Charter schools create duplicate systems with duplicate costs, reduce funds available for traditional school students in sending schools, and are a waste of taxpayer resources. When students leave traditional public schools for charter schools, the traditional public school is unable to reduce costs in proportion with the loss in per-pupil revenues. Students in public schools are left with fewer resources.
1. Engaged parents.
2. Social Norms that normalize learning behaviours.
Parent's can control the first directly and the second indirectly by "choosing" a non public school option or moving to a district that has the proper norms.
Charter schools are one of a class of escape hatches that less advantaged parents can choose in order to impact the second factor for their child. I strongly believe that these escape hatches should exist for the Parents who can't easily move or choose a private option. Improving education outcomes for the children of those parents who do care requires giving them tools to support their children whether the environment itself does or does not.
It seems unfair to force those parents to fail just because their community is failing around them.
Have we learned this? I don't remember a single time in my life when teachers were generally considered fairly paid.
Not to mention in time you’ll just get charter school mega corps that don’t have too compete.
private prisons are not Goverment granted monopolies and that has gone horribly wrong.
Charter schools are a mechanism for opt-in flexibility within the public school system to enable identification of generalizable improvements; if there isn’t systematic evaluation and feedback into the broader system, that’s definitely an issue, but (unlike vouchers, which are low-accountability subsidies to nonpublic schools), that’s what charters are for.
it also increases the divide between rich and poor (https://www.seattletimes.com/education-lab/do-charter-school...) all while taking resources away from the public system setting it up to fail more while also removing all incentives for politicians to fix it (their kids go to the private schools)
here is a video going into charter schools and showing a number of rather negative outcomes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_htSPGAY7I
Teachers want to teach and do a good jobs generally but are prevented from doing so by admin/policies that set them up to fail
I went to a private school. Obviously slightly different from the Charter system, but only in administration of funds (depending on the state). This statement is categorically untrue. The private school that I went to was not analogous in learning or structure to the public school system. Coaching for college admissions essentially took place since first grade and gradually ramped up. Additionally, the school taught to different learning styles instead of just one. Where these schools fail is socially because often kids are geographically spread farther apart. As a result I was alienated at times both at school and out of school depending on where I needed to put my time. When I transferred to public school I was bored out of my mind for years due to how far ahead I was from 8th grade. It took until around junior year before I began learning new-ish material.
To call them a "waste" of tax dollars ignores the fundamental problems with the public school system and why the separation occurs in the first place. Those fundamental problems are thorny issues though; you'll end up creating very different teaching methods, levels of classes, etc for a wider group of kids that will continue to grow as an area grows more dense. This was more sustainable at my private school because class sizes were smaller. I also don't think blaming teachers is really the right way to go here; most of them are underpaid and mistreated.
PSA a primary driver for this (along side other issues) is that in "major cities" the affluent pull out and stick their kids in private schools, creating a feedback loop of public school increasingly capturing all and predominantly the least- least-supported kids.
And teachers then teach in over-crowded classes with 3x the student-teacher ratio of the private schools, while also providing de facto baseline social services of many kinds. While horrifically underpaid.
Meanwhile the right wing is driving this feedback loop on multiple fronts, as it has been for decades—with the collapse of secular public education an open agenda for those decades.
As it stands, school districts are doing the opposite. Getting rid of educational tracking at least, or banning algebra in middle school because it's inequitable at worst (as in SFUSD). This isn't a matter of funding but ideology.
The link provided shows that, in fact, the union opposed the change. This claim is a bald faced lie, and lies should be downvoted on HN.
Unions aren't mentioned at all in the article. Your claim is also a bald faced lie. More so than the OP. This article supports OP's claim https://nypost.com/2023/03/16/nys-education-leaders-again-pr..., I can trivially find other articles from other sources where the New York teachers union has made it clear they dont find how they are evaluated by test scores acceptable. That may even be a reasonable position to have. There is more data out their to support OPs claim than yours that they are against it.
If one actually reads it, it's just a recapitulation of TFA. "SED", the organization the editorial rails against, isn't a teacher's union, you know -- it's the State Education Department. ctrl+f for "union" in that piece, and beyond a reference to the Times Union article, the only involvement of a teachers' union is at the end, where the editorial's author claims that the union is the only beneficiary of these shenanigans, and implies that they had a dastardly hand in anointing the Assembly Speaker.
If there were other articles from other sources that you could trivially find, why didn't you use them? Why use this and misrepresent what it said?
Where I live, charter schools are a joke. They are old office buildings converted to "schools". This is super unsafe and honestly quite sad to see in most cases because these office buildings are on busy streets with no playgrounds (what they do have is basically a concrete slab in the back with nearly no play equipment).
News flash: if you want education to "work", we need to pay teachers more. Subsidizing private companies (charter schools) through vouchers is just a leach on resources we could give to our existing schools and teachers instead. There are millions of teachers out there, some with master's degrees, who make much less than a new grad junior dev who goes to work, edits some CSS, and browses Reddit the rest of the day. We simply don't value education in the US enough, and charter schools are a non-solution proposed by those who would rather run away from the problem than face them head-on.
The issue is almost entirely cultural and socioeconomic. Fixing schools is basically fixing society. Intractable, which is why every school from Harvard to Oxford relies on glorified selection bias instead.
Entry Level Teacher salary in Nevada is $43,316 as of June 26, 2023, but the range typically falls between $36,172 and $52,827.
Imagine living on 36k per year before taxes. Imagine making that much, being not only in charge of controlling a minimum of 30 kids per year, but also being expected and required to educate those children all while spending (on average) 700$ per year of _your own money_ on classroom supplies. Yes, that's real. That's the new average amount teachers spend out of pocket on classroom supplies because education funding is so abysmal in the US.
Contrast that with an average starting salary of 86k as you suggest. That would be a materially huge jump and change in the financial support we give to teachers, along with an acknowledgment of how important their jobs are. As a web developer in my mid-20s, I make far more than any single person working in my high school. Of course, I took the tech route and that's highly valued in society, but I'm only here because of those teachers taking an interest in me in high school. To me, that just doesn't make any sense.
Is that supposed to be hard? I've spent less than that almost every year I've been working, and I live somewhere a lot more expensive than Nevada.
I have a dev friend who makes over 200k working for Apple and lives in our friend's garage paying just 200 a month for rent. His case has nothing to do with the average living expenses of average teachers in the US. He's an outlier, as I suspect you are.
Then 36k should be enough to support two dependents without any other income, as it’s almost 150% of poverty. And I suspect most teachers are not supporting two dependents on their incomes alone, so your comment makes me feel stronger about my previous statement.
As for me being an outlier, maybe? I don’t live in a basement. I live in a regular apartment with one roommate. I have a car (2014 sedan) and buy regular groceries, go on vacations, do things with friends, live a pretty regular life.
I take objection to you saying “if you are not … willing to live in a shared apartment” as if that’s some grand imposition. To me it sounds like you might be the outlier? Normal people, even couples live in shared apartments all the time.
I want to note that I didn’t claim that teachers aren’t underpaid (I haven't researched or thought about it enough to make a decision). Just that 36k isn’t some impossible amount to live on, which it’s not in most places.
- 2.2k (FICA)
- 4k (Health Insurance)
- 4.3k (Income Tax)
- 1k (3% matching Simple IRA)
but ignoring 3.8k into HSA and 6k going to Roth IRA because we are probably too poor to do that
=
whopping 24.5k
If you spend less than that I'd love to know what is in the care packages your mom sends you each week.
The part about my mother was unnecessary.
The reason you make more is because your company presumably has revenue. Schools don’t so the entire value proposition is different.
I fundamentally disagree. How can we expect teachers living paycheck to paycheck to educate kids well? They have no emergency fund. They're one medical emergency away from bankruptcy. They don't have retirement savings, and they have no idea when they'll be able to start saving for retirement. Being poor isn't just financial, that stress creeps into every aspect of your life including your job.
Also, I want to note one thing. It's not the dollar amount specifically I'm talking about. Sure, it would be a quick fix in my mind to pay teachers more. But really it comes down to how those dollars are being spent. In our country, too much money is being spent on student loans, housing, healthcare, food, and transportation. If the prices for all of those could come down, that would work too. It's about getting teachers out living paycheck to paycheck.
> The reason you make more is because your company presumably has revenue.
Public schools are a service our government provides for us because there's an understanding that education is important. So important that we actually require children to be educated, which is obviously a good thing. If you ask what's the revenue source, it's called taxes. If we don't have enough money to pay teachers livable wages, we either need to take money from somewhere else cough the military-industrial complex cough or increase taxes on the rich. And when I say rich, I mean the filthy rich. The people who pay almost no taxes currently and instead put the tax burden on the poor and disappearing middle-class families. The highest marginal tax rate reached nearly 94% in the 1940's. Right now, our highest marginal tax rate is just 37%. Essentially if you make 570 million per year in the US you pay no more money relatively speaking than someone making 570 thousand per year. If we taxed the rich more, we could easily pay for better education in the US.
The U.S should be aiming for something like Finland for its education system. Their secret sauce is not what they teach at all. Teachers are well paid and its a very desirable job therefore its very competitive.
Contrast that to the U.S where its just above the poverty line and therefore most people do not want to do it.
Given the central role of education in our society, teachers should absolutely be paid more.
Some schools the issue is teacher quality. Some is curriculum and resources. Some is external factors like food insecurity, housing, or crime.
It's weird like that.
After decades in education, I can tell you that the same five ideas get rehashed every six to eight years. And we ignore that our education system is nothing but a reflection of society in the US.
If you have money and connections, everything is groovy. If you don't, it's not.
I generally find myself pro-organized labor, but when we start reducing in-group competitiveness for high pay, into low pay alternatives like seniority systems, job security becoming job permanence, or outright hostility to technology, that's when I start seeing the model break down.
The “central role of education in our society” seems a lot like a slogan that is, at best, aspirational, and at worst false-meritocracy cover for persistent structural inequality.
While educational performance and attainment seems to correlate a lot with success, differences in educational interventions and methods seem to do a lot less: those measures that seem to matter seem to themselves largely be a function of who you are and what your home environment is. Its not clear that education, particularly K-12, is doing a lot more than measuring structural advantage.
It is almost universal that the worst performing schools have the highest spend per student, while the best schools have the lowest spend.
But, that's like saying hospitals don't work because the highest expenditures are on the sickest people. This isn't measuring whether more money helps schools perform better, it's showing that we spend more money on schools with lower test scores.
[1] https://www.schooldigger.com/aboutrankingmethodology.aspx
Are major cities more likely to contain people in abject poverty, who perceive their situation as hopeless, sometimes correctly? Many people struggle with learning, due to conditions at home, and without money there's no get out of jail free cards. Kids need people with money to advocate for them, or they can be abandoned by society, told they will never amount to nothing (very much like Biggy Smalls did), and their talents overlooked.
For people living in these conditions college may be achievable, but there's a very narrow window, with a ton of risk involved. To summarize, perhaps we're simply spending more, to combat bigger problems (often ineffectively); versus the quality of education being as poor as you claim.
I''d break this into two statements with "public schools" being part of both:
1. Charter schools are the saving grace to the public schools because they are not mandated to serve every student and can therefore siphon off failing or behaviorally challenged students back to the public system. Find me a charter system serving special needs and at-risk students better than the public system at the scale of a public system, and I'll change my mind.
2. Public schools have been hijacked by the teachers union and bloated administrations because their funding structures are controlled by politics and culture wars instead of targeted research and practice on what specific kids need. I'm not a fan of teachers unions or bureaucracy, but who else takes the heat for teachers who are under-resourced, under-paid, and over-worked?
> Fix K-12 schools (no, more money on bloated administrations is not the answer), and the need for affirmative action goes away.
100% agree on the affirmative action part, but to fix K-12 schools you need new or other institutions to pick up slack on supporting students. The reason that "Deputy Assistant Senior Manager of Cognitive and Emotional Development" exist is because the law is pretty clear about how a school district is responsible for a student with XYZ cognitive and emotional developmental challenges. To get rid of that administrator, you also need to transfer (operationally and legislatively) ownership of that responsibility.
Examples: https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/new-york-lowers-bar-...
Meanwhile major cities have the highest per pupil spend for public schools, with frighteningly poor outcomes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/03/30/bal...
Fix K-12 schools (no, more money on bloated administrations is not the answer), and the need for affirmative action goes away.