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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-segrega

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.
    - seibelj 8y ago
      OK, so build low-income housing in rich districts (unless you are saying the presence of poor kids destroys the good school) and stop using zoning to limit what kinds of residences can be built (lot-size, multi-family, building height, etc.). In the suburb of Saint Louis where my wife grew up, each lot had to be at least 1 acre, and had to be single-family. Given how expensive it was to live there, realistically the only properties that were profitable to build were McMansions. Amazing school district though!
      - AstralStorm 8y ago
        Rich can and will move. You would need exorbitant force to keep them. What is your proposed means of oppression to not make them move? Next, even if housing is mixed, rich can pool resources and start smaller scale private schooling. Results in Japanese model. You will have to prevent it by force as well. It doesn't take much to outdo people who are preoccupied trying to make ends meet and being distracted with better education amd more attention.
      - Latteland 8y ago
        I think we'd be better off if poorer people were not concentrated, of course today it's economic concentration or discrimination that makes it harder to equalize things. Not only am I lucky to live in a good school district for my kids, but people in my more wealthy area are much more willing to support school levys and donate money and time. There is some lower income housing, but in a boom town like Seattle you get a second negative impact on poorer people, which is displacement through rising prices of homes and apartments. Poorer people have to leave because they can't afford rising rents. Their old neighborhood starts to get more of the better educated people who could help the local schools with their background and money. It's not impossible to go up, but it feels like it is harder. In my family, my grandparents were both some of the first people to go to college during the great depression, with basically no money. They came from tiny high schools but managed to make it.
        seibelj 8y ago
        The reason housing is so expensive is that there isn’t enough housing, supply and demand. If you allow developers to build housing commiserate with demand, the prices don’t get to SF levels.
  - anonymouskimmer 8y ago
    The easiest way to unshackle market forces would be to ban the state legislatures from mandating the public schools' particulars. And "forcibly ensuring competition" doesn't seem like this is truly unshackling market forces. Unlike the free market there are genuine community-wide positive-sum benefits to oligolopic cooperation between schools.
mark212 8y ago
I disagree that it's segregating or done on purpose, but it is deeply unfair that the price of a good "public" education is being able to afford the real estate in that catchment area / school district.
- toasterlovin 8y ago
  But it's ultimately the high price of the real estate in that area that makes the schools good. We live in an economy where intelligent academic achievers do pretty well. So expensive areas are highly skewed toward intelligent academic achievers. Guess what kind of children they have...
  - mark212 8y ago
    I remain skeptical of that part. There are, however, plenty of cities in the US where the school district boundaries are drawn very precisely to enable the imposition of property taxes that support the schools. It becomes a sort of private-public school, in the sense that all the homeowners in the district pay extra and those schools have sports teams and labs and orchestra and field trips that the kids on the other side of the line can only dream of. (This is impossible in California, however, because the property taxes are set at the county level and school districts have no control over their own funding.)
    - toasterlovin 8y ago
      Having grown up in Los Angeles, I can tell you that the best schools there are also in the wealthy neighborhoods, despite the funding issue you mention not applying in California. And that's because the children of wealthy people have the genetics and culture to do well in school.
    - anonymouskimmer 8y ago
      "This is impossible in California, however" Oh no it's not. Plenty of rich neighborhoods in California have, or have tried, to split out their own district from the larger, more heterogenous district.
Latteland 8y ago
In my experience people who want charter schools want one of two things, either to send tax money to a religious school, or to destroy the public school employees. There's a lot of actual knowledge and infrastructure behind running a public school. It's sounds appealing that you can do better than some terrible big city trouble-bound public school, and we should all strive for better educational opportunities, but the charter schools consistently show now benefit and generally worse results than public schools. And that's not from lack of funding from the billionaire class. For example, see https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED528633.pdf https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED528633.pdf. That seems pretty settled. I think a more productive question is what can we do to help under-performing public schools. My suggestion is more funding to help the kids from underprivileged backgrounds catch up. That includes free breakfast and lunch, food to take home on the weekends, pre-K education, more resources for the school including reducing class sizes.
Jill_the_Pill 8y ago
When they create those new charter schools, they "compete" entirely on test scores. But no-excuses drill-and-kill for test scores is exactly the opposite of what's offered to the children of the elite, who get time to play and experiment, develop creativity and social skills, participate in arts and music, all in a non-restrictive environment.
- seibelj 8y ago
  I have no comments on how the charters are run, which is why I use them only as an example. I just think it's a tragedy that if you live in a district with a terrible school, with no capability of moving, your children are screwed out of an education.
  - Jill_the_Pill 8y ago
    You have more power to influence public institutions than you realize. In my city, we organize, attend Board of Education and PTA/PTO meetings, volunteer, raise money, lobby, write letters to the papers, and vote. We had about 400 people at the last Board meeting protesting a school closure. We'll never be a wealthy district, but an immense amount of energy is going into staving off "terrible."

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.
  - seibelj 8y ago
    OK, so build low-income housing in rich districts (unless you are saying the presence of poor kids destroys the good school) and stop using zoning to limit what kinds of residences can be built (lot-size, multi-family, building height, etc.). In the suburb of Saint Louis where my wife grew up, each lot had to be at least 1 acre, and had to be single-family. Given how expensive it was to live there, realistically the only properties that were profitable to build were McMansions. Amazing school district though!
    - AstralStorm 8y ago
      Rich can and will move. You would need exorbitant force to keep them. What is your proposed means of oppression to not make them move? Next, even if housing is mixed, rich can pool resources and start smaller scale private schooling. Results in Japanese model. You will have to prevent it by force as well. It doesn't take much to outdo people who are preoccupied trying to make ends meet and being distracted with better education amd more attention.
    - Latteland 8y ago
      I think we'd be better off if poorer people were not concentrated, of course today it's economic concentration or discrimination that makes it harder to equalize things. Not only am I lucky to live in a good school district for my kids, but people in my more wealthy area are much more willing to support school levys and donate money and time. There is some lower income housing, but in a boom town like Seattle you get a second negative impact on poorer people, which is displacement through rising prices of homes and apartments. Poorer people have to leave because they can't afford rising rents. Their old neighborhood starts to get more of the better educated people who could help the local schools with their background and money. It's not impossible to go up, but it feels like it is harder. In my family, my grandparents were both some of the first people to go to college during the great depression, with basically no money. They came from tiny high schools but managed to make it.
      - seibelj 8y ago
        The reason housing is so expensive is that there isn’t enough housing, supply and demand. If you allow developers to build housing commiserate with demand, the prices don’t get to SF levels.
- anonymouskimmer 8y ago
  The easiest way to unshackle market forces would be to ban the state legislatures from mandating the public schools' particulars. And "forcibly ensuring competition" doesn't seem like this is truly unshackling market forces. Unlike the free market there are genuine community-wide positive-sum benefits to oligolopic cooperation between schools.

mark212 8y ago

I disagree that it's segregating or done on purpose, but it is deeply unfair that the price of a good "public" education is being able to afford the real estate in that catchment area / school district.

toasterlovin 8y ago
But it's ultimately the high price of the real estate in that area that makes the schools good. We live in an economy where intelligent academic achievers do pretty well. So expensive areas are highly skewed toward intelligent academic achievers. Guess what kind of children they have...
- mark212 8y ago
  I remain skeptical of that part. There are, however, plenty of cities in the US where the school district boundaries are drawn very precisely to enable the imposition of property taxes that support the schools. It becomes a sort of private-public school, in the sense that all the homeowners in the district pay extra and those schools have sports teams and labs and orchestra and field trips that the kids on the other side of the line can only dream of. (This is impossible in California, however, because the property taxes are set at the county level and school districts have no control over their own funding.)
  - toasterlovin 8y ago
    Having grown up in Los Angeles, I can tell you that the best schools there are also in the wealthy neighborhoods, despite the funding issue you mention not applying in California. And that's because the children of wealthy people have the genetics and culture to do well in school.
  - anonymouskimmer 8y ago
    "This is impossible in California, however" Oh no it's not. Plenty of rich neighborhoods in California have, or have tried, to split out their own district from the larger, more heterogenous district.

Latteland 8y ago

In my experience people who want charter schools want one of two things, either to send tax money to a religious school, or to destroy the public school employees. There's a lot of actual knowledge and infrastructure behind running a public school. It's sounds appealing that you can do better than some terrible big city trouble-bound public school, and we should all strive for better educational opportunities, but the charter schools consistently show now benefit and generally worse results than public schools. And that's not from lack of funding from the billionaire class. For example, see https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED528633.pdf https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED528633.pdf. That seems pretty settled. I think a more productive question is what can we do to help under-performing public schools. My suggestion is more funding to help the kids from underprivileged backgrounds catch up. That includes free breakfast and lunch, food to take home on the weekends, pre-K education, more resources for the school including reducing class sizes.

Jill_the_Pill 8y ago

When they create those new charter schools, they "compete" entirely on test scores. But no-excuses drill-and-kill for test scores is exactly the opposite of what's offered to the children of the elite, who get time to play and experiment, develop creativity and social skills, participate in arts and music, all in a non-restrictive environment.

seibelj 8y ago
I have no comments on how the charters are run, which is why I use them only as an example. I just think it's a tragedy that if you live in a district with a terrible school, with no capability of moving, your children are screwed out of an education.
- Jill_the_Pill 8y ago
  You have more power to influence public institutions than you realize. In my city, we organize, attend Board of Education and PTA/PTO meetings, volunteer, raise money, lobby, write letters to the papers, and vote. We had about 400 people at the last Board meeting protesting a school closure. We'll never be a wealthy district, but an immense amount of energy is going into staving off "terrible."