Why do many conservatives paint the entire public school system with a broad brush?

Great Debates
162

Huh? The point is not to have to exclusive schools, that’s what we have now. Schools are exclusively for students in a particular district, sometimes in a particular neighborhood. Don’t live in an area with a large tax base? Sorry, second class education for you.

You get to pick your primary care physician, but if your first choice is not taking new patients you look for someone else. You don’t say well if everyone can’t get their first choice we’ll just assign doctors at random. And oh, by the way, if you live in a poor neighborhood your doctor’s office will have less funding.

Funding schools at the local level is insane.

edit: Is the fact that I want to give parents and students more choices being conflated with conservatives’ plan for using vouchers to destroy public schools? Because that is not what I’m advocating. I want schools to be funded at the federal or state level so there is more equitable resources.

163

What do you mean huh? I’m talking about the current proposals of vouchers and charter schools that take away funding from the public schools and moves it to schools that are exclusive, meaning they do not have to accept every student. Then the remaining schools who have to accept everyone in the area that wants to go there have less money to help those kids. My point is grounded in the current reality and the current proposals of those that are trying to harm public schools so they don’t have to pay for their kids to go to the exclusive schools they want to go to.

Before we invent a whole new system we need to understand what we actually want to accomplish and how it affects every child in the country. You have some valid complaints about the current system, but I don’t see a coherent overall plan that increases quality of education for every child in the US without leaving any children out.

I agree we need to fund schools better and that local funding purposely creates haves and have nots. However, letting kids that live in New Hampshire enroll in a school in Seattle doesn’t seem like a workable plan, nor does it seem like it’s going to solve the problem.

Edited to respond to your edit: I guess I need more information on how you envision this choice playing out. I’m working on actual real world proposals that are out there. If you aren’t for that sort of choice, then maybe you just need to provide more details so we can understand your plan and how it makes sure to include every child while making things better for every child.

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That is not what I’m proposing. I never mentioned vouchers or charter schools.

165

This thread is about how conservatives talk about the public school system.

166

Re-reading things, I don’t think we are even that far apart let alone opposed to each other. I certainly don’t think choice is a bad thing when it comes to schools, but comparing it to doctors seems a stretch given that there are only so many schools in a given geographic area. Nobody wants their kid having a 3 hour commute every day. So choice is necessarily limited by how many schools can you feasibly send your kid to every day.

I think about the public schools in Finland. Or I guess just schools. There are no private schools allowed there. Every student goes to public school and they have one of the best education systems in the world. The rich have no choice but to make sure the public schools are world class because they have to send their kids there. Funding is therefore not an issue. I wish we could look at other places and see what works and just implement it here, but the problem is our rich and privileged want there to be an underclass that their kids can be superior to. And they control all of the levers of power here. So we can’t actually fix this as long as those with the power don’t want it fixed.

167

So…Madame LeFarge was right?

168

Part of the problem is that the system of government in the US is very different from many other countries. In many, probably most, other countries , everything is more or less national and regions/provinces/cities, etc have some independence within certain boundaries. The US is almost the opposite in that almost everything is left to the states and the Federal government doesn’t have much influence on education, not even enough to demand that New York City and one of its adjacent suburbs combine their tax revenue and run a single school system. It would have to be done at the state level - but I’m not sure if that would do much good either. You’d certainly have some states that would spend more than others and even if there were no private school, it’s impossible to keep parents who can afford it from paying for tutoring and other extras.

Maybe all of those things in some places - but there are plenty of parks and other recreation facilities (including beaches) and libraries in my area that are only open to residents of the jurisdiction that funds them.

169

Wrong. Schools do in fact “come to the students’ house” every day for many if not most students, to pick them up in the schoolbus and take them to the school, and bring them back again at the end of the day.

Unless your plans for school reform include somehow implementing universal effective remote teaching that all students have equal access to from convenient locations near their homes, then your schools are going to have to figure out how to physically transport constantly fluctuating numbers of students from randomly distributed municipalities to the geographically scattered schools of their parents’ choice. And that’s going to be a total logistical nightmare, even worse than demanding that Kansas City postal workers must deliver the mail to some self-selected residents of Topeka.

Unless, again, what you’re really driving at here is the notion that well-to-do parents who can afford to provide their kids’ school transportation over any distance of their choosing should get the de facto unlimited “consumer choice” in schools, while the poor families just have to put up with whatever school is physically accessible in their own neighborhood, same like now. I don’t consider that a meaningful “reform” of the current system.

And do people in those countries all leave their kids at their primary care provider’s office for several hours a day every weekday in the year, barring school holidays? No? Do you think that if they did, it might have some effect on the doctors’ ability to adequately accommodate randomly fluctuating numbers of patients and the restrictions they need to place on their practice?

The idea that “consumer choice” in healthcare providers for brief office visits, which consumers make on average a few times a year, would somehow seamlessly scale up to universal schooling that has to be serving and physically managing all the kids everywhere every day is simply absurd.

Sure it makes sense, for the many and significant reasons of system-wide constraint that I’ve been talking about.

Do I think it’s absolutely impossible for the system to have slightly more porous borders, so to speak, in situations like the one you mention? No, I think it’s reasonable for there to be some degree of flexibility, subject to limitations in planning and accommodation resources, in cases where schools in different districts are about equally nearby.

And what do you know, there is in fact a feature in many US states’ education legislation called interdistrict enrollment that provides for just that approach, and in many cases with far fewer restrictions. Oh, guess what, such policies also further disadvantage low-income students who can’t afford their own transportation to more distant school systems. Gee, who could have predicted that unfortunate consequence?

Of course not, but the two issues are not the same thing. We can have more equitable school funding based at the state or even federal level—which is indeed a very good idea—without kidding ourselves that this will somehow make completely unrestricted “consumer choice” in individual schools a practical idea for a universal education system.

170

You are right, it cold never work. First hit on Google: “Finland runs a national school choice system where parents and students can choose freely between the 2,600 municipal and 80 privately-managed schools and funding follows the student.”

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There may be unrestricted school choice in theory in Finland but how many parents can and do choose to send their kids to a school that is 400 miles away from home? Which means for practical purposes, the choice is going to be limited - just because the government allows you to choose freely from the 2500 schools doesn’t mean that life doesn’t put any limits on your choice. Going by this article , I suspect that unrestricted choice is the least important difference in Finland. It doesn’t matter that I can theoretically send my kid to any school in the country when there are multiple good schools within commuting distance of my home - and choice also doesn’t matter if there are no good schools within commuting distance of my home.

172

I can choose what store I shop at, but guess what, I don’t choose one that’s 400 miles away. That would be insane, wouldn’t it? But if there is a school nearby that better fits my child’s needs, I’d like to have the opportunity to at least try to get them in. I grew up poor and am well aware of the challenges that presents. One of my classmates had his own bedroom with a desk and a chair. My mother was a hoarder and there was not even a table with a clear space to spread out my books. It was much easier for him to do his homework than me. This is just one example of the issues facing disadvantaged children.

I would have done much better in an alternative school environment. I even worked with a group of teachers to start one within the public school system: ultimately to no avail.

Perfect is the enemy of good enough. Yes, some children won’t live where there as many choices as other areas, but that is better than no choice. The bigger issue to me isn’t choice, it’s the funding issue. It’s insane that some localities have more resources for schools than others. Once that is addressed the arbitrary geographic boundaries become moot. I also like the Finnish model where funding follows the students, as long as it covers the entire tuition. It would not be fare to hand $10,000 dollars to a rich family to partially pay a $20,000 prep school.

173

Why does anyone paint with a broad brush? So you can look at a uniform coat without having to worry about a lot of details.

Not just conservatives but nearly everyone seems to paint the entire public school system with a broad brush. And they usually apply the following assortment of colors, stains, and coatings:

  • Public school teachers are of low ability and interest
  • Teachers unions protect incompetent and disinterested teachers
  • Public schools are havens for drugs, gangs, bullies, etc (typically worse as your look at poorer or inner city schools).
  • Public school can be a hinderance to getting into the top college for all but the top students

Now there is some truth to that because it’s a self fulfilling prophecy. Public schools are funded from the local tax base so people intentionally move to towns with the best schools which can then afford to raise taxes to improve the schools and so on.

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As long as a large fraction of the USA believes that massive economic and racial inequality is a feature, not a bug, the problem will remain insoluble.

Paraphrasing somebody famous whose name escapes me:

It is very hard to get someone to advocate for something when they think advocating for the opposite is in their personal best interests.

175

But the problem is that, for a very large number of children in the US, there isn’t a school nearby that fits their needs. Or there might be one school nearby that fits students’ needs, with room for 600 students, in an area that serves 60,000 students. For those very large numbers of students, “school choice” doesn’t do anything at all to help them.

176

I like your paint analogy.

When my kids were starting school I did worry about the rural district we lived in. I investigated schools of choice looking at the top rated ones 10 miles or more away. I decided against it realizing my kids would be less flexible to hang with friends after hours or participate anyway in the extracurriculars that our local school lacked

So we found that in our rural district my kids rose to the top of their class and they and their peers had decent scholarship offerings at their colleges of choice. Many went to the top schools in our state.

If they had gone to the school of choice, well my thought was little fishies in a big pond don’t stand out as well as being a big fish in a small pond.

177

And so what. Many schools dont have pools, should we prohibit them? Same with bands, auditoriums, Mandarin classes, driver’s ed, gymnastics, Spanish immersion, 4H, etc.

178

Why isn’t the idea to make all of our schools great? That’s what I don’t get. Richest country in the world and we can’t figure out how to make sure all of our kids get to go to a great school. Focusing only on choice necessitates some options that are worse choices. No school should be a bad choice ideally.

179

See LSLGuy’s post above.

180

Yeah I mean I get it, its just so frustrating and it also renders this entire debate pointless really.

As I said upthread, a lot of people want other kids to be in worse school so they feel like their kid is getting something exclusive and superior. They don’t want other kids to have the same access and chance in life as their kids do. It’s so selfish.

181

Are we talking about that, though? Or are we talking about roofs that don’t leak, hallways and classrooms and playgrounds that are safe and reasonably well equipped, cafeterias that can and do make sure the children aren’t trying to learn while hungry, decent libraries, reasonably sized classes, teachers who know their subjects and who can get them across to the kids (those are two different skills)?