Changing the laws of public schools is what needs to happen. But allowing small little schools to skate the law and then bragged that they’ve fixed the problem will just make things worse.
I will comment on that below.
I have some core beliefs about K-12 education in the United States.
1. The null hypothesis. That is, the manner of schooling makes very little durable, long-term difference in lifetime outcomes.
2. Teachers’ unions wield too much power in some jurisdictions, including Montgomery County, Maryland, where I live. The result is that huge sums of money go for pensions and for “administrators” that are simply union featherbedding positions. This non-teaching staff adds to the burden of classroom teachers, rather than helping them.
3. Parents have fairly good instincts about when their children are thriving in school and when they are not. Parents’ instincts may not be perfect, but centralized evaluation systems, such as using test scores to measure “teacher value added,” are much, much worse.
4. Even the best teachers can only handle a limited amount of disruptive students. And note that Scott E. Carrel, Mark Hoekstra,
and Elira Kuka have a paper which claims that
exposure to a disruptive peer in classes of 25 during elementary school reduces earnings at age 24 to 28 by 3 percent.
The methods used in this paper are suspect. Disruptiveness is a matter of degree, not kind. Also, I really think that the number of disruptive students matters. A lot of teachers can handle one disruptive student. I suppose a really exceptional teacher can deal with two or three. More than three and you are getting into no-hoper territory.
Next, consider three possible policies for handling education.
a) Force everyone to attend a government school, and do not allow affluent parents to segregate their children away from children of non-affluent parents.
b) Get government out of the school-provision business altogether. Instead provide vouchers to low-income families with school-age children. Provide supplemental vouchers for children with special needs, including students who have emotional problems that make them disruptive. Allow schools to decide which students to accept.
c) Stick with what we have now.
I think that it is impossible to satisfy Education Realist with (c). That is, as long as we have a mix of government-run and private schools, the playing field will never by level. Even within the system of government-run schools, allowing people to segregate by neighborhood makes the playing field uneven.
There are at least two interesting questions about what would happen under alternative systems. First, how much segregation by socio-economic class would take place? Second, what would happen to disruptive students? I think that it’s hard to get around the fact that parents like to self-segregate. It is also hard to get around the fact that disruptive students exist and pose a major challenge.
I think that (a) represents the ideal of public schooling. That is, when people defend public schools, they try to make it sound like public schooling creates egalitarian social integration and capably handles disruptive students. But I don’t think that this is the reality.
I would like to see us try (b), at least in some states, to see how it works. I wonder what the incentive has to be to get a school to take on a disruptive student. I wonder if socio-economic segregation would get worse. But I don’t think we can answer those questions without trying some experiments for several years.
What we have now includes a great deal of socio-economic segregation. As for disruptive students, I think that they ruin some classrooms. Affluent parents use private schools and affluent neighborhoods to try to keep their children out of such classrooms. Teachers opt out of classroom teaching and go into administration after they get fed up trying to deal with such classrooms.
It might be useful to identify some successful systems and use them as models to emulate or even springboards to advance our current position. I would identify specific criteria of success and then look for the most successful. The USA is a very large nation that is not entirely uniform. There are probably some states or counties within states that do a much better job than the median. Of course, we’d have to control for preconditions that make some areas look good.
The null hypothesis suggests that once you “control for preconditions that make some areas look good”, you won’t have much left.
And it probably needs to be stated again, the null hypothesis is for American schools, almost all of which have teachers with 90% or greater attendance, buildings that don’t freeze in winter, texts and desks for every student, etc. The null hypothesis is pretty much a range restriction argument.
The conservative option is (c).
Choosing (a) restricts exit and freedom. We don’t even draft our soldiers any more, so I don’t think forcing a single choice of education on everyone will fly.
Choosing (b) is a more robust experiment that simply allowing charters and private schools, but as a practical matter, requires a complete longer term commitment to learn anything and it is irreversible. You cannot cast this as an experiment. This is high risk.
Education Realist was arguing for digging in and fixing what is wrong with the public system, rather than going with the Uber approach that Charters represent.
“Parents have fairly good instincts about when their children are thriving in school and when they are not.”
Maybe that is a big part of the problem. What does “thrive” even mean? Comfortable? Stress free? Some of the most important things I’ve learned in life occurred when I was treated unfairly, or when I failed.
As far as I can see, a big part of this debate is that we don’t even agree what education is. A system where all the kids consistently mastered their lessons would in my mind be a failure. Others might see that as the holy grail of education.
Disruptive students are part of the civic mission of public schools. Socialization in both directions is part of the point. Those students need to learn to be less disruptive, and the other students need to figure out how to deal with the unevenness of other people. That is the very part of public education that cannot be replaced with a market based approach. That is the part we need the most.
Guess what? There are some disruptive adults out there too. Some disruptive bosses. Some disruptive customers. Some disruptive Presidents (sorry, couldn’t help it)
Are parents and students equipped to deal with disruptive students? Are they in a position to affect their school environment in a way that would credibly deal with that problem?
If the answer is no, it’s not clear to me that trapping them in that situation will lead to improvements. Education Realist seems to imply that if people were trapped they would find a way to fix things. Much like people who say that if we had a draft we wouldn’t end up in foreign wars.
Of course that doesn’t necessarily flow. Sometimes people are stuck in a situation AND powerless to change it. Sometimes Exit is their only way to deal with or even credibly signal to the system that this will not stand.
When people say “civic mission” I think they have in mind a civic society that hasn’t existed in America for some time and ain’t coming back for reasons we can’t really change.
The disruptive student problem is not one of leaning how to handle disruptive people, but rather that the common classroom in America has a single point of failure in regards to disruptive students, i.e., the teacher. Since the learning is passive and dependent upon the teacher’s directed lesson, having to stop to deal with a disruptive student damages the learning for all the students.
A solution could be to move away from the sage on the stage method of “teaching” with its central point of failure to a more distributed, self-guided model like the flipped classroom. Then, except for extreme disruptions, the bulk of the students will be little affected in their lesson progression by disruptive students.
In fact with flipped classrooms, a tiered system could be implemented with students who become self-motivated given independence, mildly disruptive or those lacking the self-discipline in more structured tier and really disruptive students in a discipline tier with tight, near boot camp, type control of movement and activities. The goal being to motivate students by demonstrations of self control and behavior to move up to the largely independent study tier. Assignment to a tier would be driven by documented behavior. Of course, election of another Obama-like administration would declare this racist as Obama did basic school discipline.
My understanding is that a) is what the best ranked country does. It seems logical that if all the affluent parents are forced to use public schools because they are the only option, public schools get better due to affluent parent involvement. This positive influence should go up to the board level.
How do the best ranked countries with comparable numbers of disruptive students effectively deal with them in their government schools?
My guess is they do things which are now more or less illegal in most places in the US. Corporal punishment in schools is technically illegal in Japan (a rule reportedly imposed by the Occupation Forces), but remains common and even popular there in certain contexts. Meanwhile, it’s technically legal but almost unknown in many US states. It is both legal and common in Singapore.
It’s become hopeless to even try to get a handle on how big a problem this is, since teachers and police are reportedly discouraged from making official reports that accurately record the actual state of affairs.
But in the United States, is a) really possible? I think it practice it is hard to avoid socioeconomic segregation of public schools given how vast the country is. If the public school in my area was awful and I was forced to send my kids to it, I would just move an hour away into the exurbs, or even to another state.
I think the only way it could possibly work is if there were multiple tiers of public school: the regular version, several remote boarding schools run by the state for the repeatedly disruptive students (say 3 strikes and you’re out), and the worst kids at the boarding schools being sent to juvie for the remainder of their youth (again perhaps after 3 strikes). If any regular public schools had a significant number of bad apples, the middle and upper middle class parents would flee that community.
I’d throw some kind of punitive physical labor in the mix, too. Filling potholes, maybe.
It seems logical that if all the affluent parents are forced to use public schools because they are the only option, public schools get better due to affluent parent involvement.
That assumes every public school is the same and every public school class is the same. Right now, affluent parents move to Belmont or Great Neck or New Trier and the schools there have high performing students. Forcing those parents to go to their local public school is not going to do squat for students at P.S. 101 in Queens.
And, of course, within a school, kids can be separated. Higher performing students in one class, lower performing in another. In fact, not separating kids who differ in preparation, motivation, and smarts makes for a class where somebody is going to get screwed. If you teach to the achievers, the others can’t keep up, get frustrated and angry and bored. If you teach to the non-achievers, the achievers get bored and angry and frustrated. So you teach to the middle (“teach to the 25th percentile” was my department chair’s advice).
Let’s face it, we all know suburban schools are great. It might be annoying to Libertarians who realize that a free market system might be better, but it’s perfectly viable. Parents of suburban children are happy to see their kids singing in musicals, playing sports, and hanging out in the best computer labs. The public school model with unions having a stranglehold on everything can work to provide a perfectly fine education.
It’s all about the disruptive and unprepared students. In that sense, Education Policy is really “Catching horses after the barn door was left open for 5+ years” policy and has little to do with actual education. It’s more about trying somehow to compensate for the lack of an underlying social bedrock that produces students that thrive. In an inner city classroom, it’s not like there are 3 disruptive students that make your class of 24 a poor learning environment. It’s that half your 9th grade algebra class doesn’t show up on any given day, very few students can write a coherent paragraph, and things like bringing a pencil to class are rare events. Bad schools are a symptom of social decay. Figure that out (good luck…) and the schools will be functional again
Good suburban schools are good, but houses in good suburban schools are hard to come by. It’s a massive zero sum nonsense race to bid up this very limited supply of real estate.
As you note, social dysfunction is increasing. Many of the exurbs are fraying on these metrics (that previously would have been considered “good schools”) and demographics aren’t exactly increasing the number of people with middle class values. I look at the “white L” in the Baltimore area and its shrinking every year, with many decent schools clearly turning for the worst each year. Middle class people trying to live anywhere close to growing economies are going to have a hard time affording a “good school” in the next generation. The distortions of our real estate system should in large part be chalked up as an externality cost of our broken public schools.
And of course that doesn’t get into whether you like what the schools are teaching.
True. Depressing to read.
The high school I graduated from in South Sacramento is now 94% low income and it was made famous by a viral video a couple of years ago showing a student body-slamming the principal.
Baltimore County resident here; I do not believe the white L is shrinking. At least as far as I can tell, more and more of east Baltimore from Patterson Park to Highlandtown is gentrifying, as are the areas around Hampden and Penn Station. Maybe other traditionally white areas are becoming more mixed, but a) that’s not the end of the world, as long as your new neighbors aren’t dirtbags, and b) re-development is slowly creeping westward out of downtown, too, to offset that.
That’s not to say the schools aren’t still terrible, though.
When I pull up schools on “school digger” you can see student traits and test scores by year. A lot of the suburban schools are getting less “white” each year, including areas that up until the last decade were 90+% white). The free/discounted lunch % is also going up.
There is a lot of gentrification going on in the city, but it’s all yuppies that leave when they have five year olds. And who can blame them. Even a place like Hamden that you mention is 72.7% free/discounted lunch (despite being 60% white). Roland Park is the only decent school in the city (and its expensive to live there). And even then you still need to go to private high school because Roland ends at high school (the magnets set aside a lot of slots for low income, 44% low income for Poly, and they are only 17% white, so who knows if your kid could get in or if it would be appropriate for them).
Add in a property tax twice the rate of the county, and the math literally doesn’t work. I know because I’m trying to get a bunch of young couples to settle in a neighborhood together and its just not possible for middle class people to live in the city when you calc out mortgage, property tax, and private school tuition. We did the excel spreadsheets.
So alright lets go out to the county. Dulaney Valley is in affordable Cockeysville (say hello to 695 traffic BTW). It’s gone from 80% white and 3.1% low income in 2000 to 57% white in and 20% low income in 2018. It’s still considered “good” by Maryland standards (anything not black gets in you the top 50%), but the trajectory is obvious. This is all despite boundaries clearly drawn to grab as many white kids from the L and other side of the reservoir as they could get.
Or something more dramatic. Owings Mills went from 70% white and 8% discounted lunch to 12% white and 53% discounted lunch between 1990 and 2018.
I get that single yuppies and DINKs can bid up inner harbor condos now, but that doesn’t help most people.
I should add that Baltimore City is still losing population and hasn’t increased in white %. For what yuppies have moved in some of the older working and middle class whites have moved out.
1. Robert Reich proposed something along the lines of “b”, in the Wall Street Journal. It was before he ran for MA Gov and walked it back, so perhaps late 90s?
Come to think of it, Elizabeth Warren did something similar (floated vouchers in her book) before walking it back as well once she ran for Senate.
2. You ask: “I wonder what the incentive has to be to get a school to take on a disruptive student.”
For kids with a track record of suspension, something in the range of 50% to 100% of the per-pupil allocation of a “regular student,” would intrigue many schools.
In Boston, would a Catholic elementary school struggling with enrollment, one that charges $10k….accept a public school “disruptive” kid at $27k and try to “reach” him or her? (I.e., $18,000 BPS base cost, plus $9,000 disruptive supplement). Yes.
3. A variation: Offer incentive to teacher who takes disruptive student. Allow teachers to allocate however they wish.
Example: “A” is my son’s best friend, 4th grade. I find him pleasant. Polite. Taught my son fishing. Generous trader of Halloween candy. A little challenging when I coach him in basketball, but not terrible.
“A” is frequently suspended from school for insubordination.
If you had our small district’s 10 5th grade teachers “bid” on taking “A” as a disruptive student, and it was considered just/normal to do so, about half would bid on wanting “A” for next year. Mr. W would probably submit the low bid. Let’s say $4,000 premium. How would Mr. W spend it?
– He already charges $50/hour for outside-his-job tutoring on weekends. So let’s say he assigned $2,000 towards weekly Saturday sessions with this kid, too. More mentorish than academic – let the kid take him fishing along with the kid’s grandpa. Or prepare for coming week and the points when “A” will get antsy during class, coping mechanisms.
– Maybe set aside the remaining $2,000 for the kid. Maybe some outside enrichment stuff. Karate. Coding class. Etc.
3. Separate from incentives, all disruptive kids would benefit from being “chosen” by teachers, where possible, instead of assigned. I might think “A” is 4 out of 10 disruptive, but girl “B” is 8 out of 10. You might feel opposite. Lots of arbitrage there. Now layer in the advantage of adding kid preferences.
Imagine: carefully framed 10-minute dating style type events. Disruptive kids and teachers meet, express preferences. Later, teacher gets to say “I chose you” to a kid who also chose them. Starts things out on a much better level.
Oops. I just realized I wrote too much.
I’d imagine that using neighborhoods to do the segregation is very likely far more effective at actual segregation than allowing tuition alone to accomplish it.
It is easier for families to align spending on one thing that they think is really important (sending their kid to a better school) than to buy into a neighborhood that must include all kinds of other services *and* demanding that they live in a neighborhood that they may not fit into culturally.
Generations ago and in Europe, disruptive, unproductive, and bored students would be allowed to drop out and enter the labor force at a young age. Or enter trade schools. But regulation such as minimum wage laws makes it harder to employ young people, who may not have the experience and provide enough economic value to justify the minimum pay and increased regulatiaon.
(b) is of course the right policy for reasons, both pragmatic and philosophical, too numerous to count. But by considering various strategies for implementing such a policy, we can identify the problems with government interference that justify policy (b).
The three main impediments to separation of school and state are (1) the link between real estate values and the exclusiveness of the local public school attendance area, (2) the need for child care and supervision of adolescents during working hours and, (3) the political power of the public school’s employees lobby. Addressing these impediments opens the door to better education and outcomes than are possible with government intrusion.
The primary reason we have public schools, I would submit, is that people owning homes want their local public school attendance zone to serve similarly affluent families and to exclude non-affluent families. There have been numerous reports and studies on income homogeneity in US public schools, but you can get an idea from a post on the Brookings Institution web site entitled “Growing economic segregation among school districts and schools” by Ann Owens, dated Thursday, September 10, 2015. It states among other similar findings:
We then examined segregation between schools within school districts. Available data limit our investigation to measuring segregation between students that qualify for free lunch and those that do not. We found that segregation based on free lunch eligibility between schools within districts was 10 percent higher in 2010 than 1991. Focusing only on the 100 largest districts in the U.S., segregation by free lunch status between schools increased by 30 percent. Therefore, students increasingly attend school with students whose family incomes are similar to their own. By 2010, the average student eligible for free lunch attended school where about 60 percent of students were also eligible for free lunch, compared to 50 percent in 1991, though this increase is due both to increasingly uneven sorting between schools and an increase in free lunch eligibility in the population during this time.
This creates a real estate premium for properties within the affluent, exclusive attendance zone. This pattern has significant policy consequences when it comes to educational choice. Voters in affluent neighborhoods seek to block education choice and opportunity for others by in order to preserve the real estate premium. Looking at figures 3 and 4 (pages 80 and 81) of the 2018 Condition of Public Schools report by the US Department of Education we can see that 35% of public charter schools have 75% or more of enrolled students eligible for free or reduced-price lunches compared to only 24% of traditional private schools. We see too that 57% of public charter schools are in cities, compared to 25 percent of traditional public schools. In contrast, 26% of public charter schools are located in suburban areas, compared to 32% of traditional public schools.
The problems with this situation are legion, but the key opportunity is in recognizing that affluent suburban public schools are not all they are cracked up to be. Look at the county school districts around the Washington DC area. Outcomes are nowhere near what they should be for their average income levels and the amount of money they spend. They have some of the highest teacher salaries in the country but are not anywhere near the top with respect to standardized testing.
Two factors may make it possible to crack this political nut. First, with the current ongoing Harvard litigation, Asian American students from non-affluent neighborhoods will likely start displacing a lot of affluent suburbanites in the college admissions gladiatorial combats.
Secondly, and more importantly, educational technology is advancing at a rapid clip. The quality of a school is going to matter less, and less as motivated students and their families take advantage of the relatively affordable alternatives available. I predict paying a premium to live in an affluent school district will become a less attractive option as increasing amounts of learning move from the classroom to the keyboard. This trend could be accelerated with Tyler Cowen’s Georgist land taxes. Instead of adding real estate taxes because they are close to public transportation, add a tax penalty for living in an exclusive, affluent school attendance zone. Rural Americans and non-affluent suburbanites could also help by pushing states to consider their needs by supporting alternative forms of educational delivery by funding online courses for credit and online testing for self-directed learning achievement recognition.
If you get government out of schools you are also getting government out of day care. So what to do for families with two working parents other than tell them to suck it up? There is room here for innovation, I believe. Schools are big and expensive. Micro-educational facilities with adult supervision and lots of electronic education options might be the answer. Envision a house in which a couple of adults, maybe one licensed teacher, serve several blocks of homes, and specializes in providing day care services but also teaching reading and basic math but lets kids conduct self-directed learning. Instead of warehousing vast numbers of children in public schools, provide much smaller, more one-room school house type options with a relatively small number of students interacting with a single teacher who would actually know their names and understand them as individuals. Nano-schools would personalize education, provide more alternatives for parents, and would put fewer eggs in each baskets so that a toxic school environment would ruin fewer lives and exit would be much easier. States also need to ease up a bit on day-care regulation. A big part of the cost of day care is complying with licensure and facility requirements. Perhaps some free-market think take could take on rationalizing day care regulation as a cause.
Finally, the vast number of teachers and public school administrative staff exercise inordinate political power. How to deal? First off, lines need to be drawn in the sand. Political candidates are getting away without having to pay a cost for pandering to Public Schools, Inc. Republicans can’t really be hurt by standing up to them, so that need to start demanding answers to how the unfunded teacher pension fund liabilities are going to be addressed. At the national level, candidates need to be forced to announce whether they will support or oppose bailouts for state and local governments that cannot fund their obligations. We should learn from the Puerto Rico example. Republicans just rolled over and signed off on shiploads of cash with minimal requirements to shape up. When the next major recession hits, people need to know whether they are going to have to bail out the exorbitant retirement promises made or not.
The disruptive student issue may be a red herring, I suspect. My impression is that in most suburban districts, disruptive students get transferred into special education programs. Private schools of course have far fewer restrictions on the use of suspensions and expulsions. I suspect in the long run, expulsions are far better for disruptive students in that they wind up finding their way to more disciplined environments where they learn self-control. Urban public schools with disproportionately large numbers of disruptive students, let’s say like the one in season 4 of The Wire, are pretty much juvenile detention centers. Charter and parochial schools are the best alternative options in such situations for most families with the desire and wherewithal to break out.
Honestly, I admit policy (b) is something of a long shot, and if I had to bet, I’d put money on policy (c) as what we will likely end up with. But (c) is not necessarily a static option. Under the Every Student Succeeds Act and with Secretary De Vos’s cheerleading, several states are attempting to improve education outcomes. A recent EdWeek blog post identified the following ESSA plan innovators:
New Mexico is giving districts with low-performing schools the option of using choice itself as a turnarnound strategy through charters, online classes, home schooling, and magnet schools.
Rhode Island’s list of possible interventions for long-struggling schools includes not only charter restarts but also “small schools of choice.” That would involve organizing larger schools into units of about 100 students per grade, with a focus on personalizing instruction and helping students develop stronger relationships with educators, according to the state’s plan.
Louisiana’s plan notes that low-income students who attend schools that get a C, D, or F on the state’s school rating system can participate in the state’s private school voucher program. And Louisiana gives fast-track approval to charter schools that want to serve students in districts that are rated D or F.
If these states succeed and other states learn from and advance in these directions, policy (c ) need not be that much different than policy (b).
There are already plenty of superior technological alternatives to classroom learning.
But there is no good technological substitute for socialization with good peers who exert a positive influence, and for social connections which become more important and valuable with age.
Obviously it’s impossible to equally distribute “the best socialization group” to every kid, but, at the very least, there are obvious and common-sensical steps any institution should be able to take to suppress and deal with bad apples, disruptive, and otherwise problematic kids. That’s not being done very well at all in a lot of places, and since “voice” doesn’t work, parents are desperate for an “exit” option.
Sorry Handle, I strongly disagree on this:
” at the very least, there are obvious and common-sensical steps any institution should be able to take to suppress and deal with bad apples, disruptive, and otherwise problematic kids. ”
The USA does NOT agree on what steps are common-sensical.
But the worst part is that to talk about the problem is to be labeled a racist — since proportionately more disruptive kids are black.
We don’t even agree that we don’t agree; and can’t talk about it.
Yes, but every TRULY common-sensical person agrees 🙂
Yes to all this.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/10/16/17928164/early-childhood-education-doesnt-teach-kids-fund-it
New Vox note on how early ed helps … in socialization, not education. They write more about the day care / babysitting effect being good, rather than the goodness of the under 5 y.o. peers of the little ones.
From Slate Star Codex, now more supportive of preschool:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/11/06/preschool-i-was-wrong/
Option a) is not possible in a diverse society. Public schooling is political and will always be a political prize. Mises discussed this in ‘Liberalism.’ In America, we have parochial schools and private schools, by SCOTUS decision, for the very reason of the political purpose of the original public schools dominated by Protestants.
” In all areas of mixed nationality, the school is a political prize of the highest importance. It cannot be deprived of its political character as long as it remains a public and compulsory institution. There is, in fact, only one solution: the state, the government, the laws must not in any way concern themselves with schooling or education. Public funds must not be used for such purposes. The rearing and instruction of youth must be left entirely to parents and to private associations and institutions. ”
Mises, Ludwig von (1927). Liberalism (pp. 115-116)
(b) Vouchers and more vouchers — letting parents choose. Letting schools expel the worst students.
Let there be some gov’t special schools for the disruptive / disadvantaged kids (allowing normal kids to go, if their parents want). But most normal parents want their mostly normal kids to get the education the parents want them to get.
Trump should be asking Rep governors if they aren’t willing and able to offer such vouchers plus some double vouchers, mostly state but also some Federal money, to try this.
It has to cost more at first – and has to pay teachers more. It doesn’t have to pay administrators more, but will be a much easier sell if it does.
We do need to highlight the best schools in the low cost real estate areas in the USA. Other country’s results are unlikely to transfer well, but can be interesting.
Or because the null hypothesis seems correct so the logical thing to let the principals and the teachers run the schools. Cut most of the over site and overhead and this spending. Cut down on the testing, it has not helped.
That’s what I said in the last post. Basically, let people who can afford private schools have private schools. Let geography rule. Create realistic standards. And create a standard for discipline that, if violated enough, will result in kids going to small “charter” schools that aren’t even remotely fun, giving most kids a strong incentive to behave.
Sorry, grades were due and I haven’t checked in in a while.
Are you thinking I would be unhappy with c? No. I’m not thrilled with charters, but they aren’t big enough to do damage now. So long as they are kept small, they’re not optimal but I’d take today over where the people in that conversation wanted to go.
My ranked order: first one isn’t on the ballot. No charters, no vouchers, but private schools with tax deductions. That is, you can’t take money from schools directly, but they are tax deductible as an investment in your child. So if you can afford to pay for private school, you can get help, but no vouchers.
Second would be c.
I wouldn’t want either a or b.
I’ve long supported tax credits over deductions (like at 30% or 20%) to avoid a bigger tax reduction to the higher tax bracket folk (the rich!). And also preferred tax credits for education over vouchers, but …
in the real world of semi-socialist desire to get Free Lunches (or Free School), especially for the poor, I see no political chance for tax deductions over vouchers.
Especially if the main early year effect of schools is socialization, more so than differences in getting an education, then parental choice with more choices seems far better than current (c) AND far more politically possible.
As I age (every single year it seems I’m older), I’m more and more interested in achieving improvement rather than refining what I think might be the ideal. Vouchers would be a big improvement over what we have now.
Blacks need to be convinced that vouchers would be better for them and their kids; so far, they’re not. I’d guess there are fewer than 10% black readers of Arnold’s stuff here (I’m white). No ideas on how to change this. Maybe more Candice Owens?
Blacks are absolutely right. Vouchers would not be good for them. Vouchers would not increase their access to existing quality schools, but would rob funds from public schools to create “fake” private schools designed purely to hoover up voucher funds.
Vouchers are by far the worst idea. There would be all sorts of demographics that are too expensive to educate to make a private school profitable.
Great comments — thoughtful but conflicting suggestions reflect the complexity of public education, with its many dimensions: psychology, technology, politics, philosophy, law …. The ASK blog’s economic perspective filters out most of the unproductive Political Correctness, with no loss of civility. I come to this blog from Education Realist and I recommend it.
Here are a few ideas that are worth considering.
Homophily. People gravitate to others who share their age, sex, class, religion, politics, education, interests. (Etc.) It largely explains differences in schools and communities. Human nature is predictably constant, and policies and laws which disregard it are hard to impose and unlikely to succeed.
Pareto Principle. 20% of students cause 80% of problems, 4% cause 64%, 1% cause 50%. A consistently disruptive student must be removed from the classroom.
Incentives & disincentives. President Obama and California Governor Brown legally redefined suspensions and expulsions as disparate impacts, i.e. racism, and now expect teachers to accommodate what were previously designated “willfully disobedient” students. To be charitable, good intentions gone awry.
County schools. In California, there are alternative schools run by the County departments of education. They serve a wide range of students, including home schoolers, incarcerated juvenile delinquents, autistic kids, emotionally disturbed kids, kids with handicaps (temporary and permanent), teen parents, and district rejects serving long-term expulsions. But also many “regular” students. Any parent/guardian can choose a county school, and many do because of dissatisfaction with the local options. Many times, they moved into a school district mid-semester so they attend an open-enrollment county school meanwhile. Many county sites are small scale, serving the neighborhood, and all are staffed by dedicated credentialed professionals. They are well-funded with current technology and materials. They offer both daily-attendance traditional classrooms and weekly-assigned independent study, which can be a solution for students expelled for disruptive behavior. It’s triage for the schools, calm for the individual student. Lots of personal attention. Also, consider a shy 9th grader who can’t cope with the transition from a small 6th through 8th intermediate school to a huge high school filled with older, bigger, louder, more mature students. Back in the day, 9th graders were Junior High Seniors. Not anymore. All in all, county schools have proven to be an essential part of California’s public education system and a life-saver for families. Whether you live in the state or not, check them out, they are overlooked in discussions about districts, charters, vouchers, taxes and the usual points of contention.
Compulsory education. California law requires students to attend school until age 18. Many states set the threshold at 16 or 17. 18 is ideal, but not necessarily optimal for many students who might prefer to work. The college-prep model is not for everyone.
Previous comments inspired this one. I hope some parent or teacher finds this helpful.
Thanks for the kind words. Alternative high schools are overwhelmingly run for kids who will not get enough credits to graduate in a normal school system, so are put in much easier classes and credit recovery. They are for wild, unmanageable kids and kids who just don’t care but like the social life of school.
The best thing to fix schools would be to create far more employment, which is why it’s so absurd that the same people who are for vouchers and privatization are also for open borders.
I was deliberately expansive in my description of county departments of education because their schools, to the extent anyone is even aware of them, have the not-entirely-undeserved reputation as back-up systems for teen-aged reprobates. Agreed, they should not be a first choice for anyone with a decent option in their district or the wherewithal to afford a private school. But parents and teenagers appreciate that “normal” teenagers go through phases that complicate, if not doom, their academic progress. Sometimes it’s their fault, sometimes their parents are in trouble. Think about drugs, health crises, homelessness, business failures. Many of the preceding comments are about a PLAN B, and county schools have proven to be the best option for thousands of students at a critical point in their lives. Ideally, it’s temporary, to make up Fs and return to the district or graduate. It helps the individual student and their family, and it helps the district schools by removing trouble-makers or giving F-getters (e.g. Algebra) a second chance to catch up. Many districts cut back on summer school but stuck to their on-schedule-or-drop-out policies. County schools are year-round, open enrollment.
I almost always agree with Ed Real, but please don’t dismiss alternative schools by assuming that their classrooms are infested by bad people. They have evolved to serve as a viable PLAN B for all kinds of students and parents who never imagined they would need one.
Aren’t your beliefs 1 and 4 mutually exclusive?