Oh I have some other options: #4. Claim to live in a certain area so you can send your kid to a good public school. We see this in our area all the time where you have this total dump of a district Kansas City Missouri, surrounded by districts which are much better.
#5. If someones kid is from the inner city and shows major athletic talent, their can be some conversations and the parents will suddenly find an affordable apartment in a better district.
We have compulsory education laws in the US. Having society define what that education entails is normal and to be expected. Indeed you have to set parameters else the compulsory education laws are meaningless. There are all sorts of “must do” and “must not do” things in our education system. Saying you cannot home school your kid is not a reach.
Perhaps you are not familiar with the concept of per-student spending.
A given school has a thousand students, and receives $5000 per student per year. Five hundred of the students move away, or go to a different school (not necessarily a private school, just not this one). Should the school receive the same funding? That was the “harm” the two cites on which I commented were claiming - that students going to charter schools meant that the school they no longer attended didn’t get paid for educating students that didn’t attend there.
My impression is that the biggest factor in “success” / “failure” of a school is the composition of the student body. Want a “successful” school? Fill it with suburban kids from stable, two-parent homes that value education, put effort into (and have time and money available) to help with homework, extra-curriculars, etc. Find schools with poor, inner-city populations, often-times single parents who may be working late and not around to help kids with homework, perhaps don’t always understand the importance of education, etc, and those schools will often be deemed “failures”.
I have a hard time excluding “higher” education from the discussion of public schools. We have numerous public schools beyond high school. And, our goal for k-12 needs to be far more than considering k-12 the end of the line.
This has significant implications for what we do in k-12 in terms of what we consider to be a success, whether we see it as OK to leave behind those who don’t have the money for further education, etc.
Every single high school in America has kids who are interested in higher education.
And, for those who aren’t, we still have the challenge that k-12 may be all they get!!
In the end, we can’t form our direction on the basis of whether wealthy parents have a path for their kids.
I agree with your first statement, and decline to agree with your second. The question has to be what we need to do to make education successful. If we create a system somehow whereby public education disappears, yet overall US students are as well or better educated as they are now, that’s fine with me. I doubt that is what will happen, nor should it happen, necessarily, but the purpose of education is education - all other considerations come a long second.
Vouchers and school choice are a way to promote the success of private schools to the public schools. And they are fiercely resisted by the teachers’ unions, and the educational bureaucracy in general.
My ideal would be a mixed system. Everyone gets a voucher. The public schools have to accept anyone who applies. (Special education students could get larger vouchers). Other private schools can accept or reject students as they do now.
The lowest level of students would probably wind up in public school, and would receive a crappy education. Just as they do now. Parents who value public education could send their children to the public schools as well, and their children would probably receive much the same level of education as they do now. Parents could apply for their children to get into whatever school they can get into. Those students get, on average, a better education than they do now, since the teachers are not distracted as much as dealing with trouble-makers - they are off disrupting the public school classes like they are now. Some students would do better, most would do the same, very few are going to be much worse. Not exactly a win-win, but close.
It is worth noting that in Employment Division v Smith the Supreme Court ruled that even though it historically was part of their religion states could ban the use of peyote in native American religious ceremonies.
Clearly the court can decide that religion does not trump state law if they feel like it and the state can assert a compelling interest when it comes to the education of its citizens.
They may not want to but it would not be hard for the Supreme Court to go there if they felt like it.
Maybe we need to be spending more time teaching kids the importance of education, what the opportunities actually are, how the world works in terms of education, what careers exist, etc.
My daughter has spent time with inner city high school kids who are considering applying to colleges. One of the big issues is they just don’t understand the opportunity, how they could pay off debt with more zeros than they could possibly pay, who it is that would hire them, etc. One kid told her that he knows people who borrowed that much money, and they’re all dead. So, the minimum effort to get out of HS becomes the education objective.
This affects those who end their education at any level.
You have a good augment but how to accomplish this is the question. ending options for parents will either force them to seek high performing schools and pay high taxes for that, or have them send their children to low performing schools. Basically creating the same divide of public vs private/homeschooling, but in this case public in a high tax area vs lower taxed area. And we pretty much have that divide already within public school systems.
So your solution is to treat the goddamned problem, but you don’t offer any avenue forward in that line. Perhaps we can pray for aliens to show up and show us how to to do that??? Even send distress signals via radio frequencies into space to the nearest exoplanets that have the greatest chance of life. Perhaps they have a way to do this, but it appears you do not.
I agree that if there were some way other than public school, that would be fine. The objective IS education, not funding method or organization method.
BUT, I do not see an alternative proposal that accomplishes the education objective. Vouchers just don’t work. Beyond k-6 they don’t pencil out, leaving the money going to parents who already have the money and the motivation. And, the places where they have been tried haven’t succeeded in quality or even just in addressing those kids who are capable and interested.
This idea of identifying and filtering out “lowest level students” for failure is pathetic. I know there are learning deficits, but this method filters out those who are fully capable. Plus, we need to be addressing those with deficits at least as aggressively.
We have public schools that work. We should be promoting them. We’re a long way away from having US public schools all following models that have had proven success. Plus, we can’t afford to just ignore the brain power that hasn’t been motivated by parents.
From your cite:
“Studies of home schooling and socialization have the customary faults of research in a
very young field:** no guiding theory, inadequate experimental design, poorly defined
research questions, untried and weak measures, unorthodox treatment and presentation of
data, and conclusions based on subjective judgments**. Even a cursory look at the research
reveals that many studies are qualitative descriptions of so few participants that the
results cannot be generalized. Many are surveys that rely exclusively on parental reports
but offer no idea of how reliable those reports may be. Many test only home-schooled
children without comparing them to children attending conventional schools, making it
very difficult to know what the results might mean. Furthermore, as Ray and Wartes
(1991) pointed out, all home school research is correlational (because researchers have no
way to control the type of schooling children experience), samples are usually selfselected
(because researchers cannot require home schooling families to participate), and,
however carefully researchers try to match their home-schooled and traditionally
schooled groups, there are probably still important differences between the two.”
Thus massively increasing the stratification of society, as kids are divided at an early age into “Good” and “Why bother”, which then grow up into educated alphas who have only socialized with other alphas vs Gammas who have only socialized with other Gammas, for whom the only lesson they have learned is that they are not worth being taught. The great thing about a public education system is that it exposes children to all different types of people with different backgrounds, attitudes and life experiences.
I think it should be illegal to conduct a child’s whole education using a religious point of view, that it should be illegal to run a full-education religious school, and that it should be illegal to homeschool for religious reasons. I am in favour of religious education as an additional program for those who choose it, as long as they are the only ones paying for it.
Yikes. As a now former public school teacher, I find quite a bit of what’s been posted here quite discomforting. The idea in America that you would not be allowed to school your children as you see fit is simply scary. Go move to a socialist state, where individual options are not an option, please. We are a country with individual rights, and an emphasis upon individuality, thank-you very much!
I believe the real problem with the system is simple: the focus is moving away from providing an effective public school system. The whole idea of backpack funding demonstrates this. The money doesn’t “belong” to the child, nor can you set up a publicly-funded system of education where simply letting the money follow the child will produce schools which are sufficiently effective no matter where the child takes the money. The simple concept of “economy of scale” gets lost with that, not to mention the difficulty of properly providing an effective education for those who are more difficult to educate for reasons covered by the various “special education” programs. But the pressure on parents to want to have their child opt out of the traditional system would disappear if the traditional system was accomplishing the goal of effective education.
Equally funded education is not going to accomplish that goal. There are some places where education, to be effective, will cost more than in others. Educating children growing up in poverty is an example: simply to make up the difference in conditions inherently requires added expenditure. Part of why that is difficult to make happen is that we continue in most states to rely upon locally-raised property taxes to fund the bulk of education costs. But even in states where that is NOT true (like the state I taught in, and live in, South Carolina), there is little political willpower to provide the unequal resources needed to create effective schools in areas stricken by poverty (whether urban or rural). On the contrary; the system limps along at a minimal level in impoverished areas, while being supplanted by extra monies in areas with higher-income families. It’s no shock that the schools in Fort Mill, SC, are better at educating children than the schools in Chester, SC, which is just 30-odd miles down the road.
If parents want to opt out of the public system of education, that’s fine. But the concept that they should be able to take “their child’s” money with them ignores the fact that a public education system (the goal of almost every other country in the world) that is based upon some form of free-market purchase of education will not work, even if public dollars are funneled into it. Unless, of course, you want your public education system to look a lot like your public health system…
Yes, all kids should go to public schools (I say this as a public school graduate and with teachers in every generation since my great-grandfather in 1874).
I also fear that we are falling behind the rest of the world in educational attainment and hours attended (because of agrarian holdovers).
So…
[ul]
[li]No public funding of private or religious schools[/li][li]Private and religious schools allowed after hours, weekends and summers[/li][li]Students stay in public schools until they can test out of required curricula[/li][li]Vocational training or community college/university prep included as public schooling (via industry programs or opt-in taxation)[/li][/ul]