The Latest Crime Wave: Sending Your Child to a Better School

I'm not sure, but I believe that people with children in their household pay more school taxes.

This is actually a good thing for everyone, in terms of improving the quality of schools for both rich and poor kids. What normally happens is that rich towns have higher millage, which poor town can't afford. Whereas poor towns tax the big box stores and businesses that tend to be more prevalent. When you combine the rich and poor districts you can't sufficiently tax either the houses of the rich people or the businesses, so the school quality for both declines. This is partly why Florida schools are so underfunded, because they only have 60ish districts for the entire state so they can't properly tax anyone.

Actually, it's pretty easy to escape that "fact" because it simply isn't true.

Yes, there were some covenants like that, but they were relatively rare.

And, most of the housing stock is newer than that, so even if such covenants were somewhat common and were still in force, they'd cover a small fraction of the population.

Since they haven't been in force for decades....

> Canada shares a lot of the basic educational structure as the US, and sadly a good share of the racial baggage as well, but our cities are far more monolithic than most American cities.

More "monolithic" is right. Canada is about as diverse as Minnesota.

There's a mix of local funding, typically from property taxes (which is independent of number of students enrolled), state funding from state general revenue, and sometimes federal funding. In some school districts, specific school levies may also be passed as sales or property taxes; these may be time-limited to pay for infrastructure or ongoing. The mix of all of the above varies from state to state and school district to school district.

The real estate tax funding takes a percentage of the home values of the residents in a community, not a percentage of the incomes, of course. That said, the percentage is typically not fixed.

Furthermore, the state funding formulas differ from state to state and are not time-invariant. They do tend to depend on number of student, but not necessarily kind of student (e.g. students in special education programs may or may not get more funding).

Note that "depend" doesn't mean "determined by"; in Massachusetts, for example, state funding per student depends on how much money the school district is putting in from its real estate tax base and on the per-student spending in the district; the formula is somewhat complicated but the upshot is that the richer districts get _more_ per-student state funding. Yes, this is way backwards, and isn't even the most screwed up thing about school funding in this country...

In any case, in many school districts the bulk of school funding in fact comes from property taxes on the residents of the school district. That's the whole issue in this case: Ms. Williams-Bolar was not in fact paying property taxes in the district in question.

Those who have the motivation and background to continue to higher education also tend to shift towards "good" schools. They would continue even if they didn't go to a "good" school.

If they're hostile to other groups in some way, that's not a good thing (I don't want white/black/pink/red/... people around my house). But there's nothing wrong with staying in some area because you want to be close to your family (which leads to "natural" race concentration within that area).

Thus communication problem directly impact the frustration of each party about others. Then more violence will occurs.

To be more precise. Yes, everybody want to live with people which share the same values. But this local optimization have a bad effect on the society viewed in its totality.

Taking my own example, I believe that not being segregated in school had made me lose some hours of good Math. But I believe this experience made me more tolerant. And it is also certainly true for the others.

There is no perfect society model, but my inclination is to believe that more communication is never a waste and that any lack of communication is potentially dangerous.

It does somewhat fit the traditional fault lines over school districting, though. Traditionally, conservatives quite strongly opposed to allowing school attendance to cross boundaries, supporting separate districts in which each district was funded exclusively by local taxpayers and attended exclusively by children resident in that distrct. Mix of reasons, ranging from (on the nicer side) federalism/decentralization to (on the less-nice side) maintaining de-facto segregated schools.

In addition, liberals have tended to be the main ones behind aggregation-with-choice programs, in which many smaller districts in a metropolitan area would be aggregated into one organizational district, where parents could choose to send their kids to any school in the district. Conservative suburbanites have tended to prefer keeping their schools separate, without cross-boundary enrollment permitted.

aik, Here's one example of a downside: Even relatively well-performing school districts can struggle when their student population starts moving to a new charter school in the area. Since many of the costs for education are fixed within a certain margin, it becomes difficult to shed costs to compensate for the lost funding for each student that left the district.

"almost all of their time trying prevent a riot from breaking out"

is quite similar to what I wrote with:

"The best can hope for from a K-12 school is that it will do no harm.

"Find a school that has a nice 'social atmosphere' and otherwise is RELAXED, e.g., with as little homework as possible."

So we are at least partly agreeing.

What to do about a school with knife fights in the classrooms, drug deals in the halls, and pimping at lunch time is to get the hell out: Such a school fails on "do no harm" and "a nice 'social atmosphere'".

If just have to leave and can't afford a wealthy neighborhood, then pick a small town in a rural, farming area in one of the more northern states; there essentially any school will do no harm.

Also good, pick a college town. Even if sweep floors, flip burgers, wash pots, and act as a security guard, will be able to do a terrific job getting children ready for college and life.

My good news is that don't have to move to some neighborhood with all millionaires. Instead, quite sufficient is JUST "do no harm" and a 'social atmosphere'. Academically relaxed is also good.

This is a radical recommendation: For good work in actually learning for college and life, mostly don't depend on the school. Don't mostly depend on the school even if in one of the best school districts in the country or even are sending children to one of the best private schools.

Why? Again, yet again, to repeat, bluntly the K-12 teachers don't know enough to teach much of anything to be taken very seriously. The K-12 years are some of the very best years for learning, and it is a grand disaster that those years are turned over to the K-12 system and, thus, largely wasted.

Also implied but not stated was, get the heck into college level material ASAP. In the US, the good academic material starts in college and continues into graduate and professional school. K-12 is wildly different and, academically, is a really bad joke -- mostly can just skip it. For most parents who want good education for their children, this is radical but good advice.

With my advice, careful parents, and a one-room school house in a serious, rural farming community will totally knock the socks off ANYTHING in formal K-12 education.

For your:

"Also, it can be very hard to support real learning at home if you are a single parent working two or three jobs to make ends meet."

True.

So: (1) Young people, listen up: Work however hard is necessary to form stable marriages and, really, stable, larger families. Marriages and families are IMPORTANT. Again, listen up.

(2) Unless you want a series of disasters for the rest of your life, delay having children until you can form a stable marriage.

(3) In the home, set up a 'culture' of learning instead of TV, cars, fashion frocks, popularity competitions, cell phone gossip, pop culture, fast food, sports, wild parties, etc.

Then, get the children started and going on learning, largely independently, ASAP. Then the children can learn on their own time with minimal time from parents, so little that there still is a chance for a single parent.

But this matter of a 'culture' of learning is just CRUCIAL. If there is any doubt about the culture in your home, then disconnect the TV. Keep children away from 'pop culture'. Emphasize LEARNING and, then, curiosity.