Personally, I suspect there's likely a generational non-COVID caused reduction in child welfare at play, the leading edge of which happened to get hidden by COVID.
The combo of more and more parents who work all the time and/or have delegated parenting to YouTube and mobile devices, plus charter schools (1) moving a chunk of non-IEP kids into more non-secular schools with lower standards and (2) concentrating behavior issue and IEP kids in public schools are basically rotting things from the inside out.
Would you care to share more about what this means?
"moving a chunk of non-IEP kids into more non-secular schools with lower standards"
When we applied to public schools for my child, the one we were most excited about was a charter school, not one run by the local school district.
As far as I can tell, charter schools have some selection pressure that is absent from government-run schools: if a charter school does poorly, parents don't choose it, and it closes. If a district-run school does poorly, the district will allocate kids there anyway.
In my area charter schools game the system to not deal with special needs kids and make them leave the charters. Many basically avoid doing evaluations and IEPs entirely so they can force them to go back to public schools.
The highest achieving charters have also been able to get mediocre non IEP kids to transfer back by setting them up to have trouble keeping up and not supporting them when they struggle.
Edit: And on the lower-performing side, you have schools focused on religion and/or patriotism, which tend to be less concerned about getting low performers out, but which aren't based as much around effective academics so much as ideology, and which do not meet the civic bar for education. Though I've also seen some that are just there to basically act like the charter equivalent of for-profit colleges: give parents in low SES areas a message of hope and then just minimize costs in the classroom.
> on the lower-performing side, you have schools focused on religion
That is an interesting contrast with the British equivalent. Religious schools are generally academically much better, so much so that people lie about their religion (and start turning up to church etc.) to get in (IIRC it is a condition of state funding that a minimum proportion of students are followers of the religion).
My experience in the US has been similar - most religious schools had higher performance than most public schools. Even the grading systems reflected the higher standards by using a 7 point scale rather than a 10 point scale. None of the religious schools I heard of had the "no zero" policies like some of the public schools where you get an automatic minimum 50% score just for writing your name on the test.
I'm sure there are outliers in either school type, but categorizing religious schools as lower performing doesn't to fit my experiences at all.
Yes. Catholic schools, for example, have long been known for far surpassing public school performance, so much so that non-Catholics send their children to Catholic schools. Apart from the better quality of the curricula, Catholic schools have never experienced school shootings, student relations are more genial and civilized, and you can be more confident that your child will be spared the unhinged ideologies du jour.
On top of that, they are quite generous and inexpensive as non-state schools. Listed tuition does vary considerably, as some elite Catholic schools are truly very expensive. However, they're not representative of typical tuition costs, and in either case, they usually offer financial assistance. They even lower tuition for each subsequent child you send to their school. Some schools (like Regis in NYC) are completely free, if you get in.
On top of that, Catholic laity have been founding schools independently in the last ~20 years or so (that is, these are private schools that are not under the direct authority of the bishop of the local diocese). These tend to emphasize a return to classical curricula (like the trivium and quadrivium), updated and supplemented accordingly.
(Those with a prejudice against religious schools as a whole also fail to understand that a guiding worldview is always present in any school. This cannot be avoided. In fact, it is nonsensical. It is the backdrop that determines the organization and structure of curricula in the first place. State schools in the modern liberal state naturally insinuate and teach a liberal worldview, one that bona fide Catholics merely tolerate as a matter of practicality, but utterly reject as a matter of principle, as the liberal worldview along with its liberal anthropology is at odds with the Catholic worldview. Education is ultimately a matter of intellectual formation which is something that entails some measure of moral formation as well. The liberal arts are first and foremost about freeing a person to be able to reason and reason proficiently, not about producing economic actors first and foremost, though you could naturally expect someone with this formation to be well-prepared for the world of work as well as a consequence of having been formed intellectually and morally.)
It depends on whether the focus is on spreading knowledge or preserving doctrine. Most religious schools I know are solidly in the former category, but I suspect there are exceptions.
This seems like a false dichotomy to me. They can do both. We could look at SAT scores, which show religious schools having significantly higher scores than public schools. So clearly they are learning the material.
In what now feels like a past life I knew a guy who had a perfect SAT score, I met him while visiting a family member who was his roommate at Patrick Henry College in VA.
He believed radio carbon dating was a lie and the earth was literally ~5k years old.
There are confounding factors that SAT scores don't surface.
That's why I'm saying one of the post above seems like a false dichotomy as the schools could do both. If the measures of school quality are test results, higher education, etc, then the religious schools would still exceed the public schools in those scores, which are the only measures we have.
An interesting question is, would that person in your example answer a question about radio carbon dating correctly on a test? It's possible they know the correct answer to mark but have separate philosophical beliefs. This would further support the idea that the religious schools have high academic achievement even if the beliefs differ.
My example was an anecdote, I would assume any one person with a perfect SAT score is an outlier across educational methodologies.
Self directed learning, reading comprehension, maths skills, critical thinking skills, ability to identify and reject sophistry, these abilities have some overlap perhaps but can each be skilled up separately and impact how a person can later function in roles that depend on the ability to identify true/false propositions.
Do you view the utility and practice of having overlapping confirmations and methodologies for radiometric dating (radiocarbon, potassium–argon, uranium–lead, etc.) to be a philosophic belief?
Do you think that it is wise to spend time and money formally training "high potential" people to have such deeply systemic errors in reasoning to the point that they flat reject peer reviewed, high confidence data and methods as a positive?
We aren't talking about being a Theist, Deist, ETC. We aren't talking about religious beliefs as most christians support radiometric dating, we are talking about educational materials for the young that reject following the data in pragmatic, well documented, well confirmed, high utility fields and rejects them out of pocket with untestable unobservable and sometimes demonstrably false alternatives. I don't want my curriculum to be the blind (or the sophists) leading the blind and to pretend these are equivalent because this self selected group trends towards higher SAT scores seems to miss the point.
I am pro-homeschooling and private schools generally and have multi generational exposure and participation in these things. Let a family believe whatever it wants to believe intellectually, I generally believe these variations to be positive in ensuring the human race is more diverse in exploring the "search space".
That being said, one of the smartest people I know, with all the raw materials in the world became a PHD scientist in molecular biology and bioinformatics and got nerd sniped by his YEC background, the years he's spent spinning his wheels due to an inability to follow the conclusions of his cognitive dissonance means he might as well not have become a scientist at all. It's enough that his family did that to him and it's fine or whatever, but we shouldn't have tax paid educators and curriculums participate in the cognitive crippling of children if our goal is to have a functional and productive society.
There are many people who hold beliefs that run contrary to the evidence on a variety of subjects from all educational backgrounds.
"...because this self selected group trends towards higher SAT scores seems to miss the point."
If it does, it's a point that hasn't been made yet. This entire post is about test scores, which is the way education is measured. If you're contending that public schools produce better reasoning than religious schools, then please provide that data.
"but we shouldn't have tax paid educators and curriculums participate in the cognitive crippling of children if our goal is to have a functional and productive society."
This part left me unclear, as this is also the same sort of complaint many parents are having about some of the ideologies being taught (or how they're being taught) in public schools, which are publicly funded. Most states do not publicly fund religious/private schools.
"Do you think that it is wise to spend time and money formally training "high potential" people to have such deeply systemic errors in reasoning to the point that they flat reject peer reviewed, high confidence data and methods as a positive?"
So how did your example achieve a PhD if he contradicted the peer reviewed evidence? I assume the review board and degree was from a secular school and you have implied the secular school process doesn't permit these sorts of reasoning flaws. Perhaps their reasoning on most subjects is solids and they have a few blind spots. This is generally true of most people, including those from public schools. Also, let it be known that many successful scientists have challenged existing positions successfully to discover new things. Science encourages challenging existing positions as part of the process to make new discoveries. This is one of the reasons there are so few "laws" in science and so many "theories".
"We aren't talking about religious beliefs as most christians support radiometric dating, we are talking about educational materials for the young that reject following the data in pragmatic, well documented, well confirmed, high utility fields and rejects them out of pocket with untestable unobservable and sometimes demonstrably false alternatives."
Ok... so what is your point? The vast majority of religious schools support radio cabon dating just as you admit that most religions do. I'm pretty confident that my comment chain has been using qualifiers to indicate that there may be outliers, but that in general religious schools do not have lower academic standards as indicated by the test score data. There may be outliers in any of the various school types, but the data is pretty clear that the current measures of academic success are test scores and post-secondary education, for which religious school score at least as well on. This refutes the original comment that religious schools have academically lower standards. Unless someone has actual data and not just anecdotal that says otherwise.
Outliers, bias due to self selection, bad/factually false curriculums we can observe to be in use (not simply worries pertaining to observed outcomes in an individual), institutional methods to force out special needs children to improve averages. These are all confounding factors to a simple and frankly wrong narrative. Perhaps the real issue is our universally appalling teaching in statistics.
Unless you have well designed co-hort studies most of the data just isn't really useful. The SAT, like any other measure that becomes the standard, is going to be gamed. I'm trying to highlight why a shallow and cursory glance at any data can be misleading and adding specific observations as food for thought.
Take it as you will. Test scores surely are directional and with universal declines that is worrying, but that isn't the sole topic of discussion in the thread is it?
The intial ellipses is pretty indicative, it seems clear that radiometric dating is a charity belief and is not something one thinks is a valid mechanism for acquiring accurate data and facts that map to observable, testable reality.
I think most people wouldn't have so much difficulty distinguishing philosophic positions and fact acquiring methodologies, I mean some people view physical reality as not existing and all material endeavor and observation to be a waste, surely that's an equally valid worldview to inculcate and spend tax money on, so as long as mandatorg testing scores are within the margin of error these beliefs have no downside to fund with tax dollars?
I mean if we draw no lines than why teach math or have an SAT at all? Being able to identify and record observable facts are not a critical part of education in some people's estimation it seems.
"These are all confounding factors to a simple and frankly wrong narrative...
Unless you have well designed co-hort studies most of the data just isn't really useful."
Interesting that you claim the data isn't really useful, but then are forceful about a narrative being wrong. This seems like the issue you are complaining about - holding beliefs without facts or contrary to facts.
1. "Religion" is not a monolithic category. It is effectively synonymous with "worldview". The content of a given worldview matters. So, pace modern doctrines of "tolerance", not all worldviews are equal. The notion that they are is simply absurd, as they all vary and differ and make different claims.
2. Doctrine is inevitable. As the Chestertonian quote goes, there are only two kinds of people: those who accept dogma and know it, and those who accept dogma and don't know it. A person cannot function without doctrine. The trouble is that the liberal order has managed to convince us that its doctrines aren't doctrines at all. They're just taken to be "obviously true" or "obviously neutral", which they are not.
3. Since doctrine is inevitable, then all schools at the very least insinuate the doctrines of the governing worldview in the manner things are taught and structured and in the way the school is run. In state schools, these are typically liberal doctrines. That is obvious: why would the state propagate doctrines of a worldview other than the one that it is governed by? It may demonstrate a certain tolerance for other worldviews, but the limits of this tolerance are determined by the doctrines of the governing worldview. This is inescapable, and it is dishonest to deny it.
4. Teaching doctrines is not opposed to knowledge. In fact, if a doctrine is true, then learning it is learning knowledge.
5. Now, among schools we classify as "religious", Catholic schools certainly teach both religious subject matter as well as all the sorts of subject matters you might expect to be taught in a school. We're not talking about some weird American Protestant sect here. Fides et ratio.
Too many lean into the crude caricatures of their imagination.
Great comment. Liberalism (in the broadest possible sense of the word) sets itself up as a dogma-free, 'neutral' worldview, when in fact it is teeming with dogma and substantive ideas about what is good and evil.
Hi, geye1234, its good to be meeting up with you so soon after our previous discussion!
I have to say, however, that it seems slightly tendentious of you to pick out liberalism (albeit in broadest possible sense of the word) in this manner. Is there anything to justify seeing this issue as being specific to, or concentrated within, liberalism? Prior to your comment, liberalism has not been an issue in this discussion.
I had heard rumors about it. The first time I really believed it was when a friend of mine was student teaching and was forced to give no less than 50% if the name was on the paper. He said there was one kid who refused to even write his name to get that free 50% and they gave him an incomplete or something instead. I probably wouldn't have believed it until he told me about all this. He ended up getting his teaching license but never taught due to how bad the schools were policy and behavior-wise. I have other friends who are teachers and I'd say close to half will only teach at private schools for those same reasons.
The key thing is that in the US there are two distinct kinds of religious schools: indoctrination focused, like "evolution bad, women stay in kitchen" level in some cases, focused on "the Bible" and anti-secularism, and these usually have an academic cap because they're not going to do advanced math or stem, or teach accurate history, because of the focus on religion.
On the other hand you have more traditional religious private schools, whether Catholic, segregation academies, etc., and these kinds usually have good academic standards and are probably more comparable to what you refer to. They are also rarely intersecting with the charter system.
So in theory their charters are more secular, but they're going to get as far up on the line as they can.
I have (a not close) relative who is sending his kid to a different charter where their whole website is about how much patriotism and flag rah rah is in the curriculum and how they adhere to traditional gender roles, but for the life of me I can't remember the name.
I also have numerous acquaintances working in various capacities in schools (public, charter, and private) and have to say I regard all the things mentioned in the linked articles as severely under-reported. Retaliation against teachers and staff who try to get kids services at charters is a thing. Public school districts and counties having to foot evaluation costs for parochials is a thing. Refusing and avoiding evaluations for kids in charters so they can be kicked out for behavior and then the publics have to foot the evaluation costs is a thing.
I completely think if local districts (and/or families) had a spine or the right legal resources they could be suing charters who've not even tried to follow or service existing IEPs left and right when those kids are constantly enrolling in publics mid year (with those kids generally exhibiting broad spectrums declines against academic and IEP goals).
I’m baffled by this. My wife worked at a charter school and it was nothing like this. The teachers were constantly trying to get certain kids out of their classroom who were actively threatening staff and other students, and the administration would never do anything. The assumption being that losing a kid would hurt numbers and impact funding.
Your wife needed to know how to demand special ed evaluations most likely (or get the parents to), since that would create costs and cause action. What you're reporting is typical for a profit driven charter that doesn't have much pressure to show high academic performance and is driven by profit motive. Keeping the kids in the seats keeps money coming in. Probably didn't have much of a wait-list to give them more discretion with behavioral bouncing.
Half of her kids had special education needs. You “demand special ed evaluations” and the result is, the kid comes back to your class with an IEP and congratulations, you now have to create an alternate version of each lesson plan.
The parent comment captures the education system’s attitude toward teachers perfectly. The problem is always due to a shortcoming of the teacher, and the solution is always the responsibility of the teacher.
TBH that sounds a lot more similar to the average public than most charters I've heard employees discuss.
Do you have pull out programs, self contained classrooms, etc.? How common is it to have manifestation hearings for the kids your wife thinks are risky in the classroom?
I’m realizing the term “charter school” is probably overloaded.
The charter school my wife taught at (in CA) had to prove itself to the district and fight for public dollars, hence the inability to lose any kids (and dollars).
The charter school I went to years ago sounds more like the kind you’re talking about. Basically a private school that received no public funding.
Huh, I've never heard of a charter model where the local district had any oversight.
To me a charter is just a school that is privately run, usually for either ideological or profit motives, or both, that parents can choose to send their kids to instead of a public school, and which gets money from the state, usually a bit less than a public school would, for each attending child. In turn, the charter school is usually subject to different and less stringent oversight and standards than the public school.
Unlike publics, usually charters do not have to accept mid-term enrollment and parents have to figure out transportation. In demand charters can cap their enrollment and use a lottery for admissions.
Okay, I think that probably describes the charter school my wife taught at, though it was not run for ideological or profit motives, it was inner-city.
The key though is this point:
> gets money from the state, usually a bit less than a public school would, for each attending child
So the charter is under the same pressure as the public school since compensation is directly tied to headcount, the top priority is keeping kids or you won’t survive. I’m not sure how the schools you’re mentioning are able to push kids out and not lose money. Maybe they’re just in affluent areas.
All that to say, I’m not a huge fan of charter schools but I doubt they’re the source of our problem.
One side of the coin is basically softened McCarthyism as a school, which "encourages families to be actively involved in religious organizations of their choice" and [paraphrasing] "supports the national Motto of the United States: In God We Trust."
The other is taking advantage of the angst among professional and white collar parents and runs a curriculum several years ahead of grade level, and takes advantage of filled wait-lists to create high pressure and somewhat rigid environments where kids who don't perform at a high level in even one subject get held back a year and get pressured to leave.
I can't speak to the more "American Exceptionalism" oriented schools as much, despite relative ubiquity - I've heard of them refusing to service IEPs (or resisting doing evals) here and there.
But the BASIS style ones are constantly sending kids back to the public schools that are somewhat psychologicaly damaged despite performing at quite a high level. Typical policies are things like "After grade 9, students must maintain an average score of 3 or above on all AP Exams or the student may not receive full financial support for AP Exams beyond the six that are required for graduation." I have the impression that students go back to publics because of things like not wanting to repeat a year because of struggling with Mandarin and developing self esteem issues. I think they (BASIS) also have non required courses available that have extra fees associated and aren't actually included with the state funded enrollment.
Both angles are able to effectively select student populations that cost less to serve than the student population overall and avoid IEP kids and services for them.
Obviously there are others, but anecdotally, other types don't seem to have a lot of longevity.
Funding varies by locality, but yes, the public schools get funding from the federal government, the state government, and the local government. Most local funding is provided by property taxes, which can vary by local housing valuations. Most state funding programs try to allocate funds to equalize the per student funding across the state to help correct the discrepancy by locality. Federal funds are usually grant related, but oftentimes those grants are need-based or targeted to higher needs groups (% on IEP).
Some of these articles are just generic bashing of school choice, and not relevant to the discussion about whether charter schools reject or push out more challenging students.
e.g. the last article is about Arizona's ESAs, which compete with charter schools.
I'd say the conservatives in AZ are transitioning AZ to ESAs over charters because it lets them fund religious education more easily and with less oversight, does away with the equal access fiction behind charters, and is a way to mess with budgets.
Why is this a bad thing? Its possible I'm missing some nuance because I have not dealt with the US education system in a long time, but I think one fundamental problem with universal education is that one really bad student can easily ruin the education of dozens of others.
If anything, there should be some sort of behavioral/educational reform schools, probably operated in something closer to a military fashion, to help out not only these kids, but the countless others who they'd otherwise be disrupting.
This issue is one (of many) for why if I did decide to have my children go to school in the US it would be at a high performing private school. I'd actually prefer they have the less bubbly experience of public school, but I'm not willing to tolerate having their classes disrupted by kids who are just bee-lining to jail anyhow. I had that upbringing and I think it substantially delayed my 'educational maturity'.
Exactly, ~10-15 years ago Denmark decided to start integrating "problem" children into the regular classroom and scores have dropped across the board. Currently private education enrolment has been massively on the rise since private schools are not forced to accept these kids, and/or they can more easily kick children out.
What's really sad is that now the parents are not only paying extremely high taxes to cover the standard school, but now also are having to shell out extra to make sure their child gets the eduction they deserve.
Why this is shocking is that Denmark (the whole nordics) has an extremely strong public education tradition which is being very quickly eroded. Just 20 years ago private education was seen as something for the elites (e.g. Royalty) but now it's becoming an expected expense.
Almost everyone is frustrated by this: teachers, parents, students, as well as their special needs counterparts. The only people winning are the politicians who get to morally grandstand.
As someone that spend most of school except for the last year in my hometown's low ranking one I cannot compreheend why you would integrate problematic kids like that.
I was doing my best, but with others' constant attention seeking behaviour (shouting, interrupting the teacher, and other more insane things) it was impossible for the teacher to teach and me to concentrate.
If it wasn't for my last year at a private school I wouldn't be where I am now.
I understand they want to create an environment where the kids may feel guilty or something else, but the problem isn't with who they're with in school, most likely. And by problem I mean the CORE problem. That is in most cases a deep issue at home.
In Ontario, Canada they completely got rid of special needs classes recently (so they aren't treated as second class or something), as well as gifted classes, and from two teachers and one child psychologist I talked to it's been a nightmare. Some classes will have 5+ disruptive students constantly yelling or fighting. And in the younger classes when a student has a "meltdown" they aren't allowed to send the kid to the principal, instead they clear the other kids out of the class to wander the halls, bring in the social worker lady (who is always on call), and wait until the problem kid calms down. They told me it was happening at least once a week in one classroom.
We're basically running social experiments on kids.
There are problem kids, but the effect of concentrating them is much worse than the effect of distributing them, much like piling things on one section of net is more likely to break it than distributing them.
There is, in IMO, a ceiling to the percentage of behavior and academic IEP kids you can have in one classroom without it impacting regular kids substantially. (Though for very extreme kids it might just plain not be viable or safe at all.)
Historically reform schools have not been an effective model, but they were also often basically just a way to keep problem kids away from more normal ones and would have treated teen pregnancy the same as severe autism the same as emotional disorders.
You do see more and more self-contained rooms in publics for severe case kiddos that can't be in normal classrooms, which is a bit similar.
Which is to say one child really can ruin the experience of other children. But making it so that private schools and charters have means to keep down the ratio of destructive traumatizers, IEP time wasters, etc., compared to publics doesn't solve anything. It just artificially makes public schools seem worse, cost burdens them, and creates more social stratification.
You basically end up with a tiered system where most public schools have turned into bad reform schools that can't avoid underperforming. Meanwhile, it's not that charters are good, it's just that they've been able to take advantage of two layers of selection to filter out cost centers that decrease performance.
And in turn you are now damaging the prospects of any kid whose parents aren't interested in keeping them out of the public school compared to the other options.
My public school denied education to 99% of students because they let the 1% of students who shouldn't have been there disrupt the classroom every single day.
The outcome for society is that every single student got a sub-par education, because things moved at a glacial pace, had constant interruptions, students felt unsafe, the pace was so slow that students felt bored, etc.
A far better outcome would have been to make a small public school for the highly-academically oriented students (top-10%, future doctors and engineers) a disruption-free normal curriculum (middle-80%) and a special-needs school for all the students who had learning disabilities, behavioral issues, etc which prevented them from being able to thrive in a conventional classroom.
> special-needs school for all the students who had learning disabilities, behavioral issues, etc
What about the students that fit into more than one group? I did not "thrive" in any classroom nor would I still. I had behavioral problems and a learning disability (though I was still an A/B student). I still became a software engineer, but I didn't know I had a learning disability until my 20s. Had I know when I was a kid, where would I have been placed? I had special needs, which were completely ignored (and still are), but I turned out average to above average enough.
Well actually, I did have one instance of being in an 'under the table' special needs program when I was in 6th grade. I was never told why I was in this program for part of every school day, and my parents were never informed. Idk about anyone else, but I did not enjoy being treated like a 'lesser person' because of something I could not control.
Also, what good are these special needs programs for students with learning disabilities when there is no place for many such people in the working world? If anything, I find these programs set people up for more failure than success. The golden rule of non-visible disabilities is to never mention them to any prospective or current employer. Often times, it's a one-way ticket to an eventual PIP/lay-off/firing. 1.5x time on tests is cute, but virtually no employer is giving someone 1.5x on a deadline because they are disabled.
Unfortunately schools err on the side of IEP kids because not enough non-IEP kids' families sue them for being denied FAPE because of the classroom antics of severe children being mainstreamed. (Whereas they are frequently in litigation with insane parents of IEP kids.)
"Any child of any ability, race, socioeconomic background has a right to an education."
Public education is notoriously bad at addressing the situation when some particular child frequently disrupts education of twenty others who would like to make use of their right. This is something that the noble proclamations like yours tend to just ignore.
"The charter school - better for your child? Sounds like it.
Better for society, no."
I'm curious how you think this is true. If it's better for the children in them, then they should have a better education and be more likely to contribute to society yo their maximum potential. So there's the positive side. What we would have to show is that there is a significant negative side for the students still in public schools that was not there before. The only real argument I've heard from this was about how to reduces funding from public schools. However, it also reduces costs for the reduced number of students, so it doesn't seem like a big factor. In fact, most studies show public schools having significantly higher per student budgets than the charters. So what is the negative impact on society?
Don't these scores sort of suggest a negative impact? We've been leaning further and further into charter schools in the US and I don't see where education is thriving.
If there are positive impacts on society, I would think you could very easily show us over the past 20 decades. We have more than 10x the number of charter school students today than in 2000.
==In fact, most studies show public schools having significantly higher per student budgets than the charters.==
Charter schools are generally considered public schools, but generally aren't called "public schools" due to the charter structure. "Public schools" in this example are TPA (traditional public schools). TPAs have higher per student funding than charter schools.
You are presenting a generic correlation between downward trending test scores and prevalence of charter schools. Are there any studies with a real correlation that corrects for other factors? Let's remember that correlation is not causation. Especially consider that achievement was already on a downward trend and that 10x number you quote is only resulting in 6-10% of all public school students today. Even if there is a correlation with the number of charter school students and a decrease in test scores, what is the actual reason or mechanism? Just saying overall scores are still going down and charter enrollments are up doesn't show anything.
It is. They can't put it in bold, but they can avoid special ed evaluations and services, have policies that make undesirable students repeat grades so their family will put them elsewhere, and more. It's just very much "unofficial."
A charter school is a public school that may provide instruction in any combination of grades (transitional kindergarten through grade twelve).
A charter school shall admit all students who wish to attend the school; however, if the number of students exceeds the school's capacity, attendance shall be determined by a public random drawing.
That's the thing with on-paper rights... there is always a way around denying undesirables their rights. Be it onerous voter ID requirements as a tactic of vote suppression, onerous requirements for paperwork and apply systems [1] or kafkaesque processes [2] to make it harder to get unemployment insurance, or in schools looking away at instances of bullying that aren't outright violence, unfair grading and other forms of retaliation.
Magnet and charter schools have a lot in common. You could look at state charter school statutes as encouraging school districts to be proactive about setting up academy model and magnet schools.
No, that doesn’t reflect the situation. Charters enshrine the public school revenue by allocating some of it to “better” schools. They make it harder to lower school district revenue as they (in the eyes of parents) make the established system work better.
That’s different than aiming to reduce district tax levied. I’ve read a variety of statements from charters themselves, including that one. There are also proposals to privatize administration of school districts using the same reasoning. In education, no matter who is speaking, typically the focus is on performance, retaining teachers and meeting more diverse student needs.
I think it just has to be understood that "choice" means choice for some but not for all, and society has to be OK with that. (I'm not OK with it).
In a system with a mixture of public and private schools, the public schools will always be a necessary feature of the selectivity of private schools. Not only to accept "problem" kids, but also to operate in areas where it's not profitable to run private schools, or in cases where private schools run into financial and management problems and must be bailed out.
So it's not so much that the private schools are "better" but that they both function as interdependent parts of a system.
On the other hand, there will always be a need for special education... mainstreaming all kids in one classroom hasn't worked very well either.
2. Religious private schools do not need to meet the same educational requirements as public schools.
3. Charter schools have some selection pressure, but public schools dont have a profit motive.
4. "Charter Schools" as a category is wildly varied, with some excellent institutions, and others that are grifting off the taxpayer dollar.
The most important thing however, is the vicious cycle they introduce. Public schools are required to educate every child, regardless of the expense of doing so. Charter schools face no such requirement. So when charter schools exist in that system, every student that leaves the public school and takes their little chunk of funding with them inherently makes life more difficult for the public school they're leaving. This in turn increases the incentive for every other high achieving student to leave, which makes the public school's situation worse and worse each time.
GP talked about charter schools as being non-secular. Where I live, charter schools are secular. Is that not the case where you live?
Charter schools where I live are required to educate every child. Admissions is via lottery. Is that not the case where you live? (Of course, this doesn't apply to private schools, which definitely cherry pick students, but we're talking about charter schools.)
Re: "public schools don't have a profit motive", this is technically true, but there are plenty of people working for public school districts who contribute little yet draw large salaries and lifetime pensions. A charter school that doesn't make ends meet is forced to shut down. A government-run school district that doesn't make ends meet gets given more money. (This is true in San Francisco at least. I realize that teacher and admin compensation varies widely across the US.)
BTW in most places (even places like Arizona which are relative pro school choice), the per-pupil funding of charter schools is much much less than the per-pupil funding of government-run school districts.
Because charter schools (at least here in California) have to accept any student, just like any other public school, they don't contribute to the cycle you describe. (Obviously private schools do, but I don't think you're advocating outlawing privately-funded schools.)
> Charter schools where I live are required to educate every child. Admissions is via lottery. Is that not the case where you live?
Here they’re required to educate BUT they can do a lot to deter expensive students. If they don’t have support staff, kids with special needs won’t apply. If they require a test to advance grades, those kids will leave. If they require lots of homework, anyone without a nanny or stay-at-home parent and lots of support will leave.
My wife used to teach at one of those schools and it followed an arc over a decade where they started claiming they were cheaper but once they added the legally required support staff they were only cheaper to the extent that they paid their staff less by hiring young teachers and burning them out before they got old enough to expect better pay or have major health insurance expenses.
That is basically the arc of every charter school: every few years you’ll hear about someone doing miracles on a tight budget, but over time it’ll either disappear as regression to the mean sets in or turn out to be some form of selection to avoid expensive children. There just isn’t one weird trick an entire profession has somehow missed.
In my state charters often advertise religious-adjacent or patriotic angles despite being ostensibly secular. Though it is more common for true religious schools to be private non-charters, which sets them up to have some extra hoops for state funding.
In AZ also keep in mind that the funding difference is complicated by education scholarship accounts, which are bankrupting the state.
I agree, and I think a policy shifts should include:
* NOT subsidizing private schools
* NOT determining school funding based on child count
Like so many things, schools are a public commons / good / investment in functioning society that a given goal should be determined, books kept, waste prosecuted (criminally), and services provided according to a defined standard. Then whatever that costs rolls into the next budget as the base tax rate for that year.
Which is entirely not how things are run right now. Government inefficiency frequently relates to 'yearly budgets' and places that look to continue to spend a given year's budget because otherwise it'll go somewhere else. Rather than just doing what's necessary when it's necessary irrespective of how much or little doing the most effective and efficient thing costs.
There's also the elephant in the room on how IEP (btw for the acronym haters: "Individualized educational program". Those of older gens may know it as "Special Education") needs more funding but absolutely no one wants to give that funding to the specialized care-takers/educators who train specifically for such situations. Definitely some not so PR-friendly reasons for this. It's a mess all around.
My daughter has a genetic condition and needed an IEP. The middle school she attended would not give her an evaluation until we indicated we knew they were legally required to evaluate her and they should consider this an official request.
All my previous requests were rebuffed as they tried to steer her towards a 504 plan (504 is not legally binding).
I had to pay to have her evaluated by a Pediatric Neuropsychologist (about $500, despite my excellent American Insurance). He diagnosed ADHD and referred to a Neurologist who found nothing, but referred to an MRI, which found stroke damage, then we were referred to a geneticist who identified her mitochondrial disease and put us into a Pediatric Developmental office.
Finally we got some resources that helped us navigate the school issues to get her IEP.
It was so much time, money, and effort.
One district in my area has lost like 40% of their school psychologists since the pandemic resulting in widespread use of 5/4ths contracts, expanding case loads, uncovered schools, and offers to do extra cases at piece rates. It's (IMO) trending towards some kind of collapse.
As a taxpayer I hate waste. As a long-serving business owner I accept that some level of waste is a cost of doing business.
There are several problems with the concept of "waste".
firstly it's most obvious in hindsight. It's much less obvious in foresight. We spend money with an objective in mind, and in some number of times we fail to meet that objective.
Take marketing as an example. It costs money to attend an event. Will we get a return? sometimes no.
Of course the easiest way to avoid waste is simply not to take risks, not to spend anything. If we prioritize "avoid waste" we create an environment where "nothing is attempted".
Your suggestion to criminalize this with personal accountability makes things worse. What you'll get is no money spent at all, because the risk of spending -any- money could see you in jail.
Secondly, in order to criminalize waste you need to detect it, measure it, prosecute it, defend it, and so on. None of that comes cheap. So you spend money to save money?
Of course we already do this to some extent. We keep books. We have audits. If we detect waste we might examine it, consider alternatives, learn lessons to avoid it. But that's a long long way from the costs of criminal prosecution.
Thirdly you create perverse incentives for bad actors. Don't like a teacher? Accuse them of waste. You can probably find some cause. Your competitor got a contract at a local school? Be sure to loudly proclaim that as waste because you "would have done it cheaper". Sure you would do a crap job that may have failed in 2 years instead of 20, but who's to say?
Send a few teachers to jail - does that increase or decrease the likelihood of people growing up wanting to be teachers?
So yeah, I dislike waste. But preventing waste comes with a price, not just in money. Be careful in what you choose to optimize.
> every student that leaves the public school and takes their little chunk of funding with them
Is this a state thing? In California, I don't get to stop paying taxes if my children go to a charter school. Or, am I just not understanding the point you're making re: "funding?" Are charter schools not also public where you live?
You lose a head at your school, you lose funding for that head. Some heads are more expensive to educate, like special education students, but the state gives you the same amount for each head. So as a school, you might want to keep the cheaper to educate heads and get rid of the more expensive to educate heads.
But if, theoretically, there were a way to count students, and also a hypothetical way to count money, someone might draw a correspondence between them?
Eventually school districts do close schools that have emptied out as kids have gone to charter schools (source: spouse is on school board and they are closing public schools because kids have moved to charter schools)
[0] I strongly disagree with the conclusion that, if government-run schools have excess capacity, then we should prevent charter schools from being opened or expanded.
Any source for this? My understanding is that most states have criteria for what needs to be taught in a primary and secondary school, regardless of public or non-secular. In my experience (attending, touring, friends who are teachers), the non-secular schools had higher standards.
"concentrating behavior issue and IEP kids in public schools"
Public schools in many areas are increasingly doing this by sending G-IEP to entirely separate schools. Indirectly, they are also doing this by increasing school population. Smaller communities tend to better self-police. The biggest issue is the lack of appropriate involvement followed by the lack of leverage the school has. In some areas, some non-public schools even get district IEP resources for their IEP students, so they aren't all avoiding it.
The combo of more and more parents who work all the time and/or have delegated parenting to YouTube and mobile devices, plus charter schools (1) moving a chunk of non-IEP kids into more non-secular schools with lower standards and (2) concentrating behavior issue and IEP kids in public schools are basically rotting things from the inside out.