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Comment by doytch | Hacker News Reader

I'm not American, but the core flaw that I've never had explained away for me in voucher or "school choice" systems is how "bad" schools get better.

E.g., school in my district is bad. They don't have enough resources, or their teachers are bad. People begin taking their kids out of the school which means the school now has less money. Assuming they could fire teachers at will, they can't even now afford the "better" teachers who would likely cost more. They definitely can't afford more learning resources or an expansion to lower class sizes.

So how do you prevent schools either going into a vicious or virtuous cycle?

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>So how do you prevent schools either going into a vicious or virtuous cycle?

I expect that you have to try it and add controls as necessary. Not only are these systems too complicated to model in any simple way, but have multiple players each with their own demands. It's a strategy problem as much as simply channeling some money.

It seems to me that the end game always becomes one of segregation of 'good' vs. 'bad' students. The teaching part isn't purely an aside, but matters less than you might think. So, you have to ask how important it is for the good to drag along the bad (or visa versa) and how detrimental it is to produce schools that are, in essence, jails.

I mean, take a look at how the non-voucher system works in SF. Lottery system and if you end up with a crappy school, you either put your kid in a private school or try and game the system to get them switched. The parents who are poor don’t have the bandwidth or knowledge to do it so they just get stuck with whatever school. So you end up with the same problem. Crappy schools have kids of parents who don’t value education or parents who don’t have an option.

At least with vouchers the parents, rich or poor have a choice where their kids go.

What exactly makes a crappy school? I went to the school dictated by my geography my whole life which online rankings don’t indicate as anything special - is this just a thinly veiled proxy for SES?

Percentage of time teachers spend on crowd control instead of teaching would be one good measurement, along with percentage of children performing at grade level.

In crappy schools, little learning occurs as the classroom resembles a zoo, and many/most students are several grade levels behind.

I went to both what people would consider "Crappy schools" and "good schools".

Crappy schools have an awful student body, many of which don't want to be there, are further behind in their learning than their grade indicates, are disruptive, and teachers have to spend large amounts of time calling security to have students removed or disciplining students. Often, the parents blame the schools and teachers for all their kids' problems.

In my experience, some of the teachers were still trying their best (usually young ones that weren't made cynical yet) but others were too burned out to care much since you only had to look around and see it was mainly hopeless.

The crappy school had fights every day in classes and in the hallways and were fairly violent places.

In the good school (last couple years of school) I wasn't sure the teachers were any more talented but the students showed up on time, listened, did their assignments, and were not violent or disruptive. Honestly, it was really strange to me the first few months and felt probably like when a prisoner is put back into society and they don't quite know how to act at school yet. Any slight I'd meet with threatening behavior to defend myself and intimidate, but I found it wasn't necessary after some time. I hated that school too but I think it was more I disliked a lot of the people there and the reason why was because I was initially resentful of their comfortable, happy life and civility, and just how functional things were. People listened to their teachers and wanted to succeed. I know that sounds crazy, but I was used to going to an insane asylum every day year after year and this was different. The friends I made at the crappy school are the best friends I've had but as the years have gone on many of them are dead from suicide or drugs or have had a really difficult go of it as adults. It all catches up.

I spent my entire school life in the public school system of a large city and I would never send my kids to those schools. It's not really that the schools that are "good or bad" per-se - it's the student body that determines that and that is largely decided by the parents and communities of those children. So much money has to be spent on security (my HS had 10 full-time staff) and discipline that there's not money for "nice things". But, the administration knows they need to hit numbers so kids are passed along if they show up and I knew more than a few kids who graduated and couldn't read past a 5th grade level.

Reading this it seems closer to peer group than school itself. I guess I’m part of the peer group that has to be avoided at all costs, to the extent of paying $30-$50k a year for private school.

So that’s the sad thing. So many of the kids did have potential and wanted to learn but the school environment was tainted with enough disruption to ruin it. Kids that could excel would be disruptive and I should know since I was one of them. It was anarchy at times and why not participate in it?

Kids are impressionable and will adapt to the culture they’re immersed in. I took on bad values because I was immersed in that. I’m only grateful afterwards I was able to figure it out. I lost a few years early on but was able to recover. I only wish I was immersed in a serious academic environment rather than prison training. My kids absolutely will not be immersed in that and I wish no parent that wants to surround their kids with likewise parents would have to settle for that. It’s why funding students and not schools is the best path. Poor, single moms would have the option of getting their kids out of these public school hell holes.

The failing schools will also get fewer students going for them. Money per student will be the same as it always was, and quite often with a better student/teacher ratio as well.

No. Schools benefit from economies of scale like almost everything else. If you have a school building designed for 2000 students and you have 600 attending, do you think it will be cheaper, the same, or more expensive per student to operate the building?

It will cost more per student, which leaves less money available for teachers so the student/teacher ratio would get worse. The facilities will not be kept up as required. Programs will be cut.

Also ignored in your analysis is that generally when school choice is available, the students most likely to leave a school are the high performers and the most likely to stay are the low performs and students with special needs, who are more expensive to educate and were previously subsidized by the high performers. If you compare the services provided to special needs students at a school in a wealthy area to the services provided to special needs students at a school in a poor area, there will be a massive difference in quality.

Yes because this is exactly what’s been happening for 50 years.

I’d understand this argument say in 1975, but in 2021 your argument needs some deeper analysis

You don’t. You kill the school at some point. Some organizations become so dirty they cannot be cleaned. So you allow people to select into better organizations and you let these die. Then you ensure that those administrators don’t all end up together in a new school.

Schools suffer from the same Too Big To Fail. We have to let them fail and let parents have free choice.

You haven't gotten an explanation because people who advocate for "school choice" systems don't want the bad schools to get better. They just don't want their kids to interact with people who go to the bad school.

That describes why people pay for private school more than it describes why people would support vouchers. The theory is that "school choice" would mean everyone would flee the worst schools and they'd be compelled to clean up their act or dissolve.

Ah, you mean like how the "free market" would police itself if they just got rid of those pesky regulations?

I don't exactly see how that's similar; no one is complaining that their school district is lousy because it's overregulated, they're complaining that it's mismanaged or corrupt and that without something like vouchers, only the wealthy can opt out, and poorer kids get trapped.

Ultimately I think pure free-market school choice in practice would fail not so much because of regulatory capture or a cash-grab, but because changing schools is disruptive and won't fix the problems of students with dysfunctional home lives.

Better than the current “sunk cost mentality” of public schools where poor schools have more money thrown at them until someone finally realizes its not a money issue.

It’s literally the opposite of efficient use of funds. You want to shift more money to the better run schools not the worst run schools.

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