. Should schools be administered by government or by the private sector? Few doubt that education should be publicly funded, but it's the administration that matters. Vouchers are a way of publicly funding but privately administering education. There's no union bashing here - unions are popular in the public sector because the government is a poor employer. Unions have declined in the private sector because the private sector has learned to be a better employer. Government hasn't, and may not be able to. There's no quick solution, but it seems to me that market forces will result in a better deal for teachers, students, and parents - it just won't happen quickly.

My elementary school was not good . . . but it wasn't what the kids in Mott Haven went through. You and I had a floor under us; our schools could only be so bad before our parents pulled us out and sent us to private school, which, IIRC, both our parents did.

If the only quibble is that there is some small group of kids in gentrifying neighbourhoods who might be made worse off by vouchers, then fine, I concede; I don't believe that there is any such thing as a policy change which makes no one worse off. But a voucher programme would also make some kids unambiguously better off, particularly the ones whose parents would like to send them to parochial school but for the funds.

The kids who would be made worse off under a voucher programme are the kids whose parents are too addled to understand and/or care that their kid is in a terrible school. Most of those kids are not in LB's neighbourhood; they are in what I am defining as an inner city neighbourhood. Call it whatever you want--how about "Joe"? Kids in "Joe" neighbourhoods are the ones who are vulnerable in a voucher programme; they are also the kids who have absolutely no hope whatsoever right now.

JBS, come on, this is pointless quibbling. Some of the people sitting at my desk right now are dysfunctional. The point is, certain areas don't merely have some dysfunctional people, but are so screwed up that dysfunction is dominant.

My parents gave me the option of where to go for Jr. HS, the zoned JHS, a magnate JHS which was public and the private school I went to and I picked the private school which was much the worst educational experience of my life.

My big objection to vouchers is that I don't want to pay for someone else’s religious indoctrination. I have no issue with school choice, and it seems to me that much of the problems you wish to solve could still be solved without vouchers simply by having school choice.

In addition with vouchers you end up having so much crap to regulate. I also worry that if you start offering economic incentives to people to start schools and offer government money to those schools then you will end up with schools that are trying to make a profit, much like the Edison project which didn't work in the long run.

I've just never understood how vouchers are possibly a practical solution to the problems we face with education.

At what point does the voucher driven flux of dysfunctional students (or families) destroy the functional character of the schools that they move to?

Jane Galt, my point is that the failure of dysfunctional kids is more noticeable when they are concentrated in one school but that does not mean they will actually do any better if they are spread out.

What are you arguing? That there is a tipping point once the proportion of dysfunctional kids reaches a certain level past which the functional kids don't learn anything either? That dysfunctional kids themselves do better if surrounded by functional kids?

I suspect like most people you judge school quality by outcomes without adjusting for the quality of the students which is ridiculous.

Kate has serious concerns which deserve attention. Would vouchers result in religious indoctrination? Probably. But is that worse than any other indoctrination? All education is indoctrination, but most of us get over it. And yes, people could respond to the profit incentive and make money from private education. But if kids get a good education, why should we begrudge someone a little profit from their efforts?

At this point, I'm way less concerned with whether Mom wants them to learn about Jesus, than I am with whether they can do math and reading. The republic survived for almost two centuries with prayer in schools. It cannot survive a permanent underclass of illiterates.

JBS: Yes, isn't that obvious? Dysfunction creates its own equilibria. Dysfunctional and functional kids have a better chance to do better in an orderly environment where the social norms support getting decent grades, graduating, not getting pregnant, and so forth, than in a place where the cultural norms foster those things. This will not save every dysfunctional kid, but it will save the ones who become dysfunctional as a result of the surrounding peer group.

I lived in Washington Heights for a couple of years following my divorce, and I would describe it as "inner city" because there were drug dealers standing in front of the deli across the street day and night. I know this isn't a geographical distinction, but that's how I "feel" the term.

My children continued to attend PS 87 on the Upper West Side, because I had lived in the catchment area prior to my divorce and my younger ones benefitted from the (now defunct) automatic sibling enrollment policy. This is a school where wealthy and involved parents supplement the district budget with both time and money. All supplies down to the copy machine paper are donated by parents, and several of the staff (kindergarten aides, art and music teachers, etc) are paid for out of the $400,000-ish per year that parents donate. That is precisely the sort of public school that "doesn't really count."

My oldest is now at Stuyvesant and my middle one is about to start a $650 test-prep class offered by her Upper West Side middle school to help kids get into the good high schools. They don't count, either.

Washington Heights is not inner city? Come on.

James B. Shearer said:

What are you arguing? That there is a tipping point once the proportion of dysfunctional kids reaches a certain level past which the functional kids don't learn anything either? That dysfunctional kids themselves do better if surrounded by functional kids?

I really don't want to sound snide, but this is the only way to ask this question that shows flabbergasted I am by this statement: Are you for real? Didn't everybody learn this in, like, grade school?

I'm not dealing with a public school here, but I'm the executive officer for an Army training unit, and I can tell you that yes, there's a network effect from dysfunctional people in an organization. The old cliche about a few bad apples is a cliche because it's the dead truth.

You have a small group of people who will do the right thing no matter what (call them group A), a small group of unredeemable dirtbags (group C), and a large middle that will tend to follow the prevailing culture of those around them (group B). It takes surprisingly few bad apples to generate that kind of culture. When you have people screwing up constantly, your Cadre will have to spend a great deal of time dealing with them (the old 10%/90% rule), and smaller infractions by otherwise good Soldiers (group B) tends to get overlooked by Drill Sergeants. As the group B Soldiers get away with more small stuff, they tend to try to push the envelope more and more, and the Drills tend to get overwhelmed. The group C people can start really acting out, and then your group B people can get away with even bigger offenses, since they now seem like small potatoes, both to the Drills and Privates. It's a vicious cycle, and pretty soon, everybody "knows" that you can get away with stuff.

A related dynamic is that your malcontents directly drag down some marginal Soldiers. One of our big guns is an Article 15: we take their pay and bust them down in rank, as well as put them on longer hours. You've got some marginal troops that wouldn't want to lose money for having alcohol on their own, but if you've got one who visibly doesn't care about getting fined $303, some others will think he's "cool" and follow his lead. Also, many people wouldn't hold onto contraband themselves, but will happily take a shot if offered (or, more likely, sold). These two related dynamics feed into the larger cycle I mentioned above.

It's these dynamics that caused an instructor in my officer training course to say that you should always stomp on small stuff. An example that he gave is to almost fly into a rage* over a lightswitch being installed upside-down in a building project, because if they see you caring about little piddly crap like that, they're a lot less likely to try to pull one over on you about something important.

And to answer your questions: Yes, there's a tipping point where the entire organization as a whole becomes dysfunctional, and worthless even for the good people in it. Also, in a functional organization, your good people--here including your follower middle--will help keep your marginal people on the straight and narrow (ostracism is a powerful tool), and people who tend towards dysfunction will show markedly better behavior.

*for the military in the audience, he was saying that he as an NCO should do this, not necessarily me as an officer.

No Jane Galt, it is not obvious that there will be a discontinuous response at some "tipping point" as the fraction of dysfunctional students increases.

An alternative model would be students tend to regress to the mean ability level. Say for example if a class is half level 12 ability and half level 8 ability and mean ability level acounts for half of achievement. Then the 12s will perform at level 11 and the 8s at level 9. 8s and 12s will both perform better as the fraction of 12s increases but there will be no discontinuous response.

However suppose you are correct and there is a tipping point such that adding one additional dysfunctional student can change a good school into a bad school by changing the student culture. Then good vrs bad has nothing to do with teacher quality, or the physical facilities, or educational spending or methods, or teacher's unions or anything else that reformers focus on. This means if charter or voucher schools do better it is by skimming off the cream as public school advocates claim and that they cannot be a general solution for bad schools.

Catcube, ok suppose bad schools are bad because they have too many unredeemable dirtbags. How exactly are vouchers going to solve this problem? Some schools are going to get stuck with the dirtbags.

James B. Shearer said:
Some schools are going to get stuck with the dirtbags.

But if you can keep their numbers low, and surround them with better people, it'll help mitigate their influence. The dirtbags won't feed off of each other, and the surrounding culture of good people will be more resistant.

The ideal solution is to get rid of people who are disruptive and have no intention of learning. I don't see any way that that is politcally possible. Barring that, it's best to keep the number of dirtbags distributed and isolated, not concentrated in one place.

BTW, I'm not claiming that military units (which is what I was discussing) are bad simply because they have too many bad people. More important is the skill with which leaders handle them to keep them from gaining influence, and infecting other people with dysfunction, and turning the organization as a whole dysfunctional. The reason I brought it up is that the breathtaking (to me) claim that dysfunctional people can't drag an organization down as a whole.

Washington Heights is NOT the inner city. I live there, 720 W 173rd if you care to know and I am as white as white bread. (Though I trend brown in the summer.)

It is not, however, either Tribeca or the Upper East Side; my income is probably in the top 1% of my ZIP code, but roughly average in 10021, etc.

There are a few schools that have been successful with a student body that comes entirely from dysfunctional neighborhoods, without skimming the cream or expelling many students, so teaching these kids is NOT impossible. (Aside from the ones that really are seriously retarded or mentally ill.) Besides having exceptional leadership, I suspect these schools also borrow some methods from boot camp - and have the advantage of getting their intake a few years younger than the Army does, giving them a better chance of straightening out the bad apples.

However, you can't imitate these schools across the board. First off, can you imagine what many middle-class parents would do if you put their precious 14 year old brats through something approaching boot camp? (Now, mine might have thought it was a good idea...) Second, there just aren't that many principals good enough to make it work.

Catcube said:

"... Barring that, it's best to keep the number of dirtbags distributed and isolated, not concentrated in one place."

This depends on the fraction of dirtbags and the tipping point. If the dirtbag fraction is 10% and the tipping point is 5% spreading the dirtbags out evenly will just ruin all the schools. Better to concentrate them in 10% of the schools allowing the other 90% of the schools to function.

JBS,

The fraction of "dirtbags" in ANY organization is 10%. These are the 10% of the people who take up 90% of your time; hence, the 10%/90% rule that CAtCube alluded to.

The interesting thing is that the relative level of "dirtbag" can change from organization to organization, but the 10% are always there. Let me give an example. A teacher I know was hired after school started and the enrollment showed that they needed another teacher. The principal, one of the few I've met who was rather clueless, told the other teachers in the grade level to each pick 5 students from their class to go to the new teacher's class. You can imagine the results--everyone got rid of their 10%! But the really interesting thing was in the new class, there was only a 10%. The teacher spent 90% of her time with the bottom 10%. I found that to be a very interesting stratification.

James B Shearer said:

"Better to concentrate them in 10% of the schools allowing the other 90% of the schools to function. "

No, the best route in that case is to simply close 10% of schools and throw the students that would go to those schools over the side. They're getting zero benefit from being there, and just vacuuming up resources better spent elsewhere.

But I honestly don't believe that the fraction of irredeemably dysfunctional students in the population as a whole is that high. The vast majority are in the group B (follow the crowd) that I mentioned above. But when they get put into a school that's already messed up, they follow the existing messed-up culture.

I'm outlining the organizational dynamics I've observed in my (very, very limited) experience to correct what I perceived as an incorrect assumption about the effect of disruptive people. I'm not sure that there's a politically possible solution to this. I think an ideal is to not require students who don't want to be there and truly don't care about their eduacation to attend. I don't know of a workable way to do that in practice.

In the Army's Initial Entry Training units, we've got an endstate of turning out disciplined Soldiers to the force, and there's a very clearly defined set of standards for all of their academic and physical tasks that we can check them against. We also have a relatively short time horizon. If a Soldier has been with us for more than about 15 weeks, there's a real problem somewhere. We will chapter out Soldiers that could *maybe* be redeemable with a great deal of effort, because we don't perceive that the expenditure of effort to be worth the additional Soldier, and they will be a marginal Soldier at best.

The school system doesn't have a comparably well-defined mission, and has students for years. Also, the consequences of throwing somebody out even if they could be redeemed is different. Ultimately, if we chapter them out of the Army, they've only lost a job, and it's one that let them get vaccinations and a dental check-up along the way. By the time they get to us, they've already got their high-school education. If you throw them out of a school, they don't even have that.

CatCube:

"But I honestly don't believe that the fraction of irredeemably dysfunctional students in the population as a whole is that high [10%]."

But we aren't talking about the population as a whole we are talking about the very worst public schools.

My daughter went from a private school to a public highs school. One that is rated in the top public high schools in the US. One that is so competitive that the top 25% of the class has straight As. The area it draws from is a mix of very expensive houses , middle class and upper middle class homes, and cheap apartments with substantial minority populations. It has the cream of the crop in teachers, strong extracurricular programs, good community support. We were told we were lucky she could go there.

Yet it has a significant gang problem. When I asked my daughter why she always had all her books in her backpack she said that she couldn't visit her locker at noon to change books and that there wasn't enough time to get to her locker between classes. She couldn't visit her locker at lunch because that hall was where one of the gangs ate lunch and the one time she tried to go to her locker she got shoved around, tripped, kicked and racial slurs directed at her. (One of the politest was "White ".)

Her supposedly superior teachers that promised to keep in touch by email never did. They didn't check their voicemail when I left messages. They her slide into significant academic problems without talking to us. Nobody gave us the clues we needed to find out what the problem was (anxiety disorder with some mild OCD) until we moved her back to private school.

They were unhappy when we pulled her, since she was classed as gifted (they got extra money for having her in classes) and had just been named a National Merit semifinalist. Our experience was not unique. The system is badly broken and needs to be overhauled from top to bottom.

CatCube,

You have to remember that the lowest acceptable GCT for the military is roughly 100. (At least nowadays, I well remember Project 100,000 that forced us to take people below 100 GCT. What a disaster that was!) But for the civilian population, a GCT of 100 is the AVERAGE. (For non-military types, GCT roughly equates to IQ.)

Most public schools do a good job with the average student, defined as including two standard deviaitons from the mean. It's the outliers on both ends that have a hard time. The outliers on the low end create a ripple effect that moves partly up into the other IQ regions. These outliers need a lot of help, and if they don't have parental support, they usually don't make it in the school system. Or in later life. Some become barely functional literates, others remain functionally illiterate, while others don't function at all.

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