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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

At first I could not figure out from the article what's so inherently bad about large school districts. The author is pretty vague about it, concerned about "bureaucracy" and some nebulous feeling from parents: "parents and taxpayers feel they have no ability to influence them." But what exactly are these supposedly disenfranchised parents trying unsuccessfully to achieve? These voices that aren't being heard: what are they saying? The author doesn't even hint at it until deep within the text:

> 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.

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What exactly is wrong with school choice and religious schooling? I went to a private religious school for K-12… no violence, no teenage pregnancies, and I ended up at a top research university and in solid career. My parents weren’t wealthy and used whatever money they could find to keep me out of a failing public school system and I am grateful (although not religious, which they don’t appreciate too much :)

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.

I have no doubt that out of the thousands of religious schools out there, there are some that provide an objectively great, fact-based education. Just like I have no doubt that out of the millions of parents who want to send their kids to religious schools, there are some that want to do it for strictly secular, "education-quality" reasons. And when the miracle happens and these two combine, you're going to see a great outcome like yours. These are outliers.

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.

>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.

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?

> 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?

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."

>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?

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?

Public school standards are set and enforced state-wide, so in order for that scenario to happen, the whole state in which I lived would have to have found a way to dodge the establishment clause. There's no chance my local community could start teaching young-earth creationism and not instantly find themselves in court. So that question remains hypothetical. But let's say I suddenly lived somewhere like Iran, where the state schooling was strictly religious-based: I'd be doing whatever I could to GTFO of there, not worrying about school vouchers. My opposition to charter schools and school vouchers is based on the US Constitution's first amendment, and isn't relevant in a place without that protection.

Upthread you argued that small school districts are "vulnerable to being captured by a small local enclave of fundies." Here you argue that such a thing is impossible, that state-wide standards and the first amendment would prevent it from ever happening. Which is it?

School districts are way too small. We need one school district for the whole state. No, you may not keep tax dollars local. School district taxes should be distributed state wide.

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.

Nothing in your comment addresses the contradiction that was the subject of my comment.

What is being referred to as ""good"" in this thread is simply science, aka the scientific method of testing theories and taking what can be proven and cross-validated, and applying it to everything.

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.

>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?

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.

That's the theory. What I've actually seen here (where many charters exist with public schools) is that charters actually increase the number of "good" kids in public schools. This is because without charters, parents will just stay clear of a bad area entirely. With charters, many parents will put their kids in the local public school early on, increasing the number of "good" kids that go their. They eventually will pull things out as the school systems problems increase as kids grow, but there seems to be "good" students willing to stay in the system later and later.

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.

This is the exact evolution I’ve seen of my kids’ (charter) school.

Please readers, do not believe these bullshit anecdotes. Look into real research about these things if you care about them.

Feel free to cite the research then, otherwise:

"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...

Exactly.

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.

How much do the “good” students help the “bad” students compared to the bad students harming the good students by disrupting classes, bringing violence to the school, or otherwise slowing down learning?

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.

This is exactly the issue that drives folks from "bad schools." The inability of those schools to control disruptive students.

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's also a large spectrum of "bad" kids, and a lot of the time the "bad" students educational needs aren't being met, either. For instance, there are, as you said, kids who are violent and disruptive and the answer might not be to expose them to more students but to remove them from the student body entirely and get them into a specialized program focused on trying to improve the emotional problems the kid has.

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...

There's a stage of puberty boys go through where it would work better to give them a whole schedule of Shop Class/Gym/Work-study, or similar for that year. They're re-learning how to control and move their growth spurt body and re-learning how to think with the suddenly increased Testosterone level.

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.

This is an intensely personal choice. I know people who automatically reject public schools because they consider them all low quality. I remember I saw a rude store customer say "They must have went to public school." after an employee made a math error. The devout choose Catholic schools because of values education sometimes even if they have to pay tuition. Some have to enroll their kids in public school because they feel going to a school with a normal cross section of the community is preparation for real life (and especially not a gender segregated school). Some want their kids to attend a racially and economically diverse school even if quality suffers, because their think a good student can achieve in even a mediocre school. Or vice versa they value diversity but not as much as the best schools and those are typically with above average household income and usually <15% or even <10% racial minorities.

> How much do the “good” students help the “bad” students compared to the bad students harming the good students by disrupting classes, bringing violence to the school, or otherwise slowing down learning?

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".

In some cases it is also going to redistribute misfortune as well. Is that fair or desirable?

I'm not sure what gave you the impression that I support putting "bad" students alongside "good" students, which is what I presume you mean by "redistribute misfortune". My last comment is specifically denies this (ie. "having "bad" students alongside "good" students"), and "redistribution" straightforwardly implies redistribution in resources/money.

Giving more money and resources to people who don’t want to take advantage of them in the first place isn’t going to fix the problem.

There are many parents who can afford private school but send their kids to public schools for the heterogeneity.

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).

The issue with compelled school is that it creates forced riders, a problem very rarely addressed. At what point does society end and individual rights begin? People demand marriage rights even when marriage is an institution of the state. I don't see why school choice is the particular line at which the "good" of the many should now be given consideration, despite education being as personal a choice as whom one marries.

> it creates forced riders, a problem very rarely addressed

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.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_rider

Hmm, I wonder, is there a way to permit vouchers while also somehow compensating for this effect?

Would vouchers be acceptable to you if so?

And then eventually public education would die completely and then, eventually, vouchers would dry up for certain, um, classes of people, so it would be difficult for certain people to obtain any success at all because they would get zero education.

But aren’t smaller classes linked to better academic progress?

> 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?

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.

Thants not an accurate description of how vouchers work. Tax revenue still gets redistributed and split on a per student basis just like it would otherwise.

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.

The following is satire.

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.

I'm not sure what the point of your satire is.

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.

But some charter school networks, such as Success Academy in NYC, are overwhelmingly attended by low-income students.

Anecdatum: I have talked with a parent of fraternal twins who went to Success Academy. One twin did well academically. One twin struggled. The latter was managed out by Success Academy.

When an area of a larger city is annexed to form a smaller town with its own tax structure, isn’t it effectively opting out?

That's the core issue. Are schools public goods or private goods? Considering property taxes as user fees or de facto tuition definitely falls on the private goods side.

It's not about the kids, it's about the parents.

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.

Why shouldn’t I be able to take my share of the taxes I pay for bombers and pay for Bundt cakes?

The answer is in the interests but also in the execution.

educating children is a collective good for society, not a service provided only to deserving children with rich parents. taxes pay for collective things that we need as a society, like roads, health care, sanitation, and educating the next generation.

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.

Only in your utopia do things work "as they should".

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.

Sure, if you require every private school to accept all students for the amount of the voucher and no more.

Tax dollars shouldn't be used to fund religious education.

They are anyway, just woke religion instead of some other one.

How are you using "woke" in this context?

All schools impart ideology of one kind or another. Now, I agree I don't want fundamentalist/cultist schools, but let's not pretend that [secular] schools only impart academics --it's not your little house on the prairie one-room school. In every country, state, city and town schools impart the prevailing ideology whatever that may be in the particular locale.

Prevailing ideology is vague. I'm referring to religin which violates the separation of church and state

What's wrong is that you're immediately labeled and assumptions are made, just like the parent poster did. No effort to get to know you, your situation, or the context.

Also, they explicitly want to control and indoctrinate your kids. If you fight that, you are gaslighted.

I'll put this bluntly. Society is trying to limit the number of kids who grow up taught fringe beliefs like evolution is a myth, white people shouldn't marry black people, and there was no holocaust. Vouchers... don't solve for that.

What private school teaches that? Be specific.

If I do not have children, does that mean that I would not contribute to anyone’s education? It would be great for us childless people.

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.

> you'll get to hear rant after rant from that side's best and brightest.

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.

School choice exemplifies the worst of our hyper individualistic culture. Yes, it would help the children of the hyper involved parents, but the remaining children stuck in the public schools would have far worse outcomes, and guess what, they need to contribute to society too. Creating a society that doesn't look out for those who need the most help is not a path to success.

If you dismiss the concerns of wide swaths of parents about how their kids are being educated, but you also want to forbid them from taking their business elsewhere, you're basically saying they should be confined to an institution that doesn't care about them.

No one is saying that. Theyre free to take their business elsewhere. They just still have to pay for all the other kids to be educated.

The other kids are still paid to be educated, using the per-pupil funds that are allotted to those 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.

I was a libertarian in college, in part because of these arguments. And the thing that put the sour taste in my mouth and made me swear it off forever was when I realized that “school choice” and “laboratories of democracy” weren’t about letting each state try a radical new education theory and see if it worked, it was about providing cover for people who wanted to propagate religious views through education.

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.

>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.

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?

“Small schools” and “school choice” usually translate to schools full of kids who look like my kid.

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