>> In case you needed further proof of the American education system's failings, especially in poor and minority communities, consider the latest crime to spread across the country: educational theft.
I'm not sure if it is entirely fair to single out the education system here (once again), or at least batch it in with "yet another failing". I believe more is at fault here.
Unless I'm mistaken, tax payers in a particular school district (or county) fund the school district they're part of. A consequence of this fact, in the name of fairness for the parents, is the necessity for your child to attend a school that you are directly funding (and not attend a school you're not funding, which is what the mother in the story is doing). As long as we're sticking with this system of funding our own schools in this manner, we will naturally be encouraging segregation of classes and have no choice but to turn down those who try to get around it.
So I agree a woman shouldn't be jailed for trying to circumvent the system in this manner, but with the above knowledge of how the system operates, it doesn't surprise me that she would be punished, as I'm sure many others are as well.
Allowing people to attend any school they like (which this article is arguing for I believe?) is a pretty fundamental shift in the system.
The problem is that American cities are structured to keep the poor and minorities in nominally independent cities or suburbs that are geographically indistinguishable from the richer areas, but just independent enough to ensure that property taxes aren't shared.
It's also hard to escape the fact that many, if not most of these suburbs were explicitly set up to keep out blacks, latinos, Jews, and other undesirable groups. Until the sixties, houses in these communities often carried a restrictive covenant that explicitly prohibited sales to non-whites.
Canada shares a lot of the basic educational structure as the US, and sadly a good share of the racial baggage as well, but our cities are far more monolithic than most American cities. There are only two school districts in my city (pop. ~1 million) and students can register in any school throughout the district. The only choice I make as a taxpayer is which district, public or Catholic, I want my property taxes to fund.
> It's also hard to escape the fact that many, if not most of these suburbs were explicitly set up to keep out blacks, latinos, Jews, and other undesirable groups.
Actually, it's pretty easy to escape that "fact" because it simply isn't true.
Yes, there were some covenants like that, but they were relatively rare.
And, most of the housing stock is newer than that, so even if such covenants were somewhat common and were still in force, they'd cover a small fraction of the population.
Since they haven't been in force for decades....
> Canada shares a lot of the basic educational structure as the US, and sadly a good share of the racial baggage as well, but our cities are far more monolithic than most American cities.
More "monolithic" is right. Canada is about as diverse as Minnesota.
Restrictive covenants were not rare, especially in the post-war suburbs. The first modern suburb, Levittown, NY, was racially segregated. It wasn't called 'white flight' because the people fleeing the inner city wanted to live with blacks. Restrictive covenants didn't end up the Supreme Court because no one was interested in enforcing them.
> Restrictive covenants were not rare, especially in the post-war suburbs. The first modern suburb, Levittown, NY, was racially segregated.
Pointing to an instance doesn't make the "not rare" case.
Levittown takes good pictures, but it isn't representative of post WWII housing development.
Moreover, you're still ignoring the fact that even if covenants were't rare before, the affected housing is a very small part of today's housing stock. As a result, covenants which haven't been enforceable for 50 years can't have much, if any, effect today.
The absolute numbers don't tell the whole story, and illustrate part of the difference between the U.S. and Canada on this.
The Wikipedia article on Canada is horrible on one point: "Black" isn't a single minority group in Canada. We have people from the Caribbean and people from many different regions in Africa and, yes, like U.S. we also have descendants of black slaves (in sometimes surprising places). But while they often share similar skin colourings, that is often the only thing they share in common. Many of the Ghanaians, Nigerians, South Africans, and Caribbeans I know have nothing in common except their skin colour—and their love of partying, at least the ones that I've come into contact with over the last ten years.
So, the 2.5% Canadian "black" population is a substantially more diverse population than the 12.6% U.S. "black" population, which is primarily descended from black slaves. This group may be less diverse, but it's also something that the U.S. must come to grips with as much as Canada must come to grips with its treatment of its Aboriginals (which, to be honest, the U.S. must do, too, but they're not as visible to most Americans).
> So, the 2.5% Canadian "black" population is a substantially more diverse population than the 12.6% U.S. "black" population, which is primarily descended from black slaves.
Maybe half of the US black population is descended from slaves. The rest, which is about 6% (from your numbers) comes from the same places Canada gets its 2.5%.
And then there are all of the different groups under the hispanic label.
> Since the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, an estimated total of 0.8 to 0.9 million Africans have immigrated to the United States, accounting for roughly 3.3% of total immigration to the United States during this period.[4] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_immigration_to_the_Unit...
> One of the more noted aspects of Black Canadian history is that while the majority of African Americans trace their presence in the United States through the history of slavery, the Black presence in Canada is rooted almost entirely in voluntary immigration.[17] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Canadians
I reiterate the original point: Canada is a substantially more diverse place than the U.S. in terms of places of origin, even though the U.S. has a larger percentage of visible minorities.
Africa isn't the only source of black people. Also, as your source points out, there were basically no controls on African immigration until the 1920s.
BTW, a significant number of fleeing slaves went to Canada....
It's simply not a matter of your assessment. Canada's non-white population, at 16.2%, is less than the US 27.6%. I have spent a lot of time in both Canada and the US. I'm not just quoting the figures, although that should be enough to make my case. Canada is noticeably whiter.
> It's simply not a matter of your assessment. Canada's non-white population, at 16.2%, is less than the US 27.6%.
How are we defining "white"? I ask because Hispanics just passed Black as a percentage of the US population. Both are around 13%, which leads me to suspect that the 27% "non-white" doesn't include Hispanics.
Yes. In Edmonton, although schools have "attendance areas", there's always spots for students outside attendance areas. If a school fills up there's a lottery to determine who gets in from outside the attendance area, but only one high school ever goes to lottery (Harry Ainlay) and there's schools like Lillian Osborne that are just as good as Harry Ainlay. Even students in the Edmonton suburbs can go to any school in Edmonton as long as the school doesn't go to lottery. I've always found this to be a good system.
"just independent enough to ensure that property taxes aren't shared."
This is actually a good thing for everyone, in terms of improving the quality of schools for both rich and poor kids. What normally happens is that rich towns have higher millage, which poor town can't afford. Whereas poor towns tax the big box stores and businesses that tend to be more prevalent. When you combine the rich and poor districts you can't sufficiently tax either the houses of the rich people or the businesses, so the school quality for both declines. This is partly why Florida schools are so underfunded, because they only have 60ish districts for the entire state so they can't properly tax anyone.
There are special cases like Palo Alto/East Palo Alto, which might actually be common. One city has a huge commercial tax base, and fixed institutions (Stanford) which can't move. The other, recently incorporated, has only poor people living in low value housing; no sales tax, high demand for city services like medical and police, and such.
Even if EPA's property taxes were 10x Palo Alto's, EPA would still be a horrible place. The only viable solution is to destroy it -- probably by absorbing it into neighboring cities -- so it would be diluted across a larger tax base.
(Palo Alto actually DID cherry pick certain assets, like a golf course and airport, and rerouted the creek which determines the border to take them as part of Palo Alto, a few decades ago)
Many states allow you to opt out of paying for schools in your property taxes after a certain point (usually retirement age). It drops the tax rate significantly for older folks, obviously shifting the burden to those in child-rearing years.
Not in the district I live in. Except that the city does collect a sales tax, which someone with 15 kids would presumably pay more of than someone with no kids. But in general taxes and school levies aren't at all correlated with number of children.
Schools are in general funded by taxes on real estate--which in my opinion is not a good thing, but is the way it is in the US. The couples with infants on our block and the empty-nesters pay taxes for the school system, just like the families with kids in the public schools and families with kids in private schools.
I don't object to paying taxes for schools without having a child enrolled in them. However, I think that real estate taxation is not a good way to fund the schools.
Eh, my understanding is that everybody (over a certain income level of course) pays it, but some people pay more and some people pay less. Kind of like how different people get taxed different amounts for different property.
I'll have to look into this, I'm not terribly familiar with it since I have someone do my taxes for me..
I afraid then, it's hard to reason whether something is "fair" or "not fair", given the sheer compexity of the system. Which is unfortunate: when you don't immediately understand what's fair and what's not, you have to apply rules first. And rules are just like violence: If they fail, add more rules.
As a Canadian, I'm not entirely familiar with your education system. That being said, wouldn't schools receive funding based (at least in part) on the number of children enrolled at them?
I would have thought that would have made more sense than taking a percentage out of the incomes of the residents in a community and funneling that to the school.
The point I'm getting at is Ms. Williams-Bolar pays taxes. If schools receive funding based on enrollment, then her money essentially went to that school regardless.
Doesn't work that way; property taxes in the geographic region of the school district go to fund the schools in that district and nowhere else (if you ignore the effects of equalization lawsuits). If someone living in a low-tax district puts their child in a school in a high-tax district, they are free-riding. The case in Connecticut involves a mother from Bridgeport, which is a poor area, putting her daughter in school in Norwalk, which is much wealthier.
In my moms school district it's even worse. If a person from a district attends school in a district that isn't in their district, the school they attend receives no funding for that particular person. Generally schools are funded to a degree by attendance, and kids from other districts are excluded... so that's why the districts are so particular about where the kid comes from.
There's a mix of local funding, typically from property taxes (which is independent of number of students enrolled), state funding from state general revenue, and sometimes federal funding. In some school districts, specific school levies may also be passed as sales or property taxes; these may be time-limited to pay for infrastructure or ongoing. The mix of all of the above varies from state to state and school district to school district.
The real estate tax funding takes a percentage of the home values of the residents in a community, not a percentage of the incomes, of course. That said, the percentage is typically not fixed.
Furthermore, the state funding formulas differ from state to state and are not time-invariant. They do tend to depend on number of student, but not necessarily kind of student (e.g. students in special education programs may or may not get more funding).
Note that "depend" doesn't mean "determined by"; in Massachusetts, for example, state funding per student depends on how much money the school district is putting in from its real estate tax base and on the per-student spending in the district; the formula is somewhat complicated but the upshot is that the richer districts get _more_ per-student state funding. Yes, this is way backwards, and isn't even the most screwed up thing about school funding in this country...
In any case, in many school districts the bulk of school funding in fact comes from property taxes on the residents of the school district. That's the whole issue in this case: Ms. Williams-Bolar was not in fact paying property taxes in the district in question.
Funding varies state-by-state. For example, in Michigan most school district funding comes from the state level, and local districts are limited in their ability to raise more funds.
Therefore your comment about tax "fairness" only make sense if you mean students who cross county lines in order to go to school. This is going to be rare just from a geographical standpoint.
In the 1970s we lived in Miami with my grandparents. My parents bought and moved into a house across the street. The street was the boundary line for another elementary school. My parents didn't want us to switch schools so we continued to claim my grandparents' address as our residence. The boundary had nothing to do with differences in tax levels.
Your logic also contains the implication that people with more children are taking more unfair use of the school system, unless they also pay more taxes. Do you really mean to make that association?
The mother used the (divorced, non-custodial) father's address. The father is funding the school they were sent to, even though the children (who don't pay taxes, obviously) don't live at the father's address.
Not only should she never have been punished, but the very idea that this is a 'grand theft' felony is offensive.
That said, I think the article is a confused mishmash. It went from talking about the abuse of the legal system by the school authorities to railing against teachers' unions to suggesting that the two groups (school authorities and teachers' unions) are working in cahoots to keep parents out of the loop on their children's education. Real educational reform is required in the U.S., for certain. But blaming the teachers isn't reform: it's scapegoat-ism.
Laws like the one that opened the article need to go away. Quickly, as they're offensive to everything that America claims it holds dear.
- There are virtually no private schools, every school is public.
- There are better schools and worse schools. In a big city there are a few really good ones and a bunch of mediocre ones.
- A school have to accept anyone living in a proximity, but it may also accept anyone else. So the good ones set up entry exams. Mediocre ones enroll everybody.
- I guess there are some bad schools, some really poor ones, but there are probably none or a very few "failing" ones, with meaning as in article.
By the way, where do illegal immigrants' children go to?
In general, schools in America have much much lower quality than ones in Russia. Some immigrants families here in Bay Area are quite frustrated because schools here seems to have a goal to be "a safe and pleasant place where you put your kids so you can go to work" instead "place where kids learn stuff".
Basically, schools are made in such way that no real hard work is actually done at schools and that everything needs to be done at home (evenings, weekends, etc.). I believe that is reason schools with Asians and Whites kids are much more successful.
So my theory is that there are no "good" or "bad" schools here in America: all schools are of a equally low quality, there are only "good" and "bad" neighborhoods.
To answer your question at the end: a child born in the U.S., whether born to illegal immigrants or not, is a citizen and therefore a legal resident and therefore can attend public school.
Same process in Poland (start by enrolling anywhere, later exams from the previous school matter), yet the difference was big. High schools in my home town got between 98% and ~10% people advancing higher. I guess 98% wasn't 100 because kids moving to schools abroad were counted as "not on the list of local universities".
For primary school you pretty much started in a mixed, local group, without any visible bias, so chances were really very similar for everyone.
I would argue that it's more because of self-selection, not because of good schools being that good:
Those who have the motivation and background to continue to higher education also tend to shift towards "good" schools. They would continue even if they didn't go to a "good" school.
The problem with that in America is that allowing entrance to schools based entirely on tests scores results in large numbers of Asians and whites and very few black and Hispanics and you end up with this racial discrimination mess.
The solution is that you perhaps should be making bad schools less bad, instead of making the awesome schools more shiny and then digging moats around those.
As far as I understand, "failing" school isn't about just money. It's more an atmosphere thing. Of course, the atmosphere comes with most pupils' poor background, but you wouldn't fix that by throwing money at school. ButnNot that it would hurt, too.
Efforts must be made to eliminate systematic biases in standardized testing. When we are reasonably convinced that has been done, as far as I'm concerned it's all just how the cookie crumbles. Make sure that you're acceptance policies are merit based, and damn the consequences.
Merit-based access to education is an extremely debatabe proposition. Should a quality education be limited only to the already brilliant? Is it a better outcome to make a high-potential kid very well educated or a medium-potential kid basically educated? Remember that both become voters in a democracy.
West Wing had a nice conversation about this with regard to Affirmative Action beteen the black intern and the conservativx supreme court justice.
I don't know. My own educational experience? it was a waste of time and money. I stuck with it through highschool graduation then got a .com job (that 'required' a college degree) right away. I'd be measurably more wealthy now if I had left when I passed the equivalence test a year and a half earlier and worked another year during the boom. (I graduated and got my first .com job in '97-'98, so I didn't have long to grow into a position that would last me through the crash. I mean, I made it, but judging from how my salary was going before and after the .com, I'd have entered the crash with another ten grand a year in salary, which would help, 'cause I stayed employed, but my wages didn't move at all for a few years after the crash.)
So yeah, I feel like I got negative value out of my public school experience. But, my mother was a teacher; and she taught me to read and supplied me with books. Without reading as much as I did? I would have gotten nowhere. My dad? mid-level IT manager. My step dad? a computer programmer. I had access to computers from the age of three, programming environments, and parents who would help me learn about that shit.
My experience would indicate that the children of people who don't have valuable skills to pass on to their children would benefit much more from a public school "education" than I could.
Perhaps we're working on different definitions here, but here's an anecdote of what merit-based education can do for everyone.
My friend was diagnosed with multiple learning disabilities as a child, and attended a school for people like him. Classes were small, teachers understood and he learned how to write and do math as well as an ordinary person- great results for someone with his long list of disabilities.
On the other hand, I aced an exam to go to a very selective school. Teachers pushed every kid there to do their best, and I learned how to speak, write, debate, program and do math at a level far beyond what I would have otherwise. Sure, I would have come out of my high school years knowing a lot about math no matter what school I attended, but I wouldn't have learned anything about how one should speak or debate, nor would I have learned how to write well.
I think that's the way to go- push kids as far as they can go. This is a lot easier when teachers know how far they can push, which is where results- based stratification ( something I, at least, consider synonymous to merit-based) comes in.
The segregation is not all systemic. I remember reading an article discussing research discussing how neighborhoods change as a result of very slight preferences of "I'd rather be by somebody of my race than a different race." This applied to black and white neighborhoods.
Taken over time and populations, these very slight differences in preference (and, realistically, in the USA, it is unlikely to be "slight") lead to segregated neighborhoods.
If anybody has the original, I'd love to see it again and find out what I've mis-remembered. I couldn't find it.
I compare it to boxing matches. If I'm watching a match between someone who is identified as German, and someone who is identified as Italian, without other influences, I am going to tend towards cheering for the Italian, because I identify more with Italians. Never mind the fact that I'm 3/4th German and only 1/4th Italian, and certainly don't have anything against Germans. It's purely a unconscious tribal reflex, rarely even noticed unless given a chance to magnify (time and numbers provides this magnifying factor in communities.)
As I read it, he may be arguing against this sort of "tribal reflex", but he's certainly not arguing against it's existence. My point is that I am agreeing with the parent of my original post, segregation can arise from phenomenon not necessarily codified into law or even recognized consciously by the participants. Whether this "tribal reflex" is "right or wrong" is irrelevant, the important and seemingly undisputed point is that it exists.
Self segregate means less communication between people.
Thus communication problem directly impact the frustration of each party about others. Then more violence will occurs.
To be more precise. Yes, everybody want to live with people which share the same values. But this local optimization have a bad effect on the society viewed in its totality.
Taking my own example, I believe that not being segregated in school had made me lose some hours of good Math. But I believe this experience made me more tolerant. And it is also certainly true for the others.
There is no perfect society model, but my inclination is to believe that more communication is never a waste and that any lack of communication is potentially dangerous.
How do we define "segregate"? Is it just across 'skin color' / 'irrelevant heritage' lines? What if I identify with and want to live around entrepreneurs? atheists? 'survivalists'? Homosexuals?
I think I can make a fairly strong argument for homosexuals preferring to live among themselves as being ultimately detrimental to society (reduced exposure to homosexuals allows intolerance and misunderstanding to fester), however I would never dream of calling the desire to isolate themselves from hatred "wrong".
Edit: I take it from the downvotes that we're just talking about segregation across "'skin color' / 'irrelevant heritage'" lines for some reason...
I'm not arguing preference here. All of your examples still apply. And I would simply say that right and wrong are poor constructs to let us formulate ideas about how we should live.
There's a good chance that atheists who choose to live only among atheists are going to suffer worse outcomes. Living in a diverse society leads to more perspective and better ideas, and an eventually better society.
Only living with other gay people or other Hacidic Jews or other white supremacists may feel comfortable, and it might lead to a functioning society. But is it ideal? Does it leave the people better off? Society at large?
I don't actually know the answer tho these questions, but I suspect you're better off meeting all sorts of people, living in all sorts of places, and absorbing all sorts of ideas.
I fully agree that these sorts of segregation are ultimately bad things. I merely disagree that we should label them "wrong", since I think that doing so expects too much of the individuals. Society will certainly become better off if Athiests spend more time with theists, however I cannot in good conscious really fault them (say that it is 'wrong') for their decision.
No, "freedom of association" means exactly that, in both the positive and negative forms. You are free to associate with someone, and free to not associate with someone.
It depends. Is it because they don't want to be in an unfamiliar environment, or because they don't want an unfamiliar environment to be around them?
If they're hostile to other groups in some way, that's not a good thing (I don't want white/black/pink/red/... people around my house). But there's nothing wrong with staying in some area because you want to be close to your family (which leads to "natural" race concentration within that area).
I'm not sure if, as I progress through my 30s, I am becoming more liberal, more cynical or more jaded, or what, but it seems like every day I read some article about the United States which elicits a, "What the FUCK?" from me.
This is one of those articles. Seriously? Prison??
One of many reasons the single-axis scale is misleading. :)
It does somewhat fit the traditional fault lines over school districting, though. Traditionally, conservatives quite strongly opposed to allowing school attendance to cross boundaries, supporting separate districts in which each district was funded exclusively by local taxpayers and attended exclusively by children resident in that distrct. Mix of reasons, ranging from (on the nicer side) federalism/decentralization to (on the less-nice side) maintaining de-facto segregated schools.
In addition, liberals have tended to be the main ones behind aggregation-with-choice programs, in which many smaller districts in a metropolitan area would be aggregated into one organizational district, where parents could choose to send their kids to any school in the district. Conservative suburbanites have tended to prefer keeping their schools separate, without cross-boundary enrollment permitted.
The article neglected to provide any rationale whatsoever for the "other side" which may be the triggering the WTFs. I'm not saying the logic is good, but here it is: A proportion of the school's budget comes from property tax. I found a pdf that says it is about 20% of the budget in California [1]. Thus:
Expensive neighborhood -> lots of property tax -> rich school
So essentially the laws punish freeloaders of education. Out of all the things a person can "freeload" education is probably the most noble, which I guess is why the law seems so dicey.
I don't really care about the other side. Why are we putting people in prison over this? Having the law/rule is one thing, I guess, but the punishment is extremely excessive. 10 days in prison, and 3 years of probation? She's lucky she got commuted by the governor. Not everyone will be so.
Lifeboat ethics demand awful solutions like this. If the best school in the region is known to let this slide, it will be besieged by a population it won't have the resources to support. It's almost like tax evasion, only you're required to move before you'll be allowed to pay the tax, and that particular school is not in a position to fix that. The list of applicable laws must have been pretty short if they had to resort to "grand theft", and at that point the penalty was driven by the amount of money at issue, from a law mostly aimed at car thieves.
The woman in question lives in Ohio. In Ohio, a felony conviction means you can't vote while in prison (in this case for 10 days); once released, even on parole, you can vote. See http://felonvoting.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=2... for the nice table.
In fact, a felony conviction only carries permanent loss of voting rights in only 12 states out of 50 according to that table.
Now I agree that there lots of other impacts of a felony conviction; the article mentions it being a bar to being a teacher in some cases, for example, and reading the relevant Ohio law she would be unable to hold public office in Ohio or to sit on a jury. And clearly if the woman were to move to one of those 12 states she would not be able to register to vote there.... But it's not as cut-and-dried as "could no longer vote".
My state has a more rational state law. For more than twenty years now, all public schools anywhere in the state offer open enrollment to all students anywhere in the state, up to the limits of the capacity of each school district to receive students.
More students means more enrollment, so school districts make efforts to provide attractive programs that will bring students across district lines. This competition among school districts has promoted innovation in programs and resulted in a fair amount of interchange among students who live in different neighborhoods. For example, the first public school program for "highly gifted" students in our state
began precisely because the offering district knew it could build a program that would attract in new students to the district (which was losing student population because it was in an inner-ring suburb with an aging population). That district enjoyed such success with its program that soon other school districts set up similar programs.
And the main point is that school districts don't just compete with programs for "highly gifted" students, but also with programs for fine-arts-inclined students, or students who desire language immersion programs (Spanish immersion and Chinese immersion programs are both hot programs in Minnesota), and students with many other characteristics. Some school districts gain almost half of their enrollment from open enrollment, and correspondingly some of the historically worst school districts in Minnesota have lost large percentages of enrollment to families crossing district boundaries to look for better schools. (Minnesota also has a huge number of charter schools, which is a distinct form of competition for publicly subsidized students, but they cannot offer some of the programs that public school districts can.) This competition keeps all districts accountable for providing a good learning environment, and helps change the psychology of teachers and principals dealing with families from one of treating learners as a burden to one of treating learners as an opportunity to be grateful for.
Any other state in the United States could do the same, and a few already have.
Very interesting. It's clear that Missouri (where I used to live) doesn't have open enrollment. A huge amount of resources are spent on ensuring students do NOT cross district lines. As a personal example, certain ESL students in my mother's class are visited at home very often to validate that they truly do live where they say they do.
When schools have to serve students that they're not getting paid for, the incentive to keep those students out is surprisingly strong.
tokenadult, Are you aware of any downsides/negatives to the open enrollment system?
I dont't want to generalize, but if there is one thing I have learned from my limited experience working in both a Title I HS district and a fairly affluent K-12 district is that these problems are very, very complex.
aik, Here's one example of a downside: Even relatively well-performing school districts can struggle when their student population starts moving to a new charter school in the area. Since many of the costs for education are fixed within a certain margin, it becomes difficult to shed costs to compensate for the lost funding for each student that left the district.
Good examples of the effects of government getting involved in education, particularly tying it to location. The solution to this problem is clear but politically difficult: limit government involvement in education to vouchers at most, preferably none at all.
Are you seriously proposing we go back to pre-public schooling society - you know, the one where the vast major of the population was completely uneducated since education was strictly reserved for the wealthy?
Laissez-faire brings out some admirable qualities in people, but it is also an extremely unequal system with many detrimental effects on society (including the rich). There's a historical reason why we invented public schools, public libraries, public parks, etc.
I find it difficult to understand how someone with an awareness of history can support a completely laissez-faire society where the default answer to everything is "let the market figure it out". This is not a new idea, and the present state of the world only exists because we had to suffer through centuries of unbridled capitalism and classism.
Now that we have things like affluence, the 'primed pump' of an educated society, the NEED for an educated society, and finally, the Internet, I don't see why we need nearly the government involvement in education that we did 50-100 years ago.
I am not convinced we DO have a sufficiently educated society. I see serious candidates for public office who are rejecting science (http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/22/a-fundamental-r...). I think democracy itself requires an educated populace, and that an egalitarian society requires at least a basic level of equality of opportunity for all.
I think the case can be made more easily for government involvement in education than in almost any other area of life. Purely because in a certain small % of cases, parents simply won't take any steps to see their children educated. That isn't a choice the child is making. Whether that means that the government should also run the schools themselves is of course a separate question.
Some of the world's best school systems are highly decentralised and some are highly centralised.
It's not clear that this would solve the problem. Particularly, instead of only being able to send their children to bad schools, the poorest would instead perhaps not be able to send their children to school at all.
If government is not involved in education "at all", then you have the situation that people pay $$ for schools and then have no say in how the money is spent. This would not go down well...
I suppose the Free Market would make sure that their 'customers' had input into how tuition money is spent. After all, if the government isn't involved and you're free (Free Market, remember) to move your student, then the school needs to cater to your expectations or lose tuition money.
Yeah so it turns out that the education consumer doesn't tend to spend the education dollar on quality education. Consider the current mess in privately-paid higher education.
Education is the vegetables on the dinner plate of life. I is a complicated long term investment to make good choices, but those choices have huge externalities. Parents make choices that affect their children (that is an externality) and those children grow up to affect society (another externality)
Don't forget that the for-profit colleges get 99% of their income from government financial aid. They don't have to serve their customers well; they just have to do the minimum amount of work to get the financial aid money.
Why would it be in the interest of private schools to hoard their products from me? I only make $18000 (about half the median wage) and food companies don't price me out of the market. Car companies don't either. Given that nearly every human being is in demand of an affordable education it makes no sense for companies to not accept low income students. The only reason private schools are expensive now is because the government monopoly makes it imposible for them to compete on the low income section of the market.
your analogy is apt: in your opinion, a poor person will never be able to afford a Ferrari or a Porsche, so they shouldn't be able to afford top-class education either. Ferrari will never be interested in "competing for the low income section of the market"; they'll happily keep making exclusive and expensive cars, reserved to top dogs, popes and the like.
The "voucher" sort of scheme will inevitably result in the State giving everyone enough money to buy a Nissan Micra, with rich parents "topping-up" to get a Mercedes, Porsche or Ferrari. Which is not much different from what you get now, just a bit worse.
One major problem with vouchers is that they are susceptible to fraud. Current voucher and charter schools are not posting greater successes than public schools. Government services are at risk for innefficiency due to non-incentives, but government-funded private services are at similar risk due to perverse incentives.
For example, higher education IS currently on a loan-integrated voucher system, and it is common knowledge that private colleges are a money pit these days.
Because for at least some, a large part of what they sell is social exclusivity. Those dirty little brown (or Jewish, or Irish, or Catholic, or Italian, or German, or in Fremont, CA, white trash ...) children will be kept away from your precious little gems.
Since school, education, economic potential, etc., are so tightly tied to social status, this is hardly surprising. It's also present in other goods: I'm sure you can think of luxury cars, foods, clothes, clubs, etc., whose appeal and cache is largely their exclusivity and the fact that the great unwashed masses can't access them. No, this doesn't apply to all goods, but for a class of them, yes. (That this is also tied to price discrimination behavior on the part of producers also has something to do with this).
What is the term used for the highest ranked colleges in the US? Oh yeah: "highly selective".
>> Food companies don't price me out of the market. Car companies don't either.
Do you think that you get good nutritious food by paying bottom dollar? You think those nitrates and high fructose sugar and other junk are really good for your health? You think that a low cost diet that lacks "expensive" fruits and vegetables has no impact on your health?
The problem with a cheaper second tier education is that it perpetuates the affordability problem from generation to generation. The poor parents who could not afford to send their kid to the rich school will have a son or daughter with a second tier education who will only be qualified for low paying second tier jobs. This system creates a stratified society with low mobility and represents a waste of human potential -- the brilliant kid whose parents couldn't give him a first rate education cannot reach his full potential, while the lazy dumb kid with rich parents takes up a spot in a class in which he simply does not deserve to be (from an academic perspective).
Thinking that the market is a solution to everything is a popular fallacy nowadays. There are places where the market does not produce good outcomes -- education is one of them. You cannot trade human intelligence and aptitude. You cannot have different high standards for different prices -- there are no low tier high standards and top tier high standards. People who are motivated by greed do not make good educators.
There is only so high in quality a product can get. How much better is a $1,000,000 car vs a $1,000 car? They both get you from A to B. Sure one might be a little faster but in terms of function they both perform at roughly the same base. One is for smart consumers and one is for rich people to show off.
Keeping the government monopoly in place only serves the interests of the employees and unions of the public schools and no one else. Certainly not the students.
"Thinking that the market is a solution to everything is a popular fallacy nowadays."
Wow, the discussion here is really going down the tubes into the land of nonsense.
>> How much better is a $1,000,000 car vs a $1,000 car? They both get you from A to B. in terms of function they both perform at roughly the same base
$1,000 gets me a beat up car from the 1980s that barely works, breaks down all the time and surrounds me in noxious fumes. $2,250,000 gets me a Bugatti Veyron that has a top speed of 250 mph and does 0-60 in under 3 seconds. No difference there at all -- they're quite comparable!
>Ms. Williams-Bolar last year used her father's address to enroll her two daughters in a better public school outside of their neighborhood.
This is not civil disobedience, it's just plain old falsification of records. If she had falsified another crucial piece of information - say, income level on a scholarship application - would Ms. Williams-Bolar still get all of this "end justifies the means" sympathy?
Obviously not. The whole point of the article is that poor, intelligent children do not have any way to enroll in schools that would allow them to excel. Presumably if you lied on the income level on a scholarship application, you would have the funds to send your kid to a nice school but you wouldn't want to pay for it. Note that if you were very poor lying about your income on your scholarship application would not be necessary.
If you're still not convinced, let me ask you: Would you not lie about where you lived if it meant you could get a better life for your child? I am not sure you could be called a good parent if the answer to that question is no.
No matter how worthy the purpose, falsehood is falsehood. Is it really such good education for your children to demonstrate that lying should be used to obtain the important things in life?
Would it be moral, do you think, for a parent in Nazi German to lie when asked if their child was half Jewish in order to prevent the child from being taken away to the concentration camps? In my mind, it would -- and it would be a good lesson for the child: that truth is LESS important than saving a human life.
Now suppose that the situation were more starkly clear-cut than it is here. Suppose that the jack-booted thugs knocked on the door and demanded to know whether your child was A or B. If A, then the child would get an excellent education and have an opportunity to demonstrate their potential in life. If B, then the child would receive no education beyond 5th grade and would be prohibited for the remainder of their life from making a living in any profession other than drug dealer. I don't know about you, but in this case too I would think it moral to lie and claim A when the child was actually B. This lie hurts no one, and it saves a human's potential, if not technically their life. I even think it would make a good life lesson for the child.
What about this case? The extremists may think that the choice of urban or suburban school IS a case of "chance in life" vs "drug dealer", but the reality is much less clear cut. Some people who attend poor urban schools DO succeed in spite of the disadvantages. But many more of them do not. The lie may not be justified in this case. But if you agreed with me on one or both of the hypothetical cases above, then you should see that it is a matter of degree, NOT a stark absolute -- a decision that requires careful consideration of the degree of institutional injustice that your lie serves to combat, and a decision that persons of wisdom and ethics may disagree on.
If the only justification for doing something illegal is that sometime during WW2 someone might have had to do something similar in order to escape Hitler, I'd say that's a pretty weak justification. The continuum you suggest does exist, but it's a very lopsided distribution in this case.
Since you are purporting that falsehood is never wrong...
exodus 1:15-20 (NRSV)
The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah, ‘When you act as midwives to the Hebrew women, and see them on the birthstool, if it is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, she shall live.’ But the midwives feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but they let the boys live. So the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and said to them, ‘Why have you done this, and allowed the boys to live?’ The midwives said to Pharaoh, ‘Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women; for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them.’ So God dealt well with the midwives; and the people multiplied and became very strong.
tl;dr : The king told midwives to kill baby boys. The midwives did not. When asked by the king why the boys still lived, they lied.
No, I'm not purporting that "falsehood is never wrong" (you meant "never right", I suppose). In context, I was talking about falsification of records with an intention to obtain educational benefits otherwise disallowed.
It's not OK to falsify records in order to get into a better school without paying extra; look at the original post, that's what the argument was about. Taking a subsequent phrase out of context and stretching it to bring in baby killing is not exactly adding to the conversation.
Agreed. I used the passage not to equate the two but to illustrate moral issues are not always straight forward. I personally am not sure that lying your way to a better school is the right approach.
In all seriousness though, this passage was a big point of discussion in the middle ages. Many were uncomfortable with the midwives apparently being rewarded for lying. One solution was although they were rewarded they were not rewarded as much as they would have been if they had not lied.
My interpretation: The midwives lied in the service of life; the God of this passage rewarded them. Therefore, the God of this passage is a God of life. He does not support needless destruction and is willing to allow his servants to lie if life increases as a result.
> "The case you are building is not rock solid :)"
Unfortunately, with Biblical Studies it is impossible to build a rock solid case. There is always another persuasive argument just around the corner!
And no child born of a wealthy suburb with exceptional education ever lied.
As others have noted: there's a fundamental inequity here, often based on years of discriminatory practices and uneven funding. In my book, flouting the law to highlight a social inequity that hurts humanity at large is a good thing.
underground history of american education and an econ 101 textbook. These are the bare minimum of material you should be familiar with before spouting policy prescriptions on this subject.
This is sad -- there is a need to restrict access to a limited resource, but for any individual parent, it's the right choice. The ultimate solution is to improve the quality of the bad districts, but that will take a long time.
For now, I think the best approach is strict enforcement of residency, but three tracks in for out of district students: cash payment substantially in excess of per-student marginal cost; competitive entrance for a limited number of students based on objective merit (not race based, like the PA/EPA system); and children of employees of the district (or maybe of city government in general).
I'd be fine with a parent who really wants to give a child a chance taking a job with the district primarily to get children into the schools. Maybe a second job, maybe part time, but the sacrifice should be made by the parent, not by other residents of the school taxing district. If this lets the district hire people more cheaply, or of better quality (which DOES happen in Palo Alto for just this reason), it's win/win.
Why not use a lotery? I don't see why any public district shouldn't be available to any state resident. What would be the rationale for any preference to residents or district workers?
Any other policy serves only to preserve the inequality of the education offered between districts.
They're funded locally, not by the state (in most states). There's just as much of an argument for a national lottery as a state lottery, if you want people outside the funding area to have an even shot of coming in.
This is hardly anything new. 20+ years ago, I knew kids with parents that did the same thing (though often for athletics instead of academics). Even within the city (where, at the time, you were required to attend the neighborhood school), parents found ways to game the system.
This reminds me of how european peasants could not move to a different parish then the one they were born in unless the priest would accept a transfer.
The land of the free. Free to move to any trailer park in the whole country.
I was so close to doing this for 2 of my kids this year—we were to the point of signing the papers. Our neighborhood was in the region of the worst-performing school in the district (not even the closest, either). My mom owns a house 3 blocks from a great school and we were going to use that address. My mom wasn't comfortable with it so we opted for private school.
I agree with you that it's ridiculous they'd go to prison over it. However, "holding all schools to the same high standard" is impractical with the way the system is now.
used her father's address to enroll her two daughters in a better public school outside of their neighborhood. After spending nine days behind bars charged with grand theft, the single mother was convicted of two felony counts
Slightly insane, eh, what?
I can think of a few people roaming around foot-loose and fancy-free, and even pocketing scores of millions of dollars, who should be doing that.
Don't try to send them to a 'good' school, certainly not an 'academically good' school. Bluntly, the K-12 teachers don't know anything worth much serious study or effort.
The best can hope for from a K-12 school is that it will do no harm.
Find a school that has a nice 'social atmosphere' and otherwise is RELAXED, e.g., with as little homework as possible.
Then for the real learning, have your children do that at home -- evenings, weekends, summers, and/or school study hall.
What materials? Sure, academically by far the crown jewel is just math. So, get them through math to the college sophomore level ASAP. The next best subject is physics. So, get them through freshman physics based on calculus ASAP. How? Get the best texts (good used copies are FINE, especially for the math) and work through them. If need some help, ask some friends who know the material well and/or find an appropriate, helpful college prof. Or have one parent enroll in, say, a community college course and there learn enough to guide their children and be able to ask the prof questions.
After math and physics, emphasize writing, say, letters, notes, blogs, whatever.
Sure, get 'computer literacy' and also learn the basics of programming.
Then emphasize geography, history, and art history. For English literature, at least learn about the basics of 'drama' and 'formula fiction' and touch on the more famous works. For as many of the works as can, start by watching a movie of the work. For more in drama, understand how movie and TV dramas work.
Somewhere get some basic coverage of 'people and personality', especially about human emotions. E.g., lacking anything else, read E. Fromm, 'The Art of Loving'.
For more, have the child take some community college courses, e.g., biochemistry and biology.
For more, look at the International Baccalaureate program and pick and choose from that or, maybe, just go through the whole thing.
During the last 2-3 years of the 'high school' time, review what else, if anything, is required to do well on the SAT tests.
For more? Maybe learn piano?
Likely could study accounting and take the CPA exam. A CPA would be nice to have.
For more? Jump into college material at the junior level and keep going. Get through college ASAP and then go for graduate or professional school.
For K-12? Don't ask for much and mostly just circumvent it.
I think these parents are trying to get their kids out of schools that can't even enforce basic discipline in the classroom. There's a big difference between an environment where teachers don't know anything worth much serious study or effort and an environment where teachers spend almost all of their time trying prevent a riot from breaking out in the classroom and thus spend almost no time actually instructing students.
Also, it can be very hard to support real learning at home if you are a single parent working two or three jobs to make ends meet.
"almost all of their time trying prevent a riot from breaking out"
is quite similar to what I wrote with:
"The best can hope for from a K-12 school is that it will do no harm.
"Find a school that has a nice 'social atmosphere' and otherwise is RELAXED, e.g., with as little homework as possible."
So we are at least partly agreeing.
What to do about a school with knife fights in the classrooms, drug deals in the halls, and pimping at lunch time is to get the hell out: Such a school fails on "do no harm" and "a nice 'social atmosphere'".
If just have to leave and can't afford a wealthy neighborhood, then pick a small town in a rural, farming area in one of the more northern states; there essentially any school will do no harm.
Also good, pick a college town. Even if sweep floors, flip burgers, wash pots, and act as a security guard, will be able to do a terrific job getting children ready for college and life.
My good news is that don't have to move to some neighborhood with all millionaires. Instead, quite sufficient is JUST "do no harm" and a 'social atmosphere'. Academically relaxed is also good.
This is a radical recommendation: For good work in actually learning for college and life, mostly don't depend on the school. Don't mostly depend on the school even if in one of the best school districts in the country or even are sending children to one of the best private schools.
Why? Again, yet again, to repeat, bluntly the K-12 teachers don't know enough to teach much of anything to be taken very seriously. The K-12 years are some of the very best years for learning, and it is a grand disaster that those years are turned over to the K-12 system and, thus, largely wasted.
Also implied but not stated was, get the heck into college level material ASAP. In the US, the good academic material starts in college and continues into graduate and professional school. K-12 is wildly different and, academically, is a really bad joke -- mostly can just skip it. For most parents who want good education for their children, this is radical but good advice.
With my advice, careful parents, and a one-room school house in a serious, rural farming community will totally knock the socks off ANYTHING in formal K-12 education.
For your:
"Also, it can be very hard to support real learning at home if you are a single parent working two or three jobs to make ends meet."
True.
So: (1) Young people, listen up: Work however hard is necessary to form stable marriages and, really, stable, larger families. Marriages and families are IMPORTANT. Again, listen up.
(2) Unless you want a series of disasters for the rest of your life, delay having children until you can form a stable marriage.
(3) In the home, set up a 'culture' of learning instead of TV, cars, fashion frocks, popularity competitions, cell phone gossip, pop culture, fast food, sports, wild parties, etc.
Then, get the children started and going on learning, largely independently, ASAP. Then the children can learn on their own time with minimal time from parents, so little that there still is a chance for a single parent.
But this matter of a 'culture' of learning is just CRUCIAL. If there is any doubt about the culture in your home, then disconnect the TV. Keep children away from 'pop culture'. Emphasize LEARNING and, then, curiosity.
Not sure by your statement if you have children or not. But I just finished enrolling my children in a private school instead of the local public school. I really don't care if they are black or white I want my children to go to a school where the parents value education as much as I do.
I have mixed race children and do whatever it takes to make sure that they are in schools that made up of mostly white, Asian, or Indian (India) students. Black and Hispanic students have shown no signs of valuing education and the schools usually plagued with violence. I'm not alone in this thinking; every single Asian family I know does the same.
>Black and Hispanic students have shown no signs of valuing education and the schools usually plagued with violence.
ALL of them? Almost certainly not. You're just being plain, old fashioned racist. You also sound ignorant and naive to claim to have never met a black or Hispanic student who shows a single sign of valuing education.
Do you live in the Bay Area? If so, take a trip over to San Jose and visit some of the high schools schools there with predominantly white & asian students (there are only a few). They're not garden parties. They're rough schools with gangs and drugs.
I don't think you two actually disagree. You want to send your kids to a place where the parents value education, and you're using ethnicity as an easy indirect way of measuring this. A lamentably reasonable strategy.
What decision? He simple stated, accurately, a fact. How can a fact be racially biased?
White and Asian neighborhoods generally generate higher property taxes than black neighborhoods. Schools are largely funded by property taxes. Therefore it should come as no surprise that White and Asian schools are on average better.
His causality is off, way off. That's really the main issue. Both parents here have the same motivation, admirable enough, but one chooses to subscribe to an unreliable predictor for his decision making.
A predictor that is toes a really fine line between statistical reliability and outright bigotry.
In any case, we know that socioeconomic status is a far better predictor of educational success than race. There is a Hugh correlation between race and SES but it's far from causal. I think the main objection here is that he seems to claim it is.
I might have the same high motivation to be an awesome games programmer, but that still doesn't mean I will be as good as Carmack.
I don't fault LoveLinux for his viewpoints, as they are based on his observation; and he is trying to make the best decision for his kids... I think if what he/she had said, was said by Bill Cosby or George Lopez, we would be applauding their honesty...
Have some stats to support this assertion? You've not only got to support the assertion that it is more likely than not that a school with >=51% black and Hispanic students is going to be a "bad school" (which you've failed to define, but I'll take it to mean "underperforming"), but in addition yo'uve also got to prove that a school with >=51% white or Asian students will be a "good" school, or a school that is performing up to some standard. (Which?).
I am not sure this is the whole story. The Wall Steet Journal lately seems to be on a mission to discredit any form of government. Of course it's different when they wear a uniform, do things in secret and tell us they are there to protect us...
Forty years ago, I remember hearing from a neighbor that the Arizona school district she had worked for took some pains to see that the snowbirds didn't just drop their kids off for instruction. Her oldest child was probably born in 1951 or 1952, which suggests a terminus ad quem for her teaching days of about 60 years ago.
Now and again the New York Times will write about the efforts New Jersey districts will take to investigate suspicious enrollments. I've never read of such investigations resulting in more than a kid shipped from one school to another.
And it strikes me as utterly disingenuous for the WSJ to be going on about this.
I'm not sure if it is entirely fair to single out the education system here (once again), or at least batch it in with "yet another failing". I believe more is at fault here.
Unless I'm mistaken, tax payers in a particular school district (or county) fund the school district they're part of. A consequence of this fact, in the name of fairness for the parents, is the necessity for your child to attend a school that you are directly funding (and not attend a school you're not funding, which is what the mother in the story is doing). As long as we're sticking with this system of funding our own schools in this manner, we will naturally be encouraging segregation of classes and have no choice but to turn down those who try to get around it.
So I agree a woman shouldn't be jailed for trying to circumvent the system in this manner, but with the above knowledge of how the system operates, it doesn't surprise me that she would be punished, as I'm sure many others are as well.
Allowing people to attend any school they like (which this article is arguing for I believe?) is a pretty fundamental shift in the system.