School Rhetoric

If you ask any school administrator, can your school give my child a good education, the answer, no matter what the scores of the school, will almost invariably be yes. www.mccormacks.com

First, the administrator would invite professional suicide if he or she slammed the school.

Second, as the scores and college placements show, even the lowest-scoring schools can turn out top students.

Almost any school can claim, legitimately, that its teachers and programs can meet the needs of almost all students, no matter what the school scores. But there are major differences between the schools. www.mccormacks.com

The Money Correlation

In the U.S, if you are rich or well-to-do, you are usually well educated. To rise in business or government, to secure the better jobs in our modern, complex society, you pretty much have to have a bachelor’s degree or higher. Income and education go hand in hand.

Turning to housing, what you can afford depends on your income, which correlates to your education. www.mccormacks.com

For this reason, affluent towns and neighborhoods generally have many highly educated residents, who often have disposable income that can be used to pay for tutors, SAT cramming, etc.

These people also have good educational values and high expectations for their children and the local schools.

A few middle-class towns score very high because they have strong academic values. These towns include Albany and Davis, which are located near Universities of California. University towns and high-tech towns (many knowledge workers) often score high. www.mccormacks.com

So do towns with certain minority groups with sound educational values. When these groups prosper, they often move up market.

 

School Ready-Homework

At the most basic level, parents in these communities spend the time, effort and the money to prepare their children for school. www.mccormacks.com

The kids show up at kindergarten or the first grade knowing the alphabet and in many instances how to read simple sentences. Not all of them. There are always slow learners.

The teacher spends a certain amount of time with the struggling students but has ample time to work with the faster ones. www.mccormacks.com

When it comes to homework, these parents — with exceptions — make sure it gets done.

The result: the school can teach at a fast pace. In the higher grades, the school can offer science and math earlier and more college prep and advanced placement classes.

Volunteering, Parent Activism

At high-scoring schools, many parents closely follow their children’s progress. They show up at school events and teacher conferences, contribute money when asked, and if there are problems, try to address them, sometimes by tutoring. www.mccormacks.com

Other parents are much more involved. They volunteer in the classrooms and as chaperones on school outings, they stay in close contact with the teachers, they suggest changes in programs and curriculum, they complain.

The overall level of activity is very high. www.mccormacks.com

Money

Many low- and middling schools receive more public money per student than the high-scoring schools. The upper-income schools often try for a parcel tax, which is hard to win because it requires two-thirds approval of the voters. Many affluent districts in Northern California have passed this tax; very few in Southern Cal, which in its bones is conservative about taxes.

Many schools and school districts have parent or community clubs that raise money. For middle-income districts, the goal might be $100,000 to $200,000. www.mccormacks.com

Clubs in affluent districts annually raise over $500,000 and occasionally, if elective classes are threatened, over a $1 million.

Some of these clubs ask school parents to volunteer a certain contribution per child, usually hundreds of dollars — in effect a child tax. www.mccormacks.com

Government funding comes with strings and commitments, such as staff and teacher salaries.

The parent or community clubs are private entities and can distribute their dollars as they see fit. Knowing the schools intimately — the volunteers in the classrooms — they may fund in ways that are very effective. www.mccormacks.com

 

The Intangibles

The really high-scoring schools have many clubs and extra-curricular activities. Some schools manage to work Latin and Mandarin into their curriculums.

When the children post their essays on the bulletin board, they reveal that their fathers and mothers are lawyers, computer specialists, professors and business professionals. These parents will occasionally show up to talk about their jobs. All this may rub off on the kids. www.mccormacks.com

At recess and after school, the kids hang around with kids who read books and maybe have some polished social skills. These days etiquette classes are showing up in the affluent towns.

Many students will be trying for the toughest universities: the University of California, Stanford, University of Southern Cal, Yale, Harvard, the Ivy Leagues. This shooting-for-the-top intensifies the academic program. www.mccormacks.com

What’s Not To Like

High-scoring schools often are not diverse — many whites and Asians and few from other groups, almost no poor.

These schools are not against diversity. But as their attendance zones are not diverse, they cannot be diverse.

Some parents think that these schools are too intense. If your child is a low or mid achiever, he or she might feel ill-at-ease in these schools. www.mccormacks.com

But in the large picture, these public schools in many ways are excellent institutions.

The Contrast

At other schools, especially in low-income neighborhoods, students enter with poor command of sentences and letters and the teacher spends a lot of time on rudimentary instruction. www.mccormacks.com

This slow start carries over to the homework. It’s paced to the speed of the instruction and often it’s not done or done inadequately.

Instead of spending funds on advanced placement classes, the school concentrates on the basics and remedial. www.mccormacks.com

Parents often don’t show up for conferences or school events. Always exceptions. Some of this stuff is done out of ignorance, not neglect.

Discipline

It’s a big problem at some low-scoring schools, even when they have worked out effective procedures. Time that should have gone to academics is lost to disruptions, punishments, counseling and parent conferences. www.mccormacks.com

Mid- and high-achieving schools also have discipline problems. But fewer.

 

How Low-Scoring Schools Succeed

The low-scoring school may have a well-trained, dedicated staff (in our opinion, many teachers at these schools work very hard). Its programs may be clever and well executed. www.mccormacks.com

Often the teacher will practice what is called “differentiated instruction” (which shows up in many schools, no matter what the scores). The slow readers are placed in one group, the better readers in another, the fastest in their own group. Same with math.

In later grades, the school might cluster the fast learners in their own classes, at least for part of the day, and install some advanced programs. The UC system offers college-prep classes for promising students from low-scoring schools. www.mccormacks.com