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Charter schools are the saving grace to the public schools hijacked by the teachers union and bloated administrations. Recently, these unions succeeded to lowe

• forgotOldLogin 3y ago
  The Times Union piece you cite does not say that the union supported lowering standardized test scores required for graduation. In fact, the article quotes the union funded Alliance for Quality Education as opposing the change. Charter schools create duplicate systems with duplicate costs, reduce funds available for traditional school students in sending schools, and are a waste of taxpayer resources. When students leave traditional public schools for charter schools, the traditional public school is unable to reduce costs in proportion with the loss in per-pupil revenues. Students in public schools are left with fewer resources.
  • davemp 3y ago
    Take a survey of public school board budgets if you want to see a waste taxpayer resources. There is already all the duplication of effort and wasteful initiatives you could ask for.
  • zaphar 3y ago
    If we've learned one thing about education over the years it's that past a certain point more funding doesn't help. Improving educational outcomes requires at least 2 things that the article mentions: 1. Engaged parents. 2. Social Norms that normalize learning behaviours. Parent's can control the first directly and the second indirectly by "choosing" a non public school option or moving to a district that has the proper norms. Charter schools are one of a class of escape hatches that less advantaged parents can choose in order to impact the second factor for their child. I strongly believe that these escape hatches should exist for the Parents who can't easily move or choose a private option. Improving education outcomes for the children of those parents who do care requires giving them tools to support their children whether the environment itself does or does not. It seems unfair to force those parents to fail just because their community is failing around them.
    • willio58 3y ago
      > If we've learned one thing about education over the years it's that past a certain point more funding doesn't help. Have we learned this? I don't remember a single time in my life when teachers were generally considered fairly paid.
      • chung8123 3y ago
        It is more a dollar spend on the parents is going to have a better outcome than a dollar spent on the teacher. I think Andrew Yang referenced this in his book.
  • wyager 3y ago
    Presumably the equilibrium state is that we will have fewer public schools and more charter schools, rather than a bunch of half-occupied public schools.
  • HDThoreaun 3y ago
    I'm sure my district is worse than yours, but here the public schools are a waste of taxpayer resources. They are corrupt, with more than a handful of superintendents being arrested for sweetheart contracts. They have extreme administrative bloat. They spend more per student than almost any other district in the world. And the outcomes are absolutely garbage. 25% of high schoolers are now in charters here, and honestly it's not for any reason other than the utter incompetence of the public school district. Why should we be giving more money to the system that parents have roundly rejected? At this point I'm forced to see the public schools as a waste of taxpayer resources that reduce funding for the more successful charter schools. We need competition to make schools better. The district was resting on its laurels since they were just counting on poor students showing up no matter how shitty the product was. The public can't accept that.
    • katbyte 3y ago
      The solution is to fix public schools not fund charter schools. That’s a failing of the Goverment more then anything else.
      • HDThoreaun 3y ago
        Easier said than done. Most elections for the past 20 years have revolves around the schools and they’ve only gotten worse. I honestly see no way to solve the public schools other than having all the students leave and forcing them to reconsider everything they do
        • katbyte 3y ago
          You fire all the admin and start from scratch with the teachers and kids. Teachers want to teach and do a good jobs generally but are prevented from doing so by admin/policies that set them up to fail
          • HDThoreaun 3y ago
            I would be in favor of this but I think the politics is too complicated for it to actually happen. Charters have already shown practical success
  • josephcsible 3y ago
    Is competition in other industries bad and wasteful too, since it creates duplicate systems with duplicate costs too? Should we replace it with a single monopoly per industry?
    • uoaei 3y ago
      We've already taken a wrong turn if we're treating education as an "industry" and not a public service.
  • kodah 3y ago
    > Charter schools create duplicate systems with duplicate costs, reduce funds available for traditional school students in sending schools, and are a waste of taxpayer resources. I went to a private school. Obviously slightly different from the Charter system, but only in administration of funds (depending on the state). This statement is categorically untrue. The private school that I went to was not analogous in learning or structure to the public school system. Coaching for college admissions essentially took place since first grade and gradually ramped up. Additionally, the school taught to different learning styles instead of just one. Where these schools fail is socially because often kids are geographically spread farther apart. As a result I was alienated at times both at school and out of school depending on where I needed to put my time. When I transferred to public school I was bored out of my mind for years due to how far ahead I was from 8th grade. It took until around junior year before I began learning new-ish material. To call them a "waste" of tax dollars ignores the fundamental problems with the public school system and why the separation occurs in the first place. Those fundamental problems are thorny issues though; you'll end up creating very different teaching methods, levels of classes, etc for a wider group of kids that will continue to grow as an area grows more dense. This was more sustainable at my private school because class sizes were smaller. I also don't think blaming teachers is really the right way to go here; most of them are underpaid and mistreated.
  • specialist 3y ago
    Yes and: Privatization greatly impairs transparency and accountability. Because private entities fall outside of public disclosure laws like FOIA. With depressingly predictable results.
• cardamomo 3y ago
  The articles you cite don't mention teachers' unions at all, and they don't point to "the worse job they’re doing teaching" as the reason for renorming standardized tests. I agree with you on the need for reform (though I have a hunch we would disagree on the specifics), but I don't think your argument adds up.
• MisterBastahrd 3y ago
  The need for affirmative action exists regardless of what you do to K-12 schools as long as college admissions count standardized test schools and extracurricular activities.
  • vacuity 3y ago
    If there's a baseline level of good education and whatnot, it stands to reason that there would be roughly proportionate demographics among the applicants. Get rid of legacies, and that seems perfectly fair to me.
• aaroninsf 3y ago
  "Highest spend per pupil" PSA a primary driver for this (along side other issues) is that in "major cities" the affluent pull out and stick their kids in private schools, creating a feedback loop of public school increasingly capturing all and predominantly the least- least-supported kids. And teachers then teach in over-crowded classes with 3x the student-teacher ratio of the private schools, while also providing de facto baseline social services of many kinds. While horrifically underpaid. Meanwhile the right wing is driving this feedback loop on multiple fronts, as it has been for decades—with the collapse of secular public education an open agenda for those decades.
  • scarmig 3y ago
    The solution to people fleeing public non-charter schools to go to better options is to provide opportunities for kids who remain in public schools to thrive. As it stands, school districts are doing the opposite. Getting rid of educational tracking at least, or banning algebra in middle school because it's inequitable at worst (as in SFUSD). This isn't a matter of funding but ideology.
• revolvingocelot 3y ago
  >Recently, these unions succeeded to lowering testing standards for graduation in blue states to mask the worse job they’re doing teaching our kids The link provided shows that, in fact, the union opposed the change. This claim is a bald faced lie, and lies should be downvoted on HN.
  • namelessoracle 3y ago
    what union opposed the change? The Alliance group mentioned is not a Union of teachers. https://www.aqeny.org/ https://www.aqeny.org/ Unions aren't mentioned at all in the article. Your claim is also a bald faced lie. More so than the OP. This article supports OP's claim https://nypost.com/2023/03/16/nys-education-leaders-again-prove-to-be-anti-education/ https://nypost.com/2023/03/16/nys-education-leaders-again-pr..., I can trivially find other articles from other sources where the New York teachers union has made it clear they dont find how they are evaluated by test scores acceptable. That may even be a reasonable position to have. There is more data out their to support OPs claim than yours that they are against it.
    • revolvingocelot 3y ago
      Nothing has been presented that suggests that the teachers' union wanted this to happen. That "article", an editorial from a right-leaning source, doesn't support the claim that "the New York teachers union has made it clear they dont find how they are evaluated by test scores acceptable". In fact, it doesn't include any statements from any unions at all, direct or indirect. If one actually reads it, it's just a recapitulation of the root-level link. "SED", the organization the editorial rails against, isn't a teacher's union, you know -- it's the State Education Department. ctrl+f for "union" in that piece, and beyond a reference to the Times Union article, the only involvement of a teachers' union is at the end, where the editorial's author claims that the union is the only beneficiary of these shenanigans, and implies that they had a dastardly hand in anointing the Assembly Speaker. >There is more data out their to support OPs claim than yours that they are against it Ah, but you didn't provide data, but instead a slanted editorial without the proof you trumpeted. If there were other articles from other sources that you could trivially find, why didn't you use them? Why use this and misrepresent what it said? And, fine, you got me, there doesn't appear to be any direct link between the AQE and a teachers' union -- where I come from, the teachers' union donates to grassroots lobbyists like that, the better to improve education funding for children, because teachers are actually there to teach kids, not get fat from subsidy and shirk their responsibility. I reflexively assumed it was the same here. TBH, I suspect we're not going to see eye to eye on this because I can't conceive of a scenario where teachers would rather just turn down the standards rather than lift up their charges. What's happening sounds like an admin thing -- and indeed, both the root-level link and your editorial suggests that it's the admin, the SED, doing this. I hate to say it so bluntly, but I think your own biases are clouding your judgement as to what's happening here and why. Blaming teachers is a red herring, as teachers generally do not have control over, nor approve of, what school boards wind up mandating in the name of "cost-cutting" or "modernization".
• willio58 3y ago
  > Charter schools are the saving grace to the public schools hijacked by the teachers union and bloated administrations. Where I live, charter schools are a joke. They're old office buildings converted into "schools". This is super unsafe and honestly quite sad to see in most cases because these office buildings are on busy streets with no playgrounds (what they do have is basically a concrete slab in the back with nearly no play equipment). News flash: if you want education to "work", we need to pay teachers more. Subsidizing private companies (charter schools) through vouchers is just a leach on resources we could give to our existing schools and teachers instead. There are millions of teachers out there, some with master's degrees, who make much less than a new grad junior dev who goes to work, edits some CSS, and browses Reddit the rest of the day. We simply don't value education in the US enough, and charter schools are a non-solution proposed by those who would rather run away from the problems than face them head-on.
  • endisneigh 3y ago
    I fail to see how even doubling teachers salary would resolve anything. I’d love to see a study where a school simply increased teacher salaries alone and that improved outcomes for students. The issue is almost entirely cultural and socioeconomic. Fixing schools is basically fixing society. Intractable, which is why every school from Harvard to Oxford relies on glorified selection bias instead.
    • ink_13 3y ago
      A lot of really good educators leave the field because the money is garbage. Pay peanuts, get monkeys. Given the central role of education in our society, teachers should absolutely be paid more.
      • dragonwriter 3y ago
        > Given the central role of education in our society The “central role of education in our society” seems a lot like a slogan that is, at best, aspirational, and at worst false-meritocracy cover for persistent structural inequality. While educational performance and attainment seems to correlate a lot with success, differences in educational interventions and methods seem to do a lot less: those measures that seem to matter seem to themselves largely be a function of who you are and what your home environment is. Its not clear that education, particularly K-12, is doing a lot more than measuring structural advantage.
• P_I_Staker 3y ago
  In some cases outcomes might just be bad in major cities. It may be counter intuitive, but in many ways cities have felt the brunt of economic and racial injustices. Are major cities more likely to contain people in abject poverty, who perceive their situation as hopeless, sometimes correctly? Many people struggle with learning, due to conditions at home, and without money there's no get out of jail free cards. Kids need people with money to advocate for them, or they can be abandoned by society, told they will never amount to nothing (very much like Biggy Smalls did), and their talents overlooked. For people living in these conditions college may be achievable, but there's a very narrow window, with a ton of risk involved. To summarize, perhaps we're simply spending more, to combat bigger problems (often ineffectively); versus the quality of education being as poor as you claim.
• thelock85 3y ago
  > Charter schools are the saving grace to the public schools hijacked by the teachers union and bloated administrations. I''d break this into two statements with "public schools" being part of both: 1. Charter schools are the saving grace to the public schools because they are not mandated to serve every student and can therefore siphon off failing or behaviorally challenged students back to the public system. Find me a charter system serving special needs and at-risk students better than the public system at the scale of a public system, and I'll change my mind. 2. Public schools have been hijacked by the teachers union and bloated administrations because their funding structures are controlled by politics and culture wars instead of targeted research and practice on what specific kids need. I'm not a fan of teachers unions or bureaucracy, but who else takes the heat for teachers who are under-resourced, under-paid, and over-worked? > Fix K-12 schools (no, more money on bloated administrations is not the answer), and the need for affirmative action goes away. 100% agree on the affirmative action part, but to fix K-12 schools you need new or other institutions to pick up slack on supporting students. The reason that "Deputy Assistant Senior Manager of Cognitive and Emotional Development" exist is because the law is pretty clear about how a school district is responsible for a student with XYZ cognitive and emotional developmental challenges. To get rid of that administrator, you also need to transfer (operationally and legislatively) ownership of that responsibility.