https://calmatters.org/housing/homelessness/2024/04/californ...
Perhaps, but the better question is _how_ it would change. As we can see from the history of charter schools, typically that would happen by trying to cherry pick the least expensive, best performing students while excluding the most expensive.
As a simple example, one thing which makes large school district costs higher is that public schools are required to have expensive staff to care for students’ health, mental health, and special needs. If you are running a private school, you immediately see a cost advantage if you can find a way to discourage students who need those services from enrolling. It’s illegal to say “no special needs kids” but if you’re careful you can effectively approach the same outcome without a high likelihood of being sued successfully.
A school with half the funding full of healthy children of white collar professionals in the ‘burbs will graduate more kids than a school with full funding teaching kids who speak broken English, whose parents move them around a lot between schools because they’re not housing-secure, who don’t always eat breakfast or dinner, and who are on an IEP for a learning disorder.
By far the easiest way to hit a graduation rate target is to try to take as few hard-to-teach kids as possible. The funding to make up the difference in difficulty is… I dunno, astronomical. Maybe pay for their family’s entire living expenses or something.
Yeah, these days I lean towards housing as the root of a lot of these problems but that feels kind of that that “now draw the rest of the owl” joke. There’s so much pent up demand for affordable housing and each density improvement takes long enough that the kids affected today will probably be adults by the time we see improvements.
If some people take longer to learn things than others, you pretty much have two options. Either you teach them slower, and then accept that they're not going to graduate on time and those students aren't going to get a high school diploma until age 21. Or you teach them less, and relax the graduation requirement so they can graduate on time. Both of these are unpleasant, but you have to pick one or you get the default option where they flunk out and never graduate.
I imagine most of us remember being in high school and there was always that kid in _every_ class that gave the teacher a hard time, caused distractions, etc.
There are, imho, two ways to handle that. Either drop the hammer on the kid, or do a home a visit. Or perhaps, both.
If the home visit shows the kid is just a jerk, keep dropping the hammer. If the kid has a shit home life, I imagine that 38k/yr could be spent in much better ways.
Now suppose the child has a medical condition and they have to spend half their time in the hospital getting treatment. Or they have a mental health condition and the meds only work until they build up a tolerance and then they have to switch medications and spend three months in a stupor trying to find another one that works.
They can pass the standard classes if you give them twice as long, but then they're learning one semester's worth of material every two semesters. What do you want to do with them?
There's something of a trend of reporting on schools where zero (literally zero) students are capable of doing math at grade level.
I think it started with (or at least became prominent) when Baltimore was revealed to have 23 schools in that category, though it isn't alone.
Though COVID has been taking the blame, the situation has been getting worse in the years since.
Even if these kids graduate, they have been failed by the adults who are responsible for them.
There are plenty of examples of mediocre public services getting privatized and becoming even worse, from a capital-efficiency perspective (e.g. UK railways, UK water...). Private companies are out to make a profit, and efficiency is just a mean to it; if there are other means, even to the detriment of what should be their core mission, they will pursue those means.
The real objective is both empowering, motivating, and holding accountable the middle-management layers of essential public services: administrators, teachers, railway workers, etc. Privatization doesn't magically do that. Creating a competitive system doesn't require corporate profits.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/apr/24/learni...
And every time it happens and the people are ripped off, the answer is always “even moar privatization.”
Funnily enough NYC has charter schools which aren’t exactly this but are an approximation. They’re renowned for pushing poorly performing students out of their schools and doing a terrible job serving special needs. As a result they do indeed often have great graduation rates.
Often when an ultimatum along these lines happens, whether public or private, the problem winds up being "fixed" in large part by some combination of double standards, gaming the metrics, and outright fraud. Some number called the "graduation rate" would surely change, but it wouldn't necessarily mean the same thing as what was called the "graduation rate" previously, let alone necessarily represent a materially better outcome for students.
I wanted to ask if you were joking, but that wouldn’t be productive.
What else can the legislature do? Figure out why throwing money at a problem isn’t working. This is the point someone above made about private vs public industry. Private can’t operate at a loss. The federal, state, and local governments can, and generally do. I’m sure I don’t need to point out the federal budget deficit.
If a private company was given the same 38k per student with the mandate “fix the graduation issue or you’re fired” the graduation rate would absolutely change.