Charter schools, social norming and zero-sum games (2010)

Proactive parents will typically want their children in good schools, regardless of their child's behavioural history. (This doesn't mean they refuse to acknowledge the issue, though some will. It simply means they want their children to have access to better supports.)

There is an overarching philosophy within the school system that integration is better than separation. I don't know if this has to be the case, but it has been historically true. Think of it this way: even though some of the best teachers may want to serve the most challenging schools, good teachers almost always want to teach in good schools. Where does that leave the challenging schools? If they're lucky, with a great teacher. More often, with a bunch of mediocre teachers.

Related to that, schools rarely have the resources to distinguish between students who would benefit from integration and those who would benefit from specialized and separate programs.

The boys school had a good reputation and would have engagement with the local schools via sports and dances.

> The causes and solutions are not as simple as "these kids are bad, kick them out of school", but any solution needs to involve kids who aren't disruptive and WANT to learn getting an environment conducive to that.

But it might not be that much more complicated. It's been a long time since I've been in school, but in our district there was an "alternative" high school, which had a reputation among the kids as the place you'd end up if you were too much of a behavior problem.

That said, the kids at my schools were well-behaved in class and I never knew of anyone specific who was expelled.

If behavior problems are getting more widespread, maybe embracing more of an explicit containment strategy is appropriate.

- a terrible kid was constantly given presents from a teacher, chocolates, and small things she could give him so that he would stop misbehaving in class. normally these prizes would go to a single student every day, for merit, but once this terrible person kept getting them, everyone else became pissed and demoralized.

- the young kids copy the teachers behavior, and it creates this culture of "they have a harder life than you" when trying to complain about the terrible students in their vicinity (which i completely disagree with, they're not trying hard at all that's why they get like this), so when terrible people bully decent, kind, and hardworking students, there's no sympathy for the hardworking students. they get treated like shit and abused from the future-criminals who do nothing but degrade the experience of everyone who attends, then they get told "get over it, you have everything" by their peers who for whatever reason weren't bullied, and refuse to help. its cult-like behavior

- you also have kids who are way too old for their grade, by at least 4 years. someone who should otherwise be way ahead of the classroom they're in is 2x the size of anyone else, is a literal delinquent, and is for some reason still allowed in the public school system where they either terrorize their classmates, get them into their same terrible habits, or bully people who express any kind of discontent with their behavior.

The next year I was at the private school across the street. Suddenly I wasn't a problem child anymore there.

I had already been taught algebra at home by first grade. I was in the "gifted program" in public school and the curriculum was still boring and slow. Teachers lasered in on my boredom and made my life miserable despite (or perhaps because of) being able to answer anything. I thrived a little more in private school in part because the children were on-average smarter but also because instead of the school treating everyone like they were special and going to save the world (and rewarding only the kids they liked) they taught children the value of group conformity and not being the nail that sticks up.

It is so wrong for adults to fail to protect children who want to learn simply because they want a facade of feel-good egalitarianism.

Cite a study, draw incorrect conclusions from it that support your argument, find some exception to the norm and use that as your example, and don't forget - describe how you were brought up and how that was better.

I was raised by a single mom who worked a million hours and didn’t have a baby sitter when I let myself in after school. Don’t see how “working too many hours and being stressed” is a new phenomenon because most of my extended family is poor and have always been. My mom told me not to steal and don’t be an obnoxious asshole in school, wasn’t exactly rocket science.

The lack of discipline from the parents, mentors, and teachers early on is why the State has to do it later. Discipline is not orthogonal to 'help'.

Now in admin hes some kind of teacher manager and he had teachers come to him, sometimes physically crying, unable to deal with a child with a behavioral problem. His says 99% of the time these problems are corrected with a single phone call to the parents. Just one call but no - young teachers these days don't have the guts or social wherewithal. So his job is now teaching adults how to make phone calls.

Another thing to realize is a lot of these kids do respond positively to teachers when they show them that they care and aren't there to simply baby sit and yell at them. He has had many students come to him later on thanking him for breaking their balls and setting them on the right path. Kids aren't stupid - they want respect but are treated like little monsters to be corralled and controlled like cattle.

Showing the kids you truly care is incredibly powerful for them - it connects at the human emotional level and those positive interactions boosts the kids moral and they feel more confident or centered in life.

Some would argue that disciplining is helpful in many cases. Proper disciplining is not just punishment but should include an explaination of why what they did was wrong and what the right thing to do is.

Kids having discipline is a slightly different topic, but can be partially built through the process above.

Other public institutions outside the school system need to be in place to support the parents who are stressed and overworked and barely have time to parent.

And their right to be helped stops at the line where they're causing harm to the learning of others.

Discipline in schools isn't and cannot be about holistically reforming the problem kids, it's about making sure those who want to learn can.

You can't dump the entirety of systemic poverty, racism, mental health, etc. on the education system and expect it to work well.

"Finally, why can't we just fix public schools?"

That's a good question without a good answer. Perhaps the best answer is the meta that people don't agree on the course of action that would "fix" the schools since there are numerous opinions on what that is, resulting in no action or half measures.

Uh, because more customers will leave if the private school is no better than a public school.

The school district must educate everyone. When a school expels or excludes a student that student is still a live human that must somehow be educated. They may need to be bussed somewhere. Or to be sent to another school in another district. All of this is very expensive. Never mind that someone needs to administer this.

So in a public school expelling a student increases costs significantly, several fold. In a private school, it decreases costs. The private school just tells you to hit the road.

So Vouchers do not have all choices available: Having a voucher doesn't guarantee acceptance to a school. And depending on your voucher legislation preference, you aren't going both force all schools to accept vouchers and make sure they don't raise prices. Ultimately, being selective is a feature, and therefore prices will go up, not unlike how easy student loans for colleges help raise prices. The top schools will eat the entire value of the voucher in cost increases, or just refuse the value of the voucher if they can't.

You are right in the fact that really, most people in America have to pay for the good school district, either straight up in cash, or in significant increases in home costs. I've seen 30% drops in home values as, within the same district, the line of who got to go into the 'good' public school changed. Vouchers probably make the school choices far more explicit, and might lead to less housing segregation. But they sure aren't going to make all choices available to everyone, any more than I can choose to marry a supermodel, or own a private island.

That's what we were taught. Including the inferiority of evangelical Christianity. i.e. belief in Christ as a deity and your redeemer, isn't good enough to get you into heaven. You have to do good works.

I have every confidence religious schools teach the superiority of their religion. With a white Jesus on a cross. It's not Jewish and Muslim schools pushing for public money without strings attached into private schools. It's Christian schools.

Well maybe there will come a time once again when folks understand Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptists, from which we get the wall of separation between church and state phrase. It is in the letter from the Danbury Baptists we see what they were worried about. It wasn't Jews, Muslims, atheists, or anti-religionists. They were worried about the Danbury Congregationalists.

Christians are not on the same page, is an understatement. They really aren't all on the same book either. It's impossible to promote them all the same. And they will not and should not permit dissimilar promotion.

The only sane solution to preserving freedom of religion is to also preserve freedom from it. The government must only promote secularism. Everything else is playing with fire.

That is the problem. Why not make public schools better? Why is everyone else at a disadvantage. If our focus was on putting funding into 'all' schools, not just 'rich geographic locations', then everyone could be educated.

It isn't about 'Choice', it is about everyone getting a minimal education.

If you want to 'choose' to indoctrinate your kids into your particular religion of 'choice', that can be done at home. But everyone should learn the old Reading/Writing/Arithmetic.

> They are taught about world religions, evolution, have chapel twice a week and allow prayer. It’s also the best school in the entire state. My kids go there because it's a great school.

I also went to a private christian high school and it was all that you say here. However I also remember many very rich, ultra religious parents that ousted three principles over religious horseshit while I attended until my latin teacher became Principal and told them all to pound sand or go somewhere else.

I also went to a private catholic elementry school. While it was good at the time, recently it's falling apart. The church has distanced itself from it, attendance YoY is falling, and it'll likely close in the next few years. However unlike a public school, these private schools can close and lean on the public system to catch all of the students they shake out. Unlike the private and charter schools, the buck stops at Public schools.

> The reality is that the only people with true choice in school selection have to either be able to afford private school, afford to move to a house zoned for a better school or afford to have parent who can facilitate a home school group.

Charter schools kick out kids as well, so all of these problems apply to them too. The only purpose of charter schools is to make their lobbyists (like Bill Gates and Betsy DeVos) rich by siphoning public money like defense contractors. All this talk about Charter Schools is about Options for students/parents, but nobody is talking about who is Obligated to those students, parents, and the tax payer. When a charter or private school closes, it dumps its students into the pubic system [0].

> Consider City High School in Los Angeles, California, which received a $575,000 grant from the federal government. The school had barely started its second year when it suddenly closed, leaving 116 students scrambling for a new school. Similarly, a charter school in Wilmington, Delaware, received a grant of $350,000 but closed just five months into its first school year, forcing 206 students to look for a new school.

> The Acclaim Academy charter school chain in Florida received grants of $375,000, $175,000, $175,000, and $19,198 for its four schools. One never opened, another was taken over by the district due to financial concerns and mismanagement, and the two other closed suddenly with no notice, in the middle of the year, leaving students, some of them seniors preparing college applications, searching to find new schools.

Then there is the low attendence and fraud.

> The report locates much of the blame for this waste of taxpayer money on the Department of Education’s practice of awarding grants to states with few rules and virtually no accountability. Often, grants were “doled out to individuals who had no credentials or experience to open up a new school,” according to the researchers.

> The report also identified a “pattern” of charter school operators—even before their school opened—funneling money from grants to their own personal accounts, to purchases of expensive equipment, and to “for-profit consulting and education management organizations” that do not publicly divulge how they spend money. The report concluded that, due to these practices, the charter school grant program “has become a magnet for grifters, consultants, and charter entrepreneurs who see an easy way to cash-in.”

The kicker:

> When members of Congress repeatedly referred to those findings when questioning Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, she dismissed the findings as “political.”

History is littered with corpses and bailouts. At the end of the day, it's all about privatization of public institutions for private profit.

It's also an open secret that private schools rose as a response to desegregation [1] [2].

Privatization is cancer.

[0]: https://progressive.org/public-schools-advocate/new-report-w...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segregation_academy

[2]: https://southerneducation.org/publications/history-of-privat...

Everyone in my area pays local taxes, whether they are parents or not, including businesses; the bulk of these local taxes are allocated to fund schools. Most of us don't want our taxes going to charter schools or religious schools, and I'm tired of entitled parents siphoning from the system and leaving everyone worse off. If you want to make changes, fix the rules under which schools operate and allow disruptive kids to be expelled.

Guess it depends on the state.

In my state, public dollars are literally, pulled from public schools, and given to private schools, which can then teach religion as fact.

How is that not 'syphoning'?

That is, I believe, misrepresenting the problem. Rather, it's more like

> It's fine for the small subset to self-select among many private schools. Apparently it’s only a problem when the masses similarly have choices.

And that makes sense, because 0.5% of people/funding/etc being taken out of schools isn't a big deal... but 20% starts to make a big impact.

1. Engaged parents.

2. Social Norms that normalize learning behaviours.

Parent's can control the first directly and the second indirectly by "choosing" a non public school option or moving to a district that has the proper norms.

Charter schools are one of a class of escape hatches that less advantaged parents can choose in order to impact the second factor for their child. I strongly believe that these escape hatches should exist for the Parents who can't easily move or choose a private option. Improving education outcomes for the children of those parents who do care requires giving them tools to support their children whether the environment itself does or does not.

It seems unfair to force those parents to fail just because their community is failing around them.

I went to a private school. Obviously slightly different from the Charter system, but only in administration of funds (depending on the state). This statement is categorically untrue. The private school that I went to was not analogous in learning or structure to the public school system. Coaching for college admissions essentially took place since first grade and gradually ramped up. Additionally, the school taught to different learning styles instead of just one. Where these schools fail is socially because often kids are geographically spread farther apart. As a result I was alienated at times both at school and out of school depending on where I needed to put my time. When I transferred to public school I was bored out of my mind for years due to how far ahead I was from 8th grade. It took until around junior year before I began learning new-ish material.

To call them a "waste" of tax dollars ignores the fundamental problems with the public school system and why the separation occurs in the first place. Those fundamental problems are thorny issues though; you'll end up creating very different teaching methods, levels of classes, etc for a wider group of kids that will continue to grow as an area grows more dense. This was more sustainable at my private school because class sizes were smaller. I also don't think blaming teachers is really the right way to go here; most of them are underpaid and mistreated.

The issue is almost entirely cultural and socioeconomic. Fixing schools is basically fixing society. Intractable, which is why every school from Harvard to Oxford relies on glorified selection bias instead.

Unions aren't mentioned at all in the article. Your claim is also a bald faced lie. More so than the OP. This article supports OP's claim https://nypost.com/2023/03/16/nys-education-leaders-again-pr..., I can trivially find other articles from other sources where the New York teachers union has made it clear they dont find how they are evaluated by test scores acceptable. That may even be a reasonable position to have. There is more data out their to support OPs claim than yours that they are against it.

As it stands, school districts are doing the opposite. Getting rid of educational tracking at least, or banning algebra in middle school because it's inequitable at worst (as in SFUSD). This isn't a matter of funding but ideology.