[scott_s]

Point b) is a problem if charter schools are held up as a general solution to the problems with our schools - because the solution obviously doesn't scale. (The hard-to-teach students need to go somewhere.)

Independent of that, it's also problematic because you're essentially giving up on the "failing schools public schools", by taking resources away from them.

[humanrebar]

Call me crazy, but I have no emotional attachment to buildings and organizations (whichever you mean by schools). As long as the students in failing public schools have at least replacement-level alternatives, there won't be a net negative here.

> The hard-to-teach students need to go somewhere.

That's obvious. The criticism is that, in the current system, laws and tradition have dictated that "somewhere" is Oswald Cobblepot High School down the street, and if that school is a hole, sucks to be you. Blame the voters that didn't pass the bond issue five years ago. Or get rich and move to a nicer neighborhood.

And that last point is especially important. The rich have places to send their problem students. And they can afford to move to overpriced neighborhoods that effectively weed out at-risk students from the student body. The current system (unintentionally) creates public schools full of hard-to-teach students.

[scott_s]

The point made in this piece is that such students do not have alternatives other than public schools, since the charter school policies are explicitly designed to weed them out. The end result of such policies is that "good" students who have the means to do well in school end up in charter schools, and "bad" students who do not have the means to do well in schools end up in the public schools. But, the public schools will have less overall money than before, since some of their funding has been siphoned off to the charter schools.

As I see it, this exacerbates the problems of rich schools and poor schools.

[humanrebar]

My point is that the system is already stacked against students, even if every school were a traditional public school. There are always expensive neighborhoods, private schools, tutors, etc.

And one of the side effects of the current system is that rich parents and poor parents don't even live in the same school district anymore. And housing prices are both inflated and tied to the quality of the local schools, which is insane if you think about it.

[scott_s]

Yes, I agree. It is an enormous problem. My preferred solution is to increase the total amount of money in education, and distribute it more evenly.

[crusso]

But we already know that raw education spending is not the problem.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/25/oecd-education-repo...

[scott_s]

I disagree that the article you link to supports your conclusion. See "Why Poor Schools Can't Win at Standardized Testing": http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/07/why-poor...

Anecdotally, I know several teachers. Their salaries, for their education level (Master's degree) and cost of living (NYC area, often teaching in the city), are very low. One particular example I know is a NYC public school teacher with a Master's in education and several years experience making $45k.

Many members of this community are fine with the notion that paying programmers more will tend to attract better programmers. I see no reason why we can't extend that to public school teachers.

[vonmoltke]

A potential solution, if the district is large enough, to that is to create an open enrollment district. Stop forcing kids to go to a specific school just because they happen to live at a certain address, or change schools because they need to move.

[clavalle]

>The hard-to-teach students need to go somewhere

Why not a school with behavior experts? Wouldn't a concentration of students with specific needs make it easier to address those needs because you can concentrate those specific resources there? To take an extreme example, look at the success of schools for the deaf or schools for the blind.

[scott_s]

Public schools have special education teachers, and sub-schools within existing schools for special education teachers. In other words, we already do that. We just don't fund it very well.