America’s School Districts Are Too Big
wsj.com
wsj.com
> Public schools are valuable not only because they teach young people reading or job skills but because they enable communities to pass their values on to the next generation.
Uh oh.. Here we go... I'm not going to put words in the author's mouth, and he deftly avoids actually talking in specifics about what these guys want, but we've all heard it before. All you have to do is go to Youtube and search "school board meeting argument" and you'll get to hear rant after rant from that side's best and brightest. This is a pretty sneaky submarine article for vouchers, pubic funding for religious schools, religious homeschooling, and the sugar-coated, more marketable "School Choice" label they're using these days. Large school districts are accountable to a broader, more diverse population, and subsequently aren't as vulnerable to being captured by a small local enclave of fundies.
Why shouldn’t parents be allowed to take their child’s portion of the property taxes we all pay to go to the school of their choice? Why is choice acceptable in almost every other aspect of society, but not when it comes to K-12 education?
The answer is entrenched interests - teachers unions wanting to protect their earnings, time off and pensions… bureaucrats protecting their power and pensions… and of course the anointed who think they know better than everyone else how other people’s children should be educated.
Vouchers are the answer. Convert all public schools to parent-teacher coops and let them compete in an open market with charters and private schools… some will be selective, others will be lottery, others still may give preference to locals… the goal would be for the failures to be removed from the system so something better can take its place. Have states set standards, but then let the people roam free.
AFAIK the concern is that the charter schools will have their pick of "good" students, and all the "bad" students would be forced to languish in whatever shitty schools that are responsible for the remaining students. The "bad" students also tend to cost more per pupil (eg. because they have special needs and therefore need more qualified teachers), so slicing the student population this way will benefit the "good" students to the detriment of "bad" students.
Just to spell it out some more for any other readers: this is the same reason you want (for example) a large health insurance pool, including young healthy people who don't need that insurance. The idea is to have the healthy/privileged/lucky/etc help the less fortunate ones, at any given moment, to the benefit of everyone in the longer term.
There's a necessary tension between individual choices/freedoms and a system like that, though. "Good of the one vs. good of the many," and soforth.
People who can afford to do so will already put their kids in private school or select good school districts. All that’s left in the others are poor kids who want to learn but are at the mercy of kids who don’t.
I don't think the parent poster is making a diversity argument here (ie. having "bad" students alongside "good" students enriches the experience for everyone involved). He's more making an argument that a society should engage in redistribution from the "healthy/privileged/lucky/etc" to the "less fortunate ones".
If public schools were permitted to prevent the harms of disruptive students from impacting classroom management by informing parents, "You child is no longer welcome in our classroom, you are required to find someone who will put up with them" and handing them a voucher; then I strongly suspect we would learn that the quality increased and the number of disruptive students went down as parents were forced to deal with the costs those students had imposed on us.
There are other "bad" students which might not be a problem, but it's clear that the efforts to educate them are a waste[1]:
> In the last four years, France’s son passed three classes, failed 22 and was late or absent 272 days, the teen’s transcript shows. ** > France’s son has a 0.13 GPA, which traditionally places a student near the bottom of their class. But in his case, it put him 62nd out of 120, which would indicate a wider-spread academic performance issue going on at the school.
You can't just drop some good kids into this failing system and expect students like that to suddenly do well.
I think people should reconsider trade schools, including ones that start at relatively young ages. Include an opportunity to earn money at a young age. Just paying teachers to teach kids like that classes that they keep failing doesn't help the kids or anyone else.
[1] https://www.fox5dc.com/news/baltimore-area-student-passed-on...
Tracking folks earlier would also probably help. A lot of my peers growing up worked 4 hours of their school day their senior year, those guys all own homes way before my college bound peers did.
I do this and do question whether or not it’s the right choice (financially it’s saving me a few million, but that’s just money).
Yes, I think that's the idea. I don't think it's inherently a "problem", though [1]. Lots of good things in society have this same pattern. I pay taxes for the fire department, but have never had a fire myself. Compare to the highly-problematic privatized fire departments of years past. Lots of examples in that vein.
A movie quote comes to mind: "When he reached the New World, Cortéz burned his ships. As a result, his men were well-motivated."
There is something to be said for the power of a "we're all in it together" mentality, whether forced or not.
Maybe that makes me a communist, I don't know (:
> At what point does society end and individual rights begin?
Great question. I imagine the answer varies by person, by culture and sub-culture, by time, and by many other factors. I wonder if someone has done work in quantifying where to draw that line. For instance, with the fire department example, some private ones do still exist, mostly in rural areas, where there's less risk of a fire from one neighbor endangering the next one. But in more crowded areas, such as cities, the "forced rider" approach is far superior. There're probably some formulas that could describe that trade-off.
[1] Aside: I was unfamiliar with the term "forced riders", so I'm going off of the Wikipedia page[2]; not sure if there is some inherent negative association with the term in typical usage.
Would vouchers be acceptable to you if so?
It's a slow improvement, but it's at least an improvement. As I said, without charters the "good" kids leave the system entirely, and these local schools never get better.
But the other thing to point out is that it's unfair to simply treat "good" students as commodities to spend on "bad" students and neglect "good students" educational needs (and this happens much too often, from what I've seen). For instance, I've seen a special needs student here get a full time teacher just for them (in addition to their regular teacher), which is great. But then advanced students who aren't learning anything because they already know everything on the curriculum can't even get a teacher to address their educational needs for an hour or two a week.
"I am so, so tired of socialists who admit that the current system is a helltopian torturescape, then argue that we must prevent anyone from ever being able to escape it. Who promise that once the last alternative is closed off, once the last nice green place where a few people manage to hold off the miseries of the world is crushed, why then the helltopian torturescape will become a lovely utopia full of rainbows and unicorns. If you can make your system less miserable, make your system less miserable! Do it before forcing everyone else to participate in it under pain of imprisonment if they refuse! Forcing everyone to participate in your system and then making your system something other than a meat-grinder that takes in happy children and spits out dead-eyed traumatized eighteen-year-olds who have written 10,000 pages on symbolism in To Kill A Mockingbird and had zero normal happy experiences - is doing things super, super backwards!" https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-cult-o...
The answer is in the interests but also in the execution.
The same reason you can’t opt out of paying for roads on streets you don’t use. The obvious and immediate result would be that poor communities would have shittier roads than wealthy ones, beyond the point of which that is already the case.
The real difference is the level of parental engagement and support.
School districts want to retain good students & parents for the exact same reasons those people want to leave.
Rich students are dragged down poor students & parents, but poor students are dragged up good students and parents.
There is clearly a winner and loser to the arrangement, but it isn't because the school gets less tax revenue per student.
Tax revenue would get redistributed on a per car basis.
The real difference is the level of driver engagement and support, of which roads get maintenance.
Road districts want to retain good vehicles & drivers for the same reasons those people want to leave.
Rich drivers are dragged down by poor drivers, but poor drivers are dragged up by good drivers.
There is clearly a winner and loser to the arrangement, but it isn't because the road gets less tax revenue per car.
It would be more accurate if some citizens were doing additional road repair and cleaning outside of the government, and other citizens were digging potholes in their free time.
The majority of parents who advocate against public schooling [edit: in America] are objecting to their public schools on ideological or religious grounds, not on the quality of the education it provides. And the majority of schools these parents run to with voucher money are going to teach their kids exactly the ideology they want. Educationally stunted young-earth creationists growing up to make sure their kids are educationally stunted young-earth creationists, too. That's not a good end result for society, and not one that a constitutionally-limited government should be funding or promoting.
Working in tech, I'm exposed the occasional parent who talks about sending their kids to private school, in order to give the kids an advantage towards getting into Stanford, or as prep for future pre-med degrees. These few are not the parents I'm talking about.
It's easy to make the argument against charter schools when the "majority" of people supposedly using them are using it for "bad" reasons, but what if the situation were reversed? Would you be pro charter schools in a jurisdiction where the public school system is shoving young-earth creationism down student's throats or refusing to teach sex-ed? Does your support for charter schools hinge on whether they're being used to teach "bad" things to kids, or do you believe whoever has political control over the school system should be able to dictate what kids are taught and parents cannot opt out?
When people talk about taking their kids out of the public school system based on the ideologies- they mean evolution, possibly "contraceptives work", and maybe even CRT which just validates that racism existed throughout the entire history of the United States, eg disliking how schools teach "the Civil War was about states rights over owning slaves", the HIV/AIDS epidemic was a colossal failure of US policymaking, and that racism didn't end somewhere between the 70's and the 90's.
Remember, the federal government sets the legal drinking age at 21. Are you going to argue this is a bad thing because the federal government could in theory force states to allow drinking at the age of nine?
If the federal government forces teaching creationism, we have bigger problems. If a state wants to receive federal education dollars, it must behave. Simple as that.
School districts are a vestige of our racially segregated past and unfit for tomorrow's children.
I don't think that's a persuasive argument. You are assuming a (by your own admission) hypothetical situation which is different from where we are now, and ask "But if our situation is different, would your position change?" Well, of course it will. Would you rather want people to keep their positions when the situation changes?
Besides, if the kind of people who'd teach creationism get hold of the government, they wouldn't give a damn about what their predecessors thought of public education. Nobody's going to say "I was planning to teach the nation's kids that the earth is 6,000 years old, but my neighbors fought for the rights of parents to teach their kids that the earth is 6,000 years old, which showed me the error of my ways."
This is less of an argument for charter schools and more of a line of questioning to figure out the motivation behind people's stances. Are people against charter schools because they think other people's kids won't be taught the stuff they want, or do they believe the state should have supremacy over what can be taught using public dollars, regardless of the content?
if you want to send your kid to a private school, that's okay, you should have that choice. but you should not get to choose to stop paying taxes just because you've made that choice. deciding to opt out of paying taxes is not an option you get in any other aspect of society.
There are a lot of things in our society that we just do not have a choice on.
- many can’t choose who’s roads they drive on
- many can’t choose who provides their electricity
- many can’t choose who provides their Internet
If we’re advocating for school choice based on the fact that we can choose some things, or we should be able to choose, it would stand to reason that we should also advocate for choice in all the things we consume.
We have the assumption that privatization would improve circumstances. In a lot of cases privatizing produces worse outcomes. America’s multi-payer multi-provider healthcare system has produced the worst health outcomes at the highest cost in the industrialized world. We need to recognize privatization and competition as a social tool, and know when to use it.
There are issues with the school system. Perhaps unions and bureaucrats have too much power. I’m not convinced that radically changing our education system is the right choice for everyone.
Private, for-profit schools and religious nuts teaching Noah's Ark as "history" ruin the fundamental tenants of public schooling: that everyone, regardless of socioeconomic background gets what everyone else gets.
Without maintaining that premise and spending equally per pupil, then it's the haves vs. the havenots.
Public school teachers get paid peanuts. My step sister is involved with special ed and is on food stamps.
I'm sorry, but your opinion is worse than invalid, it's dangerously ignorant.
In any public school, there's a segment of parents who were highly involved. They ran the fundraisers, volunteered on campus, and would probably raise hell if there were scandal or underperforming teachers.
Conversely, you've got other contingents that could care less what happens in the classroom as long as Junior makes the sportsball team, or solely see it as state-funded daycare. They're not contributing, they're barely even keeping tabs on the school.
If you offer a "better" school (private, charter, or even public-magnet), that's a huge lure for the "involved" parents. The default public school loses its unofficial support, causing a death spiral, as performance becomes poor enough that even indifferent parents take notice and flee. What does that mean for the kids who are there, typically for reasons beyond their control.
Even with vouchers, you can't force people to make good choices. Many people will choose the 'default' local school because they don't know how to shop for it, or it's the only choice which fits into their transport and economic constraints.
I also suspect from a social perspective, "school choice" is counterproductive. Some parents explicitly use the option to "protect their kids from dangerous ideas", and it's not usually because they're providing a higher-quality alternative outside the campus. "Selective" schools are also a great way to ensure the kids don't get exposed to kids of diverse backgrounds and social classes.
Also, they explicitly want to control and indoctrinate your kids. If you fight that, you are gaslighted.
If a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged, and a liberal is a conservative who has gone to prison, then a socialist is a libertarian who’s been to a school board meeting.
Nothing endears me to school choice more than hearing this kind of condescension and dismissiveness towards people who want what is best for their children.
What you are saying is that the per-pupil funds allotted to the child who is no longer in public school must still go to the public school, even if that public school system has alienated the parents to the point that the kids are gone. There is no accountability in that, just a license to dismiss the concerns of people who are upset or dissatisfied.
Also private school is too expensive for many people. It shouldn't be only rich people who get to make that choice.
If the larger district is more diverse, then wouldn't forcing a one-size-fits-all solution on its inhabitants be worse than allowing individual communities to choose solutions tailored to their diverse needs?
The problem with hyperlocalism is that, since the number of constituents is so small, one angry person with a megaphone can throw a race, letting them act as a petty dictator. There's already too many petty wannabe dictators running around school board meetings right now, and encouraging more isn't going to help things. Of course, I assume this is entirely the point, which makes me wonder what the author's failed crusade against his large school district was about. Transgender bathrooms? Critical race theory? Litter boxes? Teaching evolution?
(Also, I take issue with the characterization that the largest school districts tend to be the lowest-performing--my experience, looking at the list of largest school districts, is that they tend to be, well, average.)
There are people actively trying to destroy public education. So, you are spot on.
I can call my mayor-- he met with our cub scout den last fall. I can find the police chief if I want. I can speak to the deciders on the school board or in the administration.
Yes, it's expensive but there's delightful responsiveness and accountability in exchange for the sticker price.
-- confused European who thought 1500-2000 is huge
https://sde.ok.gov/sites/default/files/documents/files/FY20%...
I imagine the underlying idea is that people shouldn't have to pay taxes for kids that are a little further away. Or maybe that crank parents arguing crank causes is super productive and they should have lots of forums to do it in.
(we have relatively consistent standards for education, working towards attaining those standards is going to happen administratively, not by having more school boards to air grievances in front of)
Yep, it's that. The author is not arguing in good faith (IMHO), and is mad that crank causes can't easily subvert a school district, if the school district is sufficiently large enough to resist it. The big tell is that the author won't actually list what "community values" or "will of citizens" they think are missing in these democratically-elected school district boards (because if they admitted it honestly, it would be immediately obvious why districts resist it)
And this isn't just a thought-piece, this is a real battle happening at the local level in Michigan right now, during the past election, something like 60% of the candidates for each random district are that district's crazy cranks from school board meetings, intentionally running in bad faith, just to push minority-held crazy religious/political-extremist beliefs onto children via the school board). Districts can't kick them out of the meetings, if they are on the board themselves.
And you're not arguing in good faith, by referring to the values of people you disagree with as "crank causes".
I apologize for referring to concerns like these as "crank causes"
NYC, for example, spends an extraordinary amount per-student on paper. But a lot of that is pension obligations and other spending that (1) can't be cut, and (2) costs less in overhead in larger districts. It's not clear that other districts uniformly include their pension contributions in their student funding numbers.
Edit: To qualify: from casual searching, it seems like a lot of municipalities include teachers as a bucket in their larger civil service pension budget line.
"A movement to standardize and professionalize K-12 education began in the Progressive Era. Consolidation may have accomplished some of its goals, but America’s largest districts today tend to be among the lowest-performing."
Especially never mind The Journal of Educational Research [https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/vjer20] The experts at the Wall Street Journal will be fair and balanced. This year, size is the problem.
"I been to school myself and I don't need them pointy-heads to tell me what's wrong."
It's big brain.
Of course, YMMV. The background of 'my' district superintendant (an elected position) was that he had been a Colonel in the Army. He made damn sure I arrived by 7:30 a.m. each day.
Smaller districts often look (erroneously in my opinion) to these large districts to set an example of the “right” approach and adopt the same products.
This is how you end up with monoliths like Pearson and McGraw Hill making shitty products that teachers hate but schools continue to pay gobs of money for. And innovation is stifled because that money doesn’t go to better products from companies that can’t afford a giant lobbying arm/don’t have a 20yr relationship with the superintendent.
When they have teachers driving Teslas and BMWs, it probably looks quite appealing.
One fact about schools is that special Ed kids require far more money per student than so called regular kids.
You combine this with the fact that those who have kids with needs will correctly advocate for their kids vocally and the issue is very salient, you get more politics around the issue resulting in more people and larger districts.
Your particular concern about this “issue” will likely align with whether or not you think cities should be large and have commensurately large governments.
A small district is going to have fewer resources.
EDIT: When I say "small" I mean relative to huge, metropolitan school districts with many thousand students per grade. I'm not advocating for all districts to be reduced to rural midwestern town sizes.
The gotcha is you need social services at the poor schools and programs that actually help sustain families.
I'm unconvinced that mainstreaming special-needs students in regular classrooms is the best thing for them.
Smaller districts don’t have the overhead funding to be effective. Modern schools need technology. A district with 1000 kids doesn’t have the money to maintain competent staff or hire competent third parties.
Layers of management get introduced to keep the top from being overwhelmed, but the funding doesn't scale to account for that. As it grows, those increasing layers of management create a disconnect between the top and bottom. With the scale comes a need for larger projects, but the disconnect makes it hard to get those most out of those projects. And as the district grows to include more and more students, it becomes harder for the needs of smaller demographics within that student body to get represented.
My wife is a teacher for a large metro school district. I hear stories day after day of how her and her coworkers get handcuffed by a highly bureaucratic school district and can't get the support they need to help students succeed in the classroom. Decisions get made regarding funding, resources, and curriculum at the top from people who she never meets. These decisions are often made to cut costs to make room for growing admin needs and controversial district projects.
I work for one of the largest corporations in the US and I see plenty of bureaucracy within it, but the focus on maximizing profits at least keeps the company focused on making effective business decisions. The only thing that motivates schools is school board elections and the good will of its employees. The larger a district gets, the less power individual employees to improve things and the less representative a school board is of its constituents.
By far the most successful school districts in my state are the "medium" sized ones, with around 500 to 1000 students per grade. The districts that are much smaller or larger than that tend to have fewer resources available per student.
My sister was a teacher in a small urban school district. She had 50 kids enrolled in her 1st grade and never saw more than 20-25. Half of the parents were <25 and a ~6 were in jail for some part of the year. She would go shopping clearance sales after Christmas to buy winter coats to give to students. Some kids weren’t potty trained. Most had unstable living arrangements.
Bigger districts see both of those worlds at scale. NYC has 1M students and probably 30-40k in the conditions I described. That scale drives specialization, policy, etc.
They are so incompetent, and have been sued so many times, that they are currently under the supervision of the state board of ed pursuant to a consent decree. It's likely that I will have them in court in the coming year.
Big buys you nothing. A single teacher who knows what they're doing can make all the difference. More bureaucrats add nothing.
This is fundamentally the problem, and is unavoidable in large organizations. As a bureaucracy grows, it becomes more concerned with perpetuating itself than working on its purported mission. You see it in large companies, large nonprofits, large churches, large governments, and large school districts to name a few.
Scale investment by managing fewer students and give school administrators best practices and benchmarks. It's far easier for large districts to use large piles of money inefficiently than for districts managing fewer pupils.
The other thing is to mandate parental involvement. Without this, there is unlikely to be a good outcome. It also implies that parents need some sort of paid leave and/or scheduling to be involved in their kids' education.
In Maryland and Virginia, school districts tend to go by county or by county-equivalent city. Fairfax County, Virginia, and Howard and Montgomery Counties in Maryland have many excellent schools. If you drive a couple of hours north to Pennsylvania, the school districts tend to be much smaller, sometimes just an elementary school or two, a middle school, and a high school. I don't think that most of those high schools are competitive with (for example) TJ in Fairfax or Blair, Wootton or Richard Montgomery in Maryland.
There is no reason you can't have a top-notch small school district, but I'll bet that it is in a very prosperous end of the state. (New Jersey has the same mania for multiplication of local government, including school districts; some of those districts must be outstanding.)
Drive your kid across town, when you’re already poor?
Under choice fewer people would be denied an education by your definition.
It is pretty straightforward economic self interest. I can recommend Sowell's book "Charter schools and their enemies" it lays out the setup quite well.
Did I send my oldest kid to a charter school? Yeah, for one year. It was a bunch of Teach for America grads that warehoused the kids in front of computers for hours at a time, no PE, and sent kindergartens to detention. (Wtf?!)
So why did we choose this school? One reason: All day kindergarten. We had no idea how bad the school was actually run until like a quarter or two into it.
Fuck Rocketship Schools.
There are downsides, small population = fewer extracurricular activities, with less participation (esp. sports).
Everyone wants the best for themselves and their kid. That means buying housing in the best district they can afford. Once they're in they don't want lower socioeconomic status people to move into their neighborhood or the district to annex poor areas.
If a county, or a state, wants to send money to poorer areas, they can do it without regard to the organization of the school districts. Often, the formula is targeted at the student: if a school has X low-income students, then they get Y dollars.
Edit: my comment pertains to large school districts, aka city-wide or within large counties. The suburbs get organized differently.
Isn’t the bigger problem minority rule?
Specifically, large school districts in blue cities are underfunded by red state legislatures controlled by rural areas?
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/how-stop-m...