7 ms·

There's the theory that, by forcing the kids with the most engaged parents to go to schools with the kids of less engaged parents, the engaged parents will driv

There's the theory that, by forcing the kids with the most engaged parents to go to schools with the kids of less engaged parents, the engaged parents will drive school districts to implement good educational policies. In reality, though, that doesn't seem to have worked. School board elections have very low turnout usually, and the people elected to them are disproportionately ideologues who treat engaged parents with contempt for being "privileged."

okeuro49 3y ago
I agree, and particularly this part > There's the theory that, by forcing the kids with the most engaged parents to go to schools with the kids of less engaged parents is really rough on the kids of engaged parents, forcing them to be responsible for "fixing" systems that they didn't create. In the UK, we used to have "grammar schools" that selected on ability based on a standardised test. They were responsible for many working- and middle class children being propelled into high positions in industry and politics, including Prime Minister. However the whole idea was deemed inequitable, so they were dismantled. Now privately school educated children have less competition.
- declan_roberts 3y ago
  Also being treated like a privileged enemy of the school while trying to fix it.
- nsxwolf 3y ago
  And if you could fix the system, it would have been fixed by now. If you have a kid today, you have 5-6 years to fix the system before it starts failing them. Your kid will be grown before any meaningful change is made, and any harms caused by the current system will be fully baked in. If you have money, you have an escape hatch right now. Vouchers make that escape hatch available to more people. Public education doesn't have to mean public schools.
  - mfer 3y ago
    You need a decent school option within an acceptable travel distance. There are many who don't have a good choice like that.
    - nsxwolf 3y ago
      New schools appear as soon as the money is available.
    - tastyfreeze 3y ago
      If there is money available the choices will appear. When it stops being about the building and government curriculum and starts becoming about satisfying parents desire to have their child educated, anybody can become a teacher or organize a school. If the teacher fails to deliver the parents will go elsewhere. The free market for schools and teachers is created the moment Department of Education is eliminated and replaced with education vouchers for all.
  - KerrAvon 3y ago
    Actually, public education has to mean public schools. Vouchers are a band-aid invented by right-wing nutjobs to allow religious schools to be funded by public money; they do this by taking money away from secular public schools. If public schools are broken, we need to fix the public schools, not break them further.
    - nsxwolf 3y ago
      I'm almost 50. I've watched this scam play out my entire life. We've gotta fix the public schools, they said, when I was in public school. They said it year after year, generation after generation. It's never happening. We absolutely should allow vouchers to go to religious private schools and secular private schools alike. It's time to bleed the public schools dry and use their lots to build more housing.
      - duskwuff 3y ago
        It may surprise you to hear this, but intentionally destroying the public school system and hoping that the private sector will step in with a replacement is not a viable solution to public schooling. Private schools are not required to serve all students, either in a socioeconomic sense or a geographic one. Allowing public schools to fall into terminal disrepair does a massive disservice to those students who wouldn't be served appropriately by private schools.
- blowski 3y ago
  There are still some grammar schools, but they are badly distributed, because it’s based on political views from past ages. For example, the city of Southend in Essex has about 7000 grammar school places. Entire counties of Norfolk and Suffolk have none.
- gadders 3y ago
  Grammar schools do still exist in a few hold-out counties like Kent. One thing that was repealed by the last Labour government was the Assisted Places Scheme [1]. If you scored highly enough the government would pay for a child to go to private school. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_Places_Scheme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_Places_Scheme
brightball 3y ago
That’s a good case for vouchers. Instead, kids with engaged parents will flee to better schools. The other parents will either follow, growing the new school and model, or the other school will adapt in order to retain students. Engaged parents are your early adopters. Without vouchers, most people can’t even afford to enter the market.
- xcxcx 3y ago
  What if you launch convenience store-style mini schools with really terrible infrastructure and content but within five blocks from many buildings? You could literally rewrite history and language and program an entire generation of future voters. Imagine the possibilities
- altcognito 3y ago
  One of the purposes of public education is also assimilating children into the shared values of society. In the US this has been forgotten despite guys like Jefferson talking about this exact thing. The free market can be good at optimizing for certain outcomes, but I don't think you're going to get a lot of buy in with the current political climate being what it is, and a lack of consensus around what kind of outcomes should be required. Furthermore, making schooling a purely financial transaction? Where do you think that leads?
  - bamfly 3y ago
    Yeah, I'm OK paying taxes to get to live in a society with universally-available (mostly) fee-free primary and secondary education that aspires to some set of standards. I'm not OK paying taxes to help Bobby Baptist send his kids to Jesus Is Lord Day School. Or kick in to rich parents' budget for Phillips Exeter. If we must have vouchers, let people keep their own tax money that would have gone to schools and use that for the vouchers. I'm not interested in handing people my cash to fund private education. I'm interested in having a public education system. That, I'll pay taxes for.
    - busterarm 3y ago
Kalium 3y ago
I strongly suspect that in practice, those engaged parents handle it by moving to the next polity over that's not trying to use them to improve policies.
- bluGill 3y ago
  They often don't have a choice. They can stay, but as just one vote they cannot reform the system. They can fight for thier kids, but they may have limited results. (My mom faught hard in ~1965 to be able to take shop, but it was a boys only class and she didn't win)
  - autoexec 3y ago
    I'd bet that the school she went to would let a girl into shop class today (assuming the school and class are still around). Change is possible, but it's slow. It also matters if there's one girl who wants to take shop class vs many girls who are asking for it. Parents and students can work to change the ways their schools are run. They may have to campaign for and promote their causes so that "one vote" grows into more votes, but votes still mater.
    - bluGill 3y ago
      Sure, but it was too late for my mom. My mom would have been better off finding a different district that would let her in (this may not have been possible), instead of fighting a system that ultimately failed her.
      - nobody9999 3y ago
        >Sure, but it was too late for my mom. My mom would have been better off finding a different district that would let her in (this may not have been possible), instead of fighting a system that ultimately failed her. An interesting and important anecdote. But rather than focusing on your mom's inability to take shop class, perhaps you might reflect on the fact that your mom (and many other women/girls) fought for such changes and, eventually (albeit too late for your mom), won. That's how change happens. If you just throw up your hands and say "well, I/my mom/whoever couldn't have something that was good and important. So there's no reason to ever fight for change," seems incredibly reductive and doesn't reflect how change has been wrought throughout history. Please understand, I'm not poking at you or your mom (in fact, I don't know her, but I think she's fabulous!). Rather, I'm taking issue with the idea that we "can't win, so don't try." That's a recipe for those who understand how change is made to create the world in their image, whether you like it or not.
vuln 3y ago
> School board elections have very low turnout usually, and the people elected to them are disproportionately ideologues who treat engaged parents with contempt for being "privileged." Not only the School Board but the Teachers Unions and the United States Government are anti parents attending School Board meetings to support their children. Red or Blue, 6 or 600, it doesn’t matter when the USG decides to make parents the enemy of the state. https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/chairman-jordan-expands-investigation-biden-targeting-parents-school-board https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/chairman-jo... https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2023/03/29/garland-school-board-memo-fbi/11561422002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2023/03/29/garl... https://apnews.com/article/merrick-garland-school-boards-violence-daaff3f659981354b7a9a536db5cf2e2 https://apnews.com/article/merrick-garland-school-boards-vio...
- thebooktocome 3y ago
  Parents are merely exercising their First Amendment rights when they threaten violence against school teachers & staff? That’s an interesting position.
- declan_roberts 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - ambicapter 3y ago
    I find it hard to believe that you find it hard to believe that law enforcement was called in to deal with individuals threatening violence on others, regardless of whether these were parents at a school board meeting.
  - insanitybit 3y ago
    The article cites a parent physically attacking a school board member and your response is shock that authorities were involved?
- ryandrake 3y ago
  I dunno--if you want to see America's mental illness problem on full, public display, just do a YouTube search for "school board meeting outrage". It's great when concerned, non-ideological, rational parents show up to have a voice in how the school is run, but the flip side of that coin is ugly, belligerent, and counter-productive.
api 3y ago
> the engaged parents will drive school districts to implement good educational policies. This assumes that it's actually possible for parents to override insulated bureaucrats whose heads are stuffed completely up their own derrieres. Political hyper-polarization doesn't help either. If your local crazy-left school board abolishes merit in the name of equity, you could always replace them with crazy-right Republicans who believe the Earth is 6000 years old and Qanon is real.
matrix_overload 3y ago
>the people elected to them are disproportionately ideologues who treat engaged parents with contempt for being "privileged." There are grim economic shifts behind this. The majority of people are now priced out of raising their own kids to a good standard (i.e. stay-at-home mum). So, more and more people feel envy towards those who can, and various "equity" movements pop out (that all focus on bringing top performers down, rather than bottom performers up). The only way to fight it is move to an area where most people can still afford kids, and in our generation it may mean moving out of U.S. entirely.
orangepurple 3y ago
In this case it is abundantly clear that the school district gave up trying to fix underperformers and threw in the towel. Engaged parents are domestic terrorists: https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/01/13/school-board-association-domestic-terrorism/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/01/13/school-b... The only option is do not help and do not engage. There is no point in expending effort trying to fix a system led by people that hate you.
blobbers 3y ago
Wow you hit the nail right on the head. That's exactly what's happened at our board level. The PTA of the school itself is the involved parents, and the schoolboard has the utmost contempt for them! None of the involved parents are willing to put in the effort or have the desire to be elected to the schoolboard though.
- ineedasername 3y ago
  My experience coincides with yours with respect to the disregard school boards have for, not just the PTA, but the will of parents in general. Although I don't think that, at its base, it started with contempt-- I think it began with actual disregard or maybe apathy in favor of their own pet projects and ideas of how things should be regardless of the parents' wishes. Contempt only entered the picture when parents voices dissent. But that's only what I see locally for my district, I'd certainly believe you if you reasserted that no, in your district it did actually begin with contempt as well. With respect to the GP comment, I don't think things are quite as pre-planned as a deliberate effort to have engaged parents sort of subsidize the lack of effort by less engaged parents. That might be the net result, but attributing that to a deliberate and coordinated plan on the part of school boards or the broader public education system is, to my thinking, giving them too much credit in their ability to so coordinate and engage in such complex efforts. They bicker far too much among themselves pursuing their own agendas to agree long enough for that level of strategy. And there are on occasion parents truly willing to put in the effort and get elected, but end up quickly disillusioned on their hopes for affecting any change and leave to spend their time more productively. Often enough those who seek & stay in these board position aren't even parents of children who currently or even attended the schools in the district. Again though, I'd temper my statements with the caveat that they're based on my own singular experience, and I'd readily believe that elsewhere there are boards who arrive at the same state of affairs with a bit more deliberate actions. It's all a mess.
NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
It's a fool's quest. Assume for a moment that my vote matters... in the sense that who I choose is elected. Further, assume that I get to craft and design these magical candidates like it the sandbox mode of some video game. So, after all this, these candidates of mine are in charge of the school board, and no one can cockblock them. At this point, does it change the quality of the school's education? Not necessarily for my kids... that's a more difficult thing. Maybe it's a great school, but my kid's just one of those left behind by random individual circumstances. Just on average, does this school improve? Turns out, not really. That school system is still limited in many ways beyond the school board's ability to affect on any reasonable timescale. There is not just a finite talent pool to hire from, but quite limited. And the resources to somehow expand that talent pool are limited too (and it seems likely that even if you could offer $500k salaries, you're attracting money-grubbers more than great teachers). Your capacity for the HR system to even pick the best of that talent pool is sketchy. Textbooks? Limited by what textbooks are offered on the open market. Limited by whether parents will accept that Timmy really is a D+ student, and doesn't deserve automatic Bs for showing up and not acting the maniac. Limited by the "culture of public education"... if the best field trip ever could only happen at the end of July, that doesn't happen because we have ideas about how public schools are supposed to work and they're just not "on" during that part of the calendar. If I was some angsty nihilist, I'd be ranting about how school boards cockblock everything public schools should be doing. But it's so much worse than that. If they did cockblock those things, it'd mean they had some idea what they should do, and were for some reason opposed to it. They don't know. And if they did, it wouldn't matter. The system is designed in such a way as to be completely orthogonal its imagined purpose. And you don't have to be especially intelligent or attentive to recognize any of this enough that you just don't bother with the school board elections. Why would anyone bother to vote? The truth of the matter is it's mostly between worse-and-worst candidates who have no true desire to see any sort of real improvement, and your one vote's not enough to sway it to one or the other.
Justsignedup 3y ago
It only works when everyone is committed. When there can be no private schools. If everyone is committed, everything must improve for you to see changes. If everyone is not committed they'll just send their kids to the best schools and ignore the problematic ones.

okeuro49 3y ago

I agree, and particularly this part > There's the theory that, by forcing the kids with the most engaged parents to go to schools with the kids of less engaged parents is really rough on the kids of engaged parents, forcing them to be responsible for "fixing" systems that they didn't create. In the UK, we used to have "grammar schools" that selected on ability based on a standardised test. They were responsible for many working- and middle class children being propelled into high positions in industry and politics, including Prime Minister. However the whole idea was deemed inequitable, so they were dismantled. Now privately school educated children have less competition.

declan_roberts 3y ago
Also being treated like a privileged enemy of the school while trying to fix it.
nsxwolf 3y ago
And if you could fix the system, it would have been fixed by now. If you have a kid today, you have 5-6 years to fix the system before it starts failing them. Your kid will be grown before any meaningful change is made, and any harms caused by the current system will be fully baked in. If you have money, you have an escape hatch right now. Vouchers make that escape hatch available to more people. Public education doesn't have to mean public schools.
- mfer 3y ago
  You need a decent school option within an acceptable travel distance. There are many who don't have a good choice like that.
  - nsxwolf 3y ago
    New schools appear as soon as the money is available.
  - tastyfreeze 3y ago
    If there is money available the choices will appear. When it stops being about the building and government curriculum and starts becoming about satisfying parents desire to have their child educated, anybody can become a teacher or organize a school. If the teacher fails to deliver the parents will go elsewhere. The free market for schools and teachers is created the moment Department of Education is eliminated and replaced with education vouchers for all.
- KerrAvon 3y ago
  Actually, public education has to mean public schools. Vouchers are a band-aid invented by right-wing nutjobs to allow religious schools to be funded by public money; they do this by taking money away from secular public schools. If public schools are broken, we need to fix the public schools, not break them further.
  - nsxwolf 3y ago
    I'm almost 50. I've watched this scam play out my entire life. We've gotta fix the public schools, they said, when I was in public school. They said it year after year, generation after generation. It's never happening. We absolutely should allow vouchers to go to religious private schools and secular private schools alike. It's time to bleed the public schools dry and use their lots to build more housing.
    - duskwuff 3y ago
      It may surprise you to hear this, but intentionally destroying the public school system and hoping that the private sector will step in with a replacement is not a viable solution to public schooling. Private schools are not required to serve all students, either in a socioeconomic sense or a geographic one. Allowing public schools to fall into terminal disrepair does a massive disservice to those students who wouldn't be served appropriately by private schools.
blowski 3y ago
There are still some grammar schools, but they are badly distributed, because it’s based on political views from past ages. For example, the city of Southend in Essex has about 7000 grammar school places. Entire counties of Norfolk and Suffolk have none.
gadders 3y ago
Grammar schools do still exist in a few hold-out counties like Kent. One thing that was repealed by the last Labour government was the Assisted Places Scheme [1]. If you scored highly enough the government would pay for a child to go to private school. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_Places_Scheme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_Places_Scheme

brightball 3y ago

That’s a good case for vouchers. Instead, kids with engaged parents will flee to better schools. The other parents will either follow, growing the new school and model, or the other school will adapt in order to retain students. Engaged parents are your early adopters. Without vouchers, most people can’t even afford to enter the market.

xcxcx 3y ago
What if you launch convenience store-style mini schools with really terrible infrastructure and content but within five blocks from many buildings? You could literally rewrite history and language and program an entire generation of future voters. Imagine the possibilities
altcognito 3y ago
One of the purposes of public education is also assimilating children into the shared values of society. In the US this has been forgotten despite guys like Jefferson talking about this exact thing. The free market can be good at optimizing for certain outcomes, but I don't think you're going to get a lot of buy in with the current political climate being what it is, and a lack of consensus around what kind of outcomes should be required. Furthermore, making schooling a purely financial transaction? Where do you think that leads?
- bamfly 3y ago
  Yeah, I'm OK paying taxes to get to live in a society with universally-available (mostly) fee-free primary and secondary education that aspires to some set of standards. I'm not OK paying taxes to help Bobby Baptist send his kids to Jesus Is Lord Day School. Or kick in to rich parents' budget for Phillips Exeter. If we must have vouchers, let people keep their own tax money that would have gone to schools and use that for the vouchers. I'm not interested in handing people my cash to fund private education. I'm interested in having a public education system. That, I'll pay taxes for.
  - busterarm 3y ago

Kalium 3y ago

I strongly suspect that in practice, those engaged parents handle it by moving to the next polity over that's not trying to use them to improve policies.

bluGill 3y ago
They often don't have a choice. They can stay, but as just one vote they cannot reform the system. They can fight for thier kids, but they may have limited results. (My mom faught hard in ~1965 to be able to take shop, but it was a boys only class and she didn't win)
- autoexec 3y ago
  I'd bet that the school she went to would let a girl into shop class today (assuming the school and class are still around). Change is possible, but it's slow. It also matters if there's one girl who wants to take shop class vs many girls who are asking for it. Parents and students can work to change the ways their schools are run. They may have to campaign for and promote their causes so that "one vote" grows into more votes, but votes still mater.
  - bluGill 3y ago
    Sure, but it was too late for my mom. My mom would have been better off finding a different district that would let her in (this may not have been possible), instead of fighting a system that ultimately failed her.
    - nobody9999 3y ago
      >Sure, but it was too late for my mom. My mom would have been better off finding a different district that would let her in (this may not have been possible), instead of fighting a system that ultimately failed her. An interesting and important anecdote. But rather than focusing on your mom's inability to take shop class, perhaps you might reflect on the fact that your mom (and many other women/girls) fought for such changes and, eventually (albeit too late for your mom), won. That's how change happens. If you just throw up your hands and say "well, I/my mom/whoever couldn't have something that was good and important. So there's no reason to ever fight for change," seems incredibly reductive and doesn't reflect how change has been wrought throughout history. Please understand, I'm not poking at you or your mom (in fact, I don't know her, but I think she's fabulous!). Rather, I'm taking issue with the idea that we "can't win, so don't try." That's a recipe for those who understand how change is made to create the world in their image, whether you like it or not.

vuln 3y ago

> School board elections have very low turnout usually, and the people elected to them are disproportionately ideologues who treat engaged parents with contempt for being "privileged." Not only the School Board but the Teachers Unions and the United States Government are anti parents attending School Board meetings to support their children. Red or Blue, 6 or 600, it doesn’t matter when the USG decides to make parents the enemy of the state. https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/chairman-jordan-expands-investigation-biden-targeting-parents-school-board https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/chairman-jo... https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2023/03/29/garland-school-board-memo-fbi/11561422002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2023/03/29/garl... https://apnews.com/article/merrick-garland-school-boards-violence-daaff3f659981354b7a9a536db5cf2e2 https://apnews.com/article/merrick-garland-school-boards-vio...

thebooktocome 3y ago
Parents are merely exercising their First Amendment rights when they threaten violence against school teachers & staff? That’s an interesting position.
declan_roberts 3y ago
[flagged]
- ambicapter 3y ago
  I find it hard to believe that you find it hard to believe that law enforcement was called in to deal with individuals threatening violence on others, regardless of whether these were parents at a school board meeting.
- insanitybit 3y ago
  The article cites a parent physically attacking a school board member and your response is shock that authorities were involved?
ryandrake 3y ago
I dunno--if you want to see America's mental illness problem on full, public display, just do a YouTube search for "school board meeting outrage". It's great when concerned, non-ideological, rational parents show up to have a voice in how the school is run, but the flip side of that coin is ugly, belligerent, and counter-productive.

api 3y ago

> the engaged parents will drive school districts to implement good educational policies. This assumes that it's actually possible for parents to override insulated bureaucrats whose heads are stuffed completely up their own derrieres. Political hyper-polarization doesn't help either. If your local crazy-left school board abolishes merit in the name of equity, you could always replace them with crazy-right Republicans who believe the Earth is 6000 years old and Qanon is real.

matrix_overload 3y ago

>the people elected to them are disproportionately ideologues who treat engaged parents with contempt for being "privileged." There are grim economic shifts behind this. The majority of people are now priced out of raising their own kids to a good standard (i.e. stay-at-home mum). So, more and more people feel envy towards those who can, and various "equity" movements pop out (that all focus on bringing top performers down, rather than bottom performers up). The only way to fight it is move to an area where most people can still afford kids, and in our generation it may mean moving out of U.S. entirely.

orangepurple 3y ago

In this case it is abundantly clear that the school district gave up trying to fix underperformers and threw in the towel. Engaged parents are domestic terrorists: https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/01/13/school-board-association-domestic-terrorism/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/01/13/school-b... The only option is do not help and do not engage. There is no point in expending effort trying to fix a system led by people that hate you.

blobbers 3y ago

Wow you hit the nail right on the head. That's exactly what's happened at our board level. The PTA of the school itself is the involved parents, and the schoolboard has the utmost contempt for them! None of the involved parents are willing to put in the effort or have the desire to be elected to the schoolboard though.

ineedasername 3y ago
My experience coincides with yours with respect to the disregard school boards have for, not just the PTA, but the will of parents in general. Although I don't think that, at its base, it started with contempt-- I think it began with actual disregard or maybe apathy in favor of their own pet projects and ideas of how things should be regardless of the parents' wishes. Contempt only entered the picture when parents voices dissent. But that's only what I see locally for my district, I'd certainly believe you if you reasserted that no, in your district it did actually begin with contempt as well. With respect to the GP comment, I don't think things are quite as pre-planned as a deliberate effort to have engaged parents sort of subsidize the lack of effort by less engaged parents. That might be the net result, but attributing that to a deliberate and coordinated plan on the part of school boards or the broader public education system is, to my thinking, giving them too much credit in their ability to so coordinate and engage in such complex efforts. They bicker far too much among themselves pursuing their own agendas to agree long enough for that level of strategy. And there are on occasion parents truly willing to put in the effort and get elected, but end up quickly disillusioned on their hopes for affecting any change and leave to spend their time more productively. Often enough those who seek & stay in these board position aren't even parents of children who currently or even attended the schools in the district. Again though, I'd temper my statements with the caveat that they're based on my own singular experience, and I'd readily believe that elsewhere there are boards who arrive at the same state of affairs with a bit more deliberate actions. It's all a mess.

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago

It's a fool's quest. Assume for a moment that my vote matters... in the sense that who I choose is elected. Further, assume that I get to craft and design these magical candidates like it the sandbox mode of some video game. So, after all this, these candidates of mine are in charge of the school board, and no one can cockblock them. At this point, does it change the quality of the school's education? Not necessarily for my kids... that's a more difficult thing. Maybe it's a great school, but my kid's just one of those left behind by random individual circumstances. Just on average, does this school improve? Turns out, not really. That school system is still limited in many ways beyond the school board's ability to affect on any reasonable timescale. There is not just a finite talent pool to hire from, but quite limited. And the resources to somehow expand that talent pool are limited too (and it seems likely that even if you could offer $500k salaries, you're attracting money-grubbers more than great teachers). Your capacity for the HR system to even pick the best of that talent pool is sketchy. Textbooks? Limited by what textbooks are offered on the open market. Limited by whether parents will accept that Timmy really is a D+ student, and doesn't deserve automatic Bs for showing up and not acting the maniac. Limited by the "culture of public education"... if the best field trip ever could only happen at the end of July, that doesn't happen because we have ideas about how public schools are supposed to work and they're just not "on" during that part of the calendar. If I was some angsty nihilist, I'd be ranting about how school boards cockblock everything public schools should be doing. But it's so much worse than that. If they did cockblock those things, it'd mean they had some idea what they should do, and were for some reason opposed to it. They don't know. And if they did, it wouldn't matter. The system is designed in such a way as to be completely orthogonal its imagined purpose. And you don't have to be especially intelligent or attentive to recognize any of this enough that you just don't bother with the school board elections. Why would anyone bother to vote? The truth of the matter is it's mostly between worse-and-worst candidates who have no true desire to see any sort of real improvement, and your one vote's not enough to sway it to one or the other.

Justsignedup 3y ago

It only works when everyone is committed. When there can be no private schools. If everyone is committed, everything must improve for you to see changes. If everyone is not committed they'll just send their kids to the best schools and ignore the problematic ones.