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Comment by clnq | Hacker News Reader

I come from a Nordic country, where many things are different from the US. When I was a kid, I could choose what public school I wanted to go to. I'm trying to understand the situation you describe better.

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.

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America funds public education locally, so you are limited to public schools that you can attend by what schools are being funded by your property taxes. Some districts setup public choice schools in their districts, especially if the districts are large (e.g. Seattle, my son goes to an area choice school). Some states will also provide more equity to school districts (Washington state shifts education funding to east of the mountains from much richer Seattle area school districts), but in general you still aren't allowed to attend schools outside of your district without some kind of exception.

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).

Thank you for the context.

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.

Criticism on NCLB is basically criticism on standardized testing. Higher performing schools are going to opt out anyways (they would rather focus their kids on prep for college), lower performing schools focus on the tests with hyper focus to the expense of everything else.

Most of the belly-aching about NCLB that you'll hear comes from relatively affluent people (who are disproportionately represented on this site, since it's a forum for people in a relatively high-paying field), because it required school districts to focus disproportionately on getting closer to average outcomes for the worst performing students, rather than letting the best performing students excel even further.

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.

> 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

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.

To a less extreme extent, that was the case in my Bay Area school district. One school had phenomenal scores (due to a feedback loop of parents willing to pay more for housing to send their kid to a higher achieving school force their kid to achieve highly making the school higher achieving, raising house prices), and the others ranged from so-so, to pretty meager.

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.

Doesn't California have a more state wide funding model due to Proposition 13? They basically have to send sales tax back to schools to make up for property tax revenue losses, which they can do more equitably. The same thing happens in Washington state due to a supreme court ruling (but with property taxes instead of sales taxes). Still, Palo Alto High School isn't in the same district with East Palo Alto High School, and it is pretty obvious which one has access to more resources.

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).

The main thing to be aware of is charter schools and school vouchers. The latter literally diverts public funds to parents who want to send their kids to private schools.

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).

I’m otherwise liberal, but I am sorely tempted to vote for anyone who expands school vouchers in my area - that idea sounds amazing.

Well, good news! Vouchers are, basically, a liberal policy. You'd vote against it if you were a socialist but you can keep your lib credentials and still favor vouchers.

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.

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