What is "school choice" in the US?

That isn't the point. I was countering your position that it isn't our problem, only the governments problem (and by extension, that the government is entirely separate from the people rather than a representative part of the people). There is no point discussing what we as individual citizens could or should do unless we're in agreement that it is something that is a problem for us to be part of doing anything about in the first place.

 

School choice means that you have some option other than your local public school. The government provides you with the funds that might have gone to the public school to make your choice of where you want your child to go.

This provides an incentive for the public schools to do better. When they are monopolies, they can get lazy. It also puts the teachers' unions on notice. They have to do a better job of teaching kids and not just worry about how much they can get out of the school boards by going on strike.

When I was young, I had to go to an unaccredited high school. Quite a few of the teaches were good, although there were a few very bad ones. The trouble was with the school building which was old and antiquated. The chemistry lab looked like the one in the Smithsonian which was labeled from the 19th century. There were no language labs for foreign languages. The school library was small and inadequate.

My parents had a choice. I could go to boarding school, which would have been a financial burden on my parents when they were just digging out of financial difficulties. Or my mother, who was a teacher, could have changed jobs and commuted to a school that was 20 miles away. That town would have let me come with her, but I could not go to that school unless she worked there.

Two years after I graduated, the high school was consolidated into a regional high school. Kids from that accredited high school have gotten into Ivy League schools. There was no way that could have happened when I was young.

 

Fortunately, here in the Flo Rid A, our taxes are capped at no more than 3% per year, and that's on the taxes, not the appraisal. The house may do what mine had done and go up by more than 300% since we bought it (and according to Zillow, after a few month decline thanks to J Powell (I hate that man!), homes in this area are on the march back up. But we bought a foreclosure, which they term an 'unqualified' sale, so the house got locked in at the lowest price it was after 2008 and before they really started rebounding, with the 3% limit, meaning we have a sweetheart deal.

We bought this house intending it to be our last, and we paid cash for it. We also put a lot into it... The AC unit had literally been stolen right off the property (wouldn't surprise me if it was the former owner, but we'll never know), it had to be painted, inside and out, and more work but then something happened that we were not at all planning for or expecting, and that is when I almost died and ended up alive but severely disabled. This house was not built with a wheelchair user in mind, AT ALL, and I am most of the time essentially confined to the living room, though if I'm really careful, I can get into the kitchen (but not into the fridge), bedroom (though out of necessity, I've been in a hospital bed in the living room, but I have improved enough that it's about time to give my real bed a shot to see if it's comfortable enough... For a loooong time I couldn't lay flat, but I'm pretty sure I can now), and the bathroom is... challenging. I have a shower chair, but that has to have a driver as there is no way for me to move myself, and my manual chair will fit, but for what purpose? I'll spare you the gory details, but suffice to say I don't need a toilet at this time.

All of that nonsense to say we may be moving soonish, and given the price increase we got here, we're giving serious look to a brand new manufactured home that can be built to spec around my needs... We can move the kitchen island a few feet farther out and away to give me room to go in there and self-serve, we can put doors in that are big enough, and a roll in shower (or perhaps a bench) with no lips to go over so I can self-service in there, too. And so forth. There are some downsides to manufactured homes, but they are not your father's (or mine) doublewide... They look just like a regular home, inside and out, and while portable (in theory, it's not at all easy), they have no wheels and it doesn't seem like you're in an RV inside. Just a regular old house. I can get the wheelchair ramp for the front door/porch, and maybe a deck with a pool out back, either traditional inground, or an in/above ground hybrid that actually has a lot of advantages over the dig a hole, pour concrete in method. Once again, we'll see. But, we get to keep our SOH cap (depending on price, but since they are so elevated here, and a manufactured is so much cheaper relatively speaking, I don't think we'll need a dime more than what we'll get out of this home for the land, septic, well, home (w/ a ton of upgrades), porches, and maybe deck and pool. We can do a 2 car garage for another $20k, but I'd rather use that money, if we have it, for the pool and park the car either in the weather, or get one of those $59 home depot carports. Yeah, yeah, it's redneck as hell, but so what... If we find the right land, we'll be hundreds of feet to the closest neighbor as a worst case. Best it could be miles!

So, a whole lot of not at all relevant information for your reading pleasure. We'll still get taxed, and depending on how much we have when the wife says she's done working, hopefully the taxes won't steal the place out from underneath us.

 

Oh I see what you mean. No, I totally agree with you on that. I just meant in terms of those who have operational control over the functions of the system.

 

Wikipedia describes the most common form of school choice in the United States as: "scholarship tax credit programs, which allow individuals or corporations to receive tax credits toward their state taxes in exchange for donations made to non-profit organizations that grant private school scholarships." So far nobody has mentioned this which is interesting.

 

Why?

 

I did not ask why religion is not taught in schools, I asked: Even if the State endorsed one religion over the others, how would this mean that people would not be free to chose a different religion?

A "primer?"

 

https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisc...based-admissions-return-sf-school-board-vote/

This school is returning to merit based admissions. Every year, they receive more applicants than available spots, and the best get in. I'd love to hear one liberal tell me how it was a good idea for this school to switch to a lottery.

 

Yes, I got that, but it's still wrong to present education of future generations as something that isn't all of our responsibilities as part of communities and society or to present government as an external force to be opposed rather than something we're all involved in and should be working in the same direction.

This is a general problem with political debate and policy these days (and probably always), that is it so often framed as what "they" should do for "my" benefit rather than what "we" should do for "our" benefit. In this case, we have people who only want to make sure their children or their school are (perceived as) successful, rather than considering how all children and all schools can be.

(My next post is going to respond to someone else doing exactly that).

 

Because it is only considering this school alone though, and focused exclusively on what is good for the school as an institution (or maybe more accurately, as a business).

Every area will have a range of children, some academically capable and some less so, some with special education needs, some with difficult living conditions, some with negligent parents etc. Regardless of what any one school does, those same children will still all exist. What the system as a whole needs to do is work towards getting each and every child to reach the best standard they're capable of, some they can best contribute to society as adults.

In general, taking capable students with natural academic abilities and attentive parents then guiding them to getting good exam grades is relatively cheap and easy. Taking students with any of the difficulties or limitations then guiding them to achieving the best results and, more importantly, getting the best education, for them is often more difficult and expensive. It's no less important though, arguably more so in many ways.

If you just have individual schools cherry-picking the students who they can easily guide to good exam results (with or without an actual good education), that leaves any other schools with the difficult and more expensive job. If there is little or no systematic recognition of that and school funding is based on raw exam success or simple per-student payments, those other schools will inevitably be unable to given their students the best possible education and won't even be able to achieve the results those students are capable of.

You can have a system that works this way, separating students on the basis of ability and needs, be that with separate schools or just separate classes (in most cases, I favour the latter) but that has to be systematic, including recognition of the cost and effort of teaching each cohort and the different measures that would represent success for them.

 

Prolly means different things in different areas. For example, prior to covid lockdowns, some states were moving to ban (or so heavily regulate as to effectively ban) homeschooling. Its also common that schools are paid for out of local property taxes, and some states offer programs (sometimes called vouchers) where people who pay for private school dont have to contribute to funding public school, while other states would have you pay for both. Its also often difficult to change schools. Someone who lives relatively close to more than one school (a common occurance in more populated areas) may prefer to send their kids to the better of the two, but if everyone did that, it wouldn't work, so they restrict it, thus forcing some kids to go to the crappy school, which makes people understandably angry.

So it can mean lotsa things.

Anecdotally, I grew up in a strangely unincorporated neighborhood squished between a major city and rich yuppie community. Both of them were vying to incorporate our neighborhood into their municipality, but we were technically not part of either. It ended up that I went to school with the yuppies, even though there was a school in the big city that was closer. Similarly, some of my friends who lived nearby ended up going to the big city school even though they lived closer to my school. The big city school was terrible, inundated with gangs, overcrowding, impoverished children with bad home lives and neglectful parents, teachers that just showed up for a paycheck... my school was one of the more highly rated schools in the nation. Turns out it was so highly rated that my 'C' average in high school was considered a 'B' average by Universities nationwide. There were a lot of people in my area that wanted their kids to go to my school but were stuck going to the inner-city school instead, and they were very unhappy about it.

The yuppie town eventually incorporated my neighborhood, and my parents property value of their home literally doubled overnight... although so did their local taxes.

 

Because if government paid for private schools, few people would go to inferior pubic schools. Did I really need to explain that?

 

But why only on a "NATIONAL basis?" By that, do you mean federal legislation?

 

Is that what I did though?

Yeah, but people will inevitably put their kids first.

 

That's how it came across when you said that this is the governments problem, not the publics problem. That is drawing the hard line between the government and the people (all too common in general) and presenting this as something "they" need to fix rather than "we" need to fix. Even if it wasn't intentional, I think that is there as a subconscious idea (again, not specifically for you, it is a common thing) that needs to be acknowledged and addressed if we're going to best address any kind of fundamental social policies like this.

Exactly, and that is why we need systems to balance that, and prevent children suffering because their parents don't have the power, resources, drive or simple existence from being pushed aside. It's really another case of the flawed division, where the "I" who only cares about their own children is actually part of the "we" who should care about all children in our society. Because human nature leans towards the former, the system needs to lean towards the latter.

 

So your suggestion is that a parent should keep their kid in a pile of trash school for the good of everyone, not putting their kid first?

 

Not necessarily, but regardless of what they do (and can do) for their own child, all the parents, and the non-parents, and the parents of children in other schools should also be working together to make the school better (or in the worst case scenario, have it replaced).

If the school was on fire, would you help get all the children and teachers out safely, try to control the fire and call the emergency services or would you just rush in to rescue your child alone and then leave? Other than the immediacy, I don't see any moral difference between that and a school failing it's students academically.

 

That's what we've been doing, but apparently it's wasn't equitable enough.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/to-increase-equity-school-districts-eliminate-honors-classes-d5985dee

Some public schools are eliminating faster paced, more advanced courses in the name of equity. It's a disservice to the students who could do well in those classes, and it's done because in the name of "equity". Kids feel bad when faced with more advanced students, and some districts don't offer those courses. So what? I pay more than the median US income to put my kids in a private school, and things like this are why.

 

In a lot of states, school choice is the choice of public schools as well, including charter schools. The new wrinkle to school choice now is allowing public funds to be paid to parents, directly or indirectly, to allow them to send their kids to private schools, namely, religious education. I am all for parents who want to do that. Their choice, their responsibility. But not use government funds to do so in the process. That does not help public schools in any way, it destroys them.

Want to help public schools, get 85% of the parents in that school district to attend the monthly or bimonthly school board meetings? Get 85% of the parents to actually do some good honest research with their kids on what they are learning and why. Most don't, and will simply react after they receive an email from someone using all the right buzzwords to get them even more agitated without knowing all the facts. Most do not even go to Parent-Teacher school conferences to discuss what their child is doing if there needs to be an improvement, or even ask teachers honest questions. Very few parents will even help be chaperones for school or class tours with their children. But the problem we have is an increase in problem parents who think their child does no wrong and should be the head cheerleader because the parents have "connections" and so forth. Of 88 students, it used to be divided up into 4 classes where out of the 88, there was maybe one or two problem children, and parents. Now out of the 88, it is divided into 3 classes, now with 7 to 8 problem students and parents. This is more societal than political. And until the societal aspect is addressed, it will fall even into private schools

 

There are certainly kneejerk over-reactions in that direction too, but just having honour courses and the like isn't doing what I was talking about. It is at least as important to have similar support for those who aren't naturally academic or have specific difficulties holding them back. The problem is that schools aren't measured on getting failing students to an average result and certainly not on non-academic improvements they make to a students life and prospects. They're measured of getting exceptional results, so that is all they focus on (even if they don't want to).

So your kids are more likely to succeed in school (by the current measures of success at least) but if few other kids get that opportunity, the wider society they'll grow up in to will still be a mess.

 

I don't support national federal anything. I was saying that doing it on a national basis would put public schools out of business. Since federal government doesn't run an educational system it has no business messing with education in any way. But, as we know, about 70% of what federal government does is beyond its appropriate role.

 

And if it were done on a State basis, it would put public schools in that State out of business?

 

No I would go back. So are you suggesting that parents, after removing their kid from the pile of turd school, should go back to help improve the school?

 

I was lucky enough to attend private schools from first grade through college.

The responsibility for education is in the states not in federal government. It is in the states. Most people supporting school choice think it will provide competition that could improve public education. Government is always better when it is closer to the people. Even Australians would agree with that, yes?

 

That depends on their particular circumstances. I'm just saying that they should still consider it partially their problem as a member of that community and if they are able to contribute towards improving the school one way or another, they should, regardless of whether their own children were ever or are still students there. As I said elsewhere, even if they're successful in improving their own childrens' prospects, the community and wider society they grow up in to will still suffer from a generally failing education system, so even from a total self-interest position, it makes sense.