No, good schools are also a function of $ spend per pupil, which is correlated with school quality and opportunities for students. A really interesting place to study this is San Antonio v Rodriguez (1973) where in my opinion they laid the groundwork for such inequality in the US. The argument being made in that case (which the Supreme Court ruled against 5 4) is that funding schools via property taxes leads to this prolonged entrenched inequality.
The actual case is about whether the poor school system was allowed to have higher prop taxes than Texas allowed. In the details are the inequality argument (hence 4th amendment being at issue).
In my opinion state INCOME TAXES are the way to fund schools - lower prop taxes and make schools more equal - now everyone is happy (except those who want their 3M home to be in an exclusive school district).
Spend per pupil is a factor, but I have to agree with the parent poster, if you remove bad, disruptive, or underperforming kids from a school, and replaced them with disciplined, over-achieving students, the rest of the student body benefits. This is independent of school funding.
Private schools, even ones that receive less tuition per student than public schools of the same district prove this point because they can set a higher bar and more readily kick out disruptive students.
California spends more money on low-income school districts than the average, and I think that's generally true most other places, especially since No Child Left behind (which for all it's problems by-and-large forced states to invest in poorer schools.)
Nationally, per student cost at Catholic parochial schools is roughly 1/2 of public schools. (Couldn't find California specific numbers, but it tracks what I've seen.) That's cost/spending; tuition is even less. Special education programs eat up 1/4-1/3 of public school budgets, so there's still a gap after accounting for that.
1973 was over 50 years ago. Even the poorest, most "backward" states have long ago largely remediated spending inequities. What you hear today to support claims of inequity are cherry-picked esoteric cases to drive outrage, just like every other topic today. In reality there's clearly much more going on than what advocates for this or that would ever admit.
That's true to an extent, but much less true of Catholic parochial schools. In fact, such schools will sometimes have a population with average income less than the local public schools. Of course most parochial schools won't have special education programs, so that's a huge filter, but as I pointed out doesn't account for the budget gap.
In any event, "picking your customers" is exactly the point of the previous poster(s). Money doesn't really explain what we're seeing. Once upon a time there was a very strong correlation, and people presumed causation, but now it's quite clear that the causation wasn't there. Certainly not directly, which is why throwing more money attheschools isn't helping.
Money can be extremely strongly correlated but if I get to kick out the bottom 20% of shitheads I can still outperform you on half the budget. Not talking income wise, talking behavior wise.
Sounds similar to charter schools in NYC. They often get better results than public schools but because they “manage out” kids with bad behavior and/or learning disabilities, in a way public schools cannot.
Some public charter schools do the exact opposite, take in the problem kids so they can be given an environment better suited to their challenges. For example, Gateway Highschool in San Francisco. And they have better outcomes for those kids. But better is relative, and they get alot of criticism from those convinced equity demands the whole student population be perfectly shuffled across all classrooms, and who argue having such options excuses the district from providing even more resources to the average classroom. Many of those same people also work to prohibit ever removing a problem child from a classroom (see recent controversy in SF, about schools secretly doing that despite city prohibitions on suspension or even class removal), arguing instead every classroom should have 2 or 3 additional instructors, as if that would magically cease the disruptions.
It's doubtful that a catholic parochial school has ever turned away a catholic student. Certainly if that happens, it must be rare. If catholic students are superior to non-catholics, through some self-selection process, how does that invalidate his point? They're not being picky intentionally. A great many admit non-catholic students, often on scholarship, those students also tend to do well.
Public schools have to take children that do not want to be there and make it everyone's problem, and their classmates suffer for it. Maybe this public school policy is the issue that should concern you.
Catholic schools turn away Catholics all the time. A good friend of mine, extremely devout Catholic, has two of his kids in Catholic school. He was told that his child with special needs couldn’t be educated there. She’s in public school (and doing great).
> It's doubtful that a catholic parochial school has ever turned away a catholic student.
I went to a catholic high school (not for the catholic part, but because it was a good school at a good price and nearby). Anyone with non-trivial behavior issues was kicked out very swiftly, so yes, they definitely turn away the inconvenient kids.
That is entirely my point. Catholic schools aren’t doing anything special they are just not keeping the problem kids. Why do you assume this doesn’t concern me?
Two kids from my child's parochial middle school were suspended for a day last week. I've seen many suspensions over the years, but never once an expulsion. One time several years ago (at another school, mind you) a half dozen families tried to force the expulsion of a kid for the frequent hitting that occurred. My child was one of the kids to get hit. But the principal pushed back extremely hard and took a ton of flak. She stood her ground, though in the end the family voluntarily changed schools.
Today in many liberal cities kids simply can't be suspended at all, period. In many other areas corporal punishment and suspensions continue to be used way too much. But actual results don't really track the way people assume they do one way or another.
What's the real difference between parochial schools and public schools? IMO it has little to do with policies or resources, but the fact that parochial schools demand parental engagement. It's often a prerequisite for admission. If the school knows the parent is engaged and working with the school, they'll often deal with behavioral problems that most public schools wouldn't or simply can't. By contrast, a friend of mine saw his entire public grammar school get shutdown by a self-identified radically progressive school board in Boston for failing to expel a kindergartner after a single incident (perpetrator, black boy; victim white girl; though really if anyone was paying attention the boy was arguably the victim, both by the ridiculous outrage, but also whatever was happening in his home life). This was at a school specifically created to mix rich white students with poor black students, and every family opted in to the experiment, and the school staff was simply following the gold-standard liberal policies the school was created for; policies which in this case were easily defensible, IMO. Its sad the way things went down, though the hypocrisy exposed was telling. People want to throw money at problems, virtue signal, and demand everybody else do something about these problems, only so long as they're not personally effected.
If the parent isn't engaged or can't be engaged, throwing more resources at the school won't help. If you want better outcomes, shift attention toward helping parents become more engaged. There are myriad ways to do that, and I really don't know what might help. But trying to fix the problem through school policies and resources isn't going to work. That avenue has been exhausted, though it still demands vigilance in maintaining appropriate resource distribution. Unfortunately, suggesting this kind of approach has categorically become a form of victim blaming--i.e. blaming parents for being poor.
I would imagine that catholic parochial schools are selecting for parents that bother to put in the effort to swap their kids from the default, free public schools to the catholic schools.
Cherry-picked? Define cherry-picked. Certainly into the 2000s if you looked at, let's take NJ, and compared the school rankings to spend per pupil you'd find an absolute correlation that ties back to property values. We'd be comparing places like Camden and New Brunswick to places like Princeton, where kids have many more programs and opportunities. I'm talking published numbers of per pupil per year $ spend.
I don't understand your criticism. That 1973, the date of the case in question, is so old that we've solved school inequality?
Yep. And those bad, disruptive and underperforming kids should be sent out into the cotton fields by age six or seven, and their (obviously) inferior parents should be sterilized so they can't continue to pollute the gene pool.
Because we already know which children will be a drag on society by the time they're six or seven, right? And if we'd started doing this twenty-five years ago, we'd be much better off.
I propose intelligence/physical prowess tests for all children starting at age two or three, so we can start to weed out the dead weight much earlier.
And sterilizing the parents (as well as the kids -- but that goes without saying) will, in the medium term, address much of the tightness in the housing and job markets. It's a win-win!
And if a few decades is too long to wait for this, we could always go with summary executions, right? Or at least work camps for the inferior where they won't be a burden on society.
Sadly, all those "woke" pinko commies want to destroy our way of life by polluting our gene pool with the inferior stock, because they hate us and our free and equal society!
Unless you have some multi-layered satire thing going, I take your post to mean that you disagree with removing disruptive kids from ordinary classrooms. Okay, but do you actually have a solution? Or do we simply accept that schools all become zoos? Your rant is uninteresting and people have been saying this stuff for my entire life.
If you're going to say nothing can be done, then okay, the people who want something better will just move to live with each other in a community where this kind of problem doesn't exist, and do everything they can to keep it from following them. They can be happy that they have their standards, and you can be happy that you have yours.
>Okay, but do you actually have a solution? Or do we simply accept that schools all become zoos?
So, by you are those the only two outcomes? Dump/warehouse disruptive kids and deny them any opportunity to become productive members of society before they even hit puberty, or let them run hog wild and burn down the schools?
I'd expect there's some middle ground here that doesn't include either giving up on children just because they're having socialization issues or putting those children in charge of the school.
Do I have all the answers? No. But if you're going to advocate for throwing away children because they misbehave, why stop there? That's not a rhetorical question.
I'm not advocating for throwing away anyone with no opportunity. I chose to live somewhere where I can avoid the issue and vote against letting it come here, but I still pay for their schooling/daycare like everyone else. I suggest that the people who want to deal with the problem start disciplining the kids. Correct them. Give them after-school detention where they sit and write that they're sorry 1000 times. Isolate them from the rest of the kids if they consistently can't behave. That may involve sending them to some kind of reform school for cases where the other kids' safety is at risk. Or allow principals and perhaps teachers to deliver corporal punishment as needed.
If we're looking at things realistically, some of these children are violent. Yes, those should absolutely be removed and possibly locked in a facility if they can't be controlled. It's unfortunate, but the alternative is allowing everyone else to be harmed, for what exactly? Because you cannot face the reality that they are not going to suddenly turn into a saint and develop an interest in curing cancer when they grow up?
> I'm not advocating for throwing away anyone with no opportunity. I chose to live somewhere where I can avoid the issue and vote against letting it come here
This is the definition of conservatism. It's not a problem as long as it's not your family suffering.
If you had a "problem child" you'd be singing a different tune about how acceptable it was to discard them.
Not sure what to tell you. It's been a problem for decades and only gets worse. How would you like me to solve the problem? Go to these children's houses and give their parents a stern talking to?
I don't have a problem child. Neither do any of my neighbors. In fact it's apparently normal for 20% of my local school to test at the 99th percentile on state tests, and they're extremely polite. Weird. My wife's volunteering to lead our local girl scout troop and helps regularly at the school. It seems we're doing our part, so I'm really not sure what else you would like.
> Not sure what to tell you. It's been a problem for decades and only gets worse
It's been a problem for literally millennia. This hardly unique to 21st century america.
Yes, I'm glad you don't have a "problem child". That's genuinely great, I wish everyone was that lucky.
What I would like, in the smallest possible way, is some shred of empathy for people who aren't as lucky as you are. Perhaps you could practice the concept of "walking a mile in another man's shoes" and make an attempt to understand what they're dealing with instead of dismissing them as inferior.
I'm also happy your wife is volunteering to help with girl scouts. I think that's a great thing and more people should do it.
But that doesn't excuse your lack of empathy.
Kids are not some kind of deterministic automatons where the same input always produces the same output (as if we could even reproduce the same inputs for an entire life). They're more complicated than that for reasons we frankly can't even understand.
There are a number of things that are highly correlated with producing a "good child", a major one being having enough money that the family isn't under constant stress and you can afford second (or third or fourth) chances.
But callously discarding every child who isn't lucky enough to benefit from this is just wrong. We, as a society, a culture, should be better than that.
Am I expecting you, personally, to go out and change the world? No, no more than I'm expecting myself to do it. But we all make small decisions every day and if enough of us make the "right ones" they can add up, and it starts with empathy for our fellow man.
My wife and I both come from broken homes. Neither of us came from money. Sure, there are plenty of good people of every class, but if you spend a lot of time around lower class people, you'll learn that a lot of them will very proudly broadcast their poor behavior to everybody. It is precisely because we can empathize a little too well that we know to avoid those kinds of situations as much as possible.
We do our part, and we've decided to live in an area where others also do their part and try to build a community and a society, and not in an area where people tear down the community around them, or make excuses for those who do that. Again, what exactly are you chiding me for? What should I be doing differently? It's not us keeping them down. We're gone.
Yes. How is it relevant? Like I said I still pay taxes. In fact, quite a bit more than my parents did. It's not me voting for them to not receive an education. It's not my kids disrupting their classes. I'd be happy to vote for a school board full of hard-ass drill instructors that appoint hard-ass drill instructors as superintendents and principals. I'm happy for kids to receive merit scholarships and go study engineering.
This isn't pulling the ladder up behind me. It's noticing a ladder, climbing out of a pit, and walking away. Ladder's still right there. Meanwhile others are asking why we don't try to make ourselves more comfortable in the pit.
I understand that you're probably a bleeding heart liberal, and I respect that. How about removing the problem children AND specifically increasing funding for their education? Smaller class sizes and more intensive support than the rest of the student body.
I would argue that their outcomes in general would still be worse off then their lesser funded counterparts.
Well, that's the first time I've ever been called a bleeding heart liberal before, so I guess I'll take that as a compliment. I'm kinda confused by what even counts as liberal these days, given the, shall we say, discourse about it from "both sides". Not that I consider myself a shudder centrist.
Anyways, I'm not taking the position that we shouldn't "remove" "problem children" in the same way I agree that prisons are necessary for society.
I guess if I had to summarize my feelings on this matter in this tiny little text box, it's that while this option should exist, we should all feel shame, a sense of failure, every time we have to exercise it.
We should ask ourselves, collectively, what we could have done differently to prevent the situation from coming to this point.
It's theoretically possible that there was nothing that could be done, but people are way to willing too just leap to that conclusion.
As an extension of that, we should at least pretend a modicum of empathy for our fellow humans. People are... people. They're complicated. Nobody is good or bad. They certainly do good things and bad things, and at some point, given our current society/technology/culture/understanding of the world, our best option might be to put them in prison for the rest of their life, but that doesn't mean we should be happy about it.
Like, I get it, you have a child, you have incredibly strong feelings about how to protect and nurture this child, both biologically/genetically as well as an ingrained cultural response. You want to do the best you possibly can for your child, even if it comes at the expense of everyone else's child.
But society improves when we raise the standards for everyone.
I'm not asking that this guy go out and sell all his possessions and march in the streets or whatever extreme example you want to think of. I'm certainly not doing that either. Just remember that "problem kids" are children just as much deserving of love and respect and help as your child.
I'm not a parent, but even if I were your satire wouldn't move me - I'd still want the best for my kids and my decisions would reflect that.
Theoretical social causes and activism are great for university discussions and political sloganeering, but it's a whole different pair of sleeves than what's good for your family.
>Theoretical social causes and activism are great for university discussions and political sloganeering, but it's a whole different pair of sleeves than what's good for your family.
To which "theoretical social causes," "activism" and "political sloganeering" are you referring?
I'm genuinely confused by that, as I mentioned none of those things in my comment. Perhaps you replied to the wrong comment?
Spend per pupil matters to some extent. But overall speaking, the US has very high spend per pupil and yet still is falling in educational rankings.[0][1][2]
Increased spending doesn't matter if it goes into administrators who increase bureaucracy instead of teachers to keep them from quitting to be baristas, or to supplies and food for kids. Among many other systematic factors, accountability needs to be had for districts and even parents themselves.
> In my opinion state INCOME TAXES are the way to fund schools - lower prop taxes and make schools more equal - now everyone is happy (except those who want their 3M home to be in an exclusive school district).
It doesn't really matter exactly what tax mechanism is used to fund public schools, the actual thing keeping a 3 million dollar home in an exclusive school district is that you have to be able to afford a 3 million dollar home in order to live in the boundaries of the district and send your kids to the school.
Spend per pupil is uncorrelated. It's about the quality of parents first, the morals and values they instill in their kids (or don't - they are a reflection of their parents successes or failures).
Rich parents spend hundreds of thousands a year to control for one factor: just to keep their "average" offspring away from noisy and distracting troublemakers whose parents can't get their life together enough to even do the basic parenting. You wouldn't throw your puppy into a pool of sharks, so why would you put your kid in a suboptimal and potentially dangerous place if you can afford otherwise?
I wish I could find it now but I think generally money only drives so much change. One of the biggest issues these days is parents both dont care and get offended when you suggest their child did something wrong. As a parent myself the only lever I have is to buy a home is a district with good schools. It’s a self selection problem.
I never said anything about lower class or wealth. Next time if you want to have a constructive discussion, discuss don’t leave your biased emotions putting words in others mouth.
What are you talking about? How is that bigotry? Why are you putting words in peoples mouth.
Talk to any teacher in America, it’s one of the biggest problems today. It’s not class, or money but something got lost and parents expect schools to raise their children but at the same time will be deeply offended that the child they did not raise is misbehaving.
Yea this is a not a good take imo. I went to school in a district where every school got the same funding per student, but the schools in the wealthy neighborhoods were way more successful than the ones in bad neighborhoods. You can point to fundraising efforts, but after looking at the balance sheet the students with a high percentage of poor students actually ended up with more funding per student because of federal grants to schools that had students under the poverty line. The only real difference was that parents were more involved at the rich school and all of them punished their kids when the teacher said they needed discipline. In this district at least all the schools had the baseline level of funding they needed and past that more money didnt seem to make a huge difference.
I think the effect is twofold - spend/pupil tends to benefit poorer students more (diminishing returns), so a good school in a poor neighborhood needs more $$ to achieve equivalent outcomes. And then the lower property tax revenue in the poorer neighborhood makes it harder to sustain that higher spend
No, the money spent per pupil has a tiny effect (at best!) on outcomes.
There are also massive transfers involved (and the US has had them for at least twenty years) so the property taxes (in the US) have little to do with how much money schools have per pupil.
Or property taxes on billionaires. They are reaping the benefits of an educated population more than anyone else, why should someone else subsidize a highly qualified workforce for them? Property tax on all kinds of property they own. It must be done at a federal level to prevent state shopping.
The actual case is about whether the poor school system was allowed to have higher prop taxes than Texas allowed. In the details are the inequality argument (hence 4th amendment being at issue).
In my opinion state INCOME TAXES are the way to fund schools - lower prop taxes and make schools more equal - now everyone is happy (except those who want their 3M home to be in an exclusive school district).