3 ms·

School choice programs have been successful

16 points by mhb 2y ago

harimau777 2y ago
For people who might just read the title: The full title is "School choice programs have been wildly successful under DeSantis. Now public schools might close." The article isn't actually saying that the school choice programs have been successful in the sense of "improving education across the board".
- mattpallissard 2y ago
  > some of Florida’s largest school districts are facing staggering enrollment declines — and grappling with the possibility of campus closures — as dollars follow the increasing number of parents opting out of traditional public schools. The article isn't actually saying that DeSantis is closing schools. It's that people aren't enrolling in public schools. That said, I don't really have a dog in this race. I don't live in Florida and I'm not the biggest fan of the school system. Public, private, or otherwise.
- musicale 2y ago
  > Enrollment in charters, which are public schools operating under performance contracts freeing them of many state regulations, increased by nearly 27,000 students > Broward County Public Schools claims to have more than 49,000 classroom seats sitting empty this year, a number that “closely matches” the 49,833 students attending charter schools in the area, officials noted in an enrollment overview It sounds as if some public schools (charter schools) are becoming more popular while others (traditional public schools) face declining enrollment.
  - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
    Supposedly well funded Texan suburban public schools are very successful. Edit: and this is Florida, not Texas. Florida is much less successful than Texas in terms of public education.
smarm52 2y ago
> a haven for school choice Oof, the author comes out swinging right out of the gate. This is a great end-run around "Separate but equal". Poor communities can't afford, and so they opt for homeschooling as public school close or lose so much funding they can't function. Then white affluent communities can have the most well funded schools, given generous public grants, and other bribes they enjoy for being the core support for spread Conservative tyranny. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separate_but_equal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separate_but_equal
- badhackernews 2y ago
  [dead]
robomartin 2y ago
The question everyone should be asking is: Why is it that schools are failing us in dramatic ways? School choice is a reaction to a problem. If public schools were excellent, most parent would ever look for alternatives. Of course, there are always people who prefer private school. I get it. I went to both private and public schools from K-12, in two countries. My experience was that US public school education (Massachusetts) from several decades ago was seriously deficient when compared to schooling in a Latin American (Argentina) system. I was far better prepared, across the board, with a classical education, to the point that my classmates in the US seemed, well, pretty ignorant and incapable. What's terrible is that the situation in the US has likely degraded significantly over the decades. My kids have been through the public system in CA. I can tell you in no uncertain terms that, had it not been for a significant amount of learning at home --across a range of subjects-- they would have come out unprepared for the real world. It's that bad. I can only imagine how much worse it likely is in less affluent neighborhoods. It must be absolutely terrible. These topics, for me, always come back to the same issue: Our government failing us across a wide range of verticals. Be it healthcare, safety, education and just plain intelligent progress, their score card is mediocrity at best and, quite often, abject incompetence. Earlier today I was reading about the Department of Transportation only building 7 or 8 EV charging stations with a program funded in 2021 to the tune of $7.5 billion dollars. A similar thing has happened in CA with the sad (and expensive) joke the high speed rail project has become. At some point voters need to start understanding that the people we are voting for and hiring to work for us could not give one flying turd about any of us, our kids, our safety, our health and wellbeing. They are all political animals interested in the riches to be had through party affiliation and warfare. Nothing else matters. Nothing. And this is how we get here; to a point where we spend insane amounts of money per student in K-12 and end-up with results bested by third world countries. How you vote matters. And some of these decisions have generational effects.
- musicale 2y ago
  > Why is it that schools are failing us in dramatic ways? Do you have some ideas as to the answer(s)? Is it simply a matter of adopting a better educational approach that has been shown to work in another country, or would that also fail in the US?
qwerpy 2y ago
How nice it must be, when the schools around you have to compete in an actual "market". My kids are reaching school age soon, and I'm weighing the public/private school tradeoffs. Unlike in Florida, here in the Seattle area the public schools still more or less enjoy a monopoly for parents who can't afford private school. And they are more than happy to abuse it, with their relentless assault on gifted programs and insistence on busing in disruptive kids from other areas. I'm fortunate to have a dual tech income household so I can buy my way out of the public school problems, but I hope that my neighbors take notice and vote accordingly. Society is better off when kids who want to learn are given the opportunity to.
- seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  > Unlike in Florida, here in the Seattle area the public schools still more or less enjoy a monopoly for parents who can't afford private school. Seattle public schools have lots of incentive to keep your kids in their schools: if you leave the district (moving or going private), they lose that funding to other school districts in the state since a Washington state supreme court ruling in 2013 that basically pooled education property taxes across the state in a single pool to be distributed by child-in-school. Now, whether they actually execute on that or not remains to be seen. Cancelling the high performance classroom option is a huge bummer for many parents who actually have options (to move to Bellevue or send their kids to private schools). They are afraid to ask why kids for the actual reasons on why kids leave the district (and they tend to be the rich north Seattle kids rather than the poorer South Seattle kids that leave, creating even a larger hole in their budget). I wonder if they are hoping Eastern Washington just joins Idaho, solving all of their budget problems.
- P_I_Staker 2y ago
  > insistence on busing in disruptive kids from other areas. What do you mean? What kind of kids, are getting "bussed in", and from where?
mlindner 2y ago
Well there was decades of attacks against standardized testing, and well if you attack the only real metric, even if it wasn't a great metric, we had for judging schools, not surprised that suddenly we start getting schools that are completely inept.
djyaz1200 2y ago
School choice, as defined by Florida, is too helpful to upper-middle-class and rich children. Of course, if presented with the option to take your child's funding and add more $$ for a better experience and outcomes, any parent who had the means would. This is already the system for universities. These schools are then predominately attended by upper middle class and rich children, and that cohort has enduring benefits socially and economically. School choice should require that every dollar spent to advantage your child over others is taxed at 2 dollars and that money offers opportunities to underprivileged children. I don't think any serious person can deny that public schools aren't performing at high standards internationally, but let's not have the solution be yet another system that advantages the rich.

16 points by mhb 2y ago

For people who might just read the title: The full title is "School choice programs have been wildly successful under DeSantis. Now public schools might close." The article isn't actually saying that the school choice programs have been successful in the sense of "improving education across the board".

mattpallissard 2y ago
> some of Florida’s largest school districts are facing staggering enrollment declines — and grappling with the possibility of campus closures — as dollars follow the increasing number of parents opting out of traditional public schools. The article isn't actually saying that DeSantis is closing schools. It's that people aren't enrolling in public schools. That said, I don't really have a dog in this race. I don't live in Florida and I'm not the biggest fan of the school system. Public, private, or otherwise.
musicale 2y ago
> Enrollment in charters, which are public schools operating under performance contracts freeing them of many state regulations, increased by nearly 27,000 students > Broward County Public Schools claims to have more than 49,000 classroom seats sitting empty this year, a number that “closely matches” the 49,833 students attending charter schools in the area, officials noted in an enrollment overview It sounds as if some public schools (charter schools) are becoming more popular while others (traditional public schools) face declining enrollment.
- seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  Supposedly well funded Texan suburban public schools are very successful. Edit: and this is Florida, not Texas. Florida is much less successful than Texas in terms of public education.

smarm52 2y ago

> a haven for school choice Oof, the author comes out swinging right out of the gate. This is a great end-run around "Separate but equal". Poor communities can't afford, and so they opt for homeschooling as public school close or lose so much funding they can't function. Then white affluent communities can have the most well funded schools, given generous public grants, and other bribes they enjoy for being the core support for spread Conservative tyranny. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separate_but_equal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separate_but_equal

badhackernews 2y ago
[dead]

robomartin 2y ago

The question everyone should be asking is: Why is it that schools are failing us in dramatic ways? School choice is a reaction to a problem. If public schools were excellent, most parent would ever look for alternatives. Of course, there are always people who prefer private school. I get it. I went to both private and public schools from K-12, in two countries. My experience was that US public school education (Massachusetts) from several decades ago was seriously deficient when compared to schooling in a Latin American (Argentina) system. I was far better prepared, across the board, with a classical education, to the point that my classmates in the US seemed, well, pretty ignorant and incapable. What's terrible is that the situation in the US has likely degraded significantly over the decades. My kids have been through the public system in CA. I can tell you in no uncertain terms that, had it not been for a significant amount of learning at home --across a range of subjects-- they would have come out unprepared for the real world. It's that bad. I can only imagine how much worse it likely is in less affluent neighborhoods. It must be absolutely terrible. These topics, for me, always come back to the same issue: Our government failing us across a wide range of verticals. Be it healthcare, safety, education and just plain intelligent progress, their score card is mediocrity at best and, quite often, abject incompetence. Earlier today I was reading about the Department of Transportation only building 7 or 8 EV charging stations with a program funded in 2021 to the tune of $7.5 billion dollars. A similar thing has happened in CA with the sad (and expensive) joke the high speed rail project has become. At some point voters need to start understanding that the people we are voting for and hiring to work for us could not give one flying turd about any of us, our kids, our safety, our health and wellbeing. They are all political animals interested in the riches to be had through party affiliation and warfare. Nothing else matters. Nothing. And this is how we get here; to a point where we spend insane amounts of money per student in K-12 and end-up with results bested by third world countries. How you vote matters. And some of these decisions have generational effects.

musicale 2y ago
> Why is it that schools are failing us in dramatic ways? Do you have some ideas as to the answer(s)? Is it simply a matter of adopting a better educational approach that has been shown to work in another country, or would that also fail in the US?

qwerpy 2y ago

How nice it must be, when the schools around you have to compete in an actual "market". My kids are reaching school age soon, and I'm weighing the public/private school tradeoffs. Unlike in Florida, here in the Seattle area the public schools still more or less enjoy a monopoly for parents who can't afford private school. And they are more than happy to abuse it, with their relentless assault on gifted programs and insistence on busing in disruptive kids from other areas. I'm fortunate to have a dual tech income household so I can buy my way out of the public school problems, but I hope that my neighbors take notice and vote accordingly. Society is better off when kids who want to learn are given the opportunity to.

seanmcdirmid 2y ago
> Unlike in Florida, here in the Seattle area the public schools still more or less enjoy a monopoly for parents who can't afford private school. Seattle public schools have lots of incentive to keep your kids in their schools: if you leave the district (moving or going private), they lose that funding to other school districts in the state since a Washington state supreme court ruling in 2013 that basically pooled education property taxes across the state in a single pool to be distributed by child-in-school. Now, whether they actually execute on that or not remains to be seen. Cancelling the high performance classroom option is a huge bummer for many parents who actually have options (to move to Bellevue or send their kids to private schools). They are afraid to ask why kids for the actual reasons on why kids leave the district (and they tend to be the rich north Seattle kids rather than the poorer South Seattle kids that leave, creating even a larger hole in their budget). I wonder if they are hoping Eastern Washington just joins Idaho, solving all of their budget problems.
P_I_Staker 2y ago
> insistence on busing in disruptive kids from other areas. What do you mean? What kind of kids, are getting "bussed in", and from where?

mlindner 2y ago

Well there was decades of attacks against standardized testing, and well if you attack the only real metric, even if it wasn't a great metric, we had for judging schools, not surprised that suddenly we start getting schools that are completely inept.

djyaz1200 2y ago

School choice, as defined by Florida, is too helpful to upper-middle-class and rich children. Of course, if presented with the option to take your child's funding and add more $$ for a better experience and outcomes, any parent who had the means would. This is already the system for universities. These schools are then predominately attended by upper middle class and rich children, and that cohort has enduring benefits socially and economically. School choice should require that every dollar spent to advantage your child over others is taxed at 2 dollars and that money offers opportunities to underprivileged children. I don't think any serious person can deny that public schools aren't performing at high standards internationally, but let's not have the solution be yet another system that advantages the rich.