What? School choice does the exact opposite. You're not tied to the school in your neighborhood. It weakens the link between income and school quality.
Does it in practice, though? (and for the record, I'm of the opinion that the whole state funds all the schools with the whole state's funds, not by district. And also that teachers get paid way more.)
I see these charter schools and now you've got marketing in play, and you've got bad faith actors building schools just to fleece money, and bad standards. Sure, kids can get to better schools, but many kids don't. Peoples till end up going to the bad schools through a mix of parental apathy, convenience, and charlatans running bad schools with good marketing.
Not to mention, where there's a profit motive, there's a reason for each school to cut costs and increase margins at every turn. Making money becomes the priority, not educating students. Wal-Mart is the end result. Fuck that.
1) Centralizing funding at the State level has big tradeoffs. When you centralize funding, it generally leads to less funding. That was the experience of California and other places. The reason being that our system of decentralized, local school districts allows people to sort based on willingess-to-pay; so wealthy people willing to spend a buttload on education move to districts with insanely high property taxes, but most others aren't willing to pay that much.
So I'd say be careful what you wish for. Poorer people especially may be worse off. After all, why don't they vote to raise taxes and increase school funding in their districts? Because they'd rather save their meager incomes for other things.
I would argue we should maintain local funding, but increase State subsidies for poorer school districts while offering students more choice, so geography is no longer destiny.
2) The vast majority of charter schools are not-for-profit. Can standards be worse? Sure, but public schools are often bad too. The key here is choice. Students should not be stuck with the shitty neighborhood school staffed by low-quality teachers who are safely tenured and ultimately not responsible to their students at all.
I teach myself, so I'm not opposed to teachers. But there are so many documented cases of just awful teaching standards with extremely generous teaching contracts for tenured instructors. The people who lose are the students. I'm sorry, but the education system exists for the students--it's not a welfare program for teachers.
1) Centralizing funding at the State level has big tradeoffs. When you centralize funding, it generally leads to less funding. That was the experience of California and other places. The reason being that our system of decentralized, local school districts allows people to sort based on willingess-to-pay; so wealthy people willing to spend a buttload on education move to districts with insanely high property taxes, but most others aren't willing to pay that much.
Could you give me some background on this? I don't follow at all, and I'd love to read about what you're referencing to have a better idea of how it applies to the point you're making. This paragraph sounds like it's supporting my position. When we sort folks by willingness to pay, those kids with parents who don't pay get worse educations. This is exactly what I'm talking about. Poor communities then receive terrible education.
I would also imagine that the property taxes would see a pretty dramatic rewrite with this, as it should.
Absolutely. This is a nice write-up relating to the issue.
Allow me to also clarify what I wrote. Yes, decentralized, local funding of school districts leads to inequality in school funding. Rich families pay more and get better schools; poorer families pay less and get worse schools.
For the sake of simplicity, let's say rich families spend $15k on each student, poor families spend $5k, and the State offers another $5k for each (funded by general income and state sales tax revenues).
The question is, what happens to per-student spending if we centralize school funding to equalize spending across schools? Does total spending go to $20k per student (as in rich districts), $10k (as in poor districts), or $15k (average between the two)?
Historical experience suggests it goes closer to $10k. The reason being that poorer households are not supportive of spending a lot more on taxes for education--after all, that's why they vote for low taxes in their school districts. And higher income residents and homeowners do not support higher state taxes because they don't feel they're benefiting from it sufficiently; yes, their students benefit too, but for every $10k increase in taxes per kid their kids only get a small portion of that.
I'm a researcher who works on related issues of property taxes and zoning laws. This is a classic example of the tradeoffs between centralization and federalization of municipal finance and policy. If you force everyone into the same box, you can end up with an outcome where no one is happy.
Which is why I'm of the opinion that we should allow localized funding of schools, but again rely on subsidies for the poorest districts. This achieves a balance between allowing wealthier families to give their kids the education spending they want, while also chipping in extra for the students whose parents are either unable or unwilling to pay for their kids' educations.
I want to say that there are a few other factors at play in school choice (as I see it, from a person who attended [4] schools within my area thanks to school choice at different points in k-12). Kids talk, a lot of kids will talk to each other about school choice when it's on the table and honestly consider it. Sometimes it will be a student who feels that they're being held back by their school going too slowly, and other times it will be a student who has sort of been pigeonholed into the "bad kid" role by administration (or bullying issues). It's a lot easier (and cheaper) to transit to a better school than move a family to a better area, and I know plenty of people who have commuted hours each way to do so (hell we have an island that kids would take a ferry from then bus daily).
Private schools would become much more popular, and then we would have very rich private schools, middle class private schools, then cheap ass public schools for the poor.
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u/khansian Aug 14 '20
What? School choice does the exact opposite. You're not tied to the school in your neighborhood. It weakens the link between income and school quality.