I am so totally in favor of this concept, and think it should be extended to other public goods and services.
For instance, I can see that we should have “nice” roads, funded by everyone but only used by those people who are “engaged” and keep their cars in tip-top shape, well maintained and clean. And how about we have a “rigorous” police force, funded by everyone but keeping people who are civilly “engaged” better protected, while we have a different police force for everyone else in case they also need help sometime? And when someone does better themself, perhaps there can be a way they can “move up” to the better force? Of course if the “better force” isn’t truly better then they should fail and be shut down. Crime statistics would probably be very important in making these choices.
I can certainly see applying this idea to so many things: fire departments, zoning laws, snow removal, parks and recreation, EMS and so much more. I wonder why we don’t do that, and only try to improve education by creating a separate class for certain people? It’s a mystery.
That was the reasoning behind bussing kids across town to integrate the schools, 50 years ago. People realized that the money and resources follow the white kids, so put white kids in every school to level out the distribution of resources. In Michigan, that drove the “parochiaid” push, to publicly subsidize white kids going to white church schools, rather than going to integrated city schools. Some of us are old enough to remember the working class white people in South Boston rioting over the idea their kids would be forced into integrated schools.
These days “neighborhood schools” is a racist dog whistle for segregated schools.
This piece about parochiaid in Michigan, by the right wing Mackinac Center completely ignores the racial integration context in which the debate raged.
But, you aren’t far off of where education in Shiny-land is headed: good schools for the spawn of the “JCs”, rationed by ability to pay. While the spawn of the proles get “bantu education”, just enough to be able to polish the “JC’s” jet, yacht, and limo, before they are pushed out of school to “learn the dignity of work” at age 14.
The crux of the Finnish system is it is all paid for by national government, there is almost no escaping nor weasling, and extra money is allotted to schools to deal with whatever extra problems need dealing with. They put heavy heavy emphasis on pre-natal care, pre Kinder care, intensive kinder, and everybody up to full speed in grades 1 - 3.
Good grief. We do this all the time. In my first grade class we had three groups to learn to read. Some were faster than others. The slower groups got more teacher time and more attention.
We send some kids to college. Not all. Some colleges are selective in who they enroll.
None of this is un-American. Its being more efficient. Allocating resources where it can do more good.
The idea that all students should be treated the same. That implies we should all learn at the rate of the slowest student. That’s simply absurd.
That’s what should happen. Whichever group you were in, you still got to be part of a class with other students of varying skills - just like life in real America.
That’s actually NOT the idea. The idea is that they are a cross-section of society, not segregated by money.
As a freedom-loving American, I believe the parents can make a choice to PAY for private school. That would free up public resources for, you know, the public.
I have no doubt that if these agencies fail to provide adequate services in their community, other means will be found to fill the need. One way or another.
The consequence to those who find letting the need go unserved is acceptable is keeping “their money” in their pocket, which, in their view, is the preferred outcome.
I’ve sent my kids to two different charter schools (only 1 year each for 4 of them, and none for the fifth) and in my experience, there was no segregation by money at all (nor by race, nor by origin/language spoken at home). These charter schools were widely populated by all sorts of kids, lower middle class through very wealthy. I even noticed some really fancy cars in the carpool line, a Maybach, a BMW i8, and some other nice ones, but mostly regular ones and some old junkers. And some of the kids walked or took the bus (and taking a public bus around here is terrible).
Aside from the year at charter school, my kids have all attended private schools. Now THOSE are generally segregated by money, not always, but generally. In the current high school, many of the KIDS have really nice cars!
That is the idea, I guess. But that’s not really what happens, is it?
Schools are pretty segregated by money, because neighborhoods are pretty segregated by money. The neighborhood with “good” schools will have more expensive housing, to be sure - only people with access to money or important non-money resources (like very good credit or connections) will be able to attend those schools. At at the margins, the parents of more modest means who are just barely able to get in there are the ones who are most willing to devote a larger proportion of their resources to their kids’ education. And because student performance and preparation correlates so well with parental resources and involvement, those schools become better and better.
That’s the existing condition that supports the non-religious argument for school choice. As long as public schools stick primarily to the neighborhood school model (combined with district-level funding through property taxes), and divide up schools based on geography (with a very politicized boundary drawing process that only very dedicated parents have any participation in), public schools will be segregated by money also.
That is what the charter school law in Michigan dictates: publicly funded charters are required to accept anyone the public schools would accept.
This article give something of the history of school voucher proposals, ie state subsidies for private schools, in Michigan. The roots are in 1970, when people saw private schools as a way to avoid sending their spawn to integrated schools. and the state enacted a law prohibiting public funding for private schools.
I had been hearing about this attempt to circumvent voters, and circumvent the Gov, both of which have made clear they are against it, With the new, ungerrymandered, voting districts, the faction advocating for a subsidy program lost their majority in the legislature, so they have no path forward, for now. But they will not go away forever. They will not rest until more money is taken away from the public, and charter, schools, to help subsidize those poor, struggling, multimillionaire “JCs”, who choose to send their spawn to private schools.
True. As noted previously, the kids who are enrolled in charters would be expected to be the ones with the parents who are most supportive of education, hence, the most likely to find a way to get the spawn to school. That being said, I have noticed, in the burb I live in, that, even public schools that offer bus service, have a traffic jam of helicopter parents picking their spawn up. Never saw that when I was in school. We stood out in the rain/snow until the bus showed up. Other kids walked a mile or two home, in the same rain/snow.
It would most likely be the parents who would not get off their backside to enroll their spawn in a charter, that are also most likely to leave the kids to take the bus, or walk.
So, if charter schools are funded by public funds, and they accept anyone the public schools do, what makes them better?
More importantly, why aren’t public schools required to do/provide whatever that is?
The research is still out on whether charter schools outperform traditional public schools. Some studies show that they do others don’t. Very often the studies are not measuring the same or even similar groups of students.
