Linus is correct to disagree with the Oregon bill, and it's too bad that he didn't point to an existing example in another state with some cultural similarities to Oregon. Finding out what learning environment, inside or outside school, is optimal for each learner is definitely a worthy goal, especially if means are then provided to obtain that environment. Education policy is the issue that drew me to participate on Hacker News,
so I'm always glad to discuss how to improve opportunities for learners with other participants here. I have seen some examples of helpful reforms where I live. Minnesota, where I now live and where I grew up, has had largely equal per-capita funding for public school pupils statewide since the 1970s. The state law change that made most school funding come from general state appropriations rather than from local property taxes was called the "Minnesota miracle."
The funding reform in the 1970s was followed up by two futher reforms in the 1980s. First, the former compulsory instruction statute in Minnesota was ruled unconstitutional in a court case involving a homeschooling family, and a new compulsory instruction statute explicitly allows more nonpublic school alternatives for families who seek those. Second, the Legislature, pushed by the then Governor, set up statewide open enrollment
So Linus notes, in the article submitted here, that where he lives in Oregon, "And now, in the name of fairness, there's a bill (HB 2748) getting pushed through to make that kind of 'out-of-district tuition student' not be an option any more." That's crazy, because Minnesota's pattern of open enrollment has shown that every school district gains by enrolling as many students as it can attract, given the funding pattern here. Parents in Minnesota now have more power to shop than parents in most states. That gets closer to the ideal of detect the optimum education environment for each student (by parents observing what works for each of their differing children) and give it to them by open-enrolling in another school district (my school district has inbound open-enrollment students from forty-one other school districts of residence) or by homeschooling, or by postsecondary study at high school age, or by exercising other choices.
The educational results of Minnesota schools are well above the meager results of most United States schools, and almost competitive (but not fully competitive) with the better schools in the newly industrialized countries of east Asia and southeast Asia. It's a start. More choices would be even better.
To achieve the worthy goal mentioned in the article submitted here involves changing the incentives now operating in the school system in most countries, both as to direct regulations and as to funding. Schools should be eager to enroll new students, as a demonstration that the school is meeting learner needs, and then the schools should be rewarded for doing so.
Let me give a little perspective on the issue. Linus lives in Dunthorpe, which is one of the Portland area's wealthiest neighborhoods. Back when I was in high school, of the Dunthorpe kids that went to public schools, half went to Wilson High School and half went to Lake Oswego, both of which good schools. Then the Oregon legislature passed some law that required that primary schools feed into secondary schools in the same district, so Dunthorpe renovated an old grade school and made Riverdale High School. It's tiny - I just checked the Wikipedia page [1] and it only has 131 students and Riverdale is the 3rd wealthiest school district in the country (who says Open Source doesn't pay?).
I mention all this because as far as public schools go, it's an outlier among outliers. So comparing it to schools in Minnesota or elsewhere goes beyond the normal case of poor school districts vs. wealthy ones.
Plus, in Oregon at least, school funding does not correlate well with student performance. The Portland School District has higher per pupil funding than most of the suburbs, and yet it consistently under performs many of them.
Dunthorpe, which is on the edge of the Lewis and Clark College campus, is sometimes referred to as "the golden ghetto." The houses are, for the most part, enormous. When I was going there, Riverdale elementary, (which is k-8th grade), was chock full of children of business leaders and athletes. Kids of golf pros, The Trailblazers, CEOs and bankers. Long driveways and a private neighborhood security service.
It is not like much of the rest of Portland.
The school would have internationally famous authors come and speak to rooms of 40-50 kids. It was pretty nice.
I graduated from one of those Minnesotan miracle school districts in 2007. I think I got a reasonable education -- it wasn't great compared to what people in private schools got, but it set me up to succeed in college.
I now live in Chicago, which is the third largest school district in the United States. It's completely broken.
* The schools are massively segregated -- both by income and by race. The wealthy leadership of the city clearly decided a long time ago to give up on the public school system and send their children to private school. Even in middle class neighborhoods like Hyde Park, the divide is clear: if you're poor or black, you go to the local public school. If you can afford it, you don't.
* The school district is trying to close down 50 odd elementary schools, almost all of them in the ghettos. Why? Because population loss has eroded the tax income from those areas to the point where they can barely operate anymore.
* The entire teachers union went on strike for a few days earlier this year to protest salary and benefit cuts, increased testing, and the city's neglect for the school system. They didn't really win -- the salary cuts were mostly averted, but the tests keep rolling in.
* For every 100 students who enters CPS as a freshman in high school, only 6 ever get a bachelors degree.
The schools back home in Minnesota aren't perfect or even particularly good. They're mediocre. They're ok. But they're so much better than in Chicago (and many other parts of the country) that I will seriously consider moving back to Minneapolis when I start having kids.
I'm not sure what you expect the school system to do for the total breakdown of social structure in vast swaths of Chicago. Middle class people would be insane to keep their kids in a school system where gangs have marked off territory in most of the schools and the majority of kids are from poor, single-parent homes. Even the middle class blacks who stuck it out on the south side for so long have given up--Chicago lost 200,000 of them in the last decade. The south side has become a literal ghetto--increasingly filled only with people who can't afford to get out. The schools can't fix a community on the edge of viability, raising children with no fathers, no structure of authority, and no prospects.
I attended one of the schools in the Chicago suburbs. A public school. I think that my high school experience was pretty good; even comparable to some of the Minnesotan "miracle school" experiences. I'm just saying, before you move away from Chicago, check out the suburbs, where all the privileged people have fled to.
Another Minnesotan, who also moved to Chicago and moved back when considering where I wanted to raise a child...
I think part of what Linus gets wrong is that he confuses the correlation of high-property-tax well-funded districts with the performance of the schools in those districts. The high property taxes (or property values or however the market works it out) doesn't make the schools good, it filters out people who are indifferent to the school quality, and filters in people who place a high value on education. Once you cluster a lot of people with those values, the schools will be good; in part because of the peers a student will encounter, and in part because of all of the small but concrete things parents do to make the schools better.
Open enrollment without tuitions doesn't challenge that clustering. To participate in open enrollment in Minnesota, you have to really value education: you have to figure out what the school is you want to attend, you have to figure out the bureaucracy to get in to that school, and you have to provide your own transportation to the school. All those hurdles are just as good as high property taxes or high property values.
The irony is that as a result open enrollment is not as progressive as it might seem. It's something the privileged can use to fix their children's education experience without moving, or allow people to trade effort for income. But it doesn't bring the underprivileged up, because they really don't take advantage of open enrollment. Though perhaps I'm using circular thinking, as I generally consider children with engaged, informed, and capable parents as "privileged" regardless of income; and maybe I even think that way because Minnesota supports that particular lifestyle choice via things like open enrollment. It's a particular life arrangement that I didn't see much of in Chicago, and maybe that's no accident.
In the part of Minnesota I grew up in, open enrollment was mainly used to get a kid onto a different school's hockey team, if he didn't make the starting team of his local school.
> The high property taxes (or property values or however the market works it out) doesn't make the schools good, it filters out people who are indifferent to the school quality, and filters in people who place a high value on education.
See Scarsdale, NY, a town in westchester which features insanely high home prices to fund the public school district (virtually all houses cost millions in today's market - high even for Westchester). The rare apartment buildings found well within range of the school are deliberately zoned out of the school district because they aren't contributing tens of thousands per year in school taxes, and students living outside of the district are free to attend if they pay ~40k/year in tuition.
I really like your posts on HN tokenadult, but would you consider revising this one? I especially had trouble parsing the 'So Linus notes...' paragraph.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4728123
so I'm always glad to discuss how to improve opportunities for learners with other participants here. I have seen some examples of helpful reforms where I live. Minnesota, where I now live and where I grew up, has had largely equal per-capita funding for public school pupils statewide since the 1970s. The state law change that made most school funding come from general state appropriations rather than from local property taxes was called the "Minnesota miracle."
http://www.mnhs.org/library/tips/history_topics/18public.htm...
Today most funding for schools is distributed by the state government on a per-pupil enrollment basis.
http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/hrd/pubs/mnschfin.pdf
http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/SchSup/SchFin/index.html
The funding reform in the 1970s was followed up by two futher reforms in the 1980s. First, the former compulsory instruction statute in Minnesota was ruled unconstitutional in a court case involving a homeschooling family, and a new compulsory instruction statute explicitly allows more nonpublic school alternatives for families who seek those. Second, the Legislature, pushed by the then Governor, set up statewide open enrollment
http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/EnrollChoice/index.h...
and the opportunity for advanced learners to attend up to two years of college while still high school students on the state's dime.
http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/CollReadi/PSEO/index...
So Linus notes, in the article submitted here, that where he lives in Oregon, "And now, in the name of fairness, there's a bill (HB 2748) getting pushed through to make that kind of 'out-of-district tuition student' not be an option any more." That's crazy, because Minnesota's pattern of open enrollment has shown that every school district gains by enrolling as many students as it can attract, given the funding pattern here. Parents in Minnesota now have more power to shop than parents in most states. That gets closer to the ideal of detect the optimum education environment for each student (by parents observing what works for each of their differing children) and give it to them by open-enrolling in another school district (my school district has inbound open-enrollment students from forty-one other school districts of residence) or by homeschooling, or by postsecondary study at high school age, or by exercising other choices.
The educational results of Minnesota schools are well above the meager results of most United States schools, and almost competitive (but not fully competitive) with the better schools in the newly industrialized countries of east Asia and southeast Asia. It's a start. More choices would be even better.
To achieve the worthy goal mentioned in the article submitted here involves changing the incentives now operating in the school system in most countries, both as to direct regulations and as to funding. Schools should be eager to enroll new students, as a demonstration that the school is meeting learner needs, and then the schools should be rewarded for doing so.