Just up front: we homeschool, so we're not particularly invested in this issue.
But, I think it makes sense to look back on the earlier history of schooling in the US, back when we were the most intensely literate nation on earth. What did school look like then? Some things I've picked up just from random historical biographies and things:
1. School wasn't compulsory.
2. Outside cities, schools were run as co-ops-- think about the Little House on the Prarie books, if you've read them: there you have a picture of rural farming towns where all the families in the community would get together, donate labor, build a schoolhouse, and then everybody would pony up some of the money to hire a teacher. The "school board" was simply the parents in that group who had the time and resources to interview potential teachers and take point on any problems that developed with the building or the teacher. Depending on how poor the district was, the teacher might have his/her own living space near the school, or might split up the school year sleeping at the different families' houses, or might even have a room rented for them in a boarding house.
3. Teachers didn't hold a college degree, and were paid very little. To become a licensed teacher, you had to pass a teacher exam (usually). Teachers were often not-yet-married girls in their late teens or early twenties, or young men picking up a little extra money between high school and a decent job or college-- being a teacher for a couple years was a great way for a young man to leave home and see new faraway places. Weirdly, this meant that the pool of available teachers tended to be much higher-quality than it is now-- parents complained it was very hard to keep a teacher for more than a year, because the ladies would get married, and the young men would go on to better careers. This was irritating for school admins, but students benefited from a labor pool heavily seeded with young, intelligent, talented, and enthusiastic teachers destined to move on and become engineers, inventors, politicians, lawyers, doctors, etc.
4. Students, at least in the smaller more rural schools, were not rigorously segregated by age. They were more likely to be grouped by what they'd already learned.
5. Students attended school for fewer hours a day, fewer days each year, and most of them for fewer years. Kindergarten for five-year-olds wasn't a thing, and not many went past eighth grade. And they were still more literate/numerate than most kids in high school now.
There are probably some other valuable things to be gleaned from the pre-industrial-schooling era here-- I'd love to see what others have noted.
But also, we lived outside the US briefly, and it was interesting to see how other people tackle this problem. The South American country where we lived does not have a public school system. Just doesn't exist. There's a legal requirement to educate your children, and the vast majority of parents meet that by sending their kids to private schools, which are everywhere, and exist at many levels of affordability-- from elite private academies to your neighborhood Catholic schools all the way down to charity schools run for the desperately poor. And from what I heard (knew someone who taught in one of the expensive schools), the quality of education... wasn't necessarily better in the expensive schools. The benefit of going there was to have your kids hang out with other rich kids, not get a better education.
There were definitely good things and worse things about this, many of them specific to the country and its culture and geography-- it's just really hard to get in and set up a school, and get kids to attend it, when they live in a jungle village accessible only by boat, and the whole village picks up and moves every year. It's hard to have a school serving isolated mountain farmer families. The children of the rich were often poorly served by their schools, because teachers learned to give good grades to keep parents happy, even if the students performed poorly and didn't learn anything. Because a couple of disgruntled rich parents would get you fired, as a teacher.
Still, even without *any* tax funding, most kids at least had *access* to a formal elementary education. Church-affiliated schools were extremely common but not the only game going, and the most impressive thing seemed to be how *many* schools there were. Nobody was obliged to ride a bus to get to school, in the city, because it seemed like there was a little school every few blocks! They all walked. There was a school right next to our apartment-- never once saw a pileup of cars waiting to pick up or drop off kids. Hooray for decentralization.
Here, right now, in the US... I don't know how to find out how much overall the fedgov spends on schooling, but it is very easy to find the numbers for what various school districts spend *per student*-- including admin and buildings and lunches and curricula and lawn maintenance-- the whole shebang. And when you compare that to the tuition at most private schools, the difference is hair-curling. NY state famously spends over $20k per student per year, in the public schools (with famously bad results, particularly in the big city). In my state the average (as of 2018?) was around $10k per child (it's gone up a bit since)--but I just looked up my old church school and its current tuition, and it is still outperforming its neighboring public schools for only $8k/yr.
When I was in school, we also had access to a great pool of unlicensed non-career-track teachers, that included fresh-out-of-college trainee pastors (history, theology), the church accountant (algebra), a retired engineer (trigonometry), an RN (biology), the church's music director (band), and some talented volunteer moms (home ec). In my state, private schools are not obligated to hire licensed teachers, but they are extremely motivated to hire competent people.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2022-11-07 01:52 pm (UTC)But, I think it makes sense to look back on the earlier history of schooling in the US, back when we were the most intensely literate nation on earth. What did school look like then? Some things I've picked up just from random historical biographies and things:
1. School wasn't compulsory.
2. Outside cities, schools were run as co-ops-- think about the Little House on the Prarie books, if you've read them: there you have a picture of rural farming towns where all the families in the community would get together, donate labor, build a schoolhouse, and then everybody would pony up some of the money to hire a teacher. The "school board" was simply the parents in that group who had the time and resources to interview potential teachers and take point on any problems that developed with the building or the teacher. Depending on how poor the district was, the teacher might have his/her own living space near the school, or might split up the school year sleeping at the different families' houses, or might even have a room rented for them in a boarding house.
3. Teachers didn't hold a college degree, and were paid very little. To become a licensed teacher, you had to pass a teacher exam (usually). Teachers were often not-yet-married girls in their late teens or early twenties, or young men picking up a little extra money between high school and a decent job or college-- being a teacher for a couple years was a great way for a young man to leave home and see new faraway places. Weirdly, this meant that the pool of available teachers tended to be much higher-quality than it is now-- parents complained it was very hard to keep a teacher for more than a year, because the ladies would get married, and the young men would go on to better careers. This was irritating for school admins, but students benefited from a labor pool heavily seeded with young, intelligent, talented, and enthusiastic teachers destined to move on and become engineers, inventors, politicians, lawyers, doctors, etc.
4. Students, at least in the smaller more rural schools, were not rigorously segregated by age. They were more likely to be grouped by what they'd already learned.
5. Students attended school for fewer hours a day, fewer days each year, and most of them for fewer years. Kindergarten for five-year-olds wasn't a thing, and not many went past eighth grade. And they were still more literate/numerate than most kids in high school now.
There are probably some other valuable things to be gleaned from the pre-industrial-schooling era here-- I'd love to see what others have noted.
But also, we lived outside the US briefly, and it was interesting to see how other people tackle this problem. The South American country where we lived does not have a public school system. Just doesn't exist. There's a legal requirement to educate your children, and the vast majority of parents meet that by sending their kids to private schools, which are everywhere, and exist at many levels of affordability-- from elite private academies to your neighborhood Catholic schools all the way down to charity schools run for the desperately poor. And from what I heard (knew someone who taught in one of the expensive schools), the quality of education... wasn't necessarily better in the expensive schools. The benefit of going there was to have your kids hang out with other rich kids, not get a better education.
There were definitely good things and worse things about this, many of them specific to the country and its culture and geography-- it's just really hard to get in and set up a school, and get kids to attend it, when they live in a jungle village accessible only by boat, and the whole village picks up and moves every year. It's hard to have a school serving isolated mountain farmer families. The children of the rich were often poorly served by their schools, because teachers learned to give good grades to keep parents happy, even if the students performed poorly and didn't learn anything. Because a couple of disgruntled rich parents would get you fired, as a teacher.
Still, even without *any* tax funding, most kids at least had *access* to a formal elementary education. Church-affiliated schools were extremely common but not the only game going, and the most impressive thing seemed to be how *many* schools there were. Nobody was obliged to ride a bus to get to school, in the city, because it seemed like there was a little school every few blocks! They all walked. There was a school right next to our apartment-- never once saw a pileup of cars waiting to pick up or drop off kids. Hooray for decentralization.
Here, right now, in the US... I don't know how to find out how much overall the fedgov spends on schooling, but it is very easy to find the numbers for what various school districts spend *per student*-- including admin and buildings and lunches and curricula and lawn maintenance-- the whole shebang. And when you compare that to the tuition at most private schools, the difference is hair-curling. NY state famously spends over $20k per student per year, in the public schools (with famously bad results, particularly in the big city). In my state the average (as of 2018?) was around $10k per child (it's gone up a bit since)--but I just looked up my old church school and its current tuition, and it is still outperforming its neighboring public schools for only $8k/yr.
When I was in school, we also had access to a great pool of unlicensed non-career-track teachers, that included fresh-out-of-college trainee pastors (history, theology), the church accountant (algebra), a retired engineer (trigonometry), an RN (biology), the church's music director (band), and some talented volunteer moms (home ec). In my state, private schools are not obligated to hire licensed teachers, but they are extremely motivated to hire competent people.