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Personally, I suspect there's likely a generational non-COVID caused reduction in child welfare at play, the leading edge of which happened to get hidden by COV

Personally, I suspect there's likely a generational non-COVID caused reduction in child welfare at play, the leading edge of which happened to get hidden by COVID. The combo of more and more parents who work all the time and/or have delegated parenting to YouTube and mobile devices, plus charter schools (1) moving a chunk of non-IEP kids into more non-secular schools with lower standards and (2) concentrating behavior issue and IEP kids in public schools are basically rotting things from the inside out.

zxcvbnm69 2y ago
[dead]
rahimnathwani 2y ago
Would you care to share more about what this means? "moving a chunk of non-IEP kids into more non-secular schools with lower standards" When we applied to public schools for my child, the one we were most excited about was a charter school, not one run by the local school district. As far as I can tell, charter schools have some selection pressure that is absent from government-run schools: if a charter school does poorly, parents don't choose it, and it closes. If a district-run school does poorly, the district will allocate kids there anyway.
- digdugdirk 2y ago
  1. Non-IEP = Not Special Needs. 2. Religious private schools do not need to meet the same educational requirements as public schools. 3. Charter schools have some selection pressure, but public schools dont have a profit motive. 4. "Charter Schools" as a category is wildly varied, with some excellent institutions, and others that are grifting off the taxpayer dollar. The most important thing however, is the vicious cycle they introduce. Public schools are required to educate every child, regardless of the expense of doing so. Charter schools face no such requirement. So when charter schools exist in that system, every student that leaves the public school and takes their little chunk of funding with them inherently makes life more difficult for the public school they're leaving. This in turn increases the incentive for every other high achieving student to leave, which makes the public school's situation worse and worse each time.
  - mjevans 2y ago
    I agree, and I think a policy shifts should include: * NOT subsidizing private schools * NOT determining school funding based on child count Like so many things, schools are a public commons / good / investment in functioning society that a given goal should be determined, books kept, waste prosecuted (criminally), and services provided according to a defined standard. Then whatever that costs rolls into the next budget as the base tax rate for that year. Which is entirely not how things are run right now. Government inefficiency frequently relates to 'yearly budgets' and places that look to continue to spend a given year's budget because otherwise it'll go somewhere else. Rather than just doing what's necessary when it's necessary irrespective of how much or little doing the most effective and efficient thing costs.
    - bruce511 2y ago
      >> waste prosecuted (criminally) As a taxpayer I hate waste. As a long-serving business owner I accept that some level of waste is a cost of doing business. There are several problems with the concept of "waste". firstly it's most obvious in hindsight. It's much less obvious in foresight. We spend money with an objective in mind, and in some number of times we fail to meet that objective. Take marketing as an example. It costs money to attend an event. Will we get a return? sometimes no. Of course the easiest way to avoid waste is simply not to take risks, not to spend anything. If we prioritize "avoid waste" we create an environment where "nothing is attempted". Your suggestion to criminalize this with personal accountability makes things worse. What you'll get is no money spent at all, because the risk of spending -any- money could see you in jail. Secondly, in order to criminalize waste you need to detect it, measure it, prosecute it, defend it, and so on. None of that comes cheap. So you spend money to save money? Of course we already do this to some extent. We keep books. We have audits. If we detect waste we might examine it, consider alternatives, learn lessons to avoid it. But that's a long long way from the costs of criminal prosecution. Thirdly you create perverse incentives for bad actors. Don't like a teacher? Accuse them of waste. You can probably find some cause. Your competitor got a contract at a local school? Be sure to loudly proclaim that as waste because you "would have done it cheaper". Sure you would do a crap job that may have failed in 2 years instead of 20, but who's to say? Send a few teachers to jail - does that increase or decrease the likelihood of people growing up wanting to be teachers? So yeah, I dislike waste. But preventing waste comes with a price, not just in money. Be careful in what you choose to optimize.
- Glyptodon 2y ago
  In my area charter schools game the system to not deal with special needs kids and make them leave the charters. Many basically avoid doing evaluations and IEPs entirely so they can force them to go back to public schools. The highest achieving charters have also been able to get mediocre non IEP kids to transfer back by setting them up to have trouble keeping up and not supporting them when they struggle. Edit: And on the lower-performing side, you have schools focused on religion and/or patriotism, which tend to be less concerned about getting low performers out, but which aren't based as much around effective academics so much as ideology, and which do not meet the civic bar for education. Though I've also seen some that are just there to basically act like the charter equivalent of for-profit colleges: give parents in low SES areas a message of hope and then just minimize costs in the classroom.
  - rahimnathwani 2y ago
    I'd love to read more about this. Would you mind sharing any examples of either type, that I can Google to read more?
    - Glyptodon 2y ago
      Older sources: https://www.tucsonsentinel.com/opinion/report/020515_charter_schools_op/the-secret-behind-those-highly-performing-charter-schools/ https://www.tucsonsentinel.com/opinion/report/020515_charter... https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-education/2017/12/14/report-some-arizona-charter-schools-unlawfully-exclude-deter-student/942947001/ https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-education... https://harvardpolitics.com/arizonas-experiment-with-charter-schools/ https://harvardpolitics.com/arizonas-experiment-with-charter... https://www.12news.com/article/news/education/az-public-school-districts-are-picking-up-the-tab-for-esa-special-needs-evaluations/75-7972b101-1962-412a-9a82-9ba1cbd3cdae https://www.12news.com/article/news/education/az-public-scho... https://azmirror.com/2024/06/06/it-costs-arizona-332m-to-pay-for-vouchers-subsidizing-private-school-tuition-homeschooling/ https://azmirror.com/2024/06/06/it-costs-arizona-332m-to-pay... https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/laurieroberts/2023/11/17/arizona-taxpayers-pay-lego-esa-school-voucher/71621338007/ https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/laurieroberts/... I also have numerous acquaintances working in various capacities in schools (public, charter, and private) and have to say I regard all the things mentioned in the linked articles as severely under-reported. Retaliation against teachers and staff who try to get kids services at charters is a thing. Public school districts and counties having to foot evaluation costs for parochials is a thing. Refusing and avoiding evaluations for kids in charters so they can be kicked out for behavior and then the publics have to foot the evaluation costs is a thing. I completely think if local districts (and/or families) had a spine or the right legal resources they could be suing charters who've not even tried to follow or service existing IEPs left and right when those kids are constantly enrolling in publics mid year (with those kids generally exhibiting broad spectrums declines against academic and IEP goals).
- aantix 2y ago
  Public schools are infrastructure. Any child of any ability, race, socioeconomic background has a right to an education. That is promise of public education. The charter school can be selective. They can deny education. The charter school - better for your child? Sounds like it. Better for society, no.
  - rahimnathwani 2y ago
    Charter schools are public schools. Charter schools cannot be selective.
    - th0ma5 2y ago
      This is simply not true.
      - rahimnathwani 2y ago
        It is 100% true in California. See the following government web page: https://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/ch/cefcharterschools.asp https://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/ch/cefcharterschools.asp A charter school is a public school that may provide instruction in any combination of grades (transitional kindergarten through grade twelve). A charter school shall admit all students who wish to attend the school; however, if the number of students exceeds the school's capacity, attendance shall be determined by a public random drawing.
        seanmcdirmid 2y ago
        That isn’t different from a choice public school, at least in the surface. I would never call these schools charter, however.
        1123581321 2y ago
        Magnet and charter schools have a lot in common. You could look at state charter school statutes as encouraging school districts to be proactive about setting up academy model and magnet schools.
- analog31 2y ago
  I think it just has to be understood that "choice" means choice for some but not for all, and society has to be OK with that. (I'm not OK with it). In a system with a mixture of public and private schools, the public schools will always be a necessary feature of the selectivity of private schools. Not only to accept "problem" kids, but also to operate in areas where it's not profitable to run private schools, or in cases where private schools run into financial and management problems and must be bailed out. So it's not so much that the private schools are "better" but that they both function as interdependent parts of a system. On the other hand, there will always be a need for special education... mainstreaming all kids in one classroom hasn't worked very well either.
- empath75 2y ago
  Eventually school districts do close schools that have emptied out as kids have gone to charter schools (source: spouse is on school board and they are closing public schools because kids have moved to charter schools)
  - rahimnathwani 2y ago
    That's great to hear. Where I live even schools that close end up being re-opened with new names. This article is good and its conclusions are mostly[0] sound: https://open.substack.com/pub/sfeducation/p/wanted-careful-arsonist https://open.substack.com/pub/sfeducation/p/wanted-careful-a... [0] I strongly disagree with the conclusion that, if government-run schools have excess capacity, then we should prevent charter schools from being opened or expanded.
giantg2 2y ago
"non-secular schools with lower standard" Any source for this? My understanding is that most states have criteria for what needs to be taught in a primary and secondary school, regardless of public or non-secular. In my experience (attending, touring, friends who are teachers), the non-secular schools had higher standards. "concentrating behavior issue and IEP kids in public schools" Public schools in many areas are increasingly doing this by sending G-IEP to entirely separate schools. Indirectly, they are also doing this by increasing school population. Smaller communities tend to better self-police. The biggest issue is the lack of appropriate involvement followed by the lack of leverage the school has. In some areas, some non-public schools even get district IEP resources for their IEP students, so they aren't all avoiding it.
- Glyptodon 2y ago
  > some non-public schools even get district IEP resources for their IEP students IE public school has to pay but the money goes to the non-public.
  - giantg2 2y ago
    Yeah... imagine if private schools didnt exist and they had to pay all the money the way they complain about budgets already.

zxcvbnm69 2y ago

[dead]

rahimnathwani 2y ago

Would you care to share more about what this means? "moving a chunk of non-IEP kids into more non-secular schools with lower standards" When we applied to public schools for my child, the one we were most excited about was a charter school, not one run by the local school district. As far as I can tell, charter schools have some selection pressure that is absent from government-run schools: if a charter school does poorly, parents don't choose it, and it closes. If a district-run school does poorly, the district will allocate kids there anyway.

digdugdirk 2y ago
1. Non-IEP = Not Special Needs. 2. Religious private schools do not need to meet the same educational requirements as public schools. 3. Charter schools have some selection pressure, but public schools dont have a profit motive. 4. "Charter Schools" as a category is wildly varied, with some excellent institutions, and others that are grifting off the taxpayer dollar. The most important thing however, is the vicious cycle they introduce. Public schools are required to educate every child, regardless of the expense of doing so. Charter schools face no such requirement. So when charter schools exist in that system, every student that leaves the public school and takes their little chunk of funding with them inherently makes life more difficult for the public school they're leaving. This in turn increases the incentive for every other high achieving student to leave, which makes the public school's situation worse and worse each time.
- mjevans 2y ago
  I agree, and I think a policy shifts should include: * NOT subsidizing private schools * NOT determining school funding based on child count Like so many things, schools are a public commons / good / investment in functioning society that a given goal should be determined, books kept, waste prosecuted (criminally), and services provided according to a defined standard. Then whatever that costs rolls into the next budget as the base tax rate for that year. Which is entirely not how things are run right now. Government inefficiency frequently relates to 'yearly budgets' and places that look to continue to spend a given year's budget because otherwise it'll go somewhere else. Rather than just doing what's necessary when it's necessary irrespective of how much or little doing the most effective and efficient thing costs.
  - bruce511 2y ago
    >> waste prosecuted (criminally) As a taxpayer I hate waste. As a long-serving business owner I accept that some level of waste is a cost of doing business. There are several problems with the concept of "waste". firstly it's most obvious in hindsight. It's much less obvious in foresight. We spend money with an objective in mind, and in some number of times we fail to meet that objective. Take marketing as an example. It costs money to attend an event. Will we get a return? sometimes no. Of course the easiest way to avoid waste is simply not to take risks, not to spend anything. If we prioritize "avoid waste" we create an environment where "nothing is attempted". Your suggestion to criminalize this with personal accountability makes things worse. What you'll get is no money spent at all, because the risk of spending -any- money could see you in jail. Secondly, in order to criminalize waste you need to detect it, measure it, prosecute it, defend it, and so on. None of that comes cheap. So you spend money to save money? Of course we already do this to some extent. We keep books. We have audits. If we detect waste we might examine it, consider alternatives, learn lessons to avoid it. But that's a long long way from the costs of criminal prosecution. Thirdly you create perverse incentives for bad actors. Don't like a teacher? Accuse them of waste. You can probably find some cause. Your competitor got a contract at a local school? Be sure to loudly proclaim that as waste because you "would have done it cheaper". Sure you would do a crap job that may have failed in 2 years instead of 20, but who's to say? Send a few teachers to jail - does that increase or decrease the likelihood of people growing up wanting to be teachers? So yeah, I dislike waste. But preventing waste comes with a price, not just in money. Be careful in what you choose to optimize.
Glyptodon 2y ago
In my area charter schools game the system to not deal with special needs kids and make them leave the charters. Many basically avoid doing evaluations and IEPs entirely so they can force them to go back to public schools. The highest achieving charters have also been able to get mediocre non IEP kids to transfer back by setting them up to have trouble keeping up and not supporting them when they struggle. Edit: And on the lower-performing side, you have schools focused on religion and/or patriotism, which tend to be less concerned about getting low performers out, but which aren't based as much around effective academics so much as ideology, and which do not meet the civic bar for education. Though I've also seen some that are just there to basically act like the charter equivalent of for-profit colleges: give parents in low SES areas a message of hope and then just minimize costs in the classroom.
- rahimnathwani 2y ago
  I'd love to read more about this. Would you mind sharing any examples of either type, that I can Google to read more?
  - Glyptodon 2y ago
    Older sources: https://www.tucsonsentinel.com/opinion/report/020515_charter_schools_op/the-secret-behind-those-highly-performing-charter-schools/ https://www.tucsonsentinel.com/opinion/report/020515_charter... https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-education/2017/12/14/report-some-arizona-charter-schools-unlawfully-exclude-deter-student/942947001/ https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-education... https://harvardpolitics.com/arizonas-experiment-with-charter-schools/ https://harvardpolitics.com/arizonas-experiment-with-charter... https://www.12news.com/article/news/education/az-public-school-districts-are-picking-up-the-tab-for-esa-special-needs-evaluations/75-7972b101-1962-412a-9a82-9ba1cbd3cdae https://www.12news.com/article/news/education/az-public-scho... https://azmirror.com/2024/06/06/it-costs-arizona-332m-to-pay-for-vouchers-subsidizing-private-school-tuition-homeschooling/ https://azmirror.com/2024/06/06/it-costs-arizona-332m-to-pay... https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/laurieroberts/2023/11/17/arizona-taxpayers-pay-lego-esa-school-voucher/71621338007/ https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/laurieroberts/... I also have numerous acquaintances working in various capacities in schools (public, charter, and private) and have to say I regard all the things mentioned in the linked articles as severely under-reported. Retaliation against teachers and staff who try to get kids services at charters is a thing. Public school districts and counties having to foot evaluation costs for parochials is a thing. Refusing and avoiding evaluations for kids in charters so they can be kicked out for behavior and then the publics have to foot the evaluation costs is a thing. I completely think if local districts (and/or families) had a spine or the right legal resources they could be suing charters who've not even tried to follow or service existing IEPs left and right when those kids are constantly enrolling in publics mid year (with those kids generally exhibiting broad spectrums declines against academic and IEP goals).
aantix 2y ago
Public schools are infrastructure. Any child of any ability, race, socioeconomic background has a right to an education. That is promise of public education. The charter school can be selective. They can deny education. The charter school - better for your child? Sounds like it. Better for society, no.
- rahimnathwani 2y ago
  Charter schools are public schools. Charter schools cannot be selective.
  - th0ma5 2y ago
    This is simply not true.
    - rahimnathwani 2y ago
      It is 100% true in California. See the following government web page: https://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/ch/cefcharterschools.asp https://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/ch/cefcharterschools.asp A charter school is a public school that may provide instruction in any combination of grades (transitional kindergarten through grade twelve). A charter school shall admit all students who wish to attend the school; however, if the number of students exceeds the school's capacity, attendance shall be determined by a public random drawing.
      - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
        That isn’t different from a choice public school, at least in the surface. I would never call these schools charter, however.
        1123581321 2y ago
        Magnet and charter schools have a lot in common. You could look at state charter school statutes as encouraging school districts to be proactive about setting up academy model and magnet schools.
analog31 2y ago
I think it just has to be understood that "choice" means choice for some but not for all, and society has to be OK with that. (I'm not OK with it). In a system with a mixture of public and private schools, the public schools will always be a necessary feature of the selectivity of private schools. Not only to accept "problem" kids, but also to operate in areas where it's not profitable to run private schools, or in cases where private schools run into financial and management problems and must be bailed out. So it's not so much that the private schools are "better" but that they both function as interdependent parts of a system. On the other hand, there will always be a need for special education... mainstreaming all kids in one classroom hasn't worked very well either.
empath75 2y ago
Eventually school districts do close schools that have emptied out as kids have gone to charter schools (source: spouse is on school board and they are closing public schools because kids have moved to charter schools)
- rahimnathwani 2y ago
  That's great to hear. Where I live even schools that close end up being re-opened with new names. This article is good and its conclusions are mostly[0] sound: https://open.substack.com/pub/sfeducation/p/wanted-careful-arsonist https://open.substack.com/pub/sfeducation/p/wanted-careful-a... [0] I strongly disagree with the conclusion that, if government-run schools have excess capacity, then we should prevent charter schools from being opened or expanded.

giantg2 2y ago

"non-secular schools with lower standard" Any source for this? My understanding is that most states have criteria for what needs to be taught in a primary and secondary school, regardless of public or non-secular. In my experience (attending, touring, friends who are teachers), the non-secular schools had higher standards. "concentrating behavior issue and IEP kids in public schools" Public schools in many areas are increasingly doing this by sending G-IEP to entirely separate schools. Indirectly, they are also doing this by increasing school population. Smaller communities tend to better self-police. The biggest issue is the lack of appropriate involvement followed by the lack of leverage the school has. In some areas, some non-public schools even get district IEP resources for their IEP students, so they aren't all avoiding it.

Glyptodon 2y ago
> some non-public schools even get district IEP resources for their IEP students IE public school has to pay but the money goes to the non-public.
- giantg2 2y ago
  Yeah... imagine if private schools didnt exist and they had to pay all the money the way they complain about budgets already.