5 ms·

School districts do have an issue with those without bona fide residency attending school there. It’s a big source of fraud that hurts those paying taxes in the

by cmiles8 7mo ago

School districts do have an issue with those without bona fide residency attending school there. It’s a big source of fraud that hurts those paying taxes in the districts. I’m all for strong enforcement of those rules, but this goes too far. In most cases it’s not too hard to figure out who is committing fraud here. Families tend to rat each other out. It’s more a question of if the district is enforcing the rules.

Jeremy1026 7mo ago
Is using the surveillance state the solution to this problem though? I personally don't think so. There are other solutions, utility bills in the families name, ownership/rental documents, etc. Will there be some number of people that cheat the system? Absolutely. Will there be some number of people that learn about the license plate trackers and buy a $500 beater and park it on the right street to "beat them"? Also absolutely. Personally, I think schools shouldn't be funded solely by the taxes of residents that reside within their bounds, but as a collective pool of all tax revenue. That'll not happen in my lifetime though, too many people bought houses in "the right neighborhood" to get their kids into the "good" school that there would be so much push back that no politician would dare touch it. Especially since those people are typically also the ones with the money.
- cmiles8 7mo ago
  Many districts employ full time investigators for this. The district is a tax collector and this is a form of tax fraud. Per above though I’m not advocating for license plate readers for enforcement.
  - lotsofpulp 7mo ago
    The person in the article provided proof in the form of a mortgage statement, which should establish that they pay tax to the district. Where they spend their time outside of school hours seems irrelevant.
    - ethagknight 7mo ago
      Document fraud is both incredibly easy and pervasive. There’s a mentality of “I jumped through the hoop, now you can’t get me.” They aren’t taking blood tests or staking out your homes (I don’t think…)
      - phantom784 7mo ago
        Sounds like the license plate readers basically are stalking out homes though.
      - john_strinlai 7mo ago
        >Document fraud is both incredibly easy and pervasive. the school does not contest the legitimacy of the documents. the school even says "[...] you are the owner on record of a house in our district boundaries"
      - cucumber3732842 7mo ago
        They provided a mortgage statement. The district employee can trivially verify that by firing up the GIS system.
      - lotsofpulp 7mo ago
        So you go to the county’s website and look up the address and see who owns it. Or even homes.com
- ethagknight 7mo ago
  Surveillance State? They already have all kinds of data on you, including your child’s vaccination records, security cameras throughout the building, supposed home addresses, and parental information. I assume you have to have your ID scanned before entering the building. LPR does not offer anything revelatory from a personal freedoms perspective. Tracking license plates to look for unusually activity is an easy win for both fraud prevention and security from more serious threats.
  - summermusic 7mo ago
    > They already have all kinds of data on you So? My employer has my SSN, address, work history, etc. but I don't want them to know about where I go on the weekends. It's a fallacy to say that just because an entity knows a lot about you that it's OK if they know everything about you.
- pessimizer 7mo ago
  > There are other solutions, utility bills in the families name, ownership/rental documents, etc. Will these cause injustice and false positives even more than license plate tracking? What is your point? > Personally, I think schools shouldn't be funded solely by the taxes of residents that reside within their bounds, but as a collective pool of all tax revenue. Are you talking about undemocratically forcing a restructuring all school financing everywhere in order to avoid one school doing a $1K/mo license plate tracking contract to make sure kids live in the district that they're attending school in? What is the principle that you're trying to uphold?
  - Jeremy1026 7mo ago
    > Are you talking about undemocratically forcing a restructuring all school financing everywhere in order to avoid license plate tracking? What is the principle that you're trying to uphold? No, I'm talking about changing how schools are funded by making funds more evenly distributed across districts. Giving the kids in the "bad" areas the same opportunities as those in the "good" areas. Right now, if you can't afford that four-five-six-seven-hundred thousand dollar home, you aren't afforded the same level of public education as someone else who can. And doing so democratically, which is why I mentioned it'll never happen because no politician would be able to run on that. Their opponents would be outfunded by the top 10% to keep the status quo. And this is coming from someone who own's a home in a "good" district. Where we got a total rebuilt elementary school 4 years ago, a new middle school actively being build, and a new high school that opened 3 years ago. Why should my kids have access to everything newer and better just because we can afford to live out in the suburbs, than someone else who isn't working in the cushy tech industry and instead is busting their ass only to live in poverty?
    - phil21 7mo ago
      Newer does not mean better, or even imply it. Money spent on facilities has almost no correlation to educational outcomes. What matters are the peers you go to school with, supported by decent curriculum and moderately competent teachers. None of which is expensive. Oh, and administrators who actually care about teaching being done vs. being terrified of the lawsuit fairy. It’s the peers that matter by far the most - and that means parents. Parents that are self-selecting into good districts tend to skew heavily towards “involved” and some definition of functional. This can mean being able to and buying a home or rent an apartment in a good district, or finding some clever and/or creative workaround to get the same outcome. The latter is even better in most cases since those families are motivated at an even higher level to make sure it’s a success. The best school I went to as a kid was a private highly selective school in “the ghetto” where my dad lived growing up. Nearly every kid there was on some form of subsidized or full ride tuition, with very “working class” parents. The facilities were barebones at best. The vast majority of kids had parents who held them to extreme expectations even if they didn’t have financial means or even time to be highly involved day to day. The uber rich brand new high school I went to the next year in the suburbs wasn’t even close. The difference was in the kids who attended the school and the expectations put on them for both classroom behavior, engagement, and work ethic. Shitty disruptive kids were kicked out within a matter of days so as to let kids who wanted to be there actually learn. Anything beyond that is close to a rounding error for outcomes. The inner city school district I pay taxes into spends more per student than many of the suburbs. You could triple it again and get zero change in outcomes - in fact so far since living here school budgets are inversely correlated with outcome, although I don’t see a causation there in either direction. Schools that are allowed to be ran like schools and hold students to high expectations and standards do well. Schools that are ran like social programs trying to correct for all of societies ills do not. It’s pretty simple in the end.
- Aurornis 7mo ago
  > Will there be some number of people that learn about the license plate trackers and buy a $500 beater and park it on the right street to "beat them"? Also absolutely. I believe they’re using LPR at drop off and pick up too, so parking a $500 junker somewhere isn’t a workaround. They would have to drive to the parked car every morning, transfer into it, drive it to school, return to the parking location, swap cars again, and then repeat the entire routine for pick up. It all technically could be done, but as a parent who knows what it’s like to hustle multiple kids to school in the morning I doubt this routine would be a common workaround.
butterlesstoast 7mo ago
I wonder if perhaps the noise of families ratting each other out is getting too loud. This sounds like a solution to cut through the noise and have their own data. Like you said, this does go a bit too far. It also does not seem to properly equip the school district with factually correct info. Metal on wheels isn't a good data point for "You live here".
- cucumber3732842 7mo ago
  The kind of district where people would rat each other out at any rate that would cause non-trivial amounts of work is going to be full of exactly the kind of people who wouldn't see anything wrong with treating a circuitous 3rd party ALPR enforcement system as authoritative and would have the spare $$$ to pay for such a boondoggle.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
lokar 7mo ago
If you own a house or rent in the district you are paying (or your landlord is) the taxes that fund schools.
iterateoften 7mo ago
Ok, how big of an issue? How many students? How much wasted on fraud? I went to a top school where sometimes students tried to fake residency. It was essentially a non issue in the grand scheme of the potential waste for a school district to generate.
- elil17 7mo ago
  Is it even wasted if a child gets an education?
  - xhkkffbf 7mo ago
    One or two students don't make a difference. But if a number of people lie, then that dilutes the experience of the legit students. So it's not just as simple as you make it sound. Here's an extreme example. One boy I know went to a school from kindergarten. He was tall and expected to start on the basketball team. Suddenly,in his junior year, several great players showed up from out of nowhere. There were lots of rumors about whether they were legitimately allowed to enroll, but in the end several lifelong students were bumped from the team. The coach was happy. The principal loved the idea. The kids presumably enjoyed the new school. But there were several others who lost an opportunity. There are downsides to open door policies like you're endorsing. Most of the time, they're not so visible. But when resources are finite, people get hurt.
  - Aurornis 7mo ago
    All of the children get an education, but you have to divide up the attendance across the available schools. A single child going to the incorrect school isn’t going to break the system, but when it starts happening at scale it starts diluting the per-student funding in a district, increasing class sizes (reducing the teacher to student ratio) and eventually puts the school over limits and forces nearby children who should be going there into schools that are farther away.
elil17 7mo ago
The correct way to address this is to not have school funding be based on how expensive the nearby houses are.
- R_D_Olivaw 7mo ago
  What?! An honest solution that Doesn't impede on our privacy rights. Straight to jail with you.
- Aurornis 7mo ago
  Can’t speak for Chicago, but in my city the schools get similar funds on a per-student basis yet still have very large differences in academics from school to school. The reason parents try to get into different schools isn’t to chase funding, it’s to get into the one with the best outcomes. A lot of that comes from parental involvement and having a critical mass of engaged students and parents, not the dollar amount spent on each student.
  - triceratops 7mo ago
    Then "school district fraud" shouldn't be a problem. If a parent is willing to committing a crime to get their kid into a good school, they're heavily engaged and involved.
    - Aurornis 7mo ago
      Schools have limited capacity. If they fill up with students from far away, nearby students who have a real right to be there get pushed out. This isn’t a topic where you can think in terms of a single child only.
      - triceratops 7mo ago
        School bodies expand and contract over time as the demographic makeup of a district and school changes. "Limited capacity" isn't strictly true.
tshaddox 7mo ago
If you have proof of home ownership and proof of legal guardianship of the child, what’s the problem? I can see it being a problem if e.g. a bunch of family members are putting their kids in a school district based on a single home owned by a grandparent. But if that grandparent was also the kid’s legal guardian, fair enough!
jollyllama 7mo ago
We're either going to have to go to a voucher system or we're going to see students with spyware or tracking hardware attached to them.
Aurornis 7mo ago
> School districts do have an issue with those without bona fide residency attending school there How does this work? Do parents use a friend’s address to register for the school? Is there no way for the state-run school to check against tax records?
HelloMcFly 7mo ago
> It’s a big source of fraud This isn't 'fraud' in any meaningful moral sense, it is a rational reaction to immoral, unjust school funding models that perpetuate systemic inequalities based on the zip-code you can afford. I'm sure schools have a duty to police this in their mind, sure, but I side with parents trying to evade the boundaries they've been put because they weren't born rich enough.
- viggity 7mo ago
  The difference in outcomes isn't from funding/resources. https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/06/26/why-do-the-results-of-immigrant-students-depend-so-much-on-their-country-of-origin-and-so-little-on-their-country-of-destination/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/06/26/why-do-the...
  - HelloMcFly 7mo ago
    What am I supposed to be reading here? The article? The short snippet of commentary about it? The back-and-forth comments on the commentary? Your link seems to have nothing to say about inequitible school quality based on unfair, racist, classist propety tax funding models. How about this one which followed cohorts for 40 years and found substantial differences in life outcomes correlated* to school funding levels (PDF ALERT!): https://gsppi.berkeley.edu/~ruckerj/QJE_resubmit_final_version.pdf https://gsppi.berkeley.edu/~ruckerj/QJE_resubmit_final_versi.... Crucially this looks at life outcomes, not just test scores. --- *Just in case someone wants to remind me or anyone else that correlation does not equal causation, I will say "I know" and "in longitudinal studies, time operates as an exogenous variable that adds substantial evidence of causality in well-designed research.
    - viggity 7mo ago
      I am suggesting that the major causative factor for life outcomes is genetics. Not "racist" property tax funding models. You can take the girl out of the trailer park, but you can't take the trailer park out of the girl.
HexPhantom 7mo ago
If anything, LPR data might be a useful lead generator. But using it as decisive evidence seems like a stretch

by cmiles8 7mo ago

Jeremy1026 7mo ago

Is using the surveillance state the solution to this problem though? I personally don't think so. There are other solutions, utility bills in the families name, ownership/rental documents, etc. Will there be some number of people that cheat the system? Absolutely. Will there be some number of people that learn about the license plate trackers and buy a $500 beater and park it on the right street to "beat them"? Also absolutely. Personally, I think schools shouldn't be funded solely by the taxes of residents that reside within their bounds, but as a collective pool of all tax revenue. That'll not happen in my lifetime though, too many people bought houses in "the right neighborhood" to get their kids into the "good" school that there would be so much push back that no politician would dare touch it. Especially since those people are typically also the ones with the money.

cmiles8 7mo ago
Many districts employ full time investigators for this. The district is a tax collector and this is a form of tax fraud. Per above though I’m not advocating for license plate readers for enforcement.
- lotsofpulp 7mo ago
  The person in the article provided proof in the form of a mortgage statement, which should establish that they pay tax to the district. Where they spend their time outside of school hours seems irrelevant.
  - ethagknight 7mo ago
    Document fraud is both incredibly easy and pervasive. There’s a mentality of “I jumped through the hoop, now you can’t get me.” They aren’t taking blood tests or staking out your homes (I don’t think…)
    - phantom784 7mo ago
      Sounds like the license plate readers basically are stalking out homes though.
    - john_strinlai 7mo ago
      >Document fraud is both incredibly easy and pervasive. the school does not contest the legitimacy of the documents. the school even says "[...] you are the owner on record of a house in our district boundaries"
    - cucumber3732842 7mo ago
      They provided a mortgage statement. The district employee can trivially verify that by firing up the GIS system.
    - lotsofpulp 7mo ago
      So you go to the county’s website and look up the address and see who owns it. Or even homes.com
ethagknight 7mo ago
Surveillance State? They already have all kinds of data on you, including your child’s vaccination records, security cameras throughout the building, supposed home addresses, and parental information. I assume you have to have your ID scanned before entering the building. LPR does not offer anything revelatory from a personal freedoms perspective. Tracking license plates to look for unusually activity is an easy win for both fraud prevention and security from more serious threats.
- summermusic 7mo ago
  > They already have all kinds of data on you So? My employer has my SSN, address, work history, etc. but I don't want them to know about where I go on the weekends. It's a fallacy to say that just because an entity knows a lot about you that it's OK if they know everything about you.
pessimizer 7mo ago
> There are other solutions, utility bills in the families name, ownership/rental documents, etc. Will these cause injustice and false positives even more than license plate tracking? What is your point? > Personally, I think schools shouldn't be funded solely by the taxes of residents that reside within their bounds, but as a collective pool of all tax revenue. Are you talking about undemocratically forcing a restructuring all school financing everywhere in order to avoid one school doing a $1K/mo license plate tracking contract to make sure kids live in the district that they're attending school in? What is the principle that you're trying to uphold?
- Jeremy1026 7mo ago
  > Are you talking about undemocratically forcing a restructuring all school financing everywhere in order to avoid license plate tracking? What is the principle that you're trying to uphold? No, I'm talking about changing how schools are funded by making funds more evenly distributed across districts. Giving the kids in the "bad" areas the same opportunities as those in the "good" areas. Right now, if you can't afford that four-five-six-seven-hundred thousand dollar home, you aren't afforded the same level of public education as someone else who can. And doing so democratically, which is why I mentioned it'll never happen because no politician would be able to run on that. Their opponents would be outfunded by the top 10% to keep the status quo. And this is coming from someone who own's a home in a "good" district. Where we got a total rebuilt elementary school 4 years ago, a new middle school actively being build, and a new high school that opened 3 years ago. Why should my kids have access to everything newer and better just because we can afford to live out in the suburbs, than someone else who isn't working in the cushy tech industry and instead is busting their ass only to live in poverty?
  - phil21 7mo ago
    Newer does not mean better, or even imply it. Money spent on facilities has almost no correlation to educational outcomes. What matters are the peers you go to school with, supported by decent curriculum and moderately competent teachers. None of which is expensive. Oh, and administrators who actually care about teaching being done vs. being terrified of the lawsuit fairy. It’s the peers that matter by far the most - and that means parents. Parents that are self-selecting into good districts tend to skew heavily towards “involved” and some definition of functional. This can mean being able to and buying a home or rent an apartment in a good district, or finding some clever and/or creative workaround to get the same outcome. The latter is even better in most cases since those families are motivated at an even higher level to make sure it’s a success. The best school I went to as a kid was a private highly selective school in “the ghetto” where my dad lived growing up. Nearly every kid there was on some form of subsidized or full ride tuition, with very “working class” parents. The facilities were barebones at best. The vast majority of kids had parents who held them to extreme expectations even if they didn’t have financial means or even time to be highly involved day to day. The uber rich brand new high school I went to the next year in the suburbs wasn’t even close. The difference was in the kids who attended the school and the expectations put on them for both classroom behavior, engagement, and work ethic. Shitty disruptive kids were kicked out within a matter of days so as to let kids who wanted to be there actually learn. Anything beyond that is close to a rounding error for outcomes. The inner city school district I pay taxes into spends more per student than many of the suburbs. You could triple it again and get zero change in outcomes - in fact so far since living here school budgets are inversely correlated with outcome, although I don’t see a causation there in either direction. Schools that are allowed to be ran like schools and hold students to high expectations and standards do well. Schools that are ran like social programs trying to correct for all of societies ills do not. It’s pretty simple in the end.
Aurornis 7mo ago
> Will there be some number of people that learn about the license plate trackers and buy a $500 beater and park it on the right street to "beat them"? Also absolutely. I believe they’re using LPR at drop off and pick up too, so parking a $500 junker somewhere isn’t a workaround. They would have to drive to the parked car every morning, transfer into it, drive it to school, return to the parking location, swap cars again, and then repeat the entire routine for pick up. It all technically could be done, but as a parent who knows what it’s like to hustle multiple kids to school in the morning I doubt this routine would be a common workaround.

butterlesstoast 7mo ago

I wonder if perhaps the noise of families ratting each other out is getting too loud. This sounds like a solution to cut through the noise and have their own data. Like you said, this does go a bit too far. It also does not seem to properly equip the school district with factually correct info. Metal on wheels isn't a good data point for "You live here".

cucumber3732842 7mo ago
The kind of district where people would rat each other out at any rate that would cause non-trivial amounts of work is going to be full of exactly the kind of people who wouldn't see anything wrong with treating a circuitous 3rd party ALPR enforcement system as authoritative and would have the spare $$$ to pay for such a boondoggle.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

lokar 7mo ago

If you own a house or rent in the district you are paying (or your landlord is) the taxes that fund schools.

iterateoften 7mo ago

Ok, how big of an issue? How many students? How much wasted on fraud? I went to a top school where sometimes students tried to fake residency. It was essentially a non issue in the grand scheme of the potential waste for a school district to generate.

elil17 7mo ago
Is it even wasted if a child gets an education?
- xhkkffbf 7mo ago
  One or two students don't make a difference. But if a number of people lie, then that dilutes the experience of the legit students. So it's not just as simple as you make it sound. Here's an extreme example. One boy I know went to a school from kindergarten. He was tall and expected to start on the basketball team. Suddenly,in his junior year, several great players showed up from out of nowhere. There were lots of rumors about whether they were legitimately allowed to enroll, but in the end several lifelong students were bumped from the team. The coach was happy. The principal loved the idea. The kids presumably enjoyed the new school. But there were several others who lost an opportunity. There are downsides to open door policies like you're endorsing. Most of the time, they're not so visible. But when resources are finite, people get hurt.
- Aurornis 7mo ago
  All of the children get an education, but you have to divide up the attendance across the available schools. A single child going to the incorrect school isn’t going to break the system, but when it starts happening at scale it starts diluting the per-student funding in a district, increasing class sizes (reducing the teacher to student ratio) and eventually puts the school over limits and forces nearby children who should be going there into schools that are farther away.

elil17 7mo ago

The correct way to address this is to not have school funding be based on how expensive the nearby houses are.

R_D_Olivaw 7mo ago
What?! An honest solution that Doesn't impede on our privacy rights. Straight to jail with you.
Aurornis 7mo ago
Can’t speak for Chicago, but in my city the schools get similar funds on a per-student basis yet still have very large differences in academics from school to school. The reason parents try to get into different schools isn’t to chase funding, it’s to get into the one with the best outcomes. A lot of that comes from parental involvement and having a critical mass of engaged students and parents, not the dollar amount spent on each student.
- triceratops 7mo ago
  Then "school district fraud" shouldn't be a problem. If a parent is willing to committing a crime to get their kid into a good school, they're heavily engaged and involved.
  - Aurornis 7mo ago
    Schools have limited capacity. If they fill up with students from far away, nearby students who have a real right to be there get pushed out. This isn’t a topic where you can think in terms of a single child only.
    - triceratops 7mo ago
      School bodies expand and contract over time as the demographic makeup of a district and school changes. "Limited capacity" isn't strictly true.

tshaddox 7mo ago

If you have proof of home ownership and proof of legal guardianship of the child, what’s the problem? I can see it being a problem if e.g. a bunch of family members are putting their kids in a school district based on a single home owned by a grandparent. But if that grandparent was also the kid’s legal guardian, fair enough!

jollyllama 7mo ago

We're either going to have to go to a voucher system or we're going to see students with spyware or tracking hardware attached to them.

Aurornis 7mo ago

> School districts do have an issue with those without bona fide residency attending school there How does this work? Do parents use a friend’s address to register for the school? Is there no way for the state-run school to check against tax records?

HelloMcFly 7mo ago

> It’s a big source of fraud This isn't 'fraud' in any meaningful moral sense, it is a rational reaction to immoral, unjust school funding models that perpetuate systemic inequalities based on the zip-code you can afford. I'm sure schools have a duty to police this in their mind, sure, but I side with parents trying to evade the boundaries they've been put because they weren't born rich enough.

viggity 7mo ago
The difference in outcomes isn't from funding/resources. https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/06/26/why-do-the-results-of-immigrant-students-depend-so-much-on-their-country-of-origin-and-so-little-on-their-country-of-destination/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/06/26/why-do-the...
- HelloMcFly 7mo ago
  What am I supposed to be reading here? The article? The short snippet of commentary about it? The back-and-forth comments on the commentary? Your link seems to have nothing to say about inequitible school quality based on unfair, racist, classist propety tax funding models. How about this one which followed cohorts for 40 years and found substantial differences in life outcomes correlated* to school funding levels (PDF ALERT!): https://gsppi.berkeley.edu/~ruckerj/QJE_resubmit_final_version.pdf https://gsppi.berkeley.edu/~ruckerj/QJE_resubmit_final_versi.... Crucially this looks at life outcomes, not just test scores. --- *Just in case someone wants to remind me or anyone else that correlation does not equal causation, I will say "I know" and "in longitudinal studies, time operates as an exogenous variable that adds substantial evidence of causality in well-designed research.
  - viggity 7mo ago
    I am suggesting that the major causative factor for life outcomes is genetics. Not "racist" property tax funding models. You can take the girl out of the trailer park, but you can't take the trailer park out of the girl.

HexPhantom 7mo ago

If anything, LPR data might be a useful lead generator. But using it as decisive evidence seems like a stretch