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I send my child to a private Montessori school. With that said, there's no denying that sending your child to a private Montessori school is similar to parents

I send my child to a private Montessori school. With that said, there's no denying that sending your child to a private Montessori school is similar to parents who buy books in learning to parent are typically better parents not because they read the books but because they care enough to buy the books. If you care enough to send your child to a Montessori school, the parent is invested in the child's success and I think that's way more important.

jedimastert 11mo ago
> If you care enough to send your child to a Montessori school Think you mean to say that if you are well be enough to send your child to a private school...I try not to pull out the "privilege" card but good grief.
- whateveracct 11mo ago
  It's both.
- JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
  > if you are well be enough to send your child to a private school This is a similar but separate effect. Rich, uncaring parents can raise unachieving idiots. It’s easier to be caring with resources. But plenty of public school difference-in-outcome studies have found a signal from parental participation that I believe remained after adjusting for income.
- trenchpilgrim 11mo ago
  I have friends who have a kid in one of those schools on financial aid
- gedy 11mo ago
  My kids went to a free charter school, with similar setup and care from parents. The outcomes were notable and it wasn't really about privilege imho. (Though some activist type folks I know who count "parents who care" as a form a privilege.)
  - andrepd 11mo ago
    Which it is? From the child's pov obviously, not from the parent's.
- asdff 11mo ago
  In my experience in private schooling only about half the kids come from money. The rest are on financial aid.
- phil21 11mo ago
  I grew up quite poor. My parents cared enough to find ways to get me into private schools on grants and scholarships. My neighbors had just as many if not more opportunities to do so but did not care enough to do so for their children. Yes, it’s caring. Education as a top priority for poor families is the number one way a parent can give their kid a better life than they had. Most do not even try.
- pfannkuchen 11mo ago
  Isn’t Montessori considered kind of weird by many people, though? Like you have to be into child education and actually critically assess the available options to realize it’s probably better than the standard one. Or has Montessori achieved Eternal September?
ryukoposting 11mo ago
I spent months doing research for a blog post about One Laptop Per Child last year, and came to a related, but more broad conclusion: it's extremely easy to reach misleading conclusions when studying novel educational methods. No strong conclusion comes without qualifiers related to culture and economics. Moreover, a shocking amount of harm has been done by people trying to apply an educational method outside of the socioeconomic context where its efficacy was proven. There's a dilemma here, because in order to find ways to improve education, we have to try stuff, right? But how do we remedy the situation when those experiments fail? That's less related to the Montessori thing, but it's interesting to think about.
- paulryanrogers 11mo ago
  > But how do we remedy the situation when those experiments fail? Or worse, know we need a remedy when no one is even checking for success or failure? Thankfully the US is well on its way to dismantling the Department of Education. So no stuffy bureaucrats getting in the way /s
  - ryukoposting 11mo ago
    In OLPC's case, the remedy was a retroactive, panicked attempt at teaching teachers how to use the laptops, an effort that largely failed. You're exactly right, though. OLPC failed mostly because it didn't think to teach the teachers how to use the laptops as classroom tools (not that they would have succeeded otherwise). Countries that had the infrastructure to do the onboarding themselves were relatively well-set up to teach their kids anyway. If this is interesting to you, I highly recommend Morgan Ames' The Charisma Machine.
    - em-bee 11mo ago
      i think the constructivist idealism got in the way here. i believe the expectation was that they wouldn't need to train the teachers because the students should figure out the laptops on their own. seems they missed that figuring out the laptop and integrating it into the curriculum are two different things. i read your post btw, one thing i am wondering about is that you wrote that countries didn't improve electricity in schools because OLPC claimed that this wasn't necessary. my own speculation is that they simply didn't enough research and didn't expect that the situation would be so bad. it is also my understanding that the hand crank was dropped early because the laptop could not handle the physical stress of cranking, it would break apart. but then a separate hand crank charger was eventually produced after all: https://wiki.laptop.org/go/Peripherals/Hand_Crank https://wiki.laptop.org/go/Peripherals/Hand_Crank but if i did the math right then it would still take an hour to charge the battery with that. since there was no hand crank the need for electricity was already well known before any deployment, and part of the deployment efforts included improving the electricity infrastructure.
mlinhares 11mo ago
I did high school at a prestigious technical school at my hometown, hard to get in, very competitive. The education itself wasn't that much better than my previous school but they had the name recognition and as getting in was very hard, likely the best students around town. Almost 100% pass rate to college, mostly the best colleges. Did the education provided there affect this? Likely, but it was much more the self selection of having the best students that were doing a SAT like test to get in.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- zorked 11mo ago
  In my hometown there is something like that. There are two schools, one of them had a year with particularly good approval rates. Competitive parents started preferring that school, finding ways to send their kids there. That school has been sustaining better approval rates since then. Which should make no sense because the teachers themselves work odd years in one school, even years in the other school.
  - margalabargala 11mo ago
    > Which should make no sense because the teachers themselves work odd years in one school, even years in the other school. The finding here is, competitive parents have an impact on the college approval rates of their children. Get them to all send their kids to the same school, that school gets better approval rates, regardless of the teachers.
  - giantg2 11mo ago
    It makes perfect sense if we approach it from the stance that parents and peers matter more than the teachers. Anecdotally, kids who have parents who give a crap and peers who share similar goals (seek good grades, entrance to college, not doing drugs, etc) tend to do better in school.
  - BeetleB 11mo ago
    > Which should make no sense because the teachers themselves work odd years in one school, even years in the other school. Peers make a huge difference. Before university, I split my high school between two schools - one that was near the top academically, and one that was quite poor. The latter did have some smart students intellectually, but almost none did well academically because it wasn't valued by their peers. Then I went to a very average state university for undergrad, and a top school for graduate studies. The difference wasn't that high in terms of teaching (the average school actually had much better teachers, but offset it by low expectations). The real difference was in the peers. You like engineering? You like coding? Want to do some cool side project? Very hard to find someone like you in that average university. Then when I started working, I started tutoring some middle school kids. The kids seemed totally capable mentally, and I was trying to figure out how they can't retain simple facts like number of months in a year. Until finally it hit me. They don't have problems learning things. It's just that no one in their orbit (peers or parents) care if they know these things. When I was a kid, I'd be an idiot amongst my fellow students if I didn't know it. So I did. Everyone did. But if you're around people who think it's OK not to know how many days are in a year, chances are you won't know it, no matter how intelligent you are.
Eridrus 11mo ago
Ok, but this was an RCT, so enrollment was randomized after people self selected into this experiment.
- foxglacier 11mo ago
  It also had an obvious and unhelpful result. Of course kids who spend all day learning will know that stuff better than kids who don't. What really matters is long term life outcomes. Rudolf Steiner would say all that early learning is harmful and they should have been playing and imagining spiritual things.
  - giantg2 11mo ago
    "What really matters is long term life outcomes." What would those be and how do we measure them? There are studies that show Montessori students tend to have better executive function, better working memory, and no significant difference in creativity. I'm not aware of any that look at lifetime income or anything like that.
    - foxglacier 11mo ago
      I'm not exactly sure, but measuring performance on education tests as a child is just a proxy for the whole point of education and raising children and it could even be backwards.

jedimastert 11mo ago

> If you care enough to send your child to a Montessori school Think you mean to say that if you are well be enough to send your child to a private school...I try not to pull out the "privilege" card but good grief.

whateveracct 11mo ago
It's both.
JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
> if you are well be enough to send your child to a private school This is a similar but separate effect. Rich, uncaring parents can raise unachieving idiots. It’s easier to be caring with resources. But plenty of public school difference-in-outcome studies have found a signal from parental participation that I believe remained after adjusting for income.
trenchpilgrim 11mo ago
I have friends who have a kid in one of those schools on financial aid
gedy 11mo ago
My kids went to a free charter school, with similar setup and care from parents. The outcomes were notable and it wasn't really about privilege imho. (Though some activist type folks I know who count "parents who care" as a form a privilege.)
- andrepd 11mo ago
  Which it is? From the child's pov obviously, not from the parent's.
asdff 11mo ago
In my experience in private schooling only about half the kids come from money. The rest are on financial aid.
phil21 11mo ago
I grew up quite poor. My parents cared enough to find ways to get me into private schools on grants and scholarships. My neighbors had just as many if not more opportunities to do so but did not care enough to do so for their children. Yes, it’s caring. Education as a top priority for poor families is the number one way a parent can give their kid a better life than they had. Most do not even try.
pfannkuchen 11mo ago
Isn’t Montessori considered kind of weird by many people, though? Like you have to be into child education and actually critically assess the available options to realize it’s probably better than the standard one. Or has Montessori achieved Eternal September?

ryukoposting 11mo ago

I spent months doing research for a blog post about One Laptop Per Child last year, and came to a related, but more broad conclusion: it's extremely easy to reach misleading conclusions when studying novel educational methods. No strong conclusion comes without qualifiers related to culture and economics. Moreover, a shocking amount of harm has been done by people trying to apply an educational method outside of the socioeconomic context where its efficacy was proven. There's a dilemma here, because in order to find ways to improve education, we have to try stuff, right? But how do we remedy the situation when those experiments fail? That's less related to the Montessori thing, but it's interesting to think about.

paulryanrogers 11mo ago
> But how do we remedy the situation when those experiments fail? Or worse, know we need a remedy when no one is even checking for success or failure? Thankfully the US is well on its way to dismantling the Department of Education. So no stuffy bureaucrats getting in the way /s
- ryukoposting 11mo ago
  In OLPC's case, the remedy was a retroactive, panicked attempt at teaching teachers how to use the laptops, an effort that largely failed. You're exactly right, though. OLPC failed mostly because it didn't think to teach the teachers how to use the laptops as classroom tools (not that they would have succeeded otherwise). Countries that had the infrastructure to do the onboarding themselves were relatively well-set up to teach their kids anyway. If this is interesting to you, I highly recommend Morgan Ames' The Charisma Machine.
  - em-bee 11mo ago
    i think the constructivist idealism got in the way here. i believe the expectation was that they wouldn't need to train the teachers because the students should figure out the laptops on their own. seems they missed that figuring out the laptop and integrating it into the curriculum are two different things. i read your post btw, one thing i am wondering about is that you wrote that countries didn't improve electricity in schools because OLPC claimed that this wasn't necessary. my own speculation is that they simply didn't enough research and didn't expect that the situation would be so bad. it is also my understanding that the hand crank was dropped early because the laptop could not handle the physical stress of cranking, it would break apart. but then a separate hand crank charger was eventually produced after all: https://wiki.laptop.org/go/Peripherals/Hand_Crank https://wiki.laptop.org/go/Peripherals/Hand_Crank but if i did the math right then it would still take an hour to charge the battery with that. since there was no hand crank the need for electricity was already well known before any deployment, and part of the deployment efforts included improving the electricity infrastructure.

mlinhares 11mo ago

I did high school at a prestigious technical school at my hometown, hard to get in, very competitive. The education itself wasn't that much better than my previous school but they had the name recognition and as getting in was very hard, likely the best students around town. Almost 100% pass rate to college, mostly the best colleges. Did the education provided there affect this? Likely, but it was much more the self selection of having the best students that were doing a SAT like test to get in.

deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
zorked 11mo ago
In my hometown there is something like that. There are two schools, one of them had a year with particularly good approval rates. Competitive parents started preferring that school, finding ways to send their kids there. That school has been sustaining better approval rates since then. Which should make no sense because the teachers themselves work odd years in one school, even years in the other school.
- margalabargala 11mo ago
  > Which should make no sense because the teachers themselves work odd years in one school, even years in the other school. The finding here is, competitive parents have an impact on the college approval rates of their children. Get them to all send their kids to the same school, that school gets better approval rates, regardless of the teachers.
- giantg2 11mo ago
  It makes perfect sense if we approach it from the stance that parents and peers matter more than the teachers. Anecdotally, kids who have parents who give a crap and peers who share similar goals (seek good grades, entrance to college, not doing drugs, etc) tend to do better in school.
- BeetleB 11mo ago
  > Which should make no sense because the teachers themselves work odd years in one school, even years in the other school. Peers make a huge difference. Before university, I split my high school between two schools - one that was near the top academically, and one that was quite poor. The latter did have some smart students intellectually, but almost none did well academically because it wasn't valued by their peers. Then I went to a very average state university for undergrad, and a top school for graduate studies. The difference wasn't that high in terms of teaching (the average school actually had much better teachers, but offset it by low expectations). The real difference was in the peers. You like engineering? You like coding? Want to do some cool side project? Very hard to find someone like you in that average university. Then when I started working, I started tutoring some middle school kids. The kids seemed totally capable mentally, and I was trying to figure out how they can't retain simple facts like number of months in a year. Until finally it hit me. They don't have problems learning things. It's just that no one in their orbit (peers or parents) care if they know these things. When I was a kid, I'd be an idiot amongst my fellow students if I didn't know it. So I did. Everyone did. But if you're around people who think it's OK not to know how many days are in a year, chances are you won't know it, no matter how intelligent you are.

Eridrus 11mo ago

Ok, but this was an RCT, so enrollment was randomized after people self selected into this experiment.

foxglacier 11mo ago
It also had an obvious and unhelpful result. Of course kids who spend all day learning will know that stuff better than kids who don't. What really matters is long term life outcomes. Rudolf Steiner would say all that early learning is harmful and they should have been playing and imagining spiritual things.
- giantg2 11mo ago
  "What really matters is long term life outcomes." What would those be and how do we measure them? There are studies that show Montessori students tend to have better executive function, better working memory, and no significant difference in creativity. I'm not aware of any that look at lifetime income or anything like that.
  - foxglacier 11mo ago
    I'm not exactly sure, but measuring performance on education tests as a child is just a proxy for the whole point of education and raising children and it could even be backwards.