[gruez]

>Why shouldn’t parents be allowed to take their child’s portion of the property taxes we all pay to go to the school of their choice?

AFAIK the concern is that the charter schools will have their pick of "good" students, and all the "bad" students would be forced to languish in whatever shitty schools that are responsible for the remaining students. The "bad" students also tend to cost more per pupil (eg. because they have special needs and therefore need more qualified teachers), so slicing the student population this way will benefit the "good" students to the detriment of "bad" students.

[bnralt]

That's the theory. What I've actually seen here (where many charters exist with public schools) is that charters actually increase the number of "good" kids in public schools. This is because without charters, parents will just stay clear of a bad area entirely. With charters, many parents will put their kids in the local public school early on, increasing the number of "good" kids that go their. They eventually will pull things out as the school systems problems increase as kids grow, but there seems to be "good" students willing to stay in the system later and later.

It's a slow improvement, but it's at least an improvement. As I said, without charters the "good" kids leave the system entirely, and these local schools never get better.

But the other thing to point out is that it's unfair to simply treat "good" students as commodities to spend on "bad" students and neglect "good students" educational needs (and this happens much too often, from what I've seen). For instance, I've seen a special needs student here get a full time teacher just for them (in addition to their regular teacher), which is great. But then advanced students who aren't learning anything because they already know everything on the curriculum can't even get a teacher to address their educational needs for an hour or two a week.

[smugma]

This is the exact evolution I’ve seen of my kids’ (charter) school.

[ahahahahah]

Please readers, do not believe these bullshit anecdotes. Look into real research about these things if you care about them.

[reducesuffering]

Feel free to cite the research then, otherwise:

"I am so, so tired of socialists who admit that the current system is a helltopian torturescape, then argue that we must prevent anyone from ever being able to escape it. Who promise that once the last alternative is closed off, once the last nice green place where a few people manage to hold off the miseries of the world is crushed, why then the helltopian torturescape will become a lovely utopia full of rainbows and unicorns. If you can make your system less miserable, make your system less miserable! Do it before forcing everyone else to participate in it under pain of imprisonment if they refuse! Forcing everyone to participate in your system and then making your system something other than a meat-grinder that takes in happy children and spits out dead-eyed traumatized eighteen-year-olds who have written 10,000 pages on symbolism in To Kill A Mockingbird and had zero normal happy experiences - is doing things super, super backwards!" https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-cult-o...

[turtledragonfly]

Exactly.

Just to spell it out some more for any other readers: this is the same reason you want (for example) a large health insurance pool, including young healthy people who don't need that insurance. The idea is to have the healthy/privileged/lucky/etc help the less fortunate ones, at any given moment, to the benefit of everyone in the longer term.

There's a necessary tension between individual choices/freedoms and a system like that, though. "Good of the one vs. good of the many," and soforth.

[imgabe]

How much do the “good” students help the “bad” students compared to the bad students harming the good students by disrupting classes, bringing violence to the school, or otherwise slowing down learning?

People who can afford to do so will already put their kids in private school or select good school districts. All that’s left in the others are poor kids who want to learn but are at the mercy of kids who don’t.

[ticviking]

This is exactly the issue that drives folks from "bad schools." The inability of those schools to control disruptive students.

If public schools were permitted to prevent the harms of disruptive students from impacting classroom management by informing parents, "You child is no longer welcome in our classroom, you are required to find someone who will put up with them" and handing them a voucher; then I strongly suspect we would learn that the quality increased and the number of disruptive students went down as parents were forced to deal with the costs those students had imposed on us.

[bnralt]

There's also a large spectrum of "bad" kids, and a lot of the time the "bad" students educational needs aren't being met, either. For instance, there are, as you said, kids who are violent and disruptive and the answer might not be to expose them to more students but to remove them from the student body entirely and get them into a specialized program focused on trying to improve the emotional problems the kid has.

There are other "bad" students which might not be a problem, but it's clear that the efforts to educate them are a waste[1]:

> In the last four years, France’s son passed three classes, failed 22 and was late or absent 272 days, the teen’s transcript shows. ** > France’s son has a 0.13 GPA, which traditionally places a student near the bottom of their class. But in his case, it put him 62nd out of 120, which would indicate a wider-spread academic performance issue going on at the school.

You can't just drop some good kids into this failing system and expect students like that to suddenly do well.

I think people should reconsider trade schools, including ones that start at relatively young ages. Include an opportunity to earn money at a young age. Just paying teachers to teach kids like that classes that they keep failing doesn't help the kids or anyone else.

[1] https://www.fox5dc.com/news/baltimore-area-student-passed-on...

[ticviking]

There's a stage of puberty boys go through where it would work better to give them a whole schedule of Shop Class/Gym/Work-study, or similar for that year. They're re-learning how to control and move their growth spurt body and re-learning how to think with the suddenly increased Testosterone level.

Tracking folks earlier would also probably help. A lot of my peers growing up worked 4 hours of their school day their senior year, those guys all own homes way before my college bound peers did.

[supertrope]

This is an intensely personal choice. I know people who automatically reject public schools because they consider them all low quality. I remember I saw a rude store customer say "They must have went to public school." after an employee made a math error. The devout choose Catholic schools because of values education sometimes even if they have to pay tuition. Some have to enroll their kids in public school because they feel going to a school with a normal cross section of the community is preparation for real life (and especially not a gender segregated school). Some want their kids to attend a racially and economically diverse school even if quality suffers, because their think a good student can achieve in even a mediocre school. Or vice versa they value diversity but not as much as the best schools and those are typically with above average household income and usually <15% or even <10% racial minorities.

[gruez]

> How much do the “good” students help the “bad” students compared to the bad students harming the good students by disrupting classes, bringing violence to the school, or otherwise slowing down learning?

I don't think the parent poster is making a diversity argument here (ie. having "bad" students alongside "good" students enriches the experience for everyone involved). He's more making an argument that a society should engage in redistribution from the "healthy/privileged/lucky/etc" to the "less fortunate ones".

[imgabe]

In some cases it is also going to redistribute misfortune as well. Is that fair or desirable?

[gruez]

I'm not sure what gave you the impression that I support putting "bad" students alongside "good" students, which is what I presume you mean by "redistribute misfortune". My last comment is specifically denies this (ie. "having "bad" students alongside "good" students"), and "redistribution" straightforwardly implies redistribution in resources/money.

[imgabe]

Giving more money and resources to people who don’t want to take advantage of them in the first place isn’t going to fix the problem.

[smugma]

There are many parents who can afford private school but send their kids to public schools for the heterogeneity.

I do this and do question whether or not it’s the right choice (financially it’s saving me a few million, but that’s just money).

[Dracophoenix]

The issue with compelled school is that it creates forced riders, a problem very rarely addressed. At what point does society end and individual rights begin? People demand marriage rights even when marriage is an institution of the state. I don't see why school choice is the particular line at which the "good" of the many should now be given consideration, despite education being as personal a choice as whom one marries.

[turtledragonfly]

> it creates forced riders, a problem very rarely addressed

Yes, I think that's the idea. I don't think it's inherently a "problem", though [1]. Lots of good things in society have this same pattern. I pay taxes for the fire department, but have never had a fire myself. Compare to the highly-problematic privatized fire departments of years past. Lots of examples in that vein.

A movie quote comes to mind: "When he reached the New World, Cortéz burned his ships. As a result, his men were well-motivated."

There is something to be said for the power of a "we're all in it together" mentality, whether forced or not.

Maybe that makes me a communist, I don't know (:

> At what point does society end and individual rights begin?

Great question. I imagine the answer varies by person, by culture and sub-culture, by time, and by many other factors. I wonder if someone has done work in quantifying where to draw that line. For instance, with the fire department example, some private ones do still exist, mostly in rural areas, where there's less risk of a fire from one neighbor endangering the next one. But in more crowded areas, such as cities, the "forced rider" approach is far superior. There're probably some formulas that could describe that trade-off.

[1] Aside: I was unfamiliar with the term "forced riders", so I'm going off of the Wikipedia page[2]; not sure if there is some inherent negative association with the term in typical usage.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_rider

[epicureanideal]

Hmm, I wonder, is there a way to permit vouchers while also somehow compensating for this effect?

Would vouchers be acceptable to you if so?

[JustSomeNobody]

And then eventually public education would die completely and then, eventually, vouchers would dry up for certain, um, classes of people, so it would be difficult for certain people to obtain any success at all because they would get zero education.

[lxm]

But aren’t smaller classes linked to better academic progress?