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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

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.
- kbenson 5y ago
  > 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. Yeah, that's what I was getting at. Not only are poorer people less likely to have the time in the morning to get their children to schools farther away, they're also less likely to even have vehicles to do some in some cases. That's why maybe opening up schools to any student, ignoring criteria such as geography or testing, and providing free bussing to a certain range/degree might be a market approach way to allow those resources to be more evenly spread across children (if the poorer schools have 25% less children each but the richer schools have 50% more children, that might even out some of the funding issues and allow for other reform to take place, such as not using property taxes). Then again, maybe we'll just see an explosion of high-end private schools 20 miles outside of cities. As for testing to get into wealthier schools, to some degree that might be a chicken and egg problem. What if many people that would qualify don't because they've not had the resources to excel outside of that environment? Also, what if the testing is subtly biased towards one group over another? You could heavily regulate the testing, but I think heavy regulation often leads to people finding and abusing the loopholes. I think I favor lighter regulation (but not the lack of any, for sure), and incentives and disincentives towards desired behavior what are viewed less as a sacrosanct set of rules that must be preserved and more as an ever changing set of nudges to move us towards the outcomes we want.
  - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    > Then again, maybe we'll just see an explosion of high-end private schools 20 miles outside of cities. There is no reason to do this if you have reasonable selection criteria. Right now we're trying to maintain the facade that all public schools accept everyone while not actually doing that in practice. Make the acceptance criteria explicit and you don't need the implicit gating by income. > What if many people that would qualify don't because they've not had the resources to excel outside of that environment? Also, what if the testing is subtly biased towards one group over another? This is solved by allowing each school to have their own criteria. The thing parents want isn't actually to put all the rich kids together. It's to put their kid together with the creative kids and not the destructive kids. That might correlate somewhat with rich kids and poor kids, but it's not the same thing. Then schools that do a better job of selecting for what parents really want will be more attractive to all parents than the ones using cheap heuristics like parental income. And then the creative poor kids get to go to the good school. It also allows schools to specialize. You've got some kids who are in gangs. How about a boarding school which is 20 miles outside the city. The kid stays there all week and only comes home on weekends. A place where the bad kids can turn themselves around, where you remove the kid from existing bad influences for the school week. We already have private schools like that, but the poor families who need them the most can only send their kids to the drug-infested prison-school allocated to the neighborhood they can afford to live in.

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.

kbenson 5y ago
> 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. Yeah, that's what I was getting at. Not only are poorer people less likely to have the time in the morning to get their children to schools farther away, they're also less likely to even have vehicles to do some in some cases. That's why maybe opening up schools to any student, ignoring criteria such as geography or testing, and providing free bussing to a certain range/degree might be a market approach way to allow those resources to be more evenly spread across children (if the poorer schools have 25% less children each but the richer schools have 50% more children, that might even out some of the funding issues and allow for other reform to take place, such as not using property taxes). Then again, maybe we'll just see an explosion of high-end private schools 20 miles outside of cities. As for testing to get into wealthier schools, to some degree that might be a chicken and egg problem. What if many people that would qualify don't because they've not had the resources to excel outside of that environment? Also, what if the testing is subtly biased towards one group over another? You could heavily regulate the testing, but I think heavy regulation often leads to people finding and abusing the loopholes. I think I favor lighter regulation (but not the lack of any, for sure), and incentives and disincentives towards desired behavior what are viewed less as a sacrosanct set of rules that must be preserved and more as an ever changing set of nudges to move us towards the outcomes we want.
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  > Then again, maybe we'll just see an explosion of high-end private schools 20 miles outside of cities. There is no reason to do this if you have reasonable selection criteria. Right now we're trying to maintain the facade that all public schools accept everyone while not actually doing that in practice. Make the acceptance criteria explicit and you don't need the implicit gating by income. > What if many people that would qualify don't because they've not had the resources to excel outside of that environment? Also, what if the testing is subtly biased towards one group over another? This is solved by allowing each school to have their own criteria. The thing parents want isn't actually to put all the rich kids together. It's to put their kid together with the creative kids and not the destructive kids. That might correlate somewhat with rich kids and poor kids, but it's not the same thing. Then schools that do a better job of selecting for what parents really want will be more attractive to all parents than the ones using cheap heuristics like parental income. And then the creative poor kids get to go to the good school. It also allows schools to specialize. You've got some kids who are in gangs. How about a boarding school which is 20 miles outside the city. The kid stays there all week and only comes home on weekends. A place where the bad kids can turn themselves around, where you remove the kid from existing bad influences for the school week. We already have private schools like that, but the poor families who need them the most can only send their kids to the drug-infested prison-school allocated to the neighborhood they can afford to live in.