NationStates

Wallenburg wrote:

Internationalist Bastard wrote:But all their funding is still public. Without money they can't get better

No amount of money will help if schools keep using terrible teaching methods.

American schools have a sub-standard model yes.
That is another issue.

Taihei Tengoku wrote:

Genivaria wrote:I think 'school choice' is code for 'budget cuts for public schools'.
So no.

How much money public schools get doesn't matter.

Quote me where it says that, please.

Petrolheadia wrote:

Internationalist Bastard wrote:Did you go to a low income school?

Yes, I did.

The teachers were good; it's just that lower-class people don't always have education as their top priority.

That is true. But how would removing funding help? You should remember the cramped classes, outdated textbooks, and the waiting your turn for a test cuz you need to borrow a pencil. How does paying teachers less and buying new materials less often and in lower stock, help in any way

Internationalist Bastard wrote:

Petrolheadia wrote:Yes, I did.

The teachers were good; it's just that lower-class people don't always have education as their top priority.

That is true. But how would removing funding help? You should remember the cramped classes, outdated textbooks, and the waiting your turn for a test cuz you need to borrow a pencil. How does paying teachers less and buying new materials less often and in lower stock, help in any way

Nobody said anything about removing funding.

Wallenburg wrote:

Internationalist Bastard wrote:That is true. But how would removing funding help? You should remember the cramped classes, outdated textbooks, and the waiting your turn for a test cuz you need to borrow a pencil. How does paying teachers less and buying new materials less often and in lower stock, help in any way

Nobody said anything about removing funding.

That's often what this comes down to though. Fund public yes for vouchers to private

Wallenburg wrote:I wasn't aware this was a debate. Why would anyone oppose allowing children to go to schools outside their designated zoning?

Leaving aside people reacting along party line because they have little knowledge of what school choice is... It's fundamentally a disagreement about what funding for schools is for; educating students, or supporting public employees. The biggest opposition to school choice comes not from students, or parents but from teachers unions.

Wallenburg wrote:

Internationalist Bastard wrote:That is true. But how would removing funding help? You should remember the cramped classes, outdated textbooks, and the waiting your turn for a test cuz you need to borrow a pencil. How does paying teachers less and buying new materials less often and in lower stock, help in any way

Nobody said anything about removing funding.

Then what gets cut to pay for the vouchers? Because SOMETHING gets cut and usually it's the school budget.
Hell in Texas we have our schools partly paid by the fucking Texas Lotto as an excuse to funding from taxes, the overall budget went down of course.

Genivaria wrote:

Taihei Tengoku wrote:How much money public schools get doesn't matter.

Quote me where it says that, please.

The closest too it is:
This debate — How You Spend versus How Much You Spend — isn't a debate at all. Or shouldn't be.

Each depends on the other.

Farnhamia wrote:

Taihei Tengoku wrote:If it makes you feel any better the heroic polymaths who ushered in the modern world were also homeschooled then.

Einstein: a Catholic elementary school, the Luitpold Gymnasium in Munich, Argovian cantonal school (gymnasium) in Aarau, Switzerland
Nils Bohr: Gammelholm Latin School
Paul Dirac: Bishop Road Primary School and then at the all-boys Merchant Venturers' Technical College (later Cotham School)
Wolfgang Pauli: the Döblinger-Gymnasium in Vienna
Richard Feynman: Far Rockaway High School, a school in Far Rockaway, Queens, which was also attended by fellow Nobel laureates Burton Richter and Baruch Samuel Blumberg

Just to name a few.

You are listing theoretical physicists from well within the modern era. Turn the clock back a century or two.

Aclion wrote:

Wallenburg wrote:I wasn't aware this was a debate. Why would anyone oppose allowing children to go to schools outside their designated zoning?

Leaving aside people reacting along party line because they have little knowledge of what school choice is... It's fundamentally a disagreement about what funding for schools is for; educating students, or supporting public employees. The biggest opposition to school choice comes not from students, or parents but from teachers unions.

That's rather confusing. Aren't teachers paid regardless of what towns their students are from?

Genivaria wrote:

Wallenburg wrote:Nobody said anything about removing funding.

Then what gets cut to pay for the vouchers? Because SOMETHING gets cut and usually it's the school budget.
Hell in Texas we have our schools partly paid by the fucking Texas Lotto as an excuse to funding from taxes, the overall budget went down of course.

Since when were we talking about vouchers?

Taihei Tengoku wrote:

Farnhamia wrote:Einstein: a Catholic elementary school, the Luitpold Gymnasium in Munich, Argovian cantonal school (gymnasium) in Aarau, Switzerland
Nils Bohr: Gammelholm Latin School
Paul Dirac: Bishop Road Primary School and then at the all-boys Merchant Venturers' Technical College (later Cotham School)
Wolfgang Pauli: the Döblinger-Gymnasium in Vienna
Richard Feynman: Far Rockaway High School, a school in Far Rockaway, Queens, which was also attended by fellow Nobel laureates Burton Richter and Baruch Samuel Blumberg

Just to name a few.

You are listing theoretical physicists from well within the modern era. Turn the clock back a century or two.

A century or two? You mean, before the inception of the modern public school system?

Genivaria wrote:

Taihei Tengoku wrote:How much money public schools get doesn't matter.

Quote me where it says that, please.

I prefer these articles:
https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa746.pdf
https://www.cato.org/blog/public-school-spending-achievement-media-coverage

I even like what Politico had to say. Most improvements have been nominal and only for minorities. And considering their standards weren't great to begin with, it's hard to associate that with school spending when it could just as easily be simply school access.

Geilinor wrote:

MERIZoC wrote:
Draw kids from all over and bus them to randomized schools. That way you don't have racial segregation and massive inequities between the districts in the city and the suburbs.

That wouldn't be a good solution. Kids would be sitting on buses for hours and it would take valuable time away.

Sorry to break it to you, but kids already spend hours on buses.

Kenmoria wrote:

MERIZoC wrote:
Draw kids from all over and bus them to randomized schools. That way you don't have racial segregation and massive inequities between the districts in the city and the suburbs.

That seems like an extremely complex and chaotic plan which would massively increase every school's administration budget. If you take the USA then each van would have to travel kilometres just for one child living in a different state to all the others.

Where on earth did I say there should be busing across state lines?

Farnhamia wrote:

Taihei Tengoku wrote:You are listing theoretical physicists from well within the modern era. Turn the clock back a century or two.

A century or two? You mean, before the inception of the modern public school system?

It is almost like schooling isn't a cause of prosperity but its symptom :o

Petrolheadia wrote:The debate for and against school choice is a well-known one. Some say that parents should have a right to choose a school for their children, others say that it's better to make every child from a certain district go to a certain school.

And what position do you have?

Personally, I support school choice.
I think it's good for fighting inequality, as the quality of children's education wouldn't depend on the parents' ability to pay for a house in an area with good schools in such a system.

Yes, I support all sufficient educational choices including voting with one's feet. Schooling that interferes with one's education more than it facilitates it beyond an acceptable risk is worthless. It goes without saying that failed schooling is worse than no schooling if it impedes a child's learning enough to condemn them to a lifetime of impoverishment. Public school choice is a contingent solution to a systemic problem but probably a good first step in areas that are too unresponsive and inefficient to properly educate its students.

Genivaria wrote:

Petrolheadia wrote:Are there many places like this?

Besides, school choice would mean better education, with even public schools having to compete for students.

Treating education like a business instead of a national investment is not a good basis if the goal is actually educating your people.

That is rather odd statement, sure the education system needs public investment but that doesn't mean market forces cant be used to provide some information about where such investments should be made. Schools aren't going to be homogeneous entities, each of them has their idiosyncrasies which will impact the end result - we could try to control those centrally with hosts of guidelines and move the issue on to enforcement or we could take improvement factor and publicise it while allowing parents to choose the school (which they presumably will do based on aforementioned achievement factor).

Now we have students organically moving to better schools, funding going towards better schools and schools with worse systems shutting down naturally. We just need to make the transiting kids easier and give incentives for schools to take more students. Do that by giving free bus service for students and generous funding for schools combined with funding building projects for expanding schools.

Wallenburg wrote:

Aclion wrote:
Leaving aside people reacting along party line because they have little knowledge of what school choice is... It's fundamentally a disagreement about what funding for schools is for; educating students, or supporting public employees. The biggest opposition to school choice comes not from students, or parents but from teachers unions.

That's rather confusing. Aren't teachers paid regardless of what towns their students are from?

Genivaria wrote:Then what gets cut to pay for the vouchers? Because SOMETHING gets cut and usually it's the school budget.
Hell in Texas we have our schools partly paid by the fucking Texas Lotto as an excuse to funding from taxes, the overall budget went down of course.

Since when were we talking about vouchers?

.....my mistake it seems I misunderstood the topic.

Taihei Tengoku wrote:

Farnhamia wrote:A century or two? You mean, before the inception of the modern public school system?

It is almost like schooling isn't a cause of prosperity but its symptom

It's almost like you have your goalposts on wheels.

School is not designed to teach kids about how to live and work in the real world anyway. So why not let companies train the kids and spend the money on something else, like for a example in the US we could use it to build the wall between us and mexico.


Jk that would be a terrible idea parents should choose the schools their kids go to but the whole system also needs to be reworked.

Farnhamia wrote:

Taihei Tengoku wrote:It is almost like schooling isn't a cause of prosperity but its symptom :o

It's almost like you have your goalposts on wheels.

It reveals that the nightmare scenario (school choice will just lead to schooling being bought by those who can pay for them) isn't actually bad--it actually created the rather good place we are in. The merits of education are obvious to those who care, because education and its rewards are private, not public goods. Treating it like a public good is just the propaganda line for an ulterior motive of the state.

To an extent - school choice can be solid in some cases (as shown in cities like Camden where the public schools simply weren't working). However, this can sometimes have unintended consequences, such as stripping resources away from already struggling public schools.

Taihei Tengoku wrote:

Farnhamia wrote:It's almost like you have your goalposts on wheels.

It reveals that the nightmare scenario (school choice will just lead to schooling being bought by those who can pay for them) isn't actually bad--it actually created the rather good place we are in. The merits of education are obvious to those who care, because education and its rewards are private, not public goods. Treating it like a public good is just the propaganda line for an ulterior motive of the state.

Hmmm, "the propaganda line for an ulterior motive of the state." Good to know.

In a perfect world where a student in Idaho can go to a New York School in less than 10 minutes (and for free). That or boarding schools.
School choice doesn't fix bad education though. Maybe we should work on fixing that first?

Farnhamia wrote:

Taihei Tengoku wrote:It reveals that the nightmare scenario (school choice will just lead to schooling being bought by those who can pay for them) isn't actually bad--it actually created the rather good place we are in. The merits of education are obvious to those who care, because education and its rewards are private, not public goods. Treating it like a public good is just the propaganda line for an ulterior motive of the state.

Hmmm, "the propaganda line for an ulterior motive of the state." Good to know.

Are you saying that the state does not implement public education for its own benefits and interests, that which might not necessarily coincide with the interests of every individual?

Petrolheadia wrote:The debate for and against school choice is a well-known one. Some say that parents should have a right to choose a school for their children, others say that it's better to make every child from a certain district go to a certain school.

And what position do you have?

Personally, I support school choice.
I think it's good for fighting inequality, as the quality of children's education wouldn't depend on the parents' ability to pay for a house in an area with good schools in such a system.

No, it's terrible. You have to consider exactly how school choice would work and what its implications would be. Even if we accept the premise that there is a practical difference in quality between different schools, we can't just go "well you can send your children to the better schools" because allowing that changes the basic system fundamentally. Let's explore.

Schools are not black holes: you can't just keep chucking more and more pupils into them because they suffer from, actually quite strong, capacity constraints. I'm not 100% sure but I think all black holes are the same being extremely scary gravity sinks. Schools are not all the same to parents. In NZ, for instance, people rave about Auckland Grammar School but a lot of other schools, e.g. Papakura High School or Manurewa High School have very different reputations and/or experiences. Consequently, we can imagine that in a world of school choice, schools will have to be selective in who they admit. But we can also see that some schools have reputations such that they will face persistent and/or dramatic roll decline, which is disastrous by the way. And some schools have ambivalent reputations so may or may not experience roll changes.

If we assume pure school choice, we might infer that every single applicant will have an equal chance of attending a school. At popular schools, all prospective pupils would be put on a spread sheet and a computer program would be used to take a "random" sample* of the applicants that is the same size as the available intake capacity. Here no parent can contrive to make any individual child more likely to get in but you see immediately that schools have a disincentive to use such an admissions process. The reality is that to retain reputation and so roll size and so continued existence schools are grossly better served by having relatively more "intelligent" and "wealthy" pupils, who tend to do better on assessments and/or whose families can be used to generate funding for appealing trips to, say, Rome or Venice:

Has anybody been to Rome or Venice?
Florence? No. The other candidates will have been and have done courses on what they've seen. So they'll know, when they do an essay on the Church at the time of the Reformation,
that, oh, look, some silly nonsense on the foreskins of Christ will come in handy, so that their essays, unlike yours, will not be dull. They're not even bad, they're just boring. You haven't got a hope [of getting into Oxbridge].

Read more: https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.u ... y-boys-the

This why I say you have to specify how exactly you'd make school choice work, but the concept itself is seen to be flawed when we look at the non-popular schools. (And, in case you are wondering, these kinds of trips to far away places happen even in NZ where everywhere is far away, and Europe quite extremely distant.)

The problem with roll decline is that schools are funded to a greater or lesser extent by the number of pupils that they have. In NZ funding has traditionally worked in such a fashion that the number of staff a school has is proportional to the roll, with room to top up and hire more staff if the money can be found. We might wonder at the administrative incentives these create, but even when assume top to bottom schools only care about their pupils' educations the incentives still say "maintain roll size". You see schools with smaller rolls can just offer less. They cannot have as many different subjects and even in the core subjects they can't have quite as many different teachers. As a consequence, schools are hamstrung in their ability to direct their best teachers to the pupils the school thinks would best benefit from them. I have another quote from The History Boys on this point, "Strange how even the most tragic turn of events generally resolve themselves into questions about the timetable." Once a school gets small enough, though, it starts to look non-viable, even now in NZ this is true due to flaws in our system.

When you think about it, roll size can be considered an indicator of school quality. If the roll is declining that sends information to parents that other parents are dissatisfied with the school. On a practical level it also means that wee Johnny's friends are probably going to go to some other school. Hence once people start leaving a school, it enters a death spiral. You can see this phenomenon and its implications in a lot of the discussions you find about White Flight. Which brings us back to capacity.

While it is true that schools have capacity constraints, not all of them use up all their capacity. This is why it is possible for schools to enter a death spiral. After all, if we have a system where there is no room for another pupil, instituting school choice is just going to change which schools have which pupils, right? But how big is the system? In my experience? Parents are willing to send their children to schools up to, and perhaps even more than, an hour away. In other words, a big area. This means that ambivalent schools will have to compete for pupils to maintain roll size because not all of the popular schools are already completely full and there will always be at least one more school in the system that has a better reputation. The trouble is that this means using the school's budget to advertise and that money is better spent on the pupils.

And let us not get into the question of school induced traffic, the impacts of commutes and irrationality of parents (your child is actually probably better served by gaining those 2 hours of the daily commute even if it means going to a "worse" school).

tl;dr -- school choice would be a disaster, the question of how large a disaster revolves around how exactly you'd implement it.


*Computers don't actually generate properly random samples. They get very close but they do not succeed. A really random process would be time consuming as it would need physical input.