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Comment by cwillu | Hacker News Reader

The implication seems to be that charter schools are superior, but does that jive with other countries' successes? A commonly given alternative explanation is that the public options in the US are deliberately sabotaged via budget restrictions, and then the resulting poor performance is used to justify further cuts—a similar dynamic has been fairly recently executed in Alberta with public health care.

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There is very little correlation between per-capita student spending and student outcomes. We should fund our public schools adequately but no amount of funding can overcome a bad environment in a student's home or neighborhood.

And to be clear: we fund our schools at a higher rate than basically any other country in the world. We are fifth in the world in per-pupil student funding behind only Luxembourg, Norway, Austria, and South Korea.

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...

Budgets are NOT a problem. Magnet schools in the US get the same or _less_ funding per capita than the average for the area.

E.g. Lowell Heights in SF gets less than the average funding, and Stuyvesant in NYC gets the average amount.

I thought charter schools and public schools received the same $/student.

Charter schools generally receive less.

Source please.

Here's just one:

Heape-Johnson, A., McGee, J. B., Wolf, P. J., May, J. F., & Maloney, L. D. (August 2023). Charter School Funding: Little Progress Towards Equity in the City. School Choice Demonstration Project.

In some states and cities the difference is more extreme than in others.

I think the specific form of "charter schools" we have are mainly a US invention, but a lot of countries (like the Netherlands, where it's more common than not) actually just let students use public funds to go to private schools, which would melt the heads of most people who oppose charter schools because it's "right wing".

Charter schools are I think a direct response to figuring out how to fix low performing, big school districts in the US. So while I have no idea if private or public schools do better in the Netherlands, I think we'd need to find something more like the Baltimore public school system in another country to make the right comparison.

> A commonly given alternative explanation is that the public options in the US are deliberately sabotaged via budget restrictions, and then the resulting poor performance is used to justify further cuts

I find this hard to address because it's not really a matter of policy but of ulterior motives or conspiracy. I personally have no secret plan to make public education even worse by posting about charter schools on hacker news. To me it's just about giving students the option to get educated by an independent institution rather than be forced to attend some of the worst public school systems in the country.

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