5 ms·

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 s

by 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
But Bobby Baptist's kids going to Jesus Is Lord Day School is assimilating those kids into their society at large and Jesus Is Lord Day School still needs to meet the curriculum and testing standards that any other school in the state has to. And more often than not those private schools are _exceeding_ the standard of the public education system. I spent years in both public and private schools. The worst part of public schooling was that everything was scaled down to the poorest-performing child's level. The worst part of private schooling was that a few underperforming kids were pushed/passed along with everyone else. The latter outcome is _significantly_ better for society than the former.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- duskwuff 3y ago
  > But Bobby Baptist's kids going to Jesus Is Lord Day School is assimilating those kids into their society at large No, I think you're missing the parent's point -- it's assimilating those students into a specific religious subculture whose beliefs and values may be at odds with civil society at large. (If you have trouble seeing this, try substituting "Jesus Is Lord Day School" in your head for some other implied religions.)
  - busterarm 3y ago
    But that's exactly my point. Would you deny this same right to kids that attend Jewish day schools? Could you even argue for that without sounding like a massive bigot? Religious people are part of your community and have the right to their religious identity and to be a member of your community. If they want a school just for them, you don't suffer for it. Religion is not at odds with society. We're not the USSR. Religious freedom is an enshrined right in this country.
    - altcognito 3y ago
      At least in the US, The community is not religious by definition in the constitution. The whole gambit with vouchers is that you are laundering money for religious institutions by putting it under "personal" choice.
      - busterarm 3y ago
        It must suck going through life thinking that everyone "other" from you is out to fuck you over.
        vkou 3y ago
        If the political arm of the fundamentalist movement focused on morality policing its own members, instead of trying to force its values on the rest of us, we'd have way less of a problem with it. It is very actively 'trying to fuck us over'. And it's winning, hard, in both the 6-3 sphere, on the legislative bench, and in many others.
    - noduerme 3y ago
      I'm Jewish, I went to Jewish day school for awhile, and I definitely don't think tax money should be going to Jewish day schools. Nor Christian nor Muslim schools. What religion you raise your kids in is your business, and no we're not the USSR. Keeping religion out of publicly funded institutions, including schools, is done as much to safeguard free religious practice in this country as anything. The point is that the public institutions should be entirely civil and not under the sway of any one religion, because each religion once in control of society ends up discriminating against the others. That's why you don't allow them power in the civil sphere.
- altcognito 3y ago
  > The worst part of private schooling was that a few underperforming kids were pushed/passed along with everyone else. I also went to both. When I didn't have good enough grades they just passed me to public schools. Shocker, the private school passed off difficult children somewhere else. You know who else they didn't serve? Special needs? And who else? Anybody who couldn't afford it, or didn't believe in the holy trinity. I realize that a lot of libertarians believe that everyone should fend for themselves and that there's some sort of natural selection that justifies poor outcomes for some based on "fair rules". As I've gotten older in life, nothing seems less true.
  - busterarm 3y ago
    My private catholic schools had plenty of stupid kids, non-catholic kids (me), desperately poor kids (also me), and kids with special needs. The worst thing that they did to me was add a course to the curriculum about religion so that I had an extra course to pass than the public school kids. And we didn't even learn exclusively about Catholicism in that class.
- nobody9999 3y ago
  >But Bobby Baptist's kids going to Jesus Is Lord Day School is assimilating those kids into their society at large and Jesus Is Lord Day School still needs to meet the curriculum and testing standards that any other school in the state has to. And more often than not those private schools are _exceeding_ the standard of the public education system. Are they? There are a lot of folks who would disagree (and many of those are graduates of such institutions) with that assessment[0]: The city has determined that four Orthodox yeshivas are failing to provide an education “substantially equivalent” to what’s offered in public schools — and recommends the state reach the same conclusion for another 14 yeshivas the city says are ultimately under state authority. The findings are the results of a long-stalled and politically thorny investigation that has stretched on since 2015. The city found that just seven schools they investigated met standards. That’s in addition to two it found were up to standards in 2019. [...] The investigation was spurred by a complaint from a group called Young Advocates for a Fair Education, or YAFFED, headed at the time by a yeshiva graduate who argued his education left him ill-prepared for the world outside of religious studies. YAFFED and other critics argue many so-called ultra- Orthodox yeshivas provide little to no secular instruction, particularly for boys, and instead focus on religious studies. Representatives of the schools have pushed back strenuously on those claims. The schools are private, but do receive some state funding and, like all private schools in New York, are required to provide children with an education “substantially equivalent” to what is offered in public schools. The investigation kicked off a debate of what exactly substantially equivalent means, prompting the state to develop rules for determining it. And that's just one city in the US. I am unaware of such reviews in other places (some likely do exist, I just haven't heard about it -- please do jump in if you're aware of similar investigations), but religious schools (of whatever stripe) exist to support their preferred religion above all else. Public funding (and especially taking funds away from secular public schools) of religious schools is antithetical to the idea of a secular government and society. [0] https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2023/06/30/new-york-city-yeshiva-investigation-findings https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2023/06/30/new-yor...
devonkim 3y ago
One of the key problems in the US funding system is that population clustering effects will cause exacerbating effects where people of increasingly similar socioeconomic and cultural strata all stick together - of course this will cause rising inequality and unequal outcomes. The people living in the gated communities fund their local school primarily, not the poor one on the other end of the street that can't get or retain teachers there besides from ideologically driven sources like Teach for America because students are absolutely horrible when coming from poverty-stricken homes that use public education as a meal program while the working poor parents do 12+ hour shifts frequently. The funding structure of every other thing in the US is totally backwards and so unless we solve cultural problems like xenophobia and tribalism we will be unable to solve socioeconomic ones. As such, I have basically zero faith that the US will last another 20 years in any recognizable form as a liberal democracy.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- bamfly 3y ago
  The funding thing's a red herring. The best-funded schools in my state, with by far the highest spending per pupil, excluding special cases (e.g. schools that are also correctional institutions or otherwise not an ordinary school, so obviously have sky-high costs), are also among the very worst we've got, and it's looked like that for years. Throwing more money at schools in poor areas has had little effect on outcomes—not to say we shouldn't even out funding or even give poor-performing schools extra funding (which we already are doing, and if we just evened out funding, we'd be taking money away from the schools in very-poor areas and giving it to "richer" ones) but it very much does not look like doing that will have much effect on educational outcomes. Money is part of the cause, but where it comes in is letting parents sort their families into expensive-to-live-in school districts with other parents who could also afford those expensive areas. Their kids tend to be easier to teach for a whole bunch of reasons—which does make the schools more effective, but is not because of extra money spent on the schools. The sorting enabled by money does matter, but the funding itself (received by the schools) does not appear to be a major factor. Basically, a family pays for school quality in the US no matter what, either directly or indirectly—you pay either with tuition for expensive, good private schools if you're fairly rich, or with real estate and transportation costs if you're not that rich, with a sliding scale all the way down to "practically destitute". The extravagant spending of expensive private schools might result in better education (I'm thinking especially of the very-small class sizes, like 4-8 students per class, and the ability to pay for content-area PhDs as teachers in higher grades—we'd have to triple public school budgets to do that stuff, and that actually wouldn't even be enough because demand would so badly outstrip supply, should we try it) but beneath those relatively-few outliers with far-higher spending, moving spending/budgets up or down a (relatively) little doesn't seem to do much.
vladgur 3y ago
Public education system is definitely a positive thing that most of us will pay taxes for. However when public education is not guided by improving meaningful outcomes, but by ideologues, it needs to be checked. Vouchers sounds like a good way to insert some market dynamics and to allow parents to walk away from schools that are on the path to fail to prepare their kids for the future. My son is currently is in public elementary school here in Bay Area. If this idiocy persists, i dont believe i will keep him in non-STEM focused public school and will seek out better education for him that i will need to pay out of pocket. I can afford it, but those who are less fortunate will remain trapped and thats a travesty of CA public education
- kiba 3y ago
  However when public education is not guided by improving meaningful outcomes, but by ideologues, it needs to be checked. Vouchers sounds like a good way to insert some market dynamics and to allow parents to walk away from schools that are on the path to fail to prepare their kids for the future. As opposed to parental ideologues? By letting parents choose, we'll be letting them go to different schools championing different value system and the customers will be parents, not the children they ostensibly are charged with educating. By grouping parents with like-minded parents, we'll amplify groups and clusters, leading to not only further stratification but also further decoupling society and greater inequality.
  - bamfly 3y ago
    > By grouping parents with like-minded parents, we'll amplify groups and clusters, leading to not only further stratification but also further decoupling society and greater inequality. This effect is super obvious if you've ever sent kids to a private school. A big part of it is that you're opting in to a certain approach and set of attitudes and beliefs, even in secular ones. If you're not a fit for their program, you don't get to meaningfully agitate to change things as you might in a public school—they just tell you to go somewhere else, then pluck another candidate off the wait list to replace your family. This can be awesome (though still risky, in some ways) if it's a good bubble, but of course they aren't all good ones....
  - 3y ago
EgregiousCube 3y ago
It sounds like you're in a good spot where the taxes extracted from you go to support a value system that you are in favor of. Given that taxes aren't a choice, and given that value systems vary between people, can you envision a case where somebody with a different value system would be unhappy about where their taxes go?
- bamfly 3y ago
  Sure. Lots of people have ideas or preferences I think are terrible. I hope they lose at the ballot box. [EDIT] To make this more substantive: I think there's a distinct difference between collectively funding a public system, and redistributing money to folks to go toward private entities—this goes beyond not liking the values or environments of some of the schools private-school-preferrers might spend their vouchers on. That's why I suggested that if we must do vouchers, it ought to be limited to what a given person paid in themselves, not other people's money—I think there's a fundamental difference between funding a public good available to all and giving people cash so they can get past a private paywall to access a similar good.
josephcsible 3y ago
> I'm not OK paying taxes to help Bobby Baptist send his kids to Jesus Is Lord Day School. Would you be okay with the exact same amount of your tax dollars being used to send his kids to public school? If so, then why the difference?
- bamfly 3y ago
  One contributes to building a public institution accessible to all, and the other does not. I'm also OK with taxes for public libraries, but wouldn't like my taxes going toward vouchers to help people pay for access to private libraries.

by bamfly 3y ago

busterarm 3y ago

But Bobby Baptist's kids going to Jesus Is Lord Day School is assimilating those kids into their society at large and Jesus Is Lord Day School still needs to meet the curriculum and testing standards that any other school in the state has to. And more often than not those private schools are _exceeding_ the standard of the public education system. I spent years in both public and private schools. The worst part of public schooling was that everything was scaled down to the poorest-performing child's level. The worst part of private schooling was that a few underperforming kids were pushed/passed along with everyone else. The latter outcome is _significantly_ better for society than the former.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
duskwuff 3y ago
> But Bobby Baptist's kids going to Jesus Is Lord Day School is assimilating those kids into their society at large No, I think you're missing the parent's point -- it's assimilating those students into a specific religious subculture whose beliefs and values may be at odds with civil society at large. (If you have trouble seeing this, try substituting "Jesus Is Lord Day School" in your head for some other implied religions.)
- busterarm 3y ago
  But that's exactly my point. Would you deny this same right to kids that attend Jewish day schools? Could you even argue for that without sounding like a massive bigot? Religious people are part of your community and have the right to their religious identity and to be a member of your community. If they want a school just for them, you don't suffer for it. Religion is not at odds with society. We're not the USSR. Religious freedom is an enshrined right in this country.
  - altcognito 3y ago
    At least in the US, The community is not religious by definition in the constitution. The whole gambit with vouchers is that you are laundering money for religious institutions by putting it under "personal" choice.
    - busterarm 3y ago
      It must suck going through life thinking that everyone "other" from you is out to fuck you over.
      - vkou 3y ago
        If the political arm of the fundamentalist movement focused on morality policing its own members, instead of trying to force its values on the rest of us, we'd have way less of a problem with it. It is very actively 'trying to fuck us over'. And it's winning, hard, in both the 6-3 sphere, on the legislative bench, and in many others.
  - noduerme 3y ago
    I'm Jewish, I went to Jewish day school for awhile, and I definitely don't think tax money should be going to Jewish day schools. Nor Christian nor Muslim schools. What religion you raise your kids in is your business, and no we're not the USSR. Keeping religion out of publicly funded institutions, including schools, is done as much to safeguard free religious practice in this country as anything. The point is that the public institutions should be entirely civil and not under the sway of any one religion, because each religion once in control of society ends up discriminating against the others. That's why you don't allow them power in the civil sphere.
altcognito 3y ago
> The worst part of private schooling was that a few underperforming kids were pushed/passed along with everyone else. I also went to both. When I didn't have good enough grades they just passed me to public schools. Shocker, the private school passed off difficult children somewhere else. You know who else they didn't serve? Special needs? And who else? Anybody who couldn't afford it, or didn't believe in the holy trinity. I realize that a lot of libertarians believe that everyone should fend for themselves and that there's some sort of natural selection that justifies poor outcomes for some based on "fair rules". As I've gotten older in life, nothing seems less true.
- busterarm 3y ago
  My private catholic schools had plenty of stupid kids, non-catholic kids (me), desperately poor kids (also me), and kids with special needs. The worst thing that they did to me was add a course to the curriculum about religion so that I had an extra course to pass than the public school kids. And we didn't even learn exclusively about Catholicism in that class.
nobody9999 3y ago
>But Bobby Baptist's kids going to Jesus Is Lord Day School is assimilating those kids into their society at large and Jesus Is Lord Day School still needs to meet the curriculum and testing standards that any other school in the state has to. And more often than not those private schools are _exceeding_ the standard of the public education system. Are they? There are a lot of folks who would disagree (and many of those are graduates of such institutions) with that assessment[0]: The city has determined that four Orthodox yeshivas are failing to provide an education “substantially equivalent” to what’s offered in public schools — and recommends the state reach the same conclusion for another 14 yeshivas the city says are ultimately under state authority. The findings are the results of a long-stalled and politically thorny investigation that has stretched on since 2015. The city found that just seven schools they investigated met standards. That’s in addition to two it found were up to standards in 2019. [...] The investigation was spurred by a complaint from a group called Young Advocates for a Fair Education, or YAFFED, headed at the time by a yeshiva graduate who argued his education left him ill-prepared for the world outside of religious studies. YAFFED and other critics argue many so-called ultra- Orthodox yeshivas provide little to no secular instruction, particularly for boys, and instead focus on religious studies. Representatives of the schools have pushed back strenuously on those claims. The schools are private, but do receive some state funding and, like all private schools in New York, are required to provide children with an education “substantially equivalent” to what is offered in public schools. The investigation kicked off a debate of what exactly substantially equivalent means, prompting the state to develop rules for determining it. And that's just one city in the US. I am unaware of such reviews in other places (some likely do exist, I just haven't heard about it -- please do jump in if you're aware of similar investigations), but religious schools (of whatever stripe) exist to support their preferred religion above all else. Public funding (and especially taking funds away from secular public schools) of religious schools is antithetical to the idea of a secular government and society. [0] https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2023/06/30/new-york-city-yeshiva-investigation-findings https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2023/06/30/new-yor...

devonkim 3y ago

One of the key problems in the US funding system is that population clustering effects will cause exacerbating effects where people of increasingly similar socioeconomic and cultural strata all stick together - of course this will cause rising inequality and unequal outcomes. The people living in the gated communities fund their local school primarily, not the poor one on the other end of the street that can't get or retain teachers there besides from ideologically driven sources like Teach for America because students are absolutely horrible when coming from poverty-stricken homes that use public education as a meal program while the working poor parents do 12+ hour shifts frequently. The funding structure of every other thing in the US is totally backwards and so unless we solve cultural problems like xenophobia and tribalism we will be unable to solve socioeconomic ones. As such, I have basically zero faith that the US will last another 20 years in any recognizable form as a liberal democracy.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bamfly 3y ago
The funding thing's a red herring. The best-funded schools in my state, with by far the highest spending per pupil, excluding special cases (e.g. schools that are also correctional institutions or otherwise not an ordinary school, so obviously have sky-high costs), are also among the very worst we've got, and it's looked like that for years. Throwing more money at schools in poor areas has had little effect on outcomes—not to say we shouldn't even out funding or even give poor-performing schools extra funding (which we already are doing, and if we just evened out funding, we'd be taking money away from the schools in very-poor areas and giving it to "richer" ones) but it very much does not look like doing that will have much effect on educational outcomes. Money is part of the cause, but where it comes in is letting parents sort their families into expensive-to-live-in school districts with other parents who could also afford those expensive areas. Their kids tend to be easier to teach for a whole bunch of reasons—which does make the schools more effective, but is not because of extra money spent on the schools. The sorting enabled by money does matter, but the funding itself (received by the schools) does not appear to be a major factor. Basically, a family pays for school quality in the US no matter what, either directly or indirectly—you pay either with tuition for expensive, good private schools if you're fairly rich, or with real estate and transportation costs if you're not that rich, with a sliding scale all the way down to "practically destitute". The extravagant spending of expensive private schools might result in better education (I'm thinking especially of the very-small class sizes, like 4-8 students per class, and the ability to pay for content-area PhDs as teachers in higher grades—we'd have to triple public school budgets to do that stuff, and that actually wouldn't even be enough because demand would so badly outstrip supply, should we try it) but beneath those relatively-few outliers with far-higher spending, moving spending/budgets up or down a (relatively) little doesn't seem to do much.

vladgur 3y ago

Public education system is definitely a positive thing that most of us will pay taxes for. However when public education is not guided by improving meaningful outcomes, but by ideologues, it needs to be checked. Vouchers sounds like a good way to insert some market dynamics and to allow parents to walk away from schools that are on the path to fail to prepare their kids for the future. My son is currently is in public elementary school here in Bay Area. If this idiocy persists, i dont believe i will keep him in non-STEM focused public school and will seek out better education for him that i will need to pay out of pocket. I can afford it, but those who are less fortunate will remain trapped and thats a travesty of CA public education

kiba 3y ago
However when public education is not guided by improving meaningful outcomes, but by ideologues, it needs to be checked. Vouchers sounds like a good way to insert some market dynamics and to allow parents to walk away from schools that are on the path to fail to prepare their kids for the future. As opposed to parental ideologues? By letting parents choose, we'll be letting them go to different schools championing different value system and the customers will be parents, not the children they ostensibly are charged with educating. By grouping parents with like-minded parents, we'll amplify groups and clusters, leading to not only further stratification but also further decoupling society and greater inequality.
- bamfly 3y ago
  > By grouping parents with like-minded parents, we'll amplify groups and clusters, leading to not only further stratification but also further decoupling society and greater inequality. This effect is super obvious if you've ever sent kids to a private school. A big part of it is that you're opting in to a certain approach and set of attitudes and beliefs, even in secular ones. If you're not a fit for their program, you don't get to meaningfully agitate to change things as you might in a public school—they just tell you to go somewhere else, then pluck another candidate off the wait list to replace your family. This can be awesome (though still risky, in some ways) if it's a good bubble, but of course they aren't all good ones....
- 3y ago

EgregiousCube 3y ago

It sounds like you're in a good spot where the taxes extracted from you go to support a value system that you are in favor of. Given that taxes aren't a choice, and given that value systems vary between people, can you envision a case where somebody with a different value system would be unhappy about where their taxes go?

bamfly 3y ago
Sure. Lots of people have ideas or preferences I think are terrible. I hope they lose at the ballot box. [EDIT] To make this more substantive: I think there's a distinct difference between collectively funding a public system, and redistributing money to folks to go toward private entities—this goes beyond not liking the values or environments of some of the schools private-school-preferrers might spend their vouchers on. That's why I suggested that if we must do vouchers, it ought to be limited to what a given person paid in themselves, not other people's money—I think there's a fundamental difference between funding a public good available to all and giving people cash so they can get past a private paywall to access a similar good.

josephcsible 3y ago

> I'm not OK paying taxes to help Bobby Baptist send his kids to Jesus Is Lord Day School. Would you be okay with the exact same amount of your tax dollars being used to send his kids to public school? If so, then why the difference?

bamfly 3y ago
One contributes to building a public institution accessible to all, and the other does not. I'm also OK with taxes for public libraries, but wouldn't like my taxes going toward vouchers to help people pay for access to private libraries.