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> letting the family choose where to stick their education dollars could alleviate the vast difference in K12 education that keeps the “9.9%” in continuous powe

> letting the family choose where to stick their education dollars could alleviate the vast difference in K12 education that keeps the “9.9%” in continuous power. Could you elaborate what you mean by this? Wouldn't the best course of action to give each school the same funding based on the number of pupils, and additional funding for troubled areas in need?

temp-dude-87844 8y ago
A K-12 student's performance correlates strongly with the family's wealth [1], and interacts with several other factors like race category, stable home life, and the low incidence of everyday violent crime. If rich people successfully exclude poor people, which can be done with legal price mechanisms instead of illegal discrimination, public school performance remains high. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/04/29/upshot/money-race-and-success-how-your-school-district-compares.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/04/29/upshot/money-...
- AstralStorm 8y ago
  Even without price there are other mechanisms - accumulation of rich in specific places by word of mouth alone... where the influence and money is accumulated and applied. We see this even in primary education even in Europe, even in non-private schools. Then there are extracurriculars which take money amd time... A typical person out of place won't be able to keep up.
  - weberc2 8y ago
    This is an interesting observation. Basically freedom of association, like many freedoms, is working against equality. I'm nowhere near the 9.9 percent, but it unnerves me to think about restricting someone's basic freedoms even if it benefits me. Also it strikes me as odd that we focus on relative wealth fluctuations. Shouldn't we be more concerned about the number of people who can't afford basic necessities? If the poor are getting poorer, it seems like we should be concerned about that regardless of the performance of the rich. If the poor are getting richer but less slowly than the rich, isn't that still a good thing, or am I naive? Personally, I don't need to keep up with the 9.9%, but I'm content if my family's fortunes keep improving.
    - AstralStorm 8y ago
      Correct. This is doable but the pushback is likely to be immense. Not to mention such a programme is quite expensive and you will have to forcibly appropriate wealth in some forms. And probably introduce major savings too. UBI potentially would work on this, the question remains if you'd buy of masses politically that way. That could be the end of republic as is known.
      - weberc2 8y ago
        I’m not even advocating for any program in particular; just curious why we are laser focused on relative wealth metrics when absolute metrics seem more significant.
seibelj 8y ago
I think that we should let students from poor towns go to awesome schools in rich towns even if they aren’t residents of the rich town. The wealthy self-segregate by limiting low-income housing in their area to keep out the poors. Similarly I think it should be easy to create a new school (charter or whatever you want to call it) to compete with bad schools in poor districts. But even without option 2, option 1 would be great. Would also let rich kids interact with poor kids which will benefit everyone.
- AstralStorm 8y ago
  It is not just this. Pulling strings without separating out housing is enough. If you build a new school it will still start or with the segregated out "worse material". The only way out is indeed to forcibly randomize and disperse - Even then there will be local social clustering.
  - seibelj 8y ago
    I don’t want to forcibly do anything. I want to unshackle market forces to solve the problem in a better way. Don’t ban poor people from your town. Don’t create a monopoly on local education. The rules should forcibly ensure competition rather than forcibly control how people live and get educated.
    - Latteland 8y ago
      In US, each school district receives money proportional to their students, with some places raising money via levys or bonds in their district. It takes a long time to make new schools. If people could go to any school, you'd overwhelm some districts with tons of students and you can't just make a new school in a year or two, it takes a lot of time for the district to figure out they'll need one long term, raise the money, make plans, build and hire teachers. So this would just be a disaster in the say 3 year time frame. I think a major reason some districts do better than others is that wealth of the parents is highly correlated with educational attainment of the parents and the children. It's not that the big city schools just generally suck, they have many more problems to deal with, one being older infrastructure but also a lot more poorer kids, and less parental contributions. Being in the Seattle area, every school district is overloaded, and is struggling to plan and build new schools, and has lots of temporary buildings (aka trailers) that they have some classes in. It's true on the east side, the more wealthy side. And on the wealthy east side, it's far more conservative politically than Seattle; compare Seattle to Bellevue, Kirkland, Redmond, Issaquah. Those are still moderate to liberal cities, but as an example Issaquah has a republican US Congressman, Reichart. These places are pretty strongly supportive of keeping the public schools the way they are.

temp-dude-87844 8y ago

A K-12 student's performance correlates strongly with the family's wealth [1], and interacts with several other factors like race category, stable home life, and the low incidence of everyday violent crime. If rich people successfully exclude poor people, which can be done with legal price mechanisms instead of illegal discrimination, public school performance remains high. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/04/29/upshot/money-race-and-success-how-your-school-district-compares.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/04/29/upshot/money-...

AstralStorm 8y ago
Even without price there are other mechanisms - accumulation of rich in specific places by word of mouth alone... where the influence and money is accumulated and applied. We see this even in primary education even in Europe, even in non-private schools. Then there are extracurriculars which take money amd time... A typical person out of place won't be able to keep up.
- weberc2 8y ago
  This is an interesting observation. Basically freedom of association, like many freedoms, is working against equality. I'm nowhere near the 9.9 percent, but it unnerves me to think about restricting someone's basic freedoms even if it benefits me. Also it strikes me as odd that we focus on relative wealth fluctuations. Shouldn't we be more concerned about the number of people who can't afford basic necessities? If the poor are getting poorer, it seems like we should be concerned about that regardless of the performance of the rich. If the poor are getting richer but less slowly than the rich, isn't that still a good thing, or am I naive? Personally, I don't need to keep up with the 9.9%, but I'm content if my family's fortunes keep improving.
  - AstralStorm 8y ago
    Correct. This is doable but the pushback is likely to be immense. Not to mention such a programme is quite expensive and you will have to forcibly appropriate wealth in some forms. And probably introduce major savings too. UBI potentially would work on this, the question remains if you'd buy of masses politically that way. That could be the end of republic as is known.
    - weberc2 8y ago
      I’m not even advocating for any program in particular; just curious why we are laser focused on relative wealth metrics when absolute metrics seem more significant.

seibelj 8y ago

I think that we should let students from poor towns go to awesome schools in rich towns even if they aren’t residents of the rich town. The wealthy self-segregate by limiting low-income housing in their area to keep out the poors. Similarly I think it should be easy to create a new school (charter or whatever you want to call it) to compete with bad schools in poor districts. But even without option 2, option 1 would be great. Would also let rich kids interact with poor kids which will benefit everyone.

AstralStorm 8y ago
It is not just this. Pulling strings without separating out housing is enough. If you build a new school it will still start or with the segregated out "worse material". The only way out is indeed to forcibly randomize and disperse - Even then there will be local social clustering.
- seibelj 8y ago
  I don’t want to forcibly do anything. I want to unshackle market forces to solve the problem in a better way. Don’t ban poor people from your town. Don’t create a monopoly on local education. The rules should forcibly ensure competition rather than forcibly control how people live and get educated.
  - Latteland 8y ago
    In US, each school district receives money proportional to their students, with some places raising money via levys or bonds in their district. It takes a long time to make new schools. If people could go to any school, you'd overwhelm some districts with tons of students and you can't just make a new school in a year or two, it takes a lot of time for the district to figure out they'll need one long term, raise the money, make plans, build and hire teachers. So this would just be a disaster in the say 3 year time frame. I think a major reason some districts do better than others is that wealth of the parents is highly correlated with educational attainment of the parents and the children. It's not that the big city schools just generally suck, they have many more problems to deal with, one being older infrastructure but also a lot more poorer kids, and less parental contributions. Being in the Seattle area, every school district is overloaded, and is struggling to plan and build new schools, and has lots of temporary buildings (aka trailers) that they have some classes in. It's true on the east side, the more wealthy side. And on the wealthy east side, it's far more conservative politically than Seattle; compare Seattle to Bellevue, Kirkland, Redmond, Issaquah. Those are still moderate to liberal cities, but as an example Issaquah has a republican US Congressman, Reichart. These places are pretty strongly supportive of keeping the public schools the way they are.