I remember Linus Torvalds talking about this, getting a home in a good school district is difficult and expensive but not getting one has consequences. And when you read this, you really understand the Finnish idea that all school should be equally good, a competition between them will lead to good, better, and bad schools.
There is no such thing as a "good school district." In D.C. there is a neighborhood called Capitol Hill. The local elementary school is Brent. 5-10 years ago, rich people would never have sent their kids to that school. It was 80% low-income, and the test scores were terrible. The area has dramatically gentrified over the last several years, and now it's one of the best schools in the city (and less than 15% low-income). Nothing changed about the school or the teachers--what changed is how much money the students parents' have.
The problem in the U.S. isn't that we have "good schools" and "bad schools." It's that we have extreme segregation along racial and economic lines. Our policies create pockets of schools that are 90% low-income (and usually a similar percentage black or hispanic). It's a symptom of a society with extreme segregation and wealth inequality, not a cause.
I see things the exact opposite way. Giving the state (for the purposes of the majority of taxpayers) a monopoly on education produces schools that are uniformly bad, with terrible standardized curricula, insufficient institutional motivation to improve, and stifling bureaucracy. We have insufficient competition at the moment because the majority cannot afford to get into the good districts or uproot themselves every few years chasing them; a district with a good elementary school might have a bad middle school, or a district that was good when you moved in could go bad as your kid ages. This is simply too much trouble for all but the highest achieving and most dedicated parents, which only furthers the achievement gap that comes from exploiting it.
Instead, we could transition from a system of state run public schools to state funded private schools. Give each parent a tax credit that they can choose to spend on whatever school they like. Your school's funding is directly tied to the number of students that chose it, not the neighborhood it's in. Remove any restrictions on zoning or the number of schools allowed in an area. Remove the concepts of districts altogether. Get rid of mandatory curricula and give educators room to innovate.
I think the majority of parents out there care about their children and want them to succeed, they just don't have the money or extraordinary amounts of time to ensure it. But with a tax credit system and an abundance of competing schools in every metropolitan area, finding the right school for your kid and actually getting them into it would be much more achievable for a much greater portion of society. Yes, the most dedicated ones that get their kids into a dozen extracurricular activities and help them with their homework and whatnot will always have an advantage over the latchkey kids, but it'd still be a significant improvement over the status quo.
I live in a city in California where within the same school district, there is one school in the 99% percentile ranking while the others are in the mid range.
They could all be good schools but we simply don't want that. We want education theater for the same reason we want security theater.
In all subjects - but most especially history - it take decades to undo the damage from the public school system in America. We use it to spin old narrative yarns about what we'd wished happened.
If we decoupled housing from education as much as possible then at least people wouldn't be forced to buy all sorts of other amenities that they might or might not want along with the educations they do want.
There'd be a lot of winners from such a change, but the big losers would be incumbent homeowners in neighborhoods with "good schools" that have had that circumstance capitalized into the prices of their homes. Unfortunately that's quite a powerful group of people.
The big losers would be the bright and willing children.
It's hard enough being a nerdy kid today. Such kids almost always are in decent places because kids tend to be like their parents. Kids with the potential to succeed come from parents with the potential to succeed.
Education doesn't work if the classroom is full of kids who can't behave. Education doesn't get very advanced if the classroom is full of kids who aren't bright and willing to study.
Mix things up, and what do you get? A few strangely poor-yet-viable kids will move from very bad schools to slightly bad schools (nice but insignificant) while all the bright promising kids will end up in less-effective schools. The best schools will cease to exist. (by changing that is; they don't physically go away)
It does make us more equal, largely by inhibiting the success of our brightest and hardest-working students. Is this what you want?
What you are talking about it school choice, and in many versions of this parents are allowed to have the choice of private, charter, parochial school in addition to district schools.
Milton Friedman, a Nobel Laureate in economics, set up a foundation to advocate for it. I am not sure you are correct that biggest group blocking this is wealthy homeowners.
I agree that that is the right solution, but it would effectively be an expropriation of a huge portion of most of the middle class's wealth -- their home value that derives from being in a desirable school district -- and hence explains the difficulty of switching to a Nordic style voucher system where families get a block of government money to use at a school of their choice and the schools have to compete for it.
I don't disagree with you, but how would that work? How would you select pupils to fill the limited number of places in the desirable schools from a pool of candidates that would be much, much bigger?
> he has two very well-educated and successful daughters. They are, in a sense, his retirement plan: Barring extenuating circumstances, they will be in a position to care for him and his wife in their later years. We should all be so lucky.
I'm not quite sure how saddling my children with the cost of my care and feeding in my twilight years is a better choice than letting them go to public school and state universities. Seems like that's just passing the buck on who has to pay that particular bill.
I have to agree. I understand wanting to give your children all the benifits you can, but it doesn't make much sense to do it at the expense of your own financial stability.
>here are ways in which this is apropos—men, in particular, have seen their earning power diminish in recent decades, and Gabler isn’t the first to draw a connection between financial power and sexual power. But this is an unfortunately narrow framing of a financial crisis whose casualties are so often women.
I am having hard time parsing this seemingly self contradicting sentence even after reading the linked article.
One thing I don't like about us public k-12 schools is there stringent attendance policies. I wish there funding wasn't tied to holding our kids hostage during the school day. One of the reasons my children go to private school.
My experiences with private schools is that they have just as, if not more, stringent attendance policies. The consequence of non-attendance always seems to lead to expulsion.
Everyday experiences of discrimination (such as being treated with less respect or receiving poorer service) are common and affect black people in the US more frequently than white people. http://qz.com/334366/why-black-americans-cant-sleep-at-night...
Combine this with the other HN submission on that it 's not so much where you study but what, it's a bad call for parents to try to get their kids on an expensive school. They would be better off getting their kids to choose a STEM major even at a cheaper school.
That submission is about colleges. This submission is about high schools. The differences in quality between high schools is drastically more varied than differences in quality between colleges.
Thanks, we've fixed that above. We also changed the title from "American parents spend almost beyond their means on education", which appears to have been editorializing, to the subtitle of the article (the main title being too baity).
If you live from paycheck to paycheck, you live within your means but if anything happens, everything will fell apart. How this looks on a national scale was visible in the subprime mortage crisis a couple of years ago.
Spending on education/tuition is how middle-class Americans ensure the lower class ones stay down there. If spending on schooling was capped the way most things are capped then there would be much more competition for 'white-collar' jobs.
eg. middle class families may spend a little more on food on average but they are not going to spend 'beyond their means' on lavish cuisine in the hope that it will ensure a health advantage, because it obviously won't. The same is largely true of the quality of education available - there's no reason why the outcome (actual learning) should get much better by spending excessively on it. But then you have to factor in the signalling and filtering aspects.
The middle class is not spending money on education to keep others 'down'. They're doing it to keep from getting trampled themselves.
EDIT: I'm also going to disagree with you on this as well: "spend 'beyond their means' on lavish cuisine in the hope that it will ensure a health advantage, because it obviously won't"
Regardless as to whether or not organic and non-GMO food actually has better health benefits, people do not shop at Whole Foods just so they can show off the green bag to everyone else. Unlike say fashion, automobiles, or even gadgets, groceries are not ideal for 'signaling'
Believe it or not, most people don't have the luxury (or even the inclination) of sitting in a nice chair with their mean looking cat dreaming up ways of hurting others. Most people are just trying to get by... though obviously this greatly varies from person to person.
The distinction between middle class and lower class is such a strange one to me. The majority of the middle class still rely on employment to survive. Yes, they make more and therefore have more stuff, but their relationship to the economy as a whole is not fundamentally less precarious than the lower class. They're all working class.
> how middle-class Americans ensure the lower class ones stay down there
I'm seeing this attitude a lot and it befuddles me. I've heard a lot of wild theories on _why_ poor people stay poor, but never rooting for them to stay poor.
That's a lot different than trying to help your own kids get ahead.
[+] [-] tehabe|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rayiner|10 years ago|reply
The problem in the U.S. isn't that we have "good schools" and "bad schools." It's that we have extreme segregation along racial and economic lines. Our policies create pockets of schools that are 90% low-income (and usually a similar percentage black or hispanic). It's a symptom of a society with extreme segregation and wealth inequality, not a cause.
[+] [-] awoeifjs|10 years ago|reply
Finland ethnic groups: Finn 93.4%, Swede 5.6%, Russian 0.5%, Estonian 0.3%, Roma (Gypsy) 0.1%, Sami 0.1% (2006)
[+] [-] clevernickname|10 years ago|reply
Instead, we could transition from a system of state run public schools to state funded private schools. Give each parent a tax credit that they can choose to spend on whatever school they like. Your school's funding is directly tied to the number of students that chose it, not the neighborhood it's in. Remove any restrictions on zoning or the number of schools allowed in an area. Remove the concepts of districts altogether. Get rid of mandatory curricula and give educators room to innovate.
I think the majority of parents out there care about their children and want them to succeed, they just don't have the money or extraordinary amounts of time to ensure it. But with a tax credit system and an abundance of competing schools in every metropolitan area, finding the right school for your kid and actually getting them into it would be much more achievable for a much greater portion of society. Yes, the most dedicated ones that get their kids into a dozen extracurricular activities and help them with their homework and whatnot will always have an advantage over the latchkey kids, but it'd still be a significant improvement over the status quo.
[+] [-] pkaye|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] striking|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] velodrome|10 years ago|reply
It affects other aspects of our society, not just education.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentrification
[+] [-] ArkyBeagle|10 years ago|reply
In all subjects - but most especially history - it take decades to undo the damage from the public school system in America. We use it to spin old narrative yarns about what we'd wished happened.
[+] [-] bradleyjg|10 years ago|reply
There'd be a lot of winners from such a change, but the big losers would be incumbent homeowners in neighborhoods with "good schools" that have had that circumstance capitalized into the prices of their homes. Unfortunately that's quite a powerful group of people.
[+] [-] burfog|10 years ago|reply
It's hard enough being a nerdy kid today. Such kids almost always are in decent places because kids tend to be like their parents. Kids with the potential to succeed come from parents with the potential to succeed.
Education doesn't work if the classroom is full of kids who can't behave. Education doesn't get very advanced if the classroom is full of kids who aren't bright and willing to study.
Mix things up, and what do you get? A few strangely poor-yet-viable kids will move from very bad schools to slightly bad schools (nice but insignificant) while all the bright promising kids will end up in less-effective schools. The best schools will cease to exist. (by changing that is; they don't physically go away)
It does make us more equal, largely by inhibiting the success of our brightest and hardest-working students. Is this what you want?
[+] [-] rjdevereux|10 years ago|reply
Milton Friedman, a Nobel Laureate in economics, set up a foundation to advocate for it. I am not sure you are correct that biggest group blocking this is wealthy homeowners.
http://www.edchoice.org/school-choice/school-choice-in-ameri...
[+] [-] SilasX|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tinbucket|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cushychicken|10 years ago|reply
I'm not quite sure how saddling my children with the cost of my care and feeding in my twilight years is a better choice than letting them go to public school and state universities. Seems like that's just passing the buck on who has to pay that particular bill.
[+] [-] refurb|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dominotw|10 years ago|reply
I am having hard time parsing this seemingly self contradicting sentence even after reading the linked article.
can someone explain this to me.
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Tycho|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] naveen99|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] otoburb|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tamana|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jgalt212|10 years ago|reply
Because their parents almost made it.
[+] [-] known|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raarts|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Throwaway23412|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kough|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iamjdg|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Pyxl101|10 years ago|reply
So, within their means?
[+] [-] tehabe|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanBC|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tycho|10 years ago|reply
eg. middle class families may spend a little more on food on average but they are not going to spend 'beyond their means' on lavish cuisine in the hope that it will ensure a health advantage, because it obviously won't. The same is largely true of the quality of education available - there's no reason why the outcome (actual learning) should get much better by spending excessively on it. But then you have to factor in the signalling and filtering aspects.
[+] [-] chaostheory|10 years ago|reply
EDIT: I'm also going to disagree with you on this as well: "spend 'beyond their means' on lavish cuisine in the hope that it will ensure a health advantage, because it obviously won't"
Regardless as to whether or not organic and non-GMO food actually has better health benefits, people do not shop at Whole Foods just so they can show off the green bag to everyone else. Unlike say fashion, automobiles, or even gadgets, groceries are not ideal for 'signaling'
Believe it or not, most people don't have the luxury (or even the inclination) of sitting in a nice chair with their mean looking cat dreaming up ways of hurting others. Most people are just trying to get by... though obviously this greatly varies from person to person.
[+] [-] danharaj|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasonthevillain|10 years ago|reply
I'm seeing this attitude a lot and it befuddles me. I've heard a lot of wild theories on _why_ poor people stay poor, but never rooting for them to stay poor.
That's a lot different than trying to help your own kids get ahead.