In reality, though, that doesn't seem to have worked. School board elections have very low turnout usually, and the people elected to them are disproportionately ideologues who treat engaged parents with contempt for being "privileged."
> There's the theory that, by forcing the kids with the most engaged parents to go to schools with the kids of less engaged parents
is really rough on the kids of engaged parents, forcing them to be responsible for "fixing" systems that they didn't create.
In the UK, we used to have "grammar schools" that selected on ability based on a standardised test. They were responsible for many working- and middle class children being propelled into high positions in industry and politics, including Prime Minister.
However the whole idea was deemed inequitable, so they were dismantled. Now privately school educated children have less competition.
If you have money, you have an escape hatch right now. Vouchers make that escape hatch available to more people.
Public education doesn't have to mean public schools.
We absolutely should allow vouchers to go to religious private schools and secular private schools alike. It's time to bleed the public schools dry and use their lots to build more housing.
Parents complain about this and fight against it but are ignored. So what are we supposed to do? There are only so many school board meetings you can attend only to get eye rolls from officials.
Who defines what fixed is? How do you call success on those fixes? The process is a problem today and it's similar to politics.
I'll give two issues of issues in fixing things...
First example, if there is a problem leaders can come up with a policy/process/thing to deal with it. And call success at having that in place rather than seeing results. If the policy/process/thing doesn't work success has already been called. They aren't going to walk that back. There is a lot of this.
Second example, schools are being used for social change. And the topics of some of the social change are not agreed to in society. Who gets to decide what's right? Should schools be agents for this change? This is being fought in society right now. It's not really discussed or debated but more fought if you look at the tactics and behaviors.
How do you fix things in this form of environment?
There is a first amendment case to be made about withholding education funds from religious schools. By withholding funds from schools that are deemed to be "religious" the government is creating a preference for schools that are not on the list of religions but may be every bit as ideological. The government cannot prefer one ideology or religion over another. It is required to be agnostic.
The free market for schools and teachers is created the moment Department of Education is eliminated and replaced with education vouchers for all.
This is eloquently put. I’ve never heard it said that way. There is no reason to believe that an entity like the government, great for accumulating and distributing the money required for public education, is a good or efficient agent for administering said education.
We see this in many other fields. For instance, non-government researchers receive government grants for research. Similarly (for better or worse), the government gives money for agricultural subsidies; nobody proposes that the government ought to run the farm. It is intuitive to us that specialists in a given field may not work for the government; it is high time we applied the same logic to education.
Consider this
If you look at the system without vouchers, there is no market mechanism to correct the situation everyone is complaining about.
There are no incentives. Each year, more and more money is dumped into the system.
If you introduce competition, then schools have to start fixing problems if they want to get the funding.
One thing that was repealed by the last Labour government was the Assisted Places Scheme [1]. If you scored highly enough the government would pay for a child to go to private school.
Not only the School Board but the Teachers Unions and the United States Government are anti parents attending School Board meetings to support their children.
Red or Blue, 6 or 600, it doesn’t matter when the USG decides to make parents the enemy of the state.
https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/chairman-jo...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2023/03/29/garl...
https://apnews.com/article/merrick-garland-school-boards-vio...
As for ideology, I doubt it's possible to be non-ideological. I have children not because they are accidents or the abortions my wife didn't bother to have. Not even because we just didn't know any other way to go through life. We had children because children are a good thing unto themselves. So good that I hope they grow up to have their own and enjoy that experience. Schools are hostile to that and seem to be doing what they can to encourage sterility.
Ah yes, this is clearly a 'both sides' issue where parents are the victims.
Instead, kids with engaged parents will flee to better schools. The other parents will either follow, growing the new school and model, or the other school will adapt in order to retain students.
Engaged parents are your early adopters. Without vouchers, most people can’t even afford to enter the market.
You could literally rewrite history and language and program an entire generation of future voters. Imagine the possibilities
The free market can be good at optimizing for certain outcomes, but I don't think you're going to get a lot of buy in with the current political climate being what it is, and a lack of consensus around what kind of outcomes should be required.
Furthermore, making schooling a purely financial transaction? Where do you think that leads?
I'm not OK paying taxes to help Bobby Baptist send his kids to Jesus Is Lord Day School. Or kick in to rich parents' budget for Phillips Exeter. If we must have vouchers, let people keep their own tax money that would have gone to schools and use that for the vouchers. I'm not interested in handing people my cash to fund private education. I'm interested in having a public education system. That, I'll pay taxes for.
I spent years in both public and private schools. The worst part of public schooling was that everything was scaled down to the poorest-performing child's level. The worst part of private schooling was that a few underperforming kids were pushed/passed along with everyone else.
The latter outcome is _significantly_ better for society than the former.
No, I think you're missing the parent's point -- it's assimilating those students into a specific religious subculture whose beliefs and values may be at odds with civil society at large.
(If you have trouble seeing this, try substituting "Jesus Is Lord Day School" in your head for some other implied religions.)
Religious people are part of your community and have the right to their religious identity and to be a member of your community. If they want a school just for them, you don't suffer for it.
Religion is not at odds with society. We're not the USSR. Religious freedom is an enshrined right in this country.
It is very actively 'trying to fuck us over'. And it's winning, hard, in both the 6-3 sphere, on the legislative bench, and in many others.
Keeping religion out of publicly funded institutions, including schools, is done as much to safeguard free religious practice in this country as anything. The point is that the public institutions should be entirely civil and not under the sway of any one religion, because each religion once in control of society ends up discriminating against the others. That's why you don't allow them power in the civil sphere.
I also went to both. When I didn't have good enough grades they just passed me to public schools. Shocker, the private school passed off difficult children somewhere else. You know who else they didn't serve? Special needs? And who else? Anybody who couldn't afford it, or didn't believe in the holy trinity.
I realize that a lot of libertarians believe that everyone should fend for themselves and that there's some sort of natural selection that justifies poor outcomes for some based on "fair rules". As I've gotten older in life, nothing seems less true.
The worst thing that they did to me was add a course to the curriculum about religion so that I had an extra course to pass than the public school kids. And we didn't even learn exclusively about Catholicism in that class.
Are they? There are a lot of folks who would disagree (and many of those are graduates of such institutions) with that assessment[0]:
The city has determined that four Orthodox yeshivas are failing to provide
an education “substantially equivalent” to what’s offered in public schools —
and recommends the state reach the same conclusion for another 14 yeshivas
the city says are ultimately under state authority.
The findings are the results of a long-stalled and politically thorny
investigation that has stretched on since 2015.
The city found that just seven schools they investigated met standards.
That’s in addition to two it found were up to standards in 2019.
[...]
The investigation was spurred by a complaint from a group called Young
Advocates for a Fair Education, or YAFFED, headed at the time by a yeshiva
graduate who argued his education left him ill-prepared for the world outside
of religious studies. YAFFED and other critics argue many so-called ultra-
Orthodox yeshivas provide little to no secular instruction, particularly for
boys, and instead focus on religious studies. Representatives of the schools
have pushed back strenuously on those claims.
The schools are private, but do receive some state funding and, like all
private schools in New York, are required to provide children with an
education “substantially equivalent” to what is offered in public schools.
The investigation kicked off a debate of what exactly substantially
equivalent means, prompting the state to develop rules for determining it.
Public funding (and especially taking funds away from secular public schools) of religious schools is antithetical to the idea of a secular government and society.
[0] https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2023/06/30/new-yor...
The funding structure of every other thing in the US is totally backwards and so unless we solve cultural problems like xenophobia and tribalism we will be unable to solve socioeconomic ones. As such, I have basically zero faith that the US will last another 20 years in any recognizable form as a liberal democracy.
Money is part of the cause, but where it comes in is letting parents sort their families into expensive-to-live-in school districts with other parents who could also afford those expensive areas. Their kids tend to be easier to teach for a whole bunch of reasons—which does make the schools more effective, but is not because of extra money spent on the schools. The sorting enabled by money does matter, but the funding itself (received by the schools) does not appear to be a major factor.
Basically, a family pays for school quality in the US no matter what, either directly or indirectly—you pay either with tuition for expensive, good private schools if you're fairly rich, or with real estate and transportation costs if you're not that rich, with a sliding scale all the way down to "practically destitute". The extravagant spending of expensive private schools might result in better education (I'm thinking especially of the very-small class sizes, like 4-8 students per class, and the ability to pay for content-area PhDs as teachers in higher grades—we'd have to triple public school budgets to do that stuff, and that actually wouldn't even be enough because demand would so badly outstrip supply, should we try it) but beneath those relatively-few outliers with far-higher spending, moving spending/budgets up or down a (relatively) little doesn't seem to do much.
In fact, in impoverished areas probably the most important thing to do to improve educational outcomes after establishing a school at all isn't better schools but simply money at home - teachers are only responsible for 35% or so of the educational outcome of an aggregate population while something as simple as ensuring a child has reliable sources of meals and that the meals are with family is _way_ more important it turns out (insert correlation / causation caveats).
As such, my suggestion isn't to spend more money on schools in low performing areas but to direct funding toward better home lives for students in the districts essentially. What good is spending $100k on better teachers and equipment when the students are living in trailer parks with abusive parents that don't feed them properly? This is a problem _many_ teachers in low-opportunity areas have talked about as one of the top problems for them.
I used to support charter schools conceptually until I understood that the funding mechanisms cause a zero-sum game problem which takes funding away from schools that could use funding that would do better. At this time I'm convinced that almost any policy in education or health will fail without addressing the massive harms of large scale poverty in a capitalist system.
The core problem is that the effective route to massive improvements in equality of access to quality public education is basically "solve poverty, and concentrations of poverty", which isn't within the scope of schools' mission and is going to be far harder to sell, politically, take a long time, and be incredibly expensive.
We tried "bussing", which directly confronted parts of this, and it fucking worked, which makes it practically unique among attempts to address this problem, and it was relatively cheap compared to other things we might try that could work, but literally everyone hated it (yes, even the poorer families) so I guess that's out.
Much like the original architecture and UX of welfare in the US had assumptions like a family with a cook at home I don’t think education as an institution is really meeting the needs of the public to be better informed and critical thinking citizens invested in communities and society as a whole.
There’s a big cultural issue currently where people are resistant to move for better opportunities when much of the US immigrant population has thrived over generations specifically by migrating to opportunity areas. Now, many that try to leave impoverished areas are shamed and become pariahs for leaving basically job deserts and the social costs are horrific as people find less and less connection to others.
However when public education is not guided by improving meaningful outcomes, but by ideologues, it needs to be checked. Vouchers sounds like a good way to insert some market dynamics and to allow parents to walk away from schools that are on the path to fail to prepare their kids for the future.
My son is currently is in public elementary school here in Bay Area. If this idiocy persists, i dont believe i will keep him in non-STEM focused public school and will seek out better education for him that i will need to pay out of pocket.
I can afford it, but those who are less fortunate will remain trapped and thats a travesty of CA public education
As opposed to parental ideologues? By letting parents choose, we'll be letting them go to different schools championing different value system and the customers will be parents, not the children they ostensibly are charged with educating.
By grouping parents with like-minded parents, we'll amplify groups and clusters, leading to not only further stratification but also further decoupling society and greater inequality.
This effect is super obvious if you've ever sent kids to a private school. A big part of it is that you're opting in to a certain approach and set of attitudes and beliefs, even in secular ones. If you're not a fit for their program, you don't get to meaningfully agitate to change things as you might in a public school—they just tell you to go somewhere else, then pluck another candidate off the wait list to replace your family.
This can be awesome (though still risky, in some ways) if it's a good bubble, but of course they aren't all good ones....
What is an alternative? Forbidding parents to pull their kids from schools that are ruining their future by following a system with historically worse outcomes?
Most importantly, original articles here provide data that show that teaching math the way CA is trying to do has led to worse outcomes across the ethnic spectrum(unless of course parents had a financial ability to complement with private school/lessons).
So, we have the right to indoctrinate bullshit to children?
What is an alternative? Forbidding parents to pull their kids from schools that are ruining their future by following a system with historically worse outcomes?
We work by improving public schools. That's going to be easier said than done, but it's the right solution.
[EDIT] To make this more substantive: I think there's a distinct difference between collectively funding a public system, and redistributing money to folks to go toward private entities—this goes beyond not liking the values or environments of some of the schools private-school-preferrers might spend their vouchers on. That's why I suggested that if we must do vouchers, it ought to be limited to what a given person paid in themselves, not other people's money—I think there's a fundamental difference between funding a public good available to all and giving people cash so they can get past a private paywall to access a similar good.
Would you be okay with the exact same amount of your tax dollars being used to send his kids to public school? If so, then why the difference?
I'm also OK with taxes for public libraries, but wouldn't like my taxes going toward vouchers to help people pay for access to private libraries.
From what I have observed of the US's education system, the problem is that the public education system is assimilating children into values that are _not_ shared by society nor their parents.
That is to say: I'm a leftist and I'm worried about schools indoctrinating kids into a whitewashed, anti-LGBTQ+, jingoistic understanding of the world. However, I'm sure there are Republican parents that are concerned about kids being indoctrinated into a "woke" understanding of the world.
I don't know how you manage things when you have the country split down the middle with two completely separate worldviews.
The issue is, from my view, very much a problem of the Left-wing in the US, introducing victim/oppressor politics into schools, teaching children primarily to regard themselves as activists first, and students second.
I can also see it is causing a mental health crisis in students, who increasingly are under pressure to identify as an oppressed minority, in order to be marked out as an oppressor; victimhood conferring social status.
Where is this being done? What school districts specifically? What are the specific topics that "introduce victim/oppressor politics into schools?"
I'd really like to know, as I'm not aware of any of that stuff. Since you're obviously a "disinterested observer," without an agenda, I assume you've gathered actual evidence for your assertions.
My view (as an American "with an agenda") is very different from yours. If I'm wrong, I'd like to adjust my view. As such, please provide me with specific examples of what you're asserting.
Thanks!
An excerpt from the section "Trans as an intersectional shield":
> "“Of all of these badges of victim status, the only one that you can actually choose is ‘trans,’” Heather Heying, visiting fellow at Princeton University, pointed out to me. “All you have to do is declare ‘I’m trans’ and boom, you’re trans. And there you get to rise in the progressive stack and you have more credibility in this intersectional worldview.”
And earlier context:
> Kindergarteners are introduced to the “Genderbread Person”15 and “Gender Unicorn.”16 Kindergarten teachers read from I Am Jazz, and the little ones are taught that they might have a “girl brain in a boy body” or vice versa.17
> Teachers present an array of gender and sexual identity options and appear pleasantly surprised when a child chooses wisely (that is, anything but cisgender).
> The schools are not forcing adolescents to identify as transgender, but they are greasing the skids. The LGBTQ safe house they’ve fashioned is avant-garde and enticing, framed with moral superiority, insulated with civil rights...
That doesn't answer the question I asked, nor does it show anything even close to encouraging a "victim/oppressor" environment.
No one is trans because its' "cool" or because someone mentioned that trans people (less than 1% of the population) exist. Do you know anyone who is trans? It's certainly not some golden road to peer/social acceptance and popularity. Quite the opposite, in fact.
In fact, trans folks are routinely subject to harassment, ridicule, threats and physical violence. Stopping such abuse is the goal, not creating more trans folks -- which is ridiculous on its face.
That you take your own trained-in prejudices for the laws of nature don't make them so.
None of what you posted makes your point, rather it just points up that you don't like what certain people have to say and you want such ideas and people suppressed. What are you afraid of?
I'm not claiming that "I just want to have a debate," nor did I "pursue" you (I made exactly one request to detail evidence of your assertions) and none of what I asked about was "tangential" or "previously addressed." And I'm not "feigning" ignorance. I know quite a bit about trans folks and the issues and discrimination they face.
What's more, the tired tropes (which you trotted out rather than have a substantive discussion) are more akin to the "Gish Gallop"[0] than anything I might have written being "sea lioning."
I have no interest in debating anything with you. You're just flat wrong.
Regardless, you have your ideas/beliefs and as a decent human being, I don't despise you for those beliefs, nor do I advocate for you to be silenced (as you do about others).
Please do speak your mind. It's an important part of having a free and open society. And I will do the same.
Have a good day!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
Edit: Fixed typo.
Regulate voucher schools. Content requirements. Restrictions on religion. Maybe even standardized testing, or requirements that voucher students not be subject to extra fees.
The public is paying, after all. It can attach strings to its money.
The US no longer has universal shared values, it has many different sets of values that are all competing for survival. Schools have become the front line in this battlefield.
I disagree completely. Our shared values include belief in the rule of law, equality under that law, equality of opportunity and a whole bunch of other stuff that has always been the rhetoric, but much of which has only grudgingly been implemented for wider and wider swathes of Americans over the past 230+ years.
That some folks are at odds some issues most certainly does not mean we don't have shared values. It means that we don't share all the same values/ideas. Which is exactly how it's been here since well before the founding of the US.
Edit: Fixed prose.
This assumes that it's actually possible for parents to override insulated bureaucrats whose heads are stuffed completely up their own derrieres.
Political hyper-polarization doesn't help either. If your local crazy-left school board abolishes merit in the name of equity, you could always replace them with crazy-right Republicans who believe the Earth is 6000 years old and Qanon is real.
That's exactly what's happened at our board level. The PTA of the school itself is the involved parents, and the schoolboard has the utmost contempt for them!
None of the involved parents are willing to put in the effort or have the desire to be elected to the schoolboard though.
With respect to the GP comment, I don't think things are quite as pre-planned as a deliberate effort to have engaged parents sort of subsidize the lack of effort by less engaged parents. That might be the net result, but attributing that to a deliberate and coordinated plan on the part of school boards or the broader public education system is, to my thinking, giving them too much credit in their ability to so coordinate and engage in such complex efforts. They bicker far too much among themselves pursuing their own agendas to agree long enough for that level of strategy.
And there are on occasion parents truly willing to put in the effort and get elected, but end up quickly disillusioned on their hopes for affecting any change and leave to spend their time more productively. Often enough those who seek & stay in these board position aren't even parents of children who currently or even attended the schools in the district.
Again though, I'd temper my statements with the caveat that they're based on my own singular experience, and I'd readily believe that elsewhere there are boards who arrive at the same state of affairs with a bit more deliberate actions. It's all a mess.
An interesting and important anecdote. But rather than focusing on your mom's inability to take shop class, perhaps you might reflect on the fact that your mom (and many other women/girls) fought for such changes and, eventually (albeit too late for your mom), won.
That's how change happens. If you just throw up your hands and say "well, I/my mom/whoever couldn't have something that was good and important. So there's no reason to ever fight for change," seems incredibly reductive and doesn't reflect how change has been wrought throughout history.
Please understand, I'm not poking at you or your mom (in fact, I don't know her, but I think she's fabulous!). Rather, I'm taking issue with the idea that we "can't win, so don't try." That's a recipe for those who understand how change is made to create the world in their image, whether you like it or not.
I get that it's hard to ask people to think of the wider implications when they've got their own life to consider though.
There are grim economic shifts behind this. The majority of people are now priced out of raising their own kids to a good standard (i.e. stay-at-home mum). So, more and more people feel envy towards those who can, and various "equity" movements pop out (that all focus on bringing top performers down, rather than bottom performers up).
The only way to fight it is move to an area where most people can still afford kids, and in our generation it may mean moving out of U.S. entirely.
The only option is do not help and do not engage. There is no point in expending effort trying to fix a system led by people that hate you.
Assume for a moment that my vote matters... in the sense that who I choose is elected. Further, assume that I get to craft and design these magical candidates like it the sandbox mode of some video game.
So, after all this, these candidates of mine are in charge of the school board, and no one can cockblock them. At this point, does it change the quality of the school's education? Not necessarily for my kids... that's a more difficult thing. Maybe it's a great school, but my kid's just one of those left behind by random individual circumstances. Just on average, does this school improve?
Turns out, not really. That school system is still limited in many ways beyond the school board's ability to affect on any reasonable timescale. There is not just a finite talent pool to hire from, but quite limited. And the resources to somehow expand that talent pool are limited too (and it seems likely that even if you could offer $500k salaries, you're attracting money-grubbers more than great teachers). Your capacity for the HR system to even pick the best of that talent pool is sketchy.
Textbooks? Limited by what textbooks are offered on the open market. Limited by whether parents will accept that Timmy really is a D+ student, and doesn't deserve automatic Bs for showing up and not acting the maniac. Limited by the "culture of public education"... if the best field trip ever could only happen at the end of July, that doesn't happen because we have ideas about how public schools are supposed to work and they're just not "on" during that part of the calendar.
If I was some angsty nihilist, I'd be ranting about how school boards cockblock everything public schools should be doing. But it's so much worse than that. If they did cockblock those things, it'd mean they had some idea what they should do, and were for some reason opposed to it. They don't know. And if they did, it wouldn't matter.
The system is designed in such a way as to be completely orthogonal its imagined purpose.
And you don't have to be especially intelligent or attentive to recognize any of this enough that you just don't bother with the school board elections. Why would anyone bother to vote? The truth of the matter is it's mostly between worse-and-worst candidates who have no true desire to see any sort of real improvement, and your one vote's not enough to sway it to one or the other.
If everyone is committed, everything must improve for you to see changes. If everyone is not committed they'll just send their kids to the best schools and ignore the problematic ones.