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Comment by jhedwards | Hacker News Reader

> incentivizes schools to improve.

Doesn't school choice divert funds away from public schools, depriving them of the means to improve?

> with school choice programs, public schools get to keep almost all of the federal and local tax dollars and usually a portion of the state funds allocated for each child https://www.edchoice.org/school-choice/faqs/how-does-school-...

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.

Potentially. For example, Oklahoma now allows "public" parochial charter schools.[1]. The end game here is any district that can only support a single school pyramid will have a privately-run, religious school funded by public tax dollars.

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...

Not if families choose the public school. I think private school choice is unequivocally bad, but charters might be good depending on the situation. Charters have quickly risen to serve 1/4 of the highschoolers in my district because the public options available to poor families are legitimately violent, as in students being shot on campus. The school district was counting on poor families having no other choice so they allowed those schools to languish while they invested in the schools in wealthier areas in order to keep middle+ class families from fleeing for the suburbs. The charter schools have forced the district to at least attempt to serve the poor students.

Posted this in another response. Oklahoma is testing the waters with publicly-funded parochial charters. The end-game for many proponents of school choice, vouchers, and charters is absolutely a parochial education for everybody. Or at least parochial education for their family and friends, and everybody else can get fucked.

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/05/oklahoma-approves-p...

it’s implemented in a variety of ways, the simplest way is every parent gets an account with $X. They can then choose to spend that money on education similar to an Healthcare Spending Account.

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.

Increasing school choice incentivizes the stratification of schooling, by changing the choice from "free, probably adequate" public schools versus "expensive, maybe better" into "free, where all the poor kids go", "mid-priced, where everyone who gives a shit and can afford to goes", and "expensive, maybe better". Adding that middle tier charter school leaves the public school with only the poor or uncaring, leading to worse outcomes.

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.

> 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

> any metric public schools are worse than private options

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.

Yes, it absolutely does. It also uses public funds for private religious institutions, which I personally believe goes against the separation of church and state.

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