Comment by _-david-_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _-david-_ | Hacker News Reader

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>Doesn’t this position rest on the premise that the public education system is “broken”?

It is turning out kids who can hardly read and add. What we are doing is broken. It is possible that a change could occur that would fix the public system, but that hasn't happened yet.

>Here’s a premise for public education: Continuous investment and incremental improvement will yield better outcomes than starting from scratch, particularly where starting from scratch means providing a mechanism for public education funds to be funneled into private enterprise.

Please let us know what incremental improvement you are suggesting? Just saying let's make things better by making them better doesn't add anything to the conversation.

>Setting aside the practical barriers for families to individually navigate providing quality non-public education for their children, which are substantial, this kind of approach introduces a whole range of new risks.

I agree. I think we need to have standards and regulations around this. I am not sure if this specific bill will provide that or not.

>If a family with five children is facing poverty, loss of housing, and financial instability, it might start to look appealing to take those five kids and sign them up for homeschooling so that the funds can be used for some education and for survival.

I don't think that would be good. I imagine you can't spend this money on a mortgage and there would be validation to ensure it doesn't happen. If the bill allows abuse like this then a new bill should be passed banning it.

>Those aren’t the kinds of risks that financially secure families will ever have to face.

I think keeping poor kids in a crappy school where they will come out barely able to read will continue generational poverty and is a risk of the current school system.

Thanks for responding, this is definitely easier from a computer.

I reviewed summaries from NAEP for reading and math [0] and found that across the board, public schools appear to outperform "public charter" schools. I understand that the received wisdom is that public schools are failing student. Certainly there are many public schools that don't increase, or actively harm, outcomes for some or all of their students. But the premise here is that the public system is fundamentally broken, and it should be substantiated.

> Please let us know what incremental improvement you are suggesting

The Hunt-Lee Commission recently released a final report for improving North Carolina Public Education Pre-K through University with 16 proposals[1], broadly categorized as "Build on what we have", "Invite and test new ideas", and "Implement proven solutions". Proposals such as these were what I had in mind when I originally wrote of incremental improvement.

> I think keeping poor kids in a crappy school where they will come out barely able to read will continue generational poverty and is a risk of the current school system.

Yes. The crappy school you mention should definitely be improved. But that's not what this bill does; this bill puts the burden on families to take their kids out of the crappy school and find a better one for them, leaving the crappy school in place along with the students of families who, for whatever reason, aren't able to move their own kids.

[0]: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/dashboards/schools_dashboa... [1]: https://hunt-institute.org/news/hunt-lee-commission-releases...

>I reviewed summaries from NAEP for reading and math [0] and found that across the board, public schools appear to outperform "public charter" schools. I understand that the received wisdom is that public schools are failing student. Certainly there are many public schools that don't increase, or actively harm, outcomes for some or all of their students. But the premise here is that the public system is fundamentally broken, and it should be substantiated.

I wasn't trying to say every public school is bad and failing every student. Some schools are great, others are not. Some students can do great in bad schools and some students do bad in great schools.

I think if there is a bad school parents shouldn't be forced to keep their kids in that school. This isn't ideal, obviously every school should be great.

>The Hunt-Lee Commission recently released a final report for improving North Carolina Public Education Pre-K through University with 16 proposals[1], broadly categorized as "Build on what we have", "Invite and test new ideas", and "Implement proven solutions". Proposals such as these were what I had in mind when I originally wrote of incremental improvement.

I only skimmed the summary not the entire report, but those seem like good improvements. The problem I have is we don't really know the full long term costs and benefits to them.

I don't think these need to be exclusive though. There is no reason you can't allow your changes and allow charter schools. If the changes to the public schools improve things parents will send their kids back to the public schools when / if things improve.

Keeping kids in poor public schools because we may in the future have some fixes to the public school system isn't great and is just going to continue giving poor kids a poor education.

>Yes. The crappy school you mention should definitely be improved. But that's not what this bill does; this bill puts the burden on families to take their kids out of the crappy school and find a better one for them, leaving the crappy school in place along with the students of families who, for whatever reason, aren't able to move their own kids.

The problem is many crappy public schools aren't improving. Allowing parents to put their kids in a different school may be beneficial in the mean time. Parents who can't or won't do research can keep their kids in the crappy school. There would be less kids in the crappy schools which would be an improvement regardless.

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