The pressure that U.S. inequality exerts on parents | Hacker News Reader

The pressure that U.S. inequality exerts on parents

theatlantic.com

89 pointspzs120 comments

I remember Linus Torvalds talking about this, getting a home in a good school district is difficult and expensive but not getting one has consequences. And when you read this, you really understand the Finnish idea that all school should be equally good, a competition between them will lead to good, better, and bad schools.

One word: Gentrification.

It affects other aspects of our society, not just education.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentrification

Linus' post: https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/J1NCgKQi55X

I live in a city in California where within the same school district, there is one school in the 99% percentile ranking while the others are in the mid range.

Another reason Finnish schools are so successful:

Finland ethnic groups: Finn 93.4%, Swede 5.6%, Russian 0.5%, Estonian 0.3%, Roma (Gypsy) 0.1%, Sami 0.1% (2006)

I would be interested in a study establishing that this correlation is in fact a cause.

There is no such thing as a "good school district." In D.C. there is a neighborhood called Capitol Hill. The local elementary school is Brent. 5-10 years ago, rich people would never have sent their kids to that school. It was 80% low-income, and the test scores were terrible. The area has dramatically gentrified over the last several years, and now it's one of the best schools in the city (and less than 15% low-income). Nothing changed about the school or the teachers--what changed is how much money the students parents' have.

The problem in the U.S. isn't that we have "good schools" and "bad schools." It's that we have extreme segregation along racial and economic lines. Our policies create pockets of schools that are 90% low-income (and usually a similar percentage black or hispanic). It's a symptom of a society with extreme segregation and wealth inequality, not a cause.

First off, I very much agree with you.

I think "good school district" is coded language for what you're making explicit—a district comprised of schools and teachers with necessary and adequate resources to provide "good/better/best" education.

I don't mean to detract from your point, because I think it is definitely key to education problems nationwide.

Edit: My statement about coded language did not include mention of the segregation and amplified economic disparity/inequality. It was not my intention to omit this as a means of saying it is irrelevant. It most certainly is. I was hasty in my paraphrasing. My apologies to rayiner for detracting from his very important point, which was not what I meant to do.

I think the point of the post above yours is a bit different.

A good school is one that has the best students. It is often your classmates, more than teachers, who create an environment that is conducive to learning. What seems to be the case is that rich people invest more in their kids, and their kids are simply better students. They are better behaved, with higher comprehension and math skills, and more likely to be better students. That is what creates a good school.

So it is not that schools get richer with better resources (although that too is a factor), but that richer kids with higher parental investment are fundamentally more likely to succeed. That is the real divide.

Certainly. My ultimate point was that because of the coded language, saying a "good school district" doesn't exist is, to me, equivalent to saying the problems rayiner made explicit don't exist. Just because it's a polite term doesn't mean people don't understand what it signifies, and also doesn't mean the good/bad school divide doesn't exist. I made my point poorly and wish I hadn't, as it has led to misunderstanding.

It is telling that whenever I hear the phrase "good school district", I automatically assume an upper-middle class nuclear white family...

It is certainly no coincidence.

or in CA it is - 25% White American, 25% Indian, 25% Chinese, 25% European

There also is the effect that the grouping matters - other things being equal, your kid will succeed more when put in a class where other students have higher parental investment, rather than when put in class with a lot of poor students having issues with absenteeism and higher incidence crime and/or substance abuse.

In essence, people are willing to pay a premium in real estate prices just so their kids would not grow in a community of kids who cannot afford this premium.

That's not what I'm saying at all. Brent is in DCPS, the same as the terribly-performing schools just blocks away. DCPS doesn't assign it more resources just because the parents have money. And gentrification happened so quickly, the teachers are largely the same as they were five years ago when the school was awful. All that has changed is the makeup of the student body.

"Good school district" isn't code for "rich school district." DCPS is a terrible school district, and spends twice as much per student as the school districts in the surrounding wealthy suburbs. "Good school district" is code for "school district in which we've segregated-out the poor people and minorities."

I wasn't meaning to exclude that from the equation. Again, we don't materially disagree. I said it was coded language for what you made explicit. Guess I assumed you'd include all of it into the equation. I'd go back and edit, but whatever. My bad for not restating everything you said to avoid misinterpretation.

My point was that "good school district" is coded language, and gives people a polite way to wrap up all of that into a nice-sounding term that lets them avoid admitting the nastier things. As all coded language does.

I agree with the spirit of your comment, but you seem to be contradicting yourself. How can nothing have changed about the school? Schools derive a great deal of their funding from property taxes. You just described a school district dramatically gentrifying and going from 80% low-income to less than 15% low-income. The school now has a dramatically larger budget. They could have completely upgraded the teaching staff. They can now afford better facilities and resources. Even if the teachers are the exact same, they are now literally teaching a completely different student body. That sounds like a school that's changed to me.

> How can nothing have changed about the school? Schools derive a great deal of their funding from property taxes. You just described a school district dramatically gentrifying and going from 80% low-income to less than 15% low-income. The school now has a dramatically larger budget.

This is incorrect. All of the public schools in DC are in one school district, so the changing demographics of neighborhoods don't affect how much money is available for any given school in that district. The property taxes are all going into one pot.

Damn, owned.

Which is different from other municipalities, and would lead to some of us misunderstanding that DC works that way. Where I live, funding is very centered around districts, separate from the county, and there are massive disparities based on the wealth distribution in neighborhoods. People know where the good schools are, and they're typically the ones in which minorities are not. Hell, it's so fucked here that the county voted to sue the state last year.

What jdminhbg described is typical. A municipality (city, town, etc.) funds the schools within its boundaries. If there are affluent and poor neighborhoods within a municipality, there will typically be seen disparities in conditions at the schools that serve those respective neighborhoods. This is certainly the case in the town where I live.

Property taxes might be the same but money available for the school can change dramatically when kids of rich parents attend because of PTA fund raising.

In California schools are poorly funded but some public schools manage to raise thousands of dollars per student through the PTA. http://sfpublicpress.org/news/2014-02/how-budget-cuts-and-PT...

For reference: the $1,500 per student raised by the highest fundraising school is 1/10 as much as the approximately $15,000 per student more DCPS spends than FCPS (a neighboring suburb and second richest county in the country).

> How can nothing have changed about the school?

When you take away having to deal with problems, good things happen. LOTS of resources can turn toward creating academic achievement. That's how. In my town we have a scourge of overachievers who should be told to go fishing. That's the extent our problems.

The real issue is what causes the problems in poor school districts: Is it being poor? Being black? Are the people who blame "black culture" right? Or is it how we treat the poor and black people, from a very young age?

>Are the people who blame "black culture" right?

No. Those people are at best misguided, at worst, racist. If white American culture is the standard against which black American culture is judged, I am still waiting for the evidence that white culture prizes scholastic achievement and general intelligence. The only reason geeks and nerds became cool in America is because, suddenly dotcom riches! Until then there was a long history of media & movies that praised jocks and misanthropes above all else. (Hello, Molly Ringwald, hello Grease.) Today's college sports industrial complex is another sign. So is Fox News. So are the yahoos being elected to Texas schoolbook committees. So are creationists. I could go on....

It is probably an extreme example, but there is always "The Street Stops Here", a docu. about Bob Hurley, who is simply obsessed with keeping kids raised in dire poverty out of prison through the education system.

Of course he coaches basketball but that's almost peripheral (although he also loves winning ). His program is tightly integrated with the rest of a Catholic school. These kids live in a state of despair. He will fight this until his last breath. And he does not fight fair. Bob is a retired parole officer.

If anything, the film leaves me with the unsettling feeling that this is a very hard problem. It'd take decades of failure as a parole officer to make one Bob Hurley, and there seems to be only the one.

A school is made up of buildings and teachers, but most importantly - peers, and that must have changed dramatically.

Also, the home environment of the students has a huge impact on the school itself, and very little is done to mitigate that by American schools.

Unfortunately, I haven't kept up on my data for about 15 years, but back then two of the most strongly correlated factors of a student's performance were 1) how many books were in their home, and 2) how many college educated adults lived nearby. The amount spent per student had a tiny positive correlation. That said, I'm sure there's a minimum baseline of spending per student that needs to be achieved.

With all the raise to the top and gates foundation money floating around since then, I'm sure there is better data now. But, those factors really stuck with me.

It would be really interesting if we could factor-identify the problem as one that's fundamentally about racism. I don't suspect that this is going all that well as a project.

What we find is that race matters less than whether or not the kids have the resources and interest to exploit schools properly. The factors behind that are profound - you might consider "The Wire" a dozens-of-hours essay on the nature of the problem and it ended without much conclusion.

My Mom taught poor kids. They were of many races, but they all had the same basic problems.

I see things the exact opposite way. Giving the state (for the purposes of the majority of taxpayers) a monopoly on education produces schools that are uniformly bad, with terrible standardized curricula, insufficient institutional motivation to improve, and stifling bureaucracy. We have insufficient competition at the moment because the majority cannot afford to get into the good districts or uproot themselves every few years chasing them; a district with a good elementary school might have a bad middle school, or a district that was good when you moved in could go bad as your kid ages. This is simply too much trouble for all but the highest achieving and most dedicated parents, which only furthers the achievement gap that comes from exploiting it.

Instead, we could transition from a system of state run public schools to state funded private schools. Give each parent a tax credit that they can choose to spend on whatever school they like. Your school's funding is directly tied to the number of students that chose it, not the neighborhood it's in. Remove any restrictions on zoning or the number of schools allowed in an area. Remove the concepts of districts altogether. Get rid of mandatory curricula and give educators room to innovate.

I think the majority of parents out there care about their children and want them to succeed, they just don't have the money or extraordinary amounts of time to ensure it. But with a tax credit system and an abundance of competing schools in every metropolitan area, finding the right school for your kid and actually getting them into it would be much more achievable for a much greater portion of society. Yes, the most dedicated ones that get their kids into a dozen extracurricular activities and help them with their homework and whatnot will always have an advantage over the latchkey kids, but it'd still be a significant improvement over the status quo.

In my view, such a system will still need to be backed up by public schools, due to a number of possible failure modes:

1. Capacity shortages, which could be chronic and affect entire regions.

2. Who bails out the schools that fail? Who pays their creditors off?

3. Who provides seats to kids who can't get into a school, or who get kicked out due to issues that include behavior, special needs, or low test scores?

An additional issue is the efficiency of transporting kids to school when nobody lives close to their school. How many minivan-miles per day are we willing to spend on the dream of privatizing the schools?

I agree that majority of parents care about their kids, but educated parents are vastly better able to discern the quality of a school, and to advocate for the interests of our kids.

The simple fact of having to transport your kids to school -- a burden for the working poor -- coupled with existing economic segregation, means that private schools will still be able to cherry pick which kids they want to serve, based on location.

> 2. Who bails out the schools that fail? Who pays their creditors off?

We already have a pretty robust system for handling failed businesses.

I agree but should be hard finding that follows each student not tax credits. Poor people don't care about tax credits.

Also, what you describe already exists with charter schools. Charter schools are actually privately run but publically funded: they get funding from the state for each student that enrolls.

They could all be good schools but we simply don't want that. We want education theater for the same reason we want security theater.

In all subjects - but most especially history - it take decades to undo the damage from the public school system in America. We use it to spin old narrative yarns about what we'd wished happened.

If we decoupled housing from education as much as possible then at least people wouldn't be forced to buy all sorts of other amenities that they might or might not want along with the educations they do want.

There'd be a lot of winners from such a change, but the big losers would be incumbent homeowners in neighborhoods with "good schools" that have had that circumstance capitalized into the prices of their homes. Unfortunately that's quite a powerful group of people.

I don't disagree with you, but how would that work? How would you select pupils to fill the limited number of places in the desirable schools from a pool of candidates that would be much, much bigger?

Note that there would be 0 places in desirable schools. When you dilute the good kids, the AP classes get cancelled. When bad kids are roaming about and starting fights in the middle of lessons, teaching turns into babysitting.

It's not a matter of money. DC spends more per student than nearly everybody else. It's a matter of student quality.

Personally I like vouchers and school choice, with a variety of school philosophies and admissions processes. But even random assignment across larger geographical areas than are common today would be break the link between housing and quasi-public school tuition.

Needless to say I reject burfog's claim that we currently have an efficient meritocracy and that the betas, deltas and gammas should just make peace with their stations in life.

Yes, that's one way to do it. That's how it works for a lot of charter schools.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKTfaro96dg&feature=youtu.be...

The big losers would be the bright and willing children.

It's hard enough being a nerdy kid today. Such kids almost always are in decent places because kids tend to be like their parents. Kids with the potential to succeed come from parents with the potential to succeed.

Education doesn't work if the classroom is full of kids who can't behave. Education doesn't get very advanced if the classroom is full of kids who aren't bright and willing to study.

Mix things up, and what do you get? A few strangely poor-yet-viable kids will move from very bad schools to slightly bad schools (nice but insignificant) while all the bright promising kids will end up in less-effective schools. The best schools will cease to exist. (by changing that is; they don't physically go away)

It does make us more equal, largely by inhibiting the success of our brightest and hardest-working students. Is this what you want?

So basically you are saying that poor kids have no "potential to succeed" and should be kept segregated?

Yes. We do the exact same with disabled students. Yet no one talks about them. I suppose because it is because "looking out for the poor" makes people feel good.

Aren't public schools supposed to have special education resources? I don't know about other schools but the schools I grew up in had disabled students. They just often weren't in the same classes as the higher-achieving kids. But that's no different from students being in different accelerated, AP, or IB classes.

Interesting. How do you plan to keep the plebs from revolting once you eliminate the last vestige of social mobility?

They are exhausted from working minimum wage jobs, and the police will clean up any rabble-rousers.

The most important factor in the success of a child is arguably the stability of their home life. A poor kid with two dedicated parents can very easily get further in life than the wealthy child of a nasty divorce. And left in the dust is the kid that was "raised by the wolves," so to speak, in a ghetto, no matter how much government assistance the family receives to normalize their situation. Higher income of course confers countless perks that the highest achievers can take advantage of, but when understanding the majority of the population it is most useful as a heuristic for stability of home life.

It is nearly impossible to do justice to both sides when they are starting from such different places in life. How do you level the playing field when one was read bedtime stories to since they were a toddler and the other entered school not knowing how to read? How does the kid from an average nuclear family fare with the kids whose parents cannot even be trusted to feed them? How does a kid sheltered in a quiet suburban neighborhood feel safe around a kid that grew up fighting on the streets?

For decades the focus of the system has very clearly been on trying to offset the damage incurred in the home life of these children. And sadly, it has utterly failed at fixing multigenerational poverty. Indeed, policies stemming from No Child Left Behind seem to have made the problem even worse, raising generations of problem children who have been emboldened by weak administration that provides little consequence for consistently disrupting classes or assaulting students or even teachers!

The sad truth is that you can't fix home problems at school, and that our educational and social policies have only enabled the proliferation of broken homes.

You just said that rich kids are too weak to survive in the real world, and the solution for that is to crack down on poor kids.

It does make us more equal, largely by inhibiting the success of our brightest and hardest-working students. Is this what you want?

A. The brightest folks are not always the hardest-working. "Hard-working" in a student means blowing time on stupid worksheets and memorization instead of devoting resources to playful exploration of knowledge.

B. There is more aggregate value in having everyone do a bit better than having an occasional student who's amazing and pampered. Especially if they then proceed to go leave and never interact with the local economy again.

C. If your society is predicated on the notion of the occasional brilliant genius popping up to care for the slavering morons, maybe your society should fail.

"The brightest folks are not always the hardest-working."

I sure know it, because I was a bit lazy, but they do tend to go together. Even if they didn't, I'm fine grouping them together. The distinction doesn't matter for my purpose. Crudely, say that success potential is the product of those two. Multiply hours of effort by IQ if you like. Anyway, it doesn't matter for my purpose.

"There is more aggregate value in having everyone do a bit better than having an occasional student who's amazing and pampered."

That all depends on the trade-off. How much will you hurt the top 10% and how much will you help the lower 50% by the proposed change? If the hurt is great (likely) and the help is minor (likely) then the result is a loss.

> B. There is more aggregate value in having everyone do a bit better than having an occasional student who's amazing and pampered. Especially if they then proceed to go leave and never interact with the local economy again.

It's not that easy. For a well-functioning society it is indeed better to invest educational resources broadly to have everyone do a bit better. However, in many scientific disciplines (and especially in areas such as mathematics and theoretical physics) it seems most progress comes from a small number of high impact individuals (e.g. Newton, Einstein, Feynman etc). Thus, for robust scientific progress you should actually direct your educational resources towards the most promising kids.

Ultimately then your preferred distribution of educational resources depends on your values. If you care more for scientific progress than for social issues, then it is rational to favor targeted rather than broad spending of educational resources.

I personally do care about both, but faced with a choice I'd go for scientific progress because ultimately advances in science, technology and medicine prove to be the best way to reduce human suffering.

Pitting social issues against scientific progress is a false binary. Feynman, for example, was a Jewish kid from a remarkably normal family whose genius flourished in the more progressive atmosphere of New York City (less anti-Semitism and good public schools). Since genius of this kind seems to manifest infrequently and anomalously, making sure wherever it appears it isn't crushed under prejudice or denied sufficient opportunity seems like it should be a high priority.

This is some pretty blatant elitism. A domination loop is utterly apparent in your comment. As is typical, it uses it's consequences to justify it's continuation. Success is a fundamentally relative designation. It basically means winning. Which implies the exclusivity of success. Only some people get to have it.

> Kids with the potential to succeed come from parents with the potential to succeed.

There's another designation. One you have a genetic incentive to profess. Shame on you. Honestly. We should improve education by... improving education. As in the process by which we educate any arbitrary person. This "who deserves it" business is a distraction that perpetuates itself.

Rejection of the elite is destructive. Without the elite, we would have at best a 3rd-world situation. We need the elite.

There is no "process by which we educate any arbitrary person". Some won't succeed, no matter what portion of our resources we blow on them. The mere attempt causes our best teachers to leave the profession; few enjoy being powerless babysitters.

Your "who deserves it" terminology has a problem. It suggests that we are dishing out reward or punishment, but really could provide the best for everybody. We can't actually provide the best for everybody. This is partly because resources (including non-clonable human teachers) are limited, and partly (mostly) because the less-capable students interfere with education for the more-capable students.

> A few strangely poor-yet-viable kids will move from very bad schools to slightly bad schools (nice but insignificant) while all the bright promising kids will end up in less-effective schools

I may have overstated my position. I know there are some intractable kids that can't be educated. I just don't think the success of parents is a good measure for us to be using here. Not because it isn't a good one. It is. But because it disincentives anyone without such parents from even bothering to try. They will always be measured as the child of a not-successful person. Many such "poor-yet-viable" kids become indistinguishable from the intractable kids very quickly when they become aware of such attitudes. It is far more destructive. We only need an elite in proportion to scarcity. It is in fact only when we can provide an even playing field that the elite can be elite and not merely aristocratic.

>Education doesn't work if the classroom is full of kids who can't behave.

Education doesn't work, full stop. Or at least, it doesn't do what you think it does. The point isn't to provide a learning environment, or provide resources for students to learn. After all, education isn't paid for by an equity slice of the alumni's human capital. No, it's paid for and administered by government officials, working on the behalf of employers and parents. And what they want isn't bright, curious, and inquisitive people - they're happy when they get them, but they've got much bigger concerns. Obedience, reliability, conformity, conscientiousness, and pliability are all much bigger things that they want to cultivate.

Like, it speaks to the success of the educational system that you think it's hard to be a nerdy kid in today's educational environment and that school is a poor learning environment for so many children, and you don't immediately follow that up with something like "and that's why my children aren't going to school".

Education doesn't work, full stop.

Most Americans learned how to read, write, and do math in schools. They aren't perfect, but I think you underestimate how much learning goes on just to become a functioning citizen.

Most Americans hate doing math, do not read for pleasure, and rarely write outside of work. That's not anywhere close to success. The most important skill for getting good at something is enjoying it, and our current educational system is actively counterproductive on that axis.

Most Americans hate doing math, do not read for pleasure, and rarely write outside of work.

But even you don't deny that they can. For some reason you seem to think that teaching those things is trivial or easy.

This is how it is in England; its called the Comprehensive System. Dreamed up and implemented by people who make very sure their own kids go to Grammar schools, of course.

It may be possible to make educational opportunity depend less on parents' wealth (as the GP wants us to do) while still avoiding the problem you raise here.

My public middle-and-high schools were attended by a very wide quality-range of students, and they did an excellent job segregating students within the school into different classes according to academic ability.

There was mobility in that students who performed very well in the B-level classes were able to join A-level classes in subsequent semesters while poorly performing students were advised to move downward. Most of the subjects had three ability levels (A, B, G). There were even some students who would excel in one subject and take AP english or history while remaining at a more normal level in the STEM subjects.

Most importantly, I am convinced that the A-level students at my highschool received just about as good an education as they could find at any public school in the country. At the same time that G level and some B-level students were preparing to graduate and not go to college, most of my classmates in the A group were graduating having completed college-freshman-or-sophomore-level calculus and many were receiving acceptance letters from Ivy-league universities.

I don't know for sure whether or not this type of arrangement is common, but it seems to me like it shows that having a mixture of academic abilities in the same neighborhood need not be a disaster.

There's much to like about this comment, and I thinking tracking within a school is a good idea that deserves to come back after some time in the wilderness.

That said, I'd quibble with your first sentence. While I'd certainly agree that making educational opportunity depend less on parents' wealth is a very good thing, that wasn't the thrust of my comment. The main point I was raising had to do with how coupling housing and schools makes the housing market inefficient and so collectively costs society. Imagine if what school a child went to was determined by what car his parents drove. People might well go out and mortgage their futures, as described in the article, in order to buy Ferraris so that their children could go to the best schools. And the price of Ferraris would increase in commensurate fashion. But even if a chunk of that cost was paying for the school access they want, they'd also be buying cars they might not necessarily want. It would make much more sense for all concerned if people could buy the thing they wanted directly, perhaps by paying for private school, than to have this proxy good.

I suspect part of the problem is that private schools seem too elitist for many American's democratic tastes, but what exactly is the difference between a private school and a "public" school where the price of admission is the purchase of a multi-million dollar home? As in so many policy areas if we could talk honestly about what we want and what's going on, we could have less convoluted and more straightforward policy arrangements to further our goals.

Interesting! I definitely didn't think hard enough while reading your last post.

You're suggesting that, if we switched to funding what-are-now-public schools directly through tuition payments made by the students attending them, then that might amount to a more just (or at least generally more satisfying) system than what we have now?

Or is there another policy you think would be better?

I wouldn't want to go to an all private pay system, that would leave children without means out of luck. I do think there is a role for private schools, I went to one myself for high school and was very happy with the experience.

Anyway, there are a variety of different ways we could imagine loosing the tight coupling between housing and schooling. I mention downthread that I think school choice / vouchers is a promising approach, but I am open to other ideas as well.

The difference is the tuition will be gone, but a house will still have its value. And since the house is in an area with a good school system, its value has probably risen :-).

It's certainly not a fair system.

Short of assigning cities to people via lottery, there is no way to make schools equal. Good schools are made by having good people (students, parents) and good people will pay a premium to be among other good people.

The fairness depends on what "fair" means. You seem to think it would be fair for the people who create good schools (primarily by providing good students) to get stuck with mediocre schools. They put in all the extra value, but get nothing much in return. That doesn't seem fair to me.

The mortgage interest on a million dollar home is more than private school tuition.

Many families buying these homes have several children. Property tax scales only loosely with family size, but tuition is typically linear.

Perhaps. Seems like the interest on an 800K loan would be about 30K in the first year, which is less then private school tuition around here. But you can't really compare the full amount as you've got to live somewhere, and you get a tax deduction as well.

And once you have 2 kids...

Aside from your circular reasoning (kids that are sucessful are successful), you could transpose this argument back half a century and have faulty rationale that many whites used to justify segregation of academic institutions at all levels. The success of Jewish students from "less successful" backgrounds once anti-Semitism was largely dismantled demonstrates how this was absurd on its face.

It's not circular at all, it is simply a fact that the education system works that way. Why is Harvard prestigious? Because it has a policy of only admitting people who would be successful whether they went to Harvard or not... And "Harvard dropout" carries as much cachet at "Harvard graduate", which should tell you something.

It don't believe that's how it works. Here's another question to demonstrate this: How did the University of Michigan become a prestigious public university? In part, by accepting all the bright Jewish students that Harvard blocked from admission because of racial quotas. The subsequent success and honors of their alumni built up their reputation and donor base to what it is today. So aside from this argument being unfalsifiable and circular itself (those who went to Harvard would've been successful if they didn't go to Harvard, but they went to Harvard...), we would have to accept that all the Jewish students rejected from Harvard we're just never going to be successful anyway, which the historical example invalidates.

... In other words they were successful despite not going to Harvard!

I didn't say it was a good system; just observed that it is how it is.

It's not circular. It's like this: You can burn coal in a fire, and you can make the fire bigger by adding coal. You can call that circular, but it's provably true. Kids tend to succeed if they are surrounded by success. Parents set demands, peers provide competition, etc.

As for the Jewish students... well isn't it nice that the law does not block them from moving into the better school districts? The same applies to anybody else. If you are successful, you can move into the good school district. This has been true for about 47 years in the USA. Nobody is stopping anybody.

Don't want to pay? Clearly you don't care about education, and your child would likely degrade the educational environment. Can't pay? It's pretty much the same thing, but with a small non-zero chance of being wrong, and maybe you should homeschool.

There is no perfect system. :-(

What you are talking about it school choice, and in many versions of this parents are allowed to have the choice of private, charter, parochial school in addition to district schools.

Milton Friedman, a Nobel Laureate in economics, set up a foundation to advocate for it. I am not sure you are correct that biggest group blocking this is wealthy homeowners.

http://www.edchoice.org/school-choice/school-choice-in-ameri...

I agree that that is the right solution, but it would effectively be an expropriation of a huge portion of most of the middle class's wealth -- their home value that derives from being in a desirable school district -- and hence explains the difficulty of switching to a Nordic style voucher system where families get a block of government money to use at a school of their choice and the schools have to compete for it.

What's wrong with expropriating unearned wealth?

> he has two very well-educated and successful daughters. They are, in a sense, his retirement plan: Barring extenuating circumstances, they will be in a position to care for him and his wife in their later years. We should all be so lucky.

I'm not quite sure how saddling my children with the cost of my care and feeding in my twilight years is a better choice than letting them go to public school and state universities. Seems like that's just passing the buck on who has to pay that particular bill.

I have to agree. I understand wanting to give your children all the benifits you can, but it doesn't make much sense to do it at the expense of your own financial stability.

Speaking as someone whose parents prioritized their financial security and their hobbies, and having the experiences I have now, I can tell you that it's not a decision I would make lightly. It mattered a great deal which public schools I went to because it mattered a great deal which college I got in to. I went to a middling public school, so I ended up in a middling college. The only reason I've ended up where I am is that I'm very lucky. I could easily have ended up working retail like nearly all of my friends from high school. Knowing that actually makes me afraid to have children, because it's really likely that they'll be worse off than I am.

>here are ways in which this is apropos—men, in particular, have seen their earning power diminish in recent decades, and Gabler isn’t the first to draw a connection between financial power and sexual power. But this is an unfortunately narrow framing of a financial crisis whose casualties are so often women.

I am having hard time parsing this seemingly self contradicting sentence even after reading the linked article.

can someone explain this to me.

I think it's just saying 'financial impotence' is not gender-neutral enough as a term. But I agree it didn't make much sense the way it was phrased.

One thing I don't like about us public k-12 schools is there stringent attendance policies. I wish there funding wasn't tied to holding our kids hostage during the school day. One of the reasons my children go to private school.

My experiences with private schools is that they have just as, if not more, stringent attendance policies. The consequence of non-attendance always seems to lead to expulsion.

Private schools will allow advanced arrangements, like making up work, or homework in Leiu of attendance. Public schools are not interested in expulsion, they threaten calling child protective services. Not my district but see example attendance policy http://www.escobedoms.com/pdf/Parent_Attendance_Guide.pdf from a quick google search.

Public schools literally consider too many absences a crime ("truancy"), partly because their funding is directly tied to number of days students are in class. Private schools will charge you the same tuition regardless of how much vacation you take just like college.

How much vacations do your kids take?

its harder for me to get time off when school is out, because many of my colleagues also have children, and not everyone can take off. So I take my kids out of school when i can take vacation... first world problems :(

Some people will de-register and then re-register their children in public school as a way around it, but its not practical to do multiple times a year.

You know why the children of the upper middle class try so hard?

Because their parents almost made it.

Everyday experiences of discrimination (such as being treated with less respect or receiving poorer service) are common and affect black people in the US more frequently than white people. http://qz.com/334366/why-black-americans-cant-sleep-at-night...

Combine this with the other HN submission on that it 's not so much where you study but what, it's a bad call for parents to try to get their kids on an expensive school. They would be better off getting their kids to choose a STEM major even at a cheaper school.

That submission is about colleges. This submission is about high schools. The differences in quality between high schools is drastically more varied than differences in quality between colleges.

Broken link, the correct link is here: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/05/american...

Thanks, we've fixed that above. We also changed the title from "American parents spend almost beyond their means on education", which appears to have been editorializing, to the subtitle of the article (the main title being too baity).

ha, this article is basically preaching the ways of mr money mustache, but in a high brow way.

> almost beyond their means

So, within their means?

Until they get a fine or a medical expense or have to bury someone or etc.

If you live from paycheck to paycheck, you live within your means but if anything happens, everything will fell apart. How this looks on a national scale was visible in the subprime mortage crisis a couple of years ago.

Spending on education/tuition is how middle-class Americans ensure the lower class ones stay down there. If spending on schooling was capped the way most things are capped then there would be much more competition for 'white-collar' jobs.

eg. middle class families may spend a little more on food on average but they are not going to spend 'beyond their means' on lavish cuisine in the hope that it will ensure a health advantage, because it obviously won't. The same is largely true of the quality of education available - there's no reason why the outcome (actual learning) should get much better by spending excessively on it. But then you have to factor in the signalling and filtering aspects.

The middle class is not spending money on education to keep others 'down'. They're doing it to keep from getting trampled themselves.

EDIT: I'm also going to disagree with you on this as well: "spend 'beyond their means' on lavish cuisine in the hope that it will ensure a health advantage, because it obviously won't"

Regardless as to whether or not organic and non-GMO food actually has better health benefits, people do not shop at Whole Foods just so they can show off the green bag to everyone else. Unlike say fashion, automobiles, or even gadgets, groceries are not ideal for 'signaling'

Believe it or not, most people don't have the luxury (or even the inclination) of sitting in a nice chair with their mean looking cat dreaming up ways of hurting others. Most people are just trying to get by... though obviously this greatly varies from person to person.

You're making a distinction about their intent but not their effect.

Yes, you're right. I strongly feel that it's very important to have more empathy for people regardless of their background. Demonizing people who are different from you with an accusation without merit doesn't help anyone.

I agree. It's an aggressive gambit. Fix this or you're X (bad thing) and people will hate you. That being said, people have a tendency to lean on the crutch of intentions. Which is itself just a more subtle gambit. It's acceptance implies that anyone can do anything for which a positive intention is conceivable. In this instance, the result is a blatant signaling game that the middle class necessarily appreciates the consequences of. They jockey for status using the commoditized correlates of worth. They have alienated us each from ourselves. From our actual worth or ability to do anything. Of course they're just trying to ensure what's best for themselves. But they increasingly do so with a grotesque and ruthless ignorance of how it impacts the people around them. Something has to mediate this. Otherwise the incentive is ultimately for everyone to abandon empathy.

EDIT: Hmm. I seem to be shadow-banned. I'll reply here:

I didn't do that. I did try to identify those things they were doing (intentionally or not) that were damaging and why they were doing them. I did this while acknowledging the nature of the labeling that was taking place. I tried to instill bilateral empathy instead of merely throwing my hands up and calling them name-callers. We can also have empathy for such people. They're not that out of line. The competitive behavior of the middle class is seemingly demonic. Especially from certain perspectives.

I don't know where you're getting this demagogue stuff or the bit about the blind application of labels. We're all humans and we're all making observations of our local reality. In this tangent you seem to be perpetrating the no-name-calling philosophy you claim to oppose.

EDIT EDIT: Ah. My mistake.

No one is accepting the bad consequences of intent. However, you're not going to get any constructive conversation if you're going the route of a demagogue and just blindly applying a very strong, simple label on millions of people. Historically, that never turns out well. If anything this just distracts people from the actual problems that need to be solved.

EDIT: Sorry, I didn't mean to accuse you of writing things that a demagogue would say. That was meant for Tycho, but I just wanted to make my stance more clear for you.

EDIT: My bad. You're right. There was no need to use demagogue; I'm also human as well. Like I said, it's very hard to have constructive conversation with strong accusations flying around.

EDIT: I could be wrong but you're not shadowbanned. To prevent conversations from spiraling out of control like they do elsewhere, HN limits replies for certain sized threads with a time limit so people can think straight before replying again.

It said I was posting too quickly (regardless of where I tried to post) and I hadn't posted anything in over 45 minutes. Maybe it goes up exponentially or something and I've just never run afoul of it before.

I think this is the actual problem, or at least the cause. So I predict that tuition costs will continue to inflate and the highschool system will continue with its deficiencies because most people don't realize the true nature of the problem.

Still, the house of cards will collapse at some point. That will be interesting.

Trampled by what? A stampede of equally qualified candidates? That's exactly my point.

Also I'm not sure my point about food was clear. I'm saying give a poor family an extra $5k to spend for healthier food, and it could make a significant difference. But give them $50k (for food) more and it has no additional health benefit. But give them $50k, $250k, $500k to spend on schooling and suddenly it leads to great differences in outcome.

> Trampled by what? A stampede of equally qualified candidates? That's exactly my point.

From my understanding, your point is that people are doing this with malice with the conscious intention of hurting other people. That's very different from survival. I still also feel that's a baseless accusation.

> But give them $50k, $250k, $500k to spend on schooling and suddenly it leads to great differences in outcome.

The flaw in your logic is assuming that all or even most education is equal. Of course, because even if you don't take into account 'signalling' not all education is equal. Spending 160k on a technical diploma mill (yes these exist and they target the poor) is obviously going to net vastly different results from spending the same money on an Ivy League institution. In reality, the Ivy League university is probably going to cost a lot less if you're poor. (For the record, I attended a public uni). This is even more evident when you start looking at education outside of the US.

This has got nothing to do with 'survival.' Nobody is going to starve because they didn't get a university degree. We're talking about relative status within a class system. More specifically menial jobs vs. nice jobs.

Not all education is equal but there's no particularly good reason for the runaway costs. Quite simply, the middle class are willing to tolerate ridiculous tuition costs because it lets them stay ahead of the poor.

> This has got nothing to do with 'survival.'

The meaning of survival will vary from person to person. imo 'survival' for the middle class means not living paycheck to paycheck or having to work multiple part time jobs i.e. having a 'nice' job. While it's possible to achieve this without a degree, it's also a lot more difficult to do so without a degree. Again regardless of what survival means for different people, my point stands: most people don't value education in order to 'keep the lower class down', they value it so they can 'get by'

> Not all education is equal but there's no particularly good reason for the runaway costs.

There IS a good reason for it. Given the success of 40k and up a year diploma mills that target the poor; everyone, including the poor, has access to easy credit when it comes to funding education. Hence the runaway education costs.

http://blog.credit.com/2015/07/are-student-loans-causing-col...

When survival = nice job that's exactly what I'm talking about. Someone has to do the menial jobs. Overpriced education ensures that it won't be the people in the middle class.

Loans explain why it is possible for tuition fees to rise so much, but not why we have them, ie. why people accept them. The diploma mills are just a side-effect.

I mentioned this earlier but in my city, the school district consists of 5 high schools which all get common funding yet there is a huge difference between performance. The top school is in 99% ranking in the state and the other schools are in middle tier. Though there is equal funding, it didn't make much of a difference. I have see all the schools are they look equally shabby having been build 50 years ago.

The main thing that happened is nearly 15 years back (I think) standardized testing was passed so all schools were ranked. Then parents started sending their kids to the best schools they could afford. This started to give a divergence where the best schools started be become better. It also created demand for housing in the best school areas and the housing prices went up. In our city, the houses near the best schools are 2x the price. Quality wise everything else is the same. Now you have highly educated parents who are paid well how try to send their kids to the best school possible.

So I don't think funding is the entire answer. We need safe schools. Parents need to be motivated for their kids to succeed. And kids will learn better in an environment where peers also value their education. But throwing money at the problem in the the entire answer. I believe there is a Freakanomics article about this issue and what they believed mattered the most for kids to succeed is that the parents cared enough about their kids education.

I agree with you. There's no inherent reason why education should be getting more and more expensive. With all the technology we have and the large pool of highly educated potential teachers[1] it should actually be getting cheaper or better value for money.

But the explanation I'm giving is that the middle class like to use education as a filter that keeps the poor away from the nice white collar jobs. So they are highly insensitive to price. Meanwhile, all the broken things about education (in terms of actual teaching/learning) go unfixed.

[1] although there is an interesting argument that women who were previously forced to settle on teaching for a career are now going into industry instead (since industry became less sexist) , leading to a drop in teaching quality (especially for things like maths)

The distinction between middle class and lower class is such a strange one to me. The majority of the middle class still rely on employment to survive. Yes, they make more and therefore have more stuff, but their relationship to the economy as a whole is not fundamentally less precarious than the lower class. They're all working class.

don't you think blue-collar and white-collar employment are fundamentally different? it's true that in both cases you need a paycheque to survive, so they are perhaps more similar to each other than to truly self-sufficient life styles or the FUM class (fuck-you money), but that doesn't eliminate the important distinctions that remain between them

Not really. I remember some years back waiting in line at a boat dock and mentioning to my friend the parade of new shiny boats towed by new shiny trucks. His reply was, "look who owns all those expensive boats: plumbers and electricians. They're the ones who make the real money."

The "irony" that a friend of mine who is an EE with an MBA and manages group at a large corporation was looking into getting a low-voltage electrician's license was not lost on me.

The sticking point for your friend is that apprenticeship or equivalent and relevant electrical experience requirements tend to be full-time.

The whole schmeer is wildly incoherent and will never make any sense.

I've done the "real estate because schools" thing; that school system imploded because of the local gentry interfering with it. That system also had a 33% dropout rate while the valedictorian went to Harvard medical.

You have to use public schools as a resource for getting your kids educated. Teaching is semi-de-professionalized because of careerism and magical thinking. My youngest went on the basically teach time management to lost little children at an expensive private university.

Now she's shut of the whole education system. Turns out training dogs is a better business model.

> how middle-class Americans ensure the lower class ones stay down there

I'm seeing this attitude a lot and it befuddles me. I've heard a lot of wild theories on _why_ poor people stay poor, but never rooting for them to stay poor.

That's a lot different than trying to help your own kids get ahead.

> That's a lot different than trying to help your own kids get ahead.

Wow! Really? Who exactly are they getting "ahead" of? And what is the other person being made except for behind?

I always took that expression to mean “having cash in the bank on the day before payday"; maybe that's not how it was coined, but it's certainly possible for a person to get ahead of his own situation without comparing himself to another.

Most children don't have any merit or security unless they do something to earn it as they become adults. They are getting ahead of where they would be if they did nothing.

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