People do this in El Paso. Parents who live in Canutillo TX will fake an address so the kid can go to the magnet school in EP. In that case, they just live in a different school district. But then there are parents in New Mexico. Now the whole state of TX is paying for their kid. There are also parents who live in Mexico. Now the whole US is paying for their kid. Granted, it’s not a lot of money, but it can strain resources if lots of people do it.
And rich people can afford better health care and food and clothes and entertainment and transportation and everything else.
America is not a classless society. You think the tax payers should have to pay extra everytime someone has a kid?
But they aren’t. Those children’s grandmother pays taxes in that town, and the mother pays taxes in her town. Sounds like the government’s double-dipping, to me.
As a former school board member, let me explain a bit about how this works, at least in New Jersey.
First, the taxes you pay are not only for the education of your own specific children. Education of all the children in a community is supposed to be paid for by all members of that community, as all persons benefit from living in an educated society. Whether you should define that community as the state, the local municipality or the entire country is a separate debatable issue that I won’t go into here.
Now, in NJ, most of the cost of education is borne by local districts, primarily through real estate taxes, so the “community” is that local district for practical purposes. Obviously this leads to inequity, just as some communities have higher tax rates, some have better roads, some have better or worse parks and community services, etc.
But the population to be served by Anyville taxes is the Anyville residents. In some cases districts choose to share services. For example, if Anyville is too small to warrant a high school of its own it may contract with Otherville to accept high school students, and will send an agreed-upon sum to Otherville for that service.
However, a resident of Whatsit, which does not have such an agreement with Otherville, cannot simply decide, “I’m sending my kid to Otherville.” To do so is theft of services.
There are similar restrictions on other less obvious town services all the time. If Otherville has a town-funded library, for example, it may limit its services to only Otherville residents. The town of Whatsis could agree on a resource sharing system to open both their libraries to each other’s residents, but absent such an arrangment the Whatsitsians and Anyvilleians can’t check out books from Otherville’s library.
When I was on my school board, we had a tough enough time handling the cost for the needs of the residents of our own town. Sometimes people from a neighboring town would register kids with a phony address or a non-custodial relative’s address in an effort to use our better schools. If this was suspected to be the case, someone would be sent to the supposed residence to see if the child actually lived there.
It irks me that people gripe about paying for schools that they think they don’t use. Heck, my taxes also help pay for a lot of roads I’ll never drive on, a space shuttle I’ll never get to ride in, local parks and playgrounds I don’t use, medical clinics I don’t visit. We don’t pay for any of those other things on a pay-for-use basis, why should schools be any different?
Someone upthread suggested giving custody to the grandmother who lived in the better school district. Local and state rules will of course vary on this, but for this to be the case during the time I was active in my school board, the grandmother would have had to be the actual, permanent, legal guardian for the child. The child would have to be actually, physically, residing in her house, not just visiting during the week and going home to her real guardian evenings and/or the weekends.
We have open enrollment in Minnesota. But it really isn’t all its cracked up to be. The school has to have room after taking all the kids who go there. And the parent is responsible for transportation - not easy if you are a working parent. In truth, it mainly blurs district and school lines so that if your kid plays with the kids across the street and there is a school border there, people on the edges of the school (walking distance to the bus stop for the other school) get to pick. Its nice for some of my kid’s friends - who sit on the border between “disappointing” St. Paul public schools and better performing (and safer) 'burb schools.
The reality is that so much of a schools character is created by the students that attend the school - you can provide great teachers in a nice facility with plenty of money - and if you have a bunch of hoodlums going to the school who have parents who treat it like daycare, it won’t be a good school.
:eek:
:dubious:
Wow. Just wow. No, wait - WTF?! That comment right there almost deserves a pitting of its own. :mad:
Not everyone sends their kids to a differnet district because they cannot afford the rents or property taxes. For example, there were a couple of neighboring towns where I used to live that had smaller, preferred schools to that of the larger town of which I lived. Property taxes/rentals were the same or lower than living in town, however, apartments were mostly very small 2 bedroom dwellings and when you have 3 children, that’s just not enough room. Even so, there were hardly any vacant apartments or homes available in these smaller towns.
I am completely ignorant on how the school fundings are distributed, but in my fantasy world I would try to come up with a better system such as funds being divided by student ratio per state vs district or something like that and therefore the less funded schools are now working its way up to being more competitive with the more posh ones. Hey - I said it was a fantasy, not reality!
I empathise with your thoughts.
I used to teach in a state with little (no?) revenue sharing.
It isn’t as straightforward as you might think. In the U.S. there has been a strong history and culture of ‘schools being local’. When you do this, each district is responsible for it’s own school funding. Some districts will be of equal money equivalent but one district votes lower taxes…and so the schools in the district that has higher taxes will probably have better schools…and you get the unfairness.
Now, rich districts and poor district differences will be huge because even if the poor district values education, they have lesser ability to pay…and usually poorer people seem to not value education as much and so the difference will be even larger.
So…you say…lets take money from the richer districts and give it to the poorer ones. Setting aside the possible unethicalness and violation of the culture of ‘localness’…this still doesn’t solve the problem.
What happens is that money is ‘revenue shared’ amongst the districts of the state. Well…what happens when the rich district votes to fund more money for their local schools unilaterally? Not allow them to do this? Taking the money and sharing amongst all districts is the same as refusing to allow them to voluntarily raise money for their school because people will not vote to voluntarily pay more into a state wide system but they WILL for their local schools.
You allow that? Guess what…differences between rich and poor exist again. This time you can’t go back and take the money because the money is voluntarily given. You could raise the taxes…but it is illegal to pick on specific areas to raise money. So you could raise everyone’s…but what the rich district pays in addition is far above what you could raise the tax for everyone to pay.
The very local school district property tax method of funding schools probably did make sense back in the day when you were born, lived and died within 20 miles of the same place. When communities were local, then localized education made sense. Local control made sense. What farming community really needed some big city lawyers from 300 miles away telling them they needed to pay for educating their children about factory assembly lines instead of when to harvest the wheat?
But we’re not there anymore. The idea that everyone, with kids or not, needs to pay for the local school because everyone benefits from an educated society remains true. But “local” has gotten a lot bigger. Now that kids may move hundreds of miles multiple times throughout their lives, their education may benefit those people who didn’t even know them growing up. Lack of a good education will affect people from outside the school district, too. Certainly it will affect people living one or two towns over.
School funding, curriculum design and implementation and residence requirements all need to change because the way we live our lives has changed. It’s not about what we on this block can provide for our kids, now it’s what’s we as a nation can provide for our kids.
However, as I’ve said before, money is one of the poorest indicators for school achievement. The Chicago Public School system spends more per pupil than many of the suburban schools, but they have a much higher failure rate and lower test scores and student/parent satisfaction.
Indeed, Annie X-Mas is making a huge assumption in starting this firestorm, which may or may not be accurate: do we even know that the Grandmother’s school district spends more per pupil, or that her property taxes are higher than her daughter’s as a result? Why are we assuming that the better school is the richer school and, if it is, why are we assuming it’s better **because **it’s richer?
I am surprised at the firestorm I’ve started in this thread. I do believe that you should be able to send your children to school in another town if you have a relative paying property taxes there.
Where should it end? Should people in Paterson be allowed to send their children to school in Alpine because the schools are better? Should children be forced to spend 2 hours on the road each way to go to a better school? Private schools are generally better than public schools. Should people be allowed to send their children to private schools and have the government pick up the tuition because the school is better?
Even if you change to a state-wide funding system that gives equal amount per student…are you going to outlaw local communities from voluntarily giving more to their local school?
Also, richer == better…you are right. Not necessarily true, I agree. However, I imagine the correlation is substantial.
IME, as someone that used to teach, lower income areas as a whole do not value education as much as wealthier ones. So, they won’t even fund at the same ‘rate’ let alone pay more to try to match wealthier districts. Also, as you’ve noticed, poorer areas the students tend to have other issues to worry about than education…and even if they don’t as a whole the culture of the area devalues education. So, even if you give more to poorer areas, the schools will still probably not be ‘as good’.
A lot of states have been doing it already off and on via school vouchers.
They are heavily debated and have their critics/supporters.
I’m not sure this is true; it’s not true of *all *private schools, certainly.
Yes, IMHO. The only way I can see to fix this mess is to increase school choice so that all schools work to better themselves to keep themselves viable and attractive to students, like the one’s in yellowval’s area. “Better” should be based not on standardized test scores (or at least, not as currently designed and administered) but by student and parental satisfaction. If a school attracts enough students to keep running with a 54% graduation rate, fine. If that’s what the parents and students are happy with, more power to 'em. (I’m not making that number up, by the way. It’s the graduation rate at my son’s school. Most of the kids go there long enough to legally drop out and go into the family businesses, be it landscaping, construction or dealing drugs.)
If another school opens up and is a more attractive option for parents in the area, then it should be used. I’d like to see a set dollar amount for each student in the state, and that amount paid to the school by the state on behalf of the student no matter where the child lives, as long as his attendance meets the school’s requirements.
Yes, I think two hours of commute is reasonable if the alternative is the kind of education some of these kids are getting. One of the schools we’re applying to this year is about an hour and 15 minutes away by bus and train. That sucks, and I wish it were closer, but the inconvenience of the commute isn’t as inconvenient as having a high school dropout living in my basement until he’s 30. If he gets in, he’s going.
I do NOT agree that private schools are inherently better than public. In my, limited, experience this is definitely not been the case.
I think public schools as a whole are better that the press gives them credit for.
From what I can find for this particular case, both districts are spending similar amounts. Rochester’s state school report card says it’s in it’s fifth year of needing improvement, while the Greece School District is in good standing. Both places have several schools, and there are good schools in Rochester, but there are a lot of not so great ones too. On this website, Rochester’s district is rated 2/10, while Greece is rated 6/10.
Thanks for explaining how that would work, MLS. I was thinking the same thing that the person upthread suggested when I heard the story.
This is actually more or less how they do it here as I understand it. There are, effectively, no private schools (there are actually a very few for niche issues). There is a national curriculum which defines what needs to be learned in any given year. There is open enrollment. I can send my kids to any school in the Netherlands in theory, though they will not provide transportation.
And that’s it. Parents vote with their feet. It turns out that most people continue to send their kids to the neighborhood school – though it is also true that here parents have far more input into the operations of the school than in the US if they want to have it. The parent board at a school usually has some very significant power, at least IME so far…
I gather that (simplified) you can start a school if you can put together a list of a certain number of students who will come, if you can get a physical facility, and you get funding based on number of students. Every couple years they have a review and schools which are not performing get a set period to get into compliance or be closed. There is a point system also, my kids are worth 1.4 or 1.5 students each because they were born in another country, their mother is not a citizen, and they are bilingual. They would be worth 1.6 if Dutch was their second language but it was their second first language instead. One of my kids attends a Montessori school which was started by and is still controlled by parents.*
- The other one attends a speech and language school because he has a language disorder, special ed in Holland is a whole 'nother can of worms and to be honest I have not yet decided what I think of it.
Sorry, BlingingDuck, somehow I missed your post. Didn’t mean to ignore your questions.
I can’t decide. Part of me thinks that would be silly, and any extra above the state minimum should of course be used as the locals see fit. But I think that would pretty quickly get us back to where we are now. So there’s the temptation to say that any additional donations should be likewise divvied up per pupil, but that could adversely affect donations. OTOH, if you have to divvy it up, then maybe people would be more likely to make sure that per pupil expenditure stays reasonable with respect to inflation, and not leave some areas with ridiculously low per pupil spending because the wealthy districts don’t need a statewide raise. I dunno. I think someone who knows more about economics will have to advise me in the first year of my Benevolent Dictatorship. 
Absolutely. Which is why I think the monopoly needs to be broken by school choice measures. As long as my only realistic options are crappy schools or schools that are full or schools I can’t afford, I have no power to force my schools to be better.
Here’s where I sound elitist: I don’t give a crap about the families who don’t give a crap. I want better schools for the students and parents who want better schools.
I don’t even think you would have that option…trying to tell a community that they can’t voluntarily raise more money for the school would bring a hurricane of a storm on your head. However, I agree with you in that if they couldn’t, then they would push for more school funding for all…but then everyone would have to pay for it and some communites might have problems with that.
Well…when I was a teacher, I was a rebel in my attitudes. I had to be careful about my views because they would have made me unpopular or even got me fired. For example, I think our committment to Universal Education (educate all kids) should be looked at and possibly eliminated… It sounds like you and I are seeing similar here. However, UE is ingrained in our society and will NOT be going away.
That being so, I have to land squarely with the public school teachers on this one. When you allow options…do they have to take everyone that applies or can they cherry-pick leaving out troublesome students? Can they dismiss troublesome students? If you allow any form of cherry-picking (and I don’t see how you could stop it) then the troublesome students will default to one school…the one of last resort. You are then, essentially, forsaking Universal Education in all but name.
People shouldn’t be wanting to send their kids to Paterson, because they should be able to get a quality education in Alpine. If all of our schools were good, I’m sure we could handle the rare people who wanted to transfer to out-of-area schools.
McDonalds can make the same hamburger billions of times in hundreds of countries. But two American schools within miles of each other can be an almost entirely different substance. It screws kids. It mocks the American dream. And it’s in our power to fix this.
I agree 100% with everything even sven has said in this thread, and I am horrified at Annie Xmas’ callous disregard for the inequality that exists in the US education system.
Should this woman have broken the law? No.
Do I feel for her situation? You bet.
I think MY parents lied about where we lived when I was a kid, in fact. I’d have to check with them to be sure, but I recall them telling me not to reveal where we lived when I started kindergarten…but I also took a school bus to school, so it couldn’t have been that big of a secret. I grew up in San Francisco and the local school was known to be terrible, so my parents sent me to a better (San Francisco public) school across town. Even within a single city, there are there can be massive differences between public schools. It is one of the great shames of our nation.
I think a good bit of what makes a poor-performing school is the parents. In general, I feel that poor (in the financial sense) parents have less participation in their children’s education, have less interest in the scholastic success of their children. The kids learn the attitude from the parents, ensuring the cycle of poverty continues.
The schools can send the same amount per student, can have the same number of computers and library books, and those schools will always do poorer. However, I feel that a parent that is active and vested in her child’s education can encourage that child to take AP English and Calculus no matter which school they attend. Some inner-city private schools with small budgets do wonders because the parents are required to participate in their child’s scholastic career.
A case study: My sister’s daughter and my brother’s step-son. Both kids are relatively smart and have gone to suburban public schools. Every year my sister as attended all school meetings, parent-teacher conferences, monitored homework and has been active and reactive in her daughter’s education. Her daughter has a 4.25 GPA, has been taking colleges from the local community college instead of regular HS classes for two years and has been accepted to some of the best engineering colleges in the country. My brother and his wife never went to his step-son’s school. When the kid stopped handing in homework in elementary school, they just told him the schoolwork was his responsibility. He failed 6th grade. They continued to allow him to dictate his educational path. Now he’s 16 but doesn’t qualify for his driver’s license because his grades aren’t high enough (state mandate, not my sister-in-law’s). He has no interests that I can see that will provide a career path (auto mechanics, for example). The real difference between the two kids is the parents’ commitment to their child’s education. And because of this, my nephew can look forward to a low-income life until perhaps he grows up at 30, decides to go back to school and make something of himself. My niece has planned her education and career and can expect to have a reasonably well-paying engineering career.
StG