Hacker News Reader

Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

> However, rather than helping marginalized students, these policies deny educational opportunities for gifted students of all backgrounds.

It's worse than that—if public schools don't offer the kinds of advanced courses that wealthy parents expect their kids to have, the wealthy parents don't just shrug and say oh well. They pull them out of public school and put them into private school or homeschool or get them a tutor. It doesn't matter why a public school is inadequate (whether it's because of policy like this or simple underfunding), inadequate public schools invariably increase achievement gaps between socioeconomic classes. There's no other possible outcome. There's no world where everyone gets held down equally.

View on HN

Clearly putting harrison bergeron on the required reading list backfired-- apparently some future educational administrators mistook it for an instruction manual. :D

In much of Latin America that's exactly what happens. The public schools are generally horrible and upper middle class and upper-class families simply put their kids in private schools. Public schools are not an option for these families, so they don't support government policies that aim to invest in the failing schools - a vicious cycle that led to the virtual destruction of the public education system.

That seems to be often the pitfall with socialism-within-capitalism as often done in California imo - many of these socialist-ish policies only work if there's no easy "escape hatch" or it's at least uncommon. But not having access to private alternatives also often goes against free-market ideas.

Afaict, the wealthy and/or well-connected often "drive" the quality of public services - they're not going to insist on improvement if they can easily check out and pay for a private alternative.

I'm not saying to stop private alternatives, just that policies that might work other places probably don't work 1:1 in the US.

> inadequate public schools invariably increase achievement gaps between socioeconomic classes.

or maybe the people with education and resources decide to volunteer and fix their own community?

if all of the greedy, self-interested, disengaged people decide to leave, how is that not an improvement?

>or maybe the people with education and resources decide to volunteer and fix their own community?

The prototypical wealthy person is a small business owner or a well paid professional/executive. It's likely that they're very busy, and the prospect of them spending Wednesday afternoons volunteering at their schools is... unlikely.

>if all of the greedy, self-interested, disengaged people decide to leave, how is that not an improvement?

It's a huge problem if they leave and take their tax dollars with them.

In reality, stay at home moms in wealthy communities are literally and figuratively drivers of public (and private) education.

Our PTA raised two orders of magnitude more money than the one four miles away in a poorer area. And the classrooms were filled with parents doing teacher gruntwork - and they also kept an eye on all the kids.

It's hard to overstate how much a good PTA (and good parents) contribute, at least at the elementary school level.

The stay at home moms in those families have lots of free time and are often similarly capable and educated to their no-lifer dads. They just choose the mom job

In this case less wealthy are worth the same in terms of headcount. The only advantage wealthy have from a tax perspective is if they move and pay property tax elsewhere

Most people are going to act selfishly wrt their kids, the difference is their means to do so

Reply on news.ycombinator.com