Pretty sure cognitive reasoning is declining too. School choice is the way to go. This does two things (1) forces parents to at least be involved enough to make a decision and (2) incentivizes schools to improve
As a parent of quite a few kiddos, I’ve noticed a massive lack of involvement with most parents. It shows
Doesn't school choice divert funds away from public schools, depriving them of the means to improve?
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/05/oklahoma-approves-p...
Since the fixed costs of running a public school are effectively covered, the public school saves the marginal cost of educating the student that has diverted their funds. The school then has the same means to improve on a per student basis.
Also keep in mind that "improving" often means replacing costly and ineffective process with better ones.
What this results in, many schools, typically smaller. Where I’m at no one sends their kids to public schools if they’re well off. We create our own pods or select one of the larger private schools.
Really only poor people, with parents who don’t home school, send their kids to the public schools. School choice helps the poor, because it gives them the freedom of choice they wouldn’t otherwise have.
The wealthy already choose better options.
In way of example, we have 30 kids in our neighborhood. We can hire 3x teachers and build a small school house for $10-12k per student. We now have a neighborhood school and school choice would allow that.
People on this thread don’t really know what they’re talking about. Everyone in the school choice system still pays into taxes, it’s just you get a voucher / credit / account to apply to your place of choice. This allows for greater variation in education and more diversity of thought. It also reduces segregation due to redlining, etc of the past.
And that's before the absolutely, stark-raving mad suggestion that religious institutions should be able to collect from state-funded education allowances, introducing a healthy mix of indoctrination into the mix.
Yeah we can’t have those silly people educating their kids how they see fit — you know better! \s
You can’t argue public schooling is good, when by any metric public schools are worse than private options. There’s more violence, more indoctrination, are often less diverse (it’s based off neighborhood) and worse outcomes at public schools. The data backs up how bad they are.
There are also a lot of different school choice options. For instance, the state can impose restrictions on which institutions can get funds, etc.
That said, in the US you really can’t stop anyone from hiring public tutors and homeschooling. So what you’re arguing is basically that the rich get this method and the poor get to go to the public schools. This leads to a much larger stratification than allowing school choice
This is highly case by case. Sure, the very worst schools are public, but that's because they're in the worst areas, where people are definitely too poor to be sending their kid to private schools. On the upper end, though, it's far from clean cut.
Comparing Bay Area schools, both the best and the worst schools are public. You have to go down the list of top ACT/SAT scoring schools a-good-long-while to find a private school. Because we just have really good public schools available.
> more indoctrination
What could possibly be more indoctrinating than in-school religious practice? Religious private schools definitely blow any secular institution out of the water when it comes to indoctrination.
The key issue is introducing price discrimination into an already blighted schooling environment just exasperates the brain drain. The only reasonable solution is making the schools available in those areas better, not giving up on them entirely.
I'll be following Oklahoma - it will be interesting to see how quickly Islamic schools, or The Satanic Temple get their requests for schools submitted. And how quickly Oklahoma approves/denies them.
1 - https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/05/oklahoma-approves-p...
The largest factor in good v bad schools is already selection bias. Turning up the temperature on that (if you will) is not gonna help a thing, except the people itching like a goddamn meth addict at the prospect of getting a piece of those sweet, sweet public dollars. They'll benefit.
But if you're a parent who wants decent schools for your kids, and your current schools are lousy, and you aren't a big enough fish to move the school board, and you can't afford private school... what else are you going to try to do other than push for school choice? (You could homeschool, I guess, but not everybody feels like they're cut out for that.)
The better question is why the US education system has become a zero sum game. But don't blame affluent parents for following the incentives the system has forced on them.
Well, you're admitting there's no personal cost to your advocacy, which makes sense and I can't really argue you're not entitled to feel that way. Like in criminal justice reform, homelessness advocacy, etc. everyone is a liberal until the first time they get robbed, the first time someone smashes their car window, etc. Personal cost has a way to delivering reality to people who are disconnected from it.
> It's very much in my interest that education be distributed evenly
If there was no cost to the high performing students to keep everyone in public schools, I would actually 100% agree with you. But limiting the upper percentiles' outcomes to deliver almost negligible changes to the bottom percentile doesn't seem fair, either.
I'm not sure I agree with that assertion. But, if it is, my vote would be to fix that instead of throwing out the system. Public education works - it worked in the US for decades and it works in most of our peer nations.
fascinating.
isn't that we all do for higher education? some community colleges are free for nearby residents now, everyone that is privileged enough to go to a university is secretly into segregation!
That is just one article about it, but someone close to me was involved in the original litigation on the subject. It was not uncommon in the south for districts to close public schools and almost literally give public land and equipment from those schools to private schools which could more easily remain segregated.
There are other dimensions to school choice as well. In particular, some parents would prefer to "insulate" their children from information about sexuality or uncomfortable truths about american history.
And, I admit, public schools often are struggling to teach, so its not entirely black and white. But school choice is politically fraught.
But many people see it as the standard republican strategy: first, starve public services of funding, then claim that they are bad, and then get rid of them.
First of all, are kids not free to choose which public school they will attend in the US? If so, is that by law? Do any US states allow a choice of public schools? If not, why not? Also, school curriculums were standardized where I was a kid, so there wasn't ever the problem of creating siloed "thought" schools. Isn't school curriculum standardized in the US?
This was such a non-problem in my experience, I am honestly a bit surprised how controversial it is. It would be great if anyone gave more context, as that article relies on quite a lot of US life experience.
Education is also governed largely locally with a few state/federal standards in the background that are often not seen as a good thing (e.g. Bush's No Child Left Behind).
It's interesting that NCLB is seen in negative light, it is similar to what I had as a kid. It seems to be one of those things that was fundamentally good-spirited but corrupted. I think it could have been done well. It shouldn't cast doubt on standards in education.
Or maybe it was a failure. It would be interesting to know how education changed when NCLB was introduced and how many people liked it vs how many disliked the change.
For example, if your school district had 2 high schools, one that was extremely high achieving to the point that anything short of a perfect score on standardized test was considered a moral failing, and the other that was struggling to keep the school average at the state/national average, the school district, in order to get more funding from the fed, would need to spend as much as possible on the lower achieving school. Secondary things, like a new pool, or new buildings, or in some cases basic renovations would be denied to the higher achieving school, because they still had a far way to fall before they represented a failure of the school district.
That would never really happen though. The poor high school is very likely to be in a completely different school district with a completely separate local funding source. Rich schools mostly complained about having to prep students for NCLB when they were also prepping them for AP exams and otherwise helping getting their students into an Ivy league.
They were probably all fine on a national average, but the funding definitely got dumped exclusively into the worse off schools, while the high achieving one couldn't scrape enough money together to repair their busted pool.
Hell, the entirety of Los Angeles is under 1 school district. You're going to try and claim there isn't variance in student success/socioeconomic status between the highschools in Koreatown and Beverly Hills versus those in Compton?
Maybe California has different incentives when it comes to school district organization, but that scenario definitely "really happens" here.
Seattle is like LA, we are all one school district. But there is a huge difference between the poorest public school in Seattle vs. the richest public school in Yakima. And we have equalization of school funding via the state. What winds up happening here, however, is that school districts use funding from normal students to subsidize special education students, but have to be careful because they get funding from the state for each student equally (so if they lose their cheaper to educate advanced students to private schools or adjacent school districts, they have less money to educate their expensive to educate special ed students).
Charter schools are more subtle. They are privately run schools which often can work around regulations which restrict public schools (for example, they may not have to hire union teachers). There are de jure rules to make sure that these schools are accessible to everyone in the community, but often there are informal methods by which these schools end up being just for white students (for instance, the administration will wait until the school choice period is over and then selectively eject non-white kids).
Politics aside, you should check to see if they are available in your area. They are often only for people below a certain income level, however.