[nkrisc]

Because it’s not a real choice. As household income decreases, the odds the child goes to the nearest school (regardless of how good it is) increases.

Are you providing after school child care options or transportation to their school of choice? If not, then it’s not a real choice and kids from lower income households will remain disadvantaged.

That is to say, the results will be mostly identical except now public money will be going to private entities. Because that was always the real goal of charter schools.

[rayiner]

> Because it’s not a real choice. As household income decreases, the odds the child goes to the nearest school (regardless of how good it is) increases.

The “odds” don’t tell you whether or not it’s a “real choice.” Families that value education will take advantage of those opportunities. Families that don’t value education will get what they get.

Lots of families don’t value education and there’s nothing you can do for them. My wife is from Oregon, which has terrible test scores. And as far as I can tell, people there simply don’t care about school. Everyone’s dad is a logger or fisherman or something like that, and putting effort into academics isn’t valued.[1] In that environment, the best thing you can do is have charter schools for the minority of families that care. The alternative is to have shitty public schools that don’t serve anyone well.

[1] My wife did so well on the LSAT she got a scholarship to a top 10 law school. But people back home aren’t impressed. That doesn’t matter to her, because she is extremely internally motivated, but most people just go with their social flow: they won’t work hard for achievements people around them don’t value.

[borski]

Surely it’s possible that a family might value education but not have the literal time, if they are working non stop, to take the kids to a further school? Or to take care of them afterward?

You’re avoiding the point by saying “anyone who cares can,” and avoiding the economics entirely.

Economics can force choices against your own best interests. If you have an hour between shifts and the school is 45 minutes away, you may have no choice.

This is separate from groups of people who don’t value education. This is about where others make that choice for them.

[rayiner]

Most people aren’t “working non stop.” Out of non-disabled SNAP recipients with children, only 10% work full time, and only 33% work more than 20 hours a week: https://fns-prod.azureedge.us/sites/default/files/resource-f... (table a.26)

[borski]

Most of the people I know who work two or more jobs also do not get SNAP. Sometimes, it’s pride, and sometimes, it’s logistics.

My sister is on SNAP; it took hours, literally, for me to sign her up, and I’m quite “technically savvy” lol

And every year the renewal takes at least two hours in NYC.

[jnovek]

There is so much context here that you’re missing — have you ever been poor before?

[rayiner]

Everyone in my wife’s family grew up poor and many still are. My wife lived in a converted barn for part of her childhood.

Regardless, the data is the data! Only 10% of parents on SNAP work full time.

[jnovek]

You, personally, haven’t been poor, though, so you you don’t know what it’s like to have to balance all the things a poor person does as an adult. Your confidence that you can speak on this topic because your wife was poor as a child comes from a perspective of massive privilege.

If you had been poor as an adult, you’d know that it’s very difficult to stay on SNAP if you have any income. It incentivizes not working if you want to feed your family.

You mention people who aren’t on disability — well, it’s very hard to get on disability. Go find a social worker and ask. They’ll tell you stories about people living on the streets with diagnosed schizophrenia having to stand in front of a judge for an appeal because SSDI was rejected twice.

What percentage of people who are on SNAP actually disabled and unable to work, I wonder? It’s far high than the number of people who actually receive SSDI.

This is why I ask if you’ve been poor — the devil is in the details on these programs and you are confidently misinterpreting those details.

[borski]

Data without context is not useful.

  Data (alone) = Noise
  Data + Context = Information
  Experimentation + Error = Experience
  Information + Experience = Knowledge
  Knowledge + Humility = Wisdom

[jjulius]

What wildly inaccurate generalizations about an entire state.

Try being less closed-minded.

[hedora]

> except now public money will be going to private entities

Right, now you've come full circle to the core of my proposal: If the charter schools are not producing students that perform well academically, then they do not get paid. Instead, the investor that funded the charter school takes a bath.

This is capitalism at its finest:

- The local government provides a competitive backstop. If you do worse than that floor, then you do not get to compete.

- If your product is not fit for purpose, then you do not get paid. Private money subsidized the experiment, and only in places where the existing system had already failed.

- If the charter school (or anarcho-communist parent commune, or whichever team you want to root for) manages to reliably produce students that go on to perform well, then they solved an "insolvable" problem. Yay competition!

Over time, as the average district improves, so do the academic standards and the goalposts. Schools that once did well but are no longer competitive get phased out, so the funding model builds continuous improvement in. Nothing stops the public school districts from outcompeting the private entities. (In theory, the public districts have an unfair advantage - they don't have to turn a profit.)

[habinero]

> If the charter schools are not producing students that perform well academically, then they do not get paid

Some people have never heard of Goodhart's law and it shows lol. It leads to terrible ideas like this which make the same mistake again and again.

I want you to think -- really think -- about the ambiguities in "perform well academically". How do you measure this? Test scores? Grades? If it's grades, then you've just given everyone at that school an incentive to never fail anyone, no matter what. If it's test scores, we already know that leads to teaching to the test, which hurts academics in general. It massively incentivizes cheating and fraud. It incentivizes kicking out any student who has any problems whatsoever.

For every complex problem there is an solution that is clear, simple, and wrong.

[nkrisc]

The charter schools will do fine because they will attract wealthy students from all over who can afford to travel farther for a better school. So these charter schools will monopolize public funding for educating the wealthiest students, while poorer students will attend the nearest school regardless of quality and the schools will suffer as students struggle due to issues outside the control of the school (home life, familial financial struggles, etc.) The extremes at both ends will just be magnified.

Schools in poorer neighborhoods struggle because the people who live there are struggling.

The charter school model is attempting to solve the problem in a vacuum, but the problem does not exist in a vacuum.

[mrgoldenbrown]

In your vision how do you force the charters to accept a representative sample of students? Or do you not force them, and allow them to recruit the easy to educate kids and filter out the expensive kids?