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Comment by thatfrenchguy | Hacker News Reader

This is not because of crime, this is because upper-middle-class families in the US, especially in the bay area, play the "chase the school district" game in hopes that their kids will get a "better education" (which means being with other upper-middle class folks), despite it being a terrible idea both for society and for their kids.

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It's interesting how everything revolves around money in the US.

I take it from your name that you are French. Here the quality of the school has more to do with the education of the patients and the general "proper raising" approach.

Take Versailles for instance. The best school there attracts peuple from vastly different backgrounds and wealth. This is not a discriminant but rather how parents educate their children.

Private schools have a payement system that takes into account the revenue of parents.

Sure,you can buy your way to education but you will never hit the best (or even good) schools.

Then you have the worse neighborhoods, the problem there is a lack of interest or time of the parents rather than money on schools (they get more than the affluent neighborhood ones, take the north of Paris as an example and look at their infrastructures vs the ones in, say, Versailles).

>Then you have the worse neighborhoods, the problem there is a lack of interest or time of the parents rather than money on schools (they get more than the affluent neighborhood ones, take the north of Paris as an example and look at their infrastructures vs the ones in, say, Versailles).

The same in the US. New York City spends more per student than anywhere else in the US (https://www.silive.com/news/2019/06/how-much-does-new-york-c...). Baltimore, an incredibly poor and run-down city, spends the third most. #4-6 and #8 are all wealthy suburbs of Washington DC, but their schools are all far better than those of Baltimore or NYC (on average), despite Baltimore spending slightly more per student and NYC spending 60-70% more.

As you say, parents taking interest in their children's education is far more important than money spent.

> As you say, parents taking interest in their children's education is far more important than money spent.

I have first hand visibility on this (though obviously on limited data) when looking at the classes my children go to.

I live in a cozy neighborhood but the classes are mixed. Primary school is mixed because of social mixture and one can see that the children who are good are the ones pushed for that. Teachers clearly pass the message of "it is your work that is going to help you" (they do not even talk about money because it is mostly irrelevant in France with out education system, at least in terms of paying for school (the other costs like housing etc. is another story)).

Then you move to high school, we have several of them in my city. One is in the very top of best schools in France and the students population is not that different: you have people from all wealth and the common denominator is that they work (hard). It is not possible to buy your way into that school.

What I see is that the children care and their parents care. They either give an example (because they are well educated) or push the children to get off the social caste.

Unfortunately there is also a mass factor: a few people significantly off in a class will not be a problem. When nobody in your neighborhood cares about education (despite having access to it) then it is much more difficult for the ones who want to work.

Finally, there is often a perception in socially lower neighborhoods that the best schools are "not for them". It is not a matter of money, but of perception. I followed two high school students (a boy and a girl) for a few years - they were brilliant and I pushed them to try. They did and succeeded in ivy league schools (grandes écoles in French). They told me that they would have not even tried, again because of perception. Now they are "giving back" to their community by passing the right message.

You might enjoy this podcast[1] from the producers of Serial and the NYTimes. It deals with schools in NYC but the general idea can be applied to SF/Oakland and many other cities in the US. It's only 5 episodes and that's it.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/podcasts/nice-white-paren...

I thought upper-middle-class families just went to private school.

Nope, upper-middle class families buy a 1.5 to 3 million dollar house "to be in the right school district" in the Bay Area. Ask your colleagues with kids :-)

Yup! Had a kid. Where to live? Menlo, PA, Los Gatos, Cupertino, Los Altos. Moved to Los Gatos. Schools were the single driving factor in picking the area in which to look for housing. Without having a kid, downtown San Jose, Redwood City, East PA, etc would have been on the list. SF was never on the list for what it is worth. I like cites. Tokyo, NYC, London, etc. SF is not a really city as the side walk roll up at 10pm and in the past few years it looks more and more like a public toilet. If you step in shit on the sidewalk in SF, it likely not from a dog.

There are a few more cities with amazing schools on the Peninsula but this is effectively the calculus. Some people still send their kids to private schools from those cities but the home value is buoyed by access to the public schools.

Proving my point here thank you :). It's not really great for kids either, given the crazy level of anxiety I see in my peers who attended those schools because of all the pressure from their childhood.

With the advantage that the house can then be sold to the next set of parents after the kids have finished with school.

The good school / good neighborhood thing is a self-reinforcing cycle. Wealthy families move to neighborhoods with better schools, increasing local tax revenue, which gets invested into better and better schools, which attracts even more wealthy families. On the other hand, middle class flight leaves poor families in shitty districts, reducing tax revenue, which means worse and worse schools, which means more middle class flight. The incentives guarantee this will happen.

We need to separate school funding/quality from neighborhood affluence but that's a tall order politically.

If we let the money follow the student (aka vouchers) then good schools would sprout up and attract more students and more dollars in a self perpetuating cycle regardless of location. It is immoral that the only students who have the choice of which school they go to are those with rich parents that can select the private school they prefer. For the poor, it’s a derelict monopoly school full of lifers.

But muh unions!!!1!

We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines. Could you please stop creating accounts to do that with? We'd appreciate it, because we're trying for something different here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I see your argument as avocating for a flavor of wealth redistribution. Is be interested in hearing more, but would prefer to explore the idea in a less polarizing, more academic way. Any sources?

School choice movement, charters, voucher program. If you search for these you will see a lot.

A list of relevant articles https://reason.org/author/corey-deangelis/

I think school quality is more a factor of the the families economic status than than of how much funding a school gets.

I bet if you took took the Cupertino school district families, and transplanted them into a much worse school district, and kept the same teachers, same staff, same buildings, same funding level of school, you would see the school district improve, even without the funding.

The issue is the families in poverty don't have the time and energy to care about school. Wealthy families, care about school. So even if the school is crappy, they will make sure their kids learn what they need to. In impoverished school districts, teachers can't concentrate on teaching, because they have to act as both teachers and social workers and advocates for their students.

So even if you increased the funding of schools, if you did not address the poverty in the surrounding community, it will mostly be a waste of money and political capital.

Missouri spent $1.6B in 1980s dollars on the inner city schools in Kansas City. It didn’t do any good.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-03-27-me-51685-...

In California, tax revenue is already redistributed by the state to mostly equalize funding across school districts. Most of that funding comes from state income taxes, not local taxes.

https://ed100.org/lessons/whopays

In affluent areas the local PTA often gathers donations from parents to fund extra programs for things like sports, music, and technology.

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