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Good or bad idea, it's unfortunately unrelated to the article at hand. When you're in public education, like my wife is, it's easy to see the pattern. * Public

Good or bad idea, it's unfortunately unrelated to the article at hand. When you're in public education, like my wife is, it's easy to see the pattern. * Public education funding gets slashed. * Reduced funding == reduced capabilities == can't meet all of the children's needs. * Wealthy families see a decline in quality public education so pay to send kids to private and charter schools. * Public schools get punished for failing to live up to arbitrary, politician-set standards, and lose more funding. It's a vicious cycle and one that we only feel the pain of many years in the future. Politicians can claim a financial win by cutting millions and even thousands from education but are actually costing this country billions in the long term. If we don't push and support free, high quality, public education, the inequality gap is can only widen. If you want an ear full, ask any educator about the "high school-to-prison pipeline".

PretzelFisch 10y ago
You forgot the part where the wealthy family no longer want to pay for the public education because they don't see a benefit from it any more and force further funding cuts.
- gedy 10y ago
  They pay the same taxes, and cannot opt out of paying for public education.
  - PretzelFisch 10y ago
    yes, so they lobby to cut public education and for voucher systems where they can use some credit towards the private school they use.
tropo 10y ago
Leaving out: * We see the waste and we don't want to encourage it. * DC has a huge per-student budget, but the student performance is horrible. Clearly, budget isn't going to do the job. Perhaps there is an inverse relationship.
- ashark 10y ago
  I don't know what it's like in DC, but in my city the worst districts have to pay quite a bit more for personnel (teachers, admin, substitutes, everyone) and still don't usually attract the best, because working in a place with multiple violent disruptions in each classroom every week and where the 2nd graders yell at their substitutes and call them names that 2nd graders ought not know is frustrating and dangerous. It's way easier to feel like you're effective and appreciated in the good districts, even if you're making 20% less. If DC paid the national average it's possible no one would work there, not even mediocre teachers. So yeah, there may tend to be an inverse relationship between spending and quality, but it's (likely, in most cases) not that the money is causing the problem but rather that the problem is forcing more spending just to tread water, let alone improve anything.
rayiner 10y ago
Where is public education funding getting "slashed" (at least in the K-12 level this article is talking about). Inflation-adjusted spending per pupil in the U.S. is up moderately since the 1990's, with a small dip in the last several years due to the recession: http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2013/05/21/public-spending-per-student-drops http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2013/05/21/public-spending-pe.... We spend 25% more on education per student now than we did when I was a kid in the early 1990's.
mindcrime 10y ago
If we don't push and support free, high quality, public education, the inequality gap is can only widen. That's not exactly a given. If you want an ear full, ask any educator about the "high school-to-prison pipeline". And how much of that is a result of the misguided "war on drugs"? No doubt, we want everybody to have access to a quality education, but A. these are complex, iterrelated issues, and B. there's no particular reason to think that the "public school" model we have today is the objectively correct model.

PretzelFisch 10y ago

You forgot the part where the wealthy family no longer want to pay for the public education because they don't see a benefit from it any more and force further funding cuts.

gedy 10y ago
They pay the same taxes, and cannot opt out of paying for public education.
- PretzelFisch 10y ago
  yes, so they lobby to cut public education and for voucher systems where they can use some credit towards the private school they use.

tropo 10y ago

Leaving out: * We see the waste and we don't want to encourage it. * DC has a huge per-student budget, but the student performance is horrible. Clearly, budget isn't going to do the job. Perhaps there is an inverse relationship.

ashark 10y ago
I don't know what it's like in DC, but in my city the worst districts have to pay quite a bit more for personnel (teachers, admin, substitutes, everyone) and still don't usually attract the best, because working in a place with multiple violent disruptions in each classroom every week and where the 2nd graders yell at their substitutes and call them names that 2nd graders ought not know is frustrating and dangerous. It's way easier to feel like you're effective and appreciated in the good districts, even if you're making 20% less. If DC paid the national average it's possible no one would work there, not even mediocre teachers. So yeah, there may tend to be an inverse relationship between spending and quality, but it's (likely, in most cases) not that the money is causing the problem but rather that the problem is forcing more spending just to tread water, let alone improve anything.

rayiner 10y ago

Where is public education funding getting "slashed" (at least in the K-12 level this article is talking about). Inflation-adjusted spending per pupil in the U.S. is up moderately since the 1990's, with a small dip in the last several years due to the recession: http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2013/05/21/public-spending-per-student-drops http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2013/05/21/public-spending-pe.... We spend 25% more on education per student now than we did when I was a kid in the early 1990's.

mindcrime 10y ago

If we don't push and support free, high quality, public education, the inequality gap is can only widen. That's not exactly a given. If you want an ear full, ask any educator about the "high school-to-prison pipeline". And how much of that is a result of the misguided "war on drugs"? No doubt, we want everybody to have access to a quality education, but A. these are complex, iterrelated issues, and B. there's no particular reason to think that the "public school" model we have today is the objectively correct model.