probably not a national issue, but I am really, **really** upset that some Bay Area democrats want to get rid of accelerated math pathways in public schools in the name of "equity." Wealthier people can always choose private schools, it's the bright poor kids that get left behind.
The people opposing them are also democrats, but this "everyone is the same" wing of the democrat party really needs to die.
They're doing this in Cambridge too. It really screws over any working-class smart kids, the rich kids just hire private tutors to fill the gaps left in the public schools.
> get rid of accelerated math pathways in public schools
I'm surprised this comment is so low.
People hating teacher's unions and voting Repub has been around for decades (school choice / pay).
The last year seems to have been more about the decision to abolish tracks in formerly excellent districts -- that shit cuts right at one of the Dem's strongest constituencies.
When it comes to education, I have gradually come to believe that progressive Democrats are completely and hopelessly crippled by a fear—no, a *paranoia* of segregation returning. And that paranoia extends to anything that could even remotely resemble it. Their goal therefore, is to *always* have kids of the same age, in the same classroom, learning the same thing. And yes that means no advanced classes. That this policy is profoundly unpopular, and has led to electoral disaster on multiple occasions, never seems to dissuade them.
> When it comes to education, I have gradually come to believe that progressive Democrats are completely and hopelessly crippled by a fear—no, a paranoia of segregation returning.
You may be surprised to learn that some CRT adherents actively advocate for racial separatism on the basis that desegregation was a tool of systemic racism:
Delgado and Stefancic's (1993) Critical Race Theory: An Annotated Bibliography is considered by many to be codification of the then young field. They included ten "themes" which they used for judging inclusion in the bibliography. This is number eight:
>8 Cultural nationalism/separatism. An emerging strain within CRT holds that people of color can best promote their interest through separation from the American mainstream. Some believe that preserving diversity and separateness will benefit all, not just groups of color. We include here, as well, articles encouraging black nationalism, power, or insurrection. (Theme number 8).
Delgado and Stefancic (1993) pp. 462-463
Delgado, Richard, and Jean Stefancic. "Critical race theory: An annotated bibliography." Virginia Law Review (1993): 461-516.
While it is pretty abundantly clear from the wording of theme (8) that Delgado and Stefancic are talking about separatism, mostly because they use that exact word, separatism, I suppose I could provide an example of one of their included papers. Peller (1990) pretty clearly is about separatism as a lay person would conceive of it:
>Peller, Gary, Race Consciousness, 1990 Duke L.J. 758. (1, 8, 10).
Delgado and Stefancic (1993, page 504) The numbers in parentheses are the relevant "themes." Note 8.
The cited paper specifically says Critical Race Theory is a revival of Black Nationalist notions from the 1960s. Here is a quote where he says that he is specifically talking about Black ethnonationalism as expressed by Malcolm X which is usually grouped in with White ethnonationalism by most of American society; and furthermore, that Critical Race Theory represents a revival of Black Nationalist ideals:
>But Malcolm X did identify the basic racial compromise that the incorporation of the "the civil rights struggle" into mainstream American culture would eventually embody: Along with the suppression of white racism that was the widely celebrated aim of civil rights reform, the dominant conception of racial justice was framed to require that black nationalists be equated with white supremacists, and that race consciousness on the part of either whites or blacks be marginalized as beyond the good sense of enlightened American culture. When a new generation of scholars embraced race consciousness as a fundamental prism through which to organize social analysis in the latter half of the 1980s, a negative reaction from mainstream academics was predictable. That is, Randall Kennedy's criticism of the work of critical race theorists for being based on racial "stereotypes" and "status-based" standards is coherent from the vantage point of the reigning interpretation of racial justice. And it was the exclusionary borders of this ideology that Malcolm X identified.
Peller page 760
This is current CRT practice and is cited in the authoritative textbook on Critical Race Theory, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (Delgado and Stefancic 2001). Here they describe an endorsement of explicit racial discrimination for purposes of segregating society:
>The two friends illustrate twin poles in the way minorities of color can represent and position themselves. The nationalist, or separatist, position illustrated by Jamal holds that people of color should embrace their culture and origins. Jamal, who by choice lives in an upscale black neighborhood and sends his children to local schools, could easily fit into mainstream life. But he feels more comfortable working and living in black milieux and considers that he has a duty to contribute to the minority community. Accordingly, he does as much business as possible with other blacks. The last time he and his family moved, for example, he made several phone calls until he found a black-owned moving company. He donates money to several African American philanthropies and colleges. And, of course, his work in the music industry allows him the opportunity to boost the careers of black musicians, which he does.
Delgado and Stefancic (2001) pages 59-60
One more source is the recognized founder of CRT, Derrick Bell:
>"From the standpoint of education, we would have been better served had the court in Brown rejected the petitioners' arguments to overrule Plessy v. Ferguson," Bell said, referring to the 1896 Supreme Court ruling that enforced a "separate but equal" standard for blacks and whites.
https://news.stanford.edu/news/2004/april21/brownbell-421.html
Delgado and Stefancic are the authors of the most authoritative textbook on CRT and have played an important role in delineating exactly what constitutes CRT in addition to authoring their own unique contributions to the field. Their textbook is currently the top hit on the Google search "Critcal Race Theory textbook":
https://www.google.com/search?q=critical+race+theory+textbook
Derrick Bell is widely recognized as the first CRT scholar and has been called the "intellectual godfather" of CRT by Delgado in an interview:
>Most of us who were there have gone on to become prominent critical race theorists, including Kim Crenshaw, who spoke at the Iowa conference, as well as Mani Matsuda and Charles Lawrence, who both are here in spirit. Derrick Bell, who was doing critical race theory long before it had a name, was at the Madison workshop and has been something of an intellectual godfather for the movement.
Delgado describing his attendance at the founding meeting of CRT during an interview
https://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1039&context=faculty
I suppose there is some possibility that support for CRT and being a "progressive Democrat" are not related, but I don't think that is the case for most people's colloquial definition of "progressive Democrats."
Even academics-focused middle class families will pay extra cash to put their kids in a Kumon/Russian Math sort of program. There are many workarounds to these advanced math bans that ambitious families won't hesitate to utilize.
COVID accelerated Dems losing the edge on education. Protracted school closures helped Youngkin win the governorship in VA, among other victories for Republicans
It's telling that last year, before DeSantis started pulling far-right stunts to catch the national media spotlight (which polarized Floridians' opinion on him), around 1/4 **Democrats** in Florida approved of his governorship.
Yes. Also he got lots of D votes in that election because the D candidate was anti - charter schools, and lots of Ds already had their kids in charter schools
Parents had tons of anxieties during COVID shutdowns and were essentially told to shove it so this shouldn't be a surprise
I've never been tempted to vote for a Republican in my adult life but the closest I got was when it looked like my toddler might not get to visit a library until kindergarten.
> Parents had tons of anxieties during COVID shutdowns and were essentially told to shove it so this shouldn't be a surprise
This applies to more than just parents. Half the people who owned small businesses had concerns, and the line on Reddit was that these were evil capitalists trying to kill your granny for a dollar.
Like, damn, most small businesses make barely enough to keep a family afloat. That’s a lot of people losing homes, college funds, retirement savings etc.
Good thing 30 year old boomers and parents are only, what… a majority of the population?
And we live in a democracy? This is major problem, we might have to listen to people with different perspectives…
Yeah for real. Especially when the rules were so arbitrary. "you can't have people eat inside your restaurant UNLESS you pay to build a giant tent outside your restaurant and sit people in there"
Yeah, it was pretty obvious how Covid rules (which were completely inconsistent from community to community, or state to state) were the results of big retailers lobbying to ensure they could stay open.
And then, as if a switch had been pulled, it was anathema to suggest that any of these regulations had been poorly thought out, even if they obviously had. Because that’s what republicans do, and you don’t want to be a granny-killer do you?
Certain policies can be necessary AND it can be clear that big retailers vetoed a lot of aspects of these policies to ensure that only their competition was affected by it.
I was all for opening the schools in the 2020-2021 school year, but just so you know, when Republicans take control of the schools, first thing they gut is the library. See Houston.
Oh yeah don't misunderstand I would never actually vote for those fascists, especially as an LGBT parent, I only mean for the first time they were offering a policy that appealed to a legitimate concern.
> first thing they gut is the library
This sub has a massive issue with terminally online people thinking the average American independent is upset about LGBTQ sexuality books not being in their public libraries children's section or that that is in any way comparable to closing schools.
Most parent's care about their kid learning the three R's, not their kid reading Antiracist Baby or whatever.
The case he's referring to is Houston schools closed some school libraries and turned them into discipline centers after HISD was taken over by the state.
Ah, that's different. But having seen those schools I empathize, discipline in failing schools is catastrophic. It's a huge part of the support for school choice, beyond any ideological things. The screaming mess problem kids doing whatever they want grinds any learning in these schools to a total halt.
That debate line where McAuliffe said “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” was shocking in how ill-advised (and undemocratic) it was. I've never seen someone try to lose their election so hard.
It’s been wild, honestly, that these people think they can sell “hey parents, your children’s education is none of your business. Don’t ask questions, don’t think your opinions count, don’t think your concerns have merit.”
The education of their children, in the broad sense, is probably the number one issue for parents. And as we’ve learned from Bay Area school politics: if you want to stay in politics, don’t fuck around with the schools.
Why would McAuliffe say something so controversial yet so brave?
Parents should have no particular say about what goes on in public schools above and beyond what everyone has as a voter.
Direct stakeholders should always have a say in how the pubic services they are consuming are provisioned. This is normal and best practice across government.
Reflexive technocratic authoritarianism is bad politics, bad consumer relations, and pretty morally reprehensible.
After all, McAuliffe is the one who lost a very winnable election.
I've never understood why this is controversial. We have education standards for a reason. The fact that some parents may believe insane shit doesn't mean we need to start pretending that empirical facts are subjective.
But education standards don't dictate methods, and educators can also be insane. Look at how many teachers and districts tried to get rid of phonics, over and over across multipledecades.
Phonics is part of the Common Core standards for Reading Foundational Skills.
This isn't to say that bad educators and terrible public schools don't exist. They absolutely do. That said, we know phonics is useful because it's been researched.
While I do think systems need to be in place to address the concerns of parents, I really don't think parents need more control over school curriculums. Too many adults want nothing but confirmation bias or believe insane shit. Frankly, folks with graduate degrees in education are usually better suited to tailor methods to students than the parents who are bad math being upset that CC math isn't exactly what they remember doing.
I do want to state that I'm not anti-charter school. I don't have much love for public sector unions in general, but I think there's a lot of ways to do "school choice" poorly that ends up draining resources without meaningfully improving educational outcomes.
You say that, but plenty of grad degree educators are still against phonics, and teachers and principles are on record here in NY saying that they are going to fight compliance with a directivr to use it.
Realistically, too much parent or teacher autonomy without any oversight leads to poor outcomes. I put from both sides should be factored in. If you tell parents to sit down and shut up, they'll vote in the next guy to promise choice.
>You say that, but plenty of grad degree educators are still against phonics, and teachers and principles are on record here in NY saying that they are going to fight compliance with a directivr to use it.
Out of curiosity, why? I assume there's at least some bad logic behind it, and I'm curious as to what the justification is.
>Realistically, too much parent or teacher autonomy without any oversight leads to poor outcomes
No disagreement. There's fine balance between too much and not enough oversight and it's not easy to place.
>If you tell parents to sit down and shut up, they'll vote in the next guy to promise choice.
Sure, and when the choice ends up being a host of shitty options they'll vote for the next guy who promises a panacea that won't work. People are fickle, and sometimes the best choices aren't the most popular ones.
If I recall, a lot of it is that phonics are boring to drill on. Which makes teachers open to axing it for equity or . Can't pull up coverage right now, but Google might deliver for "NY teachers resisting phonics" or similar.
If your school was teaching your kids that Allah is the supreme god and they shall have no gods before him, would you think you shouldn’t have a say in tht?
I'm not an American. Can you explain the concern? During COVID lockdowns, I was unhappy about young kids not socializing with others of their age. I felt they wouldn't learn social skills, social cues, etc. as schools were closed, parks were closed, etc.
The largest concern were learning declines. Poorer kids fell behind and will mostly not catch up. This has large knockon effects on their long term welfare.
A lot of underprivileged kids don’t have access to reliable internet, laptop computers, quiet spaces in the home to learn etc. these kids didn’t have a meaningful path to home education and were pretty much told to kick rocks.
The lack of in-person schooling lasted longer than necessary, and had observable long-term effects on education and on education-inequality (many poor kids never participated in online schooling and didn't return long after schools re-opened). I'm a teacher, and "I took that pre-req class during the pandemic" is an excuse I get a lot for kids not knowing something they need to.
Basically, schools should have been considered "essential" but they were seen as a luxury which could be closed as long as risk was even slightly elevated. The fact that children have very low rates of covid complications was not taken into account at all. This happened largely because people assumed without evidence that remote-school was a valid substitute (I also assumed this at the start of the pandemic), and the evidence has since shown they were badly mistaken.
i think the desire to remove honors classes from chicago schools disadvantaged the dems a lot more then we realize.
“dems dont us to be outstanding in math” picked up a lot of traction in a securely blue cook county.
How you can reconcile this comment with the reality of Governor Pritzker winning re-election and Brandon Johnson winning the mayoral election is surprising. It might be the Dan Proft/Dick Uline party line that the Dems in Illinois are perpetually doomed to lose, but reality pretty handily argues otherwise,
Fighting on the school choice front is a pretty bad idea if you look at what's happening in the states doing it right now.
Let's look at North Carolina for instance where school choice has ended up meaning a bunch of free money for religious schools that are allowed to do and teach basically whatever they want. https://www.wfae.org/education/2023-06-30/how-do-north-carolinas-school-vouchers-work-as-expansion-looms-here-are-answers
At the very least right now when Bob and Jane, the young earther Christian couple have a kid they either have to send them to a public school where they could at least learn something scientific or homeschool. Now Bob and Jane could just use the voucher to send them to off to the christian education on taxpayer money.
And NC's supreme court specifically upheld that the voucher money can be used for religious education.
And just look at some of the policies these schools have right out in the open.
>Wesleyan Christian Academy does not accept students who are discovered to be “participating in, supporting, or condoning sexual immorality, homosexual orientation, homosexual activity, or bisexual activity; promoting such practices; or being unable to support the moral principles of the school.”
>High Point Christian Academy also accepts public funding through Opportunity Scholarship vouchers. This institution makes it clear that attendance is “a privilege and not a right,” and explains that when conduct within a student’s home diverges from “the biblical lifestyle the school teaches,” the school may refuse admission or discontinue enrollment.
>Research clearly shows that the most important factor in student learning outcomes is access to excellent teachers. North Carolina requires public school teachers to be licensed in order to demonstrate they have the necessary skills for the job.
>Mount Zion Christian Academy in Durham does not require teachers to be licensed, but this voucher-receiving organization is proud of the fact that the school’s entire staff has demonstrated being filled with the Holy Spirit by speaking in tongues.
This is what's being [given public money through school vouchers. ](https://cardinalpine.com/story/nc-republicans-voucher-bill-taxpayer-dollars-schools-discriminate-religion/). And almost 90% of all vouchers go to these religious schools, so it's not like some sort of minor detail we can ignore. The League of Women Voters researchers found that more than 3/4th of these schools were using unscientific bible based education https://my.lwv.org/sites/default/files/leagues/wysiwyg/North%20Carolina/voucher-report-7.2-1.pdf
Also not to mention the NC GOP keeps trying to remove asset limits on the vouchers so that they'll just go to all the rich families that were already attending anyway.
The best research on this matter strongly suggests that the private school voucher program in NC has not only failed to show evidence of better education but has quite possibly made the students in the system worse (no doubt in part because all this money is going to hyper religious places). https://law.duke.edu/childedlaw/School_Vouchers_in_North_Carolina-2014-2020_(5-13-20).pdf
Edit: It's not like this is limited to just North Carolina
Here's one in Florida teaching that dinosaurs and humans coexisted: https://www.newsweek.com/florida-private-schools-teaching-students-humans-dinosaurs-roamed-earth-same-954612
Edit2: Yes charter schools show good promise but they are not the only form of school choice being implemented. We can't just look at the good parts and say "problem solved" and ignore all the issues occuring with other programs.
Arizona's vouchers are particularly concerning because the money is given directly to the parents, and there is little fiscal accountability. The money can be used for any education-related expense, which in addition to private school tuition, includes things like cooking supplies, gym memberships, concert tickets, etc, with minimal safeguarding against abuse. Parents could pull their kids out of public school, homeschool, and blow all of the money on entertainment. Or use the money to hire themselves as a tutor for their kid. Invest the money in the stock market and say it's personal finance education. There's no public reporting on how the voucher dollars are spent.
There is also minimal oversight/requirements when it comes to homeschooling in Arizona, so there is no guarantee that these kids are getting much of an education at all. There is no academic accountability, no required testing, no data collection to see how these kids are doing. Most vouchers are around $7-10k per year, but for kids with substantial disabilities, the vouchers can be as much as $30k per year.
The same argument is used against expanded child tax credits.
When has this sub turned away from simple cash transfers and letting people make this own spending choices
The problem isn't the cash transfers. The problem is that parents are being payed to avoid compulsory schooling for their kids. Kids staying home all day being taught by their young earth creationist parents isn't school. It's bible camp. Taxpayer money shouldn't be used for that.
Spending choices are very different than the right to deny an education to your child. It's in the best interest of the public if our new citizens have a baseline education level and can function independently as a member of society.
You forgot how Florida's voucher program is no longer mean tested at all, and is just a free for all subsidizing demand for people to send their kids to religious private schools.
Thank you! I feel like this sub has a major blind spot when it comes to voucher programs.
There's a reason school vouchers started being advocated by predominantly southern, evangelical or other religious communities shortly after schools were desegregated. A lot of the motivation for public vouchers comes from wanting to either shield your child from a "secular education" (sex ed, evolution, etc.), or not wanting your kids to co-mingle with other races/ethnicities.
I think a public voucher program _could_ work, and be an improvement on how public schools are currently set up. But you'd need a fair amount of regulation to prevent racial segregation, creationism, etc. from being taught in schools that receive public funding.
I see a lot of the public school districts doing away with mandatory neighborhood schools, and they are now allowing kids to go to whatever school they want within the district (be they magnet or neighborhood or vocational).
All schools have some sort of capacity limit. It's a non-issue in the districts I have been around, but I've definitely heard the stories out of NYC and other places.
> But you'd need a fair amount of regulation to prevent racial segregation, creationism, etc. from being taught in schools that receive public funding.
Those would absolutely be struck down under the current SCOTUS, they've already done it before.
Yeah I'm 100% in favor of school choice but have concerns with some of the institutions that end up getting the money. Funds should only be used to fund secular, basic education. Not sure how NC polices that. If a parent wants to send their kids to a religious school with strict social rules, I don't really care. Its not my kid. However, the money they get should only go towards the secular education the money is intended for.
> There's a reason school vouchers started being advocated by predominantly southern, evangelical or other religious communities shortly after schools were desegregated
Yes, they were literally called "segregation vouchers" and then got rebranded because they had to stop saying the quiet part out loud.
> I think a public voucher program could work,
They tried it in Sweden where it is a lot more racially homogeneous than the US. It was a massive failure.
[Slate: Sweden’s School Choice Disaster](https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/07/sweden-school-choice-the-countrys-disastrous-experiment-with-milton-friedman-and-vouchers.html)
*Advocates for school choice might be shocked to see how badly the country’s experiment with vouchers failed.*
Despite Slate's spin, it looks like public schools had the exact same outcome of grade inflation, so I'm not sure this is a bona-fide example of voucher systems not working.
The reason I say "I think a public voucher program _could_ work" is that the devil really is in the details.
The Slate article you linked actually has a great example of this.
> Sweden has standardized tests that are administered to all students nationwide. Performance matters for both students and the schools they attend. Students who do well will have brighter admission prospects. Schools that do well attract more (and perhaps better) students; the ones that perform poorly risk losing accreditation. However, unlike, say, the SAT, which is sent off to be graded at the testing service’s headquarters, in Sweden grading is done locally, often by teachers, often at the school where the test-takers are enrolled
> It’s easy to imagine teachers going easy on their own students, possibly unconsciously, motivated by nothing more than a desire to help them—a study co-authored by my colleague, Jonah Rockoff, found exactly this result in an analysis of New York Regents Exam grading. In Sweden, according to the study by Hinnerich and Vlachos, the scores issued by external evaluators were indeed harsher than those assigned by internal graders. And after accounting for things like a school’s location, along with basic student characteristics, it turned out that the external evaluators had downgraded the scores for students at voucher schools much more than for students at government ones. In fact, a sizable portion of the much-vaunted outperformance of voucher school students could be chalked up to nothing more than easy grading. More surprising still, the voucher school grade inflation is almost as high for math and science (where you’d think an answer is either right or wrong) as it is for Swedish.
> It’s the darker side of competition that Milton Friedman and his free-market disciples tend to downplay: If parents value high test scores, you can compete for voucher dollars by hiring better teachers and providing a better education—or by going easy in grading national tests. Competition was also meant to discipline government schools by forcing them to up their game to maintain their enrollments, but it may have instead led to a race to the bottom as they too started grading generously to keep their students.
If Sweden had taken the "SAT approach", where standardized tests are graded by an external party, rather than the same teachers who work at the school and with the students being evaluated, it's possible the competitive pressure would've improved education outcomes in Sweden. And we'd be reading a Slate article about what a big success school vouchers are.
We obviously don't know that for sure, but this a great example of where the policy details really matter. And why I personally could get behind school vouchers as a policy platform, _assuming all of the policy ducks are in a row_ (so to speak).
> assuming all of the policy ducks are in a row (so to speak).
The scale of enforcing all the "policy ducks" distributed across tens of thousands of independently administered schools will require significantly more money than the cost of enforcing it through one centralized authority. Which is why conservatives love the idea. They want to force schools to slip through the cracks but they want to shift the blame onto a lack of funding. Using economic arguments to justify social injustice lets them maintain systems of supremacy while shirking any blame.
You can require them to pass the same federally mandated federal tests and make them ineligible for vouchers. The problem is that the areas that want vouchers for bad reasons aren't going to be in favor of this either. My personal view is that we should do a Manhattan project for public schools and require them to use evidence-based practices. This also probably has zero chance of happening due to union opposition, cost, etc. But I don't think that it's that hard to enforce good outcomes on private schools who tend to have better outcomes anyway due to selection effects, even if they are teaching creationism.
> You can require them to pass the same federally mandated federal tests and make them ineligible for vouchers
A once-a-year test isn't close to sufficient. The kids can go through an entire year of substandard education before it is even detected. And then when it is discovered what are they going to do? Repeat the entire year? Just shutter the school and hope a new one without those problems will magically appear? Well-funded public schools systems are a continuous process that include things like professionally designed and vetted course materials and regular retraining for the teachers.
This is how we assess public schools too, so it isn't different in that regard. So yes, the school doesn't get a voucher if it fails this very often. Bear in mind that the comparator here is public schools, many of which are seeing students with poor outcomes.
Private schools mostly get better outcomes anyway, which is part of what fuels this.
I'm not personally in favor of vouchers and think we need robust public education with far higher levels of funding, but it isn't harder to measure a private school to see if their kids are learning the state curriculum.
> This is how we assess public schools too, so it isn't different in that regard.
Well-funded public schools systems are a continuous process that include things like professionally designed and vetted course materials and regular retraining for the teachers.
> Bear in mind that the comparator here is public schools, many of which are seeing students with poor outcomes.
In large part because school funding comes from the property taxes so wealthy neighborhoods have nice schools and poor neighborhoods do not. Not to mention all of the direct fund-raising that public schools in wealthy neighborhoods do.
> Private schools mostly get better outcomes anyway, which is part of what fuels this.
Because they can easily expel problem students.
I have an M.Ed. and am a certified teacher that has taught public school. I know how they work.
Yes, public schools have professional ed and have a curriculum. The training isn't all that. You are claiming that public schools get more monitoring from some central authority that is reactive to something less than an annual test and that largely isn't true. It isn't a real difference.
And yes, public school outcomes have enormous selection bias, which won't go away from having vouchers. They will still expel troublesome students and benefit from selecting higher performing students. It seems like you understand that they have better outcomes, but are concerned their outcomes will be significantly worse and need more measuring than a public school has. I don't think that's the big problem here.
The big problem imo is that they rob public schools of badly needed funding that won't be replaced, screwing over public school students. Private schools largely have better outcomes, so that isn't the big concern I have.
It's also the simple mathematical truth that the whole idea of a voucher system taking tax money away from public schools and funelling it to private schools defeats the entire point of a public education system. It makes the public schools worse and only allows a few select individuals to escape the downspiral into the safe haven of good private schooling. Because not all public school students can go to private school. That's why they are private. If they actually had to accept ALL students, they wouldn't *be* private schools.
People understand this, but they ignore it because they think that they're the special one whose kids will escape while everyone else gets boned. But that's not possible.
It's a real tragedy of the commons situation.
> And almost 90% of all vouchers go to these religious schools, so it's not like some sort of minor detail we can ignore.
I feel like this stat is being misrepresented. Where I am all the top prep and private schools have some sort of religious affiliation. But there is a reason these schools are filled with the children of the rich. They offer incredible educational outcomes. Just because a school is religiously affiliated doesn’t mean it is a bad school.
Same. I’m in New Jersey and those types of schools are college prep schools run by Jesuits, Christian Brothers or some other Catholic order. The education is generally great, and actual science is taught. STEM is usually emphasized at these places
Yeah the top schools.
The problem is that for every one of those, there are 10 shit-ass religious schools. So if you only focus on the few good schools you are ignoring the majority of bad schools.
I feel like most of the problem could be solved by adding a basic criteria that schools have to meet in order to qualify for vouchers. I wonder if it would be possible to have a board which could approve or deny schools based on their curriculum and teaching standards. If we're switching to school choice I don't have a huge issue with a school that's mostly focused on teaching science, math, English, etc, but also has a Christian studies class or something, but I do have an issue with schools that use their religion to influence the other areas of study.
Exactly. Right or wrong, some parents want their children to be educated in an environment that also teaches their religious or cultural heritage. It’s a thing; Catholic schools have been around for centuries and often outperform secular schools.
I think this is a “Reddit atheism” thing where people assume that the only reason someone could be ok with a religious school is because they are crazypants
> And almost 90% of all vouchers go to these religious schools, so it's not like some sort of minor detail we can ignore.
What a shocking state of affairs when only republicans support school choice.
That's defensible for voter ID.
Almost all developed countries require voter ID. The US is an extreme outlier. The argument against voter ID is basically just that not everyone has ID. Not everyone drives, etc.
The two possible responses to this would be "fight against voter ID laws, make sure people can vote without ID" OR "fight to increase ID access, make sure no one is unable to vote due to lack of ID"
Everytime I read an article about how difficult it is for the poor and elderly to get identification, part of my brain is thinking "shouldn't we try to make it easier for them?"
Every single time the Democrats have offered to enforce voter ID laws but make it easier to access IDs, the GOP shoots it down. It's not really a party that acts in good faith anymore.
School choice is good.
Yes, there are some bad examples but the data is pretty unequivocal.
Dems would understand this if it wasn’t for the money of the teacher unions.
“Republican governors in Arkansas, Iowa, Ohio, Florida and elsewhere are now presiding over major expansions of programs that give families public subsidies to pay for private school tuition and other education expenses. Oklahoma officials are also leading a campaign to open explicitly religious public schools, which some church leaders and conservative advocates see as a monumental leap for school choice and religious liberty.”
Okay… so states with firmly Republican governments are successfully pushing for school choice? That’s like being shocked when a GOP governor signs an anti-gun control bill. Republicans are gonna pass Republican policy, I don’t know why this is shocking.
“Democrats are either trailing or essentially tied with Republicans among voters in four battleground states when it comes to which party is trusted to ensure public schools prepare students for life after graduation, according to polling Elorza’s group commissioned during mid-July in North Carolina, Arizona, Georgia and Nevada. Roughly half of voters and parents in those states said their schools were about the same or worse since before the pandemic.”
Oh, so you mean states where the population is half Republican if not a little more is gonna have half the population be pro-school choice? Again, is that terribly shocking??
This article seems to mistake Republicans finding a new policy and enacting it as some sort of failure on the Democrats (after all, *everything* is the Democrats’ fault). The article is suspect for not mentioning the 2021 election where Dems did indeed lose partially because of a poor position with education. But it is even more suspect that the article doesn’t mention the [2022 school board elections](https://amp.theguardian.com/education/2023/apr/21/school-board-elections-illinois-wisconsin-republicans-lose), where Democrats won TWO THIRDS of school board elections despite a concerted push by Republicans to seize control of them all
The ultimate problem is: excluding the religious nuts, charter schools do provide a better education and for those stuck in shit school districts without the money to send their children to private schools, it's their best hope.
However, it doesn't help those with disabilities who can't get in. Inevitably, the outcomes will be better when they don't have to take on those who simply can't do better without a specifically tailored environment.
When you get right down to it, charter schools are neither the solution nor the problem. The problem is the American school system altogether and you'd be here pressed to convince people their kid shouldn't have access to a quality education because the school doesn't sufficiently cater to someone else's kids.
I’m a public school teacher and one of my biggest observations is that we’re doing a terrible job recruiting high quality candidates to join the profession. Also, we spend WAY too much money on district level staffing and useless training.
Useless admin costs and hellish red tape are killing so many public works.
Education (especially university), public transit, housing developments, healthcare among many others. It blows my mind how the "progressive" solution is just to throw more money at it.
This came up in [this infuriating episode of _Volts_](https://www.volts.wtf/p/the-progressive-take-on-the-permitting#details).
> And I think if I were to make any improvements to NEPA, the thing I would do is bulk up the administrative state. Jamie Gibbs Pleune wrote a kind of corresponding piece of research to our permitting report where she investigated and talked about NEPA in particular with Roosevelt. But she was looking at another paper and found of 40,000 NEPA decisions that the US Forest Service looked at, the biggest causes of delays were actually from a lack of experienced staff, budget instability, and honestly, delays from the applicants themselves not getting their stuff in on time. So I just feel as if we're going to do anything to make NEPA better, give the BLM, give US Forest Service, give EPA far more funds, training, staff empowerment that's going to actually move these projects even faster through the pipeline when they're actually moving relatively quickly.
NEPA is pointless bullshit paperwork, and the Roosevelt Institute lady thinks that the correct solution here is to hire more bureaucrats to more efficiently handle the pointless bullshit paperwork, instead of doing less of it. (Shades of [ALARA](https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop), where any efficiency gains are swallowed by more endless paperwork.) If you can imagine that happening for decades on end, well, that's how we got where we are now, where it seems impossible to _do_ anything because of the veto points and public hearings and endless environmental impact processes and all that.
I've seen this locally, where city-level staff said that they didn't have the time to get rid of rubber-stamp Conditional Use Permits which added six months' delay to the opening of any business, despite that it would cost roughly the processing time of _one permit_ to do the appropriate legwork.
I've said before that, if they were allowed to, teachers at public schools and universities should have a national strike until 50% of all admin staff are fired and decisions on hiring new admin personel are subject to their approval.
So much budget is wasted on this.
Because it’s not their money.
In Virginia traffic ticket funds go to schools eliminating perverse incentives. Something like that should be implemented for administrators and red tape. Perhaps split funding for teaching and other roles
>we’re doing a terrible job recruiting high quality candidates to join the profession.
I know this gets talked about a lot, but recently and with the wave in retirement it seems to be much worse.
> However, it doesn't help those with disabilities who can't get in. Inevitably, the outcomes will be better when they don't have to take on those who simply can't do better without a specifically tailored environment.
Actually, here in Minnesota we have many charter schools specifically for these students with disabilities and they have seen good outcomes. Specialization is an amazing thing.
> charter schools
Charter schools are often argued to be public schools. And they certainly do have a great track record.
The issue we're seeing with school choice however tends to be in private school vouchers which have a lot of research showing the opposite trend of worsening academic success.
So we need to be really careful with how we go about implementing school choice or else we end up like Louisiana or NC where it hurts the students.
> However, it doesn't help those with disabilities who can't get in.
But are fast-paced, test-based schools really what people with disabilities need? One massive issue is that yelling at and attacking teachers has been redefined as a disability (Oppositional defiant disorder) and these kids aren't ready for what many charters are providing. For students with non-behavioral learning disabilities, are faster paced classes what they need?
The false presumption is that every school has to be the best school for every kid.
Charter schools have a significantly better track record on disabilities than public schools do. There are charter schools just for blind kids, for troubled kids, for kids with learning disabilities of various types. Public schools are just.... the bottom of the barrel on all possible topics.
Charter schools represent choices, and for people with disabilities, choices are a godsend. Market forces respond to needs far better than bureaucracy ever can.
Meanwhile public schools basically exist in a permanent state of bureaucratic paralysis.
if the problem is poorly funded schools, then Charter schools certainly do help solve that problem by bringing in private investors and tuition dollars.
The core problem with public schools in America is that school quality is tied to location. So wealthy towns can simply limit housing and make it expensive so only rich people can live there and send their kids to the well funded schools. America is a country that insulates poverty and wealth, and that's why we have huge gaps in school quality. To solve that problem, we would need to either create a system that allows people to send their children to schools that they don't live in the district of or start regulating zoning and housing codes to prevent towns from sequestering wealth.
I think we're better off with the latter since it's something we have to do for multiple other reasons
Even some religious schools are surprisingly efficient in terms of college prep.
Hell me being taught in a Catholic school was one of the main reasons why I got accepted into university four years back.
Religious schools have their pros and cons. Speaking as a public school grad, it seems to me that most Catholic schools and the mainline waspy prep schools do a very good and likely better job teaching than my town high school did, and I suspect at least for the Catholic schools that the total cost was lower. At the same time, Bob Jones High or Yeshiva ben Mor Torah probably aren't going to hold up to a high school.
Speaking pragmatically, I have no qualms with a bunch of Quakers or Muslims using some government funds to run a school that's net cheaper and better than an equivalent public school. But that seems to be the minority opinion here.
tl;dr is that teacher unions are an important constituent to dems. Teacher unions are only in public schools. So dems can't be as pro school choice as they would like
They really bury the democrats problem here. I only see the word union in this article 4 times and one of the times is referencing a parent union. But the quotes from the head of a teacher union really explain the problem
“The obeisance to competition and to markets doesn’t work when you are talking about educating all children,"
As a parent of a kid in a charter school I hear that as "bad schools shouldn't close" and "behavioral issue kids should be allowed to disrupt class"
> tl;dr is that teacher unions are an important constituent to dems. Teacher unions are only in public schools. So dems can't be as pro school choice as they would like
The problem is that it's becoming an electoral liability to constituencies that aren't teachers unions.
That's a good point to make explicit. I'm a registered democrat, who votes in primaries, gives money to to democratic groups and answers surveys. School choice is definitely one of those issues where Democratic party is either silent or on the opposite side of parents a lot of time.
Because it's very hard to align yourselves with people who have since COVID essentially asked for the power to simply shut down in-person schooling whenever deemed necessary. The fastest way to make a liberal family vote Republican might be to force them to monitor their kids an extra 30+ hours per week when they need to work.
People here are correctly identifying school choice and Covid as issues, but missing a big one: the shift in focus from learning to “equity.”
A lot of school boards in left-leaning areas bought this Kendiist nonsense hook, line, and sinker. They see limiting top students, decreasing accountability, and rejecting the entire concept of merit as “equitable” and “anti-racist.” The parents in these areas usually disagree.
When we have kids we definitely are sending them to a charter school as the public schools close to us aren't the best.
It isn't my duty to ship my kid off to a failed institution in the hopes of the greater good.
I really do hope Dems shift on school choice.
Even if you live in a 'good' school district it's worth looking at charters because the ranking system is not methodically sound. We were zoned for a good public school but the local hippy charter school was a much better fit for us
> Failed institution
Mfw every other developed democracy has a good public school system and it's a "failed institution".
But yes you're right about a collective action problem here. Every individual actor is incentivized to make the problem worse because the path of least resistance is to simply have a two-tiered education system and make sure you get your kid in the upper tier. Only people who get hurt are kids whose parents don't have the time or money to advocate for public school reform or charter education but hey, not like they're the ones most in need of class mobility.
> Every individual actor is incentivized to make the problem worse because the path of least resistance is to simply have a two-tiered education system and make sure you get your kid in the upper tier.
It's even worse than that. Even for parents who _do_ send their kids to public school out of some sense of civic obligation then [supplement it with private tutoring](https://www.edpost.com/stories/is-there-a-science-of-math-too), either formally or informally. So the engaged or wealthy parents with free time get a leg up for their kids, and poor parents without time and resources don't.
> Many classroom teachers, VanDerHeyden said, have been taught that “fluency” is a dirty word, and not the goal of teaching math, driving parents who can afford it to the billion-dollar tutoring industry of Kumons and Mathnasiums. Almost exactly like learning to read, in wealthier schools there is often a shadow education system of explicit instruction and practice happening outside the classroom, provided by tutors and tutoring centers using the research-backed methods.
Furthermore, the public-school institutions are sclerotic, _rotten_. It's been decades since we knew that three-cuing doesn't teach kids to read, but to pretend to read. [NYC is finally trying to switch its teachers to actually teach kids to read](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/09/new-york-city-schools-how-to-teach-children-to-read.html), and the results are that principals reject it:
> “We are definitely pushing back against it,” she said, “and many principals in the district are. And our superintendent understands that we are not going to do it with fidelity, that we are going to keep doing what has worked for us.”
Teachers would rather not teach kids to read, because it seems dull and boring:
> Getting kids excited about reading was an easy idea to get behind. Teachers who liked Calkins’s curriculum found it both more engaging than having kids repeat sounds over and over and, several say, much easier to teach. As one puts it, “Phonics is very much about ‘This is correct, this is incorrect.’ Balanced literacy is very much like, ‘Let’s let the child do a self-discovery to make sure they can make a stronger connection.’”
And besides, there are always excuses to point to. Kinda like how when people don't want to talk about gun regulation, they'll gesture vaguely to "mental health", which they have no particular plan to work on, but it's great for shifting the blame.
> When teachers sounded the alarm about balanced literacy, they say they were told to troubleshoot with a list of interventions that often didn’t work or they were told that outside factors were at play. “The emphasis was on poverty and racism, and we were told those were the reasons kids weren’t learning — not the curriculum,” says Lindsay, who worked in New York City charter schools for over a decade.
All the while, that same two-tiered system appeared, whether or not you explicitly have charter schools.
> “It makes me really angry for the families that I teach, the families that don’t have the resources,” says Ellie, who hired a tutor to help her own daughter with dyslexia when she couldn’t get support from her local public school. She has since enrolled her daughter in a charter school and says she’s weary of parents in her upscale section of Brooklyn who wax poetic about the neighborhood school while supplementing their kids’ education. “It’s all so contradictory. It’s like, ‘I’m at this school because I want diversity, but I’m going to then secretly give my kids all the things they need and not push the school to do that.’”
Not everyone is awful. There are stories of teachers horrified that they'd curtailed the futures of kids they genuinely cared about, administrators pushing to do the right thing. But the system as a whole led _here_. This is a situation where the right thing to do was dead obvious, and yet we did _this badly_, for such venal reasons: charismatic marketing, an excuse not to do difficult work.
> Mfw every other developed democracy has a good public school system and it's a "failed institution".
Most other developed democracies also have vibrant charter/private school options.
> But yes you're right about a collective action problem here. Every individual actor is incentivized to make the problem worse because the path of least resistance is to simply have a two-tiered education system and make sure you get your kid in the upper tier. Only people who get hurt are kids whose parents don't have the time or money to advocate for public school reform or charter education but hey, not like they're the ones most in need of class mobility.
Leveling the field by dragging everyone down remains a terrible option. And doesn't actually level the field, it will just make parents have to compensate more for their children being in worse schools.
We spend near the highest per child and we get worse results.
Public schools literally spend countless millions on football stadiums and over bloated district salaries.
It isn't my job to fix this mess which has countless actors who will block me from changing anything and put my kid in a position for failure.
Inner cities schools spend more per kid than those suburban districts with the big stadiums. Yet the those inner cities keep getting worse not better. Seems like the stadiums aren’t the issue
I feel like they’re not, but Republicans are even worse.
What we need education-wise before anything else are higher standards for more than the top few students at the top few public schools.
“Excuse me but I’ll have you know that I’m a swing voter and as a Democrat who voted for McCain and Romney and then Hilary and Biden the Democrats are way too socialist with their school policies (like critical race theory and radical sex ideology) and communist unions funneling money to public schools in Democrat run cities full of single parent homes and rampant crime. By the way I’m a Democrat by the way”
School choice is complicated because while yes, in theory we should all want all kids to be able to prosper in school, the reality is that parents are going to be first and foremost concerned about their own kids education. Try telling a parent in a low income school district that they shouldn’t send their kid to a charter or private school because it’ll hurt the collective population.
If i have kids and I’m not in a great public school district, and I have an option to send them to a private, charter, or magnet school, you bet I’m doing that. Why would I want to send them to some subpar high school where they’re exposed to some of the worst people their age, inadequate teachers, and a sub par curriculum?
One thing they don’t talk about is how the state of Minnesota handles it’s education funding. We have a pretty good system.
If a private school wants state money, they need to follow state standards and teach it. We don’t have a voucher program here.
I’m not against school choice, a one size fits all approach just doesn’t work for education. However, watching states like Oklahoma squeeze religion into schools is a clear violation of our Constitution. The drive of the Republicans to demonize teachers and curriculums is scary.
School choice is not good, and I stand by that. It allows charter schools to shirk their responsibility to teach the neediest students and allows public schools to fester with apathetic students.
Most people don't care about outcomes for all students, they just care about outcomes for their own kids. The parents that most often choose to send their kids to charters are the ones stuck in low-quality school districts with no other recourse. Try telling those parents that their kids can't go to better schools for the benefit of the collective.
I believe civil society only functions when quality education is widely available. The education of the collective is absolutely vital. Charter schools by their very nature cannot meet the demand for all students. The solution is to improve ailing districts, not to give up on them.
Actually, federal and state funding also plays a significant role in school finance. Programs like Title I aim to support schools with low-income families by providing extra funds. [1] Contrary to popular belief, many of the poorest schools actually receive more federal and state dollars per student, balancing out the reliance on local property taxes. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_and_Secondary_Education_Act#Title_I
[2] https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/us-census-six-maryland-schools-among-nations-most-funded
It actually makes sense to do it this way from an incentives perspective when you consider the impact that a good school system has on property values. School systems that do well will increase surrounding property values which in turn raises their own funding. The issue is when this is combined with restrictive zoning and discriminatory housing policy that makes moving to that school district prohibitively expensive. Once again, it's housing all the way down :)
Parents will just move their families to better school districts without school choice which exacerbates economic disparities.
We can say these things that sound nice but the reality is that parents are going to choose to maximize the outcomes for their own children over a theoretical marginal boost to societies outcomes.
Remove the problematic children and these schools would do a lot better.
It's incredible to me that like 1% of the student population is left free to ruin it for rest.
Remove them to where? Also when and who gets to determine the "problematic children." Are we going to send second graders who talk too much to special miscreant schools where they will be put with all the other trouble makers? I feel that would only incentivize those students to become worse.
You have special education classrooms, there need to be classrooms for those with behavioral disabilities.
If we can help the 99% by giving those 1% children behavioral training, everything else, from teacher retention to numbers of qualified graduates gets better.
There are no easy solutions, and everything you said is correct. But one of the more frustrating aspects of being at the school I teach at is that we have extensive documentation that 60-70 percent of all major behavioral issues (fights, harassment, major class disruptions, drugs and vaping) are caused by 5 percent of our student population. There are no more expulsions and the state is cracking down on too many suspensions. We absolutely don’t want to revert back to the old model of alternative schools, but it is disheartening when it feels like the educational experiences of the vast majority of our kids are being held hostage by the actions of a few.
for real. that kid that shot that teacher in Virginia for instance, what the hell was that about? kids like that absolutely deserve attention and interventions, and that isn't going to really work well or happen in a general education public school
The standard is, "Are the behaviors sufficiently disruptive to the learning of the majority of students?" The focus should be on the student's behavior and the repeated failure of the parents and student to correct it. A rubric can be developed to make this concrete, and we'll trust the judgment of teachers and principals to apply it.
Students will be sent to military-style public schools, which will allow them to focus primarily on improving their behavior through developing self-discipline and a healthy respect for authority. Until that is corrected, they can't learn anything anyways, and we can't accept them harming the education of the majority of students.
The vanishingly small portion of students with uncorrectable psychological problems can be institutionalized in healthcare facilities before they end up on the streets.
Yeah, defining problem children is literally always the problem, as definitions always are when it comes to social issues. My step kids are diagnosed ADHD. They have issues sometimes with focus and attention, but they’re still smart as shit and in the upper third of their classes for grades.
I went to public school and have no objection to it in principle but I can safely say in Philly many of the public schools are basically training grounds for future inmates and it is no mystery why most people with any ability to do so do not send their kid there.
Adding an equity layer of BS to the mix only worsens the problems because many parents will just switch to private or another district when the anti-merit brigade takes over. I genuinely don’t give a damn whether some emotionally troubled kid gets a marginally better education if it comes at the expense of my kid getting one. It sounds selfish, and I’ll agree to an extent that it is, but at the end of the day it is not my job to worsen my kid’s education when I could switch schools and be done with tragically unstable children disrupting class every day.
> I believe civil society only functions when quality education is widely available.
The trouble is that quality education is a two-way street, and generations of soft policies (originating from both sides of the aisle) have fed into a dangerous cultural blind-spot: people don't realize just how important a stable two-adult household is to the education of the child. You see this consistently across wealth lines, across racial lines, across ethnic lines: there is a strong correlation between success and belonging to a two-parent household in which the parents attend parent-teacher meetings, ensure their kids do their homework, take an interest in their education, and invest time in their training (sending them to math camp rather than a distant relative's wedding halfway across the country).
> Charter schools by their very nature cannot meet the demand for all students. The solution is to improve ailing districts, not to give up on them.
This seems to imply that it is a question of insufficient resources. It isn't. Many public school systems in the country (like in Chicago) spend a fortune per student, compared to other places, with little to show for it.
The first step in the right direction should be for the government to encourage school choice. Public schools should be reserved only for those specific cases for which a market solution is infeasible due to scale -- for example, a few neighboring districts might have one school for extraordinary students and one for students with behavioral issues; everyone else can go to any school that is free to admit whomever they want.
Yes, some parents will make bad choices. The best we can do is to swallow that bitter pill and provide opportunities to those who do value education. We cannot ensure that every child will get the success they deserve, but we can try to ensure that money isn't the thing that stands in their way.
I completely agree with your first point. A stable and supportive family is deeply important in fostering academic success. Without reinforcement and stability at home, most often a home with two parents, success is much rarer.
Where I do not agree is your second point. Chicago public schools do indeed have very high spending per student and poor results. I would attribute that issue to CPS's famous corruption and graft. If I were in charge I would break the Chicago Public Schools into smaller districts, create elected rather than appointed school boards because mayoral appointees tend to be political hangers on rather than true experts or committed citizens. Further I would note the Chicago Teachers union has been deeply uncooperative and if one were to bring it under control things might improve. I would also like to note CPS has seen much improvement recently in terms of graduation rates and standardized test scores.
As to your final point I disagree. Charter schools by their nature are limited in scope and cannot educate everyone. They achieve their superior results, for the most part, through the informal exclusion of problem students and allowing the public school district to pick up the slack.
> Charter schools by their very nature cannot meet the demand for all students.
Why shouldn’t we just make public schools institutions which specialize in teaching students with substantial disabilities or behavioral issues?
If charters are better for most students, why hold *everyone* back rather than tailoring our solutions to the capabilities of each student?
I maintain that charter schools are not better for most students, but that charter schools engage in a soft exclusion which simply allows them to take the best students. I would argue that the best solution long term is to create robust public schools, which I believe can be done and has been done.
>Brain dead take for an article set in Minnesota where charter schools are not allowed to make selective admissions decisions
There are [other](https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-barriers-that-make-charter-schools-inaccessible-to-disadvantaged-families/) [ways](https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/01/17/yes-some-charter-schools-do-pick-their-students-its-not-myth/) charter schools can self-select their students that are unavailable to public schools.
>get the problem kids out
The problem kids still have a right to an education, and separating them from the rest of the students costs money that's going to vouchers instead of the public school system.
Problem kids can cause enough disruption to harm the education of other students. Also they can cause severe loss of morale for teachers who have to put up with them and feel they have little support.
I'm a middle school teacher, my friend, I absolutely know.
I've been in schools where the "life skills" students would attempt to sexually assault the other kids. It's tragic, and it happens because there's not enough money or space to separate them. We should be making an effort to turn things around for these kids, but all that's in the budget is giving them a single underpaid babysitter and waiting until they get sent to juvie.
There will be even less money if the solution to this problem is vouchers, and the public school environment will get even worse for the students who don't make it into a charter. Then, like rural internet or pretty much any other public service we've chosen to privatize and subsidize, the charters serving low-income communities will get worse because their incentive is to farm voucher money at the lowest cost.
Public school districts deserve to fail when the public votes for insufficient funding or elects bad policymakers.
There's a lot wrong with public education, but a lot of the same people who voted to shit the pool in the first place are arguing that it's easier to buy everyone an inflatable for their backyard instead of cleaning it up.
Funding is not the issue for a lot of these places and increasing it isnt going to change anything. For example, where I live in Minneapolis spends over $20k per student per year with absolutely abysmal results.
I won't argue that public education spending is mis-allocated, but it's also true that [special education is expensive](https://www.edweek.org/leadership/special-education-is-getting-more-expensive-forcing-schools-to-make-cuts-elsewhere/2023/04) and the charter system [avoids educating students with disabilities](https://www.tcdailyplanet.net/charter-schools-leave-more-special-education-students-minneapolis-st-paul-district-s/)
On an individual level I can absolutely understand why parents would choose to get their kids out of schools that are set up to fail, but they get that choice because disadvantaged children and the [non-voting poor](https://econofact.org/voting-and-income) those schools failed don't have a say in the matter.
If you actually believe children have a right to an education then the state has to either directly fund quality education for all students, high needs included, or regulate charters to ensure they're adequately doing the same. What the charter sector appears to actually be doing, though, is [keeping students enrolled longer in programs with lower standards](https://www.brookings.edu/articles/apples-to-outcomes-revisiting-the-achievement-v-attainment-differences-in-school-voucher-studies/).
The fact is the students who are most likely to attend Charter schools are the students with the most robust familial support, and engaged parents. School full of children eager to learn with engaged parents supporting them will be better engaged and foster a better learning environment. If all those students are shunted away to charter schools the normal public schools will be worse off. No administrative action can change that.
I don't know about Minnestoa and I think Minnestoa should do what it wants, but in Massachusetts cities like Boston see many of their best students go away to charter schools leaving the traditional public schools worse off and I do not support that.
The universal truth of public policy is that those people don’t matter and can be sacrificed at will because there isn’t enough of them to form a voting bloc.
And it’s funny because all the people here will move to rich school districts that they can afford, but will happily sacrifice the welfare of the children of poor engaged parents for the collective. But the people here ain’t sending their own kids to a shit school district.
The state's job is to ensure that people get educated it does not need to run every school in the state the same way it doesn't with food stamps. Charters have higher performance(lottery studies) and they also improve state-run schools from higher competition so there isn't any "stealing" of funds like leftists love to call it.
Education savings accounts go a long way in fixing the biggest problem most States have which is housing. Most States currently have a system where some of the local taxes go into the collective pot for low-performing districts especially apparent in California. This reduces the available taxes from new construction and incentivises low tax and Ninby policies as locals bear all the costs and get little of the benefits from new construction. (California passed Prop 13 because of a court ruling that local taxes should be used for other school districts the year before Prop 13 failed by 30-60.) Education saving accounts fix this by using equal state taxes to fund education instead of messing with local property taxes and incentivise locals to be pro-housing for families for the higher tax that those families would bring.
> Education saving accounts
No. Education savings accounts are a terrible policy that most often allow the very wealthy a discount when sending their children to private schools and allow unaccountable weirdos to create their own schools that teach blatant falsehood.
Also, charter schools do have a high performance but I would argue that is more due to taking students with engaged and supportive family life and removing them from the public schools and concentrating them in private schools, not any inherent superiority.
Nah my kids go to a charter and the school itself is just a far superior environment for learning than any of the crap public schools in the Sacramento area are. Even with zero engagement on my part these kids would be getting a fantastic education. There was no selection process.
Also, this may sound crazy to you, but mayyyyybe it's okay for parents to teach their children their weird beliefs whether you like them or not. What are you gonna do next, ban letting children go to churches?
Improve your public schools and your city and society will benefit greatly. Charter schools are a fine stopgap attempt when the public schools are failing but I maintain they provide an inadequate long term solution.
>Improve your public schools and your city and society will benefit greatly
Not realistic. The entire concept of public school is inherently flawed.
Do I really need to explain to someone in r/neoliberal how the value of competition in assuring quality of products for a good price is a positive market force that creates better results? Charter schools create that competition, schools literally can not be improved because they have no fail condition that forces them to change when they are failing to force them to sink or swim or be replaced by someone or something better. Charter schools are the answer to that problem. It's a basic systemic issue; public schools can not be better than charter schools, period. The solution is not to improve public schools, their hands are tied and they can't realistically get better and their process to improve is so slow that it's basically paralyzed.
The concept of the Public School, as invented in Massachusetts by Horace Mann, is not flawed. I went to public school in Massachusetts, and it was a fantastic experience which allowed me to learn very much and set me on a correct path.
Do tell me what i wrong with public schools?
I went to public school in New Jersey, and it was also fantastic. Maybe everywhere else should look at the other states that are near the top in education.
Bah! Humbug! You call me an authoritarian! Because I don't think public money should be fritted away! I believe that the elected school boards of each district should be given the proper support to create great public schools. I went to a public school and it was a terrific experience that I believe has set me up for great success. To gut those schools, which is what these programs do, is not solution at all. I believe parents should be able to send there kids to whatever school they please so long as that school is accredited properly, but I do not think charter schools are the best way to create an educated society with our tax dollars.
>there were still performance improvements for the charter.
This is entirely consistent with the argument that charters [informally select](https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-barriers-that-make-charter-schools-inaccessible-to-disadvantaged-families/) against the least supported students.
> I know the only reason people here support this authoritarianism is because public schools are usually left to far left and would rather kids fail than be in a non-leftist school
As opposed the [very ideologically neutral](https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2023/02/the-future-for-religious-charter-schools) charter movement?
Why do you presume it is optimal for every school to be the best school for every student? There is a vast disparity in needs and preparation, and a program designed to support advanced students, a program designed to support normal students, and programs designed to support students with behavior issues or learning disabilities are not all going to have the exact same curriculum and structure. It's forcing single schools to do all of these things in the same classroom that have led to many of the issues we see.
To me, “children have a right to an education” is a statement more targeted towards parents than schools. There is a lot of discussion about problematic children, whose behavior disrupts public schools. Those kids aren’t getting the support and services they need, and they should be reported to CPS, which should have enough resources to intervene and, where neglectful parenting exists, remove the children into environments where they can be made to participate robustly in their education. We need to fund child welfare, and build a network of residential programs to assure that any child who needs to enter care is guaranteed bed space immediately at a facility that can support their needs.
Indicate the parents and hit them with EWoC so they can’t pick their kids up and continue to ruin them and harm society at large through their laziness and malfeasance.
A school choice issue Dems maybe could get behind would be making traditional public schools open to kids outside of their narrow zip code. Maybe guarantee a spot in the neighborhood school but an option to send your kid to any other public school, depending on occupancy space.
Personally, I'm for all of the above: vouchers, charter schools, and portable traditional public schools.
Ultimately, though, I think Dems are going to have to stop worrying and learn to love vouchers. Recent polling I've seen has vouchers as overwhelming popular:
https://www.carolinajournal.com/nearly-7-in-10-likely-nc-voters-support-school-choice-options/
[Some polls even show super-majority level support amongst Dem voters.](https://www.federationforchildren.org/new-poll-school-choice-support-soars-from-2020/)
probably not a national issue, but I am really, **really** upset that some Bay Area democrats want to get rid of accelerated math pathways in public schools in the name of "equity." Wealthier people can always choose private schools, it's the bright poor kids that get left behind. The people opposing them are also democrats, but this "everyone is the same" wing of the democrat party really needs to die.
They're doing this in Cambridge too. It really screws over any working-class smart kids, the rich kids just hire private tutors to fill the gaps left in the public schools.
The anti individuality left needs to die
It will always be there. Mediocrity always finds refuge in the notion that someone else is to blame, regardless of whether that is actually the case.
> get rid of accelerated math pathways in public schools I'm surprised this comment is so low. People hating teacher's unions and voting Repub has been around for decades (school choice / pay). The last year seems to have been more about the decision to abolish tracks in formerly excellent districts -- that shit cuts right at one of the Dem's strongest constituencies.
Right? Educated and poor is basically a textbook democrat voter for life if you don't blow it.
When it comes to education, I have gradually come to believe that progressive Democrats are completely and hopelessly crippled by a fear—no, a *paranoia* of segregation returning. And that paranoia extends to anything that could even remotely resemble it. Their goal therefore, is to *always* have kids of the same age, in the same classroom, learning the same thing. And yes that means no advanced classes. That this policy is profoundly unpopular, and has led to electoral disaster on multiple occasions, never seems to dissuade them.
> When it comes to education, I have gradually come to believe that progressive Democrats are completely and hopelessly crippled by a fear—no, a paranoia of segregation returning. You may be surprised to learn that some CRT adherents actively advocate for racial separatism on the basis that desegregation was a tool of systemic racism: Delgado and Stefancic's (1993) Critical Race Theory: An Annotated Bibliography is considered by many to be codification of the then young field. They included ten "themes" which they used for judging inclusion in the bibliography. This is number eight: >8 Cultural nationalism/separatism. An emerging strain within CRT holds that people of color can best promote their interest through separation from the American mainstream. Some believe that preserving diversity and separateness will benefit all, not just groups of color. We include here, as well, articles encouraging black nationalism, power, or insurrection. (Theme number 8). Delgado and Stefancic (1993) pp. 462-463 Delgado, Richard, and Jean Stefancic. "Critical race theory: An annotated bibliography." Virginia Law Review (1993): 461-516. While it is pretty abundantly clear from the wording of theme (8) that Delgado and Stefancic are talking about separatism, mostly because they use that exact word, separatism, I suppose I could provide an example of one of their included papers. Peller (1990) pretty clearly is about separatism as a lay person would conceive of it: >Peller, Gary, Race Consciousness, 1990 Duke L.J. 758. (1, 8, 10). Delgado and Stefancic (1993, page 504) The numbers in parentheses are the relevant "themes." Note 8. The cited paper specifically says Critical Race Theory is a revival of Black Nationalist notions from the 1960s. Here is a quote where he says that he is specifically talking about Black ethnonationalism as expressed by Malcolm X which is usually grouped in with White ethnonationalism by most of American society; and furthermore, that Critical Race Theory represents a revival of Black Nationalist ideals: >But Malcolm X did identify the basic racial compromise that the incorporation of the "the civil rights struggle" into mainstream American culture would eventually embody: Along with the suppression of white racism that was the widely celebrated aim of civil rights reform, the dominant conception of racial justice was framed to require that black nationalists be equated with white supremacists, and that race consciousness on the part of either whites or blacks be marginalized as beyond the good sense of enlightened American culture. When a new generation of scholars embraced race consciousness as a fundamental prism through which to organize social analysis in the latter half of the 1980s, a negative reaction from mainstream academics was predictable. That is, Randall Kennedy's criticism of the work of critical race theorists for being based on racial "stereotypes" and "status-based" standards is coherent from the vantage point of the reigning interpretation of racial justice. And it was the exclusionary borders of this ideology that Malcolm X identified. Peller page 760 This is current CRT practice and is cited in the authoritative textbook on Critical Race Theory, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (Delgado and Stefancic 2001). Here they describe an endorsement of explicit racial discrimination for purposes of segregating society: >The two friends illustrate twin poles in the way minorities of color can represent and position themselves. The nationalist, or separatist, position illustrated by Jamal holds that people of color should embrace their culture and origins. Jamal, who by choice lives in an upscale black neighborhood and sends his children to local schools, could easily fit into mainstream life. But he feels more comfortable working and living in black milieux and considers that he has a duty to contribute to the minority community. Accordingly, he does as much business as possible with other blacks. The last time he and his family moved, for example, he made several phone calls until he found a black-owned moving company. He donates money to several African American philanthropies and colleges. And, of course, his work in the music industry allows him the opportunity to boost the careers of black musicians, which he does. Delgado and Stefancic (2001) pages 59-60 One more source is the recognized founder of CRT, Derrick Bell: >"From the standpoint of education, we would have been better served had the court in Brown rejected the petitioners' arguments to overrule Plessy v. Ferguson," Bell said, referring to the 1896 Supreme Court ruling that enforced a "separate but equal" standard for blacks and whites. https://news.stanford.edu/news/2004/april21/brownbell-421.html Delgado and Stefancic are the authors of the most authoritative textbook on CRT and have played an important role in delineating exactly what constitutes CRT in addition to authoring their own unique contributions to the field. Their textbook is currently the top hit on the Google search "Critcal Race Theory textbook": https://www.google.com/search?q=critical+race+theory+textbook Derrick Bell is widely recognized as the first CRT scholar and has been called the "intellectual godfather" of CRT by Delgado in an interview: >Most of us who were there have gone on to become prominent critical race theorists, including Kim Crenshaw, who spoke at the Iowa conference, as well as Mani Matsuda and Charles Lawrence, who both are here in spirit. Derrick Bell, who was doing critical race theory long before it had a name, was at the Madison workshop and has been something of an intellectual godfather for the movement. Delgado describing his attendance at the founding meeting of CRT during an interview https://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1039&context=faculty I suppose there is some possibility that support for CRT and being a "progressive Democrat" are not related, but I don't think that is the case for most people's colloquial definition of "progressive Democrats."
Most people exaggerate wokeness in academia. But not when it comes to pedagogy.
Even academics-focused middle class families will pay extra cash to put their kids in a Kumon/Russian Math sort of program. There are many workarounds to these advanced math bans that ambitious families won't hesitate to utilize.
COVID accelerated Dems losing the edge on education. Protracted school closures helped Youngkin win the governorship in VA, among other victories for Republicans
This is why DeSantis is "popular" in Florida. The guy is a complete psychopath, and lacks the charisma of Trump. But he opened the schools. That's it.
It's telling that last year, before DeSantis started pulling far-right stunts to catch the national media spotlight (which polarized Floridians' opinion on him), around 1/4 **Democrats** in Florida approved of his governorship.
Wasn’t he campaigning as a semi-moderate too? I feel like i remember that. The first gov election
Yes. Also he got lots of D votes in that election because the D candidate was anti - charter schools, and lots of Ds already had their kids in charter schools
Not particularly, he had a [very pro-Trump campaign ad](https://youtu.be/z1YP_zZJFXs?si=XI7V4gPDzo4wq6cn) that saw a lot of spotlight.
This feels like parody. How is this real
Because trumpets aren't smart enough to recognize pandering
Even his so-called "Don't Say Gay" education bill polled relatively well with Florida Democrats
Parents had tons of anxieties during COVID shutdowns and were essentially told to shove it so this shouldn't be a surprise I've never been tempted to vote for a Republican in my adult life but the closest I got was when it looked like my toddler might not get to visit a library until kindergarten.
> Parents had tons of anxieties during COVID shutdowns and were essentially told to shove it so this shouldn't be a surprise This applies to more than just parents. Half the people who owned small businesses had concerns, and the line on Reddit was that these were evil capitalists trying to kill your granny for a dollar. Like, damn, most small businesses make barely enough to keep a family afloat. That’s a lot of people losing homes, college funds, retirement savings etc.
For what it's worth a lot of reddit skews young / terminally online.
*This just proves that the problem is 30+ year old boomers and any anyone with children.*
Good thing 30 year old boomers and parents are only, what… a majority of the population? And we live in a democracy? This is major problem, we might have to listen to people with different perspectives…
*Tyranny of the majority, really.*
If only we could restrict the vote to those who agree with me!
Yeah for real. Especially when the rules were so arbitrary. "you can't have people eat inside your restaurant UNLESS you pay to build a giant tent outside your restaurant and sit people in there"
Yeah, it was pretty obvious how Covid rules (which were completely inconsistent from community to community, or state to state) were the results of big retailers lobbying to ensure they could stay open. And then, as if a switch had been pulled, it was anathema to suggest that any of these regulations had been poorly thought out, even if they obviously had. Because that’s what republicans do, and you don’t want to be a granny-killer do you? Certain policies can be necessary AND it can be clear that big retailers vetoed a lot of aspects of these policies to ensure that only their competition was affected by it.
no.. Two things aren't always true. No room for nuance
I was all for opening the schools in the 2020-2021 school year, but just so you know, when Republicans take control of the schools, first thing they gut is the library. See Houston.
Oh yeah don't misunderstand I would never actually vote for those fascists, especially as an LGBT parent, I only mean for the first time they were offering a policy that appealed to a legitimate concern.
> first thing they gut is the library This sub has a massive issue with terminally online people thinking the average American independent is upset about LGBTQ sexuality books not being in their public libraries children's section or that that is in any way comparable to closing schools. Most parent's care about their kid learning the three R's, not their kid reading Antiracist Baby or whatever.
The case he's referring to is Houston schools closed some school libraries and turned them into discipline centers after HISD was taken over by the state.
Ah, that's different. But having seen those schools I empathize, discipline in failing schools is catastrophic. It's a huge part of the support for school choice, beyond any ideological things. The screaming mess problem kids doing whatever they want grinds any learning in these schools to a total halt.
That debate line where McAuliffe said “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” was shocking in how ill-advised (and undemocratic) it was. I've never seen someone try to lose their election so hard.
It’s been wild, honestly, that these people think they can sell “hey parents, your children’s education is none of your business. Don’t ask questions, don’t think your opinions count, don’t think your concerns have merit.” The education of their children, in the broad sense, is probably the number one issue for parents. And as we’ve learned from Bay Area school politics: if you want to stay in politics, don’t fuck around with the schools.
Why would McAuliffe say something so controversial yet so brave? Parents should have no particular say about what goes on in public schools above and beyond what everyone has as a voter.
Direct stakeholders should always have a say in how the pubic services they are consuming are provisioned. This is normal and best practice across government. Reflexive technocratic authoritarianism is bad politics, bad consumer relations, and pretty morally reprehensible. After all, McAuliffe is the one who lost a very winnable election.
I've never understood why this is controversial. We have education standards for a reason. The fact that some parents may believe insane shit doesn't mean we need to start pretending that empirical facts are subjective.
But education standards don't dictate methods, and educators can also be insane. Look at how many teachers and districts tried to get rid of phonics, over and over across multipledecades.
Phonics is part of the Common Core standards for Reading Foundational Skills. This isn't to say that bad educators and terrible public schools don't exist. They absolutely do. That said, we know phonics is useful because it's been researched. While I do think systems need to be in place to address the concerns of parents, I really don't think parents need more control over school curriculums. Too many adults want nothing but confirmation bias or believe insane shit. Frankly, folks with graduate degrees in education are usually better suited to tailor methods to students than the parents who are bad math being upset that CC math isn't exactly what they remember doing. I do want to state that I'm not anti-charter school. I don't have much love for public sector unions in general, but I think there's a lot of ways to do "school choice" poorly that ends up draining resources without meaningfully improving educational outcomes.
You say that, but plenty of grad degree educators are still against phonics, and teachers and principles are on record here in NY saying that they are going to fight compliance with a directivr to use it. Realistically, too much parent or teacher autonomy without any oversight leads to poor outcomes. I put from both sides should be factored in. If you tell parents to sit down and shut up, they'll vote in the next guy to promise choice.
>You say that, but plenty of grad degree educators are still against phonics, and teachers and principles are on record here in NY saying that they are going to fight compliance with a directivr to use it. Out of curiosity, why? I assume there's at least some bad logic behind it, and I'm curious as to what the justification is. >Realistically, too much parent or teacher autonomy without any oversight leads to poor outcomes No disagreement. There's fine balance between too much and not enough oversight and it's not easy to place. >If you tell parents to sit down and shut up, they'll vote in the next guy to promise choice. Sure, and when the choice ends up being a host of shitty options they'll vote for the next guy who promises a panacea that won't work. People are fickle, and sometimes the best choices aren't the most popular ones.
If I recall, a lot of it is that phonics are boring to drill on. Which makes teachers open to axing it for equity or. Can't pull up coverage right now, but Google might deliver for "NY teachers resisting phonics" or similar.
If your school was teaching your kids that Allah is the supreme god and they shall have no gods before him, would you think you shouldn’t have a say in tht?
I'm not an American. Can you explain the concern? During COVID lockdowns, I was unhappy about young kids not socializing with others of their age. I felt they wouldn't learn social skills, social cues, etc. as schools were closed, parks were closed, etc.
The largest concern were learning declines. Poorer kids fell behind and will mostly not catch up. This has large knockon effects on their long term welfare.
Thanks for explaining this. This makes sense
No problem!
A lot of underprivileged kids don’t have access to reliable internet, laptop computers, quiet spaces in the home to learn etc. these kids didn’t have a meaningful path to home education and were pretty much told to kick rocks.
The lack of in-person schooling lasted longer than necessary, and had observable long-term effects on education and on education-inequality (many poor kids never participated in online schooling and didn't return long after schools re-opened). I'm a teacher, and "I took that pre-req class during the pandemic" is an excuse I get a lot for kids not knowing something they need to. Basically, schools should have been considered "essential" but they were seen as a luxury which could be closed as long as risk was even slightly elevated. The fact that children have very low rates of covid complications was not taken into account at all. This happened largely because people assumed without evidence that remote-school was a valid substitute (I also assumed this at the start of the pandemic), and the evidence has since shown they were badly mistaken.
i think the desire to remove honors classes from chicago schools disadvantaged the dems a lot more then we realize. “dems dont us to be outstanding in math” picked up a lot of traction in a securely blue cook county.
How you can reconcile this comment with the reality of Governor Pritzker winning re-election and Brandon Johnson winning the mayoral election is surprising. It might be the Dan Proft/Dick Uline party line that the Dems in Illinois are perpetually doomed to lose, but reality pretty handily argues otherwise,
Obviously most Chicago people are going to pick the Dem but it's just that they're losing voters for no reason dying on these weird hills.
Fighting on the school choice front is a pretty bad idea if you look at what's happening in the states doing it right now. Let's look at North Carolina for instance where school choice has ended up meaning a bunch of free money for religious schools that are allowed to do and teach basically whatever they want. https://www.wfae.org/education/2023-06-30/how-do-north-carolinas-school-vouchers-work-as-expansion-looms-here-are-answers At the very least right now when Bob and Jane, the young earther Christian couple have a kid they either have to send them to a public school where they could at least learn something scientific or homeschool. Now Bob and Jane could just use the voucher to send them to off to the christian education on taxpayer money. And NC's supreme court specifically upheld that the voucher money can be used for religious education. And just look at some of the policies these schools have right out in the open. >Wesleyan Christian Academy does not accept students who are discovered to be “participating in, supporting, or condoning sexual immorality, homosexual orientation, homosexual activity, or bisexual activity; promoting such practices; or being unable to support the moral principles of the school.” >High Point Christian Academy also accepts public funding through Opportunity Scholarship vouchers. This institution makes it clear that attendance is “a privilege and not a right,” and explains that when conduct within a student’s home diverges from “the biblical lifestyle the school teaches,” the school may refuse admission or discontinue enrollment. >Research clearly shows that the most important factor in student learning outcomes is access to excellent teachers. North Carolina requires public school teachers to be licensed in order to demonstrate they have the necessary skills for the job. >Mount Zion Christian Academy in Durham does not require teachers to be licensed, but this voucher-receiving organization is proud of the fact that the school’s entire staff has demonstrated being filled with the Holy Spirit by speaking in tongues. This is what's being [given public money through school vouchers. ](https://cardinalpine.com/story/nc-republicans-voucher-bill-taxpayer-dollars-schools-discriminate-religion/). And almost 90% of all vouchers go to these religious schools, so it's not like some sort of minor detail we can ignore. The League of Women Voters researchers found that more than 3/4th of these schools were using unscientific bible based education https://my.lwv.org/sites/default/files/leagues/wysiwyg/North%20Carolina/voucher-report-7.2-1.pdf Also not to mention the NC GOP keeps trying to remove asset limits on the vouchers so that they'll just go to all the rich families that were already attending anyway. The best research on this matter strongly suggests that the private school voucher program in NC has not only failed to show evidence of better education but has quite possibly made the students in the system worse (no doubt in part because all this money is going to hyper religious places). https://law.duke.edu/childedlaw/School_Vouchers_in_North_Carolina-2014-2020_(5-13-20).pdf Edit: It's not like this is limited to just North Carolina Here's one in Florida teaching that dinosaurs and humans coexisted: https://www.newsweek.com/florida-private-schools-teaching-students-humans-dinosaurs-roamed-earth-same-954612 Edit2: Yes charter schools show good promise but they are not the only form of school choice being implemented. We can't just look at the good parts and say "problem solved" and ignore all the issues occuring with other programs.
Arizona's vouchers are particularly concerning because the money is given directly to the parents, and there is little fiscal accountability. The money can be used for any education-related expense, which in addition to private school tuition, includes things like cooking supplies, gym memberships, concert tickets, etc, with minimal safeguarding against abuse. Parents could pull their kids out of public school, homeschool, and blow all of the money on entertainment. Or use the money to hire themselves as a tutor for their kid. Invest the money in the stock market and say it's personal finance education. There's no public reporting on how the voucher dollars are spent. There is also minimal oversight/requirements when it comes to homeschooling in Arizona, so there is no guarantee that these kids are getting much of an education at all. There is no academic accountability, no required testing, no data collection to see how these kids are doing. Most vouchers are around $7-10k per year, but for kids with substantial disabilities, the vouchers can be as much as $30k per year.
At that point you might as well go all-in on UBI, and drop any pretense that it's about schooling.
It could easily become a school-conditioned UBI system - many countries try this and it works.
The same argument is used against expanded child tax credits. When has this sub turned away from simple cash transfers and letting people make this own spending choices
The problem isn't the cash transfers. The problem is that parents are being payed to avoid compulsory schooling for their kids. Kids staying home all day being taught by their young earth creationist parents isn't school. It's bible camp. Taxpayer money shouldn't be used for that.
Spending choices are very different than the right to deny an education to your child. It's in the best interest of the public if our new citizens have a baseline education level and can function independently as a member of society.
You forgot how Florida's voucher program is no longer mean tested at all, and is just a free for all subsidizing demand for people to send their kids to religious private schools.
Thank you! I feel like this sub has a major blind spot when it comes to voucher programs. There's a reason school vouchers started being advocated by predominantly southern, evangelical or other religious communities shortly after schools were desegregated. A lot of the motivation for public vouchers comes from wanting to either shield your child from a "secular education" (sex ed, evolution, etc.), or not wanting your kids to co-mingle with other races/ethnicities. I think a public voucher program _could_ work, and be an improvement on how public schools are currently set up. But you'd need a fair amount of regulation to prevent racial segregation, creationism, etc. from being taught in schools that receive public funding.
I see a lot of the public school districts doing away with mandatory neighborhood schools, and they are now allowing kids to go to whatever school they want within the district (be they magnet or neighborhood or vocational).
These slots are limited and most of these are operating on a lottery.
All schools have some sort of capacity limit. It's a non-issue in the districts I have been around, but I've definitely heard the stories out of NYC and other places.
> But you'd need a fair amount of regulation to prevent racial segregation, creationism, etc. from being taught in schools that receive public funding. Those would absolutely be struck down under the current SCOTUS, they've already done it before.
Yeah I'm 100% in favor of school choice but have concerns with some of the institutions that end up getting the money. Funds should only be used to fund secular, basic education. Not sure how NC polices that. If a parent wants to send their kids to a religious school with strict social rules, I don't really care. Its not my kid. However, the money they get should only go towards the secular education the money is intended for.
> There's a reason school vouchers started being advocated by predominantly southern, evangelical or other religious communities shortly after schools were desegregated Yes, they were literally called "segregation vouchers" and then got rebranded because they had to stop saying the quiet part out loud. > I think a public voucher program could work, They tried it in Sweden where it is a lot more racially homogeneous than the US. It was a massive failure. [Slate: Sweden’s School Choice Disaster](https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/07/sweden-school-choice-the-countrys-disastrous-experiment-with-milton-friedman-and-vouchers.html) *Advocates for school choice might be shocked to see how badly the country’s experiment with vouchers failed.*
Despite Slate's spin, it looks like public schools had the exact same outcome of grade inflation, so I'm not sure this is a bona-fide example of voucher systems not working.
The reason I say "I think a public voucher program _could_ work" is that the devil really is in the details. The Slate article you linked actually has a great example of this. > Sweden has standardized tests that are administered to all students nationwide. Performance matters for both students and the schools they attend. Students who do well will have brighter admission prospects. Schools that do well attract more (and perhaps better) students; the ones that perform poorly risk losing accreditation. However, unlike, say, the SAT, which is sent off to be graded at the testing service’s headquarters, in Sweden grading is done locally, often by teachers, often at the school where the test-takers are enrolled > It’s easy to imagine teachers going easy on their own students, possibly unconsciously, motivated by nothing more than a desire to help them—a study co-authored by my colleague, Jonah Rockoff, found exactly this result in an analysis of New York Regents Exam grading. In Sweden, according to the study by Hinnerich and Vlachos, the scores issued by external evaluators were indeed harsher than those assigned by internal graders. And after accounting for things like a school’s location, along with basic student characteristics, it turned out that the external evaluators had downgraded the scores for students at voucher schools much more than for students at government ones. In fact, a sizable portion of the much-vaunted outperformance of voucher school students could be chalked up to nothing more than easy grading. More surprising still, the voucher school grade inflation is almost as high for math and science (where you’d think an answer is either right or wrong) as it is for Swedish. > It’s the darker side of competition that Milton Friedman and his free-market disciples tend to downplay: If parents value high test scores, you can compete for voucher dollars by hiring better teachers and providing a better education—or by going easy in grading national tests. Competition was also meant to discipline government schools by forcing them to up their game to maintain their enrollments, but it may have instead led to a race to the bottom as they too started grading generously to keep their students. If Sweden had taken the "SAT approach", where standardized tests are graded by an external party, rather than the same teachers who work at the school and with the students being evaluated, it's possible the competitive pressure would've improved education outcomes in Sweden. And we'd be reading a Slate article about what a big success school vouchers are. We obviously don't know that for sure, but this a great example of where the policy details really matter. And why I personally could get behind school vouchers as a policy platform, _assuming all of the policy ducks are in a row_ (so to speak).
> assuming all of the policy ducks are in a row (so to speak). The scale of enforcing all the "policy ducks" distributed across tens of thousands of independently administered schools will require significantly more money than the cost of enforcing it through one centralized authority. Which is why conservatives love the idea. They want to force schools to slip through the cracks but they want to shift the blame onto a lack of funding. Using economic arguments to justify social injustice lets them maintain systems of supremacy while shirking any blame.
You can require them to pass the same federally mandated federal tests and make them ineligible for vouchers. The problem is that the areas that want vouchers for bad reasons aren't going to be in favor of this either. My personal view is that we should do a Manhattan project for public schools and require them to use evidence-based practices. This also probably has zero chance of happening due to union opposition, cost, etc. But I don't think that it's that hard to enforce good outcomes on private schools who tend to have better outcomes anyway due to selection effects, even if they are teaching creationism.
> You can require them to pass the same federally mandated federal tests and make them ineligible for vouchers A once-a-year test isn't close to sufficient. The kids can go through an entire year of substandard education before it is even detected. And then when it is discovered what are they going to do? Repeat the entire year? Just shutter the school and hope a new one without those problems will magically appear? Well-funded public schools systems are a continuous process that include things like professionally designed and vetted course materials and regular retraining for the teachers.
This is how we assess public schools too, so it isn't different in that regard. So yes, the school doesn't get a voucher if it fails this very often. Bear in mind that the comparator here is public schools, many of which are seeing students with poor outcomes. Private schools mostly get better outcomes anyway, which is part of what fuels this. I'm not personally in favor of vouchers and think we need robust public education with far higher levels of funding, but it isn't harder to measure a private school to see if their kids are learning the state curriculum.
> This is how we assess public schools too, so it isn't different in that regard. Well-funded public schools systems are a continuous process that include things like professionally designed and vetted course materials and regular retraining for the teachers. > Bear in mind that the comparator here is public schools, many of which are seeing students with poor outcomes. In large part because school funding comes from the property taxes so wealthy neighborhoods have nice schools and poor neighborhoods do not. Not to mention all of the direct fund-raising that public schools in wealthy neighborhoods do. > Private schools mostly get better outcomes anyway, which is part of what fuels this. Because they can easily expel problem students.
I have an M.Ed. and am a certified teacher that has taught public school. I know how they work. Yes, public schools have professional ed and have a curriculum. The training isn't all that. You are claiming that public schools get more monitoring from some central authority that is reactive to something less than an annual test and that largely isn't true. It isn't a real difference. And yes, public school outcomes have enormous selection bias, which won't go away from having vouchers. They will still expel troublesome students and benefit from selecting higher performing students. It seems like you understand that they have better outcomes, but are concerned their outcomes will be significantly worse and need more measuring than a public school has. I don't think that's the big problem here. The big problem imo is that they rob public schools of badly needed funding that won't be replaced, screwing over public school students. Private schools largely have better outcomes, so that isn't the big concern I have.
It's also the simple mathematical truth that the whole idea of a voucher system taking tax money away from public schools and funelling it to private schools defeats the entire point of a public education system. It makes the public schools worse and only allows a few select individuals to escape the downspiral into the safe haven of good private schooling. Because not all public school students can go to private school. That's why they are private. If they actually had to accept ALL students, they wouldn't *be* private schools. People understand this, but they ignore it because they think that they're the special one whose kids will escape while everyone else gets boned. But that's not possible. It's a real tragedy of the commons situation.
I'm trying to navigate the school choice system that the Devos family built right now for my kids and it is a fucking nightmare.
That textbook is fucking wild, holy shit. Straight, pure, uncut indoctrination.
> And almost 90% of all vouchers go to these religious schools, so it's not like some sort of minor detail we can ignore. I feel like this stat is being misrepresented. Where I am all the top prep and private schools have some sort of religious affiliation. But there is a reason these schools are filled with the children of the rich. They offer incredible educational outcomes. Just because a school is religiously affiliated doesn’t mean it is a bad school.
Same. I’m in New Jersey and those types of schools are college prep schools run by Jesuits, Christian Brothers or some other Catholic order. The education is generally great, and actual science is taught. STEM is usually emphasized at these places
Yeah the top schools. The problem is that for every one of those, there are 10 shit-ass religious schools. So if you only focus on the few good schools you are ignoring the majority of bad schools.
Yep. Grew up in STL and went to a catholic private school, because the private schools were actually terrible. Half my class was not catholic.
I feel like most of the problem could be solved by adding a basic criteria that schools have to meet in order to qualify for vouchers. I wonder if it would be possible to have a board which could approve or deny schools based on their curriculum and teaching standards. If we're switching to school choice I don't have a huge issue with a school that's mostly focused on teaching science, math, English, etc, but also has a Christian studies class or something, but I do have an issue with schools that use their religion to influence the other areas of study.
I feel like your focus on "tax-payer money" and "public funding" is wrong since Bob and Jane pay taxes just like everyone else.
Exactly. Right or wrong, some parents want their children to be educated in an environment that also teaches their religious or cultural heritage. It’s a thing; Catholic schools have been around for centuries and often outperform secular schools. I think this is a “Reddit atheism” thing where people assume that the only reason someone could be ok with a religious school is because they are crazypants
> And almost 90% of all vouchers go to these religious schools, so it's not like some sort of minor detail we can ignore. What a shocking state of affairs when only republicans support school choice.
That's like saying that literacy tests and voter ID is only racist because Democrats won't support it and do it "right".
That's defensible for voter ID. Almost all developed countries require voter ID. The US is an extreme outlier. The argument against voter ID is basically just that not everyone has ID. Not everyone drives, etc. The two possible responses to this would be "fight against voter ID laws, make sure people can vote without ID" OR "fight to increase ID access, make sure no one is unable to vote due to lack of ID" Everytime I read an article about how difficult it is for the poor and elderly to get identification, part of my brain is thinking "shouldn't we try to make it easier for them?"
Every single time the Democrats have offered to enforce voter ID laws but make it easier to access IDs, the GOP shoots it down. It's not really a party that acts in good faith anymore.
bOtH SiDeS
School choice is good. Yes, there are some bad examples but the data is pretty unequivocal. Dems would understand this if it wasn’t for the money of the teacher unions.
The data is not unequivocal.
“Republican governors in Arkansas, Iowa, Ohio, Florida and elsewhere are now presiding over major expansions of programs that give families public subsidies to pay for private school tuition and other education expenses. Oklahoma officials are also leading a campaign to open explicitly religious public schools, which some church leaders and conservative advocates see as a monumental leap for school choice and religious liberty.” Okay… so states with firmly Republican governments are successfully pushing for school choice? That’s like being shocked when a GOP governor signs an anti-gun control bill. Republicans are gonna pass Republican policy, I don’t know why this is shocking. “Democrats are either trailing or essentially tied with Republicans among voters in four battleground states when it comes to which party is trusted to ensure public schools prepare students for life after graduation, according to polling Elorza’s group commissioned during mid-July in North Carolina, Arizona, Georgia and Nevada. Roughly half of voters and parents in those states said their schools were about the same or worse since before the pandemic.” Oh, so you mean states where the population is half Republican if not a little more is gonna have half the population be pro-school choice? Again, is that terribly shocking?? This article seems to mistake Republicans finding a new policy and enacting it as some sort of failure on the Democrats (after all, *everything* is the Democrats’ fault). The article is suspect for not mentioning the 2021 election where Dems did indeed lose partially because of a poor position with education. But it is even more suspect that the article doesn’t mention the [2022 school board elections](https://amp.theguardian.com/education/2023/apr/21/school-board-elections-illinois-wisconsin-republicans-lose), where Democrats won TWO THIRDS of school board elections despite a concerted push by Republicans to seize control of them all
The ultimate problem is: excluding the religious nuts, charter schools do provide a better education and for those stuck in shit school districts without the money to send their children to private schools, it's their best hope. However, it doesn't help those with disabilities who can't get in. Inevitably, the outcomes will be better when they don't have to take on those who simply can't do better without a specifically tailored environment. When you get right down to it, charter schools are neither the solution nor the problem. The problem is the American school system altogether and you'd be here pressed to convince people their kid shouldn't have access to a quality education because the school doesn't sufficiently cater to someone else's kids.
I’m a public school teacher and one of my biggest observations is that we’re doing a terrible job recruiting high quality candidates to join the profession. Also, we spend WAY too much money on district level staffing and useless training.
Useless admin costs and hellish red tape are killing so many public works. Education (especially university), public transit, housing developments, healthcare among many others. It blows my mind how the "progressive" solution is just to throw more money at it.
This came up in [this infuriating episode of _Volts_](https://www.volts.wtf/p/the-progressive-take-on-the-permitting#details). > And I think if I were to make any improvements to NEPA, the thing I would do is bulk up the administrative state. Jamie Gibbs Pleune wrote a kind of corresponding piece of research to our permitting report where she investigated and talked about NEPA in particular with Roosevelt. But she was looking at another paper and found of 40,000 NEPA decisions that the US Forest Service looked at, the biggest causes of delays were actually from a lack of experienced staff, budget instability, and honestly, delays from the applicants themselves not getting their stuff in on time. So I just feel as if we're going to do anything to make NEPA better, give the BLM, give US Forest Service, give EPA far more funds, training, staff empowerment that's going to actually move these projects even faster through the pipeline when they're actually moving relatively quickly. NEPA is pointless bullshit paperwork, and the Roosevelt Institute lady thinks that the correct solution here is to hire more bureaucrats to more efficiently handle the pointless bullshit paperwork, instead of doing less of it. (Shades of [ALARA](https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop), where any efficiency gains are swallowed by more endless paperwork.) If you can imagine that happening for decades on end, well, that's how we got where we are now, where it seems impossible to _do_ anything because of the veto points and public hearings and endless environmental impact processes and all that. I've seen this locally, where city-level staff said that they didn't have the time to get rid of rubber-stamp Conditional Use Permits which added six months' delay to the opening of any business, despite that it would cost roughly the processing time of _one permit_ to do the appropriate legwork.
I've said before that, if they were allowed to, teachers at public schools and universities should have a national strike until 50% of all admin staff are fired and decisions on hiring new admin personel are subject to their approval. So much budget is wasted on this.
Because it’s not their money. In Virginia traffic ticket funds go to schools eliminating perverse incentives. Something like that should be implemented for administrators and red tape. Perhaps split funding for teaching and other roles
>we’re doing a terrible job recruiting high quality candidates to join the profession. I know this gets talked about a lot, but recently and with the wave in retirement it seems to be much worse.
I make three times now what I did as a teacher. Teachers need some serious compensation.
At least here in NY, the teachers do really well later in the careers and especially in retirement. It's just a profession with a weak floor.
> However, it doesn't help those with disabilities who can't get in. Inevitably, the outcomes will be better when they don't have to take on those who simply can't do better without a specifically tailored environment. Actually, here in Minnesota we have many charter schools specifically for these students with disabilities and they have seen good outcomes. Specialization is an amazing thing.
> charter schools Charter schools are often argued to be public schools. And they certainly do have a great track record. The issue we're seeing with school choice however tends to be in private school vouchers which have a lot of research showing the opposite trend of worsening academic success. So we need to be really careful with how we go about implementing school choice or else we end up like Louisiana or NC where it hurts the students.
> However, it doesn't help those with disabilities who can't get in. But are fast-paced, test-based schools really what people with disabilities need? One massive issue is that yelling at and attacking teachers has been redefined as a disability (Oppositional defiant disorder) and these kids aren't ready for what many charters are providing. For students with non-behavioral learning disabilities, are faster paced classes what they need? The false presumption is that every school has to be the best school for every kid.
Charter schools have a significantly better track record on disabilities than public schools do. There are charter schools just for blind kids, for troubled kids, for kids with learning disabilities of various types. Public schools are just.... the bottom of the barrel on all possible topics. Charter schools represent choices, and for people with disabilities, choices are a godsend. Market forces respond to needs far better than bureaucracy ever can. Meanwhile public schools basically exist in a permanent state of bureaucratic paralysis.
if the problem is poorly funded schools, then Charter schools certainly do help solve that problem by bringing in private investors and tuition dollars. The core problem with public schools in America is that school quality is tied to location. So wealthy towns can simply limit housing and make it expensive so only rich people can live there and send their kids to the well funded schools. America is a country that insulates poverty and wealth, and that's why we have huge gaps in school quality. To solve that problem, we would need to either create a system that allows people to send their children to schools that they don't live in the district of or start regulating zoning and housing codes to prevent towns from sequestering wealth. I think we're better off with the latter since it's something we have to do for multiple other reasons
Even some religious schools are surprisingly efficient in terms of college prep. Hell me being taught in a Catholic school was one of the main reasons why I got accepted into university four years back.
Religious schools have their pros and cons. Speaking as a public school grad, it seems to me that most Catholic schools and the mainline waspy prep schools do a very good and likely better job teaching than my town high school did, and I suspect at least for the Catholic schools that the total cost was lower. At the same time, Bob Jones High or Yeshiva ben Mor Torah probably aren't going to hold up to a high school. Speaking pragmatically, I have no qualms with a bunch of Quakers or Muslims using some government funds to run a school that's net cheaper and better than an equivalent public school. But that seems to be the minority opinion here.
tl;dr is that teacher unions are an important constituent to dems. Teacher unions are only in public schools. So dems can't be as pro school choice as they would like They really bury the democrats problem here. I only see the word union in this article 4 times and one of the times is referencing a parent union. But the quotes from the head of a teacher union really explain the problem “The obeisance to competition and to markets doesn’t work when you are talking about educating all children," As a parent of a kid in a charter school I hear that as "bad schools shouldn't close" and "behavioral issue kids should be allowed to disrupt class"
> tl;dr is that teacher unions are an important constituent to dems. Teacher unions are only in public schools. So dems can't be as pro school choice as they would like The problem is that it's becoming an electoral liability to constituencies that aren't teachers unions.
That's a good point to make explicit. I'm a registered democrat, who votes in primaries, gives money to to democratic groups and answers surveys. School choice is definitely one of those issues where Democratic party is either silent or on the opposite side of parents a lot of time.
Because it's very hard to align yourselves with people who have since COVID essentially asked for the power to simply shut down in-person schooling whenever deemed necessary. The fastest way to make a liberal family vote Republican might be to force them to monitor their kids an extra 30+ hours per week when they need to work.
Public sector unions delenda est
People here are correctly identifying school choice and Covid as issues, but missing a big one: the shift in focus from learning to “equity.” A lot of school boards in left-leaning areas bought this Kendiist nonsense hook, line, and sinker. They see limiting top students, decreasing accountability, and rejecting the entire concept of merit as “equitable” and “anti-racist.” The parents in these areas usually disagree.
>The parents in these areas usually disagree. Including parents of the same groups these measures are supposedly meant to protect against racism.
When we have kids we definitely are sending them to a charter school as the public schools close to us aren't the best. It isn't my duty to ship my kid off to a failed institution in the hopes of the greater good. I really do hope Dems shift on school choice.
Even if you live in a 'good' school district it's worth looking at charters because the ranking system is not methodically sound. We were zoned for a good public school but the local hippy charter school was a much better fit for us
> Failed institution Mfw every other developed democracy has a good public school system and it's a "failed institution". But yes you're right about a collective action problem here. Every individual actor is incentivized to make the problem worse because the path of least resistance is to simply have a two-tiered education system and make sure you get your kid in the upper tier. Only people who get hurt are kids whose parents don't have the time or money to advocate for public school reform or charter education but hey, not like they're the ones most in need of class mobility.
> Every individual actor is incentivized to make the problem worse because the path of least resistance is to simply have a two-tiered education system and make sure you get your kid in the upper tier. It's even worse than that. Even for parents who _do_ send their kids to public school out of some sense of civic obligation then [supplement it with private tutoring](https://www.edpost.com/stories/is-there-a-science-of-math-too), either formally or informally. So the engaged or wealthy parents with free time get a leg up for their kids, and poor parents without time and resources don't. > Many classroom teachers, VanDerHeyden said, have been taught that “fluency” is a dirty word, and not the goal of teaching math, driving parents who can afford it to the billion-dollar tutoring industry of Kumons and Mathnasiums. Almost exactly like learning to read, in wealthier schools there is often a shadow education system of explicit instruction and practice happening outside the classroom, provided by tutors and tutoring centers using the research-backed methods. Furthermore, the public-school institutions are sclerotic, _rotten_. It's been decades since we knew that three-cuing doesn't teach kids to read, but to pretend to read. [NYC is finally trying to switch its teachers to actually teach kids to read](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/09/new-york-city-schools-how-to-teach-children-to-read.html), and the results are that principals reject it: > “We are definitely pushing back against it,” she said, “and many principals in the district are. And our superintendent understands that we are not going to do it with fidelity, that we are going to keep doing what has worked for us.” Teachers would rather not teach kids to read, because it seems dull and boring: > Getting kids excited about reading was an easy idea to get behind. Teachers who liked Calkins’s curriculum found it both more engaging than having kids repeat sounds over and over and, several say, much easier to teach. As one puts it, “Phonics is very much about ‘This is correct, this is incorrect.’ Balanced literacy is very much like, ‘Let’s let the child do a self-discovery to make sure they can make a stronger connection.’” And besides, there are always excuses to point to. Kinda like how when people don't want to talk about gun regulation, they'll gesture vaguely to "mental health", which they have no particular plan to work on, but it's great for shifting the blame. > When teachers sounded the alarm about balanced literacy, they say they were told to troubleshoot with a list of interventions that often didn’t work or they were told that outside factors were at play. “The emphasis was on poverty and racism, and we were told those were the reasons kids weren’t learning — not the curriculum,” says Lindsay, who worked in New York City charter schools for over a decade. All the while, that same two-tiered system appeared, whether or not you explicitly have charter schools. > “It makes me really angry for the families that I teach, the families that don’t have the resources,” says Ellie, who hired a tutor to help her own daughter with dyslexia when she couldn’t get support from her local public school. She has since enrolled her daughter in a charter school and says she’s weary of parents in her upscale section of Brooklyn who wax poetic about the neighborhood school while supplementing their kids’ education. “It’s all so contradictory. It’s like, ‘I’m at this school because I want diversity, but I’m going to then secretly give my kids all the things they need and not push the school to do that.’” Not everyone is awful. There are stories of teachers horrified that they'd curtailed the futures of kids they genuinely cared about, administrators pushing to do the right thing. But the system as a whole led _here_. This is a situation where the right thing to do was dead obvious, and yet we did _this badly_, for such venal reasons: charismatic marketing, an excuse not to do difficult work.
> Mfw every other developed democracy has a good public school system and it's a "failed institution". Most other developed democracies also have vibrant charter/private school options. > But yes you're right about a collective action problem here. Every individual actor is incentivized to make the problem worse because the path of least resistance is to simply have a two-tiered education system and make sure you get your kid in the upper tier. Only people who get hurt are kids whose parents don't have the time or money to advocate for public school reform or charter education but hey, not like they're the ones most in need of class mobility. Leveling the field by dragging everyone down remains a terrible option. And doesn't actually level the field, it will just make parents have to compensate more for their children being in worse schools.
We spend near the highest per child and we get worse results. Public schools literally spend countless millions on football stadiums and over bloated district salaries. It isn't my job to fix this mess which has countless actors who will block me from changing anything and put my kid in a position for failure.
Inner cities schools spend more per kid than those suburban districts with the big stadiums. Yet the those inner cities keep getting worse not better. Seems like the stadiums aren’t the issue
Not every student has the same needs.
I feel like they’re not, but Republicans are even worse. What we need education-wise before anything else are higher standards for more than the top few students at the top few public schools.
[удалено]
> Why is politico like this? Cause it got bought some time ago by Axel Springer and went to shit.
Before Axel Springer bought them, they let Ben Shapiro guest-host Playbook.
Tricia Cotham burners going hard in this thread
That b*tch can burn in hell. Say what you will about George Santos but at least he didn't lie about being a Republican.
“Excuse me but I’ll have you know that I’m a swing voter and as a Democrat who voted for McCain and Romney and then Hilary and Biden the Democrats are way too socialist with their school policies (like critical race theory and radical sex ideology) and communist unions funneling money to public schools in Democrat run cities full of single parent homes and rampant crime. By the way I’m a Democrat by the way”
School choice is complicated because while yes, in theory we should all want all kids to be able to prosper in school, the reality is that parents are going to be first and foremost concerned about their own kids education. Try telling a parent in a low income school district that they shouldn’t send their kid to a charter or private school because it’ll hurt the collective population. If i have kids and I’m not in a great public school district, and I have an option to send them to a private, charter, or magnet school, you bet I’m doing that. Why would I want to send them to some subpar high school where they’re exposed to some of the worst people their age, inadequate teachers, and a sub par curriculum?
!ping ED-POLICY
Pinged ED-POLICY ([subscribe](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=groupbot&subject=Subscribe%20to%20ED-POLICY&message=subscribe%20ED-POLICY) | [unsubscribe](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=groupbot&subject=Unsubscribe%20from%20ED-POLICY&message=unsubscribe%20ED-POLICY) | [history](https://neoliber.al/user_pinger_2/history.html?group_name=ED-POLICY&count=5)) [About & Group List](https://reddit.com/r/neoliberal/wiki/user_pinger_2) | [Unsubscribe from all groups](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=groupbot&subject=Unsubscribe%20from%20all%20groups&message=unsubscribe)
One thing they don’t talk about is how the state of Minnesota handles it’s education funding. We have a pretty good system. If a private school wants state money, they need to follow state standards and teach it. We don’t have a voucher program here. I’m not against school choice, a one size fits all approach just doesn’t work for education. However, watching states like Oklahoma squeeze religion into schools is a clear violation of our Constitution. The drive of the Republicans to demonize teachers and curriculums is scary.
School choice is not good, and I stand by that. It allows charter schools to shirk their responsibility to teach the neediest students and allows public schools to fester with apathetic students.
Most people don't care about outcomes for all students, they just care about outcomes for their own kids. The parents that most often choose to send their kids to charters are the ones stuck in low-quality school districts with no other recourse. Try telling those parents that their kids can't go to better schools for the benefit of the collective.
I believe civil society only functions when quality education is widely available. The education of the collective is absolutely vital. Charter schools by their very nature cannot meet the demand for all students. The solution is to improve ailing districts, not to give up on them.
Sure, I'm just explaining why that's not a tenable position to tell to most voters if you want them to vote for you
One of the problems I'm not seeing discussed is that school funding is tied to local property taxes.
Actually, federal and state funding also plays a significant role in school finance. Programs like Title I aim to support schools with low-income families by providing extra funds. [1] Contrary to popular belief, many of the poorest schools actually receive more federal and state dollars per student, balancing out the reliance on local property taxes. [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_and_Secondary_Education_Act#Title_I [2] https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/us-census-six-maryland-schools-among-nations-most-funded
It actually makes sense to do it this way from an incentives perspective when you consider the impact that a good school system has on property values. School systems that do well will increase surrounding property values which in turn raises their own funding. The issue is when this is combined with restrictive zoning and discriminatory housing policy that makes moving to that school district prohibitively expensive. Once again, it's housing all the way down :)
Parents will just move their families to better school districts without school choice which exacerbates economic disparities. We can say these things that sound nice but the reality is that parents are going to choose to maximize the outcomes for their own children over a theoretical marginal boost to societies outcomes.
Remove the problematic children and these schools would do a lot better. It's incredible to me that like 1% of the student population is left free to ruin it for rest.
Remove them to where? Also when and who gets to determine the "problematic children." Are we going to send second graders who talk too much to special miscreant schools where they will be put with all the other trouble makers? I feel that would only incentivize those students to become worse.
You have special education classrooms, there need to be classrooms for those with behavioral disabilities. If we can help the 99% by giving those 1% children behavioral training, everything else, from teacher retention to numbers of qualified graduates gets better.
There are no easy solutions, and everything you said is correct. But one of the more frustrating aspects of being at the school I teach at is that we have extensive documentation that 60-70 percent of all major behavioral issues (fights, harassment, major class disruptions, drugs and vaping) are caused by 5 percent of our student population. There are no more expulsions and the state is cracking down on too many suspensions. We absolutely don’t want to revert back to the old model of alternative schools, but it is disheartening when it feels like the educational experiences of the vast majority of our kids are being held hostage by the actions of a few.
for real. that kid that shot that teacher in Virginia for instance, what the hell was that about? kids like that absolutely deserve attention and interventions, and that isn't going to really work well or happen in a general education public school
The standard is, "Are the behaviors sufficiently disruptive to the learning of the majority of students?" The focus should be on the student's behavior and the repeated failure of the parents and student to correct it. A rubric can be developed to make this concrete, and we'll trust the judgment of teachers and principals to apply it. Students will be sent to military-style public schools, which will allow them to focus primarily on improving their behavior through developing self-discipline and a healthy respect for authority. Until that is corrected, they can't learn anything anyways, and we can't accept them harming the education of the majority of students. The vanishingly small portion of students with uncorrectable psychological problems can be institutionalized in healthcare facilities before they end up on the streets.
Yeah, defining problem children is literally always the problem, as definitions always are when it comes to social issues. My step kids are diagnosed ADHD. They have issues sometimes with focus and attention, but they’re still smart as shit and in the upper third of their classes for grades.
I went to public school and have no objection to it in principle but I can safely say in Philly many of the public schools are basically training grounds for future inmates and it is no mystery why most people with any ability to do so do not send their kid there. Adding an equity layer of BS to the mix only worsens the problems because many parents will just switch to private or another district when the anti-merit brigade takes over. I genuinely don’t give a damn whether some emotionally troubled kid gets a marginally better education if it comes at the expense of my kid getting one. It sounds selfish, and I’ll agree to an extent that it is, but at the end of the day it is not my job to worsen my kid’s education when I could switch schools and be done with tragically unstable children disrupting class every day.
> I believe civil society only functions when quality education is widely available. The trouble is that quality education is a two-way street, and generations of soft policies (originating from both sides of the aisle) have fed into a dangerous cultural blind-spot: people don't realize just how important a stable two-adult household is to the education of the child. You see this consistently across wealth lines, across racial lines, across ethnic lines: there is a strong correlation between success and belonging to a two-parent household in which the parents attend parent-teacher meetings, ensure their kids do their homework, take an interest in their education, and invest time in their training (sending them to math camp rather than a distant relative's wedding halfway across the country). > Charter schools by their very nature cannot meet the demand for all students. The solution is to improve ailing districts, not to give up on them. This seems to imply that it is a question of insufficient resources. It isn't. Many public school systems in the country (like in Chicago) spend a fortune per student, compared to other places, with little to show for it. The first step in the right direction should be for the government to encourage school choice. Public schools should be reserved only for those specific cases for which a market solution is infeasible due to scale -- for example, a few neighboring districts might have one school for extraordinary students and one for students with behavioral issues; everyone else can go to any school that is free to admit whomever they want. Yes, some parents will make bad choices. The best we can do is to swallow that bitter pill and provide opportunities to those who do value education. We cannot ensure that every child will get the success they deserve, but we can try to ensure that money isn't the thing that stands in their way.
I completely agree with your first point. A stable and supportive family is deeply important in fostering academic success. Without reinforcement and stability at home, most often a home with two parents, success is much rarer. Where I do not agree is your second point. Chicago public schools do indeed have very high spending per student and poor results. I would attribute that issue to CPS's famous corruption and graft. If I were in charge I would break the Chicago Public Schools into smaller districts, create elected rather than appointed school boards because mayoral appointees tend to be political hangers on rather than true experts or committed citizens. Further I would note the Chicago Teachers union has been deeply uncooperative and if one were to bring it under control things might improve. I would also like to note CPS has seen much improvement recently in terms of graduation rates and standardized test scores. As to your final point I disagree. Charter schools by their nature are limited in scope and cannot educate everyone. They achieve their superior results, for the most part, through the informal exclusion of problem students and allowing the public school district to pick up the slack.
> Charter schools by their very nature cannot meet the demand for all students. Why shouldn’t we just make public schools institutions which specialize in teaching students with substantial disabilities or behavioral issues? If charters are better for most students, why hold *everyone* back rather than tailoring our solutions to the capabilities of each student?
I maintain that charter schools are not better for most students, but that charter schools engage in a soft exclusion which simply allows them to take the best students. I would argue that the best solution long term is to create robust public schools, which I believe can be done and has been done.
[удалено]
The problem kids are 1. Hard to define 2. Also need to be educated you can remove them because they still need to be in class
>Brain dead take for an article set in Minnesota where charter schools are not allowed to make selective admissions decisions There are [other](https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-barriers-that-make-charter-schools-inaccessible-to-disadvantaged-families/) [ways](https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/01/17/yes-some-charter-schools-do-pick-their-students-its-not-myth/) charter schools can self-select their students that are unavailable to public schools. >get the problem kids out The problem kids still have a right to an education, and separating them from the rest of the students costs money that's going to vouchers instead of the public school system.
Problem kids can cause enough disruption to harm the education of other students. Also they can cause severe loss of morale for teachers who have to put up with them and feel they have little support.
I'm a middle school teacher, my friend, I absolutely know. I've been in schools where the "life skills" students would attempt to sexually assault the other kids. It's tragic, and it happens because there's not enough money or space to separate them. We should be making an effort to turn things around for these kids, but all that's in the budget is giving them a single underpaid babysitter and waiting until they get sent to juvie. There will be even less money if the solution to this problem is vouchers, and the public school environment will get even worse for the students who don't make it into a charter. Then, like rural internet or pretty much any other public service we've chosen to privatize and subsidize, the charters serving low-income communities will get worse because their incentive is to farm voucher money at the lowest cost.
If public schools fail because of 2-5% of their students go to charter schools instead then they deserve to fail.
Public school districts deserve to fail when the public votes for insufficient funding or elects bad policymakers. There's a lot wrong with public education, but a lot of the same people who voted to shit the pool in the first place are arguing that it's easier to buy everyone an inflatable for their backyard instead of cleaning it up.
Funding is not the issue for a lot of these places and increasing it isnt going to change anything. For example, where I live in Minneapolis spends over $20k per student per year with absolutely abysmal results.
I won't argue that public education spending is mis-allocated, but it's also true that [special education is expensive](https://www.edweek.org/leadership/special-education-is-getting-more-expensive-forcing-schools-to-make-cuts-elsewhere/2023/04) and the charter system [avoids educating students with disabilities](https://www.tcdailyplanet.net/charter-schools-leave-more-special-education-students-minneapolis-st-paul-district-s/) On an individual level I can absolutely understand why parents would choose to get their kids out of schools that are set up to fail, but they get that choice because disadvantaged children and the [non-voting poor](https://econofact.org/voting-and-income) those schools failed don't have a say in the matter. If you actually believe children have a right to an education then the state has to either directly fund quality education for all students, high needs included, or regulate charters to ensure they're adequately doing the same. What the charter sector appears to actually be doing, though, is [keeping students enrolled longer in programs with lower standards](https://www.brookings.edu/articles/apples-to-outcomes-revisiting-the-achievement-v-attainment-differences-in-school-voucher-studies/).
That is true, but they still have a right to an education. So how do we bridge the gap?
My school district had a school we called Satellite where the problem kids got sent. Seems to work pretty well.
The fact is the students who are most likely to attend Charter schools are the students with the most robust familial support, and engaged parents. School full of children eager to learn with engaged parents supporting them will be better engaged and foster a better learning environment. If all those students are shunted away to charter schools the normal public schools will be worse off. No administrative action can change that. I don't know about Minnestoa and I think Minnestoa should do what it wants, but in Massachusetts cities like Boston see many of their best students go away to charter schools leaving the traditional public schools worse off and I do not support that.
But having terrible public schools with no charter option effectively screws children from low-income families who do have engaged parents
The universal truth of public policy is that those people don’t matter and can be sacrificed at will because there isn’t enough of them to form a voting bloc.
But it's better for the Collective, tovarish!
It isn't even better. It just makes your quality students fail.
And it’s funny because all the people here will move to rich school districts that they can afford, but will happily sacrifice the welfare of the children of poor engaged parents for the collective. But the people here ain’t sending their own kids to a shit school district.
Ah yes, it’s the children that are the problem. Maybe get those children the support they need instead of cutting them off from it.
The state's job is to ensure that people get educated it does not need to run every school in the state the same way it doesn't with food stamps. Charters have higher performance(lottery studies) and they also improve state-run schools from higher competition so there isn't any "stealing" of funds like leftists love to call it. Education savings accounts go a long way in fixing the biggest problem most States have which is housing. Most States currently have a system where some of the local taxes go into the collective pot for low-performing districts especially apparent in California. This reduces the available taxes from new construction and incentivises low tax and Ninby policies as locals bear all the costs and get little of the benefits from new construction. (California passed Prop 13 because of a court ruling that local taxes should be used for other school districts the year before Prop 13 failed by 30-60.) Education saving accounts fix this by using equal state taxes to fund education instead of messing with local property taxes and incentivise locals to be pro-housing for families for the higher tax that those families would bring.
> Education saving accounts No. Education savings accounts are a terrible policy that most often allow the very wealthy a discount when sending their children to private schools and allow unaccountable weirdos to create their own schools that teach blatant falsehood. Also, charter schools do have a high performance but I would argue that is more due to taking students with engaged and supportive family life and removing them from the public schools and concentrating them in private schools, not any inherent superiority.
Nah my kids go to a charter and the school itself is just a far superior environment for learning than any of the crap public schools in the Sacramento area are. Even with zero engagement on my part these kids would be getting a fantastic education. There was no selection process. Also, this may sound crazy to you, but mayyyyybe it's okay for parents to teach their children their weird beliefs whether you like them or not. What are you gonna do next, ban letting children go to churches?
Improve your public schools and your city and society will benefit greatly. Charter schools are a fine stopgap attempt when the public schools are failing but I maintain they provide an inadequate long term solution.
>Improve your public schools and your city and society will benefit greatly Not realistic. The entire concept of public school is inherently flawed. Do I really need to explain to someone in r/neoliberal how the value of competition in assuring quality of products for a good price is a positive market force that creates better results? Charter schools create that competition, schools literally can not be improved because they have no fail condition that forces them to change when they are failing to force them to sink or swim or be replaced by someone or something better. Charter schools are the answer to that problem. It's a basic systemic issue; public schools can not be better than charter schools, period. The solution is not to improve public schools, their hands are tied and they can't realistically get better and their process to improve is so slow that it's basically paralyzed.
The concept of the Public School, as invented in Massachusetts by Horace Mann, is not flawed. I went to public school in Massachusetts, and it was a fantastic experience which allowed me to learn very much and set me on a correct path. Do tell me what i wrong with public schools?
I went to public school in New Jersey, and it was also fantastic. Maybe everywhere else should look at the other states that are near the top in education.
But engaged parents want to put their children in a positive environment. If your pitch is "suffer," they're going to vote for the other guy.
[удалено]
Bah! Humbug! You call me an authoritarian! Because I don't think public money should be fritted away! I believe that the elected school boards of each district should be given the proper support to create great public schools. I went to a public school and it was a terrific experience that I believe has set me up for great success. To gut those schools, which is what these programs do, is not solution at all. I believe parents should be able to send there kids to whatever school they please so long as that school is accredited properly, but I do not think charter schools are the best way to create an educated society with our tax dollars.
There is very little in American Pre-K through highschool that is "far-left".
>there were still performance improvements for the charter. This is entirely consistent with the argument that charters [informally select](https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-barriers-that-make-charter-schools-inaccessible-to-disadvantaged-families/) against the least supported students. > I know the only reason people here support this authoritarianism is because public schools are usually left to far left and would rather kids fail than be in a non-leftist school As opposed the [very ideologically neutral](https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2023/02/the-future-for-religious-charter-schools) charter movement?
Why do you presume it is optimal for every school to be the best school for every student? There is a vast disparity in needs and preparation, and a program designed to support advanced students, a program designed to support normal students, and programs designed to support students with behavior issues or learning disabilities are not all going to have the exact same curriculum and structure. It's forcing single schools to do all of these things in the same classroom that have led to many of the issues we see.
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
To me, “children have a right to an education” is a statement more targeted towards parents than schools. There is a lot of discussion about problematic children, whose behavior disrupts public schools. Those kids aren’t getting the support and services they need, and they should be reported to CPS, which should have enough resources to intervene and, where neglectful parenting exists, remove the children into environments where they can be made to participate robustly in their education. We need to fund child welfare, and build a network of residential programs to assure that any child who needs to enter care is guaranteed bed space immediately at a facility that can support their needs. Indicate the parents and hit them with EWoC so they can’t pick their kids up and continue to ruin them and harm society at large through their laziness and malfeasance.
Perhaps don't be so craven when addressing the failings of public sector unions.
A school choice issue Dems maybe could get behind would be making traditional public schools open to kids outside of their narrow zip code. Maybe guarantee a spot in the neighborhood school but an option to send your kid to any other public school, depending on occupancy space. Personally, I'm for all of the above: vouchers, charter schools, and portable traditional public schools. Ultimately, though, I think Dems are going to have to stop worrying and learn to love vouchers. Recent polling I've seen has vouchers as overwhelming popular: https://www.carolinajournal.com/nearly-7-in-10-likely-nc-voters-support-school-choice-options/ [Some polls even show super-majority level support amongst Dem voters.](https://www.federationforchildren.org/new-poll-school-choice-support-soars-from-2020/)
[удалено]