In most cases it’s not too hard to figure out who is committing fraud here. Families tend to rat each other out. It’s more a question of if the district is enforcing the rules.
Personally, I think schools shouldn't be funded solely by the taxes of residents that reside within their bounds, but as a collective pool of all tax revenue. That'll not happen in my lifetime though, too many people bought houses in "the right neighborhood" to get their kids into the "good" school that there would be so much push back that no politician would dare touch it. Especially since those people are typically also the ones with the money.
Per above though I’m not advocating for license plate readers for enforcement.
They aren’t taking blood tests or staking out your homes (I don’t think…)
the school does not contest the legitimacy of the documents.
the school even says "[...] you are the owner on record of a house in our district boundaries"
Tracking license plates to look for unusually activity is an easy win for both fraud prevention and security from more serious threats.
So? My employer has my SSN, address, work history, etc. but I don't want them to know about where I go on the weekends. It's a fallacy to say that just because an entity knows a lot about you that it's OK if they know everything about you.
Will these cause injustice and false positives even more than license plate tracking? What is your point?
> Personally, I think schools shouldn't be funded solely by the taxes of residents that reside within their bounds, but as a collective pool of all tax revenue.
Are you talking about undemocratically forcing a restructuring all school financing everywhere in order to avoid one school doing a $1K/mo license plate tracking contract to make sure kids live in the district that they're attending school in? What is the principle that you're trying to uphold?
No, I'm talking about changing how schools are funded by making funds more evenly distributed across districts. Giving the kids in the "bad" areas the same opportunities as those in the "good" areas. Right now, if you can't afford that four-five-six-seven-hundred thousand dollar home, you aren't afforded the same level of public education as someone else who can. And doing so democratically, which is why I mentioned it'll never happen because no politician would be able to run on that. Their opponents would be outfunded by the top 10% to keep the status quo.
And this is coming from someone who own's a home in a "good" district. Where we got a total rebuilt elementary school 4 years ago, a new middle school actively being build, and a new high school that opened 3 years ago. Why should my kids have access to everything newer and better just because we can afford to live out in the suburbs, than someone else who isn't working in the cushy tech industry and instead is busting their ass only to live in poverty?
What matters are the peers you go to school with, supported by decent curriculum and moderately competent teachers. None of which is expensive. Oh, and administrators who actually care about teaching being done vs. being terrified of the lawsuit fairy.
It’s the peers that matter by far the most - and that means parents. Parents that are self-selecting into good districts tend to skew heavily towards “involved” and some definition of functional. This can mean being able to and buying a home or rent an apartment in a good district, or finding some clever and/or creative workaround to get the same outcome. The latter is even better in most cases since those families are motivated at an even higher level to make sure it’s a success.
The best school I went to as a kid was a private highly selective school in “the ghetto” where my dad lived growing up. Nearly every kid there was on some form of subsidized or full ride tuition, with very “working class” parents. The facilities were barebones at best. The vast majority of kids had parents who held them to extreme expectations even if they didn’t have financial means or even time to be highly involved day to day.
The uber rich brand new high school I went to the next year in the suburbs wasn’t even close.
The difference was in the kids who attended the school and the expectations put on them for both classroom behavior, engagement, and work ethic. Shitty disruptive kids were kicked out within a matter of days so as to let kids who wanted to be there actually learn.
Anything beyond that is close to a rounding error for outcomes.
The inner city school district I pay taxes into spends more per student than many of the suburbs. You could triple it again and get zero change in outcomes - in fact so far since living here school budgets are inversely correlated with outcome, although I don’t see a causation there in either direction.
Schools that are allowed to be ran like schools and hold students to high expectations and standards do well. Schools that are ran like social programs trying to correct for all of societies ills do not. It’s pretty simple in the end.
For example - a school is not a correction facility. If a student is violent, they do not belong in school. Get them out and put into a proper facility designed for such things. It's not the school's problem anymore to think about.
The results speak for themselves on the topic.
A school is to educate students who are there, present, and want to be educated. They will fail at any other task.
Small parroquial government entities that are funded inequitably are bad, actually. And the current system of schools districts is a legacy of segregation and white flight. Local government boundaries are entirely arbitrary, should the city let water or fire services suffer in one council district because it doesn't produce enough taxes to support it?
A child's academic opportunity shouldn't be determined by their zip code and parents income. Everyone should have access to free high quality public schools.
I believe they’re using LPR at drop off and pick up too, so parking a $500 junker somewhere isn’t a workaround. They would have to drive to the parked car every morning, transfer into it, drive it to school, return to the parking location, swap cars again, and then repeat the entire routine for pick up. It all technically could be done, but as a parent who knows what it’s like to hustle multiple kids to school in the morning I doubt this routine would be a common workaround.
Straight to jail with you.
The reason parents try to get into different schools isn’t to chase funding, it’s to get into the one with the best outcomes. A lot of that comes from parental involvement and having a critical mass of engaged students and parents, not the dollar amount spent on each student.
This isn’t a topic where you can think in terms of a single child only.
But school buildings have limited capacity and teacher:student ratios should be maintained. These cannot be changed instantly. Planning happens according to people actually living there, so if a lot of people are circumventing the rules and cheating their way in it breaks the system.
Not even very long horizons. For example, a hot housing market can cause a rush of young families into a district as older retirees cash out and move to Florida or whatever. Schools adapt to this.
I agree following rules is important. What kind of example are you setting for your kids, right? But having some perspective is also important.
FYI, parent engagement is also heavily proportional to parent income/property prices.
Very hard to be engaged at school with double/triple working class jobs.
For state funding, they use a system called EBF which is better than straightforwardly giving out money based on local property taxes. However, it is far from fair. As an example, part of the calculation is what's called a "regionalization factor" - where funding is reduced for areas with lower local average incomes.
This isn't 'fraud' in any meaningful moral sense, it is a rational reaction to immoral, unjust school funding models that perpetuate systemic inequalities based on the zip-code you can afford. I'm sure schools have a duty to police this in their mind, sure, but I side with parents trying to evade the boundaries they've been put because they weren't born rich enough.
Your link seems to have nothing to say about inequitible school quality based on unfair, racist, classist propety tax funding models. How about this one which followed cohorts for 40 years and found substantial differences in life outcomes correlated* to school funding levels (PDF ALERT!): https://gsppi.berkeley.edu/~ruckerj/QJE_resubmit_final_versi.... Crucially this looks at life outcomes, not just test scores.
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*Just in case someone wants to remind me or anyone else that correlation does not equal causation, I will say "I know" and "in longitudinal studies, time operates as an exogenous variable that adds substantial evidence of causality in well-designed research.
You may think it’s OK to steal because the end justifies the means… but it’s still stealing.
I can see it being a problem if e.g. a bunch of family members are putting their kids in a school district based on a single home owned by a grandparent. But if that grandparent was also the kid’s legal guardian, fair enough!
Here's an extreme example. One boy I know went to a school from kindergarten. He was tall and expected to start on the basketball team. Suddenly,in his junior year, several great players showed up from out of nowhere. There were lots of rumors about whether they were legitimately allowed to enroll, but in the end several lifelong students were bumped from the team. The coach was happy. The principal loved the idea. The kids presumably enjoyed the new school. But there were several others who lost an opportunity.
There are downsides to open door policies like you're endorsing. Most of the time, they're not so visible. But when resources are finite, people get hurt.
A single child going to the incorrect school isn’t going to break the system, but when it starts happening at scale it starts diluting the per-student funding in a district, increasing class sizes (reducing the teacher to student ratio) and eventually puts the school over limits and forces nearby children who should be going there into schools that are farther away.
How does this work? Do parents use a friend’s address to register for the school? Is there no way for the state-run school to check against tax records?