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Comment by eaenki | Hacker News Reader

Giving kids the choice to seamlessly switch classroom should be enough for most of them. Anyway, classrooms as they are right now, are in themselves a rather flawed concept. And we’re already at a deep level here. At an higher level, parents should have vouchers equal to their tax spending that it’s directed toward to schooo to spend at the school of choice. See Steve jobs’ interview on education for more on that.

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As a public school teacher, the voucher program would be absolutely awful. Good schools would get better and poor ones would get worse, as the only parents who could necessarily afford to switch schools are already those who are better off. This would just create a huge inequality between the school systems.

The current system is putting up barriers to the growth of students by forcing them to stay in mediocre schools. Students from the richest families don't have this problem because their parents have the ability to move to other cities or even other countries in search of the best opportunity.

The inequality is already there, the current system only serves to hide it and maintain it. Why not try letting go and opening up the door for more students to move around? It would give us a better idea of where the problems are so we can address them.

> The inequality is already there, the current system only serves to hide it and maintain it. Why not try letting go and opening up the door for more students to move around? It would give us a better idea of where the problems are so we can address them.

Genuine question: why do you think the issue of educational inequality is hidden? The problem areas are fully known and there are dedicated charities working to address it all around the world. Is the argument we need to make the situation so worse to bring it into the public conscious more?

The best schools are at full capacity with the middle class and up families that you’ve mentioned. No one is going to move their student to a mediocre school. Now what? Students are still in mediocre schools and can’t go anywhere else. Vouchers solved nothing.

The current system is not hiding or maintaining the problem. The problem is pretty blatant and well known.

Why don't people start more private schools if their capacity is maxed? By assumption, there is more demand than supply, and the vouchers would increase the demand further.

Why would a private school be better? We are trying this in the UK (Academy Schools) and across the UK they are failing: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/jul/22/academy-sc...

From what I can tell, there's no voucher system or equivalent that allows the existence of competition between those schools, which is exactly why the private schools would (according to the proposal) be better.

Why are we trying to pretend that meaningful competition is possible in this sphere, or that it would produce a better result for the student?

Pretending is fun. Why is meaningful competition not possible in this sphere?

The same reason that meaningful competition is usually difficult (when it is difficult)--information asymmetry.

Experts don't really know what makes one school better than another. Is it performance on standardized test scores? Improvements on standardized test scores? College acceptance rate?

Even when you do decided on a metric, one of the biggest impacts on educational outcome is parental involvement. Is school A really more effective than school B, or just more effective at attracting involved parents?

If experts have a hard time judging the effectiveness of a school, most parents don't have a chance.

For an example of what this looks like, take a look at for-profit colleges. Through advertising and information asymmetry they attract students who will rack up tens of thousands in student loans for mostly worthless degrees. The most successful for-profit colleges aren't the ones that are the best at educating students, they're the ones that are the best at marketing and sales.

Late to reply. Funding is based on the number of children in the school - so if the school can attract more people it will get more money. Obviously this isn't the same as 'your tax' funding your children - but hey we at least play at being socialist. In major cities it is not uncommon to have a choice of schools open to you (I previously lived within 500m of 4 primiary schools) and so the competition to get both the right number of pupils to fund the school, all the while getting the 'best' pupils exists. It just isn't providing the results you are hoping - I'd say as it 'seems' that the funding ends up being used to pay the heads and other senior staff very well: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/0/academies-pros-cons/

Why should a voucher go to a private school? That's public money you're now taking out of the public use. And it still doesn't solve the issue of the fact that the kids left behind will be worse off due to even less money in their school system.

Wouldn't costs go down at schools with less attendance? I'd have to imagine the majority of school spend is operational costs. You need fewer books, lunches, teachers, etc with fewer students.

You're assuming private schools wouldn't be around to solely make as much profit as possible. Plus, there's always the issue of higher pricing being associated with better results. And then the schools could even follow the path of universities and start charging more and more.

It’s non-linear for most of those things though - a class of 20 kids or a class of 30 kids still need a teacher (although there’s evidence that the former’s going to have better outcomes), books aren’t bought new every year so are amortised over a whole load of students, lunches are cheaper when you can buy ingredients in bulk etc.

Private schools are usually more expensive because there’s a lower ratio of students to teachers. If all the rich kids left, you’d have schools being merged together to save money; you wouldn’t have the few(er) poor kids left behind with one teacher covering multiple classes.

Then maybe we should focus on school reform as a whole and find out what makes mediocre schools mediocre? My guess is that a lot of it has to do with the family and home environment of the students. I teach in the rural South (20% of the county is poverty line or below), and the issue isn't really with the students or the education. It lies in the expectations parents have and cultural values with regards to education. Furthermore, even among the poorer students, you can see those whose parents encourage them at home to do well in school. That's the main issue that affects school quality. With the upper middle class and wealthy you have students whose parents can spend time, encourage and help them (or get tutors), so of course that's going to happen more.

And if you take the kids like that from the mediocre schools, or, really, take what money their taxes provide for the school system, you're just leaving the disadvantaged kids to be more disadvantaged.

Let kids move, sure, but the funding shouldn't move with them.

My guess is that a lot of it has to do with the family and home environment of the students.

It does, but it's not only that. For a student to excel they need a lot of different things and if they're deprived of any of them they will not do well. In your case, you may see a lot of students with a family/home environment that makes it difficult for them to focus. In other cases a student may have a more supportive home environment but their classmates don't and the slower pace the class may run at as a result leaves the student bored and disinterested.

So a student needs a supportive family, access to proper nutrition, but also a curriculum of really challenging courses that pushes him/her to learn a lot. The latter need is why wealthy parents pull their kids out of public schools.

Essentially, the problem with public schooling is the same one we saw with the mortgage crisis and one the insurance industry deals with all of the time: adverse selection [1]. Students that struggle due to lack of nutrition or a difficult family environment need a far greater share of the funding allocated to the school. Students with strong and supportive backgrounds get far less out of a school that focuses on struggling students. This encourages them to leave, just as an insurance policy that charges the same premium to both smokers and non-smokers tends to drive out the non-smokers.

What we end up with are schools with disproportionate numbers of struggling students. So what's the answer? I don't think there is a single answer. A ton of commentators out there look to education as a silver bullet for class mobility. Yes, education correlates very strongly with career outcome. But education itself is an outcome of a whole host of factors and I strongly believe those need to be fixed, first.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_selection

It's also based on the (mis?)conception that the taxes you pay are for your own children's education, rather than being for everyone's.

I always find it interesting the majority of the tax receipt in the US is income tax - in the UK it is 25% (44% if you include National Insurance [welfare]). It is the largest lump of tax collected. Is that because what we see as VAT is collected at a state level?

It's more complex than that - it almost seems more like the US is made of 50 countries with open borders. I've lived in 3 different states and each is different in terms of tax.

The US Federal Gov primary source of revenue is the federal income tax, while State Gov budgets are based on income taxes, property taxes, and sales(VAT) taxes. Some states have no income tax and some have no sales taxes, some have very high/low property taxes.

Additionally, some counties (several cities) and even cities have income taxes or additional sales/property taxes. It's very difficult to calculate what you effectively pay in taxes and where those taxes go.

State sales taxes can't really be compared to a VAT. A VAT gets collected at each step along the way from raw materials to final product; sales tax is only collected at final sale.

Conceptually, yes. Most mid and large manufacturers are using gov-sponsored programs that allow deferral of duties and VAT/other taxes until final sale. Source; I work in global trade.

Collecting a VAT is probably more expensive to society than collecting a sales tax, as every business has to keep track of it instead of just the ones that do the final sale. The reason you need VAT is in practice, if sales taxes are higher than around 10%, the number of businesses/people who start to find ways to not pay it starts getting significant. With a VAT each business in effect enforces the tax on the business it buys from or has to pay the tax themselves. Raising a sales tax higher than 10% can net you less tax revenue(highest sales tax in the US is 10.25%, highest VAT 50% (Bhutan) with 25% common in Europe).

I imagine this effect is getting less pronounced as cash is used less and less in transactions.

Define "everyone"- your township, your state?

NJ has a program that provides education aid to underperforming students (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbott_district). Chris Christie looked into defunding it while he was in office(https://www.nj.com/education/2016/09/christie_wants_court_to...), which makes me strongly suspect that this sort of thing isn't available in a lot of other states...

Well, depends on how your taxes are raised. I live in the UK and it's incredibly centralised so 'everyone' is the nation.

When you say that, you imply that it's the kids, not the money that follows them, that makes a school good.

Then I didn't phrase it accurately enough. It's definitely more the fact that money will be leaving the school system with those kids whose parents are fortunate enough to be able to move them. And when that happens, you'll just further disadvantage the disadvantaged.

Good schools would get better. New schools would get started. The bad schools will die. Maybe yours. It would be a period of great change, but we’d be better off in the end. Any parent can afford to switch schools with a $44k voucher (California’s per child education cost). If education is like any other market without a gov. retaining its monopoly.. we’ll see a net increase in product value. Parents would start shopping for a school like they shop for any other expensive item - like cars or homes: with great care - in a world of choice.

Switching schools isn't hard/impossible because parents can't pay a fee. It's because you have to be within a physical distance of the school, and that space is limited. If you make schools a market with vouchers then you are going to end up with the rich getting everything and the poor being left with scraps. This already happens to some extent with parents moving to good schools districts, but it's at least somewhat mitigated by every school continuing to receive funding

It’s hard to imagine it getting much worse than today. Head on up to Hayward and check out the schools there (if you dare), then cross I580 and look at the Castro Valley schools. If you live in a poor neighborhood and also happen to care about your kid’s education, you are shit out of luck. Schools are already hopelessly class segregated, and this is not unique to the Bay Area. Tying school funding to how rich the school’s neighborhood is ranks up there among the dumbest ideas we’ve come up with as a society.

You realize California thought that different levels of funding was the problem and now almost all schools are funded by the state based on the number of students. More recently the state doubled down on this "we need more money for poor students" philosophy and now disadvantaged students get more funding. Castro Valley schools probably get less funding per student than Hayward. What people don't want to realize is that the most important component of if a school is "good" or not is the student population itself. You can't change this with funding or changes in teaching styles, or testing, etc. You can with forced busing, but that only works for a little while as parents who want a great school for their kids move to locations where busing is not in effect.

Except places using vouchers don't produce better outcomes.

Better to eliminate the reason for good and bad schools - using property taxes. Also source for 40k? That's about 4x as much as it's reported to be.

I'm doubtful about your assertion that new schools will pop up. I actually doubt that they will, especially in poorer areas. So the kids whose parents are able will leave, taking their money. Thus solidifying the problem of funding to the schools.

And, as mentioned, transportation is a big issue for many as well. School busses are nice for those parents who have to work at 7, or earlier, and can't take their kids to school. Same going home. Unless, of course, you're going to start bussing kids to all the new schools that pop up, assuming any do.

Also, how do you deal with regulations and standards? If my tax money is going to a private school, it better follow a standard and not be teaching creationism, etc.

And I, too, would like to see your source on cost of education... You also assume that the private schools won't all be owned by the same company or that they won't agree to set prices the max available from the vouchers... Or higher.

  I'm doubtful about your assertion that new
  schools will pop up.

If you can get $44k per student per year, I'm sure new schools will pop up, just like for-profit colleges. Whether that's a good thing is of course another question.

It's not $44K per year. In California, it may be around $13K per year depending somewhat on location (~ $65/day/student). See the first spreadsheet linked at: https://www.cde.ca.gov/ds/fd/ec/currentexpense.asp

(For a couple of years my kid went to a school that encouraged donation of ~$50/day/kid for voluntary absences, to make up for the lost state fees for that day of instruction.)

I'll correct myself. Apparently it's more like $13k, not $44k. At least as of now. Although it depends. Still, the point is to make schools compete and to make new schools pop up - so that the overall quality will go up.

Education is a fundamental human right, not a product.

Code my website. Having website is fundamental right, not a product.

Are you being absurd, or are you genuinely unaware that education is considered a human right?

I live in the LAUSD (Los Angeles) school district, which has a pretty strong charter system and has had for a long time.

In the case of LA, your assertions are just not true. They seem to be based on generalities about monopoly markets, and to be un-informed by how charters really play out.

The charter school era has been a period of great change - but there are some really bad charters, and some of them fail suddenly during the school year. Some of the for-profit charters have been notably corrupt, and oversight of small charters is hard. As a recent example, a charter near my home closed just a few days after the beginning of the school year, due to insufficient enrollment (http://www.pucschools.org/iprep/). Now those families are searching for another school. Most of them will end up at their neighborhood school after all.

To return to your "market" concept: one of the fundamentals of properly functioning markets is information. It is very hard for parents - even well-informed parents - to gather information about the real quality of instruction at a school. (The things that parents respond to don't really correlate with educational quality.) Another fundamental is liquidity - this is just not a liquid market. People like to stick with one school if possible - for good reasons.

Another problem with the "market" concept is that provision of elementary education is not really a market transaction. The teachers are not really in it mostly for the pay. The parents don't treat it as a market either. What was the last time you volunteered time at your local grocery store or lumber yard?

You and I agree that there are problems with "monopoly" elementary education - but throwing charters at it as a simple market solution has not worked out well. It seems to be a more complex problem.

Not sure what you mean by a $44k voucher and California’s per child education cost. California spends around $11.5k per pupil for primary/secondary school[1] per year. $44k per year would cover the cost of even the most expensive private schools while $11.5k would only cover private school if it is heavily subsidized by a religion. I'd quit my job in a heartbeat and start a small school or tutor 5-10 kids directly, if you pay me $44k each.

[1] http://www.governing.com/gov-data/education-data/state-educa...

Not to put too fine a point on it, but do you guys all realize that you've taken a child's post enumerating his/her primarily emotional concerns about social media, and turned it into a political argument about the primarily financial concern of school choice?

As if school choice would make any dent in bullying. I mean a school is a school. If there are teens in it, there will be bullying, drugs, posturing, fakeness, and (gasp) some of them might even have sex.

I think vouchers, or not having vouchers, may solve the problems you guys have with schools. Mostly because you, like me, are probably adults. But let's not pretend that they address these emotional concerns that are causing more and more teens to shy away from social media. It's just silliness to do that.

> and turned it into a political argument about the primarily financial concern of school choice?

A conversation about social media and its effect on people and our culture is political from the get-go. Having conversations that don't touch on politics is hard and be careful when you think you've succeeded. Folks are absolutely right to point out the consequences of voucher program when they're presented as a solution to problems.

That is, I agree with you here:

> But let's not pretend that they address these emotional concerns that are causing more and more teens to shy away from social media. It's just silliness to do that.

but want to caution people to think twice when they believe a discussion isn't political because it almost always is, technology included.

I came from a small country in Europe and schools followed a more strict policy. We were not allowed to change classrooms from 1-12 grade, the teachers switched classrooms. Because of that process, we created a bond with the classmates and kind of became like a family and protected one another. There was bullying, but it was minimal because the non-supervision time window was small during our 20 min lunch break. I promise, if the western schools follow the same policy all that pushing and shoving of kids during class transition will not happen. Just my 2 cents.

Or you punish the few for the actions of the majority. I was in a terrible class in school, and for 3 years we had all our lessons together. The only way the teachers knew how to attempt to control it was through collective responsibility, punishing the entire class - something that only affects the people who behave well enough to even indulge in punishment [0].

Relying on peer bonding falls down when you're unlucky to be placed with those who're unengaged in the system (mostly not their own fault, society has let them down, doesn't make the impact any less shitty for all involved though).

Until you make education more engaging (usually through quality teachers), and invest in supporting those who've been let down to the extent they've given up on progressing in life by age 12, without being destructive to others, it's going to be a clusterfuck all round.

[0] those who don't care enough to not set fire to the classroom are unlikely to care about turning up for detention or getting a bad referral...

the non-supervision time window was small during our 20 min lunch break

So you didn't have breaks between classes? You were stuck in the classroom all day?

There was a 5-10 min window for teachers to walk from class to class. So yeah we were there the entire time, 8AM-3PM. Same thing exists in the lower grades in US, K-5. We don’t see those kids complaining either.

Frankly, that sounds awful to me, even as an adult; it sounds like a recipe for sedentarism and vitamin D deficiency. In my country we have 15m recesses between each class, starting from 5th grade, where we got some sunlight and exercise - at least climbing the stairs back to the classroom, but many kids played some sport or game with physical activity.

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