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Comment by femiagbabiaka | Hacker News Reader

Simplistic arguments like this are one of the more annoying parts of the rhetoric of charter school advocates. It assumes that all charter schools are of high quality and that making education yet another thing that is economically stratified in the US is good. It’s ok to say that things that sound nice like choice in education can have knock on effects that are bad for society.

Very few things in this world are purely good.

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It seems like a charter school that develops a reputation for low quality is a self-solving problem in a way that a public school which develops the same reputation is (currently) not.

One goes out of business; the other goes along indefinitely, with perhaps the wealthiest parents nearby withdrawing their kids, but most families and children are forced to endure it or move away.

The feedback loop in education is several years long. Before a charter school develops a bad reputation, they just change their name, put up a banner declaring "Under New Management" and continue right along with better PR.

What happens to a failing public school? It keeps the same name, but adds “now Title I with an even larger budget”.

It’s not clear that that’s in any way better and I think is worse.

If public schools weren't awful, there would be no need for charter schools.

The public school experiment has failed.

Tell me you only follow policy in the US without telling me: exhibit one.

The public school “experiment” has been purposefully sabotaged is more like it.

The article is about US schools.... so?

How can one sabotage a house of cards? Failure was inevitable.

I don’t believe that public schooling, an actually lindy institution worldwide, an institution that was working quite well in the US up until about the 70s and 80s (wonder what happened then hmm) that has produced world renowned schools in the US in particular, is more of a house of cards than the Potemkin village that is charter and private schools.

You'll need to provide evidence that public schools were working well in the 70s and 80s. Graduation rates today are higher than those decades. High school was optional for many parts of the country.

The reason for the outcry now, is that we measure everything, and even the wealthier areas of the country are unable to perform to any reasonable standard.

Note: not working well in the 70s and 80s, working will up until the 70s and 80s. But gladly, this is a great resource: https://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93442.pdf.

Combine with this: https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jstor.org/stable/1804780.

At the exact point in our history that we should've accelerated spending in public resources we did an about face in the opposite direction towards privatization and the growth of the administrator class. All of our institutions (healthcare, finance, infrastructure, education, etc.) have been low-productivity money pits since then.

Graduation rates and attendance were even lower before the 70's, so I'm not sure what fantasy world you might be referring to. Are you referring to segregated schools? That probably wasn't an ideal system.

Oh. I assumed we were sharing information, not exchanging insults. I'm not sure what segregation has to do with anything, the data doesn't align, and many of the states focused on are in the north anyways. If you can't see the gigantic drop in test scores, lower velocity on all fronts save spending, and corresponding drop in productivity then that's ok.

Graduation rates don't actually reflect on the quality of education, I don't think, unless you're controlling for a lot of other variables. I don't typically see people controlling for them, e.g. a politician might brag that graduation rates are up in their district, arguing that education has improved, while ignoring the underlying reason that standardized tests got easier or the schools spent more time test-prepping and less time educating.

> an institution that was working quite well in the US up until about the 70s and 80s

Was it really? With corporal punishment, public humiliation, and outright bullying? I would never want to live or return to a time when in loco parentis permitted schools to be run like fiefdoms.

My district spends $29k per student. More than almost any other in the world. Yet some of its schools are so bad that a quarter of high schoolers opted out. It's not about funding. It's an overwhelmingly blue area, politicians are not purposefully sabotaging the schools. The government is just utterly incompetent, and worse, corrupt. And unfortunately many of the students are from households that don't emphasize the importance of education.

> More than almost any other in the world.

You should only compare to countries with a similar cost structure.

Replace world with almost any place you can think of and the statement remains true.

Your implication that conservative politicians are more likely to be sabotaging schools than democratic politicians is hilarious. I'm quite certain both sides are equally adept at throwing good money after bad so long as the present policy they pursue is fashionable and focus group tested. They're incompetent, as you say, or, perhaps, they just aren't willing to risk their own political future because the changes that might make a difference will be unpopular with voters.

My reading of "purposefully sabotaged" is that whoever was in charge of the schools decided to make them worse for political reasons, like not believing in public education. I'm not aware of any dems doing this. I certainly agree that they have accidentally sabotaged schools through incompetence or corruption, but that's a much harder problem to fix than "just don't vote for people that don't believe in public education".

My point was that elections here are almost always about improving public schools, but the government has not been able to over the course of decades. Call their stewardship what you will. Purposeful sabotage, accidental sabotage, whatever, doesn't really matter to me. What matter is that the government is not capable of enacting the voters will of having good public schools, which is why charters are so popular.

It's similar problem to drugs. We have populist solutions that don't work and solutions that work but will make you unelectable. Guess what solutions will get implemented? Also it doesn't matter how much money is spent per child if almost all of it is spent on turning school into day prisons for children. Students from poor families need more resources to be able to achieve same as children who have richer families. Family support goes a long way. This includes material support and cultural one. Parents often don't know how or have resources to help their children. Easiest solution would be for schools/government to help their parents so their children could rely on their family for support. Helping whole family is not only good for children but also to whole community. It was shown that hungry students have lower achievements than feed ones but we still pretend like only thing that matters is personal learning ethics, so we don't have to feed them.

Keep in mind that the North also had it's share of segregation and discrimination against poor(and by proxy Irish, Poles etc) and people of colour. It includes schools.

Also property tax as way of funding schools is awful.

Spends 29k on what? School infrastructure is crumbling around the country. Teachers are paid so little most of them could get a raise working at Costco. This country has engendered in every sector that matters a fleet of middle managers and administrators whose purpose is to extract value and provide little. Maybe we can start by trimming that away, something teachers have been saying for years.

And as for the overwhelmingly blue thing, that’s another simplistic narrative. Substantive politics in the US has very little to do with the party that you vote for, as the parties agree on 99% of the particulars, if not the rhetoric. Illinois is one of the bluest states in America and Chicago one of the bluest cities, and yet Rahm Emmanuel ran under a dem regime one of the most infamous regimes of city-wide austerity in recent memory. The Daleys were out and out corrupt racists. I could go on.

> The public school experiment has failed.

The American education model was modeled on the 18th-century Prussian education system designed to create docile subjects and factory workers.

And by the measure it was actually designed for, I'd say it's an astonishing success. It's why you can be a high school graduate but not literate.

I encourage you to do your own research on the father of American education: Horace Mann.

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