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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   31373 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023

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HISD to eliminate librarians and convert libraries into disciplinary centers at NES schools

Not worth a post as top level thread on it's own; but hilariously dystopic enough to post here. It's only one (admittedly large and important) SD, but this is the type of shit Margret Atwood would write about as a totally out there thought experiment.

Hopefully enough people get mad it stops there.

So the school district in question was recently taken over by the state due to the consistently failing scores of some of its schools. This is somewhat politically controversial because it's a red state but a blue district, although most at least seem to agree that the schools themselves are underperforming. The new superintendent brought in to fix this is trying some pretty aggressive reforms -- honestly I would have expected business-as-usual with maybe a hint of red politics, followed by little actually changing.

My understanding of the details from peripherally following this are as follows:

  • New Education System schools are (mostly?) the failing ones: they seem to be leaving the well-ranked ones alone.
  • Several thousand (IIRC) non-teaching administrators at the district office have been laid off.
  • Teacher salaries at NES schools have been bumped measurably, but will also be tied to test scores.
  • There seems to be a focus on the core "Three Rs" (reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic), and honestly swapping librarians for improved classroom sizes and reducing classroom disruption might be worth it. It sounds like they are keeping the actual books.

Overall, I'm surprised they are willing to try an experiment with such large changes. Some of the changes seem a bit partisan, but "reduce classroom sizes and pay teachers more" seems to generally have bipartisan expectations of improving scores. Classroom discipline is red-coded, as is cutting non-core services. I'm modestly hopeful it will show results, but the blue teacher constituency would love to see egg on the State' face. I'm never quite sure how much we can expect the education system to solve issues at home: maybe in aggregate, but not in every case, certainly.

It's a sensible cost-cutting move on the whole. School districts tend to accumulate a mass number of redundant organizational administrative staff if allowed to over the years.

The main problem is that in schools like this, the libraries tend to be a refuge for the well-performing, high-iq students, so placing the high-iq students in the same room as the students who regularly and routinely misbehave is a problem.

If a student is regularly disruptive, one must wonder if they will be able to function in society.

It should be noted that Texas plans to pass a school choice bill in October, and most of the high-IQ students who’d been hiding in the library will probably transfer to catholic schools next year anyways.

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