Instead, kids with engaged parents will flee to better schools. The other parents will either follow, growing the new school and model, or the other school will adapt in order to retain students.
Engaged parents are your early adopters. Without vouchers, most people can’t even afford to enter the market.
One of the purposes of public education is also assimilating children into the shared values of society. In the US this has been forgotten despite guys like Jefferson talking about this exact thing.
The free market can be good at optimizing for certain outcomes, but I don't think you're going to get a lot of buy in with the current political climate being what it is, and a lack of consensus around what kind of outcomes should be required.
Furthermore, making schooling a purely financial transaction? Where do you think that leads?
Yeah, I'm OK paying taxes to get to live in a society with universally-available (mostly) fee-free primary and secondary education that aspires to some set of standards.
I'm not OK paying taxes to help Bobby Baptist send his kids to Jesus Is Lord Day School. Or kick in to rich parents' budget for Phillips Exeter. If we must have vouchers, let people keep their own tax money that would have gone to schools and use that for the vouchers. I'm not interested in handing people my cash to fund private education. I'm interested in having a public education system. That, I'll pay taxes for.
But Bobby Baptist's kids going to Jesus Is Lord Day School is assimilating those kids into their society at large and Jesus Is Lord Day School still needs to meet the curriculum and testing standards that any other school in the state has to. And more often than not those private schools are _exceeding_ the standard of the public education system.
I spent years in both public and private schools.
The worst part of public schooling was that everything was scaled down to the poorest-performing child's level.
The worst part of private schooling was that a few underperforming kids were pushed/passed along with everyone else.
The latter outcome is _significantly_ better for society than the former.
> But Bobby Baptist's kids going to Jesus Is Lord Day School is assimilating those kids into their society at large
No, I think you're missing the parent's point -- it's assimilating those students into a specific religious subculture whose beliefs and values may be at odds with civil society at large.
(If you have trouble seeing this, try substituting "Jesus Is Lord Day School" in your head for some other implied religions.)
But that's exactly my point. Would you deny this same right to kids that attend Jewish day schools? Could you even argue for that without sounding like a massive bigot?
Religious people are part of your community and have the right to their religious identity and to be a member of your community. If they want a school just for them, you don't suffer for it.
Religion is not at odds with society. We're not the USSR. Religious freedom is an enshrined right in this country.
I'm Jewish, I went to Jewish day school for awhile, and I definitely don't think tax money should be going to Jewish day schools. Nor Christian nor Muslim schools. What religion you raise your kids in is your business, and no we're not the USSR.
Keeping religion out of publicly funded institutions, including schools, is done as much to safeguard free religious practice in this country as anything. The point is that the public institutions should be entirely civil and not under the sway of any one religion, because each religion once in control of society ends up discriminating against the others. That's why you don't allow them power in the civil sphere.
At least in the US, The community is not religious by definition in the constitution. The whole gambit with vouchers is that you are laundering money for religious institutions by putting it under "personal" choice.
If the political arm of the fundamentalist movement focused on morality policing its own members, instead of trying to force its values on the rest of us, we'd have way less of a problem with it.
It is very actively 'trying to fuck us over'. And it's winning, hard, in both the 6-3 sphere, on the legislative bench, and in many others.
>But Bobby Baptist's kids going to Jesus Is Lord Day School is assimilating those kids into their society at large and Jesus Is Lord Day School still needs to meet the curriculum and testing standards that any other school in the state has to. And more often than not those private schools are _exceeding_ the standard of the public education system.
Are they? There are a lot of folks who would disagree (and many of those are graduates of such institutions) with that assessment[0]:
The city has determined that four Orthodox yeshivas are failing to provide
an education “substantially equivalent” to what’s offered in public schools —
and recommends the state reach the same conclusion for another 14 yeshivas
the city says are ultimately under state authority.
The findings are the results of a long-stalled and politically thorny
investigation that has stretched on since 2015.
The city found that just seven schools they investigated met standards.
That’s in addition to two it found were up to standards in 2019.
[...]
The investigation was spurred by a complaint from a group called Young
Advocates for a Fair Education, or YAFFED, headed at the time by a yeshiva
graduate who argued his education left him ill-prepared for the world outside
of religious studies. YAFFED and other critics argue many so-called ultra-
Orthodox yeshivas provide little to no secular instruction, particularly for
boys, and instead focus on religious studies. Representatives of the schools
have pushed back strenuously on those claims.
The schools are private, but do receive some state funding and, like all
private schools in New York, are required to provide children with an
education “substantially equivalent” to what is offered in public schools.
The investigation kicked off a debate of what exactly substantially
equivalent means, prompting the state to develop rules for determining it.
And that's just one city in the US. I am unaware of such reviews in other places (some likely do exist, I just haven't heard about it -- please do jump in if you're aware of similar investigations), but religious schools (of whatever stripe) exist to support their preferred religion above all else.
Public funding (and especially taking funds away from secular public schools) of religious schools is antithetical to the idea of a secular government and society.
> The worst part of private schooling was that a few underperforming kids were pushed/passed along with everyone else.
I also went to both. When I didn't have good enough grades they just passed me to public schools. Shocker, the private school passed off difficult children somewhere else. You know who else they didn't serve? Special needs? And who else? Anybody who couldn't afford it, or didn't believe in the holy trinity.
I realize that a lot of libertarians believe that everyone should fend for themselves and that there's some sort of natural selection that justifies poor outcomes for some based on "fair rules". As I've gotten older in life, nothing seems less true.
My private catholic schools had plenty of stupid kids, non-catholic kids (me), desperately poor kids (also me), and kids with special needs.
The worst thing that they did to me was add a course to the curriculum about religion so that I had an extra course to pass than the public school kids. And we didn't even learn exclusively about Catholicism in that class.
One of the key problems in the US funding system is that population clustering effects will cause exacerbating effects where people of increasingly similar socioeconomic and cultural strata all stick together - of course this will cause rising inequality and unequal outcomes. The people living in the gated communities fund their local school primarily, not the poor one on the other end of the street that can't get or retain teachers there besides from ideologically driven sources like Teach for America because students are absolutely horrible when coming from poverty-stricken homes that use public education as a meal program while the working poor parents do 12+ hour shifts frequently.
The funding structure of every other thing in the US is totally backwards and so unless we solve cultural problems like xenophobia and tribalism we will be unable to solve socioeconomic ones. As such, I have basically zero faith that the US will last another 20 years in any recognizable form as a liberal democracy.
The funding thing's a red herring. The best-funded schools in my state, with by far the highest spending per pupil, excluding special cases (e.g. schools that are also correctional institutions or otherwise not an ordinary school, so obviously have sky-high costs), are also among the very worst we've got, and it's looked like that for years. Throwing more money at schools in poor areas has had little effect on outcomes—not to say we shouldn't even out funding or even give poor-performing schools extra funding (which we already are doing, and if we just evened out funding, we'd be taking money away from the schools in very-poor areas and giving it to "richer" ones) but it very much does not look like doing that will have much effect on educational outcomes.
Money is part of the cause, but where it comes in is letting parents sort their families into expensive-to-live-in school districts with other parents who could also afford those expensive areas. Their kids tend to be easier to teach for a whole bunch of reasons—which does make the schools more effective, but is not because of extra money spent on the schools. The sorting enabled by money does matter, but the funding itself (received by the schools) does not appear to be a major factor.
Basically, a family pays for school quality in the US no matter what, either directly or indirectly—you pay either with tuition for expensive, good private schools if you're fairly rich, or with real estate and transportation costs if you're not that rich, with a sliding scale all the way down to "practically destitute". The extravagant spending of expensive private schools might result in better education (I'm thinking especially of the very-small class sizes, like 4-8 students per class, and the ability to pay for content-area PhDs as teachers in higher grades—we'd have to triple public school budgets to do that stuff, and that actually wouldn't even be enough because demand would so badly outstrip supply, should we try it) but beneath those relatively-few outliers with far-higher spending, moving spending/budgets up or down a (relatively) little doesn't seem to do much.
I'm not disagreeing that throwing money at bad schools won't really help is the thing although it might seem like that's where my line of thinking may lead. Heck, usually more money at schools from what I've seen ranges from more administrators (lol if anyone thinks that helps) to equipment for students (as if an iPad will help a disengaged kid that much?). Add in the reality that lower socioeconomic status folks tend to move a LOT (think migrant workers' children) and that has pretty bad outcomes on education regardless of potential of the child.
In fact, in impoverished areas probably the most important thing to do to improve educational outcomes after establishing a school at all isn't better schools but simply money at home - teachers are only responsible for 35% or so of the educational outcome of an aggregate population while something as simple as ensuring a child has reliable sources of meals and that the meals are with family is _way_ more important it turns out (insert correlation / causation caveats).
As such, my suggestion isn't to spend more money on schools in low performing areas but to direct funding toward better home lives for students in the districts essentially. What good is spending $100k on better teachers and equipment when the students are living in trailer parks with abusive parents that don't feed them properly? This is a problem _many_ teachers in low-opportunity areas have talked about as one of the top problems for them.
I used to support charter schools conceptually until I understood that the funding mechanisms cause a zero-sum game problem which takes funding away from schools that could use funding that would do better. At this time I'm convinced that almost any policy in education or health will fail without addressing the massive harms of large scale poverty in a capitalist system.
The core problem is that the effective route to massive improvements in equality of access to quality public education is basically "solve poverty, and concentrations of poverty", which isn't within the scope of schools' mission and is going to be far harder to sell, politically, take a long time, and be incredibly expensive.
We tried "bussing", which directly confronted parts of this, and it fucking worked, which makes it practically unique among attempts to address this problem, and it was relatively cheap compared to other things we might try that could work, but literally everyone hated it (yes, even the poorer families) so I guess that's out.
I’m a big proponent of leveraging Amdahl’s Law in social policies and that freedom of movement should be promoted culturally given the nature of markets to solve a lot of problems although we have serious gaming and regulatory capture issues in the US that make this pretty naïve. If command economies oftentimes fail to attain resilience and markets have horrific social side effects detrimental to civil society / collective problem solving, as a society we should probably accommodate people to relocate given it’s probably cheaper than encouraging specific groups to relocate geographically. There’s no clear social contract at a point given so many holes and inconsistencies over many decades of back and forth bad faith approaches along with institutionalists myopic to the individual scopes of their well intentioned policies.
Much like the original architecture and UX of welfare in the US had assumptions like a family with a cook at home I don’t think education as an institution is really meeting the needs of the public to be better informed and critical thinking citizens invested in communities and society as a whole.
There’s a big cultural issue currently where people are resistant to move for better opportunities when much of the US immigrant population has thrived over generations specifically by migrating to opportunity areas. Now, many that try to leave impoverished areas are shamed and become pariahs for leaving basically job deserts and the social costs are horrific as people find less and less connection to others.
Public education system is definitely a positive thing that most of us will pay taxes for.
However when public education is not guided by improving meaningful outcomes, but by ideologues, it needs to be checked. Vouchers sounds like a good way to insert some market dynamics and to allow parents to walk away from schools that are on the path to fail to prepare their kids for the future.
My son is currently is in public elementary school here in Bay Area. If this idiocy persists, i dont believe i will keep him in non-STEM focused public school and will seek out better education for him that i will need to pay out of pocket.
I can afford it, but those who are less fortunate will remain trapped and thats a travesty of CA public education
However when public education is not guided by improving meaningful outcomes, but by ideologues, it needs to be checked. Vouchers sounds like a good way to insert some market dynamics and to allow parents to walk away from schools that are on the path to fail to prepare their kids for the future.
As opposed to parental ideologues? By letting parents choose, we'll be letting them go to different schools championing different value system and the customers will be parents, not the children they ostensibly are charged with educating.
By grouping parents with like-minded parents, we'll amplify groups and clusters, leading to not only further stratification but also further decoupling society and greater inequality.
> By grouping parents with like-minded parents, we'll amplify groups and clusters, leading to not only further stratification but also further decoupling society and greater inequality.
This effect is super obvious if you've ever sent kids to a private school. A big part of it is that you're opting in to a certain approach and set of attitudes and beliefs, even in secular ones. If you're not a fit for their program, you don't get to meaningfully agitate to change things as you might in a public school—they just tell you to go somewhere else, then pluck another candidate off the wait list to replace your family.
This can be awesome (though still risky, in some ways) if it's a good bubble, but of course they aren't all good ones....
Ultimately, it is your right as a parent to decide what values you want your minor children to be taught.
What is an alternative? Forbidding parents to pull their kids from schools that are ruining their future by following a system with historically worse outcomes?
Most importantly, original articles here provide data that show that teaching math the way CA is trying to do has led to worse outcomes across the ethnic spectrum(unless of course parents had a financial ability to complement with private school/lessons).
Ultimately, it is your right as a parent to decide what values you want your minor children to be taught.
So, we have the right to indoctrinate bullshit to children?
What is an alternative? Forbidding parents to pull their kids from schools that are ruining their future by following a system with historically worse outcomes?
We work by improving public schools. That's going to be easier said than done, but it's the right solution.
If the question is whether the state or the parent has the ultimate power to decide on what to teach their kids, the individual parent must almost always win in my opinion.
It sounds like you're in a good spot where the taxes extracted from you go to support a value system that you are in favor of. Given that taxes aren't a choice, and given that value systems vary between people, can you envision a case where somebody with a different value system would be unhappy about where their taxes go?
Sure. Lots of people have ideas or preferences I think are terrible. I hope they lose at the ballot box.
[EDIT] To make this more substantive: I think there's a distinct difference between collectively funding a public system, and redistributing money to folks to go toward private entities—this goes beyond not liking the values or environments of some of the schools private-school-preferrers might spend their vouchers on. That's why I suggested that if we must do vouchers, it ought to be limited to what a given person paid in themselves, not other people's money—I think there's a fundamental difference between funding a public good available to all and giving people cash so they can get past a private paywall to access a similar good.
> One of the purposes of public education is also assimilating children into the shared values of society.
From what I have observed of the US's education system, the problem is that the public education system is assimilating children into values that are _not_ shared by society nor their parents.
I think that part of the problem is that I have no idea what values you are talking about that don't match society/parents.
That is to say: I'm a leftist and I'm worried about schools indoctrinating kids into a whitewashed, anti-LGBTQ+, jingoistic understanding of the world. However, I'm sure there are Republican parents that are concerned about kids being indoctrinated into a "woke" understanding of the world.
I don't know how you manage things when you have the country split down the middle with two completely separate worldviews.
The issue is, from my view, very much a problem of the Left-wing in the US, introducing victim/oppressor politics into schools, teaching children primarily to regard themselves as activists first, and students second.
I can also see it is causing a mental health crisis in students, who increasingly are under pressure to identify as an oppressed minority, in order to be marked out as an oppressor; victimhood conferring social status.
>The issue is, from my view, very much a problem of the Left-wing in the US, introducing victim/oppressor politics into schools, teaching children primarily to regard themselves as activists first, and students second.
Where is this being done? What school districts specifically? What are the specific topics that "introduce victim/oppressor politics into schools?"
I'd really like to know, as I'm not aware of any of that stuff. Since you're obviously a "disinterested observer," without an agenda, I assume you've gathered actual evidence for your assertions.
My view (as an American "with an agenda") is very different from yours. If I'm wrong, I'd like to adjust my view. As such, please provide me with specific examples of what you're asserting.
For one example, Abigail Shrier's book "Irreversible Damage" covers the mental health crisis amongst girls identifying as transgender.
An excerpt from the section "Trans as an intersectional shield":
> "“Of all of these badges of victim status, the only one that you can actually choose is ‘trans,’” Heather Heying, visiting fellow at Princeton University, pointed out to me. “All you have to do is declare ‘I’m trans’ and boom, you’re trans. And there you get to rise in the progressive stack and you have more credibility in this intersectional worldview.”
And earlier context:
> Kindergarteners are introduced to the “Genderbread Person”15 and “Gender Unicorn.”16 Kindergarten teachers read from I Am Jazz, and the little ones are taught that they might have a “girl brain in a boy body” or vice versa.17
> Teachers present an array of gender and sexual identity options and appear pleasantly surprised when a child chooses wisely (that is, anything but cisgender).
> The schools are not forcing adolescents to identify as transgender, but they are greasing the skids. The LGBTQ safe house they’ve fashioned is avant-garde and enticing, framed with moral superiority, insulated with civil rights...
Thanks! I can recommend those for reading lists in the public schools near me.
That doesn't answer the question I asked, nor does it show anything even close to encouraging a "victim/oppressor" environment.
No one is trans because its' "cool" or because someone mentioned that trans people (less than 1% of the population) exist. Do you know anyone who is trans? It's certainly not some golden road to peer/social acceptance and popularity. Quite the opposite, in fact.
In fact, trans folks are routinely subject to harassment, ridicule, threats and physical violence. Stopping such abuse is the goal, not creating more trans folks -- which is ridiculous on its face.
That you take your own trained-in prejudices for the laws of nature don't make them so.
None of what you posted makes your point, rather it just points up that you don't like what certain people have to say and you want such ideas and people suppressed. What are you afraid of?
> Sealioning (also sea-lioning and sea lioning) is a type of trolling or harassment that consists of pursuing people with relentless requests for evidence, often tangential or previously addressed, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity ("I'm just trying to have a debate"), and feigning ignorance of the subject matter
I'm not claiming that "I just want to have a debate," nor did I "pursue" you (I made exactly one request to detail evidence of your assertions) and none of what I asked about was "tangential" or "previously addressed." And I'm not "feigning" ignorance. I know quite a bit about trans folks and the issues and discrimination they face.
What's more, the tired tropes (which you trotted out rather than have a substantive discussion) are more akin to the "Gish Gallop"[0] than anything I might have written being "sea lioning."
I have no interest in debating anything with you. You're just flat wrong.
Regardless, you have your ideas/beliefs and as a decent human being, I don't despise you for those beliefs, nor do I advocate for you to be silenced (as you do about others).
Please do speak your mind. It's an important part of having a free and open society. And I will do the same.
assimilating children into the shared values of society
The US no longer has universal shared values, it has many different sets of values that are all competing for survival. Schools have become the front line in this battlefield.
>The US no longer has universal shared values, it has many different sets of values that are all competing for survival. Schools have become the front line in this battlefield.
I disagree completely. Our shared values include belief in the rule of law, equality under that law, equality of opportunity and a whole bunch of other stuff that has always been the rhetoric, but much of which has only grudgingly been implemented for wider and wider swathes of Americans over the past 230+ years.
That some folks are at odds some issues most certainly does not mean we don't have shared values. It means that we don't share all the same values/ideas. Which is exactly how it's been here since well before the founding of the US.
> purposes of public education is also assimilating children into the shared values of society
Regulate voucher schools. Content requirements. Restrictions on religion. Maybe even standardized testing, or requirements that voucher students not be subject to extra fees.
The public is paying, after all. It can attach strings to its money.
Or, unengaged parents will blame the school for their kid's poor performance and move their kids over, thus bringing down the metrics that gave everybody the impression that it was a good school in the first place.
Instead, kids with engaged parents will flee to better schools. The other parents will either follow, growing the new school and model, or the other school will adapt in order to retain students.
Engaged parents are your early adopters. Without vouchers, most people can’t even afford to enter the market.