I also enjoyed an education from public schools in The Netherlands (NL) but I feel this article is more about the teacher than the system. Besides, the NL system is also district-based and we recently started "grading" schools according to standardized tests and then publishing the results. This will probably (and already has to a certain degree) result in parents wanting their children to go to the schools that score highest, in turn, those schools request more "bijdrage" (extra cost, for supposed 'school trips' and 'books'), in turn making those schools less diverse (i.e. more "white") and in turn making schools that used to perform nominally, worse.

The teacher is what makes the student, and unfortunately I have also witnessed PABO students barely able to pass basic spelling/math tests. Those students will probably only go on to teach toddlers/basic grades, but due to teacher shortages it is conceivable that they will eventually move on to teach higher grades as well.

In my opinion, there is no easy short-term solution to the problem of adequate teacher-levels due to regulation/unions etc. We parents should try our best to partially circumvent the entire issue by avoiding "permanent damage" is done by staying up to date with what the child learns and focus on rote-skills that are hard for teachers to supervise in large class-rooms but immensely important when those kids grow up: maths and writing.

Perhaps this will get easier as teaching/assignments are increasingly interactive, allowing the parent to gain a better view of the child's performance and problems. Here's me hoping this e-learning thing takes off as soon as possible, with teachers perhaps evolving to simply guiding their pupils with extra support (if necessary), social interaction (digital age might not be all thats cracked up to be with encouraging social skills), learning techniques, and job planning as kids these days have no idea what they realistically are going to do for work later.

EDIT: Added some perhaps off-topic personal vision of what a teacher should do in the future when MOOCS/e-learning takes off.

(1) Many poor school districts are urban (2) Many urban dwellers are not owners, they are renters (3) Schools are funded by property taxes payed by owners (4) Often, the owners are large corporations, that do not involve themselves in anything about how the schools are run.

Basically, poor, urban schools are largely funded by faceless corporations holding hundreds of apartments paying taxes, not random rich families with luxury condos in the city sending kids to private school.

I'm not following the cause and effect of your logic. Are you missing a point or two? Perhaps "The ones who are paying for it are paying less than they need to"? or maybe "The ones who apportion those taxes have no financial incentive to apportion them wisely"?

Even in those cases, there should be enough distance between those paying the tax (in whatever portions) and those spending the tax to ensure that the government runs without interference and can provide the best service at that price point. If the service isn't good enough, then increase the price point. If you don't want to increase the price point, then reduce the quality of your service.

Either way, I think the argument falls into the category of "Wealth redistribution is a broken concept", and that's a whole 'nother ball game that any discussion on schools just isn't big enough for.

As I understand what the parent post's author wrote, the ones who pay for the US school system aren't the ones who use it: their kids go to private schools.

Perhaps this point was missing or too implicit: contrary to what occurs in Europe, there is no "How is my money being spent?" effect as a result of this.

I'm still not getting it. Are you saying that some taxes should be ringfenced and only used for the specific purpose of education (and by extension other taxes to other things), and that taxpayers get to see precisely how their proportion of taxes are being spent on that particular thing?

In any representative democracy that I know of, the budget (including tax income and government outgoings such as education) is handled by elected representatives of the people. There is no direct connection between a specific tax dollar and a specific public service. Rather, these things are budgeted for in aggregate.

The elected representatives are accountable to their electorate for these budgets, not to individual taxpayers. The concept of "How is my money being spent?" is a feature of this aggregated budgeting rather than any specific tracking from specific taxpayer to specific service. Going back to the parent posting, which implied an accountability of legislation (or at least educational administration) to its funders, I don't see how this works in representative democracies such as the US, because the funders are not stockholders in the traditional sense: Their extra tax dollars do not give them extra voting rights. The only way I can imagine that they would have more voting rights is through lobbying and other such methods that bypass traditional electoral accountability.

In short, an argument in the form of "Higher net tax payers are not net consumers of government spending, therefore government spending that does not help them does not efficiently help others" assumes either that citizens have an electoral power relative to the tax they pay (which is undemocratic) or that wealth redistribution is broken (in this case or in general).

> I'm still not getting it.

In Europe, the main group of tax payers are eating their own dog food by sending their kids to public schools. When the public schools their kids go to sucks, they know first hand and lobby to get it fixed.

In contrast, the main group of tax payers in the US are sending their kids to private schools. When the local public schools sucks, it doesn't have the slightest immediate impact on their kids and they therefor will not care much.

I still fail to see the influential connection between the taxpayer's opinion and the service his tax pays for. A rich guy who pays tax and doesn't avail of the state's education is in a minority, regardless of how much tax he pays.

As far as I can see, the only way the argument works is if money is what's doing the electing, rather than individual voters (as in, we don't have "one man one vote" but rather we have "mo' money mo' votes" like in private companies). If that's the case, then that's a way bigger story than "rich guy doesn't care that his tax dollars make good public education".

I think school are better to be public. But I'm a bit of a socialist when it comes to schools (and healthcare, and justice).

When all (or nearly all) schools are public, then everyone pays for what they get.

The article didn't directly address private v. Public education, but rather that our teacher preparation methods are crap. You may be able to argue those who graduate from the best programs for creating educators may be skimmed off the top by the resources a private institution hasavailableto them in terms of provided salary and other issues, but the more direct issue is that teaching is hard.

One may be an expert in ones field, and not be a teacher. Saldly one may be a teacher, but over the years we've also gone and built a system which actively discourages teaching.

So the issue isn't necessarily one of money, but of how we approach the problem of building teachers.

You don't matriculate from an institution. I think you mean 'graduate'.

Clearly I am the product of an American public school education :)

Yes. Services used only or mainly by the poor, tend to be poor.

But public education is not a service used primarily by the poor unless you have an extremely broad definition of poor. I believe the figure is around 10% of children are in private education.

Education is segregated in the states by rich and poor districts; it is a felony to enroll your kid in the wrong school.

This is dishonest. Education is segregated by geographic proximity to school in the states. Of course, poor people live in poor areas and rich people live in rich areas so there is a strong correlation. Within a given school system, which is at the county level in this state (and I think most states), the same amount of tax money is generally spent per student so the rich schools get the same amount of the poor schools. The rich schools just have parents and PTAs that can collect more money than the poor schools.

Is there a good solution though? I've seen kids bused across town to try and fix this. Of course if you're the family who is getting bused across town to go to a worse school you're angry, but if you're moving to a better school you're probably pretty happy. Other counties have school choice plans where you can pick your school from a small list and they hope that it evens out (Hint: It doesn't).

Both options suck. What is better? Do other countries provide funding at the national level so that poor counties can educate at the same level as rich ones? In America, that'd probably require a change to the constitution.

You are either igonorant or are being dishonest. Most states don't have county-level school districts; and definitely heavily populated ones do not. The district is either rich or poor. Example: mercer island is just across I90 from Seattle in king county, and is one of the richest districts in the nation (since mercer island is rich). The PTA BS is just made up libertarian propaganda (blame the poor people for being poor).

Bussing solves racial disparity within a district, not economic disparity. Course, these often correspond but not always.

Most first world countries fund educations out of the federal budget so it is more equitable; course, the libertarians would call that socialist, but you reap what you sow.

I live in the 10th most populated state and our school districts are at the county level. I know the 24th most populated state also has districts at the county level.

I tried to find statistics based on state, but could not find any data. (A quick google seems to imply that CA, NY, and WA do not do it based on county, but it's hard to say that most states do with only 5 measurements.)

I'm not really sure why your posts are so angry about this topic, but your original assertion was that schools were segregated by wealth, which is obviously not how are schools districts are devised. I understand that your jaded worldview may keep you from accepting this fact.

School districts and towns that they correspond to are often setup explicitly to prevent equitable distribution of resources. It is very human nature to do that in the "got mine get lost" way. property taxes are just s bad way at it (and WA does much better than most states).

So you're really hitting on the different qualities that can exist inside of public education here, and it's definitely a state-by-state issue (although universally I'd say there are systemic differences between the quality of public urban education vs. suburban vs. rural). While that's definitely a topic of concern and a big problem, the fact remains that that is still publicly funded education. "Rich districts" are still funded by state & county tax funding, where those tax payers are directly taking advantage of their tax dollars at work. My objection was just this notion that public education is just some fringe social benefit for the poor, because outside of the mega-wealthy, its one of the few places in government that society is very deeply invested.

There is thst: society benefits from educated kids, but we've managed to create a system segregated by socioeconomic factors that tend to inhibit social mobility, which then describes why the US can simultaneously have the best and worst schools in the developed world at the same time.

So "trickle down"?

It might be that trickle-down only works if the people from whom it trickles down are in some real way dependent on the trickling-down. Which seems not to be the case here, as cies said.