At first I could not figure out from the article what's so inherently bad about large school districts. The author is pretty vague about it, concerned about "bureaucracy" and some nebulous feeling from parents: "parents and taxpayers feel they have no ability to influence them." But what exactly are these supposedly disenfranchised parents trying unsuccessfully to achieve? These voices that aren't being heard: what are they saying? The author doesn't even hint at it until deep within the text:
> Public schools are valuable not only because they teach young people reading or job skills but because they enable communities to pass their values on to the next generation.
Uh oh.. Here we go... I'm not going to put words in the author's mouth, and he deftly avoids actually talking in specifics about what these guys want, but we've all heard it before. All you have to do is go to Youtube and search "school board meeting argument" and you'll get to hear rant after rant from that side's best and brightest. This is a pretty sneaky submarine article for vouchers, pubic funding for religious schools, religious homeschooling, and the sugar-coated, more marketable "School Choice" label they're using these days. Large school districts are accountable to a broader, more diverse population, and subsequently aren't as vulnerable to being captured by a small local enclave of fundies.
What exactly is wrong with school choice and religious schooling? I went to a private religious school for K-12… no violence, no teenage pregnancies, and I ended up at a top research university and in solid career. My parents weren’t wealthy and used whatever money they could find to keep me out of a failing public school system and I am grateful (although not religious, which they don’t appreciate too much :)
Why shouldn’t parents be allowed to take their child’s portion of the property taxes we all pay to go to the school of their choice? Why is choice acceptable in almost every other aspect of society, but not when it comes to K-12 education?
The answer is entrenched interests - teachers unions wanting to protect their earnings, time off and pensions… bureaucrats protecting their power and pensions… and of course the anointed who think they know better than everyone else how other people’s children should be educated.
Vouchers are the answer. Convert all public schools to parent-teacher coops and let them compete in an open market with charters and private schools… some will be selective, others will be lottery, others still may give preference to locals… the goal would be for the failures to be removed from the system so something better can take its place. Have states set standards, but then let the people roam free.
I have no doubt that out of the thousands of religious schools out there, there are some that provide an objectively great, fact-based education. Just like I have no doubt that out of the millions of parents who want to send their kids to religious schools, there are some that want to do it for strictly secular, "education-quality" reasons. And when the miracle happens and these two combine, you're going to see a great outcome like yours. These are outliers.
The majority of parents who advocate against public schooling [edit: in America] are objecting to their public schools on ideological or religious grounds, not on the quality of the education it provides. And the majority of schools these parents run to with voucher money are going to teach their kids exactly the ideology they want. Educationally stunted young-earth creationists growing up to make sure their kids are educationally stunted young-earth creationists, too. That's not a good end result for society, and not one that a constitutionally-limited government should be funding or promoting.
Working in tech, I'm exposed the occasional parent who talks about sending their kids to private school, in order to give the kids an advantage towards getting into Stanford, or as prep for future pre-med degrees. These few are not the parents I'm talking about.
>The majority of parents who advocate against public schooling [edit: in America] are objecting to their public schools on ideological or religious grounds, not on the quality of the education it provides. And the majority of schools these parents run to with voucher money are going to teach their kids exactly the ideology they want. Educationally stunted young-earth creationists growing up to make sure their kids are educationally stunted young-earth creationists, too. That's not a good end result for society, and not one that a constitutionally-limited government should be funding or promoting.
It's easy to make the argument against charter schools when the "majority" of people supposedly using them are using it for "bad" reasons, but what if the situation were reversed? Would you be pro charter schools in a jurisdiction where the public school system is shoving young-earth creationism down student's throats or refusing to teach sex-ed? Does your support for charter schools hinge on whether they're being used to teach "bad" things to kids, or do you believe whoever has political control over the school system should be able to dictate what kids are taught and parents cannot opt out?
> It's easy to make the argument against charter schools when the "majority" of people supposedly using them are using it for "bad" reasons, but what if the situation were reversed?
I don't think that's a persuasive argument. You are assuming a (by your own admission) hypothetical situation which is different from where we are now, and ask "But if our situation is different, would your position change?" Well, of course it will. Would you rather want people to keep their positions when the situation changes?
Besides, if the kind of people who'd teach creationism get hold of the government, they wouldn't give a damn about what their predecessors thought of public education. Nobody's going to say "I was planning to teach the nation's kids that the earth is 6,000 years old, but my neighbors fought for the rights of parents to teach their kids that the earth is 6,000 years old, which showed me the error of my ways."
>I don't think that's a persuasive argument. You are assuming a (by your own admission) hypothetical situation which is different from where we are now, and ask "But if our situation is different, would your position change?" Well, of course it will. Would you rather want people to keep their positions when the situation changes?
This is less of an argument for charter schools and more of a line of questioning to figure out the motivation behind people's stances. Are people against charter schools because they think other people's kids won't be taught the stuff they want, or do they believe the state should have supremacy over what can be taught using public dollars, regardless of the content?
Public school standards are set and enforced state-wide, so in order for that scenario to happen, the whole state in which I lived would have to have found a way to dodge the establishment clause. There's no chance my local community could start teaching young-earth creationism and not instantly find themselves in court. So that question remains hypothetical. But let's say I suddenly lived somewhere like Iran, where the state schooling was strictly religious-based: I'd be doing whatever I could to GTFO of there, not worrying about school vouchers. My opposition to charter schools and school vouchers is based on the US Constitution's first amendment, and isn't relevant in a place without that protection.
Upthread you argued that small school districts are "vulnerable to being captured by a small local enclave of fundies." Here you argue that such a thing is impossible, that state-wide standards and the first amendment would prevent it from ever happening. Which is it?
School districts are way too small. We need one school district for the whole state. No, you may not keep tax dollars local. School district taxes should be distributed state wide.
Remember, the federal government sets the legal drinking age at 21. Are you going to argue this is a bad thing because the federal government could in theory force states to allow drinking at the age of nine?
If the federal government forces teaching creationism, we have bigger problems. If a state wants to receive federal education dollars, it must behave. Simple as that.
School districts are a vestige of our racially segregated past and unfit for tomorrow's children.
What is being referred to as ""good"" in this thread is simply science, aka the scientific method of testing theories and taking what can be proven and cross-validated, and applying it to everything.
When people talk about taking their kids out of the public school system based on the ideologies- they mean evolution, possibly "contraceptives work", and maybe even CRT which just validates that racism existed throughout the entire history of the United States, eg disliking how schools teach "the Civil War was about states rights over owning slaves", the HIV/AIDS epidemic was a colossal failure of US policymaking, and that racism didn't end somewhere between the 70's and the 90's.
>Why shouldn’t parents be allowed to take their child’s portion of the property taxes we all pay to go to the school of their choice?
AFAIK the concern is that the charter schools will have their pick of "good" students, and all the "bad" students would be forced to languish in whatever shitty schools that are responsible for the remaining students. The "bad" students also tend to cost more per pupil (eg. because they have special needs and therefore need more qualified teachers), so slicing the student population this way will benefit the "good" students to the detriment of "bad" students.
That's the theory. What I've actually seen here (where many charters exist with public schools) is that charters actually increase the number of "good" kids in public schools. This is because without charters, parents will just stay clear of a bad area entirely. With charters, many parents will put their kids in the local public school early on, increasing the number of "good" kids that go their. They eventually will pull things out as the school systems problems increase as kids grow, but there seems to be "good" students willing to stay in the system later and later.
It's a slow improvement, but it's at least an improvement. As I said, without charters the "good" kids leave the system entirely, and these local schools never get better.
But the other thing to point out is that it's unfair to simply treat "good" students as commodities to spend on "bad" students and neglect "good students" educational needs (and this happens much too often, from what I've seen). For instance, I've seen a special needs student here get a full time teacher just for them (in addition to their regular teacher), which is great. But then advanced students who aren't learning anything because they already know everything on the curriculum can't even get a teacher to address their educational needs for an hour or two a week.
"I am so, so tired of socialists who admit that the current system is a helltopian torturescape, then argue that we must prevent anyone from ever being able to escape it. Who promise that once the last alternative is closed off, once the last nice green place where a few people manage to hold off the miseries of the world is crushed, why then the helltopian torturescape will become a lovely utopia full of rainbows and unicorns. If you can make your system less miserable, make your system less miserable! Do it before forcing everyone else to participate in it under pain of imprisonment if they refuse! Forcing everyone to participate in your system and then making your system something other than a meat-grinder that takes in happy children and spits out dead-eyed traumatized eighteen-year-olds who have written 10,000 pages on symbolism in To Kill A Mockingbird and had zero normal happy experiences - is doing things super, super backwards!" https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-cult-o...
Just to spell it out some more for any other readers: this is the same reason you want (for example) a large health insurance pool, including young healthy people who don't need that insurance. The idea is to have the healthy/privileged/lucky/etc help the less fortunate ones, at any given moment, to the benefit of everyone in the longer term.
There's a necessary tension between individual choices/freedoms and a system like that, though. "Good of the one vs. good of the many," and soforth.
How much do the “good” students help the “bad” students compared to the bad students harming the good students by disrupting classes, bringing violence to the school, or otherwise slowing down learning?
People who can afford to do so will already put their kids in private school or select good school districts. All that’s left in the others are poor kids who want to learn but are at the mercy of kids who don’t.
This is exactly the issue that drives folks from "bad schools." The inability of those schools to control disruptive students.
If public schools were permitted to prevent the harms of disruptive students from impacting classroom management by informing parents, "You child is no longer welcome in our classroom, you are required to find someone who will put up with them" and handing them a voucher; then I strongly suspect we would learn that the quality increased and the number of disruptive students went down as parents were forced to deal with the costs those students had imposed on us.
There's also a large spectrum of "bad" kids, and a lot of the time the "bad" students educational needs aren't being met, either. For instance, there are, as you said, kids who are violent and disruptive and the answer might not be to expose them to more students but to remove them from the student body entirely and get them into a specialized program focused on trying to improve the emotional problems the kid has.
There are other "bad" students which might not be a problem, but it's clear that the efforts to educate them are a waste[1]:
> In the last four years, France’s son passed three classes, failed 22 and was late or absent 272 days, the teen’s transcript shows.
**
> France’s son has a 0.13 GPA, which traditionally places a student near the bottom of their class. But in his case, it put him 62nd out of 120, which would indicate a wider-spread academic performance issue going on at the school.
You can't just drop some good kids into this failing system and expect students like that to suddenly do well.
I think people should reconsider trade schools, including ones that start at relatively young ages. Include an opportunity to earn money at a young age. Just paying teachers to teach kids like that classes that they keep failing doesn't help the kids or anyone else.
There's a stage of puberty boys go through where it would work better to give them a whole schedule of Shop Class/Gym/Work-study, or similar for that year. They're re-learning how to control and move their growth spurt body and re-learning how to think with the suddenly increased Testosterone level.
Tracking folks earlier would also probably help. A lot of my peers growing up worked 4 hours of their school day their senior year, those guys all own homes way before my college bound peers did.
This is an intensely personal choice. I know people who automatically reject public schools because they consider them all low quality. I remember I saw a rude store customer say "They must have went to public school." after an employee made a math error. The devout choose Catholic schools because of values education sometimes even if they have to pay tuition. Some have to enroll their kids in public school because they feel going to a school with a normal cross section of the community is preparation for real life (and especially not a gender segregated school). Some want their kids to attend a racially and economically diverse school even if quality suffers, because their think a good student can achieve in even a mediocre school. Or vice versa they value diversity but not as much as the best schools and those are typically with above average household income and usually <15% or even <10% racial minorities.
> How much do the “good” students help the “bad” students compared to the bad students harming the good students by disrupting classes, bringing violence to the school, or otherwise slowing down learning?
I don't think the parent poster is making a diversity argument here (ie. having "bad" students alongside "good" students enriches the experience for everyone involved). He's more making an argument that a society should engage in redistribution from the "healthy/privileged/lucky/etc" to the "less fortunate ones".
I'm not sure what gave you the impression that I support putting "bad" students alongside "good" students, which is what I presume you mean by "redistribute misfortune". My last comment is specifically denies this (ie. "having "bad" students alongside "good" students"), and "redistribution" straightforwardly implies redistribution in resources/money.
The issue with compelled school is that it creates forced riders, a problem very rarely addressed. At what point does society end and individual rights begin? People demand marriage rights even when marriage is an institution of the state. I don't see why school choice is the particular line at which the "good" of the many should now be given consideration, despite education being as personal a choice as whom one marries.
> it creates forced riders, a problem very rarely addressed
Yes, I think that's the idea. I don't think it's inherently a "problem", though [1]. Lots of good things in society have this same pattern. I pay taxes for the fire department, but have never had a fire myself. Compare to the highly-problematic privatized fire departments of years past. Lots of examples in that vein.
A movie quote comes to mind: "When he reached the New World, Cortéz burned his ships. As a result, his men were well-motivated."
There is something to be said for the power of a "we're all in it together" mentality, whether forced or not.
Maybe that makes me a communist, I don't know (:
> At what point does society end and individual rights begin?
Great question. I imagine the answer varies by person, by culture and sub-culture, by time, and by many other factors. I wonder if someone has done work in quantifying where to draw that line. For instance, with the fire department example, some private ones do still exist, mostly in rural areas, where there's less risk of a fire from one neighbor endangering the next one. But in more crowded areas, such as cities, the "forced rider" approach is far superior. There're probably some formulas that could describe that trade-off.
[1] Aside: I was unfamiliar with the term "forced riders", so I'm going off of the Wikipedia page[2]; not sure if there is some inherent negative association with the term in typical usage.
And then eventually public education would die completely and then, eventually, vouchers would dry up for certain, um, classes of people, so it would be difficult for certain people to obtain any success at all because they would get zero education.
> Why shouldn’t parents be allowed to take their child’s portion of the property taxes we all pay to go to the school of their choice?
The same reason you can’t opt out of paying for roads on streets you don’t use. The obvious and immediate result would be that poor communities would have shittier roads than wealthy ones, beyond the point of which that is already the case.
Thants not an accurate description of how vouchers work. Tax revenue still gets redistributed and split on a per student basis just like it would otherwise.
The real difference is the level of parental engagement and support.
School districts want to retain good students & parents for the exact same reasons those people want to leave.
Rich students are dragged down poor students & parents, but poor students are dragged up good students and parents.
There is clearly a winner and loser to the arrangement, but it isn't because the school gets less tax revenue per student.
It would be more accurate if some citizens were doing additional road repair and cleaning outside of the government, and other citizens were digging potholes in their free time.
Anecdatum: I have talked with a parent of fraternal twins who went to Success Academy. One twin did well academically. One twin struggled. The latter was managed out by Success Academy.
That's the core issue. Are schools public goods or private goods? Considering property taxes as user fees or de facto tuition definitely falls on the private goods side.
In any public school, there's a segment of parents who were highly involved. They ran the fundraisers, volunteered on campus, and would probably raise hell if there were scandal or underperforming teachers.
Conversely, you've got other contingents that could care less what happens in the classroom as long as Junior makes the sportsball team, or solely see it as state-funded daycare. They're not contributing, they're barely even keeping tabs on the school.
If you offer a "better" school (private, charter, or even public-magnet), that's a huge lure for the "involved" parents. The default public school loses its unofficial support, causing a death spiral, as performance becomes poor enough that even indifferent parents take notice and flee. What does that mean for the kids who are there, typically for reasons beyond their control.
Even with vouchers, you can't force people to make good choices. Many people will choose the 'default' local school because they don't know how to shop for it, or it's the only choice which fits into their transport and economic constraints.
I also suspect from a social perspective, "school choice" is counterproductive. Some parents explicitly use the option to "protect their kids from dangerous ideas", and it's not usually because they're providing a higher-quality alternative outside the campus. "Selective" schools are also a great way to ensure the kids don't get exposed to kids of diverse backgrounds and social classes.
educating children is a collective good for society, not a service provided only to deserving children with rich parents. taxes pay for collective things that we need as a society, like roads, health care, sanitation, and educating the next generation.
if you want to send your kid to a private school, that's okay, you should have that choice. but you should not get to choose to stop paying taxes just because you've made that choice. deciding to opt out of paying taxes is not an option you get in any other aspect of society.
Only in your utopia do things work "as they should".
Private, for-profit schools and religious nuts teaching Noah's Ark as "history" ruin the fundamental tenants of public schooling: that everyone, regardless of socioeconomic background gets what everyone else gets.
Without maintaining that premise and spending equally per pupil, then it's the haves vs. the havenots.
Public school teachers get paid peanuts. My step sister is involved with special ed and is on food stamps.
I'm sorry, but your opinion is worse than invalid, it's dangerously ignorant.
All schools impart ideology of one kind or another. Now, I agree I don't want fundamentalist/cultist schools, but let's not pretend that [secular] schools only impart academics --it's not your little house on the prairie one-room school. In every country, state, city and town schools impart the prevailing ideology whatever that may be in the particular locale.
What's wrong is that you're immediately labeled and assumptions are made, just like the parent poster did. No effort to get to know you, your situation, or the context.
Also, they explicitly want to control and indoctrinate your kids. If you fight that, you are gaslighted.
I'll put this bluntly. Society is trying to limit the number of kids who grow up taught fringe beliefs like evolution is a myth, white people shouldn't marry black people, and there was no holocaust. Vouchers... don't solve for that.
If I do not have children, does that mean that I would not contribute to anyone’s education? It would be great for us childless people.
There are a lot of things in our society that we just do not have a choice on.
- many can’t choose who’s roads they drive on
- many can’t choose who provides their electricity
- many can’t choose who provides their Internet
If we’re advocating for school choice based on the fact that we can choose some things, or we should be able to choose, it would stand to reason that we should also advocate for choice in all the things we consume.
We have the assumption that privatization would improve circumstances. In a lot of cases privatizing produces worse outcomes. America’s multi-payer multi-provider healthcare system has produced the worst health outcomes at the highest cost in the industrialized world. We need to recognize privatization and competition as a social tool, and know when to use it.
There are issues with the school system. Perhaps unions and bureaucrats have too much power. I’m not convinced that radically changing our education system is the right choice for everyone.
> you'll get to hear rant after rant from that side's best and brightest.
Nothing endears me to school choice more than hearing this kind of condescension and dismissiveness towards people who want what is best for their children.
School choice exemplifies the worst of our hyper individualistic culture. Yes, it would help the children of the hyper involved parents, but the remaining children stuck in the public schools would have far worse outcomes, and guess what, they need to contribute to society too. Creating a society that doesn't look out for those who need the most help is not a path to success.
If you dismiss the concerns of wide swaths of parents about how their kids are being educated, but you also want to forbid them from taking their business elsewhere, you're basically saying they should be confined to an institution that doesn't care about them.
The other kids are still paid to be educated, using the per-pupil funds that are allotted to those children.
What you are saying is that the per-pupil funds allotted to the child who is no longer in public school must still go to the public school, even if that public school system has alienated the parents to the point that the kids are gone. There is no accountability in that, just a license to dismiss the concerns of people who are upset or dissatisfied.
Also private school is too expensive for many people. It shouldn't be only rich people who get to make that choice.
I was a libertarian in college, in part because of these arguments. And the thing that put the sour taste in my mouth and made me swear it off forever was when I realized that “school choice” and “laboratories of democracy” weren’t about letting each state try a radical new education theory and see if it worked, it was about providing cover for people who wanted to propagate religious views through education.
If a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged, and a liberal is a conservative who has gone to prison, then a socialist is a libertarian who’s been to a school board meeting.
>Large school districts are accountable to a broader, more diverse population, and subsequently aren't as vulnerable to being captured by a small local enclave of fundies.
If the larger district is more diverse, then wouldn't forcing a one-size-fits-all solution on its inhabitants be worse than allowing individual communities to choose solutions tailored to their diverse needs?
Dear god no. The proposed cap is on 10k students, which is roughly the size of one high school with its feeder schools (we're talking about breaking up large school districts, so individual schools are going to be on the larger side). That's not something on the level of "this is going to create inefficiencies" so much as "this is going to utterly destroy things."
The problem with hyperlocalism is that, since the number of constituents is so small, one angry person with a megaphone can throw a race, letting them act as a petty dictator. There's already too many petty wannabe dictators running around school board meetings right now, and encouraging more isn't going to help things. Of course, I assume this is entirely the point, which makes me wonder what the author's failed crusade against his large school district was about. Transgender bathrooms? Critical race theory? Litter boxes? Teaching evolution?
(Also, I take issue with the characterization that the largest school districts tend to be the lowest-performing--my experience, looking at the list of largest school districts, is that they tend to be, well, average.)
New Jersey has a zillion small townships. Each jurisdiction needs their own bureaucracy and politicians and sometimes own police department. This is a big part of why property taxes are usually >$10,000/yr over there. What local government is going to vote to dissolve themselves and merge to deliver more efficient shared services?
Being able to deal mostly with first-line managers because a township is small is worth a premium.
I can call my mayor-- he met with our cub scout den last fall. I can find the police chief if I want. I can speak to the deciders on the school board or in the administration.
Yes, it's expensive but there's delightful responsiveness and accountability in exchange for the sticker price.
High school is a bit under a third of school years in the US, so that's a high school of about 3000 (which is how big my high school was, for example).
Too many high paid super intendents who have very little impact education. At least in Oklahoma. Yukon, Piedmont and Atoka (smallish towns) have SIs making 180k which is absurd salary for this state.
Pretty sure the author means that big school districts are too big. My county, total population less than the proposed 40,000 student line, has at least 5 school districts (and this is typical in most of Michigan).
I imagine the underlying idea is that people shouldn't have to pay taxes for kids that are a little further away. Or maybe that crank parents arguing crank causes is super productive and they should have lots of forums to do it in.
(we have relatively consistent standards for education, working towards attaining those standards is going to happen administratively, not by having more school boards to air grievances in front of)
> Or maybe that crank parents arguing crank causes is super productive and they should have lots of forums to do it in.
Yep, it's that. The author is not arguing in good faith (IMHO), and is mad that crank causes can't easily subvert a school district, if the school district is sufficiently large enough to resist it. The big tell is that the author won't actually list what "community values" or "will of citizens" they think are missing in these democratically-elected school district boards (because if they admitted it honestly, it would be immediately obvious why districts resist it)
And this isn't just a thought-piece, this is a real battle happening at the local level in Michigan right now, during the past election, something like 60% of the candidates for each random district are that district's crazy cranks from school board meetings, intentionally running in bad faith, just to push minority-held crazy religious/political-extremist beliefs onto children via the school board). Districts can't kick them out of the meetings, if they are on the board themselves.
To pick on just a single thing: this article highlights a handful of eye-popping figures for per-student spending in larger districts, but it never actually establishes that these comparisons are meaningful.
NYC, for example, spends an extraordinary amount per-student on paper. But a lot of that is pension obligations and other spending that (1) can't be cut, and (2) costs less in overhead in larger districts. It's not clear that other districts uniformly include their pension contributions in their student funding numbers.
Edit: To qualify: from casual searching, it seems like a lot of municipalities include teachers as a bucket in their larger civil service pension budget line.
Everyone's got an opinion about education. Those are free. Evidence? We don't need no steenkin' evidence!
"A movement to standardize and professionalize K-12 education began in the Progressive Era. Consolidation may have accomplished some of its goals, but America’s largest districts today tend to be among the lowest-performing."
Especially never mind The Journal of Educational Research [https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/vjer20] The experts at the Wall Street Journal will be fair and balanced. This year, size is the problem.
"I been to school myself and I don't need them pointy-heads to tell me what's wrong."
The size is the problem when your a private/charter shill, this dude has written books about it lol "The Urban School System of the Future: Applying the Principles and Lessons of Chartering (2012)." Step 1. break up large school districts, Step 2. open up charter/private schools, Step 3. collect tax money for 2-3 years while providing no educational value and shut down before any mandatory education minimums kick in. Step 4. Repeat steps 2-3
After getting a degree in Ed., I taught 9-12 science and math (5 preps each day) for 3 years (those poor kids) before I ran away screaming.
Of course, YMMV. The background of 'my' district superintendant (an elected position) was that he had been a Colonel in the Army. He made damn sure I arrived by 7:30 a.m. each day.
One thing not getting mentioned here is the outsized influence large districts have on the broader education market. A contract with a huge district like LAUSD or CPS can be worth millions, and often these go to large incumbents because they have the resources to basically lobby these districts to accept them. Their motivations for choosing a product then become largely political as opposed focused on efficacy.
Smaller districts often look (erroneously in my opinion) to these large districts to set an example of the “right” approach and adopt the same products.
This is how you end up with monoliths like Pearson and McGraw Hill making shitty products that teachers hate but schools continue to pay gobs of money for. And innovation is stifled because that money doesn’t go to better products from companies that can’t afford a giant lobbying arm/don’t have a 20yr relationship with the superintendent.
> Smaller districts often look (erroneously in my opinion) to these large districts to set an example of the “right” approach and adopt the same products.
When they have teachers driving Teslas and BMWs, it probably looks quite appealing.
I can’t read the article but it makes sense that the school districts are too big as they’re a function of county and city level bureaucracy, proportional to size.
One fact about schools is that special Ed kids require far more money per student than so called regular kids.
You combine this with the fact that those who have kids with needs will correctly advocate for their kids vocally and the issue is very salient, you get more politics around the issue resulting in more people and larger districts.
Your particular concern about this “issue” will likely align with whether or not you think cities should be large and have commensurately large governments.
Chicago Public Schools, one of the biggest districts in the nation, has an enormous department for special ed (Office of Diverse Learner Supports and Services). They are utterly incompetent. They have been sued again and again. They are staffed by arrogant, pompous bureaucrats lording over their little fiefdoms. They are bound to their rule books and could not care less about whether the rules apply to an individual student.
They are so incompetent, and have been sued so many times, that they are currently under the supervision of the state board of ed pursuant to a consent decree. It's likely that I will have them in court in the coming year.
Big buys you nothing. A single teacher who knows what they're doing can make all the difference. More bureaucrats add nothing.
> They are staffed by arrogant, pompous bureaucrats lording over their little fiefdoms.
This is fundamentally the problem, and is unavoidable in large organizations. As a bureaucracy grows, it becomes more concerned with perpetuating itself than working on its purported mission. You see it in large companies, large nonprofits, large churches, large governments, and large school districts to name a few.
A small district is also going to be incentivized to spend those resources more wisely. And even large districts with the best intentions end up choked by bureaucracy. Better to have many small districts than a few big ones IMO.
EDIT: When I say "small" I mean relative to huge, metropolitan school districts with many thousand students per grade. I'm not advocating for all districts to be reduced to rural midwestern town sizes.
Maybe a small (organizationally speaking), specialized school district for students who need this special accomodation? Physcially, this could overlap the districts that provide services for normal students.
I'm unconvinced that mainstreaming special-needs students in regular classrooms is the best thing for them.
I can imagine a scenario where these problems could be addressed by the individuals facing a situation like that and working with other individuals to come up with a workable solution, without establishing a large bureaucracy.
No way. Small schools sure; small districts no way.
Smaller districts don’t have the overhead funding to be effective. Modern schools need technology. A district with 1000 kids doesn’t have the money to maintain competent staff or hire competent third parties.
When I say "small" I don't mean "tiny". But past a certain size things start breaking down.
Layers of management get introduced to keep the top from being overwhelmed, but the funding doesn't scale to account for that. As it grows, those increasing layers of management create a disconnect between the top and bottom. With the scale comes a need for larger projects, but the disconnect makes it hard to get those most out of those projects. And as the district grows to include more and more students, it becomes harder for the needs of smaller demographics within that student body to get represented.
My wife is a teacher for a large metro school district. I hear stories day after day of how her and her coworkers get handcuffed by a highly bureaucratic school district and can't get the support they need to help students succeed in the classroom. Decisions get made regarding funding, resources, and curriculum at the top from people who she never meets. These decisions are often made to cut costs to make room for growing admin needs and controversial district projects.
I work for one of the largest corporations in the US and I see plenty of bureaucracy within it, but the focus on maximizing profits at least keeps the company focused on making effective business decisions. The only thing that motivates schools is school board elections and the good will of its employees. The larger a district gets, the less power individual employees to improve things and the less representative a school board is of its constituents.
By far the most successful school districts in my state are the "medium" sized ones, with around 500 to 1000 students per grade. The districts that are much smaller or larger than that tend to have fewer resources available per student.
Usually those “medium” schools are suburban districts with engaged parents and cash. It’s a different universe with its own set of problems.
My sister was a teacher in a small urban school district. She had 50 kids enrolled in her 1st grade and never saw more than 20-25. Half of the parents were <25 and a ~6 were in jail for some part of the year. She would go shopping clearance sales after Christmas to buy winter coats to give to students. Some kids weren’t potty trained. Most had unstable living arrangements.
Bigger districts see both of those worlds at scale. NYC has 1M students and probably 30-40k in the conditions I described. That scale drives specialization, policy, etc.
What are the redistribution methods that should be put in place to avoid poorer districts to be at even a worse disadvantage than when they're mixed up with other level of income?
The author makes no argument that educational outcomes would improve or costs would decrease with his plan, and brushes off such concerns as secondary. My priorities and the author's priorities for public schools are different. Furthermore I find it ironic that the author cites bureaucracy as a problem with large school districts but the purposed plan would produce a larger overall number of school administrations and bureaucrats as more school districts are created.
It makes sense to have roughly sized but limited district, school, and classroom to optimize between the collective economies-of-scale on one side and the maximum number of students any classroom or district can administer in an effective manner on the other. Too few: it's too expensive per pupil; too many (~ 24+) in a classroom, the quality of education suffers and too many in a district also leads to inefficiencies and scaling issues. Los Angeles is the worst, by far: 560k students. Ridiculous. That's the population of a large city. Good luck forming a local hobby club for the kids with other parents and with the school's blessing.
Scale investment by managing fewer students and give school administrators best practices and benchmarks. It's far easier for large districts to use large piles of money inefficiently than for districts managing fewer pupils.
The other thing is to mandate parental involvement. Without this, there is unlikely to be a good outcome. It also implies that parents need some sort of paid leave and/or scheduling to be involved in their kids' education.
In Maryland and Virginia, school districts tend to go by county or by county-equivalent city. Fairfax County, Virginia, and Howard and Montgomery Counties in Maryland have many excellent schools. If you drive a couple of hours north to Pennsylvania, the school districts tend to be much smaller, sometimes just an elementary school or two, a middle school, and a high school. I don't think that most of those high schools are competitive with (for example) TJ in Fairfax or Blair, Wootton or Richard Montgomery in Maryland.
There is no reason you can't have a top-notch small school district, but I'll bet that it is in a very prosperous end of the state. (New Jersey has the same mania for multiplication of local government, including school districts; some of those districts must be outstanding.)
NYC Charter stats: 15% of NYC public school students attend public charter schools. 9% of the students are multilingual learners, 18% have IEPs, 80% of students are economically disadvantaged.
This is just classic right-wing propaganda. Larger districts are more redistributive, smaller districts mean rich neighborhoods keep their own money. 100% on-brand for WSJ opinion page, and Manhattan Institute. "School choice", vouchers, etc are all core Manhattan Institute goals.
“But into the 1980s, Texas continued its notorious practice of tolerating small school districts, thus allowing affluent sections of a city to provide high quality schools for their children while poor whites, blacks, and Chicanos were obliged to tax themselves at a higher rate to provide even a minimal education. A dark leaf in modern Texas history was the state’s effort (until forbidden by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1982) to deny public school education to the children of illegal aliens— the very group Texas employers had been coaxing across the border for cheap labor for generations.” -The Book of America by Hagstrom and Peirce (1983), Page 132
Wrong. The money gets distributed from two sources: the state, and the county via property taxes. The size of the district has no impact on the money-distribution formula for either.
If a county, or a state, wants to send money to poorer areas, they can do it without regard to the organization of the school districts. Often, the formula is targeted at the student: if a school has X low-income students, then they get Y dollars.
Edit: my comment pertains to large school districts, aka city-wide or within large counties. The suburbs get organized differently.
Your comment does not apply to California, my state, and you did not qualify your statement with a given state. In California it’s acceptable and common for a district to have their own parcel taxes. See: Berkeley Unified and its BSEP parcel tax.
There’s no inherent problem. Usually opponents create hypothetical scenarios in which corrupt entities funnel money away from public schools, which is a valid concern, but isn’t an inherent property of school choice.
In theory parents gain access to a better school to enroll their kids and bad schools bleed enrollment. It's not a magic solution to under-performing schools. And when it does deliver results it does so by undermining the "public" part of public schools. It increases time and transportation costs. Some parents prefer that the local school be improved instead of replacing it. Alternatives like charter schools use selective admission. When you don't have to accept disabled, non-English speaking, or misbehaving kids it's easy to show higher test scores, graduation rates, and post-graduation outcomes. This leaves the public schools with the bottom of the barrel students. The death spiral is complete once public schools no longer enroll a cross section of the area they serve and only function as a welfare service.
Everyone wants the best for themselves and their kid. That means buying housing in the best district they can afford. Once they're in they don't want lower socioeconomic status people to move into their neighborhood or the district to annex poor areas.
School choice doesn’t deny anyone anything. With no choice you get whatever school your district is and that’s it. With school choice you can go somewhere else, but you still have the same option you had before. Nobody is being denied anything.
Parents dump the schools with teachers who are members of the union. Union has less money to pay the politicians of a certain party. Of course boards also get paid per student head, student who goes to a school that is not part of that farm (charter, private whatever..) is not bringing in the cash.
It is pretty straightforward economic self interest. I can recommend Sowell's book "Charter schools and their enemies" it lays out the setup quite well.
Literally no parent thinks “What I really want is a union busting school.” That’s not even a top 10000 concern.
Did I send my oldest kid to a charter school? Yeah, for one year. It was a bunch of Teach for America grads that warehoused the kids in front of computers for hours at a time, no PE, and sent kindergartens to detention. (Wtf?!)
So why did we choose this school? One reason: All day kindergarten. We had no idea how bad the school was actually run until like a quarter or two into it.
My son goes to a charter school. I have the exact opposite experience: small school, small class sizes, passionate teachers/administrators, strict dress and phone policies, involved parents.
There are downsides, small population = fewer extracurricular activities, with less participation (esp. sports).
All the students with uninterested parents end up in the same school have poor outcomes. These are the students that need the most help to succeed but school choice gives them the least. I don't want people like that in society, higher rates of criminality and lower useful output. Things work better when everyone works together.
> Public schools are valuable not only because they teach young people reading or job skills but because they enable communities to pass their values on to the next generation.
Uh oh.. Here we go... I'm not going to put words in the author's mouth, and he deftly avoids actually talking in specifics about what these guys want, but we've all heard it before. All you have to do is go to Youtube and search "school board meeting argument" and you'll get to hear rant after rant from that side's best and brightest. This is a pretty sneaky submarine article for vouchers, pubic funding for religious schools, religious homeschooling, and the sugar-coated, more marketable "School Choice" label they're using these days. Large school districts are accountable to a broader, more diverse population, and subsequently aren't as vulnerable to being captured by a small local enclave of fundies.