That’s why I think reforming the funding model is the firs step
[eyeroll] From Finnish website on the Finnish educational system:
(Emphasis added.) Which is fundamentally different from the basic “consumer choice” principle that all consumers are equally entitled to get their services from anywhere they please, which is what you seem to be advocating for US schools.
But they don’t, as the reality of the Finnish school system attests: extra-local schooling options within the public education system are permitted in theory, but not always available in practice. Parents are not guaranteed the right to enroll their child in whatever school they choose: the only school in which a child is guaranteed a spot is that of their local municipality.
I don’t understand why you don’t seem to be noticing the practical constraints that produce this limitation. Even in a “funding-follows-student” model, school spaces and teaching staffs, and all the associated requirements like support staff and educator housing options and so on, cannot be magically expanded and contracted at a moment’s notice to accommodate random fluctuations in enrollment based on the whims of consumer choice.
No, as I said, completely unrestricted “consumer choice” in individual schools is not a practical idea for a universal education system. Not in Finland, and not in the US either. Reforming the underlying structure of school funding—which, as I noted earlier, I agree is a very good idea for other reasons—will not somehow change that basic reality.
True. But if all schools are fungible and all schools are equally excellent, then there’s not nearly the need for “choice” as in “voting with your feet and your dollars in pursuit of quality.”
Fixing funding is a necessary, but by no means sufficient, condition for achieving equal excellence.
Because I think to a certain extent it doesn’t matter how much you spend on the school because the schools don’t exist in a vacuum. What I mean is that no matter how much you spend on a school in Newark, NJ, you are going to get students whose parents (or more likely, parent) are unemployed or living in poverty and all that goes with that when compared to someplace like Short Hills, NJ (one of the wealthiest towns in the country).
We’re kind of going through something similar. We are happy with the public elementary school in the city where we live but need to figure out where they will go once they get into middle school because the middle and high schools here aren’t that good. So we’re trying to figure out between urban, suburb, or rural.
There’s a difference between the overall “quality” of a school and a child’s personal experiences of it. My son is in 7th grade right now. His middle school has mediocre ratings according to the rating agencies. But he’s thriving. He’s taking advanced math, and generally doing very well.
I believe the home environment has far more effect on a child’s performance at school than anything else.
Agree overall, but I’d broaden it slightly.
Any kid’s personal home environment has a big impact on them. The collective home environments of the rest of the kids in that grade and school have the next biggest impact. Finally, the school proper, as it tries to teach the kids it’s given has the last affect.
Often the most advantageous thing about choosing a “better” school is the “better” classmates you find there.
I’d love to know where “all consumers are equally entitled to get their services from anywhere they please” actually exists. There are all sorts of times when consumers don’t get their first choice. A primary care physician might not be taking on new patients, a hairdresser might be booked up, there may not be a room at your first choice of hotel. In college, some classes fill up and can’t accommodate every student who wants to take it.
In practice, students generally want the school closest to their house, or where their siblings went, or where their friends are going. But there are times when there are other priorities. One school may offer a program another doesn’t or have a different educational philosophy. Some students might thrive in a large school with lots of activities while others would do better in a small school. Some studies have shown that girls do better in STEM subjects when they are separated from boys. My junior high had an oceanography elective while the other junior high in my city didn’t. They were both considered good schools, but they were not identical.
It turns out that an incredibly important factor in employee satisfaction is the degree of control they feel they have over their work. If you want parents to support public schools it would be wise to allow them to feel they have some degree of control as well. If you say take it or leave it, people will continue to leave.
It’s not like this isn’t being done already. Many larger cities have schools for the arts or that are STEM focused. They have systems in place for student placement based on ability or through a lottery. Obviously Finland has a system as well. They didn’t throw up their hand and say that if everyone can’t go to the school they want, then they’ll have no choice at all.
It was in the movie Teachers Nick Nolte takes his student, Laura Dern, to get an abortion. I don’t think it is during school hours, though.
And, and this is vitally important, the movie is a WORK OF FICTION. Of course, you know that. 
And neither does the US, as I already pointed out in my post #169 about interdistrict enrollment policies, and as you also noted with regard to specialized “magnet schools” and similar.
My point throughout this discussion is that the basic logistical constraints of universal education make it intrinsically unrealistic to have a system in which, as you advocated in your post #152, “parents enroll their students without regard to geographic boundaries”. It’s just not feasible to have a system where everybody is equally entitled to individual choice everywhere, “without regard to geographic boundaries”. The only feasible way to guarantee that every student gets access to education is to set some ground rules about which students go to which school, and the fairest and most efficient way to do that is via geographic boundaries.
Now, as I’ve already acknowledged, it can be entirely feasible to allow exceptions to the ground rules about locality-based enrollment—where local school resources permit, and if it can be achieved fairly*—as the Finland system does, and as some US school systems do to a lesser extent.
If you’re now shifting your original goalposts to support that more limited ambition rather than completely unrestricted enrollment “without regard to geographic boundaries”, then no problem, I agree with you.
* The caveat about fairness is an important one, though. If we just say that schools can use their excess enrollment capacity to accept students from however far away their parents can afford to send them at their own expense, then that’s just giving students from wealthier families even more unfair advantage. Of course, in practical terms students from wealthier families are always going to have all kinds of unfair advantages over other students. But a public system of universal education shouldn’t be designed to increase such advantages, which is what a policy of the form “you can send your kids to any (currently under-enrolled) school that you can personally afford the transit costs for” would be doing.
And for the second time (the other was in the early 1980s), Des Moines has had a school shooting with 2 fatalities, although in that case it was a stalker who had wealthy parents (and his dad was a lawyer) and a girl who wasn’t interested in him. THIS shooting is said to have been targeted, and it sounds like DSM’s version of the “alternative school” in my old town, the one where people who worked there believed in compulsory sterilization as a condition of admission.
I told that story to a woman I know who teaches HS here and has for many years, and she said that the alt-schools here had stricter rules than the regular schools, so kids won’t want to go there.
There is another problem with this. Parents with money and jobs that allow flexible hours will be able to get their kids to the faraway school. Parents without money, or access to transportation, or hours that won’t let them do this won’t. It will make the system even more unfair.
As for local funding, in California at least school taxes go to the state and get allocated back to the districts according to a formula when this was set in place, which was court ordered. The allocation was based on funding at the time. My district which was poorer back then got screwed, and since the legislature is heavily LA based, and LA did well, this will never change. Yet one of our underfunded high schools is one of the best in the state. But I doubt anyone would call California a public school paradise.
My province (Ontario) sets the school tax portion of property taxes, collects the taxes into a provincial fund, and allocates the funding to schools on a per-capita basis, with added provincial funding for ESL, special needs, etc. There are still schools that are better than others, but at least funding disparities are not a significant factor.
Probably because their kids go to private schools. If they had their way, they would probably get rid of public education entirely. If someone can’t afford to be educated, then that’s just the breaks and it’s their fault. I’m 100% sure they don’t want their folks rubbing elbows w/ minority groups, people from furin countries, the poor, etc.
Or they homeschool because they don’t want their kids around people who might find out what the parents are really like, or who disagree with their philosophies.
This doesn’t just apply to Christian fundamentalists, either; I know of two families who HSed because they did not want their children around people of faith, and Christians in particular.
People like that scare me.
Which people scare you? The xians or the anti-xians? Or just apartheid extremists in general, regardless of what they’re apart about?
Extremists in general, that’s who.
Imagine people who HSed their kids so they won’t be going to school with Jews or Muslims. Yeah, I don’t think too many people would approve of that, either.
Update: The staff member was the school’s founder! He’s expected to make a full recovery, last I heard, and they did host a public memorial for the two young people who died.
Update II: Rolling Fork, Mississippi was hit by a wedge tornado last night, basically obliterating the town with at least 25 fatalities. The town was also “host” to THIS, which it what a lot of voucher advocates really want. Read the link at your own risk.
Ah yes, the White Supremacist Academy of the Ignorant Deep South = SWAIDS. A fine institution of low learning if ever there was one.
One hopes the SWAIDS was comprehensively destroyed. And that they correctly interpret this message from their god as his disapproval of their sins. One also hopes for a winning lottery ticket. And a pony.
One expects to be comprehensively disappointed. 
Here’s their admissions statement. (Suuuuure, that’s what you do.)