I get empire-building, but everybody empire-building at once in the same way in the face of budget constraints?
What "budget constraints"?
How many Colleges have actually had to *reduce* their costs? Colleges have passed their costs onto students, students pay for them via loans, full stop.
Further these empires are popular with the students, and the professors, for ideological reasons... and often the colleges have promised to create them at gun point (i.e. do it or we'll riot) by the students.
My daughter is very talented in Art, she very clearly is gifted and interested. No, we don't "brutally say no", but we do point out the economics of everything, and the incomes of everything.
Her drawing is breathtaking and no doubt will get better, we encourage it, the economics of trying to support herself on drawing are iffy. If she wants to give it a whirl then that's fine, but my job right now is to make sure her other life skills aren't lacking so she has options.
I expected the tax returns to be somehow damaging to Trump (hell, that’s why he refused to release them at all, right?)
Romney got ripped up and down for releasing his tax returns because he (as a silly rich guy) did things normal people can't.
Trump releasing his taxes would have been much more damaging than him keeping them hidden, even if he'd done nothing illegal or unethical.
Basically as long as the media is going to act as an arm of the Democratic party, we're not going to see any tax returns from ultra rich members of the GOP.
She seems ignorant to the fact that the HBC’s were created because black students weren’t allowed in white colleges
It was poor optics and the press spinning it. The big question she's alluding to, and that should be asked is...
"What do I do if the public schools fail my child?"
What form that failure takes doesn't matter. Yes, racism was the traditional problem if we go back far enough in time. But I don't see why "incompetence" or "bad roll of the dice" is an answer that should have me tolerating a sub-par education for my kid(s).
Claiming that "the system as a whole" is better off with my kid doesn't impress. Ditto going into how "the system as a whole" is better off without competition. Ditto going into how this can't happen (it can and it does), or how we're going to change the system in 10 years so this can't happen (I've been listening to that for decades).
"What do I do if the public schools fail my child?"
If you don't have a workable-by-me answer then you're claiming the needs of the system outweigh those of my child. And in some systems, you're claiming the needs of the system outweigh the needs of almost all of its captive children.
public schools should be worried.
Only if they don't supply a quality product.
Despite my occasional issues with them, the local publics are great, they'll do fine. But for the schools that don't supply a quality product? They deserve the problems they'll get.
...in a handful of very wealthy districts local funding dramatically exceeds the norm...
That. Exactly. There are crazy high levels of spending in a few districts. When groups want to make the case that poor districts are underfunded, they cherry pick these rich areas for comparison, instead of looking at the median. Detroit is way above the median.
If throwing money at the problem would fix it then we'd long be done. That leaves... culture? human capital?
So... when the middle class flees they take with them the bulk of the leadership? The guy who runs the children's baseball team, the gal who organizes various school events, and so forth. This creates a power vacuum, and bad things happen all over the place?
and the worst possible way of funding schools so we end up with some schools having classes with leaky roof and other schools being able to build $20 million dollar high school football stadiums.
That's the easy comparison, and both examples are true. There really are schools which use a money cannon to solve their "problems". Detroit really does have leaky roofs. But let's dig into some numbers.
So their per-pupil is $13,900
Their class size should be: 14.8 to 1.
So far, on paper these numbers seem pretty healthy. Locally our per-pupil has gone up a lot recently and it's still below $10k, so they're like an extra 40% over us. Detroit has 4(!) non-teachers for every teacher, locally two thirds of all school employees are teachers (so they're 1:4 and we're 1: 0.6).
Detroit regularly makes the news with the arrest of mayor/principals/staff/whoever, their school board used to make the news with expenses made by/for the school board. They also make the news on a shocking lack of resources for their students. They have an insanely bloated administration.
I see no reason not to think Detroit's money problems aren't corruption, mismanagement, incompetence, and a shocking misallocation of resources... or it's not about the money, and these numbers are a big reason why a charter could come in and do more with less.
the Laffer Curve does not say that “all tax cuts pay for themselves” as many people claim. What is true is that tax rate cuts will always lead to more growth, employment, and income for citizens, which are desirable outcomes leading to greater prosperity and opportunity.
Provided you don't break the economy, lose a war, that sort of thing.
I’ve got no beef against charters as long as it’s understood that you can’t realistically expect to fund them out of the same pool of funds allocated to the existing public schools without really fishing over the latter.
Then why should the local school system respond to parents?
If the money follows the child, then I have a budgetary gun pointed at the school body, and they're going to do right by my kid or I'll go elsewhere.
If that's not the case, then the system is probably better off forcing me to leave.
This is why it undermines the idea of universal schooling.
First of all, well reasoned. However... while everything you said holds together logically, I think this line of reasoning assumes we're starting from a utopian reality.
There are schools where the *bulk* of the students are failing. There are schools which are poorly run, where the administrators are corrupt and occasionally arrested, the teachers are substandard, and so forth. That's not just "undermining the idea of universal schooling", it's shooting it dead.
These are the sorts of places where Charters shine. That's the opposite of what we'd expect if "skimming" were the Charter's sole advantage.
There needs to be a way for (poor) people to hold public schools accountable.
greginak: There could be a dozen reasons for why that child is disruptive. Some are relatively easy to solve some are harder and some are mysterious. That child should have a chance to get past their problems. Many children have disruptive periods or bad years. And many of them get past that to success. That is actually one of the jobs of a school, any school, to figure out what the kids struggle is and try to deal with it.
Sure. All true. None of that changes that 6 of them in a classroom greatly [impedes] education for everyone.
And none of that is a good reason to damage my kid's education.
Somehow one of my kids was misassigned into the lower tracked English class. I found out she needed to sit in the hallway in order to study or do homework because the teacher had no control over the class. Next day I spoke with the Principal and had her schedule changed so she wasn't in that class.
So she (rightfully) ended up with the kids that care about education, and the ones that don't can do whatever it is that they do.
Advice for anyone with kids: The Principal's job is to fold, not stand firm.
Saying, “Let’s improve all schools and give everyone an opportunity to choose between a variety of good ones,” NEEDS to give parents those options? Why? No one currently is guaranteed either of those. Why must they be going forward?
Because if you don't then I'll move.
I don't think society has the ability to fix all "negative impact" children, so presumably they're still going to be in school... and that's fine. My job as parent is to make sure their problems don't negatively impact my kids.
Similarly my job as parent is to make sure in High School that my kids get four years of math (etc), even if it's more advanced math than what some/most of the kids in school can take.
I’m just arguing that education is not a toaster, and the preferences of parents are not the highest priority.
Over the years I've had to step in and "correct" the school's judgement four times (and counting) on major issues. Things like whether the kid will be held back a grade. Someone needs to be the last authority on these sorts of things.
The school's interests don't totally line up with my kids nor does the school have more information about my kids than I do, nor does the school have more time, etc.
Short of child abuse (and society has decided that lack of education is that), the default judgement should be that the parent is a better judge of what's good for their kid than some bureaucrat's 10 second judgement.
So rather than deciding, “Should we improve current schools OR just let people defect?” why not opt for, “Let’s try to improve all current schools — maybe by diversifying their offerings — and then help people find the one that works best for them.”
What that means in practice needs to be something like....
1) My kid never shares a classroom with a disruptive kid.
That implies "track early, track often". 'Advanced math' and 'Normal math' is probably more politically correct than the reality but whatever.
2) My kid has access to advanced (as in, actually advanced and not normal without the kids who don't want to learn) STEM classes.
That implies if there are resource conflicts between paying for my kids' advanced classes and paying for some other kids' social services, my kids win. An Advanced Physics class is useful for my kids, another social worker is not.
I only care about other kids in the distant abstract. The moment the administration starts talking about "everyone" or "all kids" I'm going to tune out the entire conversation. My kids are my first priority, that means I don't sacrifice them for my own political ideals (this has come up), much less someone else's.
Stillwater: Blindly turning these types of functions over to greedhounds never seems to work out all that well for anybody.
My expectation is most or all Charters are created and run by well meaning people. How effective they are is a different issue.
IMHO the big problem historically for this sort of thing was the imbalance of information.
How do I know that Charter-X (or Public-Y) is great or terrible? Short of sending my kid there for years, how do I cut through the happy-talk and the unhappy-talk? And for that matter, if I do send my kid there for years, do I really know what good 4th-grade math looks like compared to bad 4th-grade math?
When the issue came up with my family, I sat down and did lots of on-line research. There are school evaluation websites. Comparisons of test scores to the local area and the nation, that sort of thing.
Before I walked in the door of Public-School-Y I'd evaluated the kid's assumed elementary, middle, and high schools. Walking around the school was a formality, I already knew what we'd find.
We did the same before sending the kids into Charter-X.
There are tools to evaluate all this, they're free and on-line, it's all public information. I do NOT understand why parents consistently defend failing schools. Feelings don't trump math, and the math is out there.
On the other hand, the abysmal record of the charter schools introduced ought to give even conservatives pause in turning over education to the greedy opportunists who seem to comprise the US business community.
It is very easy to listen to one side's true believers and come to the conclusion that charters are always a mistake, or that they're always right.
Quoting wiki: In general, urban charter schools may appear to be a good alternative to traditional urban schools for urban minority students in poor neighborhoods, if one looks strictly at test scores, but students in suburban charter schools do no better than those in traditional suburban schools serving a mostly middle-class white population.
1) Charters don't appear to do better than a functional public school.
2) Charters are apparently at their best when the public school is a dysfunctional mess. Presumably that means corruption, incompetence, or other adult administrational problems.
3) Consistency of quality is a real issue. There are charters who are better than public, there are others who are much worse.
4) IMHO one of their big strengths is their existence forces the general school system to be a lot more responsive to corner cases.
5) Another big strength is simply introducing feedback into the system. Good products drive out bad ones, just having hundreds of experimental approaches will probably result in successful techniques. I assume those techniques will mostly be copied by the publics but whatever.
The current public system has serious problems with lack of feedback, and with not knowing cost effective ways to deal with what we call poverty. Charters have the potential to fix the former and shed light on the later of those issues.
I will resist one that gives different parents different access to power.
Be careful that we don't let the perfect stand in the way of the good.
I moved my family out of one district and into another, purely for (and because of) the schools. I put it in the budget when my oldest turned *zero* and told my wife we had to move in five years.
That sounds a lot like "different access to power", and it's what currently exists. Vouchers would absolutely be imperfect, and wouldn't level the playing field... but it's probably make it more level than it is now.
Where do I advocate harming anyone? I’d advocating for all students.
If the students have different and opposing needs, then "for all students" is just happy talk to obfuscate who you're making the priority and to avoid defending that choice.
Do you think young people choose to be disruptive for the hell of it and must be punished for doing so?
Who cares? First do no harm. So first you prevent consistently disruptive students from damaging the education of the non-disruptive students.
And to answer your question more directly, *Yes*, I think some students is no value in education and are disruptive just for the hell of it... although my wife's crew was high school so experiences may vary.
I don’t think the solution is those high-flying students leaving, resulting in an underfunded school full of “disruptive ones”.
It's seriously unethical to harm child "A" for the benefit of child "B". Worse, it's not just the high fliers who are being harmed. Six disruptive students. Fewer than that "high fliers". And maybe 15+ who aren't either. Those last are probably hurt the worst.
Ideally the disruptive students are kicked out and the rest learn. Less ideally, the high fliers and the non-disruptive students leave.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Don’t Blame Me!”
What "budget constraints"?
How many Colleges have actually had to *reduce* their costs? Colleges have passed their costs onto students, students pay for them via loans, full stop.
Further these empires are popular with the students, and the professors, for ideological reasons... and often the colleges have promised to create them at gun point (i.e. do it or we'll riot) by the students.
"
My daughter is very talented in Art, she very clearly is gifted and interested. No, we don't "brutally say no", but we do point out the economics of everything, and the incomes of everything.
Her drawing is breathtaking and no doubt will get better, we encourage it, the economics of trying to support herself on drawing are iffy. If she wants to give it a whirl then that's fine, but my job right now is to make sure her other life skills aren't lacking so she has options.
On “Morning Ed: Immigration {2017.03.15.W}”
Romney got ripped up and down for releasing his tax returns because he (as a silly rich guy) did things normal people can't.
Trump releasing his taxes would have been much more damaging than him keeping them hidden, even if he'd done nothing illegal or unethical.
Basically as long as the media is going to act as an arm of the Democratic party, we're not going to see any tax returns from ultra rich members of the GOP.
On “Linky Friday: Survival of the Fittest”
It was poor optics and the press spinning it. The big question she's alluding to, and that should be asked is...
"What do I do if the public schools fail my child?"
What form that failure takes doesn't matter. Yes, racism was the traditional problem if we go back far enough in time. But I don't see why "incompetence" or "bad roll of the dice" is an answer that should have me tolerating a sub-par education for my kid(s).
Claiming that "the system as a whole" is better off with my kid doesn't impress. Ditto going into how "the system as a whole" is better off without competition. Ditto going into how this can't happen (it can and it does), or how we're going to change the system in 10 years so this can't happen (I've been listening to that for decades).
"What do I do if the public schools fail my child?"
If you don't have a workable-by-me answer then you're claiming the needs of the system outweigh those of my child. And in some systems, you're claiming the needs of the system outweigh the needs of almost all of its captive children.
Only if they don't supply a quality product.
Despite my occasional issues with them, the local publics are great, they'll do fine. But for the schools that don't supply a quality product? They deserve the problems they'll get.
"
That. Exactly. There are crazy high levels of spending in a few districts. When groups want to make the case that poor districts are underfunded, they cherry pick these rich areas for comparison, instead of looking at the median. Detroit is way above the median.
If throwing money at the problem would fix it then we'd long be done. That leaves... culture? human capital?
So... when the middle class flees they take with them the bulk of the leadership? The guy who runs the children's baseball team, the gal who organizes various school events, and so forth. This creates a power vacuum, and bad things happen all over the place?
Thoughts?
"
That's the easy comparison, and both examples are true. There really are schools which use a money cannon to solve their "problems". Detroit really does have leaky roofs. But let's dig into some numbers.
Detroit's schools have:
Budget: $666,651,276
Students: 47,959
Teachers: 3,235
Staff: 15,535
So their per-pupil is $13,900
Their class size should be: 14.8 to 1.
So far, on paper these numbers seem pretty healthy. Locally our per-pupil has gone up a lot recently and it's still below $10k, so they're like an extra 40% over us. Detroit has 4(!) non-teachers for every teacher, locally two thirds of all school employees are teachers (so they're 1:4 and we're 1: 0.6).
Detroit regularly makes the news with the arrest of mayor/principals/staff/whoever, their school board used to make the news with expenses made by/for the school board. They also make the news on a shocking lack of resources for their students. They have an insanely bloated administration.
I see no reason not to think Detroit's money problems aren't corruption, mismanagement, incompetence, and a shocking misallocation of resources... or it's not about the money, and these numbers are a big reason why a charter could come in and do more with less.
"
Provided you don't break the economy, lose a war, that sort of thing.
"
Then why should the local school system respond to parents?
If the money follows the child, then I have a budgetary gun pointed at the school body, and they're going to do right by my kid or I'll go elsewhere.
If that's not the case, then the system is probably better off forcing me to leave.
"
First of all, well reasoned. However... while everything you said holds together logically, I think this line of reasoning assumes we're starting from a utopian reality.
There are schools where the *bulk* of the students are failing. There are schools which are poorly run, where the administrators are corrupt and occasionally arrested, the teachers are substandard, and so forth. That's not just "undermining the idea of universal schooling", it's shooting it dead.
These are the sorts of places where Charters shine. That's the opposite of what we'd expect if "skimming" were the Charter's sole advantage.
There needs to be a way for (poor) people to hold public schools accountable.
"
The charter we went to was still a public school, they're just their own separate district. They're funded by the money which follows the child.
As far as I can tell, the whole "withdrawing from the collective" part is basically a non-issue.
"
She found a different district which doesn't have disruptive students (i.e. College) and is now highly regarded by her students.
"
Sure. All true. None of that changes that 6 of them in a classroom greatly [impedes] education for everyone.
And none of that is a good reason to damage my kid's education.
Somehow one of my kids was misassigned into the lower tracked English class. I found out she needed to sit in the hallway in order to study or do homework because the teacher had no control over the class. Next day I spoke with the Principal and had her schedule changed so she wasn't in that class.
So she (rightfully) ended up with the kids that care about education, and the ones that don't can do whatever it is that they do.
Advice for anyone with kids: The Principal's job is to fold, not stand firm.
"
I think the lady in the link at the very top would be against defection if it weren't her kids at stake, i.e. if it were only mine.
This sounds a lot like the whole abortion argument. It's arguing for/against something that someone else needs to pay for if your ethics are followed.
"
True, but this is weird when you think about it.
"In grinding poverty" by USA standards still means access to enough money to be middle class in much of the 2nd (or especially 3rd) world.
My impression is that we're staring at cultural issues, with poverty both the cause and the result.
On “Daily Mail: Witches gather at midnight to cast spell on Donald Trump”
If *any* of this sort of thing worked there would be *someone* making money off of it, or weaponizing it.
A 1% advantage on the stock market is worth probably a Trillion dollars.
If it takes a human sacrifice to fire up, we've got groups that are willing to do that, some of them working for the gov.
On “Linky Friday: Survival of the Fittest”
Because if you don't then I'll move.
I don't think society has the ability to fix all "negative impact" children, so presumably they're still going to be in school... and that's fine. My job as parent is to make sure their problems don't negatively impact my kids.
Similarly my job as parent is to make sure in High School that my kids get four years of math (etc), even if it's more advanced math than what some/most of the kids in school can take.
"
I have listened to my wife talk about the same kids every week, sometimes every day.
You can dress it up in any "mindset" you want, but what I said is the underlying reality.
"
Over the years I've had to step in and "correct" the school's judgement four times (and counting) on major issues. Things like whether the kid will be held back a grade. Someone needs to be the last authority on these sorts of things.
The school's interests don't totally line up with my kids nor does the school have more information about my kids than I do, nor does the school have more time, etc.
Short of child abuse (and society has decided that lack of education is that), the default judgement should be that the parent is a better judge of what's good for their kid than some bureaucrat's 10 second judgement.
"
What that means in practice needs to be something like....
1) My kid never shares a classroom with a disruptive kid.
That implies "track early, track often". 'Advanced math' and 'Normal math' is probably more politically correct than the reality but whatever.
2) My kid has access to advanced (as in, actually advanced and not normal without the kids who don't want to learn) STEM classes.
That implies if there are resource conflicts between paying for my kids' advanced classes and paying for some other kids' social services, my kids win. An Advanced Physics class is useful for my kids, another social worker is not.
I only care about other kids in the distant abstract. The moment the administration starts talking about "everyone" or "all kids" I'm going to tune out the entire conversation. My kids are my first priority, that means I don't sacrifice them for my own political ideals (this has come up), much less someone else's.
"
That is pretty easy. The teacher knows by the end of week one if child-x is disruptive.
It's what to do about it that is the problem.
"
@stillwater
My expectation is most or all Charters are created and run by well meaning people. How effective they are is a different issue.
IMHO the big problem historically for this sort of thing was the imbalance of information.
How do I know that Charter-X (or Public-Y) is great or terrible? Short of sending my kid there for years, how do I cut through the happy-talk and the unhappy-talk? And for that matter, if I do send my kid there for years, do I really know what good 4th-grade math looks like compared to bad 4th-grade math?
When the issue came up with my family, I sat down and did lots of on-line research. There are school evaluation websites. Comparisons of test scores to the local area and the nation, that sort of thing.
Before I walked in the door of Public-School-Y I'd evaluated the kid's assumed elementary, middle, and high schools. Walking around the school was a formality, I already knew what we'd find.
We did the same before sending the kids into Charter-X.
There are tools to evaluate all this, they're free and on-line, it's all public information. I do NOT understand why parents consistently defend failing schools. Feelings don't trump math, and the math is out there.
"
It is very easy to listen to one side's true believers and come to the conclusion that charters are always a mistake, or that they're always right.
Quoting wiki: In general, urban charter schools may appear to be a good alternative to traditional urban schools for urban minority students in poor neighborhoods, if one looks strictly at test scores, but students in suburban charter schools do no better than those in traditional suburban schools serving a mostly middle-class white population.
1) Charters don't appear to do better than a functional public school.
2) Charters are apparently at their best when the public school is a dysfunctional mess. Presumably that means corruption, incompetence, or other adult administrational problems.
3) Consistency of quality is a real issue. There are charters who are better than public, there are others who are much worse.
4) IMHO one of their big strengths is their existence forces the general school system to be a lot more responsive to corner cases.
5) Another big strength is simply introducing feedback into the system. Good products drive out bad ones, just having hundreds of experimental approaches will probably result in successful techniques. I assume those techniques will mostly be copied by the publics but whatever.
The current public system has serious problems with lack of feedback, and with not knowing cost effective ways to deal with what we call poverty. Charters have the potential to fix the former and shed light on the later of those issues.
"
Be careful that we don't let the perfect stand in the way of the good.
I moved my family out of one district and into another, purely for (and because of) the schools. I put it in the budget when my oldest turned *zero* and told my wife we had to move in five years.
That sounds a lot like "different access to power", and it's what currently exists. Vouchers would absolutely be imperfect, and wouldn't level the playing field... but it's probably make it more level than it is now.
"
If the students have different and opposing needs, then "for all students" is just happy talk to obfuscate who you're making the priority and to avoid defending that choice.
Who cares? First do no harm. So first you prevent consistently disruptive students from damaging the education of the non-disruptive students.
And to answer your question more directly, *Yes*, I think some students is no value in education and are disruptive just for the hell of it... although my wife's crew was high school so experiences may vary.
"
It's seriously unethical to harm child "A" for the benefit of child "B". Worse, it's not just the high fliers who are being harmed. Six disruptive students. Fewer than that "high fliers". And maybe 15+ who aren't either. Those last are probably hurt the worst.
Ideally the disruptive students are kicked out and the rest learn. Less ideally, the high fliers and the non-disruptive students leave.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.