7 ms·

> Just look at any suburbs: the inhabitants clearly disagree with me. Some of us just have kids and have noticed that all the city housing is either incredibly

by ashark 9y ago

> Just look at any suburbs: the inhabitants clearly disagree with me. Some of us just have kids and have noticed that all the city housing is either incredibly expensive or in slums, and the schools in the city proper are dangerous and terrible so we'd also have to pay for private school[0]. And we're not made of money. I'd much rather live in the city—I hate the car-centric lifestyle—but living there if I have enough money not to but not enough money to also pay for private k-12 schooling would be irresponsible. Plus there's the issue of having to balance commutes for two people in a dual-income household—one of us would almost certainly need a car anyway. [0] This is true for my city at least. YMMV.

hamstercat 9y ago
It's definitely a choice and I wasn't implying it's a bad one. Everyone has different priorities, like you said it could be kids or something else. All I'm saying is that it's those choices that make urban sprawl a thing and reduces the effectiveness of living car-free. I'd buy a car in an instant if I had to, and I consider myself lucky not to have to right now. Not all suburban cities are equal either, some makes it possible not to have to commute by car (at least near where I live).
InitialLastName 9y ago
That's a chicken-and-egg problem too... inner-city schools suck because everyone with money took their taxes to the suburbs (for better schools).
- ashark 9y ago
  Well, more to the point they took their bound-to-be-good-students-on-average children to the suburbs. If you do it right (i.e. you don't make a bad choice and get ripped off) you're buying your kids' peers more than anything else by paying to live in more affluent districts or (more directly) by paying private school tuition. This is why pouring money into poor districts rarely does much to educational quality—the money's coincident with other factors that make rich(er) kids easy to teach and relatively unlikely to seriously disrupt class on a regular basis, miss large numbers of school days, et c, and just giving the schools more money doesn't fix all that other stuff. So it's still a chicken/egg problem but a much tougher one to resolve than if schools having too little money were even a large part of the trouble. It's even a shitty situation for people who can afford to get their kids into better schools because there's pressure under this system to spend absolutely as much as you can on these things, because you will definitely be improving your kids' chances in life by doing so. It's a craptastic coordination problem that's so bad things would kind of be better if we just assigned schools based on some combination of parental income and education level, since that'd put most kids more or less where they are when we use willingness-and-ability-to-spend-money as a proxy for those things (i.e. the current system) while keeping everyone from having to waste tons of money competing over blessed zip codes or paying private school tuition.
  - InitialLastName 9y ago
    That's a well-put perspective. ... however... I can't even picture the political shitstorm that would happen if someone suggested (openly) segregating schools by parental income and education level.
    - ashark 9y ago
      Oh, I know it's not politically feasible and is fairly horrible. It's damning of our current system, though, that it's de facto very nearly the same thing and also incredibly expensive/stressful.
    - ghaff 9y ago
      There are competitive admission public high schools in some cities but this isn't a very common concept.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > That's a chicken-and-egg problem too... inner-city schools suck because everyone with money took their taxes to the suburbs (for better schools). Well, yes, but more to the point inner city schools suck in outcome terms because outcomes are driven more by parental educational attainment and other non-school factors (income is mostly irrelevant except that it correlated with parental education, and tax base is irrelevant as shown by the fact thst the problem is not particularly attenuated in states that equalize per pupil spending statewide, so that taking your tax money elsewhere has only a very weak effect on school funding) than by anything schools do, and no one has found (and most of the efforts of standardizing what schools do in the expectations of consistent outcomes detracts from the search for) interventions that address deficiencies in this area. To fix inner city (or “poor rural” or other “problem” schools) you have to either first fix or, at least, find interventions that break the cyclical nature of the underlying social inequalities that actually cause the poor outcomes.
  - InitialLastName 9y ago
    To add to that, and as an example, I live in a (moderately) low-income immigrant enclave in a (very) expensive city with (very) poor school outcomes. There are lots of families with little kids on my block. Just about every night, weeknights included, those kids are out in the streets/sidewalks playing until 12-2am.
- Mz 9y ago
  Money spent on education correlates very poorly with educational quality at k-12 level. (This may be different a the college level.) Parental involvement and other factors are much stronger indicators.
  - InitialLastName 9y ago
    As a sibling of yours pointed out, the presence of affluent peers makes a big difference.
    - Mz 9y ago
      Look, I know you don't know me as some kind of education expert, but I homeschooled my gifted-learning disabled sons for a lot of years and I was Director of Community Life at TAGFAM for a brief period and I know whereof I speak here. Those peers are almost certainly not just affluent, they are almost certainly also well read, well spoken and well educated. Money easily grows out of being well educated, assuming there aren't other barriers to accomplishment. You have the cause and effect relationship here backwards.
      - InitialLastName 9y ago
        Really not trying to disparage you, but I think there's room to allow the cause and effect to go in both directions. Since parental involvement is a really good proxy for wealth, and, as you point out, parental involvement correlates strongly with educational outcomes, wealthy children tend to have better educational outcomes. However (and take it from a gifted and learning disabled person) the presence of better-educated (and more academically invested) students in a classroom can be a rising tide that brings up the more marginal students. Overall, I don't think we actually disagree. Education is well-correlated with wealth. Parental involvement (given that parents who are able to be involved are more likely to be able to do that and stay financially functional) effectively "counts" as money spent on education, especially since it indirectly helps the entire cohort. It takes a village. Sidenote: > assuming there aren't other barriers to accomplishment In my neck of the world, poverty counts.
- s73ver 9y ago
  "inner-city schools suck because everyone with money took their taxes to the suburbs (for better schools)." Let's not beat around the bush; this happened back in the day because they took their taxes to the suburbs for mostly white schools.

by ashark 9y ago

hamstercat 9y ago

It's definitely a choice and I wasn't implying it's a bad one. Everyone has different priorities, like you said it could be kids or something else. All I'm saying is that it's those choices that make urban sprawl a thing and reduces the effectiveness of living car-free. I'd buy a car in an instant if I had to, and I consider myself lucky not to have to right now. Not all suburban cities are equal either, some makes it possible not to have to commute by car (at least near where I live).

InitialLastName 9y ago

That's a chicken-and-egg problem too... inner-city schools suck because everyone with money took their taxes to the suburbs (for better schools).

ashark 9y ago
Well, more to the point they took their bound-to-be-good-students-on-average children to the suburbs. If you do it right (i.e. you don't make a bad choice and get ripped off) you're buying your kids' peers more than anything else by paying to live in more affluent districts or (more directly) by paying private school tuition. This is why pouring money into poor districts rarely does much to educational quality—the money's coincident with other factors that make rich(er) kids easy to teach and relatively unlikely to seriously disrupt class on a regular basis, miss large numbers of school days, et c, and just giving the schools more money doesn't fix all that other stuff. So it's still a chicken/egg problem but a much tougher one to resolve than if schools having too little money were even a large part of the trouble. It's even a shitty situation for people who can afford to get their kids into better schools because there's pressure under this system to spend absolutely as much as you can on these things, because you will definitely be improving your kids' chances in life by doing so. It's a craptastic coordination problem that's so bad things would kind of be better if we just assigned schools based on some combination of parental income and education level, since that'd put most kids more or less where they are when we use willingness-and-ability-to-spend-money as a proxy for those things (i.e. the current system) while keeping everyone from having to waste tons of money competing over blessed zip codes or paying private school tuition.
- InitialLastName 9y ago
  That's a well-put perspective. ... however... I can't even picture the political shitstorm that would happen if someone suggested (openly) segregating schools by parental income and education level.
  - ashark 9y ago
    Oh, I know it's not politically feasible and is fairly horrible. It's damning of our current system, though, that it's de facto very nearly the same thing and also incredibly expensive/stressful.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    There are competitive admission public high schools in some cities but this isn't a very common concept.
dragonwriter 9y ago
> That's a chicken-and-egg problem too... inner-city schools suck because everyone with money took their taxes to the suburbs (for better schools). Well, yes, but more to the point inner city schools suck in outcome terms because outcomes are driven more by parental educational attainment and other non-school factors (income is mostly irrelevant except that it correlated with parental education, and tax base is irrelevant as shown by the fact thst the problem is not particularly attenuated in states that equalize per pupil spending statewide, so that taking your tax money elsewhere has only a very weak effect on school funding) than by anything schools do, and no one has found (and most of the efforts of standardizing what schools do in the expectations of consistent outcomes detracts from the search for) interventions that address deficiencies in this area. To fix inner city (or “poor rural” or other “problem” schools) you have to either first fix or, at least, find interventions that break the cyclical nature of the underlying social inequalities that actually cause the poor outcomes.
- InitialLastName 9y ago
  To add to that, and as an example, I live in a (moderately) low-income immigrant enclave in a (very) expensive city with (very) poor school outcomes. There are lots of families with little kids on my block. Just about every night, weeknights included, those kids are out in the streets/sidewalks playing until 12-2am.
Mz 9y ago
Money spent on education correlates very poorly with educational quality at k-12 level. (This may be different a the college level.) Parental involvement and other factors are much stronger indicators.
- InitialLastName 9y ago
  As a sibling of yours pointed out, the presence of affluent peers makes a big difference.
  - Mz 9y ago
    Look, I know you don't know me as some kind of education expert, but I homeschooled my gifted-learning disabled sons for a lot of years and I was Director of Community Life at TAGFAM for a brief period and I know whereof I speak here. Those peers are almost certainly not just affluent, they are almost certainly also well read, well spoken and well educated. Money easily grows out of being well educated, assuming there aren't other barriers to accomplishment. You have the cause and effect relationship here backwards.
    - InitialLastName 9y ago
      Really not trying to disparage you, but I think there's room to allow the cause and effect to go in both directions. Since parental involvement is a really good proxy for wealth, and, as you point out, parental involvement correlates strongly with educational outcomes, wealthy children tend to have better educational outcomes. However (and take it from a gifted and learning disabled person) the presence of better-educated (and more academically invested) students in a classroom can be a rising tide that brings up the more marginal students. Overall, I don't think we actually disagree. Education is well-correlated with wealth. Parental involvement (given that parents who are able to be involved are more likely to be able to do that and stay financially functional) effectively "counts" as money spent on education, especially since it indirectly helps the entire cohort. It takes a village. Sidenote: > assuming there aren't other barriers to accomplishment In my neck of the world, poverty counts.
s73ver 9y ago
"inner-city schools suck because everyone with money took their taxes to the suburbs (for better schools)." Let's not beat around the bush; this happened back in the day because they took their taxes to the suburbs for mostly white schools.