FFS. If you are going to endlessly harp about something, at least make sure you know what you’re talking about. The Kansas City school system was under a federal desegregation order and was essentially being run from the bench (SCOTUS and Congress having granted federal judges a lot of power to administer desegregation programs because most states couldn’t or wouldn’t). In the case of Kansas City, the judge took his mandate well beyond its limits.
All the Kansas City experiment tells us is that judges aren’t very good at running school districts, which frankly I don’t think we needed experimental evidence to discern.
That’s the catch though; education is education, not some sort of panacea for society’s ills. It’s not THE solution to poverty, but rather one piece of the puzzle, and I think it’s completely unfair to put the crushing weight of being the solution to poverty on the educational system. To some degree it’s the chicken or the egg; are unproductive attitudes and regard for education a product of poverty, or is poverty a result of those attitudes? And again, it’s unfair to expect the educational system to remedy that.
What is clear, is that a culture of valuing education does pay huge dividends in educational success (duh!) and by extension, success in the workplace and society. Look at the Asian or Jewish populations as an example- both place extremely high value on education and intellectualism, and are consequently very successful as a result.
And describing DISD as a “failed district” is a bit unfair I admit. There are good non-magnet schools, but I’d be willing to bet they track very closely with the economic and ethnic makeup of their areas. E.g Lowe elementary, Tasby middle and Conrad high stink, while Preston Hollow elementary, Pershing middle and WT White high schools are good.
And FWIW, I don’t think RISD is particularly awesome; they definitely have their issues. But on the whole, their schools are better rated than DISD, probably because DISD has a whole lot more poverty to deal with that RISD doesn’t. But what that means in terms of where people live and what schools their children attend, is that if they have the means, they move somewhere else or send their kids to private school.
One is that the notion that I should not be allowed to benefit my own children unless I equally benefit the children of strangers is an absolute non-starter. I can’t take my kids to Europe unless all kids can go to Europe? Fuck that noise - if my kids can benefit from something, they will get it and if your kids can’t get it, tough shit.
The other is that the things that affect student achievement have almost nothing to do with spending, and forcing rich school districts to fund poor ones will achieve little or nothing. That’s the point of Urbanredneck’s mention of the Kansas City schools. The problems of that district were not caused by segregation and were not fixed by enormously increased spending.
The idea that we will just force parents to spend as much on the offspring of dysfunctional single parents mired in the culture of dependency has been tried. It doesn’t help. Spending is not the problem.
That’s not what’s proposed. You’re not allowed to fund roads privately, so your kids can drive on better roads. Roads are funded such that interstates are good for everyone. If you want to have better books, more structure, etc. at home, go for it.
This is so ridiculous. Do you genuinely think that spending money on a better climate control for my classroom would have no effect? That better copiers, more up-to-date library materials, more palatable healthful foods in cafeterias, teacher assistants, smaller class sizes–that none of these matter, because one district was run incompetently? I know what hte point of UR’s mention of KC schools was; it’s a ridiculous point to support with that flimsy evidence, and it always has been.
I’ve known teachers—teachers on crappy salaries—who spend hundreds of dollars a year of their own money on stuff that the school can’t afford to provide, and that improves the classroom and the learning experience for their students. Tell those teachers that money is irrelevant to student achievement.
I am allowed to buy my kids a better car, pay for driving school, and so forth.
No, none of those matter. Not because one district was run incompetently - because spending is not the problem.
The parents are - or more properly, the parent is - the problem. The dysfunctional culture is the problem. The kind of “crabs in a bucket” approach you propose will do nothing to address the root of the problem.
The Kansas City example, as well as the whole history of increasing spending on failing schools, shows the falsity of the notion that children fail because we don’t spend enough.
I think one issue that blurs the matter is that it isn’t how much we spend that’s important. It’s how we spend it. If you have a district where the kids don’t have textbooks, for instance, they’re obviously going to suffer. Getting the kids textbooks would improve the district, and it would cost money. But that doesn’t mean that you can just increase the district’s funding by an amount equal to the cost of the textbooks, because there’s no guarantee that that extra money would actually go to textbooks. If you have a failing district that doesn’t have textbooks, and funding increases in that district go towards increasing administrator salaries, then you’ll still have a failing district.
And there are districts that spend money on even worse things than raises for the administrators. In Cleveland, for instance, the summer before a school building was torn down, they had all new windows put in. Not one student set foot in the building between the new windows being installed and the building being demolished. They did no good for anyone, but they still cost money. That same building was demolished with the library still full of books, and the classrooms still containing various school supplies. Not only did the district not make any effort to remove any of those materials, they actually hired security to guard the school to make sure that no teachers would remove them on their own time. At another school in the district, the students wear short sleeves all winter, and the teachers keep all of the windows open, because that’s the only way to keep the temperatures tolerable (though still uncomfortably hot): The school’s heating system has settings only for “off” or “broil”. How much does it cost to put in a new HVAC system? I’m sure it’s less than the cost of all the fuel they’re burning every winter, and yet they won’t do it.
Now, would it fix everything in Cleveland if the district stopped throwing away money uselessly like this? Of course not. But it’s still a necessary step.
You sure are. And you can pay for your kids to have a full library at home, tutors, afterschool enrichment activities, and so forth. Excellent extension of the analogy! Nobody is saying you can’t spend on your kids. I’m just saying, you shouldn’t vote for increased funding for only the children of wealthy families, which is how local property tax funding works out.
that makes me so angry, and I think it’s what LHoD is also trying to describe. When people say poor parents leave their kids to rot, or blame the whole culture–which includes the kids in that culture–there’s a sense that those kids deserve less. That they are less loved because they are less lovable. That poverty reflects worth and that there isn’t much you can salvage down at the bottom, and if anyone is truly extraordinary, they will find their own way to rise to the top.
But that’s bullshit. You get attentive and neglectful parents at all levels, but in affluent areas the free-loaders get carried along because people don’t mind making allowances and accommodating kids that they see as like them–their kids’ friends. I’ve worked with affluent communities, and while there were a lot of parents up there all the time, you never met nor saw fully half of the parents. But you didn’t notice who wasn’t there because enough people were–it was just understood that that was the parent community.
In less affluent areas, the attentive parents have a lot less to offer–money, time, resources, and know-how–but they are just as abundant.
An affluent parent who spends 6 hours a months helping with sports teams or lunch duty or whatever is an attentive and concerned parent.
A poor parent who works 60 hours a week at two minimum-wage jobs in order to pay the rent and keep food on the table is an inattentive and neglectful parent.
I’d like to point out that in rich districts, property tax rates are actually lower than in poor districts. It’s just that the difference in property values is so great that rich districts are much better funded, anyway. To pick two districts in my own area (Cook County, IL) at random:
Winnetka, IL (Winnetka SD): Tax rate 8.8; Spending $20k/student
Robbins, IL (Posen-Robbins SD): Tax rate 16.0; Spending $10k/student
No… what she’s saying is that a rich school may have 40% of parents volunteering, donating, etc… and the poor school will also have 40% but the parents at the poor school aren’t able to volunteer as much, or donate as much, etc…
But what can we do when one school has enough PTA money raised to have things like a big garden, and a bunch of other nifty stuff, while the other doesn’t even have enough parents attending to have a proper PTA? You’d have to have some kind of district-wide donation scheme, which IMO, would drive down donations, as people aren’t terribly keen on donating say… $100, of which only maybe $7 would go to their child’s school, even if it’s equitable.
I’m not at all against a statewide property tax and statewide per-student allocation of educational funds. That seems entirely fair and reasonable to me. But I do balk at the idea of wanting parents to donate for, or volunteer at schools that their children don’t attend. If they wanted to do that, they’d already be doing it, and for the most part, they’re not.
I should add that having federal oversight was necessary for KCMO. Why? For maybe 20-30 years every time they tried to raise taxes to improve the district it was voted down. Why? So many residents of the district had given up and switched to private schools or they were childfree families. It took a judge to force the local taxpayers and the state of Missouri to pay up.
Whereas out where we live in the Blue Valley district they have never had a school tax increase or bond issue that didnt pass.
Now it didnt help that back in the 70’s KCMO went thru some nasty years of desegregation where schools went from nearly all white to all black within 4-5 years. Then there was a teacher strike. All these things undercut public support for KCMO schools and nearly all the white kids left for the suburbs or private schools.
Now what is odd is right across the state line is the Kansas City Kansas School district which also serves the same lower and working class and majority black and hispanic populations but actually has some pretty decent schools.
Of their areas, yes, but not their populations. Preston Hollow is a very good school–and it’s 89% free/reduced lunch and 60% LEP. Pershing (an Elementary school, fwiw) has a very similar rates–a little higher, actually. W.T. White is higher again–76% Free/Reduced lunch and 65% LEP (and, to be Pedantic, those elementary schools feed into Hillcrest, not White, but the pattern hold for both). They are packed with poor kids.
Weirdly enough, the “rich” schools do pretty well even when they are mostly populated with poor kids. But it’s hard to reproduce that when so many people consider poor kids/families inherently undesirable and less deserving.
There, no doubt, is much of the problem. There is no such sense.
No one is saying that these kids are less worthy of spending. I am saying that more spending doesn’t help, for reasons having nothing to do with their worth as humans.
This is not a worthwhile statement. You get far more neglectful, overwhelmed, or outright incompentent parents much, much more in school districts which are failing, and those parents, mostly single mothers, who are to blame for most of the failure.
The idea that schools fail for lack of funding is not borne out by the evidence.
And this is ridiculous except for extremely silly definitions of “more spending.” It’s true that foolish or random spending doesn’t help. But devoting more resources to a problem, in a considered, strategic, and evidence-based fashion almost always helps with solving the problem. This isn’t particular to education; it’s how society works.
Small-government advocates want to carve out an exception for education, using a single anecdote of mismanagement as their entire proof. There’s no such exception.
Adequate resources (which translates to money) is necessary but not sufficient. Showing examples of it being not sufficient and claiming that such demonstrates it is not necessary is very very silly.
Leave aside the debate about why certain populations are “harder to teach” … for this section of the discussion is does not matter … they are. There are more challenges for some schools than others. Blame parents, blame culture, blame societal systems, blame environments, blame lead exposure, be a racist and blame gene pools, seriously immaterial … whatever way you roll we can all agree, they are.
A funding system that systematically funds the schools with the harder to teach and more challenging student populations significantly less than the schools with easier to teach and less challenging populations is freakingly farchadat funding folks.
No flipping the funding formula would not and does not in and of itself magically solve all ills. Nor can any intervention be expected to produce a quick fix.
Funding formulas are mostly decided at state and local levels not Federal anyway.
I can think of two reasons (not mutually exclusive) that that may be so:
There may be a cadre of wealthy, influential parents who hold the school accountable in ways that poor, working class parents may not be able to.
The better, more experienced teachers might want to work at a school in or near Preston Hollow (the part of town where Ross Perot, Roger Staubach, Geo. W. Bush, T. Boone Pickens, Lee Trevino, Dirk Nowitzki and Mark Cuban live) because it’s quite nice, well-kept, and about zero crime.
I doubt it’s the children themselves who are getting that scorn, but rather the parents are being perceived as not shouldering their portion of the load of being good parents and holding the school and teachers aaccountable.
That’s actually a larger feeling in society in general toward the poor/working class- traditional “middle class” values put a lot of pride and value on pulling one’s own weight, and that generates a lot of disdain and irritation with people perceived as somehow not doing that, and it’s viewed as even worse if you don’t just suck it up and deal with it. The very worst would be crying out for help in a manner that implies that you deserve it. That’s generally considered contemptible, as not only are you not pulilng your own weight, but you’re actively expecting someone else to do it for you.
I think these kinds of attitudes are very pertinent to this discussion, as they tend to (IMO) cause the sort of school segregation that we see- the people with some degree of wealth feel like they’re getting a double-whammy; they’re paying the lion’s share of the taxes, and they’re getting dinged for not donating time/money to the poor schools, while the poor people (and worse, uninvolved do-gooders) sit around and whine about inequity. The feeling is kind of a “Inequity? Who’s doing all the volunteering, tax-paying and donating around here anyway?” situation.
Then could you please provide a cite of the evidence that preventing a well-to-do school district from spending more money on their own children has solved the problem of another, poorer school district? Thanks in advance.
Of course, if it has never happened, then it isn’t very evidence-based, is it?