The arguments are so facetious and facile. India has more corruption then the US and they can handle a free lunch program for all kids. Why can't America?
Because many of the people that need it the most keep voting against their own interests. Because education is terrible in all the the states that vote red.
The wealthy do use public schools. They pay huge amounts to live in upper class neighborhoods with wealthy peers, where a lot of tax money goes into the schooling system so the kids can take all sorts of extracurriculars and AP classes. It gets the same results as private school but the cost comes from living in that neighborhood rather than paying the school directly
California actually has a pretty solid school tax-redistribition system that more or less solves this problem (of course districts still can and do fundraise for direct donations to the PTA/music fund and bond measures to upgrade facilities, but it's still vastly more fair).
In a completely unrelated phenomenon, private schools are incredibly popular among Californians of means.
I am dating someone that has a child in private school. First grade costs $4k+ a month, maybe even 6k I forget.
Nothing in the parking lot or talking even screams wealthy.
Every person I've met in the social circle, also send their kids to private school in the SF bay area. I haven't even met another adult that sends their kids to public school.
These are people that make $250k-$600k probably. But that's not "wealthy" in the SF bay area.
That's very believable; the kind of people who unnecessarily send their kids to an expensive private school when some of the best public schools in the country are nearby are the kind of people who would generally socialize together.
And $250k is wealthy. That's literally top 1.5 percentile in the U.S. They don't have to blow half of their income sending their kids to an expensive school. They choose to do so and that is the hallmark of wealth.
It doesn't matter what percentile in the US it is, when a 2 bedroom apartment is $3k+ and the average small house is $6k to rent.
Also. If you haven't been to a public school in California recently you really don't know what has changed. I went to public school all my life and then ended up in Berkeley. I'm 40. It was borderline negligent for my parents to send me there in my opinion as a kid knowing what I know now. But we were pretty hard up for money.
But if you told me, should someone lease two luxury cars or send their kid to private school.... You'd have to be nuts to think you'd gain more from the cars than the school.
After taxes (assuming single income, CA residence), $250k is $150k of spendable income.
$6k on a house is $72,000 a year, leaving $78k to spend on food, utilities, etc. Assuming for some reason you spend $1000 on utilities each month (presumably you run a cryptofarm in your closest and a weed farm in your backyard), you still have $68k to spend on food. Assuming you spend an average of $20/meal/person on 3 meals/day every day of the year that's still leaves $2000 for other stuff.
Or in other words, even with profligate spending you still have money leftover. Which brings us back to this: techies apparently are good at code but very bad at basic finance.
If you haven't been to a public school in California recently you really don't know what has changed. I went to public school all my life and then ended up in Berkeley.
Berkeley is considered one of the best universities in the world. If you don't think it's a good school, the problem is you, not the schools.
If you haven't been to a public school in California recently you really don't know what has changed.
I volunteer coach to various local schools (changes every season). My alma mater is (now) considered one of the best public schools in state and occasionally makes the national list; it sends a higher % of students to the prestigious colleges (Ivy League, Berkeley, Stanfurd) than the famous local private schools (Troy and Harvard-Westlake).
But if you told me, should someone lease two luxury cars or send their kid to private school.... You'd have to be nuts to think you'd gain more from the cars than the school.
This is a nonsensical strawman...which supports my first point.The choice is not to lease two luxury cars or send their kids to private school. Both choices are the wrong choice. The correct choice for someone making $250k who claims that they are living paycheck-to-paycheck is to send their kid to public school, and address any deficiencies with tutoring or extracurricular activities (both of which are more likely to benefit college admissions and academic performance than private school and cost a fraction of private school tuition).
TLDR: if you are in the top 1.5 percentile you are not, nor will you ever be considered living paycheck to paycheck. If you tell someone that, they'll smile at you politely and assume you have a severe mental defect.
I told you I went to public schools and made it into cal...while talking about people spending $4k a month of 1st grade..
And you decide to talk about the quality of UC Berkeley instead of the average 1st grade school in the SF Bay Area.
But yes, I have the mental defect.
It's all relative. Someone making $250k with a family in the SF Bay Area could be basically living paycheck to paycheck if they just try to appear casually financially well-off. Nice house, nice car, electricity is 4x more than Idaho for example so add bills, eat out a few times, and send one child to a $4k a month 1st grade and you're living paycheck to paycheck.
No, that's just bad financial management. Spending $48000 to send your kid to a private school is a choice that parents can make when they're wealthy enough to do so.
"Living paycheck to paycheck" means that you just barely make enough to pay for food and rent, and don't have any spare money to cover unplanned costs like medical care. Spending a ton of money on vacation and private school is by definition not living paycheck to paycheck.
No it doesn't. Living paycheck to paycheck means you don't have any left over each paycheck, and the worse version of it is that you don't even have emergency savings left over in case unforseen costs come up.
The underlying issue too is "Sorry Timmy, cause we're not rich and live in a poorer district, your schooling is worse and you have access to less choice."
And that goes back to how taxes for public schools are driven. The problem seems too engrained and too massive to fix. And since schools are state controlled, you'd need 50 solutions, not 1.
This really isn't true anywhere in the US. The highest spending per pupil will be the city school district. The people who live there may be relatively poor but there's a lot more commercial real estate to tax.
The wealthy should not be required to go to public schools. They should be able to choose whatever schools they think is the best fit for their children. Same for everyone else.
Not only do they pay for it, they pay for public schools too.
I am, by any measure, at least upper-middle-class (though I do have to work for money; it's not free in my mailbox). I don't have kids, so I wouldn't be taking advantage of the public schools I pay for, but I also grew up in a very median-income household and went to private schools (which were much less expensive at the time, though still not cheap). So my parents paid for public schools that neither of their children ever attended.
People who send kids to private schools pay taxes (which fund schools) but don’t take resources from public schools.
Forcing them to use the public schools would further divide the tax funding across more kids, reducing the funds available per kid.
This suggestion is reminiscent of California trying to reduce educational inequality by eliminating advanced math classes and putting everyone together. It was a terrible idea, but it made sense to someone looking for what they thought was an easy solution.
"Texas will implement a $1 billion school voucher program, one of the largest in the country, that uses public dollars to fund private school tuition under a bill Gov. Greg Abbott signed Saturday, capping off a yearslong effort by Republicans… Texas joins more than 30 other states that have implemented a similar program, of which about a dozen have launched or expanded their programs in recent years to make most students eligible."
I get your math and appreciate the insight within it.
At the same time, PTAs accept cash which when not being spent on private school is available. The challenge is getting those parents to allocate it when it will be spread across the entire student body. Far more impactful is the factor of alignment of incentives that given wealthy families' generally greater proximity to power can deliver funding.
I liked this: it's not private school vs public school, it is private school vs public school plus a tuition's worth of enrichment.
Your other comment does get at why my kid is in private school: you can't ignore special education needs.
> At the same time, PTAs accept cash which when not being spent on private school is available.
I think this is magical thinking underlying the concept: That wealthy parents will step up to provide money to privately fund the public schools for everyone.
We have plenty of evidence that the is just isn’t the case, though. People spend that money on things like sending their kids to school with their own lunches and hiring private tutors.
When parents have lost faith in a school’s ability to provide good education (or lunches, or activities, etc) they don’t think the best course of action is to send the school a lot of money and hope for the best. They take matters into their own hands, outside of school.
The entire concept is built on layers of wishful thinking that just aren’t supported.
We are wealthy parents who stepped up and gave substantial amounts to the PTA
We made our decision (noted before) when the school spent its energy to manage us rather than fix problems and serve our student. To be fair, there were ties they had no control over but they definitely failed in ways they could have done better too. When things that matter to us are out of our power we put them back under our power to the extent we can.
The problem with defection is the large scale/long term reduced prosperity trajectory.
> things like sending their kids to school with their own lunches and hiring private tutors
And summer "enrichment". That was popular among the small group of well-off families that insisted on sending their kids to public schools (in, essentially, a school-within-a-school that actually taught the kids instead of warehousing them for six to eight hours a day). Expensive camps, summer programs in Europe, that sort of thing.
Public schools are funded by taxes. Wealthy people already pay those taxes.
If you force everyone to use the public schools, you’re just dividing the tax money across more students.
In the context of school lunch, they would just send their kids to school with a packed lunch.
The whole concept of forbidding people from taking advantage of other educational opportunities is half-baked class warfare fodder. It doesn’t make sense if you think about the numbers, but it appeals to people who are more interested in punishing wealthy people than fixing the situation.
Full disclosure, am a parent who sends their kid to a charter school and strong advocate for parents to be allowed to choose where to send their schools.
That being said, the strong version of the argument being made is that if all schools are funded nationally (so that schools in more affluent areas don't automatically get more money) and rich people and people of influence were forced to send their kids to the same public schools as every body else, then those people would be more inclined to use their influence to try to make public schools better and would be less inclined to fight against raising taxes to improve public education. Of course this would go against those peoples narrow self interest (since many of their kids would probably end up getting a worse education) so it is unlikely to happen
I understand the argument, but I’m trying to point out that similar claims were made about eliminating advanced math classes in California and it did not work at all.
I think the claim appeals to some people because they’re bought in to the idea that a small fraction of wealthy people control everything from school budgets to taxes, and therefore if you force them into your space and restrict their rights to other options they will use that extreme influence to improve the situation for everyone.
Yet in practice it doesn’t work, and we’ve seen it play out. In California the parents who cared about their kids’ math scores just gave up on school math classes and hired tutors or did their own at-home tutoring (at great sacrifice, especially for the non-wealthy). With school lunches you would just see parents with means sending their kids to school with good prepared lunches. I suppose the next logical extension is to ban wealthy parents from sending their kids in with lunches and hope that it will set off the chain of events that’s supposed to make them fix the problem for everyone.
Where I live our school budgets and funding are partially up for vote on the ballot every election cycle. It’s not for the wealthy to decide, it’s just a public vote. And things still aren’t passing easily. I think people reach for the wealthy as an easy excuse for who to blame, but whenever I look at the ballot results it’s impossible to ignore the fact that the general public is averse to increasing school budgets right now.
> the idea that a small fraction of wealthy people control everything from school budgets to taxes
It's not control.
It's simply that there exists a (relatively-speaking) small fraction of wealthy people. To wit, income inequality.
If we had less income inequality in the US, there wouldn't need to be nudges to align wealthy people's interests with everyone else.
If we're fine with large amounts of income inequality, then we're going to need to put in some utilitarian guardrails, given that $ = political power and political power controls school funding.
Why does less then replacement rate equal extinction?
It just requires a reimagination of the economy it's not an extinction level threat. That's just scare mongering.
I don't see anyone else saying this, but I don't like audiobooks because of the voices and over production.
If I want to listen to a book, I use TTS, it's gotten very good. I can pick the voice and I just hear the story. I can also switch back to reading without trying to figure out where I am since the Text to speech is using the same epub I'm reading.
Same as you, I found some I absolutely hated, especially where they added background music, sound effects, etc. - I just want the book, not a production.
Others I found that a good narrator really added to the experience, especially when they were good at changing voices/accents for different characters speaking. I found that made it a lot easier to track what was going on or who was speaking, especially in books with a large number of characters.
This checks out because all those DOGE hires appear to be hackers, and they are now state sponsored.
Most of them could never pass a basic background check, much less a TS or even public trust from one of the more invasive Federal agencies.
It is worth pointing out that many of these people are probably violating Federal and possibly even some state laws. Violations of Federal laws can be pardoned, if the President is so inclined. State laws can't. No prosecution will occur during this administration, but this administration will not last forever.
> The best-known member of Elon Musk's U.S. DOGE Service team of technologists once provided support to a cybercrime gang that bragged about trafficking in stolen data and cyberstalking an FBI agent, according to digital records reviewed by Reuters.
Well that is kind of the point though, I asked for sources because it is clear that the comment, containing a false and baseless claim (as evidenced by the inability to provide one single supporting source), was not intellectually honest. If we don't challenge these things, then others will start believing them.
I looked through the filing cited in this comment and every instance of the word "background" just says that backgrounds for a given employee are either complete or in progress, plus the quote. Nothing indicates anyone failed any background check (to the contrary just by count it seems like about half of them have been completed), and certainly nothing indicates that "most of them could never pass" one. Which again just by virtue of about half of them having been completed already seems to be false on its face.
It's not unusual to give an otherwise-qualified person limited access to certain data while their background checks are completed.
Dude, background checks are brutal. You can be denied because your parents (not you) struggled to pay taxes. You could have acedemic dishonesty that disqualifies you (that one small area where "permanent record" in school may actually cost you something). There are so many little things that no other kind of high paying job cares about in background checks that are suddenly red flags for clearance.
There's a reason Musk especially kept dodging trying to get proper clearance. He isn't even fully cleared to see all aspects of SpaceX. Some of his employees he brought in probably aren't better off.
On mine I run calibre, jellyfin, openbooks, and Samba to share files out. All my other computers backup to my home server and it has a process to deal with incremental and offsite (btrfs snapshots and b2).
I also use it from my other computers via ssh to access git, irc, keepass, and whatever else tickles my fancy.
The cities are cherry picked but the routes aren't, except for avoiding highways. You can go to any address and that means sometimes having to avoid, e.g., chickens on the road.
