In general, absolutely. The variable which correlates most highly with student success, by every reasonable measure, is parental involvement.
Well, assuming that the school offers it and offers it enough class periods that your kid can get into the class.
The problem as I see it is that there doesn’t seem to be a remedy for the situation. How do you correct for the inequalities? How many of those inequalities are matters of funding and how many are the result of something else? It is easy to say that the system sucks, and that Annie Xmas is cruel and unfeeling, but how do you propose to make it better?
The problem with say allowing all of the kids to attend school in the school of their choosing is that you will either overwhelm the schools capacity to provide a good education, or you will need to provide some other mechanism to determine which kids get to go where.
even sven, the problem with allowing the kids in Paterson to go to Alpine is that who is going to fund the school system’s increased costs to educate the kids? This includes the extra schools that would need to be built, the maintenance on those extra facilities, and increased teacher costs. In the short term, the increased class sizes might work to reduce any advantage that the students in Alpine enjoyed.
Yeah, stuff like that is easy to say, but even if the kid is motivated, that doesn’t mean such a thing is an option for them. There’s honours programs, AP classes, and community colleges in some places, providing kids there with extra opportunities, but there’s also places with none of those, leaving other kids totally boned.
Hell, until fairly recently, I didn’t know AP classes were a widespread thing and not just something Ontario used to do to keep kids in high school longer.
Jayn_Newell - How do A/P classes keep kids in school longer?
StG
Here are the penalties most schools face if they miss NCLB’s goals for 5 years:
“After 2 years: Schools must allow parents to transfer their children to other public schools. They also must develop a school improvement plan and spend 10 percent of their Title I allocation on teacher professional development.
After 3 years: Schools must provide eligible students with “supplemental services,” which generally means tutoring.
After 4 years: Schools must take “corrective action,” such as replacing school staff, adopting new curriculum or extending the school day.
After 5 years: Schools face takeover by the state or a contracted private education firm.” http://www.stateline.org/live/ViewPage.action?siteNodeId=136&languageId=1&contentId=41611
Are there good and bad schools in states that don’t fund their schools via property taxes and also equitably share funds among schools?
They don’t. But Ontario used to have a Grade 13 program, and up until a couple years ago that was the only context in which I’d ever heard the term used.
While it’s not the case for everyone, I had all the credits I needed to graduate high school early, but I stayed on with the rest of my class and took some AP courses and fun electives because it was cheap college credit and I didn’t really know what I wanted out of life/college yet. So I guess you could say the attractiveness of $50 3 college credit classes did encourage me to stay in high school longer.
We have open enrollment in that students can enroll in districts that border their resident district for free. We’ve had kids leave our district because of sports (it’s a small school and generally not dominant in our league in any sport) but I think we have more come in because of academics - in our general area we are one of about three or four schools who have gotten an ‘excellent’ rating from the state over the last few consecutive years (and I think it’s been about 7 times out of 8 years overall).
If I recall correctly, the lawsuit about Ohio’s school funding has not yet been settled, but I think we are allotted so much per enrolled student, with more being allowed for kids in special ed. We pay quite a bit in school district income tax in our district, and it sort of annoys me that the parents who open-enroll their kids here aren’t paying full-freight. It doesn’t bother me so much that I lose sleep over it, though.
Our school website has a link where you can anonymously report out of district students. A law was just passed here where a parent can be taken to court if they bring their child(ren) into the district illegally.
This stupid law makes it hard on some of us. Our situation: we live with hubby’s mom, cause he helps care for her. Everything here is in her name. We have to go through an affidavit process every year to prove we live here. This involves showing ID and car title with current address on it, a current utility bill, copy of my paystub with current address on it, and a signed, notarized statement that we live in the district. This is every year: people who have a lease or a mortgage don’t have to do this every year. All they have to do is show up with a current utility bill to prove their residence. Residents who own or rent are automatically assigned teachers every year: those of us on affidavit have to get assigned teachers on the first day of registration. People who come in on an affidavit are automatically suspected of not living in the district.
They sent us a letter which was returned to the school. Everyone in this household shares the same last name. When we moved out of here the first time and into an apartment, their mail also followed us. It literally took us two years to get the mail straight, but anything addressed to us that came here to the house ended up being returned. Now that we’ve moved back, we have a post office box so this does not happen again. A second letter that the school sent here was actually delivered to us, but we are still suspected of not living in the district. Fine. Send your silly little investigator over. Anytime. We don’t mind. Our kids are in fourth grade and have been in this school system their entire school career. I would think, with all the problems we’ve had, that they’d know us by now.
I hate that they’re so afraid of an invasion of kids from a neighboring city that it had to come to this.
Government services are supposed to be.
In most CA districts, you MUST live within the district boundaries in order to attend district schools. Period. Some districts will also insist that you go to the school assigned to your street/neighborhood, but others (Irvine USD, for example) will let you choose your high school (some emphasize sports, or drama, or academics, etc).
Having said that, you should know that local property taxes in CA do NOT fund local schools. After passage of Proposition 13 about 30 years ago, all the property tax dollars go straight up to Sacramento, where lots of folks get to run their fingers over them, and of course some go missing in the process. Then, the funds are redistributed to the districts, in a supposedly equal manner.
But it’s not equal. A number of districts in CA took one look at the effect Prop 13 was going to have and said “Oh hell no” and got themselves some lobbyists. Those lobbyists got certain districts named as “Basic Aid Districts,” which sounds better than what everyone else calls them, which is The Nifty Fifty. They get more $ per student than other districts. Why? Because they were sneaky bastards.
That is our system. Flawed and no one is willing to fix it. Enjoy.
If the only issue was “butts in seats,” then I would have no problem with seating all eligible kids who live in the district, then starting a wait list for out of district transfers. Simple.
It’s better than nothing, though. An open enrollment program like Minnesota’s would have given this woman a chance to send her children to their desired school legally.