In reality, though, that doesn't seem to have worked. School board elections have very low turnout usually, and the people elected to them are disproportionately ideologues who treat engaged parents with contempt for being "privileged."
> There's the theory that, by forcing the kids with the most engaged parents to go to schools with the kids of less engaged parents
is really rough on the kids of engaged parents, forcing them to be responsible for "fixing" systems that they didn't create.
In the UK, we used to have "grammar schools" that selected on ability based on a standardised test. They were responsible for many working- and middle class children being propelled into high positions in industry and politics, including Prime Minister.
However the whole idea was deemed inequitable, so they were dismantled. Now privately school educated children have less competition.
If you have money, you have an escape hatch right now. Vouchers make that escape hatch available to more people.
Public education doesn't have to mean public schools.
This is eloquently put. I’ve never heard it said that way. There is no reason to believe that an entity like the government, great for accumulating and distributing the money required for public education, is a good or efficient agent for administering said education.
We see this in many other fields. For instance, non-government researchers receive government grants for research. Similarly (for better or worse), the government gives money for agricultural subsidies; nobody proposes that the government ought to run the farm. It is intuitive to us that specialists in a given field may not work for the government; it is high time we applied the same logic to education.
The free market for schools and teachers is created the moment Department of Education is eliminated and replaced with education vouchers for all.
Who defines what fixed is? How do you call success on those fixes? The process is a problem today and it's similar to politics.
I'll give two issues of issues in fixing things...
First example, if there is a problem leaders can come up with a policy/process/thing to deal with it. And call success at having that in place rather than seeing results. If the policy/process/thing doesn't work success has already been called. They aren't going to walk that back. There is a lot of this.
Second example, schools are being used for social change. And the topics of some of the social change are not agreed to in society. Who gets to decide what's right? Should schools be agents for this change? This is being fought in society right now. It's not really discussed or debated but more fought if you look at the tactics and behaviors.
How do you fix things in this form of environment?
We absolutely should allow vouchers to go to religious private schools and secular private schools alike. It's time to bleed the public schools dry and use their lots to build more housing.
Parents complain about this and fight against it but are ignored. So what are we supposed to do? There are only so many school board meetings you can attend only to get eye rolls from officials.
There is a first amendment case to be made about withholding education funds from religious schools. By withholding funds from schools that are deemed to be "religious" the government is creating a preference for schools that are not on the list of religions but may be every bit as ideological. The government cannot prefer one ideology or religion over another. It is required to be agnostic.
Consider this
If you look at the system without vouchers, there is no market mechanism to correct the situation everyone is complaining about.
There are no incentives. Each year, more and more money is dumped into the system.
If you introduce competition, then schools have to start fixing problems if they want to get the funding.
One thing that was repealed by the last Labour government was the Assisted Places Scheme [1]. If you scored highly enough the government would pay for a child to go to private school.
Not only the School Board but the Teachers Unions and the United States Government are anti parents attending School Board meetings to support their children.
Red or Blue, 6 or 600, it doesn’t matter when the USG decides to make parents the enemy of the state.
https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/chairman-jo...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2023/03/29/garl...
https://apnews.com/article/merrick-garland-school-boards-vio...
Should parents not bring their outrage to the school board when they are outraged?
Just recently we have a school board covering up TWO rapes by the same individual because of trans ideology.
We have teachers forcing their viewpoints on sexuality to elementary aged kids by presenting clearly sexually explicit material. This isn’t a debate the actual books have been exposed.
These are outrage worthy concerns and parents would be endangering their children to not put a stop to this.
Thankfully we are.
This is just a nonsense sentence.
Not everyone believes in this and that is ok. I choose to respect the wishes of adults around me for social cohesion. I draw the line when we’re talking about children.
As for ideology, I doubt it's possible to be non-ideological. I have children not because they are accidents or the abortions my wife didn't bother to have. Not even because we just didn't know any other way to go through life. We had children because children are a good thing unto themselves. So good that I hope they grow up to have their own and enjoy that experience. Schools are hostile to that and seem to be doing what they can to encourage sterility.
Ah yes, this is clearly a 'both sides' issue where parents are the victims.
I know that the incentives for gov't agencies are many are sometimes backwards, but to direct the most powerful law enforcement agency in the world at these fed up parents is beyond the pale.
If everyone is committed, everything must improve for you to see changes. If everyone is not committed they'll just send their kids to the best schools and ignore the problematic ones.
Instead, kids with engaged parents will flee to better schools. The other parents will either follow, growing the new school and model, or the other school will adapt in order to retain students.
Engaged parents are your early adopters. Without vouchers, most people can’t even afford to enter the market.
The free market can be good at optimizing for certain outcomes, but I don't think you're going to get a lot of buy in with the current political climate being what it is, and a lack of consensus around what kind of outcomes should be required.
Furthermore, making schooling a purely financial transaction? Where do you think that leads?
I'm not OK paying taxes to help Bobby Baptist send his kids to Jesus Is Lord Day School. Or kick in to rich parents' budget for Phillips Exeter. If we must have vouchers, let people keep their own tax money that would have gone to schools and use that for the vouchers. I'm not interested in handing people my cash to fund private education. I'm interested in having a public education system. That, I'll pay taxes for.
I spent years in both public and private schools. The worst part of public schooling was that everything was scaled down to the poorest-performing child's level. The worst part of private schooling was that a few underperforming kids were pushed/passed along with everyone else.
The latter outcome is _significantly_ better for society than the former.
No, I think you're missing the parent's point -- it's assimilating those students into a specific religious subculture whose beliefs and values may be at odds with civil society at large.
(If you have trouble seeing this, try substituting "Jesus Is Lord Day School" in your head for some other implied religions.)
Religious people are part of your community and have the right to their religious identity and to be a member of your community. If they want a school just for them, you don't suffer for it.
Religion is not at odds with society. We're not the USSR. Religious freedom is an enshrined right in this country.
Keeping religion out of publicly funded institutions, including schools, is done as much to safeguard free religious practice in this country as anything. The point is that the public institutions should be entirely civil and not under the sway of any one religion, because each religion once in control of society ends up discriminating against the others. That's why you don't allow them power in the civil sphere.
It is very actively 'trying to fuck us over'. And it's winning, hard, in both the 6-3 sphere, on the legislative bench, and in many others.
I also went to both. When I didn't have good enough grades they just passed me to public schools. Shocker, the private school passed off difficult children somewhere else. You know who else they didn't serve? Special needs? And who else? Anybody who couldn't afford it, or didn't believe in the holy trinity.
I realize that a lot of libertarians believe that everyone should fend for themselves and that there's some sort of natural selection that justifies poor outcomes for some based on "fair rules". As I've gotten older in life, nothing seems less true.
The worst thing that they did to me was add a course to the curriculum about religion so that I had an extra course to pass than the public school kids. And we didn't even learn exclusively about Catholicism in that class.
Are they? There are a lot of folks who would disagree (and many of those are graduates of such institutions) with that assessment[0]:
The city has determined that four Orthodox yeshivas are failing to provide
an education “substantially equivalent” to what’s offered in public schools —
and recommends the state reach the same conclusion for another 14 yeshivas
the city says are ultimately under state authority.
The findings are the results of a long-stalled and politically thorny
investigation that has stretched on since 2015.
The city found that just seven schools they investigated met standards.
That’s in addition to two it found were up to standards in 2019.
[...]
The investigation was spurred by a complaint from a group called Young
Advocates for a Fair Education, or YAFFED, headed at the time by a yeshiva
graduate who argued his education left him ill-prepared for the world outside
of religious studies. YAFFED and other critics argue many so-called ultra-
Orthodox yeshivas provide little to no secular instruction, particularly for
boys, and instead focus on religious studies. Representatives of the schools
have pushed back strenuously on those claims.
The schools are private, but do receive some state funding and, like all
private schools in New York, are required to provide children with an
education “substantially equivalent” to what is offered in public schools.
The investigation kicked off a debate of what exactly substantially
equivalent means, prompting the state to develop rules for determining it.
Public funding (and especially taking funds away from secular public schools) of religious schools is antithetical to the idea of a secular government and society.
[0] https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2023/06/30/new-yor...
The funding structure of every other thing in the US is totally backwards and so unless we solve cultural problems like xenophobia and tribalism we will be unable to solve socioeconomic ones. As such, I have basically zero faith that the US will last another 20 years in any recognizable form as a liberal democracy.
Money is part of the cause, but where it comes in is letting parents sort their families into expensive-to-live-in school districts with other parents who could also afford those expensive areas. Their kids tend to be easier to teach for a whole bunch of reasons—which does make the schools more effective, but is not because of extra money spent on the schools. The sorting enabled by money does matter, but the funding itself (received by the schools) does not appear to be a major factor.
Basically, a family pays for school quality in the US no matter what, either directly or indirectly—you pay either with tuition for expensive, good private schools if you're fairly rich, or with real estate and transportation costs if you're not that rich, with a sliding scale all the way down to "practically destitute". The extravagant spending of expensive private schools might result in better education (I'm thinking especially of the very-small class sizes, like 4-8 students per class, and the ability to pay for content-area PhDs as teachers in higher grades—we'd have to triple public school budgets to do that stuff, and that actually wouldn't even be enough because demand would so badly outstrip supply, should we try it) but beneath those relatively-few outliers with far-higher spending, moving spending/budgets up or down a (relatively) little doesn't seem to do much.
In fact, in impoverished areas probably the most important thing to do to improve educational outcomes after establishing a school at all isn't better schools but simply money at home - teachers are only responsible for 35% or so of the educational outcome of an aggregate population while something as simple as ensuring a child has reliable sources of meals and that the meals are with family is _way_ more important it turns out (insert correlation / causation caveats).
As such, my suggestion isn't to spend more money on schools in low performing areas but to direct funding toward better home lives for students in the districts essentially. What good is spending $100k on better teachers and equipment when the students are living in trailer parks with abusive parents that don't feed them properly? This is a problem _many_ teachers in low-opportunity areas have talked about as one of the top problems for them.
I used to support charter schools conceptually until I understood that the funding mechanisms cause a zero-sum game problem which takes funding away from schools that could use funding that would do better. At this time I'm convinced that almost any policy in education or health will fail without addressing the massive harms of large scale poverty in a capitalist system.
The core problem is that the effective route to massive improvements in equality of access to quality public education is basically "solve poverty, and concentrations of poverty", which isn't within the scope of schools' mission and is going to be far harder to sell, politically, take a long time, and be incredibly expensive.
We tried "bussing", which directly confronted parts of this, and it fucking worked, which makes it practically unique among attempts to address this problem, and it was relatively cheap compared to other things we might try that could work, but literally everyone hated it (yes, even the poorer families) so I guess that's out.
Much like the original architecture and UX of welfare in the US had assumptions like a family with a cook at home I don’t think education as an institution is really meeting the needs of the public to be better informed and critical thinking citizens invested in communities and society as a whole.
There’s a big cultural issue currently where people are resistant to move for better opportunities when much of the US immigrant population has thrived over generations specifically by migrating to opportunity areas. Now, many that try to leave impoverished areas are shamed and become pariahs for leaving basically job deserts and the social costs are horrific as people find less and less connection to others.
However when public education is not guided by improving meaningful outcomes, but by ideologues, it needs to be checked. Vouchers sounds like a good way to insert some market dynamics and to allow parents to walk away from schools that are on the path to fail to prepare their kids for the future.
My son is currently is in public elementary school here in Bay Area. If this idiocy persists, i dont believe i will keep him in non-STEM focused public school and will seek out better education for him that i will need to pay out of pocket.
I can afford it, but those who are less fortunate will remain trapped and thats a travesty of CA public education
As opposed to parental ideologues? By letting parents choose, we'll be letting them go to different schools championing different value system and the customers will be parents, not the children they ostensibly are charged with educating.
By grouping parents with like-minded parents, we'll amplify groups and clusters, leading to not only further stratification but also further decoupling society and greater inequality.
This effect is super obvious if you've ever sent kids to a private school. A big part of it is that you're opting in to a certain approach and set of attitudes and beliefs, even in secular ones. If you're not a fit for their program, you don't get to meaningfully agitate to change things as you might in a public school—they just tell you to go somewhere else, then pluck another candidate off the wait list to replace your family.
This can be awesome (though still risky, in some ways) if it's a good bubble, but of course they aren't all good ones....
What is an alternative? Forbidding parents to pull their kids from schools that are ruining their future by following a system with historically worse outcomes?
Most importantly, original articles here provide data that show that teaching math the way CA is trying to do has led to worse outcomes across the ethnic spectrum(unless of course parents had a financial ability to complement with private school/lessons).
So, we have the right to indoctrinate bullshit to children?
What is an alternative? Forbidding parents to pull their kids from schools that are ruining their future by following a system with historically worse outcomes?
We work by improving public schools. That's going to be easier said than done, but it's the right solution.
[EDIT] To make this more substantive: I think there's a distinct difference between collectively funding a public system, and redistributing money to folks to go toward private entities—this goes beyond not liking the values or environments of some of the schools private-school-preferrers might spend their vouchers on. That's why I suggested that if we must do vouchers, it ought to be limited to what a given person paid in themselves, not other people's money—I think there's a fundamental difference between funding a public good available to all and giving people cash so they can get past a private paywall to access a similar good.
Would you be okay with the exact same amount of your tax dollars being used to send his kids to public school? If so, then why the difference?
I'm also OK with taxes for public libraries, but wouldn't like my taxes going toward vouchers to help people pay for access to private libraries.
From what I have observed of the US's education system, the problem is that the public education system is assimilating children into values that are _not_ shared by society nor their parents.
That is to say: I'm a leftist and I'm worried about schools indoctrinating kids into a whitewashed, anti-LGBTQ+, jingoistic understanding of the world. However, I'm sure there are Republican parents that are concerned about kids being indoctrinated into a "woke" understanding of the world.
I don't know how you manage things when you have the country split down the middle with two completely separate worldviews.
The issue is, from my view, very much a problem of the Left-wing in the US, introducing victim/oppressor politics into schools, teaching children primarily to regard themselves as activists first, and students second.
I can also see it is causing a mental health crisis in students, who increasingly are under pressure to identify as an oppressed minority, in order to be marked out as an oppressor; victimhood conferring social status.
Where is this being done? What school districts specifically? What are the specific topics that "introduce victim/oppressor politics into schools?"
I'd really like to know, as I'm not aware of any of that stuff. Since you're obviously a "disinterested observer," without an agenda, I assume you've gathered actual evidence for your assertions.
My view (as an American "with an agenda") is very different from yours. If I'm wrong, I'd like to adjust my view. As such, please provide me with specific examples of what you're asserting.
Thanks!
An excerpt from the section "Trans as an intersectional shield":
> "“Of all of these badges of victim status, the only one that you can actually choose is ‘trans,’” Heather Heying, visiting fellow at Princeton University, pointed out to me. “All you have to do is declare ‘I’m trans’ and boom, you’re trans. And there you get to rise in the progressive stack and you have more credibility in this intersectional worldview.”
> In schools across America, kindergarteners are taught that biological sex and gender very often come apart; one has no essential connection to the other... As it is presented in schools, “cisgender” often seems to be a null set.
That doesn't answer the question I asked, nor does it show anything even close to encouraging a "victim/oppressor" environment.
No one is trans because its' "cool" or because someone mentioned that trans people (less than 1% of the population) exist. Do you know anyone who is trans? It's certainly not some golden road to peer/social acceptance and popularity. Quite the opposite, in fact.
In fact, trans folks are routinely subject to harassment, ridicule, threats and physical violence. Stopping such abuse is the goal, not creating more trans folks -- which is ridiculous on its face.
That you take your own trained-in prejudices for the laws of nature don't make them so.
None of what you posted makes your point, rather it just points up that you don't like what certain people have to say and you want such ideas and people suppressed. What are you afraid of?
I'm not claiming that "I just want to have a debate," nor did I "pursue" you (I made exactly one request to detail evidence of your assertions) and none of what I asked about was "tangential" or "previously addressed." And I'm not "feigning" ignorance. I know quite a bit about trans folks and the issues and discrimination they face.
What's more, the tired tropes (which you trotted out rather than have a substantive discussion) are more akin to the "Gish Gallop"[0] than anything I might have written being "sea lioning."
I have no interest in debating anything with you. You're just flat wrong.
Regardless, you have your ideas/beliefs and as a decent human being, I don't despise you for those beliefs, nor do I advocate for you to be silenced (as you do about others).
Please do speak your mind. It's an important part of having a free and open society. And I will do the same.
Have a good day!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
Edit: Fixed typo.
Regulate voucher schools. Content requirements. Restrictions on religion. Maybe even standardized testing, or requirements that voucher students not be subject to extra fees.
The public is paying, after all. It can attach strings to its money.
The US no longer has universal shared values, it has many different sets of values that are all competing for survival. Schools have become the front line in this battlefield.
I disagree completely. Our shared values include belief in the rule of law, equality under that law, equality of opportunity and a whole bunch of other stuff that has always been the rhetoric, but much of which has only grudgingly been implemented for wider and wider swathes of Americans over the past 230+ years.
That some folks are at odds some issues most certainly does not mean we don't have shared values. It means that we don't share all the same values/ideas. Which is exactly how it's been here since well before the founding of the US.
Edit: Fixed prose.
You could literally rewrite history and language and program an entire generation of future voters. Imagine the possibilities
That's exactly what's happened at our board level. The PTA of the school itself is the involved parents, and the schoolboard has the utmost contempt for them!
None of the involved parents are willing to put in the effort or have the desire to be elected to the schoolboard though.
With respect to the GP comment, I don't think things are quite as pre-planned as a deliberate effort to have engaged parents sort of subsidize the lack of effort by less engaged parents. That might be the net result, but attributing that to a deliberate and coordinated plan on the part of school boards or the broader public education system is, to my thinking, giving them too much credit in their ability to so coordinate and engage in such complex efforts. They bicker far too much among themselves pursuing their own agendas to agree long enough for that level of strategy.
And there are on occasion parents truly willing to put in the effort and get elected, but end up quickly disillusioned on their hopes for affecting any change and leave to spend their time more productively. Often enough those who seek & stay in these board position aren't even parents of children who currently or even attended the schools in the district.
Again though, I'd temper my statements with the caveat that they're based on my own singular experience, and I'd readily believe that elsewhere there are boards who arrive at the same state of affairs with a bit more deliberate actions. It's all a mess.
An interesting and important anecdote. But rather than focusing on your mom's inability to take shop class, perhaps you might reflect on the fact that your mom (and many other women/girls) fought for such changes and, eventually (albeit too late for your mom), won.
That's how change happens. If you just throw up your hands and say "well, I/my mom/whoever couldn't have something that was good and important. So there's no reason to ever fight for change," seems incredibly reductive and doesn't reflect how change has been wrought throughout history.
Please understand, I'm not poking at you or your mom (in fact, I don't know her, but I think she's fabulous!). Rather, I'm taking issue with the idea that we "can't win, so don't try." That's a recipe for those who understand how change is made to create the world in their image, whether you like it or not.
I get that it's hard to ask people to think of the wider implications when they've got their own life to consider though.
There are grim economic shifts behind this. The majority of people are now priced out of raising their own kids to a good standard (i.e. stay-at-home mum). So, more and more people feel envy towards those who can, and various "equity" movements pop out (that all focus on bringing top performers down, rather than bottom performers up).
The only way to fight it is move to an area where most people can still afford kids, and in our generation it may mean moving out of U.S. entirely.
Assume for a moment that my vote matters... in the sense that who I choose is elected. Further, assume that I get to craft and design these magical candidates like it the sandbox mode of some video game.
So, after all this, these candidates of mine are in charge of the school board, and no one can cockblock them. At this point, does it change the quality of the school's education? Not necessarily for my kids... that's a more difficult thing. Maybe it's a great school, but my kid's just one of those left behind by random individual circumstances. Just on average, does this school improve?
Turns out, not really. That school system is still limited in many ways beyond the school board's ability to affect on any reasonable timescale. There is not just a finite talent pool to hire from, but quite limited. And the resources to somehow expand that talent pool are limited too (and it seems likely that even if you could offer $500k salaries, you're attracting money-grubbers more than great teachers). Your capacity for the HR system to even pick the best of that talent pool is sketchy.
Textbooks? Limited by what textbooks are offered on the open market. Limited by whether parents will accept that Timmy really is a D+ student, and doesn't deserve automatic Bs for showing up and not acting the maniac. Limited by the "culture of public education"... if the best field trip ever could only happen at the end of July, that doesn't happen because we have ideas about how public schools are supposed to work and they're just not "on" during that part of the calendar.
If I was some angsty nihilist, I'd be ranting about how school boards cockblock everything public schools should be doing. But it's so much worse than that. If they did cockblock those things, it'd mean they had some idea what they should do, and were for some reason opposed to it. They don't know. And if they did, it wouldn't matter.
The system is designed in such a way as to be completely orthogonal its imagined purpose.
And you don't have to be especially intelligent or attentive to recognize any of this enough that you just don't bother with the school board elections. Why would anyone bother to vote? The truth of the matter is it's mostly between worse-and-worst candidates who have no true desire to see any sort of real improvement, and your one vote's not enough to sway it to one or the other.
This assumes that it's actually possible for parents to override insulated bureaucrats whose heads are stuffed completely up their own derrieres.
Political hyper-polarization doesn't help either. If your local crazy-left school board abolishes merit in the name of equity, you could always replace them with crazy-right Republicans who believe the Earth is 6000 years old and Qanon is real.
The only option is do not help and do not engage. There is no point is expending effort trying to fix a system led by people that hate you.
[1] https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/the-roots-of-black-politic...
EDIT: There are lots of papers regarding school vouchers and private schools and why it’s a bad idea. Simplistic solutions to complex problems tend not to work and have bad unintended consequences.
This hasn't been true for decades:
>on average, both Black and Latinx total per pupil expenditures exceed White total per pupil expenditures by $229.53 and $126.15, respectively.[0]
Almost all federal funds go to poor areas, so much so that they have more funding on average.
[0]https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23328584198724...
While total per pupil expenditures may be greater for the typical Black or Latinx students’ districts, there is variation in how these dollars are spent. On average, both Black and Latinx per pupil expenditures exceed White per pupil expenditures for administration, instruction, and social services. On the other hand, Black and Latinx per pupil expenditures are less than White per pupil expenditures on infrastructure. Black per pupil expenditures on all other items are slightly less than in the typical White student’s district, while Latinx spending is comparable.
Table 1 also illustrates some familiar facts. Black and Latinx students’ typical districts tend to have higher levels of child poverty, on average, than the typical White student’s district (5.4 and 4.0 percentage points higher in Black and Latinx districts, respectively).
Poor students who come from food insecure homes or live in high crime areas need more help in school in terms of school lunch programs, after school care, mental health intervention, etc. As such they need a lot more funding per student.
Complex problems require more than a simplistic solution. There are cultural, sociological, and economic forces at play. Vouchers are not a panacea. For one thing, private schools don’t have to accept students they consider a problem. Wealthy schools don’t want too many undesirables so won’t accept vouchers. Public schools will end up having mostly all the problem students without the resources to deal with them.
The answer is (and always will be) human capital. You could airdrop TJHSST kids into a literal warzone and they would do well. Smart kids are smart because they are smart. There is no magic dirt, and "muh multicausal forces" is pure cope.
People like you got ahold of SF's school system and made Lowell lottery entrance. They swore that it wouldn't have a big impact on test results and that the new class would benefit from being on the magic dirt of Lowell High School. Of course that's what their theories would support. Lo and behold it was an abject failure as anyone who wasn't a psychotic leftist could predict.
Smart kids dropped into a war zone may or may not do well. They might die for one thing. They might get so traumatized by the event that they are unable to cope in life. Change someone’s circumstances drastically enough then it won’t be possible to know what the outcome is.
Which you keep repeating without providing any supporting argument or citations, hence the downvotes.
It’s worth pointing out that people who support vouchers haven’t posted links to papers showing that vouchers are good. At least not in the thread started by rayiner. There have been papers posted on ancillary topics but not on the efficacy of vouchers. This isn’t a complaint on my part. I’m showing an asymmetry in the view that you posted above.
As for downvotes. I don’t care about internet points and never complain about downvotes or are otherwise affected by them. If you think what I’ve written is poorly stated or otherwise bad then downvote.
The person who said that smart kids dropped into a war zone would do just fine said something moronic and without attribution to its veracity. Why don’t you downvote them and ask for citations? Are you consistent in your view on this? I doubt it because if you were you’d be downvoting the overwhelming majority of comments on every thread on HN.
Being a progressive and seeing real-world data crush your entire world view time after time must be a strange feeling.
It’s not a strange feeling seeing data contradict my beliefs. I welcome such occurrences as they provide an opportunity to get rid of false beliefs. In the present circumstance I’ve not argued that more money needs to spent. I have suggested a better method of allocation of expenditures and that school vouchers are not the answer. Do you have evidence that I’m wrong on this? If so please show the evidence.
And even then you still have the problem of transportation. Only the more well off families have the time and means to get their kids to somewhere that isn't their closest home school.
Unless you require the school to accept vouchers from anyone who wants to go and provide them transportation, you're still going to get inequalities of outcomes.
I think you're letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Rich people buy homes near good schools. Poor people live in homes they can afford next to bad schools. Removing the option for poor parents to drive their kids is not equity. Its damnation.
I live in a state where you can _pay_ (yes not a voucher - you PAY) to attend a school outside your district. I knew several poor families which took advantage. I don't know of a single middle-class family which did the same.
Not a scientific study. But it seems to me totally excluding the possibility of going to a better school is not kindness or progress or equity. Infantilizing poor people who "don't have time to drive" is silly. Some don't but there's always car pooling. When you're desperate you make it work.
There is inequality in aptitude with respect to education. Forcing equality of outcomes is a design for crushing cruelty. Some people having good schooling is better than nobody in the name of equity. Pursuit of this policy is undermining public support for state-run schools.
As for not giving schools significantly more money for special ed, what is significant in your eyes?
I'd suggest that additional funding for special education, on a per student basis could be based on some sort of disability index, whereas the more services they require gets the district more money. Ideally some formula that is a mix of numbers based on local assessments, and weighted to similar districts in size and socioeconomic backgrounds of their residents. Like if a district games the system, the weighting should result in them being brought back into some mean.
No. Why should I accept less from a private school when the public school already guarantees it? This is incredibly important for special needs students and families.
> I'd suggest that additional funding for special education...
This already happens. In part, it depends on the state and county. Schools get more money for special needs students. I'm fine with them getting more money, but let's not pretend that the school receives the same funding for special-needs and non-special needs students.
That's naive. How much effort will be required to get your kid to a better school? Daily effort? Schools get selected because of convenience (distance, cost), and because the neighborhood friends go there as well. Homo economicus does not exist.
Furthermore, it presupposes an open competition between schools without restrictions on placement, and all information available and understandable to everyone. It's not going to work.
There's also the effect of mixing children with different backgrounds. A good school with can absorb a small amount of deficient students and stimulate them. Having everyone fight for the same school will cancel that, certainly if there also are programs that advance one group over another.
The only result of a free market for schooling will be that well-informed parents with some means will be able to select better schools for their kids. This being a (near) zero-sum game (you can't find a million good teachers), it'll mean the rest will be off worse.
1) A good public education should be available to all students, with reasonable transportation provided. This is an axiom for me.
2) Private schools do not seem consistently provide a better education, but they do enable siphoning and segregation of students. Students with disabilities of various types can be excluded; the education can be explicitly religious; private education can really enable exclusivity of many kinds. On one level all that is fine -- but I don't want taxpayer dollars to support it. Raise money thru your church to send kids to that stuff.
In addition, I think your premise is false. In the school district I live in, children can apply to attend any school in the district. Charter schools are available as well as public schools. Choice is available with a publicly funded model, and as a parent I am partaking in that and switching a kid from a high-scoring school that I'm nevertheless not fully satisfied with to another high-performing school that rivals the privates for about $30k less a year.
But in the end, I actually don't think competition forces improvement. The misalignment of incentives is too great. Individual teachers want to do their best for their kids, in general, and they also want to improve their income. To do their best, they try to help the visible high achievers if they can but they absolutely must take time on the kids acting out. Administrators have to deal with district edicts and teacher demands, but they don't have the money to support teacher development (which would be the #1 thing to help both teachers and kids). School districts/boards need to show they're "using technology" and "being equitable" and "being innovative" and all sorts of stuff that is not the same as improving outcomes. Everyone is supposed to do well on the tests, even when the tests are stupid (and whoo-hoo are some of them terrible). Schools have to deal with homelessness and hunger, because no other regional agency deals with all the kids in the area. Nothing lines up and so we end up with free lunch that's not so nutritious but does hit a calorie bar, attempts at equity without supports (putting kids with behavioral problems into crowded and understaffed classrooms), a bunch of teachers who are scared of math yet have to teach it, who would benefit most from upgrading their skills....
The reason education costs are screaming out of control in secondary education is because the government isn't responsible for student loans but students are and they have no opportunity to discharge to bankruptcy and there are no normal consumer debt protections for them. It's guaranteed free money for universities without any underwriting process and an albatross on the neck of the middle class.
Tuitions will remain high for as long as they have students desperate or ignorant enough to make poor financial choices.
The sad part is that this continues despite universities largely not meeting society's needs nor the needs of the students.
Do you have any evidence private schooling is bad? This is the first time I've heard it's worse than public school.
Is this a result of the private schooling or does the socioeconomic status of their parents play a significant role?
I attended both and the people that were rich enough to attend private school but were sent to public school anyway still did very well for themselves, not obviously different from those that attended private school.
I would reference the confirming NAIS studies as well but they've got some self-interest in those results.
the data is very very old (20 years), but they did not find significant differences after adjusting for the schools / students characteristics. Unadjusted scores however do look better for private schools.
https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/dashboards/schools_dashboa...
Private schools outperform in nearly all subjects.
This assumes a lot of facts not in evidence. In general schools that accept vouchers generally operate on much smaller per-student budgets (especially if you include the capital budget -- buildings and facilities) than public schools do. In many voucher states, the public school gets some level of funding for a student even a parent gets a voucher and sends their child somewhere else.
They can and do raise my property taxes, but it's much harder than colleges simply demanding higher and higher tuitions.
Are there circumstances where the availability of vouchers results in a parent making a worse educational selection for their student? Would this leave educational marketing to lean towards populist institutions (like Kanye West's "schools" or Megachurch-derived schools)?
> Stuff like this is why I will remain a proponent for true vouchers for the rest of my life.
The only thing that does is line the pockets of fundamentalist christian schools with money and increase the inequality. schools should not be tied to local taxes by and large... there should be a equality of funding.
If it was a different pool of money, I get it, but -- speaking specifically about the Bay Area -- one of the reasons public schools have suffered is because of attrition toward parochial & private options. When school attendance shrinks, so does funding, which creates a downward spiral of performance in many cases. And it isn't even that all the private options are superior, but because public school funding is dependent on attendance, they detract from the capability & capacity many of these schools have to deliver high quality education. I'm sure it isn't unique, but I've never lived in a place that had such a high proportion of kids in parochial & private schools, and it absolutely does harm the public schools. Compare this to somewhere like Massachusetts, which is equally progressive, treats teachers equally well (better), and has much higher performing public schools -- largely because fewer families with means to pay for private actually do, and those kids & households further support the teachers and administration of their neighborhood schools.
The schools are there for the kids. They aren't cattle to be used as a commodity input to a jobs and spending program.
The incentive is because it saves the government money, and educated the student better.
If costs the government 20k per year to educate 1 child, and a private school can do a better job of it, for 15k, then the government saves money by having the private school do it instead.
By what metric are the private options not superior to the Bay Area Public Schools?
I would argue that until the Bay Area housing crisis is resolved (probably in part by repealing prop 13), the private-school exodus will continue.
Last thing I want my tax dollars go toward is religious child-brainwashing and radicalized programming.
In places where vouchers are legal, this is the kind of result you get.
Are you talking about attempting to erase African American's suffering over the last 400 years here?
Or are you talking about erasing LGBTQ peoples?
Or are you wanting to erase health education and sex ed, cause "celibacy is better" (aka catholic propaganda)?
Which indoctrinations are you talking about?
Searching "Public School Indoctrination" in google shows the following:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/02/the-indoctrination-in... - Goes off about "critical race theory" (aka history) and to a lesser extent, gender
https://www.ocpathink.org/post/analysis/indoctrination-in-pu... - again, raling on about history classes, err, I mean CRT.
https://thehill.com/opinion/education/3941143-the-myth-of-wo... Op-ed that calls out "woke" for what it is - intolerance and hate.
https://www.ocregister.com/2022/02/14/im-a-teacher-heres-how... Oped by a teacher, again rails on about CRT.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/communi... Bemoaning the evils of "leftist ideology".
And looking at how those "anti-public education indoctrination" articles are written, sure as hell looks like a thinktank written by the same dozen or so people to create a frenzy of anger and outrage. And this boogeyman called "CRT" has a different name. It's called History.
I dont care if you have weird beliefs. I just don't want weird beliefs funded by the state. And that's also including my own weird beliefs.
Besides, the state can mandate a minimum curriculum which includes civic education to receive the voucher, with the state managing standardized end of years test for the mandatory curriculum.
The options to handle it well are there, society just needs the will.
You say this, but what you actually mean is no wealthy parent should be stuck without options.
The hoi polloi that can't afford the voucher plus mountain of money private school tuition will still be quite stuck without options, except that you've also created an explicit two-class system.
I hear those do wonders for social cohesion. As will opening a firehose of money into the insane fundamentalist indoctrination that so many parents wish to inflict on their children, but can't in public school.
What are you talking about? The voucher is supplied by the state, and charter schools are definitionally tuition-free to students and their families.
No, it's not. Society only works when people believe in a shared fiction, and when they stop believing it, things go completely to shit.
I would absolutely oppose indoctrination into a bad shared fiction, just like a religious person would oppose indoctrination into a 'religion is the opiate of the masses and must be purged from society' shared fiction, or like a pro-democracy person would oppose indoctrination into 'the way forward is installing an autocracy that will seize power through force of arms' shared fiction, or like how most of us would probably have issues with pro-ISIS indoctrination.
'Some peopling' moral relativism is a bankrupt philosophy that will lead us to ruin.
I’m against vouchers because I don’t think I should have to pay with my taxes for religious indoctrination masquerading as private education.
It’s one thing if you’re forced into through zoning. It’s an entirely different picture if it’s a choice of parents.
I don’t care if they somehow produce on average even 30 points of IQ improvement. They shouldn’t exist.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2012/02/is-sexual-abuse-...
This was also backed by the US Department of Education in 2004. Since then they've been very hesitant to revisit the issue.
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED483143.pdf
The New York Times was also admitting, way back in 1995, that about 5% of public school teachers are abusers. Considering how many teachers a child goes through, they'll probably meet a few.
https://www.nytimes.com/1995/05/21/nyregion/teacher-student-...
I think that if it wasn't for the fact that it was school, sending your child to any place where there was a 1-in-10 chance of them being sexually abused would be a crime.
Not GP, but here you go:
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=sexual+abuse+in+private+sch...
https://www.aauw.org/app/uploads/2020/03/Crossing-the-Line-S...
The 1-in-10 number is self-reported harassment which is different from teacher-on-student abuse but I don’t really care about the distinction. Your 1-in-20 number is a different metric entirely, by the way (as abusers are not one-to-one with abused). Again, I don’t really care about these wrinkles.
Anyway, AAUW’s data doesn’t distinguish between reports from public and public charter, so you can’t use this data to draw conclusions about differences between public and religious schools.
Furthermore, and this is the most important part, their main recommendation to reduce the incidence of abuse and discrimination in all schools (i.e., one of the things I actually want to minimize) is to promote more adherence to Title IX protections.
Private schools have no legal obligation to provide any Title IX protections, and indeed some religious schools, by their very doctrine, cannot.
Next time, if you’re going to demand statistics that don’t exist (as private schools have no reporting requirements and the AAUW report demonstrates that many institutions obviously underreport) please provide better links, thanks.
It was in no way a superior product like they want you to believe anyway. It was obvious in college that I had inferior math and science education, and I was considered a high performer in my high school!
They even turned me off religion completely, so fail on all counts.
are you missing a NOT in there? as in `I'm NOT for vouchers because I don't think I should have to pay with my taxes for religious indoctrination masquerading as public education. `?
because as it stands, your comment makes as much sense as saying
> if you are not paying for the product you are the product
Just because you are paying does not mean you are NOT the product, to spell it out.
Similarly, just because people have the option to pay for their Islamic Madrasah or whatever Jewish or Christian equivalents are with vouchers, does not mean they will not try to shove their ideologies down everyone in public education in the next election cycle.
No, I'm not. A vision of equity advanced by kneecapping math education in public schools is no less faith-based than creationism taught in private schools. If anything, I'd guess creationism is less damaging to students.
This:
bolsters shitty religious propaganda
dumbs down the students receiving substandard education
props us churches
drains money out of the public schools
requires that I pay a part of my taxes to an unaccountable religious organization.
This isn't a requirement for vouchers. You can simply state that religious schools aren't eligible.
Just under a third of Californian's aren't religious [1]. Nobody is proposing to ban religious schools.
If you can't swing it, make the choice local. Each county or whatever can vote on whether to permit religious vouchers. The Bay Area will ban it. The Central Coast won't. This remains better than the status quo. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-stu...
There is a powerful political and legal movement behind the idea that state-funded religious indoctrination is not only permitted, but required.
Uh huh. And if you are a homeschooler, or go to private school, you are taxed right now to pay for secular indoctrination masquerading as public education. /s
But seriously, by this logic, what is the justification for using taxes paid by people who don't attend public school, to fund the public schools?
I think the answer becomes a lot clearer then.
Miss Manners has a quote something like "School taxes are what we pay to the future in hopes that it has things like nice young geriatric doctors in it."
Also, what precisely are you claiming is "secular indoctrination"? Evolution? The separation of church and state (in the US)? People who went to religious school have confidently told me that both are myths. They also told me that their school absolutely should have gotten tax funding.
It's weird how many are against giving poor people the same opportunity and want to keep them trapped.
You claim that you shouldn't be "stuck" with a bad school program but you aren't. You can run for school board along with other like minded student-focused parents and get the thing corrected.
What will really happen is what happens today. Kids whose parents have options just get put in private schools and the problem gets ignored. The kids whose parents have no options get left behind.
The best argument I have heard for not getting into algebra too quickly is that kids are often not getting enough time spent on foundational math skills, and then that leads them not to have those foundations as math ramps up in difficulty.
I don't think eliminating advanced math for equity's sake makes any sense, but we should also be careful not to rush through lower-level math and leave even strong students without foundational skills.
Math education in the U.S. is not working for the vast majority of students. We need to find a way to make it more engaging and applied. We may also need to just spend more time each day on math.
Pull your kid. Find them a school that gives them the greatest opportunity to succeed and use the funds earmarked for their education to ensure they receive it.
Currently, options are restricted to parents who can afford to move to a different school zone, afford private school or have a parent available who can facilitate a home school environment.
Letting parents vote with their kids placement will force schools to truly advance.