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Comment by high_5 | Hacker News Reader

> According to data from the Education Department, calculus is not even offered in most schools that serve a large number of Black and Latino students.

The data mentioned does not show if the problem is in the schools or the Black/Latino students picking such schools.

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Students don't typically pick their high schools. They're sorted into one based on their address. Transfers are possible, within enrollment limits, and subject to a parent's willingness to go through the paperwork, but they're certainly not the norm.

I'm going to guess you just have no idea how schooling works in the US. Otherwise I'd be super interested in your theory that the poorest parents are spending resources to take their kids out of their way to shittier schools.

I'm not an American, so can you tell me? Don't you have some sort of state or national standards every school has to cover?

No. Every state is different, and even within states, every county/city can be different, and even within county/city, different school districts can be different. My city of 200k people has two different school districts led by different people. I am assuming there are some standards tied to federal government funding, or maybe standards at the state level.

Generally though, you want to live in the more expensive parts of town because those schools will be better managed (and obviously have a more capable cohort of students due to them being kids of richer parents). When buying a house, the basic question all couples with kids face is "what is the least expensive house in the most expensive neighborhood" in order for their kids to attend the better schools (assuming the parents are not rich enough to send them to $20k+ per year private schools).

It is one of the reasons the SAT and Advanced Placement test scores is (or was back in my day) so prominent in determining admittance to college. They are optional tests that kids take to show their proficiency.

Sort of, it's complicated, but that's also not related to what GGP said? They were claiming parents could choose schools, which is not true (at least, in most of the US). Whether schools are pf consistent quality (they aren't really) is a separate issue.

Don't students get to pick even in high school? High school is when education between kids starts to diverge so you need a way to select where to go at that stage, USA doesn't let you do that unless you pay for private school?

It depends -- in some areas there's schools called "magnet schools" that are public, free schools that you can test into. I went to a high school like that. In New York there's a lottery system for magnet schools instead of tests, I believe. However, magnet schools still have a "feeder area" like regular schools, just a larger one -- I drove ~45 minutes to my high school, whereas my regular high school was 10 minutes away.

A lot of this is due to how US schools are funded, which is primarily by property taxes. That plays into the strict location requirements, since you could imagine a small school funded by a small property tax base being overwhelmed by students from outside the school's tax base choosing to go there and not having funding to support them. It also plays into the quality discrepancies: wealthy areas have nicer houses and therefore pay higher property-tax-per-capita (sort of, there's also racial discrimination dynamics here), so schools in wealthy areas have more money per student and can hire better teachers, have better teacher:student ratios, nicer equipment, etc. There's some state/federal funding of schools I think, but most funding is from property taxes, at least in the places I've lived.

In general, I think most confusion non-Americans have about the US stems from confusion about how our government works: in a very real way schools are run by counties and towns, not federal or state governments. School boards are elected, and schools are mainly run on a local level. Asking why a student can't choose to go to a different school is a bit like asking why a German student can't choose to go to a French high school -- there's an administrative barrier between them.

It depends on the city and how they have setup admissions to the government high schools. Some cities allow people to apply to high schools not in their neighborhood. But for the vast, vast majority, your high school will be based on the address you live.

It is relatively common to use the address of a relative or friend in a richer part of town to get your kid in the nicer high school that you cannot afford to buy a house or rent an apartment in. My immigrant parents did that for me on multiple occasions.

Nope. You can choose classes within your school, but if you go to a shitty school you're out of luck. This is why initiatives like this are so important. And comments like the original one that started this thread are ignorant at best, and when made into a political viewpoint, oppressive.

Well, to me and probably many others it is unthinkable that students wouldn't be able to pick their high school. But thanks for explaining, now I think I understand better why American college is structured as it is. I always wondered why American colleges offered high school courses, but if students cannot reliably take high school courses then colleges needs to offer those to all the students who couldn't take them in high school.

This is also, in similar theme to my other comment, because high schools aren't standardized and have often wildly different curricula, even between high-quality high schools. Colleges do a ton of work to smooth this out, from offering high-school courses for freshmen to re-normalizing GPAs to account for different grading scales between schools.

"The data mentioned does not show if the problem is in the schools or the Black/Latino students picking such schools"

This wording is so wrong. You can't say that the Black/Latino Students are the problem in any context. You can't say Race-People-problem. Can't.

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