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.
Is it? I would assume that a focus on basic instruction and the three R's would just bypass moral instruction completely. Where does that fit into math class?
It's a large jump from "what math do people need" to "people have an obligation to help the less fortunate". The former is ostensibly within the purview of educators. The latter should probably be left up to individual households.
Think of all the different types of teachers in the USA. Imagine your child, or image you have one. If a teacher was very different from you ideologically and morally, what would you want that teacher to teach your child?
I think most commenters here are moderate or left, and are taking certain positions because they are disappointed in leftist values and institutions they used to rely on, that they feel have gotten off the rails.
You know what I like? Stoicism. I don't like unnecessary fear mongering. And I don't like the sharp increase in mental health issues among young people. I don't like moral arrogance or righteousness. And I think these things are related. Maybe I can't ask for stoicism, but I think I can ask questions about how certain dispositions and attitudes in how critical subjects are taught are freaking out students so badly that about 50% of them are depressed or anxious, despite the fact that most of them are more privileged than anyone has ever been in history.
I don't think its interesting or noble or challenging or valuable for my child to get a different perspective by getting conservative anti-sex sex education. I do think it could harm them. But, if I'm going to ask for something more neutral, I'm going have to concede that some of the things I want taught may be too liberal for other people, so there will have to be compromise all around.
So, we aren't going to agree on things.
I don't like a reactionary, emotionally-driven, alarmist, anxious, doomer, authoritarian, anti-humanitarian take on almost any subject - and they are certainly out there.
from another post I made in this thread:
Plus there is always the question - whose anti-racism are we teaching? What about someone like John McWhorter versus Ibram Kendi? Whose climate change are we teaching? One that pushes for collective action or for personal responsibility? A climate change that enforces ascetism or looks for tech solutions to climate? One that's pragmatic and based in solutions or one that runs around screaming the sky is falling? What sexism/feminism are we teaching? The one that says that war, corporate power, and imperialist science are men's games and that we should be honoring a natural female perspective and deconstructing inherently male ideas, or a feminism that says women should be CEOs and marines? Do teachers just get to decide what version of these things they will push? Who are they accountable too?
1. One of the most consistent findings in American public polling is that parents, of any demographic, think their child's school is good. They just think other people's kid's schools are bad.
2. The school choice crowd spoke almost exclusively about supposed quantitative learning gains, until the endurance came back. Then they changed their tune
"One of the most consistent findings in American public polling is that parents, of any demographic, think their child's school is good."
If that's true, then why is school choice a problem? Won't it collapse from lack of use, if most parents truly think their kid's school is good?
It seems possible that people are telling pollsters that they think their kid's school is good as a kind of defense mechanism -- either external (I can't let others know how bad things are here, because that might validate what they think of me and my kid) or internal (I can't admit to myself that I would like something better). If that's the case, choice would reveal their actual preferences. If that's NOT true, then it seems like school choice programs would naturally wither away from lack of use.
Our district offers a choice of several schools per zone and guarantees bus service within your zone. The logistics are a nightmare and we’re constantly understaffed with bus drivers, getting some kids home literal hours after school dismisses.
Even though most people may not choose a school that’s not residential, enough do that it throws a wrench in the whole system.
Sure, that's a fair consideration. There may well be some point on the demand curve below which the logistical hassle doesn't make sense. If two people want school choice, maybe it's not worth doing.
But it does seem that in some school districts significant numbers of parents are looking for change. If the demand is high enough, then even if it's a minority interest, we might swallow the logistical challenge as we do for other programs with relatively small target populations, like magnet schools or voluntary majority-minority transfers.
I was going to comment "that might be true on average, but not in places like Chicago." Then I looked it up and found out I was wrong. Even during the pandemic, 2 out of 3 CPS parents said they were satisfied with the quality of their children's education.
I was surprised because I never heard much about school choice until I moved there. My friends obsessed over which high school their kids would "get into" and several moved to the suburbs to avoid Chicago public schools. But I suppose there's a huge selection issue when surveying parents who stuck with CPS.
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.
First, let me admit: I'm relying on domain knowledge here, not a broad survey.
But: mostly compared to districts (within the US) or countries (outside the US) that manage to fit more into the plain high-school curriculum, rather than into a college-prep curriculum for the gifted. I would like to see many more people leave high school with basic knowledge of calculus, linear algebra, and/or statistics. There are countries where linear algebra and introductory calculus, at least, are high-school subjects, not first-year university subjects.
Similarly, I took Regents World History in upstate NY in the early 2000s. This was, somehow, much stronger than the Massachusetts world history curriculum, judging by how broad and deep my knowledge apparently is compared to my friends (and partner) from over the state line who aced their courses but got a much narrower, shallower curriculum. (And again, my take here is not that I'm a history expert -- I didn't major in history. It's that I got B's or so in the same high-school history class as everyone else in my year.)
And let's not even talk about how many schools offer shop class or other manual-skills courses anymore! It's too damn few.
I don't think there's a free lunch, but I think that if pedagogy and domain experts work together, we can make modest but significant improvements in a number of areas.
I’d love that too, but how are you gonna force neural pathways for calculus into the brain of a kid who isn’t interested, is hungry and tired, and just wants to get out of here and make enough to pay their cell phone bill? (This isn’t commentary on the value of that kid, either. Different life goals, is all.)
Also pretty much everyone kid in California takes 3+ years of Spanish, but none of us can speak it. I think Canadians take even more French with still no results. I don't think "put more X in schools" arguments work.
Ugh—the “not being able to teach or learn a second language” thing that is unique to Americans. Don’t get me started.
Oh but I didn’t know Canadians were that bad at French. In the “old days” I really thought they all knew it well enough to speak it, even if they were not perhaps smoothly bilingual. In the US, kids learn lists of colors, lists of numbers, lists of days of the week, a few formulaic sentences —and then they can place out of the required college classes with that “knowledge.” And they can’t speak or understand a thing.
I also took German classes in college in Germany. Still don't know more than a few words. I think the lesson is that it doesn't really do anything if you're not using it.
Well, I'm gonna start by making sure that kid has free, healthy meals available, but that's a separate issue.
There's no silver bullet "trick" for increasing rigor and standards in schools, but there are other countries where the average high-school graduate took some calculus. And while they don't remember every integral-calculation trick for the rest of their lives (lmfao I do STEM for a living and don't remember those), I do think they're more math literate and make more capable citizens of a scientifically-driven society with a sociotechnically mediated mode of production. They're better off.
We should learn from what they've accomplished and replicate it as best we can, bit by small bit.
I don't disagree. My kids go to Title 1 schools where everyone gets free breakfast and lunch, so that's covered. I'm all for rigor, but we have to accept as a society that more intellectual rigor will yield apparently worse overall results. My 8th grader is taking sophomore level math--so the instruction is there for the taking--but a huge proportion of the kids aren't capable or willing to take advantage of that.
"Willing" is probably even the more persuasive point. I wish more people (and consequently young people) were more interested in learning for learning's sake. But a lot aren't. And that's a valid choice.
Sure, not every kid wants to learn calculus. That's actually why my reply mentioned shop class. Some people just wanna get out of school and go to work, and the school system should facilitate that as rigorously as possible!
Yeah it seems like, well, you're wanting way too much out of secondary education. You can get it more rigorous, but you'd just get more people struggling, I think, and more failouts rather than actually improved results. It's probably better that someone come out with no knowledge of calculus than that they fail, since it will severely affect their job prospects.
In addition, I think a lot of the requests for job training in secondary ed is employers wanting to avoid the burdens of actually training people.
" would like to see many more people leave high school with basic knowledge of calculus, linear algebra, and/or statistics. "
Then you're not going to graduate many kids. And by the way, no citing Europe. They've tracked all the kids who can't do those subjects into vocational school. They aren't teaching the topics to all students.
I can’t speak for the commenter, but I wonder whether the comparison group is “us, in the past, at a time when finishing high school was something that privileged people did and you could get a good job after that.”
I remember my great-grandmother speaking in reverential tones about “finishing high school” as if it was a privilege and a great opportunity. She finished 8th grade which I think back then was pretty good, especially for a girl who was destined to be a worker bee.
Now we just warehouse everyone through high school, and when they’re done, we want everyone to “go to college” next, which for some people is a wonderful opportunity that expands their horizons, and for others is “more warehousing” until they get a paper with their degree on it, and hope all the loans are justified by a “good job” which increasingly is unavailable unless you have graduate degrees, which in turn are becoming easier to obtain, part-time at night, from expensive diploma mills. And so it goes.
I wonder too to what extent this prolonged “education” of our young correlates with our time’s / our culture’s long adolescence. My gg, after completing her 8th grade education, went to work and was just waiting to get married and start her family.
And, perhaps not unimportantly, with the jobs you could get with your 8th-grade education, you could live modestly but decently, have your own place to live etc.
We’ve drawn out childhood and adolescence such that now we commonly see the claim that “the brain” isn’t done developing until age 25 (which doesn’t really mean what anyone thinks it means). “Kids” are still living at home at 25, 30, not because humans are less capable of fending for themselves but because there are no good jobs for them, despite all the education.
Without the means to live an adult life, a lot of people seem to lack the desire to live an adult life. Maybe “desire” is the wrong word, because it implies a failing in them that I don’t want to attribute to them, like a lack of “gumption.” It might be more like learned helplessness, where after, say, a bachelor’s degree you can maybe get the sort of crappy low-paying job my gg got after 8th grade, enough to barely pay the bills. Except now you have debt.
If a decent job and their own place to live were dangling like a carrot in front of them, we might see young people becoming more “mature” sooner again.
I don’t know how much those trends have to do with education, or with how well or for how long we educate people. I do think a lot of education, post- readin’ writin’ and ‘rithmetic has become more of an effort to give kids “better lives” via more years in school, without necessarily delivering the goods of “additional education.”
The time spent in school becomes just a means to a desired higher-paying end, as evidenced, say, by the number of office workers in graduate programs who are paying a lot but learning nothing in particular. More and more, clerical workers have “master’s degrees” but can still barely format their own resumes free of typos. Forget writing a decent cover letter. Pretty sure my gg could have given these MBAs a run for their money in the resume and cover letter department, although she never had a job that was fancy enough to require either.
Somehow, year-for-year of education, the people in the old days seemed to know more.
Maybe in my gg’s day, the fancy high school kids read the Aeneid in Latin, but that’s hardly the case now.
Maybe your commenter meant none of this. Maybe all of this, including my gg’s view, is all just looking back on “the old days” in a completely deluded fashion, as if things were better then. She also thought women being able to vote was an amazing and daring innovation.
Lol! Sometimes I’m writing a long-winded comment (because do I write any other kind?) and I think “Hm could this just be my own post instead?” But then I’m like “nah I just want to reply to the convo!”
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.
Given that every kid in a "dollars follow the kids" model would have resources to spend, could you explain further how "dollars follow the kid" mentality" is uniquely selfish with regard to "your kid" vs. "their peers" in your comment?
People who pay more taxes are going to want more tax dollars given back for their kids. That’s going to further drive self segregation of the haves and have nots, instead of embracing the shared community we’re all part of.
I remember hearing this refrain 25 years ago, growing up in suburban NYC. The idea was that more money means rich kids will do better, except, I went to one of the most modest school systems in the county and we still had Advanced Placement courses. We may not have had AP German/Japanese, but we had the big 5 (Calc, Physics, History, English, Spanish) which was pretty solid.
It wasn't the money, it was the people. Unfortunately, most kids weren't motivated or pushed to do better cuz their parents were/are shmucks.
When I got to college, I tutored high schoolers from rich cities and boy were plenty of them dumb.
"Rich kids do better in school cuz they're rich" is a tired and misleading refrain, time for Liberals to change.
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 people start having a “public school” line item deduction on their paychecks, then I could see how the comparison with social security makes more sense.
I mean, you could take a pen and write in x% of the state and local withholding as for public education, and it would be about as informative as the Social Security line item. There is a relationship between what you pay in to SS and what you get out, but it's not close to 1-1, and SS is not funded solely from contributions.
Sure, but the way social security works is very much the way public finance works, and I don't think anyone argues otherwise. It doesn't really make sense to me to say that making public education look more like social security is "not how public expenditure works", and that argument seems key to what Freddie is saying. I see the post as:
1. Moving towards school choice is not how public expenditure works, to do it would blow up the notion of the social contract.
2. Given 1, the only way to justify moving towards school choice is if public schools are really bad and choice would make them way better.
3. But they aren't as bad as you think, and choice would not make them way better.
As someone who agrees that school choice wouldn't make things WAY better, but thinks they might make them a little better, point 1 seems really important to getting me onboard here.
I don't know how things work where you are, but "school taxes" are a line item on my property tax bill and a larger amount than everything else put together.
If I showed my kids our family budget, housing would be a line item. But I can't cut them a check for their bedroom's worth of mortgage. I can hand them a $10 bill from the allowance for chores line item.
This is a solid practical argument -- and one that could apply to schools, too. The practical argument as to your household budget is (I think) that transaction costs and inefficiencies prevent you from simply writing your child a check for their own housing. You can't easily sell your house and buy a smaller one, so now you're paying for a bedroom you're not using. And you and the child both benefit from the common spaces -- for example, a shared kitchen -- so that total costs would go up if you had to provide your child enough money to rent a separate one-bedroom with its own kitchen.
And the same thing is to some extent true of schools. There are certain shared overheads in a public school system, and for that reason it is arguably inefficient to have private schools in a place with a public school system, because you have to duplicate cafeterias, administration, and so on. In the case of private schools, however, we don't mind, as long as the parents of the private school students pay for the entire cost of the inefficiency. (Indeed, the private school families are now subsidizing the public school families; the more families who choose private school, yet still pay taxes, the greater the per-student budget of the public schools!)
Vouchers and school choice are a different story, because in that case the money leaves the local public school and goes elsewhere. That means the school now has less money, but still must maintain many of the same overheads. Like you as a homeowner, they can't easily scale facilities up and down proportional to the number of children.
But I don't think that argument is a moral one based on the social contract. It's just about efficiency -- and efficiency arguments don't always trump individual rights.
Suppose that there are two towns next door to each other. Town A and Town B have equally well-ranked schools. But a new factory has just moved to Town B, and so it has more jobs. In order to take advantage of these new jobs, some families move from Town A to Town B. They are taking their tax dollars with them, and the public school in Town A is left in a position similar to that of a school that has lost students to vouchers -- less money, fewer students, but they can't easily downscale infrastructure. So the school now has a higher per-student overhead.
That sucks for Town A, but I don't think we would say that the families moving to Town B are violating the social contract. Part of the social contract is a reservation of individual rights that trump the collective interest. One such right is the right to travel to try to improve your situation.
Yet once we admit that it's not really against our principles to allow people to withdraw money from one school and put it into another, for purely personal and selfish reasons (a better job, nicer views, whatever), is it really such a stretch to say that people should be able to withdraw their money from a local school, and apply it to a different school, because of the perceived quality of the schools themselves?
Maybe! Maybe that's a bridge too far. But it doesn't seem like an easy question to me. If Town B has "better schools" that Town A, should we prevent people from moving to Town B, on the basis that Town A will now have higher overheads per pupil? That would be a radical shift in American educational policy (and constitutional doctrine on the right to travel).
But now imagine that Town A and Town B share a single school district but maintain different schools. They collectively create a school choice program, where the child's funding travels with him or her. Suppose we see the same drain from Town A to Town B. What is the practical or moral difference between families abandoning Town A's public school for Town B's public school by moving (as in the previous example), versus abandoning Town A by using the school choice program? Doesn't Town A lose funding either way?
That’s why I’m not a huge fan of school choice to be honest. We agonized for a long time about the ethics of it with our kids and ultimately decided, what the hell are we doing here? They’ll go to their residential school because that’s our community school. And that means our kids go to Title 1 schools. This is not a problem. The school is 15 years old, so the facilities are great. High percentage of minority high percentage of poor kids. And we’ve never had a teacher we didn’t like, who didn’t serve as a really good teacher. (At the elementary level all have been women, but my kids have had black and white teachers. My middle schooler also has male teachers, of a range of “races.”)
I realized that, for us in our circumstances, our kids would do well wherever they were because they have us as a support system. Choosing the wealthier whiter school that was available to us felt gross, because that’s not the community we live in. My kids get to play with their school friends out in the neighborhood, no play dates or driving required. They have academically and intellectually gifted programs available (so far one of our kids has qualified).
I guess I’d feel different if my white male kids were being openly discriminated against, but so far they’re not. (We’re in a purple region of a red state.)
Amen. Twenty per cent of my property tax bill goes to road maintenance, plowing, town administration, etc. Eighty per cent goes specifically to public education. The total of the education component of my property tax is *significantly* more than I pay the IRS each year. I would consider my federal taxes as part of the social contract. But when I see that a specific and astronomical dollar amount is going to "public education," and I disagree with the sudden turn toward CRT and gender indoctrination, I get a bit steamed.
I don't agree with CRT and gender criticism either. That's what elected school boards are meant to manage. By viewing social services as an opt-in opt-out endeavor, there is no social contract. I don't want my community run exclusively like a free market.
I definitely agree with this (and my kids go to Catholic school). I am fine not having a school choice option and paying for private school fully out of pocket.
However, if this is important to you (and to Freddie, and to me), we need to start addressing the concerns that are being expressed here, over and over, by parents who are extremely dissatisfied with social justice indoctrination, with the school closures, with the refusal by some school boards to even permit their input, and with school unions that have seemingly become hostile to the communities they work with and for.
That last one kills me the most. I come from a long line of union workers, including schoolteachers, and I (and my parents) would have grown up so, so, so poor if it weren't for those unions. Watching giant teachers unions making insane school closure demands and, in California, insisting that the students don't need in-person schooling because they remotely taught them what "insurrection" means makes me want to cry. THEY ARE GOING TO LOSE IF THIS KEEPS UP, AND I DON'T WANT THEM TO LOSE. Not least because my wife is a union schoolteacher.
Sorry, this is definitely not directed at you, since I bet we agree on everything that's important and have had great conversations here before. Just venting.
Vent away! I don’t disagree that all the concerns you’ve raised are totally valid. I’m just not ready to give up on schools as a primary footer in our modern social contract.
The amount of anger at public schools on this thread has been eye-opening, especially because this isn’t a Republican blog. It’s clear that parents have had it with all of the things you mentioned. Glenn Youngkin won’t be the last Republican to exploit these sentiments.
I disagree with a couple of premises here, but I’ll stick with the most education-centric:
Whatever amount of per-pupil money a school receives that would follow the student to other schools is only loosely related to the cost that student imposes on the school. At scale, assuming a mostly random distribution of students, it works out very roughly OK. Shifting to an all-choice model at the school level messes with that significantly.
Of the many ways in which this applies, let’s use special education as a particularly clear example.
Federal funds for special education are nowhere near enough to meet the federal requirements for all students entitled to it. The disparity has been growing over time, and it’s one of the big drivers of the growth in non-federal education spending.
What’s driving this increase? Some people will jump to assumptions that we’re seeing big increases in the number of students in special education tied to various perverse incentives around trying to get more special education funds. However, there’s little evidence of significant shifts in special education identification, and certainly not at the scale that would match the increase in funds spent on it.
Two major factors leading to this increase are from domains outside of education: improvements in health care for children with intense needs and deinstitutionalization.
With respect to the first case, better health care means children who would have died of intense genetic or otherwise innate conditions before reaching school age in earlier years now make it to school, where they’re rightly entitled to a free and appropriate education in their least restrictive environment, which can involve significant labor and other costs for schools. Put bluntly, these are a small number of students who are very expensive in fiscal terms. The higher costs of serving these students, again, are not fully covered by federal special education funds. The difference has to come from somewhere, with general state funds and local levy funds picking up much of it. Whatever your state’s per pupil general allocation to schools is, some amount of each pupil’s “personal” allocation is actually going to subsidize these costs. What’s more, the spectrum of actual per-pupil costs in the whole of special education—not just the numerically-small-but-expense-high group I’ve described—is so varied that simply adding an additional per-special-education-pupil allocation wouldn’t cover it.
Deinstitutionalization covers students who, in years past, would have been in various, well, institutions (think asylum style). Those students are now in the school system, shifting the expenditure from human service funding to education funding. Many are in special education. Again, the real per pupil cost of educating many such students exceeds the actual funds schools receive to do the job, so much of the rest comes from other students’ allocations.
With an at-scale “backpack” model, some students become super attractive to schools—you can stick them in a library with a high-speed Internet connection and they’ll walk out years later knowing more than you’d have paid someone to “teach” them. Other students are completely not sustainable for anyone to take on, even if you’re running a specialized program, because there just aren’t enough resources coming with them to provide what they need (and that you’d be legally required to offer in the extreme special education cases).
Trying to come up with a morally acceptable “funding backpack” that can cover all of these situations would result in education funding systems even more byzantine than the ones we’ve got.
I know how glib this sounds, but it's not immediately obvious to me why "send larger checks to special needs kids" wouldn't solve this issue.
I don't want it to sound like I have all the answers here, because I definitely don't, and I fully acknowledge that moving to an all choice world may be vastly worse. But I can imagine ways in which it would be better, and I feel like a lot of objections raised are missing the forest for the trees. Yes, a voucher model where every student got exactly the money they're currently technically earmarked for in the current system would work badly for the reasons you point out...but we wouldn't have to do it that way.
1) The category “special education” covers a huge range of conditions which vary significantly in their cost to schools. The low-number/high-cost conditions I initially discussed are one end of the spectrum. There are also far less costly conditions, such as some speech-related disabilities which require comparatively cheaper interventions and, when addressed effectively, often involve the student exiting special education. You could in theory try to come up with a tiered special education voucher with some large range of differentiated levels. This would necessarily reduce the amount of funds available for general vouchers, unless you’re prepared to significantly increase government spending on schools (and good luck with that, politically).
2) Special education is just one of many areas where general funds get spread away from some of the low-cost students who generated them. Students not yet fluent in English, homeless students, and neglected/delinquent students are all examples of cases where we currently have some dedicated funding streams that are insufficient to cover the actual per-pupil cost.
3) To pick a less identity-connected example, consider transportation costs. A student in walking distance costs much less than a student who lives a long bus ride from school. Will a student also get an add-on voucher based on how far they live from school?
4) How quickly will families be able to adjust their vouchers when their conditions change? A parent loses a job, the family moves, the student gets diagnosed with a condition (or develops an extreme one suddenly, as with traumatic brain injury)? Etc.
We’re now talking about constant political fighting about add-on vouchers, some amount of new bureaucratic/administrative structure to minimize deceit/graft, and you now have even stronger incentives for schools to do everything they can to attract “profitable” students who cost less to educate than they bring in via voucher while steering away students who may well cost significantly more than they generate in revenue.
There’s a reason places like Milwaukee, with a long-standing voucher system, charter schools, and open enrollment within the district school system don’t see dramatic changes in the quality of experience available to most students (while those with the most motivated, savvy, stable, and adequately resourced families can find their way to a small number of “better” schools). Markets don’t work the same way when absolutely everyone in a given age range is supposed to have access to an at least partially-customized service at low-to-no cost to the consumer.
Why don't we give everybody a check for their share of Medicare, and if you get cancer you can just go build yourself an oncology ward? There are some things we have to do together in order to do them at all.
I mean, if you're on Medicare, you can choose what hospital you want to go to and what doctor you want to see, and they're frequently privately run hospitals and doctors, and Medicare will pay for it. If the way public education worked was you can choose from a variety of schools, some of which are privately run, and pick the one you like best and the government will pay for it, I agree that vouchers would be less likely to be beneficial.
Notice that for Medicare or Medicaid, the government doesn't require everyone to report to a government-run hospital where there are government-paid employees using government-produced equipment.
You go to a doctor, and that doctor gets reimbursement from the government at a certain schedule.
And the government *does* operate under that model for the VA!
Given the task "the government will provide for your health care," there are a bunch of ways to get there:
1. You go to a government-run facility
2. You go to a doctor of your choice who submits reimbursement from the government
3. You get a check to buy insurance on a regulated free-market
(There are even more, I'm keeping this simple.)
All of those accomplish the government tasks of "give you health care." None of them should necessarily be off the table because they are violating some norm.
If the government needs pens, it doesn't have to build its own pen factory. If the government needs to give people food, it doesn't run its own farms. "Just buy the thing" is always an option.
So we have similar options for education:
1. You go to a government-run facility
2. You go to a teacher/tutor of your choice who submits reimbursement from the government
3. You get a check to buy education on a regulated free-market
I'm willing to debate the trade-offs of those different options, but none of them should be banned.
The point is to educate the children. I'm not arguing here that #3 is the best option. But it absolutely should be an option that is discussed and considered to be as reasonable as the other options.
(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.
Your concerns are legit but,”no benefit”? Be advised that you will, at some point, have to teach them a few things you may lack any real knowledge of, while students at even a modestly decent public high school will have access to teachers with at least undergrad degrees in the entire range of subjects required for a HS diploma. Will you be compensating for that with videos and online instruction? A demanding reading schedule? Authoritative dinner guests? Field trips to local museums?
As a HS teacher - a lifer in that - I find it depressing that homeschooling seems an attractive option, but can't dispute anyone's reasons simply on the basis of content availability, which, in these times, is truly one of the actual benefits of mod tech. In fact, I've always supported independent reading programs and they've fallen out of favor in schools since the advent of the testing era that came with NCLB lo those many years ago. So, yes, if you have a good family reading culture, your kid will probably be fine.
But there are good things still to be had from the people who work in schools. Tales of lame teachers and clueless, bureaucratic admins are easy to come by. Obviously bad actors exist in schools. So do people who take their work seriously and approach it with energy and enthusiasm. What is lost or gained by lack of exposure to them is an unanswerable question. If your kid is a good musician or athlete, though, I think you'll have difficulty finding better alternatives. In my case, FWIW, home sucked, so I spent a lot of time at school and that's probably a big factor in how I ended up in teaching. My art teacher was a big difference-maker for me. I will always be grateful I crossed paths with her when I did.
A large portion of the homeschooling is COVID-related, I think. Or at least I know multiple couples where one parent has quit their job to homeschool rather than try to navigate the COVID school closures.
That said, people are getting feisty about various educational trends, and it'll only get worse if it continues (especially when the other shoe drops and ROGD is acknowledged for the medical scandal it is--schools going behind parents' backs to "affirm" gender identities is a powder keg)
These are children who've withdrawn from public schooling altogether i.e. not just schooling from home, they no longer attend any public school, in person or virtual. I've heard COVID was part of it as parents objected when they saw what their kids were being taught as they learned from home.
And I agree, the trans push is alienating many parents.
That's what I mean--they've completely withdrawn their kids from public school, downloaded a curriculum from some homeschooling website, and just started teaching themselves rather than deal with public schools and all the closures. Unless I'm misunderstanding what you're getting at?
I'm here in Evanston, Illinois where everyone is drunk on the equity movement. The district allocates more than 2% of our annual budget solely to paying equity consultants and equity training and just laid off a bunch of reading support staff to fund the equity content. Last year during remote schooling, I sat there watching the teachers do it and .. so cringe. It was particularly weird watching a kindergarten teacher try to teach the kids about "restorative justice" - a concept I'm not sure my Northwestern students would even understand...
We're searching for private schools but it's either the Catholics @ $8k a year or elite private schools at $40k. Nothing in between. It sucks.
Do you find that the parents are strongly in support of it, or is it entirely the administration? That would be a good guide to figuring out how it'll shake out.
We have our kids in the Catholic schools for $8K a year. It's entirely wonderful, a great and active community that we interact with constantly. I really recommend it.
Just to be clear, I'm not against teaching equity or being anti-racist or whatever. But at this point in time, during budget crisis', attacks from the right to defund everything, and COVID - let's just focus on keeping the schools open, safe, and operating. This "racism is the real pandemic" language that gets thrown around makes me insane. Let's solve one thing at a time..
Having seen it during remote schooling, the equity curriculum for K-8 is basically corporate diversity training with some crappy kids books thrown in. It's a grift and the only winners are the diversity consultants and booksellers that fill the administration building now.
>The district allocates more than 2% of our annual budget solely to paying equity consultants and equity training and just laid off a bunch of reading support staff to fund the equity content.
You sure this isn't just a backdoor effort to break the teacher's unions and deskill their job?
Turn a skilled job into one or more unskilled jobs, for which labor competition can be increased and wages decreased -- despite the resulting work being of lower quality. It's class war from the boss class.
If "equity" becomes an excuse to get rid of experienced teachers and quality teaching, and replace it will bullshit, then the district can replace scarce, experienced, high-wage workers with abundant, inexperienced, low-wage workers.
That is far too strategic for the current school board leadership and superintendent. Hanlon's Razor is at play here; we're not dealing with galaxy brains.
Evanston might be the wokest place on earth. Were you there when the superintendent said “Black, Brown, and LGBTQ” students would be prioritized for in person learning?
I was and there were a few schools in the district where the principals had to inform white parents that their kids probably wouldn't be coming back in-person in 2020 but the black, brown and LGBTQ kids would. Ultimately, that effort failed and nobody went back!
Serious question that might sound like a joke but it's not: what prevents a parent from just asserting that their kids are now black, brown, or LGBTQ just to get them back to in-person?
Also with stuff like this; the superintendent didn't actually have the power to make this call which is why it died. Saying you're going to do something controversial that you don't actually have the power to do, in order to get attention and news coverage is a very Trump-era thing
The kids there are made to take a DNA test and wear the results in a microchip embedded in the nape of their necks. Teachers and school security guards walk around with little scanners like the ones veterinarians and animal shelters use on dogs.
I went to a Jesuit high school......one of the 2 or 3 best ever to happen to me. If you can get into a Catholic school, you should try it....but make sure the curriculum is truly different from public ones.
Yep. Our kids are in Catholic school. It isn't because we found our public schools alienating - our oldest did kindergarten in the public school, and it was fantastic - but the race-obsessed, "parents should have no say in education" rhetoric elsewhere isn't helping. Whatever reluctance we felt about the tuition is gone.
I get the appeal and in fact I find parochial schools charming (really, I’m not being sarcastic). But for a lot of us—most of us? Americans, generally— it isn’t an option financially.
"Teachers are openly displaying communist or antifa symbols."
This is a ridiculous comment. Bill O'Reilly-level stupid. Were you also worried that Democrats planned to build projects in the middle of upperclass neighborhoods in 2020? That we were inching ever closer to Sharia law in 2012?
"There's no longer an emphasis on STEM education, anti-racism curriculum is king and cancel-culture reigns."
I've found that teachers are politically pretty much on the same page as parents, especially given that most of them are also district parents. If anything, they're more conservative than the parents.
Same. Wife works for an educational services company that happens to cater to a very wealthy, right-leaning district in Austin, TX. Teachers are almost all either conservative or centrist social liberals. They also service Title I schools, several if not most (I think) are Catholic? Needless to say the Catholic schools are even more conservative.
How about if you don't label people. People are not necessarily consistent. Maybe on another topic they may make an interesting point. (I'm going to start charging FdB for moderating these comments?) [joke]
There are a lot of reasonable ways to express concerns about what's happening in schools, but becoming a pawn for right wing culture wars surely can't be one of them.
How about if we don't impugn people's motives or label them, and look instead at their feelings and logic? The comments here are trending to Reddit snark and sarcasm - just the thing FdB is trying to avoid. Hint: leave out the word 'pawn'.
No doubt that's a good instinct in general, though snark and sarcasm deserve their place, too, right? The feelings and logic of the post my comment references betrays hysteria. As for my use of pawn, I don't think Elon signed up for that role, but I can't skirt around my belief that they are playing it. For what it's worth, my own comment here made me think about the political battles where I've been co-opted into playing the pawn.
Yeah. I thought homeschooling was a fringe terrible idea and now I'm slightly sympathetic to it.
We spend a lot of time discussing the origins of wokism. And I think one area we haven't adequately addressed is that there are any number of teachers that have quite a bit of contempt for individuals/parents that they don't politically or morally agree with, and feel at liberty to "educate" your children in their own morals and politics. The few teachers I know talk this way; its very disrespectful towards parents. They take a certain pride in identifying as rebels or subversive, and express that in their teaching. I know many more public administrators, and I literally hear things like "you got to get em when they are young," implying that adults are too corrupt to even be worth talking to. It really gets me, because this is how Christians think: its best to win converts as children, vulnerable and easily manipulated. It's gross.
I think an entirely overlooked aspect of the home schooling debate is that a huge part of "education", in my opinion, is about interacting with other people your age.
I interacted with loads of people my own age while I was homeschooling. More than I wanted to, in fact, being an introvert.
And I also interacted with people who weren't my own age -- probably a lot more of them than I would have if I'd been in public school. One thing that I've commonly experienced, both when I was a homeschooled kid and now that I'm an adult, is that homeschoolers tend to be much more confident and competent at talking to adults than public schooled kids.
It seems as though public school kids mostly only encounter adults as authority figures, not as friends or colleagues or in general social situations. So they tend to only learn how to relate to them in terms of power relationships, either appealing to them for help or else clamming up to avoid the risk of punishment. Rather Foucauldian!
I'm not particularly pro homeschooling, I just understand why some people are choosing it.
The decision is a series of plus and minuses, different for every family, and everyone's doing their best to get their best out of non-perfect options.
Same, it's certainly not for everyone. And there are certainly parents who use "homeschooling" as an excuse to keep their kids on the family compound where they can abuse them away from the state's scrutiny. Every option has drawbacks. But homeschooling (up though 7th grade) was great for me.
The internet seems unsure whether "Give me the child until seven years, and I will show you the man" is attributable to Aristotle or the founder of the Jesuits, but the basic point is clear: humans absorb a tremendous amount of the values and beliefs they will carry with them for the rest of their lives in childhood. Values and beliefs inform behavior, and if you're concerned at all with how other humans behave (or will behave in the future), you have to be concerned with what children are being taught by their parents and by their teachers.
I'll give a simple and perhaps trivial example: I really hate litter. (Living for a couple decades in a city that would regularly flood, and always being able to tell where the high water line was in the drainage canals by seeing the line of styrofoam cups and other trash that got washed into the storm sewers, will do that to you.) How, then, to stop people from littering? It's already illegal, and that apparently doesn't stop anybody who wants to do it from doing it, I assume because they know they won't get caught. It seems unlikely in the current (USA) political environment that a strong push to hire enough police to go around throwing people in jail for littering is likely to gain traction. The pandemic has taught us that a concerted public messaging effort encouraging pro-social behaviors like masks and vaccines will be met with "fuck you, I don't have to do what you tell me" from a significant chunk of society.
It seems to me to be more or less true that people are either litterers or they aren't, and if they're not it's because somebody taught them when they were young that it's wrong to do, and if they are, it's because somebody taught them when they were young (whether explicitly or accidentally by example) that it's perfectly fine. And so, if we really want to create a litter-free world, the only practical solution is to educate (brainwash? indoctrinate?) every child that it's super wrong to throw your trash away on the ground. If I was a public school teacher, I'd do everything I could within the rules to shame and/or punish any student I caught doing it, because my values tell me it's right to do so. If that child's parents have different values, am I being disrespectful to them for telling their kid they have to pick up their Capri Sun pouch and put it in the trash?
Now instead of litter, make it about racism, or sexism, or climate change, or creationism/evolution, or some more controversial topic. Is a passionate environmentalist teaching earth science supposed to tell a student who says their daddy says climate change is all a liberal hoax "well, I guess your father is entitled to their beliefs" and leave it at that? If they merely point to stacks of scientific papers proving the greenhouse effect and showing correlations between global average temperature and average atmospheric CO2, are they being disrespectful to those parents?
Are you then okay with a teacher who believes that evolution is a hoax concocted by Satan to test humanity teaching those values to children? What about a "race realist", who can find all sorts of science to back up the claim that African-descended people are less intelligent than European- or Asian-descended people? How about a sex ed teacher who thinks that women can't get pregnant from rape? These are all beliefs that people earnestly hold.
If the criteria is "teachers can teach whatever nonsense suits their fancy", I think _everyone_ is gonna have a problem with it. What we teach children in school is decided democratically, which is exactly what's happening with the pushback: parents are saying that no, they don't consent to their children being taught these things.
No, I would not be okay with those things. My argument was not "teachers should be free to indoctrinate their students with whatever they want to", my point was that no matter how much we might want teachers to stick to teaching "just the facts" in school, they're going to end up teaching their values to students one way or another (either explicitly, or just by selective enforcement of various school rules), and that it's probably impossible to expect people who seriously care about social issues to agree not to use the very powerful tool of early childhood education to change people's future behavior as citizens.
Personally, I hope that the liberal ideal of a pluralistic society - more "hey, that just like, your opinion, man" and less "somebody is WRONG on the INTERNET and I need to stop them!" - will eventually become fashionable again. And I do personally think teachers should be smart enough to know what issues are sensitive and avoid speaking their minds about them. Some of my strongest memories of elementary and junior high school are about teachers who did things like casually dropping God into their teachings, or openly saying what they thought about abortion, and already at that age thinking they wrong for talking about that stuff since it shouldn't be the government's job to tell kids what to think about those things.
The two options seem to be either Freddie's "just do democracy better", i.e. conflict theory, "we're just always going to be fighting about these things so let's figure out how to fight better for what we want", or the more libertarian school choice path that lets parents shop around for schools that teach what they want their kids taught.
I actually don't agree with the statement that you should use every conceivable way to shame or punish children for a behavior. I would instead ask you to ask children to think about it and feel it out - that's a lot different than pointing to a stack of reference books. You know, teaching. You have a false dichotomy of choices.
Plus there is always the question - whose anti-racism are we teaching? What about someone like John McWhorter versus Ibram Kendi? Whose climate change are we teaching? One that pushes for collective action or for personal responsibility? A climate change that enforces ascetism or looks for tech solutions to climate? One that's pragmatic and based in solutions or one that runs around screaming the sky is falling? What sexism/feminism are we teaching? The one that says that war, corporate power, and imperialist science are men's games and that we should be honoring a natural female perspective and deconstructing inherently male ideas, or a feminism that says women should be CEOs and marines?
Do teachers just get to decide what version of these things they will push? Who are they accountable too?
Its not good to be in charge of 25 little kids, personally decide that litter is the most important problem, and then privilege that idea over every other idea in your class room and go nuts enforcing it. I can't image ever thinking I am entitled to do that.
There are educators who believe they are indeed entitled to do that. They also think that they are being fair and neutral because they do not explicitly tell the students "what to think," they merely order students who disagree with them to apologize and/or leave the classroom. They also take pride in that they don't try to argue with students, they just "provide additional facts" and refuse to take questions lest they [the educator] get "traumatized" by someone's opposition.
Great points throughout too though, especially about clarifying what exact aspect of a concept gets taught.
You're going to have to provide evidence that "teachers" (used in the general, far-reaching sense) are displaying "antifa" logos and communist symbols if you want me to take your future comments seriously. That's patently ridiculous for more than one reason.
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.
Absenteeism and parent satisfaction should immediately make your ears go up for selection effects. And again: SCHOOL CHOICE ADVOCATES INSISTED THEY WOULD RAISE YEAR SCORES FOR AT LEAST TWENTY YEARS AND THEY FAILED. And now you're just calling backsies and saying oh no, that doesn't matter? When exactly does the school "reform" postmortem happen where you acknowledge that you loudly called for the firing of hundreds of thousands of teachers on an entirely unjustifiable basis?
Inner city parents partnering with conservative reformers for school choice have been strange bedfellows for decades--"Waiting for Superman", the Obama administration's push for school reform, etc. And if the comparison is between suburban schools that may or may not be academically mediocre compared to the rest of the world versus schools in the inner city that may be literally crumbling then I will always prioritize the latter in terms of what society should be paying attention to.
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.
We probably couldn't disagree more politically, but I wholeheartedly agree with your statement, for what it's worth :) I think people should be able to direct their money, it'd be nice to take that power back from the worthless scumbag politicians who give it to their friends. I think people should be able to direct their money to where it benefits them most, and why not? Why should we have to fund institutions we think are failing us?? Because Freddie said so? :-P
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.
How many people are really saying "I should get back the specific dollars I put into the system"?
It feels like a weakman (not a strawman, because I bet there really are some stupid people out there saying it).
But people do seem to be saying "as someone who pays in, I have a say in how the money is spent, and I am advocating that we spend the money earmarked for education in this (what I see as) better way."
So when Freddie says "Get better at politics. Campaign harder," that is exactly what they are doing.
Plenty of parents who pay to give their children something other than public schooling complain about "paying twice"" for school and feel they should be able to claw back some, if not all, of the money they pay in school taxes.
Next time one of them says that, ask them to clarify.
"Did you mean you should get all your tax dollars back, or that the district's spending should be available to educate your child?"
If my tax dollars paid for trash collection, and the trash collection sucked so bad (in my esimation) that I had to privately pay, out-of-pocket, for it to happen, "paying twice" is a perfectly understandable complaint to make about my situation.
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.)
I'm in Evanston and it was maddening to be remote schooling my son for most of 2020 while districts in Wilmette or Deerfield were open. CPS is fine and probably even really good if you have a genius kid that can get into the magnet schools. It'll be interesting to see what changes now that the CPS board is going to be elected instead of appointed - I expect probably a hard turn to the left and equity.
Yep I have a friend in Wilmette who has 2 school-aged kids and he says it's like living in a different country. There are such huge differences in how well these districts have handled this thing.
I used to live in Evanston when it was content to be a nice place to raise your kids and be close to the lake. From the sound of it, going full woke has, as in every other place that tried it, turned Evanston into shit.
Evanston schools are 50% nonwhite. Deerfield and Wilmette districts are 80% or more white. That's why your schools weren't open. Nonwhite parents preferred remote learning.
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.
There is no reliable evidence that the alternatives work! These comments are blowing my mind. Why should I believe in the need to socially fund alternatives when the evidence that they provide better teaching is functionally non-existent?
people are staring to push back, though! From the Washington Post:
"More than ever, educators in the nation's public schools are addressing gender identity in some classes and trying to help trans teenagers who are struggling to come to terms with their identities. But nationwide, those steps are meeting growing resistance from school boards and state lawmakers who are insisting that the topic has no place in public schools -- and enacting policies to ban any hint of it.
"This is not about bigotry," said Chris Ager, Merrimack's school board chairman, who has led the campaign for that town's new policy. "This is about whose job this should be to bring up these issues. We shouldn't be indoctrinating students about anything, and in many schools, you're starting to see that with transgenderism."
...
"Another closely watched debate about transgender issues in schools is unfolding in New Hampshire. Last summer, the school board in Merrimack approved a policy -- the "Prohibition of Alternative Lifestyle Instruction" -- that prohibits faculty from mentioning virtually any aspect of transgender identities and threatens disciplinary action against those who do.
Ager, the school board chairman, said the policy followed complaints from parents that schools were promoting a "trans lifestyle." He said he proposed the ban after seeing school health courses that mentioned alternative pronouns, high school papers noting trans dances and support hot lines, and discovering that a drag queen made an appearance at an elementary school in the region.
"I realized we had begun to socially indoctrinate students on this issue." Ager said, "This isn't our role. It should only be the role of parents."
Do you agree with gender identity teachings' stance that homosexuality is a bigoted and exclusionary fetish? Do you think schools are right to impart that message to students?
People like you who haven't done the reading and assume transgender is just, like, super-gay, are whistling past the graveyard and you don't even know it.
are you folks *all* delusional? Private schools are far more likely to impose progressive dogma on their kids than publics are. Charters are, too. Jesus, learn something.
What's the goal? Aside from academic performance I can think of at least a couple of issues that school choice may address.
1. Cost to benefit ratio. The amount of money spent on education is huge compared to other countries and it's largely because of a bloated administrative class. Private schools typically have a better teacher to manager/administrator ratio.
2. Literal rats in the walls in some underserved districts. Regardless of whether or not academic performance improves sending students to schools that are clean and safe is still an improvement in my book.
You're looking at a different endpoint than the commenters.
You're looking at educational efficacy: how do public schools square up against private schools when it comes to test scores, student preparedness, etc.
They're looking at other factors: does public school teach values I endorse, are public schools even open or is it still distance-learning, etc
Yes, if there wasn't a difference between public and private schools before, there is now. My friend sent her daughter to the local Christian school, and they set up a remote option but remained open for the past 2 years. They had the $$ resources to maximize safety and retain staff.
I don't believe in "school choice" (public funding for private school) on principle, but I can't deny that for the past two years there has been a huge difference in the private vs. public experience.
Yeah, thank you for saying this. Freddie really seems to be arguing against some 3rd party who isn't in the room. It's not education policy wonks saying "charter schools fix test scores" but normal people saying "those private schools sure do seem open".
Private schools were more likely to be open, but not everywhere. Where private schools had a majority white population, they were open. But there are areas where private schools are majority Asian, and they didn't open.
Charters were more likely to be closed than publics.
Single biggest factor in school closure was parental preference, and race was the major factor in parental preference.
You're absolutely wrong. *Your* preferences might not have mattered. What you seem unaware of is that your preferences may not have been the majority view in your district.
“Does my child come home crying every day” was the most important endpoint for my parents when they pulled me from public school back in the 90s, and also for me when I briefly considered pulling my child more recently.
I'm sure Flint parents are relieved that they don't have the option to send their kids to schools that have not been proven to drive higher test scores!
Private schools, like publics, were based on the will of parents. The single biggest factor in a school opening or not, whether public or private, was the parental race, because there's a clear pattern in racial preferences for remote or inperson education during the pandemic.
For arguments sake, let's put the show on the other foot.
What if charter schools or some other alternative improved every educational metric across the board? Charter school students won every spelling bee, math olympics, etc. Ivy League schools had to rig their admissions criteria so they wouldn't be dominated by students from these alternatives. And so on.
But the students produced were a cross between Alex P. Keaton and MAGA. They emerged convinced that homosexuals (including, in some cases, their parents), were degenerates. They distrusted minorities, opposed immigration, and were in general antisocial.
Would you concede the win in this case? Would you say that while you find some of the methods abhorrent, you can't argue with the results, and thus these schools need to be supported?
Or are there other factors in play?
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One of my goals as a parent is to surround my kids with adults who care about them. Many of their public school teachers have demonstrated that to them. But to many, the institution seems to be saying, "we don't give a shit about you." That matters, even if the needle on test scores doesn't move that much.
I would say this hypothetical maps to the experience of public school parents frustrated with public schools.
They are expressing frustration with the level of service and the values promoted in schools, and being told there can't be an alternative because there'e no proof they increase test scores.
The burden of proof is on the public school system! If public schools aren't demonstrably better (not merely equivalent to) charter schools and private schools, then there's no good reason to deny educational freedom. (And yes, the rich will always have educational freedom, but poor parents need freedom of choice as well).
Well, I think that's the fundamental disagreement, and the point of this essay.
de Boer is a Marxist and a communist, and to him, (and I am likely summarizing this poorly), the default should be that the state should provide any given service absent overwhelming proof that an alternative is superior.
For most of the rest of us, the default is that competition is, in general, good, and that choice, in general, is good, and that providers should be able to compete on a somewhat level playing field, and consumers should have a choice, again, absent overwhelming proof that the government would deliver superior results.
de Boer is correct, that, historically, education has landed in the box with other things the government provides like national defense, transportation infrastructure, licensing, etc. (though I would say not quite as neatly given the existence of private schools and homeschooling). Where I think the essay fails is in arguing that the performance of schools during the pandemic offers a compelling reason to reconsider this.
"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.
Good comment. The core point is: the purpose of school choice/voucher programs is not and has never been to help the worst-off students, and certainly not to help the worst-off schools. Its purpose has always* been specifically to allow the marginal student -- the student who *could* do really well in the right school environment, and is *only* doing worse because of their school environment -- escape from a bad school that's dragging them down.
That makes it very much a bourgeois program: it all about helping out the children of pretty well-functioning families who aspire to improve their socio-economic position. It's not about those stuck in real cultural/structural poverty cycles.
It's not for the rich, who don't need it, and it's not for the poor who won't use it. It's for folks on the bubble between blue-collar grinding and white-collar earning.
*Well, "always" except for when it's not been about mainstream "academic success" at all, but is instead explicitly about fostering ideological separation of students from dominant cultural values, which is the case both for conservative Christians now and for Black nationalists during the 1970s.
This is also, I think, where Freddie's points are always going to fall on deaf ears.
Schooling, based on the data, seems to mostly work on a societal level. That is not the level that people, especially parents, are engaged in. For better or worse, parents want the best for their child specifically, and saying "your kid might do worse than they could have done in a better school, but at the end of the day a few kids over there do better and it all comes out in the wash, statistically speaking" is not a compelling argument to them.
Read the accounts of charter school activists: almost universally, they had an unusually bright and somewhat sensitive child who wilted in whatever district they were placed in and thrived once they were moved somewhere else. I believe Freddie that, statistically, this is a small population that doesn't move the needle on a societal level. But good luck convincing individual parents that they ought not care where their kid goes to school because of this.
I actually think forcing parents of a "bright and somewhat sensitive child" to sacrifice that child's future on the altar of The Public Good is an evil an inhuman worldview.
Our school district is broken up into zones, where you can choose any of the schools within the zone and still receive bus access (which by the way is a logistical nightmare). Our zone contains one of the poorest, highest minority elementary schools AND one of the whitest, most successful elementary schools.
What you describe is already happening, and vouchers aren't part of it. To me, vouchers allow parents to make more obvious ideological and self segregating choices more than educational ones.
The disruptive kids point is a tough one to grapple with. My wife estimates about half her time and effort are taken up by one or two kids in each class. I'll ask her about her day and she'll respond with "Jason was away!", and that's enough to know that it was a fantastic day for everyone. When a teacher talks about a great class, they don't mean that all the students are good, just that there are no difficult ones. During the last week of school the teachers and admin get together to figure out next year's classes. 90% of the process is making sure the difficult kids are spread out evenly.
I don't know what to do about it. All teachers recognize the issue. Everyone who went to school knows how it works. It's not good for the well behaved students. The difficult students are often resented by everyone.
Something that sort of works, sometimes, are Educational Assistants. They are teacher-lite people who go around class to class and basically give the teacher a break from the difficult student, so they can actually teach.
How about nothing? What's the justification for putting schools in charge of moral instruction in the first place?
Is it? I would assume that a focus on basic instruction and the three R's would just bypass moral instruction completely. Where does that fit into math class?
It's a large jump from "what math do people need" to "people have an obligation to help the less fortunate". The former is ostensibly within the purview of educators. The latter should probably be left up to individual households.
Think of all the different types of teachers in the USA. Imagine your child, or image you have one. If a teacher was very different from you ideologically and morally, what would you want that teacher to teach your child?
I think most commenters here are moderate or left, and are taking certain positions because they are disappointed in leftist values and institutions they used to rely on, that they feel have gotten off the rails.
You know what I like? Stoicism. I don't like unnecessary fear mongering. And I don't like the sharp increase in mental health issues among young people. I don't like moral arrogance or righteousness. And I think these things are related. Maybe I can't ask for stoicism, but I think I can ask questions about how certain dispositions and attitudes in how critical subjects are taught are freaking out students so badly that about 50% of them are depressed or anxious, despite the fact that most of them are more privileged than anyone has ever been in history.
I assume you are liberal.
You want someone very different from you ideologically, teaching your child abstinence only sex education.
why? So you can yell at me or something?
I don't think its interesting or noble or challenging or valuable for my child to get a different perspective by getting conservative anti-sex sex education. I do think it could harm them. But, if I'm going to ask for something more neutral, I'm going have to concede that some of the things I want taught may be too liberal for other people, so there will have to be compromise all around.
So, we aren't going to agree on things.
I don't like a reactionary, emotionally-driven, alarmist, anxious, doomer, authoritarian, anti-humanitarian take on almost any subject - and they are certainly out there.
from another post I made in this thread:
Plus there is always the question - whose anti-racism are we teaching? What about someone like John McWhorter versus Ibram Kendi? Whose climate change are we teaching? One that pushes for collective action or for personal responsibility? A climate change that enforces ascetism or looks for tech solutions to climate? One that's pragmatic and based in solutions or one that runs around screaming the sky is falling? What sexism/feminism are we teaching? The one that says that war, corporate power, and imperialist science are men's games and that we should be honoring a natural female perspective and deconstructing inherently male ideas, or a feminism that says women should be CEOs and marines? Do teachers just get to decide what version of these things they will push? Who are they accountable too?
1. One of the most consistent findings in American public polling is that parents, of any demographic, think their child's school is good. They just think other people's kid's schools are bad.
2. The school choice crowd spoke almost exclusively about supposed quantitative learning gains, until the endurance came back. Then they changed their tune
"One of the most consistent findings in American public polling is that parents, of any demographic, think their child's school is good."
If that's true, then why is school choice a problem? Won't it collapse from lack of use, if most parents truly think their kid's school is good?
It seems possible that people are telling pollsters that they think their kid's school is good as a kind of defense mechanism -- either external (I can't let others know how bad things are here, because that might validate what they think of me and my kid) or internal (I can't admit to myself that I would like something better). If that's the case, choice would reveal their actual preferences. If that's NOT true, then it seems like school choice programs would naturally wither away from lack of use.
Our district offers a choice of several schools per zone and guarantees bus service within your zone. The logistics are a nightmare and we’re constantly understaffed with bus drivers, getting some kids home literal hours after school dismisses.
Even though most people may not choose a school that’s not residential, enough do that it throws a wrench in the whole system.
Sure, that's a fair consideration. There may well be some point on the demand curve below which the logistical hassle doesn't make sense. If two people want school choice, maybe it's not worth doing.
But it does seem that in some school districts significant numbers of parents are looking for change. If the demand is high enough, then even if it's a minority interest, we might swallow the logistical challenge as we do for other programs with relatively small target populations, like magnet schools or voluntary majority-minority transfers.
I was going to comment "that might be true on average, but not in places like Chicago." Then I looked it up and found out I was wrong. Even during the pandemic, 2 out of 3 CPS parents said they were satisfied with the quality of their children's education.
I was surprised because I never heard much about school choice until I moved there. My friends obsessed over which high school their kids would "get into" and several moved to the suburbs to avoid Chicago public schools. But I suppose there's a huge selection issue when surveying parents who stuck with CPS.
Source: https://kidsfirstchicago.org/ed-recovery-norc (lots of interesting survey data here)
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.
As compared to what and where?
First, let me admit: I'm relying on domain knowledge here, not a broad survey.
But: mostly compared to districts (within the US) or countries (outside the US) that manage to fit more into the plain high-school curriculum, rather than into a college-prep curriculum for the gifted. I would like to see many more people leave high school with basic knowledge of calculus, linear algebra, and/or statistics. There are countries where linear algebra and introductory calculus, at least, are high-school subjects, not first-year university subjects.
Similarly, I took Regents World History in upstate NY in the early 2000s. This was, somehow, much stronger than the Massachusetts world history curriculum, judging by how broad and deep my knowledge apparently is compared to my friends (and partner) from over the state line who aced their courses but got a much narrower, shallower curriculum. (And again, my take here is not that I'm a history expert -- I didn't major in history. It's that I got B's or so in the same high-school history class as everyone else in my year.)
And let's not even talk about how many schools offer shop class or other manual-skills courses anymore! It's too damn few.
I don't think there's a free lunch, but I think that if pedagogy and domain experts work together, we can make modest but significant improvements in a number of areas.
I’d love that too, but how are you gonna force neural pathways for calculus into the brain of a kid who isn’t interested, is hungry and tired, and just wants to get out of here and make enough to pay their cell phone bill? (This isn’t commentary on the value of that kid, either. Different life goals, is all.)
Also pretty much everyone kid in California takes 3+ years of Spanish, but none of us can speak it. I think Canadians take even more French with still no results. I don't think "put more X in schools" arguments work.
put more Afghanis in schools.
hehe jk but seriously I went to a modest school system in suburban NYC, heavily minority, and we had 5 AP courses.
To me, the biggest threats are CRT/Anti-racism, a de-emphasis on stem, and probably the biggest: parents who don't care about their kids education.
I agree with you on this.
Ugh—the “not being able to teach or learn a second language” thing that is unique to Americans. Don’t get me started.
Oh but I didn’t know Canadians were that bad at French. In the “old days” I really thought they all knew it well enough to speak it, even if they were not perhaps smoothly bilingual. In the US, kids learn lists of colors, lists of numbers, lists of days of the week, a few formulaic sentences —and then they can place out of the required college classes with that “knowledge.” And they can’t speak or understand a thing.
I also took German classes in college in Germany. Still don't know more than a few words. I think the lesson is that it doesn't really do anything if you're not using it.
Well, I'm gonna start by making sure that kid has free, healthy meals available, but that's a separate issue.
There's no silver bullet "trick" for increasing rigor and standards in schools, but there are other countries where the average high-school graduate took some calculus. And while they don't remember every integral-calculation trick for the rest of their lives (lmfao I do STEM for a living and don't remember those), I do think they're more math literate and make more capable citizens of a scientifically-driven society with a sociotechnically mediated mode of production. They're better off.
We should learn from what they've accomplished and replicate it as best we can, bit by small bit.
I don't disagree. My kids go to Title 1 schools where everyone gets free breakfast and lunch, so that's covered. I'm all for rigor, but we have to accept as a society that more intellectual rigor will yield apparently worse overall results. My 8th grader is taking sophomore level math--so the instruction is there for the taking--but a huge proportion of the kids aren't capable or willing to take advantage of that.
"Willing" is probably even the more persuasive point. I wish more people (and consequently young people) were more interested in learning for learning's sake. But a lot aren't. And that's a valid choice.
Sure, not every kid wants to learn calculus. That's actually why my reply mentioned shop class. Some people just wanna get out of school and go to work, and the school system should facilitate that as rigorously as possible!
Yeah it seems like, well, you're wanting way too much out of secondary education. You can get it more rigorous, but you'd just get more people struggling, I think, and more failouts rather than actually improved results. It's probably better that someone come out with no knowledge of calculus than that they fail, since it will severely affect their job prospects.
In addition, I think a lot of the requests for job training in secondary ed is employers wanting to avoid the burdens of actually training people.
Why does everyone need to know calc and lin alg? I'm guessing less than 1% of the population has ever needed to calculate an integral or determinant .
Smart kids who want to go into math and engineering will learn them, and do so with interest. Why involve everyone else?
" would like to see many more people leave high school with basic knowledge of calculus, linear algebra, and/or statistics. "
Then you're not going to graduate many kids. And by the way, no citing Europe. They've tracked all the kids who can't do those subjects into vocational school. They aren't teaching the topics to all students.
I can’t speak for the commenter, but I wonder whether the comparison group is “us, in the past, at a time when finishing high school was something that privileged people did and you could get a good job after that.”
I remember my great-grandmother speaking in reverential tones about “finishing high school” as if it was a privilege and a great opportunity. She finished 8th grade which I think back then was pretty good, especially for a girl who was destined to be a worker bee.
Now we just warehouse everyone through high school, and when they’re done, we want everyone to “go to college” next, which for some people is a wonderful opportunity that expands their horizons, and for others is “more warehousing” until they get a paper with their degree on it, and hope all the loans are justified by a “good job” which increasingly is unavailable unless you have graduate degrees, which in turn are becoming easier to obtain, part-time at night, from expensive diploma mills. And so it goes.
I wonder too to what extent this prolonged “education” of our young correlates with our time’s / our culture’s long adolescence. My gg, after completing her 8th grade education, went to work and was just waiting to get married and start her family.
And, perhaps not unimportantly, with the jobs you could get with your 8th-grade education, you could live modestly but decently, have your own place to live etc.
We’ve drawn out childhood and adolescence such that now we commonly see the claim that “the brain” isn’t done developing until age 25 (which doesn’t really mean what anyone thinks it means). “Kids” are still living at home at 25, 30, not because humans are less capable of fending for themselves but because there are no good jobs for them, despite all the education.
Without the means to live an adult life, a lot of people seem to lack the desire to live an adult life. Maybe “desire” is the wrong word, because it implies a failing in them that I don’t want to attribute to them, like a lack of “gumption.” It might be more like learned helplessness, where after, say, a bachelor’s degree you can maybe get the sort of crappy low-paying job my gg got after 8th grade, enough to barely pay the bills. Except now you have debt.
If a decent job and their own place to live were dangling like a carrot in front of them, we might see young people becoming more “mature” sooner again.
I don’t know how much those trends have to do with education, or with how well or for how long we educate people. I do think a lot of education, post- readin’ writin’ and ‘rithmetic has become more of an effort to give kids “better lives” via more years in school, without necessarily delivering the goods of “additional education.”
The time spent in school becomes just a means to a desired higher-paying end, as evidenced, say, by the number of office workers in graduate programs who are paying a lot but learning nothing in particular. More and more, clerical workers have “master’s degrees” but can still barely format their own resumes free of typos. Forget writing a decent cover letter. Pretty sure my gg could have given these MBAs a run for their money in the resume and cover letter department, although she never had a job that was fancy enough to require either.
Somehow, year-for-year of education, the people in the old days seemed to know more.
Maybe in my gg’s day, the fancy high school kids read the Aeneid in Latin, but that’s hardly the case now.
Maybe your commenter meant none of this. Maybe all of this, including my gg’s view, is all just looking back on “the old days” in a completely deluded fashion, as if things were better then. She also thought women being able to vote was an amazing and daring innovation.
Don't waste your blog posts on the comment section!
Lol! Sometimes I’m writing a long-winded comment (because do I write any other kind?) and I think “Hm could this just be my own post instead?” But then I’m like “nah I just want to reply to the convo!”
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.
Given that every kid in a "dollars follow the kids" model would have resources to spend, could you explain further how "dollars follow the kid" mentality" is uniquely selfish with regard to "your kid" vs. "their peers" in your comment?
People who pay more taxes are going to want more tax dollars given back for their kids. That’s going to further drive self segregation of the haves and have nots, instead of embracing the shared community we’re all part of.
I remember hearing this refrain 25 years ago, growing up in suburban NYC. The idea was that more money means rich kids will do better, except, I went to one of the most modest school systems in the county and we still had Advanced Placement courses. We may not have had AP German/Japanese, but we had the big 5 (Calc, Physics, History, English, Spanish) which was pretty solid.
It wasn't the money, it was the people. Unfortunately, most kids weren't motivated or pushed to do better cuz their parents were/are shmucks.
When I got to college, I tutored high schoolers from rich cities and boy were plenty of them dumb.
"Rich kids do better in school cuz they're rich" is a tired and misleading refrain, time for Liberals to change.
I didn't say they'd do better because they're rich. I said they would be self segregating.
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 people start having a “public school” line item deduction on their paychecks, then I could see how the comparison with social security makes more sense.
I mean, you could take a pen and write in x% of the state and local withholding as for public education, and it would be about as informative as the Social Security line item. There is a relationship between what you pay in to SS and what you get out, but it's not close to 1-1, and SS is not funded solely from contributions.
Yes but social security was created with the purpose of paying out cash. Public education was not.
Sure, but the way social security works is very much the way public finance works, and I don't think anyone argues otherwise. It doesn't really make sense to me to say that making public education look more like social security is "not how public expenditure works", and that argument seems key to what Freddie is saying. I see the post as:
1. Moving towards school choice is not how public expenditure works, to do it would blow up the notion of the social contract.
2. Given 1, the only way to justify moving towards school choice is if public schools are really bad and choice would make them way better.
3. But they aren't as bad as you think, and choice would not make them way better.
As someone who agrees that school choice wouldn't make things WAY better, but thinks they might make them a little better, point 1 seems really important to getting me onboard here.
Point 1 is actually the most important to me.
I don't know how things work where you are, but "school taxes" are a line item on my property tax bill and a larger amount than everything else put together.
If I showed my kids our family budget, housing would be a line item. But I can't cut them a check for their bedroom's worth of mortgage. I can hand them a $10 bill from the allowance for chores line item.
This is a solid practical argument -- and one that could apply to schools, too. The practical argument as to your household budget is (I think) that transaction costs and inefficiencies prevent you from simply writing your child a check for their own housing. You can't easily sell your house and buy a smaller one, so now you're paying for a bedroom you're not using. And you and the child both benefit from the common spaces -- for example, a shared kitchen -- so that total costs would go up if you had to provide your child enough money to rent a separate one-bedroom with its own kitchen.
And the same thing is to some extent true of schools. There are certain shared overheads in a public school system, and for that reason it is arguably inefficient to have private schools in a place with a public school system, because you have to duplicate cafeterias, administration, and so on. In the case of private schools, however, we don't mind, as long as the parents of the private school students pay for the entire cost of the inefficiency. (Indeed, the private school families are now subsidizing the public school families; the more families who choose private school, yet still pay taxes, the greater the per-student budget of the public schools!)
Vouchers and school choice are a different story, because in that case the money leaves the local public school and goes elsewhere. That means the school now has less money, but still must maintain many of the same overheads. Like you as a homeowner, they can't easily scale facilities up and down proportional to the number of children.
But I don't think that argument is a moral one based on the social contract. It's just about efficiency -- and efficiency arguments don't always trump individual rights.
Suppose that there are two towns next door to each other. Town A and Town B have equally well-ranked schools. But a new factory has just moved to Town B, and so it has more jobs. In order to take advantage of these new jobs, some families move from Town A to Town B. They are taking their tax dollars with them, and the public school in Town A is left in a position similar to that of a school that has lost students to vouchers -- less money, fewer students, but they can't easily downscale infrastructure. So the school now has a higher per-student overhead.
That sucks for Town A, but I don't think we would say that the families moving to Town B are violating the social contract. Part of the social contract is a reservation of individual rights that trump the collective interest. One such right is the right to travel to try to improve your situation.
Yet once we admit that it's not really against our principles to allow people to withdraw money from one school and put it into another, for purely personal and selfish reasons (a better job, nicer views, whatever), is it really such a stretch to say that people should be able to withdraw their money from a local school, and apply it to a different school, because of the perceived quality of the schools themselves?
Maybe! Maybe that's a bridge too far. But it doesn't seem like an easy question to me. If Town B has "better schools" that Town A, should we prevent people from moving to Town B, on the basis that Town A will now have higher overheads per pupil? That would be a radical shift in American educational policy (and constitutional doctrine on the right to travel).
But now imagine that Town A and Town B share a single school district but maintain different schools. They collectively create a school choice program, where the child's funding travels with him or her. Suppose we see the same drain from Town A to Town B. What is the practical or moral difference between families abandoning Town A's public school for Town B's public school by moving (as in the previous example), versus abandoning Town A by using the school choice program? Doesn't Town A lose funding either way?
That’s why I’m not a huge fan of school choice to be honest. We agonized for a long time about the ethics of it with our kids and ultimately decided, what the hell are we doing here? They’ll go to their residential school because that’s our community school. And that means our kids go to Title 1 schools. This is not a problem. The school is 15 years old, so the facilities are great. High percentage of minority high percentage of poor kids. And we’ve never had a teacher we didn’t like, who didn’t serve as a really good teacher. (At the elementary level all have been women, but my kids have had black and white teachers. My middle schooler also has male teachers, of a range of “races.”)
I realized that, for us in our circumstances, our kids would do well wherever they were because they have us as a support system. Choosing the wealthier whiter school that was available to us felt gross, because that’s not the community we live in. My kids get to play with their school friends out in the neighborhood, no play dates or driving required. They have academically and intellectually gifted programs available (so far one of our kids has qualified).
I guess I’d feel different if my white male kids were being openly discriminated against, but so far they’re not. (We’re in a purple region of a red state.)
Amen. Twenty per cent of my property tax bill goes to road maintenance, plowing, town administration, etc. Eighty per cent goes specifically to public education. The total of the education component of my property tax is *significantly* more than I pay the IRS each year. I would consider my federal taxes as part of the social contract. But when I see that a specific and astronomical dollar amount is going to "public education," and I disagree with the sudden turn toward CRT and gender indoctrination, I get a bit steamed.
I don't agree with CRT and gender criticism either. That's what elected school boards are meant to manage. By viewing social services as an opt-in opt-out endeavor, there is no social contract. I don't want my community run exclusively like a free market.
I definitely agree with this (and my kids go to Catholic school). I am fine not having a school choice option and paying for private school fully out of pocket.
However, if this is important to you (and to Freddie, and to me), we need to start addressing the concerns that are being expressed here, over and over, by parents who are extremely dissatisfied with social justice indoctrination, with the school closures, with the refusal by some school boards to even permit their input, and with school unions that have seemingly become hostile to the communities they work with and for.
That last one kills me the most. I come from a long line of union workers, including schoolteachers, and I (and my parents) would have grown up so, so, so poor if it weren't for those unions. Watching giant teachers unions making insane school closure demands and, in California, insisting that the students don't need in-person schooling because they remotely taught them what "insurrection" means makes me want to cry. THEY ARE GOING TO LOSE IF THIS KEEPS UP, AND I DON'T WANT THEM TO LOSE. Not least because my wife is a union schoolteacher.
Sorry, this is definitely not directed at you, since I bet we agree on everything that's important and have had great conversations here before. Just venting.
Vent away! I don’t disagree that all the concerns you’ve raised are totally valid. I’m just not ready to give up on schools as a primary footer in our modern social contract.
The amount of anger at public schools on this thread has been eye-opening, especially because this isn’t a Republican blog. It’s clear that parents have had it with all of the things you mentioned. Glenn Youngkin won’t be the last Republican to exploit these sentiments.
It's worth noting that charter school advocates are often very quick to insist that they don't want public schools to shut down.
I disagree with a couple of premises here, but I’ll stick with the most education-centric:
Whatever amount of per-pupil money a school receives that would follow the student to other schools is only loosely related to the cost that student imposes on the school. At scale, assuming a mostly random distribution of students, it works out very roughly OK. Shifting to an all-choice model at the school level messes with that significantly.
Of the many ways in which this applies, let’s use special education as a particularly clear example.
Federal funds for special education are nowhere near enough to meet the federal requirements for all students entitled to it. The disparity has been growing over time, and it’s one of the big drivers of the growth in non-federal education spending.
What’s driving this increase? Some people will jump to assumptions that we’re seeing big increases in the number of students in special education tied to various perverse incentives around trying to get more special education funds. However, there’s little evidence of significant shifts in special education identification, and certainly not at the scale that would match the increase in funds spent on it.
Two major factors leading to this increase are from domains outside of education: improvements in health care for children with intense needs and deinstitutionalization.
With respect to the first case, better health care means children who would have died of intense genetic or otherwise innate conditions before reaching school age in earlier years now make it to school, where they’re rightly entitled to a free and appropriate education in their least restrictive environment, which can involve significant labor and other costs for schools. Put bluntly, these are a small number of students who are very expensive in fiscal terms. The higher costs of serving these students, again, are not fully covered by federal special education funds. The difference has to come from somewhere, with general state funds and local levy funds picking up much of it. Whatever your state’s per pupil general allocation to schools is, some amount of each pupil’s “personal” allocation is actually going to subsidize these costs. What’s more, the spectrum of actual per-pupil costs in the whole of special education—not just the numerically-small-but-expense-high group I’ve described—is so varied that simply adding an additional per-special-education-pupil allocation wouldn’t cover it.
Deinstitutionalization covers students who, in years past, would have been in various, well, institutions (think asylum style). Those students are now in the school system, shifting the expenditure from human service funding to education funding. Many are in special education. Again, the real per pupil cost of educating many such students exceeds the actual funds schools receive to do the job, so much of the rest comes from other students’ allocations.
With an at-scale “backpack” model, some students become super attractive to schools—you can stick them in a library with a high-speed Internet connection and they’ll walk out years later knowing more than you’d have paid someone to “teach” them. Other students are completely not sustainable for anyone to take on, even if you’re running a specialized program, because there just aren’t enough resources coming with them to provide what they need (and that you’d be legally required to offer in the extreme special education cases).
Trying to come up with a morally acceptable “funding backpack” that can cover all of these situations would result in education funding systems even more byzantine than the ones we’ve got.
I know how glib this sounds, but it's not immediately obvious to me why "send larger checks to special needs kids" wouldn't solve this issue.
I don't want it to sound like I have all the answers here, because I definitely don't, and I fully acknowledge that moving to an all choice world may be vastly worse. But I can imagine ways in which it would be better, and I feel like a lot of objections raised are missing the forest for the trees. Yes, a voucher model where every student got exactly the money they're currently technically earmarked for in the current system would work badly for the reasons you point out...but we wouldn't have to do it that way.
A couple points:
1) The category “special education” covers a huge range of conditions which vary significantly in their cost to schools. The low-number/high-cost conditions I initially discussed are one end of the spectrum. There are also far less costly conditions, such as some speech-related disabilities which require comparatively cheaper interventions and, when addressed effectively, often involve the student exiting special education. You could in theory try to come up with a tiered special education voucher with some large range of differentiated levels. This would necessarily reduce the amount of funds available for general vouchers, unless you’re prepared to significantly increase government spending on schools (and good luck with that, politically).
2) Special education is just one of many areas where general funds get spread away from some of the low-cost students who generated them. Students not yet fluent in English, homeless students, and neglected/delinquent students are all examples of cases where we currently have some dedicated funding streams that are insufficient to cover the actual per-pupil cost.
3) To pick a less identity-connected example, consider transportation costs. A student in walking distance costs much less than a student who lives a long bus ride from school. Will a student also get an add-on voucher based on how far they live from school?
4) How quickly will families be able to adjust their vouchers when their conditions change? A parent loses a job, the family moves, the student gets diagnosed with a condition (or develops an extreme one suddenly, as with traumatic brain injury)? Etc.
We’re now talking about constant political fighting about add-on vouchers, some amount of new bureaucratic/administrative structure to minimize deceit/graft, and you now have even stronger incentives for schools to do everything they can to attract “profitable” students who cost less to educate than they bring in via voucher while steering away students who may well cost significantly more than they generate in revenue.
There’s a reason places like Milwaukee, with a long-standing voucher system, charter schools, and open enrollment within the district school system don’t see dramatic changes in the quality of experience available to most students (while those with the most motivated, savvy, stable, and adequately resourced families can find their way to a small number of “better” schools). Markets don’t work the same way when absolutely everyone in a given age range is supposed to have access to an at least partially-customized service at low-to-no cost to the consumer.
Why don't we give everybody a check for their share of Medicare, and if you get cancer you can just go build yourself an oncology ward? There are some things we have to do together in order to do them at all.
I mean, if you're on Medicare, you can choose what hospital you want to go to and what doctor you want to see, and they're frequently privately run hospitals and doctors, and Medicare will pay for it. If the way public education worked was you can choose from a variety of schools, some of which are privately run, and pick the one you like best and the government will pay for it, I agree that vouchers would be less likely to be beneficial.
We *could* do that.
Notice that for Medicare or Medicaid, the government doesn't require everyone to report to a government-run hospital where there are government-paid employees using government-produced equipment.
You go to a doctor, and that doctor gets reimbursement from the government at a certain schedule.
And the government *does* operate under that model for the VA!
Given the task "the government will provide for your health care," there are a bunch of ways to get there:
1. You go to a government-run facility
2. You go to a doctor of your choice who submits reimbursement from the government
3. You get a check to buy insurance on a regulated free-market
(There are even more, I'm keeping this simple.)
All of those accomplish the government tasks of "give you health care." None of them should necessarily be off the table because they are violating some norm.
If the government needs pens, it doesn't have to build its own pen factory. If the government needs to give people food, it doesn't run its own farms. "Just buy the thing" is always an option.
So we have similar options for education:
1. You go to a government-run facility
2. You go to a teacher/tutor of your choice who submits reimbursement from the government
3. You get a check to buy education on a regulated free-market
I'm willing to debate the trade-offs of those different options, but none of them should be banned.
The point is to educate the children. I'm not arguing here that #3 is the best option. But it absolutely should be an option that is discussed and considered to be as reasonable as the other options.
(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.
I mean, what could "communist symbols" even mean...LOL
Diet Coke is as DLC neoliberal as it gets
A concerned parent is a good parent.
Your concerns are legit but,”no benefit”? Be advised that you will, at some point, have to teach them a few things you may lack any real knowledge of, while students at even a modestly decent public high school will have access to teachers with at least undergrad degrees in the entire range of subjects required for a HS diploma. Will you be compensating for that with videos and online instruction? A demanding reading schedule? Authoritative dinner guests? Field trips to local museums?
As a HS teacher - a lifer in that - I find it depressing that homeschooling seems an attractive option, but can't dispute anyone's reasons simply on the basis of content availability, which, in these times, is truly one of the actual benefits of mod tech. In fact, I've always supported independent reading programs and they've fallen out of favor in schools since the advent of the testing era that came with NCLB lo those many years ago. So, yes, if you have a good family reading culture, your kid will probably be fine.
But there are good things still to be had from the people who work in schools. Tales of lame teachers and clueless, bureaucratic admins are easy to come by. Obviously bad actors exist in schools. So do people who take their work seriously and approach it with energy and enthusiasm. What is lost or gained by lack of exposure to them is an unanswerable question. If your kid is a good musician or athlete, though, I think you'll have difficulty finding better alternatives. In my case, FWIW, home sucked, so I spent a lot of time at school and that's probably a big factor in how I ended up in teaching. My art teacher was a big difference-maker for me. I will always be grateful I crossed paths with her when I did.
A large portion of the homeschooling is COVID-related, I think. Or at least I know multiple couples where one parent has quit their job to homeschool rather than try to navigate the COVID school closures.
That said, people are getting feisty about various educational trends, and it'll only get worse if it continues (especially when the other shoe drops and ROGD is acknowledged for the medical scandal it is--schools going behind parents' backs to "affirm" gender identities is a powder keg)
These are children who've withdrawn from public schooling altogether i.e. not just schooling from home, they no longer attend any public school, in person or virtual. I've heard COVID was part of it as parents objected when they saw what their kids were being taught as they learned from home.
And I agree, the trans push is alienating many parents.
That's what I mean--they've completely withdrawn their kids from public school, downloaded a curriculum from some homeschooling website, and just started teaching themselves rather than deal with public schools and all the closures. Unless I'm misunderstanding what you're getting at?
People expect all of their media to confirm their priors. What would make us think that they view education differently?
This feels very right to me as well.
I'm here in Evanston, Illinois where everyone is drunk on the equity movement. The district allocates more than 2% of our annual budget solely to paying equity consultants and equity training and just laid off a bunch of reading support staff to fund the equity content. Last year during remote schooling, I sat there watching the teachers do it and .. so cringe. It was particularly weird watching a kindergarten teacher try to teach the kids about "restorative justice" - a concept I'm not sure my Northwestern students would even understand...
We're searching for private schools but it's either the Catholics @ $8k a year or elite private schools at $40k. Nothing in between. It sucks.
Do you find that the parents are strongly in support of it, or is it entirely the administration? That would be a good guide to figuring out how it'll shake out.
We have our kids in the Catholic schools for $8K a year. It's entirely wonderful, a great and active community that we interact with constantly. I really recommend it.
All the parents grumble about it behind the scenes to each other at the park or in private settings but we dare not air these grievances publicly.
I think teaching restorative justice in kindergarten is normal. Billy takes Sally’s crayon, the teacher makes Billy give it back and apologize.
I’m sure that’s not how the woke do it, though…
Totally 100% and unclear to me why it needs to be presented to the students in the context of race instead of just their daily lives.
Or just capitalism.
Just to be clear, I'm not against teaching equity or being anti-racist or whatever. But at this point in time, during budget crisis', attacks from the right to defund everything, and COVID - let's just focus on keeping the schools open, safe, and operating. This "racism is the real pandemic" language that gets thrown around makes me insane. Let's solve one thing at a time..
Having seen it during remote schooling, the equity curriculum for K-8 is basically corporate diversity training with some crappy kids books thrown in. It's a grift and the only winners are the diversity consultants and booksellers that fill the administration building now.
Totally get it. Its ok to say anti-racism is good, but that it needs to be done well. Its ok to balance this need with other needs.
>The district allocates more than 2% of our annual budget solely to paying equity consultants and equity training and just laid off a bunch of reading support staff to fund the equity content.
You sure this isn't just a backdoor effort to break the teacher's unions and deskill their job?
What do you mean by de-skill their job?
Turn a skilled job into one or more unskilled jobs, for which labor competition can be increased and wages decreased -- despite the resulting work being of lower quality. It's class war from the boss class.
Ok, and what does equity training have to do with that?
If "equity" becomes an excuse to get rid of experienced teachers and quality teaching, and replace it will bullshit, then the district can replace scarce, experienced, high-wage workers with abundant, inexperienced, low-wage workers.
Depends how much you think teacher quality has to do with student outcomes.
Or to put it another way "commoditize" these positions and roles.
That is far too strategic for the current school board leadership and superintendent. Hanlon's Razor is at play here; we're not dealing with galaxy brains.
Evanston might be the wokest place on earth. Were you there when the superintendent said “Black, Brown, and LGBTQ” students would be prioritized for in person learning?
I was and there were a few schools in the district where the principals had to inform white parents that their kids probably wouldn't be coming back in-person in 2020 but the black, brown and LGBTQ kids would. Ultimately, that effort failed and nobody went back!
Serious question that might sound like a joke but it's not: what prevents a parent from just asserting that their kids are now black, brown, or LGBTQ just to get them back to in-person?
Nothing and I think that's part of why the whole plan didn't work out
Would you do that?
If it's the optimal play, why wouldn't I?
Also with stuff like this; the superintendent didn't actually have the power to make this call which is why it died. Saying you're going to do something controversial that you don't actually have the power to do, in order to get attention and news coverage is a very Trump-era thing
The kids there are made to take a DNA test and wear the results in a microchip embedded in the nape of their necks. Teachers and school security guards walk around with little scanners like the ones veterinarians and animal shelters use on dogs.
I don’t see the problem
How could you have possibly deluded yourself into thinking that the elite private schools have *less* of a problem with the equity movement?
Try Lutheran...
I went to a Jesuit high school......one of the 2 or 3 best ever to happen to me. If you can get into a Catholic school, you should try it....but make sure the curriculum is truly different from public ones.
Yep. Our kids are in Catholic school. It isn't because we found our public schools alienating - our oldest did kindergarten in the public school, and it was fantastic - but the race-obsessed, "parents should have no say in education" rhetoric elsewhere isn't helping. Whatever reluctance we felt about the tuition is gone.
I get the appeal and in fact I find parochial schools charming (really, I’m not being sarcastic). But for a lot of us—most of us? Americans, generally— it isn’t an option financially.
Definitely get that - we've got three kids, and I'm not sure how we're going to handle it when they're all school age.
"Teachers are openly displaying communist or antifa symbols."
This is a ridiculous comment. Bill O'Reilly-level stupid. Were you also worried that Democrats planned to build projects in the middle of upperclass neighborhoods in 2020? That we were inching ever closer to Sharia law in 2012?
"There's no longer an emphasis on STEM education, anti-racism curriculum is king and cancel-culture reigns."
Ridiculous right-wing moral panic nonsense.
I've found that teachers are politically pretty much on the same page as parents, especially given that most of them are also district parents. If anything, they're more conservative than the parents.
Same. Wife works for an educational services company that happens to cater to a very wealthy, right-leaning district in Austin, TX. Teachers are almost all either conservative or centrist social liberals. They also service Title I schools, several if not most (I think) are Catholic? Needless to say the Catholic schools are even more conservative.
Also kind of robs any credibility and makes me more likely to skip over future comments from that person.
How about if you don't label people. People are not necessarily consistent. Maybe on another topic they may make an interesting point. (I'm going to start charging FdB for moderating these comments?) [joke]
There are a lot of reasonable ways to express concerns about what's happening in schools, but becoming a pawn for right wing culture wars surely can't be one of them.
How about if we don't impugn people's motives or label them, and look instead at their feelings and logic? The comments here are trending to Reddit snark and sarcasm - just the thing FdB is trying to avoid. Hint: leave out the word 'pawn'.
No doubt that's a good instinct in general, though snark and sarcasm deserve their place, too, right? The feelings and logic of the post my comment references betrays hysteria. As for my use of pawn, I don't think Elon signed up for that role, but I can't skirt around my belief that they are playing it. For what it's worth, my own comment here made me think about the political battles where I've been co-opted into playing the pawn.
Deserve their place….yes, on Reddit. Not here.
Agree to disagree, then.
Yeah. I thought homeschooling was a fringe terrible idea and now I'm slightly sympathetic to it.
We spend a lot of time discussing the origins of wokism. And I think one area we haven't adequately addressed is that there are any number of teachers that have quite a bit of contempt for individuals/parents that they don't politically or morally agree with, and feel at liberty to "educate" your children in their own morals and politics. The few teachers I know talk this way; its very disrespectful towards parents. They take a certain pride in identifying as rebels or subversive, and express that in their teaching. I know many more public administrators, and I literally hear things like "you got to get em when they are young," implying that adults are too corrupt to even be worth talking to. It really gets me, because this is how Christians think: its best to win converts as children, vulnerable and easily manipulated. It's gross.
I think an entirely overlooked aspect of the home schooling debate is that a huge part of "education", in my opinion, is about interacting with other people your age.
I interacted with loads of people my own age while I was homeschooling. More than I wanted to, in fact, being an introvert.
And I also interacted with people who weren't my own age -- probably a lot more of them than I would have if I'd been in public school. One thing that I've commonly experienced, both when I was a homeschooled kid and now that I'm an adult, is that homeschoolers tend to be much more confident and competent at talking to adults than public schooled kids.
It seems as though public school kids mostly only encounter adults as authority figures, not as friends or colleagues or in general social situations. So they tend to only learn how to relate to them in terms of power relationships, either appealing to them for help or else clamming up to avoid the risk of punishment. Rather Foucauldian!
I'm not particularly pro homeschooling, I just understand why some people are choosing it.
The decision is a series of plus and minuses, different for every family, and everyone's doing their best to get their best out of non-perfect options.
Same, it's certainly not for everyone. And there are certainly parents who use "homeschooling" as an excuse to keep their kids on the family compound where they can abuse them away from the state's scrutiny. Every option has drawbacks. But homeschooling (up though 7th grade) was great for me.
When you're a kid, people your own age are monsters.
It's gross, but it works.
The internet seems unsure whether "Give me the child until seven years, and I will show you the man" is attributable to Aristotle or the founder of the Jesuits, but the basic point is clear: humans absorb a tremendous amount of the values and beliefs they will carry with them for the rest of their lives in childhood. Values and beliefs inform behavior, and if you're concerned at all with how other humans behave (or will behave in the future), you have to be concerned with what children are being taught by their parents and by their teachers.
I'll give a simple and perhaps trivial example: I really hate litter. (Living for a couple decades in a city that would regularly flood, and always being able to tell where the high water line was in the drainage canals by seeing the line of styrofoam cups and other trash that got washed into the storm sewers, will do that to you.) How, then, to stop people from littering? It's already illegal, and that apparently doesn't stop anybody who wants to do it from doing it, I assume because they know they won't get caught. It seems unlikely in the current (USA) political environment that a strong push to hire enough police to go around throwing people in jail for littering is likely to gain traction. The pandemic has taught us that a concerted public messaging effort encouraging pro-social behaviors like masks and vaccines will be met with "fuck you, I don't have to do what you tell me" from a significant chunk of society.
It seems to me to be more or less true that people are either litterers or they aren't, and if they're not it's because somebody taught them when they were young that it's wrong to do, and if they are, it's because somebody taught them when they were young (whether explicitly or accidentally by example) that it's perfectly fine. And so, if we really want to create a litter-free world, the only practical solution is to educate (brainwash? indoctrinate?) every child that it's super wrong to throw your trash away on the ground. If I was a public school teacher, I'd do everything I could within the rules to shame and/or punish any student I caught doing it, because my values tell me it's right to do so. If that child's parents have different values, am I being disrespectful to them for telling their kid they have to pick up their Capri Sun pouch and put it in the trash?
Now instead of litter, make it about racism, or sexism, or climate change, or creationism/evolution, or some more controversial topic. Is a passionate environmentalist teaching earth science supposed to tell a student who says their daddy says climate change is all a liberal hoax "well, I guess your father is entitled to their beliefs" and leave it at that? If they merely point to stacks of scientific papers proving the greenhouse effect and showing correlations between global average temperature and average atmospheric CO2, are they being disrespectful to those parents?
Are you then okay with a teacher who believes that evolution is a hoax concocted by Satan to test humanity teaching those values to children? What about a "race realist", who can find all sorts of science to back up the claim that African-descended people are less intelligent than European- or Asian-descended people? How about a sex ed teacher who thinks that women can't get pregnant from rape? These are all beliefs that people earnestly hold.
If the criteria is "teachers can teach whatever nonsense suits their fancy", I think _everyone_ is gonna have a problem with it. What we teach children in school is decided democratically, which is exactly what's happening with the pushback: parents are saying that no, they don't consent to their children being taught these things.
No, I would not be okay with those things. My argument was not "teachers should be free to indoctrinate their students with whatever they want to", my point was that no matter how much we might want teachers to stick to teaching "just the facts" in school, they're going to end up teaching their values to students one way or another (either explicitly, or just by selective enforcement of various school rules), and that it's probably impossible to expect people who seriously care about social issues to agree not to use the very powerful tool of early childhood education to change people's future behavior as citizens.
Personally, I hope that the liberal ideal of a pluralistic society - more "hey, that just like, your opinion, man" and less "somebody is WRONG on the INTERNET and I need to stop them!" - will eventually become fashionable again. And I do personally think teachers should be smart enough to know what issues are sensitive and avoid speaking their minds about them. Some of my strongest memories of elementary and junior high school are about teachers who did things like casually dropping God into their teachings, or openly saying what they thought about abortion, and already at that age thinking they wrong for talking about that stuff since it shouldn't be the government's job to tell kids what to think about those things.
The two options seem to be either Freddie's "just do democracy better", i.e. conflict theory, "we're just always going to be fighting about these things so let's figure out how to fight better for what we want", or the more libertarian school choice path that lets parents shop around for schools that teach what they want their kids taught.
I actually don't agree with the statement that you should use every conceivable way to shame or punish children for a behavior. I would instead ask you to ask children to think about it and feel it out - that's a lot different than pointing to a stack of reference books. You know, teaching. You have a false dichotomy of choices.
Plus there is always the question - whose anti-racism are we teaching? What about someone like John McWhorter versus Ibram Kendi? Whose climate change are we teaching? One that pushes for collective action or for personal responsibility? A climate change that enforces ascetism or looks for tech solutions to climate? One that's pragmatic and based in solutions or one that runs around screaming the sky is falling? What sexism/feminism are we teaching? The one that says that war, corporate power, and imperialist science are men's games and that we should be honoring a natural female perspective and deconstructing inherently male ideas, or a feminism that says women should be CEOs and marines?
Do teachers just get to decide what version of these things they will push? Who are they accountable too?
Its not good to be in charge of 25 little kids, personally decide that litter is the most important problem, and then privilege that idea over every other idea in your class room and go nuts enforcing it. I can't image ever thinking I am entitled to do that.
There are educators who believe they are indeed entitled to do that. They also think that they are being fair and neutral because they do not explicitly tell the students "what to think," they merely order students who disagree with them to apologize and/or leave the classroom. They also take pride in that they don't try to argue with students, they just "provide additional facts" and refuse to take questions lest they [the educator] get "traumatized" by someone's opposition.
Great points throughout too though, especially about clarifying what exact aspect of a concept gets taught.
You're going to have to provide evidence that "teachers" (used in the general, far-reaching sense) are displaying "antifa" logos and communist symbols if you want me to take your future comments seriously. That's patently ridiculous for more than one reason.
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.
There is an awful lot of unjustified assumptions in this comment.
The DC voucher program was a disaster! https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/28/us/politics/school-choice-betsy-devos.html
Absenteeism and parent satisfaction should immediately make your ears go up for selection effects. And again: SCHOOL CHOICE ADVOCATES INSISTED THEY WOULD RAISE YEAR SCORES FOR AT LEAST TWENTY YEARS AND THEY FAILED. And now you're just calling backsies and saying oh no, that doesn't matter? When exactly does the school "reform" postmortem happen where you acknowledge that you loudly called for the firing of hundreds of thousands of teachers on an entirely unjustifiable basis?
The postmortem never happens because wage suppression and labor squeeze/speedup of teachers *is the point*.
Inner city parents partnering with conservative reformers for school choice have been strange bedfellows for decades--"Waiting for Superman", the Obama administration's push for school reform, etc. And if the comparison is between suburban schools that may or may not be academically mediocre compared to the rest of the world versus schools in the inner city that may be literally crumbling then I will always prioritize the latter in terms of what society should be paying attention to.
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.
>My guess is that this is at least partially impoverished, primarily minority neighborhoods in urban cores. Can it be addressed?
What, poor rural whites don't do badly in school anymore?
Poor rural whites do better than the kids of highly educated blacks everywhere in America.
Same problem but to a lesser degree.
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.
We probably couldn't disagree more politically, but I wholeheartedly agree with your statement, for what it's worth :) I think people should be able to direct their money, it'd be nice to take that power back from the worthless scumbag politicians who give it to their friends. I think people should be able to direct their money to where it benefits them most, and why not? Why should we have to fund institutions we think are failing us?? Because Freddie said so? :-P
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.
How many people are really saying "I should get back the specific dollars I put into the system"?
It feels like a weakman (not a strawman, because I bet there really are some stupid people out there saying it).
But people do seem to be saying "as someone who pays in, I have a say in how the money is spent, and I am advocating that we spend the money earmarked for education in this (what I see as) better way."
So when Freddie says "Get better at politics. Campaign harder," that is exactly what they are doing.
Plenty of parents who pay to give their children something other than public schooling complain about "paying twice"" for school and feel they should be able to claw back some, if not all, of the money they pay in school taxes.
Next time one of them says that, ask them to clarify.
"Did you mean you should get all your tax dollars back, or that the district's spending should be available to educate your child?"
If my tax dollars paid for trash collection, and the trash collection sucked so bad (in my esimation) that I had to privately pay, out-of-pocket, for it to happen, "paying twice" is a perfectly understandable complaint to make about my situation.
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.)
I'm in Evanston and it was maddening to be remote schooling my son for most of 2020 while districts in Wilmette or Deerfield were open. CPS is fine and probably even really good if you have a genius kid that can get into the magnet schools. It'll be interesting to see what changes now that the CPS board is going to be elected instead of appointed - I expect probably a hard turn to the left and equity.
Yep I have a friend in Wilmette who has 2 school-aged kids and he says it's like living in a different country. There are such huge differences in how well these districts have handled this thing.
I used to live in Evanston when it was content to be a nice place to raise your kids and be close to the lake. From the sound of it, going full woke has, as in every other place that tried it, turned Evanston into shit.
Evanston schools are 50% nonwhite. Deerfield and Wilmette districts are 80% or more white. That's why your schools weren't open. Nonwhite parents preferred remote learning.
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.
Whether it's possible or not, some are trying - at least on the academic front. I salute their efforts. Someone has to start the ball rolling.
https://www.fairforall.org/fair-schools/
https://1776unites.com/our-work/curriculum/
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.
There is no reliable evidence that the alternatives work! These comments are blowing my mind. Why should I believe in the need to socially fund alternatives when the evidence that they provide better teaching is functionally non-existent?
Dude I can't even get my students to learn parts of speech or remember my classroom location but somehow I control their gender expression?
The fact that you deny even the possibility of grooming is actually evidence that it has already worked on you, sorry.
people are staring to push back, though! From the Washington Post:
"More than ever, educators in the nation's public schools are addressing gender identity in some classes and trying to help trans teenagers who are struggling to come to terms with their identities. But nationwide, those steps are meeting growing resistance from school boards and state lawmakers who are insisting that the topic has no place in public schools -- and enacting policies to ban any hint of it.
"This is not about bigotry," said Chris Ager, Merrimack's school board chairman, who has led the campaign for that town's new policy. "This is about whose job this should be to bring up these issues. We shouldn't be indoctrinating students about anything, and in many schools, you're starting to see that with transgenderism."
...
"Another closely watched debate about transgender issues in schools is unfolding in New Hampshire. Last summer, the school board in Merrimack approved a policy -- the "Prohibition of Alternative Lifestyle Instruction" -- that prohibits faculty from mentioning virtually any aspect of transgender identities and threatens disciplinary action against those who do.
Ager, the school board chairman, said the policy followed complaints from parents that schools were promoting a "trans lifestyle." He said he proposed the ban after seeing school health courses that mentioned alternative pronouns, high school papers noting trans dances and support hot lines, and discovering that a drag queen made an appearance at an elementary school in the region.
"I realized we had begun to socially indoctrinate students on this issue." Ager said, "This isn't our role. It should only be the role of parents."
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oh my mistake, this is an article from 1996 about homosexuality, I just changed a few words: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1996/05/11/educators-under-pressure-on-gay-issues/9b6b930c-21b6-4f10-a671-f1d4a463b1ab/
Do you agree with gender identity teachings' stance that homosexuality is a bigoted and exclusionary fetish? Do you think schools are right to impart that message to students?
People like you who haven't done the reading and assume transgender is just, like, super-gay, are whistling past the graveyard and you don't even know it.
are you folks *all* delusional? Private schools are far more likely to impose progressive dogma on their kids than publics are. Charters are, too. Jesus, learn something.
What's the goal? Aside from academic performance I can think of at least a couple of issues that school choice may address.
1. Cost to benefit ratio. The amount of money spent on education is huge compared to other countries and it's largely because of a bloated administrative class. Private schools typically have a better teacher to manager/administrator ratio.
2. Literal rats in the walls in some underserved districts. Regardless of whether or not academic performance improves sending students to schools that are clean and safe is still an improvement in my book.
You're looking at a different endpoint than the commenters.
You're looking at educational efficacy: how do public schools square up against private schools when it comes to test scores, student preparedness, etc.
They're looking at other factors: does public school teach values I endorse, are public schools even open or is it still distance-learning, etc
Yes, if there wasn't a difference between public and private schools before, there is now. My friend sent her daughter to the local Christian school, and they set up a remote option but remained open for the past 2 years. They had the $$ resources to maximize safety and retain staff.
I don't believe in "school choice" (public funding for private school) on principle, but I can't deny that for the past two years there has been a huge difference in the private vs. public experience.
Yeah, thank you for saying this. Freddie really seems to be arguing against some 3rd party who isn't in the room. It's not education policy wonks saying "charter schools fix test scores" but normal people saying "those private schools sure do seem open".
Private schools were more likely to be open, but not everywhere. Where private schools had a majority white population, they were open. But there are areas where private schools are majority Asian, and they didn't open.
Charters were more likely to be closed than publics.
Single biggest factor in school closure was parental preference, and race was the major factor in parental preference.
False, parents had no say, their preferences did not matter.
You're absolutely wrong. *Your* preferences might not have mattered. What you seem unaware of is that your preferences may not have been the majority view in your district.
“Does my child come home crying every day” was the most important endpoint for my parents when they pulled me from public school back in the 90s, and also for me when I briefly considered pulling my child more recently.
My first metric is "showing up."
Private schools and homeschooling had a better record of staying open during the pandemic than public schools.
Thankfully, the evidentiary bar for closing schools in a town that's already been victimized by other systemic failures is quite a bit lower: https://www.mlive.com/news/flint/2022/01/flint-schools-extends-virtual-learning-period-indefinitely.html
I'm sure Flint parents are relieved that they don't have the option to send their kids to schools that have not been proven to drive higher test scores!
Private schools, like publics, were based on the will of parents. The single biggest factor in a school opening or not, whether public or private, was the parental race, because there's a clear pattern in racial preferences for remote or inperson education during the pandemic.
For arguments sake, let's put the show on the other foot.
What if charter schools or some other alternative improved every educational metric across the board? Charter school students won every spelling bee, math olympics, etc. Ivy League schools had to rig their admissions criteria so they wouldn't be dominated by students from these alternatives. And so on.
But the students produced were a cross between Alex P. Keaton and MAGA. They emerged convinced that homosexuals (including, in some cases, their parents), were degenerates. They distrusted minorities, opposed immigration, and were in general antisocial.
Would you concede the win in this case? Would you say that while you find some of the methods abhorrent, you can't argue with the results, and thus these schools need to be supported?
Or are there other factors in play?
---
One of my goals as a parent is to surround my kids with adults who care about them. Many of their public school teachers have demonstrated that to them. But to many, the institution seems to be saying, "we don't give a shit about you." That matters, even if the needle on test scores doesn't move that much.
"suppose reality were completely different..."
I would say this hypothetical maps to the experience of public school parents frustrated with public schools.
They are expressing frustration with the level of service and the values promoted in schools, and being told there can't be an alternative because there'e no proof they increase test scores.
The burden of proof is on the public school system! If public schools aren't demonstrably better (not merely equivalent to) charter schools and private schools, then there's no good reason to deny educational freedom. (And yes, the rich will always have educational freedom, but poor parents need freedom of choice as well).
Well, I think that's the fundamental disagreement, and the point of this essay.
de Boer is a Marxist and a communist, and to him, (and I am likely summarizing this poorly), the default should be that the state should provide any given service absent overwhelming proof that an alternative is superior.
For most of the rest of us, the default is that competition is, in general, good, and that choice, in general, is good, and that providers should be able to compete on a somewhat level playing field, and consumers should have a choice, again, absent overwhelming proof that the government would deliver superior results.
de Boer is correct, that, historically, education has landed in the box with other things the government provides like national defense, transportation infrastructure, licensing, etc. (though I would say not quite as neatly given the existence of private schools and homeschooling). Where I think the essay fails is in arguing that the performance of schools during the pandemic offers a compelling reason to reconsider this.
"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.
Good comment. The core point is: the purpose of school choice/voucher programs is not and has never been to help the worst-off students, and certainly not to help the worst-off schools. Its purpose has always* been specifically to allow the marginal student -- the student who *could* do really well in the right school environment, and is *only* doing worse because of their school environment -- escape from a bad school that's dragging them down.
That makes it very much a bourgeois program: it all about helping out the children of pretty well-functioning families who aspire to improve their socio-economic position. It's not about those stuck in real cultural/structural poverty cycles.
It's not for the rich, who don't need it, and it's not for the poor who won't use it. It's for folks on the bubble between blue-collar grinding and white-collar earning.
*Well, "always" except for when it's not been about mainstream "academic success" at all, but is instead explicitly about fostering ideological separation of students from dominant cultural values, which is the case both for conservative Christians now and for Black nationalists during the 1970s.
This is also, I think, where Freddie's points are always going to fall on deaf ears.
Schooling, based on the data, seems to mostly work on a societal level. That is not the level that people, especially parents, are engaged in. For better or worse, parents want the best for their child specifically, and saying "your kid might do worse than they could have done in a better school, but at the end of the day a few kids over there do better and it all comes out in the wash, statistically speaking" is not a compelling argument to them.
Read the accounts of charter school activists: almost universally, they had an unusually bright and somewhat sensitive child who wilted in whatever district they were placed in and thrived once they were moved somewhere else. I believe Freddie that, statistically, this is a small population that doesn't move the needle on a societal level. But good luck convincing individual parents that they ought not care where their kid goes to school because of this.
I actually think forcing parents of a "bright and somewhat sensitive child" to sacrifice that child's future on the altar of The Public Good is an evil an inhuman worldview.
Our school district is broken up into zones, where you can choose any of the schools within the zone and still receive bus access (which by the way is a logistical nightmare). Our zone contains one of the poorest, highest minority elementary schools AND one of the whitest, most successful elementary schools.
What you describe is already happening, and vouchers aren't part of it. To me, vouchers allow parents to make more obvious ideological and self segregating choices more than educational ones.
The disruptive kids point is a tough one to grapple with. My wife estimates about half her time and effort are taken up by one or two kids in each class. I'll ask her about her day and she'll respond with "Jason was away!", and that's enough to know that it was a fantastic day for everyone. When a teacher talks about a great class, they don't mean that all the students are good, just that there are no difficult ones. During the last week of school the teachers and admin get together to figure out next year's classes. 90% of the process is making sure the difficult kids are spread out evenly.
I don't know what to do about it. All teachers recognize the issue. Everyone who went to school knows how it works. It's not good for the well behaved students. The difficult students are often resented by everyone.
Something that sort of works, sometimes, are Educational Assistants. They are teacher-lite people who go around class to class and basically give the teacher a break from the difficult student, so they can actually teach.