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by humanrebar 4214 days ago
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.
1 comments
scott_s 4214 days ago
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.
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crusso 4214 days ago
But we already know that raw education spending is not the problem.

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

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scott_s 4214 days ago
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.

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crusso 4213 days ago
The article you linked to mentions that the standardized testing organizations have such a lock on testing that schools have to buy their specific expensive study materials or else the students will do worse on the standardized tests.

I don't even know if I would agree that giving more money to all schools would solve this problem. What's to keep those standardization study materials companies from raising their prices to increase their profitability?

How about if we instead take apart the centralized institutions that allow testing companies to maintain monopolies on testing and standardized testing study materials?

Once again, this isn't a problem rooted in money for education. This is a problem of entrenched power structures that prioritize maintaining their power over educating children.

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