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In a State With School Vouchers For All, Low-Income Families Aren’t Choosing to Use Them
(www.propublica.org)
this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2024
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Sure, and probably a reduction in administrative staff since we'd move a lot of those responsibilities onto more local staff. I honestly don't see a ton of value in school districts as a concept, and instead think we should be thinking in terms of what makes an individual school stand out. If we shift money from the districts to the schools, we could probably fund a lot of this w/o changing revenue.
One huge part of this, though, is replacing school buses with city transit. If kids are taking city transit to get to school, transferring to a different bus to go to a different school shouldn't be a big deal (just ride w/ the kids the first few times and they'll get it). This is where a lot of the cost savings should come from IMO, we shouldn't be maintaining two separate fleets of transit vehicles and employees, we should instead expand and improve city transit to cover both use cases.
One of the benefits of districts is that you can then afford to have magnet type schools that specialize in one specific field, like performing arts, science, etc. That allows for students who are excelling in that district to get more specialized instruction. As for the transit bit, yes doubling up is troubling but we would need to provide additional routes and runs on each route to improve coverage to the point that school buses become moot. I'm not sure which would be easier to do, though I do want to support the swap to public transit.
And if school buses are moot, then districts are largely moot. Why rely on a district to provide specialized services when you can just let the schools themselves decide what to specialize in to attract students? That works really well for universities, and the main limitation for K-12 schools to operate that way is transit. Moving students to specialized schools within a district is incredibly rare, and I've only seen it in one place (where I grew up, which spent a ton on schools and had an advanced placement school). In my current area, the only way you're getting school choice is if the parents bring the kids to/from school, because the buses only run for students in their boundaries.
I think this type of system would work pretty well in densely populated areas like city centers, though it would break down for smaller towns and whatnot. So we should probably keep the traditional model for rural areas, and migrate to school choice for urban areas.
But yes, transit is absolutely the key. And I think killing bus service would kick-start transit service, since parents would quickly get annoyed if they had to take their kids there every day.
You're incorrect there. The main limitation for schools k-12 to specialize is funding. To get the equipment and staff necessary takes a lot of money (which is why universities use funding not just from grants that aren't available to public k-12, like from their research sides that do not exist in public k-12). The salary is also a huge problem for specialists since they can easily make more with less stress and more validation on the private sector side.
Even if all that got sorted, you would still want to use districting to consolidate some positions in admin, and to make it easier to plan specializations of k-12 schools (so there's less overlap if it's not needed and you don't have a bunch of waste expenses).
That may be true w/ the current system where specialized programs are add-ons to the regular programs, but if we're replacing a current class, maybe funding isn't as much of an issue. If we use your example, universities specialize and students apply to the school that supports their desired specialty. The university I went to had no medical program but had an awesome law program, whereas the school an hour away had the opposite (awesome medical, no law), so if I wanted to go into law or medical, I would choose the school appropriately.
But when I say "specialize," I generally don't mean things that require more equipment, like IT or trades, I mean teaching style. For primary education, here are some examples:
None of these really change equipment requirements, but they do require a different type of curriculum and teacher development.
Secondary education could also change, but this gets a lot more into equipment. I'm thinking some schools could stop general education at grade 10, with the last two years preparing kids for the workforce in specific areas (e.g. trades, IT, etc). They'd still have some traditional classroom instruction, but a significant portion of the day (half?) would be dedicated to whatever their focus is. They would invite local businesses to fund the more expensive programs in return for access to the students as a form of recruitment. Other schools would do the traditional college track and focus more on writing essays, reading literature, etc. All of the tracks would hit base learning standards, I just think kids can learn a lot more effectively if they attend a school that matches their ideal learning style.
I think we're wasting a lot of kids' potential by forcing everyone through traditional education. This isn't the fault of teachers either, and I think most teachers agree that many of their students would do better in another environment, but that other environment doesn't exist. I think the school bus system is holding us back, and if we had better mobility between schools, we could specialize schools to get better outcomes for all.
What experience do you have to back up any of your ideas? I have a degree, certification, and about a decade of teaching experience and I do not see it working the way you describe.
First off, it seems you're sampling from the Arbitur system (German system of last two years being work related, which only really works because the school system segregates children based on scores for their elementary and middle schools, and which we do not do here and which you did not mention)
Secondly, you say that the school bus system is holding us back and would allow for schools to specialize but we already have that occurring in school districts with normal school bus systems. The bus system clearly isn't preventing magnet schools from existing so that's not the issue.
Thirdly, there are only so many seats at each campus and so how are you going to discriminate as to who gets entry? Will it be based solely on teacher/counselor recommendation, or will there be testing requirements? If you look at private schools which are not in districts and have significantly more funding to specialize, they also do not let the majority of applicants enter. How do we make education accessible without creating these hurdles to allow for specialization that will literally do the opposite for the majority of students (skewing mostly towards lower income/immigrant families who will have issues either with the language or with educational support at home since time has to be allocated towards survival earning instead of spending more time on reinforcement for the student)
Fourth, how do you propose these individual schools get funding to allow for these specializations without tying it to attendance and creating a huge fight over who gets which student (thus going against what might be best for the student)? With district's, at least the money can get moved from one school to the next if there is excess or you need to specialize a school in the district. You can also share physical resources between schools in district's, not so much between individual schools across town.
Fifth, which schools aren't going to have sports fields? Those are typically district property to be used by multiple schools to cut down on costs.
That's just off the top of my head, there's a lot of moving parts and shared resources that look easy to split from the outside while actually being incredibly interconnected.
Mostly a handful of books I've read, documentaries I've watched, and discussions with teachers in my family. For democratic learning, I cite Sir Ken Robinson's You, Your Child, and School (I think, I read a few books around that time), and for independent learning, I cite myself and my friends, who were perennially bored and much preferred to just teach ourselves throughout K-12 school (college was great because I could skip classes if I knew it was going to be a waste of time). The main saving grace for me was a concurrent enrollment program at the local community college, so I got my AA a couple months before my high school diploma.
And yes, the Arbitur system in Germany (I never remember what it's called). I see so many kids drop out here around 10-12th grade because they feel like school is pointless, and some years later they end up in the trades. My school opened up a machine shop, and I think that reduced high school dropouts some (not sure, I've since moved and never bothered checking before/after stats).
My current district doesn't offer as many of those programs, though they do have a few classes here and there (e.g. a programming class as an elective). My current school district is considering a split (we're the largest in the state, by a lot) largely to "keep costs local," and my main concern is that we'd have even less opportunity for specialized programs because each school needs to be a complete unit. We also have charter schools, but those are only available for privileged kids, which doesn't really solve the wider problem of poor test scores (privileged kids would likely succeed regardless due to parental support. We do have concurrent enrollment at a local university, which is nice, but that only helps college-bound kids.
We kind of do. I'm in the US (Utah specifically, grew up in WA), and we absolutely do a form of segregation. My kids go to a charter school (so not sure how public school works), and they split kids roughly by ability, and have them learn independently if they're ahead of the class (both my kids are). They have a separate class as well for kids who are at the top (we call it "compass club," which both my kids attend). Where I grew up, we had a special program called "STEP" for "highly capable" K-5 students (my friend was invited, I wasn't) where kids are bussed from around the district to a single school, and we had "honors" classes in 6-12, which basically taught material a year ahead for math, and went more in depth for humanities classes (english and history). We also did and do state testing pretty much every year to determine outcomes, which impacts funding for schools.
I think we should take that a step further and split schools based on teaching style. I have three elementary schools and a charter school within 3 miles of my house, but they all offer basically the same approach to education, each being a little silo. We chose the charter school (enrollment is based on a lottery) because our assigned school had a crappy principle who seemed to scare away teachers (most teachers stayed for 1-2 years and moved on), whereas other parents moved their kids to one of the other schools in the area. So at least in my neighborhood, only about 30% stayed with the assigned school, and the other 70% have to take their kids themselves, which is incredibly wasteful. And I'm in a very privileged neighborhood, the less privileged kids in the boundaries are basically stuck where they're at.
No, but it's preventing access to those magnet schools. Given the choice between a free bus and having to drop off and pick up your kid every day, which do you think a busy family is going to choose? What ends up happening, at least in my area, is that privileged kids get to take advantage of those programs, while poorer kids don't. Some areas will bus between those schools, but that's hardly an efficient system.
If a certain program is popular, your options are:
Denying kids is a temporary problem and probably only relevant in the first couple years it's offered while teachers skill up to teach whatever that program is. So I recommend doing the last two as much as possible before the first two. If the program is successful, the other two will happen naturally as schools rebalance to meet shifting needs.
Funding is always an issue. In general, funding should be applied based on need, and teachers reallocated and paid based on ability. So if you're teaching disadvantaged kids in broken homes, that teacher should get paid a lot more than a teacher largely teaching independent learners, and perhaps school hours should be extended for the former and reduced for the latter (the latter probably has support at home). Teachers would fight for the role they'd prefer (i.e. lower pay and easier students, or higher pay and more challenging students/longer hours).
Honestly, most schools wouldn't have sports fields. Ideally, most of these would be remitted to the cities as parks, and after school sports would fall under the city's purview (most cities already do this anyway). I really liked after-school sports, but it's hardly required for schools to fund and only really benefits a relatively small percentage of the student body. They could be subsidized for lower-income kids as well, and transportation for competition w/ other teams would be handled through mass transit.
That's how it worked where my SO grew up (E. Asia), so I don't see why we couldn't do that here.
Certainly, and as an outsider, I don't have that larger context. My aim here is to propose an alternative to our current system that better serves the needs of kids instead of trying to force them all into the same mold. Oh, and also gives more control to teachers, as well as offers more opportunities for experimentation.
Things like "no child left behind" and "common core" push hard on that "one-size fits all" approach, which I really think does our kids a disservice. We should have a "one size fits most" approach by default, with different options available for the rest of the kids.
So you are coming from a place that has:
I'd be happy to keep going with this but you're missing a lot and I already am overworked with my current students.
I honestly don't know much about this, but I do know they are required to use a simple lottery, with priority only allowed for family of existing students (i.e. my second kid was accepted because my first kid attends there). It's not a private school that has an application process, you simply fill out some details (mostly name and age) and students are randomly selected. We applied to two, and were accepted to one. If we weren't accepted to either, we would have appealed to the district to allow us to move to a different public school (two of three in the area are acceptable to us, we just really didn't like our local principle, nor did the teachers in my neighborhood).
If you have some good resources (e.g. books), I'd love to educate myself better. But just saying, "you're wrong because you don't have experience" isn't particularly helpful. I understand you're busy, and I am grateful that you've responded as much as you have, but surely there's something you could point me at so I could correct whatever mistaken assumptions I have.