4 ms·

So basically a deregulated, market based approach. This will work great in wealthy areas with good schools with educated and supportive parents.

by mnd999 5y ago

twoodfin 5y ago
The idea that poor parents don’t care about their kids’ success enough to want to choose what they perceive to be better schools is belied by the lengthy waiting lists for slots in charter or magnet schools and voucher programs. What we have now is a market-based approach, where the price of admission to a top flight public school system is a $1M mortgage.
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  The root cause is that you have more or less four choices * private, which is expensive (and in some cases not a guarantee of quality) * rich public, which requires probably living in the extremely local school district * magnet/charter, which usually have whole apparatuses dedicated to securing donor funding similar to how colleges ask former alumni and the wealthy to top up their budgets * poor public At least some of the problems might be solvable by consolidating America's extremely local school districts, but that's kind of hard because a lot of the separate school districts were intentionally set up that way to ensure that socioeconomic classes did not have to share schools in a post-segregation world. Even if you did manage to do it, a lot of people would probably pull out and choose private instead. But it is absolutely insane that in some states "boundary-hopping" school districts can send parents who want the best for their child to jail. http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/america-tonight/america-tonight-blog/2014/1/21/where-school-boundaryhoppingcanmeantimeinjail.html http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/america-tonight/ame...
  - toast0 5y ago
    > At least some of the problems might be solvable by consolidating America's extremely local school districts Large school districts seem to attract their own special blend of problems. > But it is absolutely insane that in some states "boundary-hopping" school districts can send parents who want the best for their child to jail. Sounds like fraud, which is generally a jailable offense. Specific details would matter, but what would you expect to happen if you registered to vote with an improper address so you could vote in a different district for some reason? I'd expect some chance of jail.
- mnd999 5y ago
  So we are in agreement that what you suggest doesn’t work.
  - kbenson 5y ago
    Did they suggest something?
  - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    The existing system is the inverse of what we need. Right now you have good schools and bad schools and the way to get into the good schools is to have money and pay a lot for a house. The cost is more not because the good school actually costs more to operate, but because "having money" is being used as the admissions criteria, as a heuristic for not being a destructive influence. It's pretending that public schools don't have any admissions criteria and then having one anyway. But because it's only that one, the market is broken. Dumb rich kids go to the good school and smart poor kids go to the bad school. We could do the opposite. Give everyone a fixed amount of money for school, untethering the choice of school from your income, and then use anything else as the admissions criteria. Let the school choose its own. The schools with better-than-cheap-heuristic admissions criteria will be the most desirable, but will also accept desirable classmates regardless of parental income, because that's part of what makes it a desirable school.
- kbenson 5y ago
  Being poor doesn't necessarily mean you care less, but it can mean you have less time, resources and mobility to out towards finding a better school and having your child go to a better school, especially if it's not as close. What we have now is a system where we for the most part try to remove market influences so wealth doesn't advantage/disadvantage children, but with the constant thorn of wealthier parents constantly fighting to have their resources applied to their own children, sometimes without considering what that means overall. If we could actually separate wealth from public education, maybe we'd actually see some change. One interesting way might be to allow free bussing up to 10 (or more?) miles for any child, and allow parents to choose whatever school they want. Those wealthier schools in nicer areas will have to start splitting those funds between more and more students. Of course this would never be allowed for long.
  - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    > Being poor doesn't necessarily mean you care less, but it can mean you have less time, resources and mobility to out towards finding a better school and having your child go to a better school, especially if it's not as close. Knowing which school is the good school is hardly the problem. It's the one in the good neighborhood where the poor kids can't afford to live. The problem with the status quo is that knowing that doesn't get you into the school, only money does. > If we could actually separate wealth from public education, maybe we'd actually see some change. This is the idea of school choice. You give every kid in the state the same amount of money for school and don't gate admission by street address and the poor kid at least has a chance to go to the better school. You would then end up with admissions criteria like test scores for the better schools, which would have some disparity in them, but how is that worse than the status quo of every rich kid going to the good school and every poor kid going to the bad school? At least there would be a path for getting out of the hole based on something other than having your parents make more money and buy a very expensive house. And then you can work on improving admissions criteria so that promising students with low income parents get to go to better schools. Or better yet, start your own good school that does exactly this without needing permission from the parents of dumb rich kids who want your slot.
    - 5y ago
syshum 5y ago
>>supportive parents. supportive parents are the key to success, rich, poor, black, white, asian, Hispanic, gay, strait, etc. children with rich parents may have more doors opened, and access to things, but proclaim wealth is the only factor or even the biggest factor is false. unsupported rich parents turn out children that fail all the time, and supportive poor parents turn out children that go on to success. A support system at home is the biggest determinate for success or failure in life.

So basically a deregulated, market based approach. This will work great in wealthy areas with good schools with educated and supportive parents.

by mnd999 5y ago

So basically a deregulated, market based approach. This will work great in wealthy areas with good schools with educated and supportive parents.

twoodfin 5y ago

The idea that poor parents don’t care about their kids’ success enough to want to choose what they perceive to be better schools is belied by the lengthy waiting lists for slots in charter or magnet schools and voucher programs. What we have now is a market-based approach, where the price of admission to a top flight public school system is a $1M mortgage.

bobthepanda 5y ago
The root cause is that you have more or less four choices * private, which is expensive (and in some cases not a guarantee of quality) * rich public, which requires probably living in the extremely local school district * magnet/charter, which usually have whole apparatuses dedicated to securing donor funding similar to how colleges ask former alumni and the wealthy to top up their budgets * poor public At least some of the problems might be solvable by consolidating America's extremely local school districts, but that's kind of hard because a lot of the separate school districts were intentionally set up that way to ensure that socioeconomic classes did not have to share schools in a post-segregation world. Even if you did manage to do it, a lot of people would probably pull out and choose private instead. But it is absolutely insane that in some states "boundary-hopping" school districts can send parents who want the best for their child to jail. http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/america-tonight/america-tonight-blog/2014/1/21/where-school-boundaryhoppingcanmeantimeinjail.html http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/america-tonight/ame...
- toast0 5y ago
  > At least some of the problems might be solvable by consolidating America's extremely local school districts Large school districts seem to attract their own special blend of problems. > But it is absolutely insane that in some states "boundary-hopping" school districts can send parents who want the best for their child to jail. Sounds like fraud, which is generally a jailable offense. Specific details would matter, but what would you expect to happen if you registered to vote with an improper address so you could vote in a different district for some reason? I'd expect some chance of jail.
mnd999 5y ago
So we are in agreement that what you suggest doesn’t work.
- kbenson 5y ago
  Did they suggest something?
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  The existing system is the inverse of what we need. Right now you have good schools and bad schools and the way to get into the good schools is to have money and pay a lot for a house. The cost is more not because the good school actually costs more to operate, but because "having money" is being used as the admissions criteria, as a heuristic for not being a destructive influence. It's pretending that public schools don't have any admissions criteria and then having one anyway. But because it's only that one, the market is broken. Dumb rich kids go to the good school and smart poor kids go to the bad school. We could do the opposite. Give everyone a fixed amount of money for school, untethering the choice of school from your income, and then use anything else as the admissions criteria. Let the school choose its own. The schools with better-than-cheap-heuristic admissions criteria will be the most desirable, but will also accept desirable classmates regardless of parental income, because that's part of what makes it a desirable school.
kbenson 5y ago
Being poor doesn't necessarily mean you care less, but it can mean you have less time, resources and mobility to out towards finding a better school and having your child go to a better school, especially if it's not as close. What we have now is a system where we for the most part try to remove market influences so wealth doesn't advantage/disadvantage children, but with the constant thorn of wealthier parents constantly fighting to have their resources applied to their own children, sometimes without considering what that means overall. If we could actually separate wealth from public education, maybe we'd actually see some change. One interesting way might be to allow free bussing up to 10 (or more?) miles for any child, and allow parents to choose whatever school they want. Those wealthier schools in nicer areas will have to start splitting those funds between more and more students. Of course this would never be allowed for long.
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  > Being poor doesn't necessarily mean you care less, but it can mean you have less time, resources and mobility to out towards finding a better school and having your child go to a better school, especially if it's not as close. Knowing which school is the good school is hardly the problem. It's the one in the good neighborhood where the poor kids can't afford to live. The problem with the status quo is that knowing that doesn't get you into the school, only money does. > If we could actually separate wealth from public education, maybe we'd actually see some change. This is the idea of school choice. You give every kid in the state the same amount of money for school and don't gate admission by street address and the poor kid at least has a chance to go to the better school. You would then end up with admissions criteria like test scores for the better schools, which would have some disparity in them, but how is that worse than the status quo of every rich kid going to the good school and every poor kid going to the bad school? At least there would be a path for getting out of the hole based on something other than having your parents make more money and buy a very expensive house. And then you can work on improving admissions criteria so that promising students with low income parents get to go to better schools. Or better yet, start your own good school that does exactly this without needing permission from the parents of dumb rich kids who want your slot.
  - 5y ago

syshum 5y ago

>>supportive parents. supportive parents are the key to success, rich, poor, black, white, asian, Hispanic, gay, strait, etc. children with rich parents may have more doors opened, and access to things, but proclaim wealth is the only factor or even the biggest factor is false. unsupported rich parents turn out children that fail all the time, and supportive poor parents turn out children that go on to success. A support system at home is the biggest determinate for success or failure in life.