Morning Brew: April 8th, 2009

I'd want to know that my kid was attending a school made up of students with the greatest diversity possible.

I am a teacher, Jerrold. Trust me, most parents do not think in so enlightened a manner. There is a lot of social-Darwinism out there.

Yes parents should be able to shop for their kids. But we already have private schools so that kind of solves that pointless problem. Most view the public schools as one tier (with little to distinguish them from) and the private ones as a different tier.

But the private ones are really getting hard on their students. Most of them do the IB high school system (they all ignored the better structured AP system). So now it is a scramble to get kids into non-IB, non-AP private schools.

Also for public schools, parents may want some reassurance that their kids don't end up doing the thug life. Private schools have that type of monitoring and they actually CARE for their students.

<i>"parents may want some reassurance that their kids don't end up doing the thug life"</i> Excuse me?!?!? Don't parents parent anymore? Schools don't exist to teach children morals, values and common sense. There are no assurances in life - period. Maybe I should start whining about the fact that most of my hard earned property tax dollars are going towards public education when I don't even have children. I just can't do that - today's children are tomorrow's future leaders of this city, province and country! The general public needs to demand better education for ALL.

"Private schools have that type of monitoring and they actually CARE for their students."

Tron - while this may be a perceived notion - that private schools = better education, it also comes hand-in-hand with kids growing up in *extremely* sheltered environments, and NO assurance that they will not one day wind up in the "thug life" or so-to-speak. Additionally - it should be noted that private schools do not CARE about the students, they CARE about the insane tuition money being paid by the parents of said children, and further donations being handed to the school.

Also - I attended both private and public high schools - AND did the IB program. Today, I'm no better or worse than any other student I went to school with.

"Don't parents parent anymore? Schools don't exist to teach children morals, values and common sense."

Yes, many parents do still "parent". However, parenting only goes so far. You can't hover over your kids 24/7. If you send your kids to a school with serious problems, your kids have a much better chance of picking up some of those problems. You know, peer pressure from those kids with lousy parents who don't give a fuck.

Some schools perform better than others - performance is correlated with the income of parents, the value they place on education, their involvement with their kids, etc. "Diverse" schools perform badly on these measures. Kids from poor, single parent homes, kids where English is not spoken, kids where education is not valued, they all do poorly in class and drag down the performance of the entire class. Teachers are distracted by discipline problems and their pace is slowed to get sufficient remedial instruction to the slowest students. A student in the 80th percentile won't do as well in that class as they would in a class that had no discipline or remedial issues, they'd be in the middle or slower part of the class instead of the absolute front... Compound that over 14 years of education and you'll see a huge difference in performance.

The best performing schools tend to be in neighbourhoods with very successful parents and/or where the vast majority of parents value education highly (certain ethnic & religious groups, highly educated low-wage professionals...). Involved parents know these things and will do all that they can to ensure their kids get the best education possible.

Toronto Life had a great article in September 08 about the competitiveness of parents around highly rated schools http://www.torontolife.com/features/ps-i-love-you/ A very tiny few will, like Jerrold claims, live out their professed values about diversity and send their kids to a horrible school, damaging them for life (like Jimmy Carter sending his daughter to a DC public school), while most will profess the PC nostrums while fighting like ferrets to get every advantage possible.

Not sure why there's the hate for IB here - there are a large number of public and catholic schools in Torono that offer IB (including Vaughan Road and Michael Power). IB is the most advanced academic standard available, recognized internationally and offered globally, making it far easier to find a school when a family has to move cities or continents. AP doesn't have the structure and the offerings at AP level are idiosyncratic. Some of the best private schools in the world have gone IB, including Cheltenham Ladies' College and Fettes (Tony Blair's alma mater). In Toronto Branksome, UCC, TFS, and The York School are all IB.

The whole idea that by removing this information from a Ministry of Ed site would do anything is hilarious. It would just serve as another leg up for higher socioeconomic status parents by increasing the barriers to getting the information. All of the data is public (from Stats Can, school report cards, etc) and can be fairly easily integrated by layering census tract information with school catchment zones. In some cases free information isn't sufficiently detailed, but anyone with access to (expensive) commercial GIS info can do it very easily. This is all public information, just presented in a more manageable way - having the government "protecting" us by making public information harder to use is quite hilarious.

If one does have to send one's children to public school (shudder), the easiest way to sort schools is by looking for proximity to synagogues and French Immersion programs. Jewish culture puts an especially high value on education, and the shabbos requirements mean that synagogues have dense clusters around them. Early Immersion is very challenging, with any children who struggle for any reason being sent to English programs. Immersion is also only sought out by highly involved parents with a serious commitment to their children's education - it's basically free private school with more restrictive demographics than UCC (much lower immigrant %ge and basically no one who doesn't speak English at home). These are rough heuristics, but the best available if you don't have GIS data and certain lobby groups are successful in hiding information.

Other heuristics besides synagogues and EFI are to avoid areas with rental housing occupied by families and aim for the highest possible property values. School systems with fairly stringent catchment restrictions see school quality highly correlated with property values through a tightly coupled positive feedback loop. This can be seen in the DC suburbs, Chicago suburbs, and in real estate ads for certain midtown Toronto neighbourhoods (houses in Allenby and John Ross Robertson catchments advertise that fact prominently). Rosedale, Forest Hill, Hogg's Hollow, and Bayview don't see that as much since the houses are fairly differentiated as it is, residents can generally afford multiple private school tuitions, and they have monopolies on neighbourhood schools or have multiple excellent options (i.e. Rosedale sending pupils to Rosedale PS or Whitney PS).

Exactly right.

http://www.thestar.com/article/606543

Thought this was relevant.

"The handful of Oakville schools that only offer French immersion are driving students out of their neighbourhood in search of an English program and are also leading to "segregation" based on gender and ability, a group of parents charge"
...
"When school systems are segregated along social class lines or by student ability, then children from families of a low socioeconomic status and children of lower ability on average learn at a slower pace while students from families of higher socioeconomic status and with higher abilities tend to do only slightly better, he added."

How dare we let our kids reach their full potential while other kids are lagging behind because they (and their parents) don't give a shit about education!!