this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2024
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In a State With School Vouchers For All, Low-Income Families Aren’t Choosing to Use Them (www.propublica.org)
submitted 4 weeks ago by Eccentric@sh.itjust.works to c/longreads@sh.itjust.works
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[–] Oni_eyes@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

So you are coming from a place that has:

  1. no experience with how this system works
  2. Your kids are not actively in the public system and you yourself admit you don't know what it's like in your area
  3. You have no understanding of the current teacher shortage by saying that people will just train up to fill new roles (we already have a shortage in stem, with overloaded classes, but sure there will magically be people who want to train to enter this low income career that you're suggesting take on either lower pay for small classes or more pay for even larger classes in another section...)
  4. You're advocating for a charter model while talking about the public system despite there being a huge gap between the two in terms of responsibility towards the entire student population in their area (charters don't have to follow all the rules that are tied to federal funds thanks to the Supreme Court, so they can deny the difficult to teach students, not even talking about behavior or grades but disability, which I guess is fine by you as long as it's not your kid getting excluded)
  5. Common core is simply the idea that there needs to be a standard set of knowledge taught to everyone as a baseline for well educated citizens. That's not a bad idea conceptually though it does get messed with a lot because there isn't enough funding to actually follow through on it vis a vis teaching staff and support.

I'd be happy to keep going with this but you're missing a lot and I already am overworked with my current students.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 weeks ago
  1. correct - though I do consider myself more well-read on the topic than the average person
  2. they technically are, though testing is different (we have entrance and exit tests, whereas public schools only have exit tests); but charter schools are privately run, publicly funded schools that must meet the same standards as public schools (and can't discriminate on applications)
  3. I certainly do, seeing as I have family members in the school system; i think teacher salaries should be dramatically increased to encourage more applications, and this is especially acute in my area where teachers are paid particularly poorly; so this shift comes with the assumption of increasing teacher salaries at the expense of spending on buses and admin staff
  4. yes, basically a charter system, but I don't think it necessarily needs to work that way; I think school admin should be allowed to specialize their school in any way they see fit, and if it doesn't work, they'll be replaced by someone with different ideas; whether that's offered as a public school or charter school is irrelevant, but the current model would support that as a charter school thing
  5. I think it's too granular, I honestly don't care if my kid is falling behind in English but excelling in Math in a given year, I just care that they exit the school system meeting certain expectations; and that's what a democratic classroom system would do, it could delay certain subjects until kids are interested, and then go hard once they are (so kids could be 2 years ahead in one area, and a year behind in others); this can work well for some kids, but really poorly for others (as Sir Ken Robinson describes)

they can deny the difficult to teach 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).

you’re missing a lot

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.