With Covid waves prompting controversial school closures and the critical race theory controversy still bubbling, I see more and more people talking about wanting to use “their tax dollars” to send their kid to another school, a charter school or private school, presumably. They don’t like public schools, for reasons that are more and less legitimate, and they want their tax dollars back to pay for an alternative. This entails a very selective endorsement of the idea that the money you pay into taxation is somehow still your money, that you can just demand to withdraw your portion of public funds to use it as you would prefer. (How your share would be calculated is never clear.) The EdChoice nonprofit approvingly
Ok, I actually disagree with this one: I think American secondary-school curricula are (non-uniquely) lacking in rigor for the median student. I think most people should graduate high school knowing way more stuff in greater depth than they do now, just as preparation for citizenship and the working world.
I don't disagree with the rest, just with that one angle of "we're doing pretty ok". Fuck privatizing schools.
Apparently these folks didn’t listen to George’s speech about how the building and loan works in Its a Wonderful Life.
Also, I understand as a parent the drive to give your kids the best. But this kind of dollars-follow-the-kid mentality is pretty uniquely selfish. You don’t give a shit about other people’s kids, and what “your” tax dollars or even your kid’s presence and contributed resources could do to help their peers.
I think the frame here is a bit of a straw man. Imagine if, instead of sending retired people a check every month, Social Security offered a free house and meals to everyone over 65, but your choices over what house and meals you get are extremely limited. If "Social Security choice" reformers started arguing for sending a check every month instead, they wouldn't be arguing for "overwhelming the basic social contract that dictates public expenditure," they'd be arguing for separating the redistributive aspect of the program, which genuinely requires to abandon notions of "money I paid in," from the actual PROVISION of the services, which doesn't, as evidenced by the fact that houses and food are available on the free market.
While I don't doubt there are exceptions, I think most advocates for school choice aren't arguing against the redistributive aspect of public education spending, they're just arguing against the aspect of government specifically providing the educational institutions rather than merely the funding. Now there are certainly reasons why it might be better for government to provide the schools rather than just send checks, and Freddie has argued them well here and elsewhere, but I don't think it's as simple as saying, "that's not how public financing works."
(When I see an opening on tax-supported public goods, I take it).
The public good of public libraries is another example. Support varies by state and is not always tied to state wealth. Taxation is at the local level. There are studies that link library support to student success and community health...though not robust. In general people are not arguing to take this money and buy their own books. The taxpayer contribution is about the cost of one book. PLs are for everyone.
See: Pelczar, M., Frehill, L. M., Nielsen, E, Kaiser, A., Hudson, J., & Wan, T. (2021). Characteristics of Public Libraries in the United States: Institute of Museum and Library Services: Washington, D.C.
It's not that I don't necessarily disagree, but you're also seeing the highest percentage of children homeschooled, ever (and that's not because they're working from home, these are children who've withdrawn from all public schooling). You have a huge portion of the country that doesn't trust public schools, that's not a good look. It wasn't like this when we were in school 30 years ago.
About 2 years ago, my sister said she planned to homeschool her kids (then 3 & 1) to which I replied that she was crazy and public schools are fine. About 2 months ago, after a year of seeing what's been going on in places like Loudon, Fairfax and local to me (near very Liberal Portland, Oregon), I told her I think homeschooling is the right choice.
There's no longer an emphasis on STEM education, anti-racism curriculum is king and cancel-culture reigns. There's no more open debate. The focus is on race. Teachers are openly displaying communist or antifa symbols. You have to worry if some batshit social worker is gonna convince your kid they're trans (please don't tell me I'm crazy, this literally is happening in some places and parents telling me half the high school claims to be trans).
You can tell these people they don't get to decide how their money is spent, but they're fleeing the schools YOU desperately want to preserve. You were the one who said last month, in a post where you banned comment, schools should be a warm, welcoming place. They're not, or at least getting to that place.
After enough families have fled, the schools you say you cherished as a kid and that every kid should cherish, will be, for lack of a better word, defunded.
The segment of the population that has the greatest incentive to push for school choice are poor inner city minorities who face local public schools that are disaster zones, not due to a lack of academic rigor but in the sense that they are crumbling and often literally unsafe.
My teacher education program at the University of Montana in the early aughts was absolutely awash in the charter school craze, they absolutely indoctrinated me into it and I thought we were gonna go out there and change the world with it, lol. They took all of us young energetic progressives and funneled that energy into corporate profit - I'm still embarrassed that I was such a charter advocate for so long.
It's hard to believe that anyone who went through that can look at the educational landscape that exists today and say "oh yeah, we found the solution and it's charter schools." They got all of the resources they wanted, they got 100% bipartisan support and billions in public and private investment. And they've changed.... nothing. They've got nothing but anecdata, a kid "saved" here and there. A school doing better over there. It's impressive to me that these people still exist.
"The trouble is that we’re dragged down by a relatively small number of students that perform so terribly that they drag down our averages."
My guess is that this is at least partially impoverished, primarily minority neighborhoods in urban cores. Can it be addressed?
"Rather it’s a complex and multivariate social problem that can’t be solved at the school level."
I think that it's likely that the same factors wreaking havoc on schools in these environments are also intimately connected to urban crime, intergenerational poverty, etc. It's not just trillions of dollars of education spending that have failed to make any substantial impact: decades of anti-poverty programs haven't accomplished much either.
If we're going to play the "where my tax dollars" game, I'd be only too happy to redirect mine away from the military-industrial complex, and toward planned parenthood and iconoclastic art.
On the one hand, I totally agree with you from a civics perspective. I've made this same argument with some of my co-workers who send their kids to Catholic school. Government is not a fee for service proposition.
On the other hand, as a parent with a child in public school, it feels like there has to be a better way to do this. It often seems to me that public schools are not generally being run primarily for the benefit of students, but for the benefit of other stakeholders.
In my district, recent scandals have shown that those in power have worked hard to suppress the voices and concerns of parents and students to protect teachers and administrators, to the extent that the Attorney General has decided she needed to get involved.
I don't think you're being fair about the specific frustrations of parents in 2022. National performance and success at international math competitions simply aren't relevant to the on-the-ground decisions people have to make, and when a decent chunk of your tax bill goes towards funding a school system that consistently makes your life difficult, I can totally understand why people look for a way to put that money somewhere else.
I live in Chicago, and as we all know CPS and CTU have been engaged in very public fights for the last 10-15 years, but have particularly been at each other's throats over COVID. CPS has had waves of school closures, work stoppages and was remote for effectively all of 2020. "That's COVID", you might say -- but at the same time this was happening, plenty of suburban districts managed to only go remote for a few weeks of the whole pandemic! And the same is true for charter and private schools within the city! This alone, to me, completely demolishes the position that schools are more-or-less all the same and that the important thing is the innate academic ability of the child. (I do find your position pretty persuasive for pre-COVID stuff, I have to say.)
Anyway - while it's all well and good to argue that, well, statistically speaking a smart kid will be fine whether they go to CPS or not, right now there are huge _qualitiative_ differences in how well different districts are doing. I can totally understand the frustration of parents who see themselves as effectively being forced to purchase an inferior product, even while they can clearly see a better one right next to them. That might not be how you prefer to look at the situation, but I don't have any trouble understanding that perspective at all.
(If it matters, I don't have kids yet but am getting married and expect to have some soon, so school districts have been weighing more heavily in my mind lately.)
We are a much more individualistic nation than we were 10, 20 or 50 years ago. We have much less of a "mainstream" culture than we did in the past. How could we possibly build a history curriculum that Trump and Biden voters agree on?
Schools are were kids are socialized. People want their kids to be socialized into their values, and those values have diverged wildly.
When many of the providers of education have abdicated their responsibility to provide the service they are responsible for, it's going to take more than, "that's not the way we do things around here" to convince me that parents should not have alternatives. (particularly coming from someone with fairly radical ideas on how society should be structured in other domains).
I see 2 key differences between education and and other public goods.
The first is that it makes much more sense for private entities to provide education than other public services like national defense, transportation infrastructure, policing, etc. Private schools and homeschooling exist, and, while I'm not a wonk with metrics, I think it's safe to say that the results don't present an open-and-shut case that such a thing inevitably leads to disaster such that attempts at private policing would. There is debate about whether it's better for the government to provide people services directly or just give them money (or cash-like equivalents) in domains like housing, medicine, the child tax credit, food stamps, etc. I don't see anything about education that means it must intrinsically be removed from such debates.
Second, the behavior of public education providers reveals that, at least at certain key points that exert considerable leverage, they don't consider themselves to be providing a fundamental service that is a vital part of the social contract. They have been fine with drastically reducing the level of service in the face of the pandemic, and continue to do so even as various developments have reduced the risk. The military did not go "fully remote" during the pandemic; public schools did. And then branded those who complained as domestic terrorists. I don't know exactly how responsibility for this should be divided between local government officials, school boards, school administrators, and teachers unions, but as a constituent, I don't particularly care. From my perspective, it's simply not serving us, and high-minded talk about the social contract rings hollow when the school district is closing its doors but lecturing me about what my family should be doing during its private time.
"Many studies that involve randomly assigning students to schools perceived to be of differing quality find no school effects, which is counterintuitive only if you assume every brain is the same. There are no magical institutions anywhere in the world where you can take a kid who is not naturally inclined to be a genius and turn them into a genius."
I don't have access to most of those studies, but I trust your characterization. I would be curious to know whether there's other research pointing in the other direction.
But the second sentence seems like a huge strawman. I don't think the argument is that a different school could turn all children into geniuses. I think the argument is that certain public schools are indeed full of children suffering from "complex and multivariate social problem[s]," which often means that a school is full of violence, disruption, chaos, a poor culture of learning, constant teacher distraction, etc. How is it possible that these conditions don't drag down the other kids in the same school who aren't personally suffering from the same complex and multivariate social problems, but who get the spillover effect?
(See, for example, this paper: https://www.nber.org/papers/w22042 -- "Results show that exposure to a disruptive peer in classes of 25 during elementary school reduces earnings at age 26 by 3 to 4 percent. We estimate that differential exposure to children linked to domestic violence [their proxy for "disruptive," for reasons they explain in the paper] explains 5 to 6 percent of the rich-poor earnings gap in our data, and that removing one disruptive peer from a classroom for one year would raise the present discounted value of classmates' future earnings by $100,000.")
If nothing else, in high school the condition of the student body often means those schools don't have advanced classes because there isn't sufficient demand for them. I would need very strong evidence to believe that a bright kid who goes to a dangerous high school where advanced calculus, physics, and chemistry are not offered will be on the exactly the same footing heading into college science and math as equivalently bright kids who went to quiet, well-behaved schools where such classes were offered.
And this is to say nothing of the psychological and social effects other than test scores -- why should well-behaved kids, with parents who have the hustle to try for something better, be forced to go to school with kids whose parents don't care, who don't want to be there, who disrupt the learning environment, and who are often actively dangerous? I feel for the latter group of kids, who are the way they are through no fault of their own. But they can be awful to be around -- especially now that many public schools feel hamstrung in applying discipline.
If it truly won't work -- i.e., if well-designed studies truly and consistently show that none of those factors matters, and the kids in terrible schools somehow are graduating at their full individual potential and without psychological scars... then fine. But it seems to me that's the question. Not whether children of middling or low potential will become geniuses in a different school.
And if the answer is that it's morally wrong to abandon the difficult kids, notwithstanding that they ruin learning for the people around them, that's fine, too. But then let's outlaw private education altogether. Rich liberal parents wax poetic about the glorious communal project of public education -- and then they put their kids in Harvard-Westlake and Sidwell Friends. We should also assign all children in a county randomly to schools, so that each school gets its fair share of difficult kids and there are no "good schools" anymore. And no enclaves within larger systems, like Beverly Hills. THEN I would believe people when they say they're committed to solidarity with those kids. Otherwise it often seems to mean that only poor families should stand in solidarity with them.
A final argument might be that it would be cheaper and more efficient to remove the difficult kids from the schools. I think that's politically unpalatable, though.
Ok, I actually disagree with this one: I think American secondary-school curricula are (non-uniquely) lacking in rigor for the median student. I think most people should graduate high school knowing way more stuff in greater depth than they do now, just as preparation for citizenship and the working world.
I don't disagree with the rest, just with that one angle of "we're doing pretty ok". Fuck privatizing schools.
Apparently these folks didn’t listen to George’s speech about how the building and loan works in Its a Wonderful Life.
Also, I understand as a parent the drive to give your kids the best. But this kind of dollars-follow-the-kid mentality is pretty uniquely selfish. You don’t give a shit about other people’s kids, and what “your” tax dollars or even your kid’s presence and contributed resources could do to help their peers.
I think the frame here is a bit of a straw man. Imagine if, instead of sending retired people a check every month, Social Security offered a free house and meals to everyone over 65, but your choices over what house and meals you get are extremely limited. If "Social Security choice" reformers started arguing for sending a check every month instead, they wouldn't be arguing for "overwhelming the basic social contract that dictates public expenditure," they'd be arguing for separating the redistributive aspect of the program, which genuinely requires to abandon notions of "money I paid in," from the actual PROVISION of the services, which doesn't, as evidenced by the fact that houses and food are available on the free market.
While I don't doubt there are exceptions, I think most advocates for school choice aren't arguing against the redistributive aspect of public education spending, they're just arguing against the aspect of government specifically providing the educational institutions rather than merely the funding. Now there are certainly reasons why it might be better for government to provide the schools rather than just send checks, and Freddie has argued them well here and elsewhere, but I don't think it's as simple as saying, "that's not how public financing works."
(When I see an opening on tax-supported public goods, I take it).
The public good of public libraries is another example. Support varies by state and is not always tied to state wealth. Taxation is at the local level. There are studies that link library support to student success and community health...though not robust. In general people are not arguing to take this money and buy their own books. The taxpayer contribution is about the cost of one book. PLs are for everyone.
See: Pelczar, M., Frehill, L. M., Nielsen, E, Kaiser, A., Hudson, J., & Wan, T. (2021). Characteristics of Public Libraries in the United States: Institute of Museum and Library Services: Washington, D.C.
Tables for each state are ranked here in a zip file: https://www.imls.gov/research-evaluation/data-collection/public-libraries-survey
It's not that I don't necessarily disagree, but you're also seeing the highest percentage of children homeschooled, ever (and that's not because they're working from home, these are children who've withdrawn from all public schooling). You have a huge portion of the country that doesn't trust public schools, that's not a good look. It wasn't like this when we were in school 30 years ago.
About 2 years ago, my sister said she planned to homeschool her kids (then 3 & 1) to which I replied that she was crazy and public schools are fine. About 2 months ago, after a year of seeing what's been going on in places like Loudon, Fairfax and local to me (near very Liberal Portland, Oregon), I told her I think homeschooling is the right choice.
There's no longer an emphasis on STEM education, anti-racism curriculum is king and cancel-culture reigns. There's no more open debate. The focus is on race. Teachers are openly displaying communist or antifa symbols. You have to worry if some batshit social worker is gonna convince your kid they're trans (please don't tell me I'm crazy, this literally is happening in some places and parents telling me half the high school claims to be trans).
You can tell these people they don't get to decide how their money is spent, but they're fleeing the schools YOU desperately want to preserve. You were the one who said last month, in a post where you banned comment, schools should be a warm, welcoming place. They're not, or at least getting to that place.
After enough families have fled, the schools you say you cherished as a kid and that every kid should cherish, will be, for lack of a better word, defunded.
The segment of the population that has the greatest incentive to push for school choice are poor inner city minorities who face local public schools that are disaster zones, not due to a lack of academic rigor but in the sense that they are crumbling and often literally unsafe.
My teacher education program at the University of Montana in the early aughts was absolutely awash in the charter school craze, they absolutely indoctrinated me into it and I thought we were gonna go out there and change the world with it, lol. They took all of us young energetic progressives and funneled that energy into corporate profit - I'm still embarrassed that I was such a charter advocate for so long.
It's hard to believe that anyone who went through that can look at the educational landscape that exists today and say "oh yeah, we found the solution and it's charter schools." They got all of the resources they wanted, they got 100% bipartisan support and billions in public and private investment. And they've changed.... nothing. They've got nothing but anecdata, a kid "saved" here and there. A school doing better over there. It's impressive to me that these people still exist.
"The trouble is that we’re dragged down by a relatively small number of students that perform so terribly that they drag down our averages."
My guess is that this is at least partially impoverished, primarily minority neighborhoods in urban cores. Can it be addressed?
"Rather it’s a complex and multivariate social problem that can’t be solved at the school level."
I think that it's likely that the same factors wreaking havoc on schools in these environments are also intimately connected to urban crime, intergenerational poverty, etc. It's not just trillions of dollars of education spending that have failed to make any substantial impact: decades of anti-poverty programs haven't accomplished much either.
If we're going to play the "where my tax dollars" game, I'd be only too happy to redirect mine away from the military-industrial complex, and toward planned parenthood and iconoclastic art.
On the one hand, I totally agree with you from a civics perspective. I've made this same argument with some of my co-workers who send their kids to Catholic school. Government is not a fee for service proposition.
On the other hand, as a parent with a child in public school, it feels like there has to be a better way to do this. It often seems to me that public schools are not generally being run primarily for the benefit of students, but for the benefit of other stakeholders.
In my district, recent scandals have shown that those in power have worked hard to suppress the voices and concerns of parents and students to protect teachers and administrators, to the extent that the Attorney General has decided she needed to get involved.
I don't think you're being fair about the specific frustrations of parents in 2022. National performance and success at international math competitions simply aren't relevant to the on-the-ground decisions people have to make, and when a decent chunk of your tax bill goes towards funding a school system that consistently makes your life difficult, I can totally understand why people look for a way to put that money somewhere else.
I live in Chicago, and as we all know CPS and CTU have been engaged in very public fights for the last 10-15 years, but have particularly been at each other's throats over COVID. CPS has had waves of school closures, work stoppages and was remote for effectively all of 2020. "That's COVID", you might say -- but at the same time this was happening, plenty of suburban districts managed to only go remote for a few weeks of the whole pandemic! And the same is true for charter and private schools within the city! This alone, to me, completely demolishes the position that schools are more-or-less all the same and that the important thing is the innate academic ability of the child. (I do find your position pretty persuasive for pre-COVID stuff, I have to say.)
Anyway - while it's all well and good to argue that, well, statistically speaking a smart kid will be fine whether they go to CPS or not, right now there are huge _qualitiative_ differences in how well different districts are doing. I can totally understand the frustration of parents who see themselves as effectively being forced to purchase an inferior product, even while they can clearly see a better one right next to them. That might not be how you prefer to look at the situation, but I don't have any trouble understanding that perspective at all.
(If it matters, I don't have kids yet but am getting married and expect to have some soon, so school districts have been weighing more heavily in my mind lately.)
We are a much more individualistic nation than we were 10, 20 or 50 years ago. We have much less of a "mainstream" culture than we did in the past. How could we possibly build a history curriculum that Trump and Biden voters agree on?
Schools are were kids are socialized. People want their kids to be socialized into their values, and those values have diverged wildly.
When many of the providers of education have abdicated their responsibility to provide the service they are responsible for, it's going to take more than, "that's not the way we do things around here" to convince me that parents should not have alternatives. (particularly coming from someone with fairly radical ideas on how society should be structured in other domains).
I see 2 key differences between education and and other public goods.
The first is that it makes much more sense for private entities to provide education than other public services like national defense, transportation infrastructure, policing, etc. Private schools and homeschooling exist, and, while I'm not a wonk with metrics, I think it's safe to say that the results don't present an open-and-shut case that such a thing inevitably leads to disaster such that attempts at private policing would. There is debate about whether it's better for the government to provide people services directly or just give them money (or cash-like equivalents) in domains like housing, medicine, the child tax credit, food stamps, etc. I don't see anything about education that means it must intrinsically be removed from such debates.
Second, the behavior of public education providers reveals that, at least at certain key points that exert considerable leverage, they don't consider themselves to be providing a fundamental service that is a vital part of the social contract. They have been fine with drastically reducing the level of service in the face of the pandemic, and continue to do so even as various developments have reduced the risk. The military did not go "fully remote" during the pandemic; public schools did. And then branded those who complained as domestic terrorists. I don't know exactly how responsibility for this should be divided between local government officials, school boards, school administrators, and teachers unions, but as a constituent, I don't particularly care. From my perspective, it's simply not serving us, and high-minded talk about the social contract rings hollow when the school district is closing its doors but lecturing me about what my family should be doing during its private time.
"Many studies that involve randomly assigning students to schools perceived to be of differing quality find no school effects, which is counterintuitive only if you assume every brain is the same. There are no magical institutions anywhere in the world where you can take a kid who is not naturally inclined to be a genius and turn them into a genius."
I don't have access to most of those studies, but I trust your characterization. I would be curious to know whether there's other research pointing in the other direction.
But the second sentence seems like a huge strawman. I don't think the argument is that a different school could turn all children into geniuses. I think the argument is that certain public schools are indeed full of children suffering from "complex and multivariate social problem[s]," which often means that a school is full of violence, disruption, chaos, a poor culture of learning, constant teacher distraction, etc. How is it possible that these conditions don't drag down the other kids in the same school who aren't personally suffering from the same complex and multivariate social problems, but who get the spillover effect?
(See, for example, this paper: https://www.nber.org/papers/w22042 -- "Results show that exposure to a disruptive peer in classes of 25 during elementary school reduces earnings at age 26 by 3 to 4 percent. We estimate that differential exposure to children linked to domestic violence [their proxy for "disruptive," for reasons they explain in the paper] explains 5 to 6 percent of the rich-poor earnings gap in our data, and that removing one disruptive peer from a classroom for one year would raise the present discounted value of classmates' future earnings by $100,000.")
If nothing else, in high school the condition of the student body often means those schools don't have advanced classes because there isn't sufficient demand for them. I would need very strong evidence to believe that a bright kid who goes to a dangerous high school where advanced calculus, physics, and chemistry are not offered will be on the exactly the same footing heading into college science and math as equivalently bright kids who went to quiet, well-behaved schools where such classes were offered.
And this is to say nothing of the psychological and social effects other than test scores -- why should well-behaved kids, with parents who have the hustle to try for something better, be forced to go to school with kids whose parents don't care, who don't want to be there, who disrupt the learning environment, and who are often actively dangerous? I feel for the latter group of kids, who are the way they are through no fault of their own. But they can be awful to be around -- especially now that many public schools feel hamstrung in applying discipline.
If it truly won't work -- i.e., if well-designed studies truly and consistently show that none of those factors matters, and the kids in terrible schools somehow are graduating at their full individual potential and without psychological scars... then fine. But it seems to me that's the question. Not whether children of middling or low potential will become geniuses in a different school.
And if the answer is that it's morally wrong to abandon the difficult kids, notwithstanding that they ruin learning for the people around them, that's fine, too. But then let's outlaw private education altogether. Rich liberal parents wax poetic about the glorious communal project of public education -- and then they put their kids in Harvard-Westlake and Sidwell Friends. We should also assign all children in a county randomly to schools, so that each school gets its fair share of difficult kids and there are no "good schools" anymore. And no enclaves within larger systems, like Beverly Hills. THEN I would believe people when they say they're committed to solidarity with those kids. Otherwise it often seems to mean that only poor families should stand in solidarity with them.
A final argument might be that it would be cheaper and more efficient to remove the difficult kids from the schools. I think that's politically unpalatable, though.