Comment by orochimaaru | Hacker News Reader

Comment by orochimaaru | Hacker News Reader

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>>>If this continues for another couple generations, we're potentially faced with an America of an educated nobility and illiterate peasantry, and the future may look very Medieval indeed.

It sort of is already. The segregation of Americans by school district based on what their property taxes are already accomplishes this. Observe the standards to which schools that are wealthier (because of better taxes) vs schools in areas with lower taxes. The parents of the kids in the former are expected to play a more imperative role, the kids are challenged a LOT more. My fourth grader was expected to do at least 3 detailed book reports, each book at least 200 pages per book, including learning to present her findings in a timed manner. They were graded informally on a detailed rubric. They advance kids to higher math grades based on the child’s skill level. So there are 4th graders doing 5th and some exceptional ones 6th grade math.

This contrasts with another school district we were in earlier. Very loving teachers. But they had no space to challenge the kids. Because the teachers had to own the responsibility of getting each kid across the finish line for the grade.

Texas has "Robinhood" rules where property taxes from affluent areas are taken away and given to lower income areas throughout the state, so that the schools have more similar budgets regardless of income level in the area.

They still have drastically different quality of schools and student experiences though, because the kids are coming from very different home environments, parental expectations, cultural norms, etc.

I’ve heard teachers often dislike the term good or bad school district. And rightly so. The home environment that kids come from can vary. This makes a “great schools” score (or something equivalent) not a marker of the level of effort the teachers put in but rather a marker for parents to find “better peer groups” and “like minded pta”. Note I’m consciously avoiding the discussion of race here. Because in most suburban cases the good/bad doesn’t depend on race but more on income. This will obviously change if you look at urban districts.

I think the parents never really claimed or cared whether it's the marker of the level of effort the teachers put in, but they care whether it's the marker of "better peer groups". From the parents perspective, you care about outcomes, and the particular experience your kid will have.

Having had direct experience with a system like that, my anecdotal experience was that the affluent school still has more than enough money (anecdotal), while the poorer surrounding school districts were critically underfunded (not quite as anecdotal, newspaper stories from the time, etc).

That's not to say that the program wasn't helping, but the mere existence of such a program isn't enough to equalize that variable. Of course the points you bring up are important factors in education as well.

How does that work if average is $15k per kid? In the class of 20 kids it's 300k per year. It's hard to imagine it's not enough to fund decent education. Google tells me it's closer to 20k in California. That is crazy amount of money.

We were a small affluent school district and the receiving school districts were much, much larger.

I'm not sure if the exact figures, but part of the issue is that it was a low tax jurisdiction in general, and presumably the program was implemented to patch the system and bring it up to par, which it only partly did. If the transfers were implemented on top of a system that wasn't already at crisis levels, no doubt net outcome would improve in kind.

California does too. Parents get around it in all sorts of ways. Donating (and having your employer donate) to a 501(c)3 PTA that then directly funds many of the enrichment activities at the school. Parent volunteers for things like robotics classes. In-kind donations: my kid's teacher let slip that they were running out of paper, my kid shows up to class the next day with 2 reams. After-school enrichment through things like Kumon or RSM. Home tutoring. Study sessions after school.

I'm not sure it'd be desirable (let alone legal) to prevent that, though. The point is to raise up the kids that are doing poorly, not to make the kids doing well also do poorly.

> Kumon or RSM

South Bay?

Close. Peninsula.

I don't think that "home tutoring" or Kumon is "getting around" property tax redistribution. That's just raising your kid by investing your time and money, which is what parents have done since time immemorial.

In NJ it goes further and the poorest towns have much better funded schools than average. Been that way for decades. Zuckerberg even gave us an extra $100 million just for fun. None of it has affected the disparity in outcomes.

A friend's son just started as a teacher in a middle school in a low income district in NJ. On back to school night, for one of his classes, not one parent showed up. So, yeah, the outcomes are dependent on more than money.

Also, I attended a university in Newark NJ. Our city campus was adjacent to a Newark public high school. If you walked on the nearby sidewalk, you had to watch out for items being thrown out of the upper story high school class rooms, such as chairs and even desks. So I assume the teachers at that school had their hands full.

I think that the amount of money spent per pupil is not a critical factor. It does help I’m sure to a certain point, but the issue with the educational system is not about money. For example, Many inner city schools spend far more money per pupil than suburban schools and yet these inner city school systems have terrible results.

The real issue is what you addressed with the introduction of phonics, which addresses the instruction and the material and how it’s taught. These are improvements that would be felt across all socioeconomic levels and schools across geographic areas. Another critical factor is parents and how they support their children and the time that parents have to support their children. Lower socioeconomic level families do not have time and do not have money to support children academically as they are working multiple low income jobs while trying to survive and pay rent and eat.

This isn't only reflected in educational standards. I've seen a ton more restrictions in traffic and speed limits in more affluent areas, and higher/less blatant enforcement in poorer areas, even when the poorer areas are more populated with children.

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