It's a slow improvement, but it's at least an improvement. As I said, without charters the "good" kids leave the system entirely, and these local schools never get better.
But the other thing to point out is that it's unfair to simply treat "good" students as commodities to spend on "bad" students and neglect "good students" educational needs (and this happens much too often, from what I've seen). For instance, I've seen a special needs student here get a full time teacher just for them (in addition to their regular teacher), which is great. But then advanced students who aren't learning anything because they already know everything on the curriculum can't even get a teacher to address their educational needs for an hour or two a week.
"I am so, so tired of socialists who admit that the current system is a helltopian torturescape, then argue that we must prevent anyone from ever being able to escape it. Who promise that once the last alternative is closed off, once the last nice green place where a few people manage to hold off the miseries of the world is crushed, why then the helltopian torturescape will become a lovely utopia full of rainbows and unicorns. If you can make your system less miserable, make your system less miserable! Do it before forcing everyone else to participate in it under pain of imprisonment if they refuse! Forcing everyone to participate in your system and then making your system something other than a meat-grinder that takes in happy children and spits out dead-eyed traumatized eighteen-year-olds who have written 10,000 pages on symbolism in To Kill A Mockingbird and had zero normal happy experiences - is doing things super, super backwards!" https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-cult-o...
Just to spell it out some more for any other readers: this is the same reason you want (for example) a large health insurance pool, including young healthy people who don't need that insurance. The idea is to have the healthy/privileged/lucky/etc help the less fortunate ones, at any given moment, to the benefit of everyone in the longer term.
There's a necessary tension between individual choices/freedoms and a system like that, though. "Good of the one vs. good of the many," and soforth.
People who can afford to do so will already put their kids in private school or select good school districts. All that’s left in the others are poor kids who want to learn but are at the mercy of kids who don’t.
There are other "bad" students which might not be a problem, but it's clear that the efforts to educate them are a waste[1]:
> In the last four years, France’s son passed three classes, failed 22 and was late or absent 272 days, the teen’s transcript shows. ** > France’s son has a 0.13 GPA, which traditionally places a student near the bottom of their class. But in his case, it put him 62nd out of 120, which would indicate a wider-spread academic performance issue going on at the school.
You can't just drop some good kids into this failing system and expect students like that to suddenly do well.
I think people should reconsider trade schools, including ones that start at relatively young ages. Include an opportunity to earn money at a young age. Just paying teachers to teach kids like that classes that they keep failing doesn't help the kids or anyone else.
[1] https://www.fox5dc.com/news/baltimore-area-student-passed-on...
Tracking folks earlier would also probably help. A lot of my peers growing up worked 4 hours of their school day their senior year, those guys all own homes way before my college bound peers did.
If public schools were permitted to prevent the harms of disruptive students from impacting classroom management by informing parents, "You child is no longer welcome in our classroom, you are required to find someone who will put up with them" and handing them a voucher; then I strongly suspect we would learn that the quality increased and the number of disruptive students went down as parents were forced to deal with the costs those students had imposed on us.
I don't think the parent poster is making a diversity argument here (ie. having "bad" students alongside "good" students enriches the experience for everyone involved). He's more making an argument that a society should engage in redistribution from the "healthy/privileged/lucky/etc" to the "less fortunate ones".
I do this and do question whether or not it’s the right choice (financially it’s saving me a few million, but that’s just money).
Yes, I think that's the idea. I don't think it's inherently a "problem", though [1]. Lots of good things in society have this same pattern. I pay taxes for the fire department, but have never had a fire myself. Compare to the highly-problematic privatized fire departments of years past. Lots of examples in that vein.
A movie quote comes to mind: "When he reached the New World, Cortéz burned his ships. As a result, his men were well-motivated."
There is something to be said for the power of a "we're all in it together" mentality, whether forced or not.
Maybe that makes me a communist, I don't know (:
> At what point does society end and individual rights begin?
Great question. I imagine the answer varies by person, by culture and sub-culture, by time, and by many other factors. I wonder if someone has done work in quantifying where to draw that line. For instance, with the fire department example, some private ones do still exist, mostly in rural areas, where there's less risk of a fire from one neighbor endangering the next one. But in more crowded areas, such as cities, the "forced rider" approach is far superior. There're probably some formulas that could describe that trade-off.
[1] Aside: I was unfamiliar with the term "forced riders", so I'm going off of the Wikipedia page[2]; not sure if there is some inherent negative association with the term in typical usage.
Would vouchers be acceptable to you if so?
AFAIK the concern is that the charter schools will have their pick of "good" students, and all the "bad" students would be forced to languish in whatever shitty schools that are responsible for the remaining students. The "bad" students also tend to cost more per pupil (eg. because they have special needs and therefore need more qualified teachers), so slicing the student population this way will benefit the "good" students to the detriment of "bad" students.