I have no problems with the feds kicking in some money or matching funds to help build new schools. However again I will go back to the experience at Kansas City Missouri where new schools did little to help anything. Again, such a plan would require new schools AND new teaching staff which would require hiring and firing alot of people.
Public education should be set up such that if you want to benefit your own children, you need to support policies that benefit all children. It’s how Finland has achieved its success.
Yes, in your area. Take a city like Cleveland. The people in the metropolis itself are disproportionately poor. Most of the wealthy live in suburbs like Westlake or Shaker Heights. The people in Westlake are willing to pay high taxes for education, and end up with good public schools. The people in Cleveland, meanwhile, can’t afford to pay high taxes, and end up with a worse public school system than Detroit (this is not entirely due to the lack of funding, but it’s one factor). An equitable system would require that the Westlakers support not only their own schools, but also Cleveland’s.
Exactly. The current system, under which in much of the US public schools are significantly supported by property taxes, rewards students born to wealthy parents with a superior public education.
Public school financing should not be based off local wealth levels. It should be based off state or even national wealth levels. Schools with more impoverished students should always receive more funds, since impoverished students need more wraparound services.
Wealthy parents can still support excellence for their own kids; they’ll just have to do it by supporting excellence for everyone’s kids.
I completely agree yet still must note … Michigan has one of the highest shares of funding by way of a progressive state tax and least by property tax. Progressive funding clearly is not a complete answer to the inequality issue. Also the worst and most regressively funded is Illinois, not historically because the wealthy were after preserving their kids’ educations at the expense of everyone else but because of the power of Chicago. Once upon a time it had a solid industrial base which paid lots of property tax leaving homeowners with less … a property tax heavy system in the state was preferred because of all those regular folk in Chicago wanted it like that.
The problem isn’t funding, at least not in my area. The two schools I mentioned earlier are within the same school district, zip code and about a mile apart. The ONLY substantive difference between them is the student body makeup, and by extension, the parental involvement. For what it’s worth, Skyview routinely has “Teacher of the Year” candidates and winners, and the principal is great- she’s involved with the neighborhood association in hopes of getting more neighborhood kids to attend.
So in our area, it literally comes down to trying to equalize parental involvement and concern, and that’s not something you can equalize, without doing something likely to be viewed as equally odious, and that’s to get away from the concept of neighborhood schools and try and socioeconomically level things out by busing students hither and yon.
Granted, we’re a little bit of an extreme example, being an upper-middle class area blighted by a lot of low-income apartment residents, due to a controversial court decision by a Dallas federal judge back in the 1980s, that mandated that public housing be put in the midst of otherwise high income areas. It really didn’t do anyone any favors; the public housing people are every bit as criminal and indigent as they were before, but now they’re blighting areas that had very little crime before the court decision.
And the school districts have to deal with that really weird high/low mix, and it’s VERY clear where the apartment kids go to school and where they don’t, if you look at the schools in the district and their test scores. Skyview vs. Moss Haven is a sterling example of this. Without the apartments, Skyview would be much like Moss Haven or Merriman Park (the school about a mile south of Skyview, and much like Moss Haven), but with the apartments, it’s almost as terrible as a school in DISD.
But in a sense, it might be a useful microcosm of the country- how DO you deal with that sort of difference? If you can find a
…conclusion to a sentence? 
Gosh, I’m sorry that you’re surrounded by such human mold–or are they bacteria? I never can remember what causes blight. In any case, have you considered using bleach to rid yourself of this problem? Poor you.
Thanks for illustrating so beautifully the attitude that prevents real educational progress in our country.
Note, too, that it’s “almost as bad as a school in Dallas ISD”. So apparently the 160,000 kids a few miles from him are a complete write off. No hope there.
Realistically, there’s only one way to do that: federal control of the education system. And that’s never going to happen.
Not with the current US culture, I agree. Too many wealthy people view the poor as a disease, rather than viewing poverty as something to eliminate. But I don’t think federal control is the only option; statewide funding could also work.
It can happen in smaller towns also where you have a HUGE taxbase from a major industry being there, but relatively few people.
So the school gets all this money and serves a small number of kids.
Branson Missouri is a great example. Lots of tax and sales tax money coming from all those hotels, resorts, and shows but not alot of people. So Branson schools get alot of money. However they serve a very poor population so they need all they can get.
bump does raise a very important point about the importance of parental involvement. How do we equalize that? I don’t know either, and would really love to hear any ideas.
My point is that my area had the economic juxtaposition imposed in an artificial fashion by a legal decision, and is probably an extreme example of wealthy vs. poor in the same schol district.
And say what you will, but it’s hard to argue that these people aren’t a blight, when the area went from a low-crime upper middle class suburb (where the Cowboys used to practice and live, for example) to an area that’s got upper middle class homes with some of the highest crime, lowest income apartments in the city solely due to the results of the court decision.
I’m sure it’s awful to be poor, but why does bringing them up necessarily mean that you have to bring others down in the bargain? That’s what most people protest against, and what seems like a valid criticism. Why should parents want to go along with policies that will ultimately help the poor and engender educational equality, etc… if it actively reduces the quality of their children’s education? Or why as a homeowner, should I want to embrace lower property values, cruddier schools and drastically increased crime in the name of helping the poor?
Which ultimately is what every single one of these plans proposes in one way or another, and why people who aren’t poor tend to balk so hard at them. It’s not disdain or hatred for the poor, but rather outright hostility to the idea that they have to be brought down for the poor to be raised up. Parents at the good schools don’t want to share with the students at the poor schools with non-involved parents. The feeling is that it’s THOSE parents’ responsibility to care and shepherd their school, not their own to share with them.
The reason I mentioned DISD in my comment is because they’re basically a huge failed district. 91 of 227 (40%) DISD schools in 2015 are on the Texas Education Agency PEG list, which are schools so poor that they let parents transfer their children out of the district. The abysmal performance of DISD schools is a huge reason for flight to the suburbs, or at least suburban districts that overlap the Dallas city limits like Richardson.
Kansas City Missouri is ina similar situation where you have some very big and beautiful and expensive homes that are next to section 8 housing and projects. The areas around Brookside and Ward parkway are like this. They are also converting many of the old warehouses into condos.
How have they coped? Have the rich parents “shared”? Nope. Basically all of the people with kids in those areas 1. put them in private schools 2. move out of the area when their kids are of school age. All those condos they are building - not a kid in any of them.
Now the idiots who run the district could have allowed neighborhood schools and they have. But the minute they see a successful school thats more than 40% white - they close a failig school and dump those kids into the good ones. A great example was Southwest High school in the Brookside area which was showing great promise as a collegfe prep school and getting families in the area to stay. BUT then the dummies decided to close Westport HS and dumped them into Southwest and you had instant chaos. The school went thru riots, fires, and 3 principals in 1 year. Its student body dropped and they are finally closing it this year.
Oh and guess what? KCMO is unique is it has a school
(the following is from the above post which got cut off)
Oh and guess what? KCMO is unique is it has a school DEDICATED to black Students called theAfrican Centered Academy. Yep I’m not kidding. Actually the black parents wanted it (they were pissed at being told their kids cannot learn unless they sit next to a white kid). But now that they are closing Southwest they are telling those kids they will go to ACA although they CLAIM they will drop or at least reduce the African Centered focus. Oh thats going to go over well.
Yeah, you cannot make this crap up and I’d like to see Hillary fix it.
What’s happening in my part of Dallas (the part within Dallas that’s served by the Richardson (the city just N-NE of Dallas) school district) is that the school zone boundaries desperately need redrawing. You have schools like Moss Haven, which are something like 95% upper middle class (predominantly white as well), and you have schools like Skyview, less than a mile away that are like 50% black, 37% hispanic, and 8% white, and that 87% black & hispanic is overwhelmingly poor apartment students. I’m sure the Skyview boundaries were fine back in the late 1980s/early 1990s when the apartments weren’t so overwhelmingly ghetto, but they are now.
Moss Haven is 67% white, 16% black and 11% hispanic, and their state test percentages are reading 91%, writing 84% and science 88%. Skyview, on the other hand, has scores of reading 61% writing 51% and science 64%.
Now why in the world would the Moss Haven parents want to go along with some sort of redistricting plan that would likely diminish the quality of their children’s education? It’s all fine and good to be altruistic and worry about the poor, but it’s an unrealistic expectation for parents to value that, or nebulous benefits of diversity above the concrete realities of a good education.
Similarly, why in the world would any parent with the wherewithal to put their children somewhere else allow them to go to Skyview? The same principal applies.
So to me, that points to a population of Skyview parents that either do not care, or do not have the resources (or knowledge) to put their kids elsewhere. And it also seems to me that any plan to change that would (rightly) be perceived as threatening to the parents at schools like Moss Haven or Merriman Park.
I’m not sure what the solution is, but I do think there’s no substitute for parental involvement in a child’s education, and I don’t think it’s right to diminish one group in the name of raising another.
By going full Harrison Bergeron and dragging everyone down to the level of the worst offenders. It is pure idiocy to think that you can cure bad parenting by blaming the people who aren’t leaving their kids to rot.
It’d also be pure idiocy to suggest improving education by shoving bananas up everyone’s nose. Since that’s not on the table, I’m not going to pretend anyone’s suggesting it. You might do the same.
Dallas has plenty of good schools too–many of the magnets are better than anything in Richardson, even with high poverty rates, and there are good neighborhood schools as well. I can think of several I’d preferably send my son to–and I live in like literally the most desirable feeder pattern in Richardson.
It’s not a failed district. It’s a struggling district. If people decide urban education is simply over–failed–they are writing off a generation. Do we have a solution for poverty yet? No. But there have been improvements, and it’s it’s a little early to call it off and switch to workhouses.