You do realize that property taxes also go to police, fire, parks, and other public services than school, right?
Or are you proposing a voucher system for those as well?
I see. If you think having a greater variety of classes is what makes a school better, that certainly pushes me toward the folks in this thread pushing for options that would get you out of making decisions about my child’s education and that would give me more choices.
That’s only a half-measure - once you start talking about how much you pay in property taxes vs. how much of it was spent on schooling your kids, you then have to explain why the people who don’t have kids in school should have to contribute anything to a system of vouchers , how you adjust the vouchers based on the number of children ( like your neighbors who paid the same property tax but had five kids) and why you think the other services your property tax paid for are worth only about $2300/yr. Here’s a hint- $270,000 of your property tax didn’t go to your kids’ schooling and some of your childless neighbors’ property taxes did.
You don’t think having AP and college prep courses makes a better school?
Same here ! I feel the same way I don’t want my tax money going to support religious schools. My tax money did help repair a church in my city I am was BULLSHIT ! I feel the same about my money going to a Temple
Let’s start off with your “specific family.” Nation-wide, average spending is about $11K per head, of which about $5700 comes from local property taxes (and other local revenues, but property taxes is the biggie). cite (Other local property taxes pay for police, fire, city/county services, etc. For example, I pay taxes to support the county library system, the airport, and the cemetery.) Reworking your example for real-world national average figures (not adjusted for inflation):
$5700 x 35 years = $199,500
$11K x 13 years (K-12) * 3 kids = $429,000
They paid $199,500 in property taxes towards the schools and received $429,000 in schooling. And you think they “deserve” more so they can send their kids to private schools?
It’s not what makes a school better , it’s *part * of what makes a school better. Imagine two schools with similar graduation rates, similar scores on standardized testing etc. Would you disagree with the idea that the one with more options for languages or more AP courses is better than the other?
And BTW , I really hate the assumption that schoolwide data necessarily has much to do with an individual child’s education. I went to a huge high school which looked bad on paper - but that didn’t affect my education one bit. I suppose it might have if I had gone to a tiny high school where I would have ended up in classes with the students with substandard reading and math skills- but I didn’t. Those students might as well have been in a different school than I attended.
Cite, please. As far as I know, the actual research is pretty clear that having a stay-at-home parent doesn’t have a major impact on academic outcomes.
Agreed, all of these are good descriptions of the core problem, and the thing is that the basic issues at their core are really not very complex. The analogy with health care is a good one. Where I live we have single payer health care, essentially a single health care system where everyone has equal access to any of it and all of it. It isn’t a perfect system and problems occasionally manifest themselves, but when problems occur, they gain a high degree of public attention across the entire political spectrum and among the media, influential politicians, and the rich and powerful, because the publicly funded health care system isn’t a “poor people’s health care system”, it’s everybody’s health care, and so there is a universal interest in making it the best system that it can be. That common interest both stems from and further promotes social solidarity in preference to wealth-based or class-based divisiveness.
Exactly the same principles apply to the public school system. It has become a dogma of conservative ideology to oppose those principles both in education and in health care, and the reasons seem to vary-- it’s almost like the reasons don’t really matter, as long as things are so arranged that money will always buy you a better education or better health care. IOW, that money will always be a differentiator of social privilege, even when it comes to intrinsic human rights like the right of a child to a decent education or the right to health care. Sometimes the reasons are (rather perversely) stated in terms of some kind of “fairness”, or the even more perverse fear that someone might get something they don’t really “deserve”, or perhaps somewhat more rationally out of a fear that public systems (that is, systems that are at some level managed by the government) won’t be as good as private ones. The latter point, however, has been broadly disproven in the many excellent public education and universal health care systems that exist around the world.
In and of itself, no. A better school educates better, and adding a class with an AP title does not magically make a school educate better. Especially when we’re talking about a method of running schools that is failing and has failed millions of students. My small school had limited AP offerings, so I took two online.
Huh, is that what I said?
Nope, not what I said.
One of the many benefits is that you have a larger variety of classes to choose from, is what I said.
Another of the benefits is greater services, as well as extracurriculars.
There are actually quite a number of benefits of economies of scale.
Now, I did graduate from the one of the largest school districts in my state, and it did also happen to be one of the top ranked school districts in the state, so maybe I am biased, but having more options available to the student is not always a bad thing.
What you said was:
And when asked for clarification about “not as good”, you offered:
That’s weak. I do not want you making decisions about my child’s schooling if that’s what you think constitutes good vs not as good.
I care about educational outcomes. The US public school system is failing. And “a wider array of classes, services, and extra curriculars” is really not relevant to the conversation. I am deeply skeptical of vouchers, but not because “smaller schools are generally not as good.”
Here is a report on schools size commissioned by NC: http://www.ncpublicschools.org/docs/data/reports/size.pdf
I think we’ve found the core of the OP’s problem right here. He doesn’t want his kids around the “darker” types and wants everybody else to pay for their private schooling.
I’m not at all convinced that the problem with most bad schools is the actual school institution itself. Rather, it’s the families who send their kids there unprepared and who don’t value their children’s educations.
In my area, the performance of the local elementary schools is, I hate to say, ENTIRELY dependent on the percentage of poor children who attend the schools. Above some threshold, and the performance of the schools plummets like a stone. Below it, and the schools typically do well. And I’m talking of several local schools within about a 4 mile radius, not schools scattered across either end of a large district.
I can see both sides of the voucher argument. On one hand, if all the people with money and motivation yank their kids for elsewhere, that concentrates the families who don’t value education into schools that are shitholes.
On the other hand, as a parent, I keep thinking “Why should my children be penalized because other people can’t be arsed to teach their pre-kindergarten chlidren how to count? Or their abcs?” Vouchers seem pretty good from that perspective, it lets parents avoid the shit situation of having substandard schooling because the teachers are spending all their effort doing remedial education for poor kids, instead of challenging on-level or above level children.
I think the real answer is probably busing, as horrible as it sounds. My local district (Richardson ISD) could solve a lot of their problems if they implemented a comprehensive busing system to even out the socio-economic and racial differences between schools, instead of stupidly adhering to some kind of “neighborhood school” concept where kids go to schools in their local areas, which basically leads to defacto segregation and things like Moss Haven Elementary being less than 1.5 miles from Skyview Elementary, Thurgood Marshall Elementaryand Forest Lane Academy. The latter 3 are overwhelmingly attended by poor black and hispanic apartment kids, while Moss Haven is almost entirely white, upper middle class children.
So as a parent whose kids are zoned for Skyview, vouchers are attractive, but I can see why they aren’t fair either. But I do want to say that I’ve met the principal and staff at Skyview, and they’re not cruddy, the school’s not run down, but the student body is not particularly education-oriented either, and their PTA is pathetic. Moss Haven’s raises HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of dollars, while Skyview’s raises like ten thousand total.
It certainly would explain a lot. It might also explain why he inexplicably brought up the ill-advised health care analogy, which as I noted earlier does a lot more to undermine his argument than to support it.
No, completely wrong. One tenet of capitalism is that when it comes to merchandise like TV sets and washing machines, you only get what you are able to pay for. But in civilized countries, there are also guarantees of access to justice, health care, and education as basic human rights that are not premised on the ability to pay for them, specifically as set out in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Additionally, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child sets out in Article 24 “the right of the child to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health and to facilities for the treatment of illness and rehabilitation of health”, in Article 27 “the right of every child to a standard of living adequate for the child’s physical, mental, spiritual, moral and social development”, in article 28 to the right to high standards of primary education which shall be free to all, and in article 29 to “the development of the child’s personality, talents and mental and physical abilities to their fullest potential … [for] the preparation of the child for responsible life in a free society.” Capitalist tenants aren’t mentioned anywhere. :rolleyes:
One more time: your taxes do not pay for your children’s education, they pay for everyone’s children’s education. That couple in the fancy-ass orange house on 43[sup]rd[/sup] & Benson Street have no children, but their taxes go to schools (amongst other things, as has been noted), so what should they be allowed to use their credit for? I feel rather confident that they would rather not live in a city full of uneducated half-wits who can barely, if at all, function in society, so they pay for a better community.
Community values and Capitalism seem to be at odds over some issues, one of them being education, which is why public education has tended to avoid the capitalist model.
Are we still pretending that redlining isn’t a thing, or that it doesn’t exist any more? :mad:
Redlining applies to neighborhoods (e.g., Compton, Harlem), more than persons. It is a way to keep sucky neighborhoods suck, not a way to exclude the wrong sort from Bel Aire.
But you know what is interesting? Hamilton Park has a great PTA, great programs, busses from all elementary schools, free extended day, solid test scores, and is still fairly easy to get into. I wonder why people don’t want to go there? Cuz I’m thinking it’s racism.
This is also why vouchers won’t help truly middle class parentts. Affluent parents pay big bucks to keep their kids in a certain social environment. If working and middle class parents start showing up with vouchers, they will raise tution to keep that school unaffordable and exclusive.