The Ohio Supreme Court ruled on using property tax for funding but --sigh- nothing changed
You won’t find it. You might find a large school district that funds the schools equitably (by whichever definition you use) but “funding from the district” and “spending” are not the same thing. Being poor will always put people at an educational disadvantage, whether it’s because wealthier districts can spend more money on the schools than poorer districts or because wealthy parents can supplement the district’s spending. And you can’t stop that entirely- you can keep them from getting together and giving money to the school/district but you can’t stop them from spending on their individual kids.
While I agree that in practice “meritocracy” often doesn’t work. There’s just something that doesn’t sit well with me about making hiring or collect acceptance decisions on abstract notions of societal justice.
Then again, I also think the American university system is part of a class-structuring apparatus designed to funnel selected candidates into a giant corporate bullshit-machine where they can enjoy some degree of a higher standard of living with their peers maintaining infrastructure to collect, maintain, and allocate capital.
So in theory, should we be seeking the best and brightest to educate as our next generation of doctors, lawyers, engineers, accountants, scientists? Yes.
In practice, is it also about justifying an internship or entry level analyst job for some CEO’s dipshit kid studying some basket weaving course so that CEO will do business with my consulting firm, investment bank, or hedge fund? Maybe that too.
I’m pretty sure that the university admissions staff are already familiar with how academically rigorous various schools are.
Without having read the whole thread, NY Times columnist, David Brooks, suggested (on Friday eve’s “PBS Newshour”) use of “class-based” admissions policies as a way to both circumvent the SCOTUS decision and – more importantly – help slow the wealth equality gap.
They may, to some extent, but that’s not what I was getting at. I was wondering if colleges could use this as a sort of loophole in the Supreme Court’s ruling. The admissions staff wouldn’t need to make a subjective ruling on how rigorous every high school for every applicant is. You could have a mathematical formula that calculates how much a student outscores their high school classmates (assuming such info is available). Students who excel in under-performing schools, which are often in minority areas and poorly funded, would have an advantage.
This would give the colleges what they want (a diverse student body) while complying with the Court ruling (because it isn’t explicitly race-based).
Given the curious ignoring of legacy admissions while obsessing over anything with even the tiniest whiff of affirmative action (both race and class based) it’s very hard to not come to that conclusion.
You think admissions decisions can be reduced to a mathematical formula? I’m pretty sure that any top school can fill their freshman class twice or five times over with prospective students, each of whom are equally qualified on paper.
I’ve got a better idea: instead of lowering standards, which does no one any good, why not advocate for prep schools for disadvantaged kids, whether by race or class or whatever.
There are two ways to approach a disparity in educational outcome: you can either lift up the people who aren’t making it, or cut down the ones that did to ‘even the playing field’. We are completely focused on the latter.
I think you could get widespread support from the right and the left for the concept of government-funded ‘excellence academies’ or something similar. Say a kid is a bright prospect from a bad school. Because the school sucks, he didn’t get very good education in math. Prospects like that could get scholarships to university prep schools which guarantee them a place in a good college so long as they pass the prep.
Sending anyone to college who is not prepared for college is a disaster. The result is watered down courses or students swtching to easier faculties who will accomodate them - but which will leave them saddled with debt and unemployable.
Not entirely, no, but I think some numerical values, like test scores and GPA, are part of admissions decisions. I’m suggesting that the mathematical part of the admissions process could be modified in a way that would implicitly increase racial diversity, now that the Court has said it can not be an explicit factor in admissions.
We kind of have this now in the form of community colleges. They will be low cost or even free. Students who don’t meet the academic standards for college can go to CC for a college-like experience. They can get exposed to that kind of educational environment and have little or no debt if they decide it’s not for them.
Community college is not prep school. I’m talking about schools designed to take kids from terrible schools and get their math and reading skills up to the point where you don’t need affirmative action because the kids will be as good as anyone else if they were selected for potential in the first place.
A better solution would be to tear down the terrible inner city schools, salt and burn the places where they stood, and give the money to parents to spend on competitive schools.
Seriously, this is an area where Democrats need to take leadership. The education system is owned ny the Democrats. The cities with the worst schools are all run by Democrats. Republicans are pretty much powerless to fix the public schools, which is why they are focusing on home schooling and charter schools, or shutting down the Dept. of Ed completely.
The fact that the median high school graduate in Baltimore is functionally illiterate should be a great shame to the people running the city and the public schools. And the rank and file in the Democratic party should be raising holy hell about it. But they don’t, so schools get worse. The middle class will pull their kids and home school them or put them in private or charter schools. The poor will not have that ability.
So fix the damned schools, and all these problems go away. The problem for Democrats is that the teacher’s unions are the #1 funders of Democratic campaigns and make up a big percentage of volunteers and campaign workers. So they can’t be crossed, and they are the ones ruining everything. Well, that and hard-left school boards.
And don’t claim that you can’t fix the problems without more funding. Some of the worst schools in America get some of the highest funding. New York spends $24,000 per student. DC spends $22,000, and has terrible schools. Those are the two most highly funded state school systems in the country, and just about double the national average. In comparison, Utah only spends $7600 per student. Utah, however, is 4th in the country for SAT scores, and New York is 31st, DC is 41st.
This is a self-fixing problem in the long run. People will continue to pull their kids from bad public schools, and states are rapidly setting up voucher and charter programs that allows them to do so. AI will help homeschooling immensely. So the bad public schools can either clean up their act, or the public will simply go around them and their funding will shrink. The poor, who don’t have the capability to pull their kids, will continue to suffer. And Democrats will continue to look the other way in fear of angering the teachers.
That’d be great, but, unfortunately, it’s not a very realistic solution. Poor schools have had major problems for decades. Trying to address their problems have been very difficult and progress has been very slow. It’s just not going to happen that there’s going to be this kind total of transformation to get kids from poor schools up to speed. We’ll have to work pretty much with the system we have or just with minor tweaks. If people really wanted to have poor schools be at the level as rich schools, they’d be a lot closer already. There have been ample opportunities to make that happen yet here we are.
But even within a rich school, there are still kids who are at a major financial disadvantage. Even in the richest zip code, there are kids living in apartments with single parents just scraping by. So if a college is looking at two kids from the same HS with similar grades and skills, giving preference to the poorer kid is probably a good thing. The rich kid is likely going to have more options as to which school they go to.
And then not actually have any competitive schools that will take them. This is what proponents of charter schools are always arguing, but it never works. Charter schools end up so “competitive” by virtue of the fact that they simply ignore all standards, requirements, and regulations, and nobody ever calls them on it.
Again, this can’t be fixed at the city level. The cities with the worst schools simply don’t have the resources they need. And they can’t get those resources without the help of voters from the entire state.
Just throw your hands up and declare there’s nothing you can do?
There was a paper a few years ago that found there was one simple thin that could be done that would bring America’s standards up to the better school systems around the world: Fire the bottom 10% of teachers, and distribute their kids to other classes. You don’t even need to replace fhem.
This is an application of Pareto’s law, which says that 80% of the problems in a system come from 20% of the actors in it. The paper found that the best teachers taught about a year and a half of material in a year, and the worst taught about half a year of material in a year. So a kid that got the best teacher would wind up a full year ahead of a kid who got saddled with the worst. Success in grade school is increasingly determined by your ability to avoid the bad teachers. Even one bad one can set you back dramatically.
Other obvious solutions:
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restore classroom discipline. Some schools are completely out of control. This stems from progressive school boards refusing to let teachers discipline students, and schools not being allowed to expel troublemakers.
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Re-focus on teaching the fundamentals before inundating kids with all the political crap they are getting these days.
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Bring back reform schools, and send the expelled students to them. Those schools should focus on restoring discipline and getting the kids back on track to learn. If they cause problems in reform school, send them to juvie.
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Reform the education faculties in colleges, which have become a politicised joke.
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Bring more men back into teaching. Little boys could use more male role models, especially since in the worst places they aren’t likely to have one at home.
You know who opposes all this? The teacher’s unions. That’s why you won’t do anything.
What you’re calling the “political crap” is the fundamentals. Remember “Everything I ever really needed to know, I learned in kindergarten”? That’s the stuff that’s getting lambasted as “woke” now.
And the “progressive school boards”, the ones actually implementing things like restorative practices and PBIS, are getting much better results, discipline-wise, than those who focus on punishment (which is what I assume you’re referring to).
It appears this thread has gone off-topic. I will be reviewing it and trying to figure out what to do with it. It might take awhile.
This one is too much of a mess to fix. Rather than close it, I’m going to move it to IMHO. The OP himself seems to be open to the expansion of the topic. So enjoy the conversation in IMHO, the Debate is long gone.
I don’t know why you’re using such outdated numbers, but the trend has held, so readers should consider the relative levels rather than those specific amounts. It’s cheaper to do anything in SLC than in NYC or DC. That includes running a school. And teaching kids from households that have the time and resources for education readiness is easier. That doesn’t mean the funds are being used well, and the literature on spending and outcomes is mixed, but pointing out the spending and outcomes of a few states without consideration of any other factors is of minimal value.
Students in DC may already attend any public school in DC that has room for them, other than a few magnet schools. DC opens and closes schools as needs and populations change.