Why the school choice movement is finally scoring breakthrough wins | Hacker News Reader

Why the school choice movement is finally scoring breakthrough wins

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20 pointsjseliger25 comments

I live in Arizona, my son is non-verbal and autistic. My wife visited the public school that our son would have been attended and found that the staff were largely disengaged. Only one person in the room had any real qualification (she was engaged and competent), but that teacher would only have 20 minutes a day to spend with our son.

Due to my son's developmental trajectory, he qualified for the ESA before it was generally available (although AZ's attorney general's office had to get quietly involved due to race-based discrimination during the application process). He now has a tutor that works with him 2-3 hours a day one-on-one and he is making audible verbal progress. His tutor is in a master's program for speech language pathology at our local state university. We pay her out of pocket and get reimbursed through the ESA. AZ's ESA program is the ONLY shot my son has to be functional and avoid living on disability his entire life (which will cost the state a LOT more than getting him a competent tutor).

Should public schools be improved? Yes. Will they be improved before my son's developmental window for language is closed? No. Funding ESAs are like diversifying your societal investment by funding startups vs just buying more IBM stock. Hopefully, the difference will be more like startups vs Microsoft, which has turned some things around. Sclerotic institutions need re-invigoration, which requires real incentives to break out of their current ruts.

I'm guessing there are people who are:

- in favour of Arizona's ESAs for kids who would otherwise qualify for supplemental services from the school district, but

- against Arizona's universal ESAs

I'm firmly in the 'fund students not systems' camp, but I think there are people who are firmly in the other camp, who would not be against your child's ESA.

If the money follows the student in these "school choice" programs, why would that be "defunding" public school? If schools get $x of money per student, and a student decides to go to a private school... The public school no longer bears the costs of educating that student, so it's a neutral move.

Part of the reason is that not all of the costs scale linearly per student. Take 15% of the students out of a class and you get 15% less income, but you still need the same number of teachers, admins, building costs, etc.

>Take 15% of the students out of a class and you get 15% less income, but you still need the same number of teachers, admins, building costs, etc.

Those should scale somewhat linearly too though. Consolidate classrooms to keep the same student-to-teacher ratio and you'll need less teachers. Less teachers means less administration. Less children means less buildings, etc.

There's so much dead weight in administration that can be cut. This may force the hand.

As much as I agree that there is a ton of dead weight in the public school system as a whole, and I strongly feel that the buildings themselves are a big part of that in many parts of the country,

I don't agree that the 15% scales linearly in most cases you can't remove 15% of a principal, or security guard, and in most cases there aren't enough math teachers or similar for a good class size to really help - if a school has 2 math teachers you can't remove 15% of them because you have 6 less kids in the school.

I am all for less buildings, less football fields and all that though for sure - a complete rework of the whole complex would benefit most kids in the low and middle.

A) this will be politically difficult. And can’t simply be handwaved away by saying it should happen anyway. Cynically, I also don’t see the administration getting any smaller…

B) you can’t get rid of a classroom in a building. Your stuck with it.

No doubt it'll be politically difficult, I agree with you there. I'm also cynical when it comes to administration not wanting to slim down.

Indeed you can't get rid of classrooms, but I see lots of schools with temporary buildings that can be removed. You could also consolidate schools, but it may be difficult to forecast and plan.

Maybe schools could rent out their empty rooms to the private schools and share common resources. Kind of like "educational infrastructure as a service". I'm only half joking, I've seen some real examples of this: elementary school/alternative school, high school/deaf-only school, high school/adult school. The buildings were divvied up, and the admin and everything else was a different organization. The only complicated thing was having to have separate entrances for each and locked doors inside so students can't pass from one side to another.

The history in the US of separate but equal education and other facilities might give this plan some opponents.

Right, fair enough..

Speaking of separate but equal, were schools in the US ever separated by gender? Because ~100 years ago in Canada they were. You can still find old school buildings with Boys/Girls engraved above separate entrances.

Public schools were not within the lifetime of my parents (high school classes of 1943 and 1945), I don't think. The old one-room schoolhouses of course weren't divided even by age.

They are already separate but ’equal’.

Kids with no special needs and from high functioning families get a lot more education for their dollar. Right now the model is to have those kids subsidized the ones from broken homes and special needs.

Really it’s the argument between equity and equality. Equality benefits top performers, equity benefits the bottom.

I've found it very interesting how true this is when diving into the data, and speaking with people in the varying parts of all this.

I did not understand what the serious impact of all these issues are until actually seeing first hand how the micro-interactions were handled at the school on the local level, and then grabbing data to see how it is reported only solidified what I witnessed on the grounds.. but there is no way I would of connected the plot lines and dots without going and seeing the interactions.

then trying to find ways to solve and discussing with those tasked with solving.. wow. The finite resources create a major problem for those 'in the middle', as they will never get enough help to succeed, and I don't see that changing unless we go back to one room schools and destroy the current multi-million dollar school building complex.

I will add that it appears it does not matter how much the tax dollars of the high functioning families are used to subsidize the kids from broken homes - there will never be enough to fix the learning problem the middle and lower class are tasked with in the standard learning systems - certainly there are benefits for the special needs folks that get the help they need

- but we have already given up on the middle and lower class kids, I now don't see that changing in the US ever, taxes will never be raised enough to cover what is needed - their best hope is to get out of the public school system and do something different, literally anything.

> The public school no longer bears the costs of educating that student, so it's a neutral move.

It's not neutral because the "alternative" schools never take the expensive students. You are seeing selection bias.

This was the general confounder when you look at all the "alternative schooling" outcomes. When "alternative" schools participate in a lottery which causes them to have the same demographics as the public school, they almost always turn out worse than the public school.

(I say almost always because there was one notable exception--Louisiana. There the suburban schools were so terrible that even alternative schooling beat them--but not by much).

School teachers are true believers. They often work at public schools for way below market rates. That often balances this between the two.

That being said the reason you pay for private schools is specifically so you can exclude those who aren’t interested in education

Market rates for whom? Programmers? It was never my impression that private-school teachers were paid as well as public school benefits or had comparable benefits.

The reason you pay for private schools is the same reason that you buy a house in a good school district: to select your child's classmates and their parents.

The reason private school teachers get paid equal or less often has more to do with the level of education of the private school. The barrier to every for public school teaching in my state is very high. They get paid a pittance considering how much education they need to have to get the job and unpaid hours worked

the reason you pay for private schools is specifically so you can exclude the poor

No, the reason (in my case) was because the public schools prioritize social agendas over academic quality. My kids can do advanced math. My neighbor's kids estimate or guess. I hope the public schools in my area get de-funded. They are a waste of tax payer money. My choice had nothing to do with who is poor or rich.

No, having a poor kid in the class does not negatively affect your kid. Having a poor performing kids that requires more resources and attention does.

Doesn’t success academy do a lottery system?

Not in the sense I am saying.

I believe that "Success Academy" does a lottery after you apply. This is selection bias again as they disqualify some applicants (almost always by a proxy for socioeconomic cohort).

The "lottery" I am referencing is when students get assigned to any available school which takes public money solely based upon the lottery. A school cannot refuse a student that has been placed into their school by the lottery.

What this does is that it removes selection bias. A school can no longer decline a student simply because they belong to a lower socioeconomic cohort (or use any of the proxy measures that indicate lower socioeconomic cohort--religion, race, ADHD, etc.).

Once you remove this bias, the alternative schools almost always come in looking worse than the public schools. This is unsurpising as the alternative schools are almost always smaller and cannot amortize the fixed costs as effectively.

We know how to "fix" education. You make teacher to student ratios somewhere around 1 teacher (2 teachers if elementary age) to 5-10 students and then place students of roughly equivalent levels together.

EVERYBODY hates this for their own reasons.

I’m wish we spent as much time and money on fixing public schools as we do steering public money to private schools. The problem with many school choice programs is that it’s effectively giving up on a public school. That may benefit individual students but it abandons the kids left behind.

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