I went to public school as a kid and the disruptive kids were expelled. Not just kicked out of class - totally kicked out of school and told to find a new one! One reason I send my kids to private school is if you don’t want to learn they will kick you out. In public schools today you get a few bad kids and it ruins the whole class. This is a big reason why teachers are quitting en masse from public schools - they are behavioral consultants rather than teachers. The pay has always sucked - it’s the lack of ability to discipline bad kids that makes it miserable, and then parents blame you for everything when you just want to teach math and go home.

It seems obvious to me (since the experiment is repeated over and over within millions of families) that environment plays a major role in behaviour, but tbh I don't see good behaviour rubbing off onto the 'bad' kids in a mixed setting, it's almost always the other way around, or at best, a productive environment is disrupted by a few troublemakers.

So 'good' kids should get an environment free of disruption so they can do what they do. And the 'bad' kids should get an environment much more focused on encouraging good behaviour, so they learn to do the good stuff too. Win-win.

Proactive parents will typically want their children in good schools, regardless of their child's behavioural history. (This doesn't mean they refuse to acknowledge the issue, though some will. It simply means they want their children to have access to better supports.)

There is an overarching philosophy within the school system that integration is better than separation. I don't know if this has to be the case, but it has been historically true. Think of it this way: even though some of the best teachers may want to serve the most challenging schools, good teachers almost always want to teach in good schools. Where does that leave the challenging schools? If they're lucky, with a great teacher. More often, with a bunch of mediocre teachers.

Related to that, schools rarely have the resources to distinguish between students who would benefit from integration and those who would benefit from specialized and separate programs.

In some ways, the 'best' teachers should be assigned to the 'bad' kids, certainly those with the best command of a class. The 'good' kids don't need that so much.

I don't think it's fair to Black or female students to equate their integration with the "integration" of students who are specifically disruptive.

Why wouldn't this apply to private schools especially because in that situation parent's have financial leverage?

Edit Another comment said that private schools have an incentive to provide a good service otherwise people will take their money and leave. I want to temper my statment about parent's changing schools because

1. Unlike grocery stores or gas stations how many schools would be within reasonable distance where a parent could easily change.

2. "Customers take their money and leave" doesn't seem to happen that often with every other business. It's a constant theme here where we complain about the general public continuing to use substandard products. Yes it's a serious product (child's education) but factor in my points.

3. Changing schools could be traumatic for a child because they made friends, comfortable with teachers, familiar with the school. School isn't where you buy gas or go to the gym. Children are young AND emotional, stability is probably ideal. This means parents don't have as much leverage as I first stated

4. What metric do parents use? Grades, bullying?

If grades schools will have a financial incentive to inflate more than public schools. Public schools and private both have standardized tests, however a report card from a private school is a subjective judgements from the teacher that the parent will use as a metric

If bullying and a parent complains once should the other child be expelled? How does this system work? What if there are no witnesses, bully denies it. What about verbal abuse, what if no one hears it?

If private schools start expelling bullies why aren't they required to teach children like public schools. Charter schools are supposed to be about a parents choice why should a child, bully or not, have less rights especially since they receive public money.

The boys school had a good reputation and would have engagement with the local schools via sports and dances.

I don't get the mind reading. Why? It's like we read completely different posts.

Kids have more behavior problems and remember things poorly when they're hungry.

Kids that don't have a stable housing situation struggle to focus in school.

Kids with untreated medical problems struggle to focus in school.

Kids with absent parents (like a parent that tries to work multiple jobs) struggle in school

Kids with parents in unstable relationships (poverty screws up relationships and forces people into suboptimal relationships to combine resources) do poorly in school and are more susceptible to abuse

Kids that are the victim of abuse struggle to focus in school.

Hey you guys remember when in the 80s we convinced all the women that it would be empowering and freeing to start slaving away as a corporate drone and that would be the best life for them, that kids didn't need 2 parents at home?

Isn't it great how that panned out.

EDIT

To be clear I'm not saying women shouldn't be in the workforce, but the fact of the matter is that at some point they convinced us all we had to have 2 parents working and that's when things went to hell. It was great for a little bit while everyone was making a bit of extra cash, but basically what happened was the supply of labor doubled, and when supply goes up...

I wouldn't attribute a lack of home stability to women empowerment. A lack of home stability is often caused by poverty. A poor mother cannot afford not to work, cannot afford suitable environments to raise her children while she works, and must make difficult decisions regarding proper nourishment/safe place to sleep/access to utilities/physical presence.

Until near the middle of the century running a household of as too time intensive for most women to go off to work.

Nannies and maids were generally unmarried, childless women.

I’m the early 20th century only 5% of married women worked outside the home in the US https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-history-of-womens-wor...

Also only about 7% of children lived with single mothers in 1900.

Whether you intended to or not, it is exactly what you were saying.

When my daughter was born, a coworker asked if I hope she'll be a programmer one day, and my answer was that I hope not; I want her to be able to stay at home like her mother, and if she can't and has to work some corporate job, that means I will have somehow failed her. If she wants a job like mine, then again I will have probably failed her somehow.

The causes and solutions are not as simple as "these kids are bad, kick them out of school", but any solution needs to involve kids who aren't disruptive and WANT to learn getting an environment conducive to that.

> The causes and solutions are not as simple as "these kids are bad, kick them out of school", but any solution needs to involve kids who aren't disruptive and WANT to learn getting an environment conducive to that.

But it might not be that much more complicated. It's been a long time since I've been in school, but in our district there was an "alternative" high school, which had a reputation among the kids as the place you'd end up if you were too much of a behavior problem.

That said, the kids at my schools were well-behaved in class and I never knew of anyone specific who was expelled.

If behavior problems are getting more widespread, maybe embracing more of an explicit containment strategy is appropriate.

The complicated part is the "why" of their behavior, which can range from an antisocial personality disorder, to not getting enough attention at home.

Sadly many of the cause of behavior problems is from systemic issues like poverty, or poor mental health services across the country.

The bottom line is that neither the kids nor the teachers want to, or deserve to, deal with the byproduct of other failed systems.

The failed systems should be fixed, and services provided to these kids to the extent possible, but OUTSIDE of a classroom setting.

The cost of past failures can't be borne by the students and teachers in the public school system.

You can have specialized people look at the "why" after you remove the disruptive (some times dangerously disruptive) person from forced prolonged contact with innocent ones.

It's certainly very good to look and fight the causes; as it's important to give the people chances to go back on track, and protect them at that new environment too. But forcefully submitting everybody else to them is just horrible.

- a terrible kid was constantly given presents from a teacher, chocolates, and small things she could give him so that he would stop misbehaving in class. normally these prizes would go to a single student every day, for merit, but once this terrible person kept getting them, everyone else became pissed and demoralized.

- the young kids copy the teachers behavior, and it creates this culture of "they have a harder life than you" when trying to complain about the terrible students in their vicinity (which i completely disagree with, they're not trying hard at all that's why they get like this), so when terrible people bully decent, kind, and hardworking students, there's no sympathy for the hardworking students. they get treated like shit and abused from the future-criminals who do nothing but degrade the experience of everyone who attends, then they get told "get over it, you have everything" by their peers who for whatever reason weren't bullied, and refuse to help. its cult-like behavior

- you also have kids who are way too old for their grade, by at least 4 years. someone who should otherwise be way ahead of the classroom they're in is 2x the size of anyone else, is a literal delinquent, and is for some reason still allowed in the public school system where they either terrorize their classmates, get them into their same terrible habits, or bully people who express any kind of discontent with their behavior.

If only disruptive kids were expelled instead of placated MANY of us might have had a better education.

The next year I was at the private school across the street. Suddenly I wasn't a problem child anymore there.

I had already been taught algebra at home by first grade. I was in the "gifted program" in public school and the curriculum was still boring and slow. Teachers lasered in on my boredom and made my life miserable despite (or perhaps because of) being able to answer anything. I thrived a little more in private school in part because the children were on-average smarter but also because instead of the school treating everyone like they were special and going to save the world (and rewarding only the kids they liked) they taught children the value of group conformity and not being the nail that sticks up.

That seems like an awful lesson to impose on children. "Keep your head down and don't do anything to attract attention. Go to your grave having spent your life hiding among the faceless crowd".

Shitty teachers that play favorites won't not exist in a private setting. Shitty teachers that demand abject compliance from students to soothe their egos won't not exist in a private setting.

It sounds like a bored student was disrupting the education of 30 others, so teachers punished them more than the other students? They should have probably kicked you ahead a grade if you were so far ahead of your peers, but that would require someone in the situation to attribute your behavior to boredom rather than mere defiance. Did your parents not suggest such a thing? Was it not an option for some other reason? It sounds like a change of environment brought you away from old grievances and that the increased coursework gave you something to do. It's completely possible that a grade skip in the same school could have done the same.

It's a crucial survival skill. You learn when and where in your life to apply it. The "lesson" is that the whole world doesn't revolve around you. Please keep me away from the karens that _haven't_ yet learned that about life.

> It sounds like a bored student was disrupting the education of 30 others, so teachers punished them more than the other students? They should have probably kicked you ahead a grade if you were so far ahead of your peers, but that would require someone in the situation to attribute your behavior to boredom rather than mere defiance. Did your parents not suggest such a thing? Was it not an option for some other reason? It sounds like a change of environment brought you away from old grievances and that the increased coursework gave you something to do. It's completely possible that a grade skip in the same school could have done the same.

Most of my time in that school was fine, I just got unlucky one year and got a nasty old tenured b* of a teacher who decided from day one that she hated me and directed constant negative attention towards me. I just wanted to be left alone. I had had 5 consistent years at that school already without problems, but she was besties with the principal. Later on in her career she got rubberroomed by the school board, so I don't think the problem was me here.

>The "lesson" is that the whole world doesn't revolve around you

These strike me as very different things.

Teaching kids to remain grounded, respectful of others and how to live within an existing system is one thing.

The former sounds like teaching them to avoid garnering attention at all, which is quite another.

I've read about cultures where standing out, for good or bad, is socially punished. "The tallest blade of grass is the first to be mowed down". I would not want us to foster such a culture here.

I could agree with "don't stand out for the wrong reasons".

>Most of my time in that school was fine

It doesn't seem this has much to do with the debate between public and charter schools at all. Just a poor experience you unfortunate enough to have gone through.

Between my experience and the data I would say it comes down to class and gender, but maybe in the reverse order.

In my primary school education, both public and private, there was a pervasive and often oppressive favoritism towards the girls in just about all situations.

We've been starting to see the results of this in the data for the last couple of decades where men have worse education outcomes by a sizable percentage.

In reality, it did not actually work this way. I did get into at least one fight where administration got involved, and they let me off the hook. (Neither of us got suspended, in fact.) In my own view, I 'started' that fight although I did not 'instigate' it, not that the difference matters much. Some kid in line for PE kept kicking the back of my shoes, and after the fourth or fifth time, I started punching him.

Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, I don't know but I have to at least consider that a few innocent kids getting suspended unfairly for being attacked might be worth it if it prevents more attacks that escalate further.

You could even argue the opposite, that if you're going to get suspended for being attacked you might as well try to bite their ear off and go down fighting, but no one does, they just focus on the innocent kid getting suspended.

On another note I highly suspect residual trauma is a reason for teachers having issues with parents, and schools with willingness to fund. The tree remembers and assumes the worst of teachers based upon their own experience.

But I would suggest that in a debate over whether or not it's a good idea to punish children who are innocent (e.g. being attacked in a one-sided "fight"), the onus is on you to demonstrate that there are benefits to the approach, not on others to demonstrate that punishing innocent kids, or people in general, isn't a bad idea.

Kids being unfairly punished for being attacked encourages more attacks, though, especially if it is punishing all participants regardless of role in a manner that is less of a punishment for the kind of people who would be inclined to attack and more of a punishment to those who would not.

What is it with education that makes people so willing to internalize well known Fascist values?

Acceptance of that thought is common; of collective punishment is common; blatant repression is advocated everywhere. If you take the values of a common school and try to apply them to adults, you will get either punched away or arrested.

I categorically oppose "zero tolerance". It removes judgement, ignores context. It's a strategy for bureaucrats to absolve themselves of responsibilty.

But I actually don't know if it's better, worse, or indifferent. If it proves a net win, I might change my stance.

Please share if you find any such research. Thanks.

It is so wrong for adults to fail to protect children who want to learn simply because they want a facade of feel-good egalitarianism.

I agree that keeping them in general education is bad too, though. A caring society would take that kid somewhere with specialised staff that will help them work through their issues.

Home life should be addressed by child services, etc. Granted in reality they are often as understaffed or as incompetent and corrupt as any other government service, but at least that's their mission. School teachers should not be doubling as social workers.

But underfunding is a big problem whichever way it's structured, and I of course agree with you that it's not something you can just say "this is the responsibility of the teachers to do on top of their existing responsibilities".

The problem is the selective and performative guilt:

Why don’t kids who have a terrible home life, but are studying diligently to better themselves and improve their lives equally deserve our help?

We need to have structures that can address this behavior in a way that fosters societal integration. This "spillover" might not be a problem given proper staffing... but a 1:25 ratio is never enough to handle problems and never will be.

For this same reason I've always hated (since a kid) the way anti-drug education has been presented to children. It's not taken seriously and doesn't present the reality of how prevalent drug (even prescription) use is among adults in society. It doesn't treat prescription drug use, alcohol, nicotine or caffeine abuse with any weight whatsoever and doesn't prepare children for the reality of having to deal with people who are on drugs.

Are people with a pattern of disruptive, dysfunctional behavior allowed to be present in your workplace?

Is this something you would see as desirable to experience, for the same reasons you've given that children should experience it?

Yes, actually. The standard to fire people is high and HR wants these people constructively managed out rather than fired. This is incredibly common in large corporations.

Had a bad hire once that abused an entire engineering department for 2 years while they had no responsibilities and did no work until they were finally bored enough to quit.

These are not gotcha questions. I'm honestly trying to understand your worldview here.

If you get expelled _by a public school system_ you may not have another option.

My worldview is that all kids have the right to an education, regardless of how "manageable" adults interpret their behavior. "Disruptive children" are more often a failure of the adult to meet the needs of the child. Also they're children. They haven't learned how to behave like adults yet. Expecting them to do so is cruel.

What if most people don't want this type of education? Are they wrong? Do you have the moral authority to force it on them?

Never dealt with them again once I left high school. Not even any close calls.

That shit's like living in a war zone. No one sends their kids to a war zone so they can "learn to survive". No good lessons exist in a war zone, not even in between people stepping on landmines or getting pulverized by airstrikes.

All that exists in such a place is a bunch of trauma, and yes, debilitating/mutilative injuries, for those that somehow manage to get sneak back out of them.

Bullying is like this too, though obviously to a lesser degree.

I strongly suspect that most people get their ideas about what bullying is from the same half-dozen made-for-tv movies and other narrative fragments thereof on the subject.

It's not just the constant picking and poking that bullies do, it's the way they make the entire school environment like a prison yard. You never know when someone is going to do something to you, or how a teacher (guard) would react. Teachers exacerbating the problem because, while powerless, they mostly threw up their hands because they were not allowed to send the student out of the class.

Public school in America is, in a word, prison.

It wasn't the only way that schools were like prisons, just the most uncomfortable of those. We can be honest now, we're well distance from it at this point.

> You never know when someone is going to do something to you, or how a teacher (guard) would react.

Did you ever have any of the teachers join in? Not just decide that it was your fault, but to actually pick up on the name-calling and contempt? When it happens during class, that's the cue for everyone else to join in too, even those who'd always be too timid.

But pretty much the whole administration does this in more subtle ways, you know? For me, this happened on the school bus more than anywhere else. I was in second grade, they were in highschool. An hour's bus ride to school every morning, an hour home each afternoon. Bus driver was an old asshole of a curmudgeon and from his driving I doubt he could see 6ft in front of his face (let along 14ft back through a mirror). When my mama went to the administration to try to have a stop put to it... they threatened her with me being thrown off the school bus. We lived in a rural area, she didn't have a car at the time. The implication was that if/when I missed school, it'd be truancy. She'd be arrested, I'd be put in foster care.

You know, me. The second-grader who is a troublemaker just provoking the 16 yr olds into beatings, into having my clothes torn and stained with god knows what, into having my hair snipped off whenever my head was turned.

I can't even tell anyone about this shit. No one believes me. I don't believe it myself. My memories seem like lies to me.

> Teachers exacerbating the problem because, while powerless,

Sounds alot more like "only following orders" to me.

As to how 18 years of being forced into a small room with them helps prepare you for that, I hope you'll enlighten me.

No, all it does is make sure that any child with a bad home life has no future. Sure, it solves the "problem" of making one teacher manage 30 kids meaning one kid can DDoS the system but it does that by ignoring it all together.

Mom's a teacher, and "bad" kids LOVE her because she's extremely good at her job. Those bad kids pretty much universally just need attention because they get none in normal life. There are still occasionally young psychopaths but they generally do get expelled at some point. Otherwise most bad kids would come do their homework in her class because she was basically the only adult in the building they respected. She was literally "just" a french teacher but because she understands what it means to be a teacher she was an intervention for many a "bad" kid.

You want one bad kid to not spoil the bunch? Stop making undertrained, underpaid "teachers" without even an education degree oversee a class of 30 kids. How good could one person possibly manage 30 adults, let alone kids. Stop hiring glorified baby sitters because that's all you can get for $30k a year in salary. Stop treating teaching like a disposable profession.

Teachers can be bad and do have the capability to pick on children. Having these kinds of outcomes totally allows a teacher to single out a child they don't like and wreck their whole life.

Adults are intentionally victimizing the majority of students to cater to their own shallow virtue signaling.

There are scenarios in life where we're all in this together and excising people for their inconvenience isn't what's best for society.

You don't just cast off disabled people into the void, for example. Unless you have a solution for where to put these problem public school kids that isn't juvenile detention, I don't want to hear it.

We're talking about children here. They don't know how to behave like adults yet. Cutting them out of society where they fail to meet expectations is cruelty.

I think you misunderstand what a zero-tolerance policy is and how it's applied. There literally is no tolerance. There is no nuance to them. If an incident is reported they are required to take action. There isn't a decision-making process past the point of the incident being reported. Everyone involved and any witnesses literally have to keep their mouths shut.

You say children should learn this, and then you say that this is because they will have some new capacity for empathy they wouldn't otherwise have.

I see no reason to believe this proposition is true. What if instead, when they learn this, it just makes them more vulnerable to various kinds of dysfunction themselves? What if, even if learning about this is a good thing, it's only a good thing when they're well on their way to adulthood?

You have no real evidence of cause and effect here. Just a lazy asumption. "But when I learned of this, I immediately had intense feelings of empathy!" doesn't mean much because you're not even a single data point, but an anecdote. Self-reported. And not a young child.

> or caffeine abuse with any weight whatsoever

This is coming from someone who would legalize heroin, cocaine, and meth and sell it from liquor stores: no one ever sucked cock in the alley behind the pawn shop for a hit of caffeine. It's not in the same category.

Public education is like Lord of the Flies. There is no room for empathy, only survival.

They should learn by being subjected to the effects of their dysfunction? I honestly don't grasp this strategy. It's like saying that we should learn that some people are psychopaths by going to live with them..

Is that really possible in the US? IIRC, the government has a mandate to educate every child, including those that are extremely developmentally disabled (which is why special education is such a huge item in school budgets). If a kid is expelled from school, wouldn't the district be legally required to find some alternative arrangement?

Despite being treated as such, schools are not day cares, and parents still have some responsibility for the upbringing of their children. If the kid misbehaves enough, it is on the parent.

In places with mandatory public education, parents suing the district for not providing education for their expelled child are likely to win.

I don't know what the answer is, but "all children are owed a public education and in fact we'll arrest their parents if they drop out" and "public schools can kick children out" are self-evidently not compatible policies.

That's not all we're doing. We're also protecting an entire classroom of children from disruptive behavior.

If it's gotten to the point where we would consider expulsion, then some of those children, or their families, likely find that disruption so intolerable that they themselves would need to arrange transportation to far flung school districts. That's why so many underprivileged families are desperate to get their kids into charter schools.

As I keep trying to point out in this comment tree, people seem to have learned that it's morally appropriate to talk about only one type of victim here. I don't agree. I think it's morally necessary to always discuss both the disruptive child and the classroom they are disrupting, always in the same breath.

If you want to argue it's a better distribution, or that there is some reason to believe expulsions will push "problem children" to smaller classrooms on average, then fine, but absent those arguments it's very clearly worse for the student and their parents but not better for anyone else (or rather, it's maybe better for specific other people, but also worse for yet other ones, and on average no better for anyone).

Changing behavior requires pressure and people generally do not like it when they notice it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEA_2004

All a parent has to do is ask for an individualized education plan, IEP, and a public school will have to do a metric ton of cover your ass to be able to expel a child.

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED495879.pdf

The Republicans only had a slight majority. And after a change, the bill passed in both chambers almost unanimously.

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/108/hr1350

On the other hand, federally legislating that local school taxing districts provide services costing $x and if they do not, open up local taxpayers to litigation of $y where x and y are quite large is…something else.

How is a poor school district serving poorer taxpayers supposed to provide expensive IEP for every problem child and/or collect all the evidence to expel them, and at the same time provide quality education to well behaved kids?

Some aspects do give me pause.

Such as Any regiment which makes things worse. We're all just guessing; people need to be empowered, so hopefully they can muddle thru things.

Thresholds need to be obvious and ruthlessly enforced. Not fuzzy and optional. (eg If a student assaults a teacher, insta removal, to never come back. And so forth.)

Alas, forging these kinds of rulesets, and then sticking to them at scale, is all but impossible.

Also, most people blathering about public education are repeatedly proven worse than wrong. (Including me.) So am deepyly skeptical of fixes and silver bullets. I insist there's at least some existence proof before supporting any reforms.

In a dorm the week before finals, 90% of the students are urgently trying to prepare for finals.

10% are drunk and or high and playing frisbee in the halls 24 hours a day.

From friends who have taught high school in poor neighborhoods the situation as similar, only more violent.

You could conceivably create schools composed entirely of the kids who got expelled from somewhere else, which I think some districts have actually done (continuation schools), but you're effectively creating a juvenile prison system for people who didn't commit any actual crime and definitely never got a trial.

During covid, someone observed that it exposed the primary role of public schools to be day care.

I was raised by a single mom who worked a million hours and didn’t have a baby sitter when I let myself in after school. Don’t see how “working too many hours and being stressed” is a new phenomenon because most of my extended family is poor and have always been. My mom told me not to steal and don’t be an obnoxious asshole in school, wasn’t exactly rocket science.

The lack of discipline from the parents, mentors, and teachers early on is why the State has to do it later. Discipline is not orthogonal to 'help'.

…and does that work? Recidivism rates would suggest otherwise.

Somehow, that part of medicine never makes it into these “alternatives” — which makes claims of “systems thinking” or “crime as disease” sound like shallow pretenses for performative virtue rather than legitimate considered policy.

All I'm saying is that it's pretty obvious jailing criminals is incredibly expensive and not particularly effective at reducing future crime.

And replace it with what?

Some of these exist to some degree already. Some of the issues are systemic and not just related to those in prison. For example, the decline of real wages over the past 50 years and the rise of barriers to entry for many things (renting, jobs, etc) has made it difficult for lower skilled individuals to succeed. If you feel you have no hope in the system, then you will be more inclined to act outside the system.

None of this is an excuse for someone to break the law, merely an observation that the current system might not be maximizing societal benefits but rather too focused on punishment alone.

I've seen irate voters at town meetings upset that tax dollars were being using to pay for books and tutoring for inmates, let alone mental health counseling. As a country the US is incredibly far off from the mindset of prisoner rehabilitation. We treat prisoners like animals, and for some reason are surprised when they keep acting like animals.

Now in admin hes some kind of teacher manager and he had teachers come to him, sometimes physically crying, unable to deal with a child with a behavioral problem. His says 99% of the time these problems are corrected with a single phone call to the parents. Just one call but no - young teachers these days don't have the guts or social wherewithal. So his job is now teaching adults how to make phone calls.

Another thing to realize is a lot of these kids do respond positively to teachers when they show them that they care and aren't there to simply baby sit and yell at them. He has had many students come to him later on thanking him for breaking their balls and setting them on the right path. Kids aren't stupid - they want respect but are treated like little monsters to be corralled and controlled like cattle.

Showing the kids you truly care is incredibly powerful for them - it connects at the human emotional level and those positive interactions boosts the kids moral and they feel more confident or centered in life.

Some would argue that disciplining is helpful in many cases. Proper disciplining is not just punishment but should include an explaination of why what they did was wrong and what the right thing to do is.

Kids having discipline is a slightly different topic, but can be partially built through the process above.

This is a very difficult problem to solve and people will often support the stick and complain that someone doesn't deserve the carrot. Everyone needs both.

Other public institutions outside the school system need to be in place to support the parents who are stressed and overworked and barely have time to parent.

And their right to be helped stops at the line where they're causing harm to the learning of others.

Discipline in schools isn't and cannot be about holistically reforming the problem kids, it's about making sure those who want to learn can.

You can't dump the entirety of systemic poverty, racism, mental health, etc. on the education system and expect it to work well.

Since they are a for profit enterprise, unlike public schools, wouldn't there be a financial incentive to have as many customers as possible?

In one particular area what is the reason a charter school would be better than a public school. Since the entry factor for most (excluding schools for smart kids) is money why wouldn't the same problems occur at a charter school? Finally, why can't we just fix public schools?

"Finally, why can't we just fix public schools?"

That's a good question without a good answer. Perhaps the best answer is the meta that people don't agree on the course of action that would "fix" the schools since there are numerous opinions on what that is, resulting in no action or half measures.

Uh, because more customers will leave if the private school is no better than a public school.

> we are thinking about spending an enormous amount of time, effort and money on a major overhaul of the education system when we don't have the data to tell us if what we'll spend will wasted or, worse yet, if we are to some extent playing a zero sum game.

... well, do we have the data now?

Seems to me the "education system" keeps having the same debates over and over; surely "data" isn't at issue here? From an outsider perspective it seems like all sides to any debate feel free to make up any data and any reinterpretation of existing data they need, in order to support their position of the day.

> First off, this is an observational study, not a randomized experiment. I think we may be reaching the limits of what analysis of observational data can do in the education debate and, given the importance and complexity of the questions, I don't understand why we aren't employing randomized trials to answer some of these questions once and for all.

People miss that the primary interest groups that are lobbying for private schools, that are arguing against public schools, are for Religion. They want to be able to teach the bible as fact, not teach evolution, to allow prayer.

By syphoning public dollars, into private schools, they are bypassing the separation of state-church.

This then takes dollars away from public schools, which then struggle. Then the awful state of the public schools, is used as an argument for more private schools, and thus more religious schools.

Eventually the population wont be able to think in scientific terms anymore, logical reasoning will be gone.

They are taught about world religions, evolution, have chapel twice a week and allow prayer. It’s also the best school in the entire state. My kids go there because it's a great school.

There are a lot of anti religious scare tactics used to push people off of vouchers.

The reality is that the only people with true choice in school selection have to either be able to afford private school, afford to move to a house zoned for a better school or afford to have parent who can facilitate a home school group.

Voucher proponents want everybody to have all choices available.

So Vouchers do not have all choices available: Having a voucher doesn't guarantee acceptance to a school. And depending on your voucher legislation preference, you aren't going both force all schools to accept vouchers and make sure they don't raise prices. Ultimately, being selective is a feature, and therefore prices will go up, not unlike how easy student loans for colleges help raise prices. The top schools will eat the entire value of the voucher in cost increases, or just refuse the value of the voucher if they can't.

You are right in the fact that really, most people in America have to pay for the good school district, either straight up in cash, or in significant increases in home costs. I've seen 30% drops in home values as, within the same district, the line of who got to go into the 'good' public school changed. Vouchers probably make the school choices far more explicit, and might lead to less housing segregation. But they sure aren't going to make all choices available to everyone, any more than I can choose to marry a supermodel, or own a private island.

That's what we were taught. Including the inferiority of evangelical Christianity. i.e. belief in Christ as a deity and your redeemer, isn't good enough to get you into heaven. You have to do good works.

I have every confidence religious schools teach the superiority of their religion. With a white Jesus on a cross. It's not Jewish and Muslim schools pushing for public money without strings attached into private schools. It's Christian schools.

Well maybe there will come a time once again when folks understand Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptists, from which we get the wall of separation between church and state phrase. It is in the letter from the Danbury Baptists we see what they were worried about. It wasn't Jews, Muslims, atheists, or anti-religionists. They were worried about the Danbury Congregationalists.

Christians are not on the same page, is an understatement. They really aren't all on the same book either. It's impossible to promote them all the same. And they will not and should not permit dissimilar promotion.

The only sane solution to preserving freedom of religion is to also preserve freedom from it. The government must only promote secularism. Everything else is playing with fire.

There's nothing about vouchers that prevents the creation of secular private schools. Religious schools that you have no choice but to attend are very, very different than religious schools that your parents choose for you because they think it's the best place for your education.

A possible work around is the state donates $x to each registered religious organization in that state. Every group gets an equal amount.

John Rawls "veil of ignorance" thought experiment applies here.

You need to look at the inverse of this though. If people want to be able to ensure that people without the financial means to participate cannot attend, all they'll need to do is attach a religious label to the school and that will ensure that the funds aren't able to be accepted. Creating an exclusivity by proxy.

The other issue is the assumption that public funds aren't supporting any religion already. This is a loop hole by claiming that a religion doesn't have an actual deity and therefore is exempt. Meaning, you can teach anything you want as long as there wasn't a deity involved.

Mindfulness, for example, comes from Buddhism but is widely encouraged in public schools. It's only allowed because it doesn't claim a deity. The "Church of Satan" goes out of it's way to claim they don't believe in any god. Hedonism goes back to the days of ancient fertility cults that were typically associated with some type of idol worship, but as long as you don't publicize the idol it passes the "no deity" test.

The "veil of ignorance" definitely covers use cases along with this. There are a lot of parents who are very aware that belief systems are being taught in schools, deity or no.

That is the problem. Why not make public schools better? Why is everyone else at a disadvantage. If our focus was on putting funding into 'all' schools, not just 'rich geographic locations', then everyone could be educated.

It isn't about 'Choice', it is about everyone getting a minimal education.

If you want to 'choose' to indoctrinate your kids into your particular religion of 'choice', that can be done at home. But everyone should learn the old Reading/Writing/Arithmetic.

It'd be nice if you could explicitly define how that would work. I can understand some ideas not working 100% of the time, but throwing money into black holes where nothing comes out is an insult to taxpayers.

Baltimore [City] has been the clearest example. I believe we're around $25k a head in a seat so far there. At what number specifically do you think all that gets turned around? $50k? $100k? If you can't answer that, why should anyone give a shit about what you think is good for society, demanding everyone pay into ponzi schemes like Baltimore? If you refuse to answer that, then you are out of your depth completely and you have no basis for making or influencing policy decisions.

It's far too easy to use other people's money and then wring your hands about not getting the results you advertised.

edit: [City] need to discriminate between Baltimore county and Baltimore city here since there may be eventual confusion on school system ratings

Yes? That's how things work everywhere in the world.

I'd like $50 billion and the biggest yacht in the world, I don't plan on doing anything to get either of those things, so magically, they will appear to me as soon as I walk out the door in 20 minutes.

> but you can take one cherry picked example from Baltimore to justify turning the US into a Taliban style theocracy?

I don't think I addressed religion once until just now, so this is coming out of left field to say the least. But since you want to be hyperbolic about things I never said, I'll imagine your ideas are no more than theft and money laundering.

I suppose that's the end of this discussion.

Think this is the old “I Require more proof from you, than I provide” argument.

No, posting an entire policy and implementation plan to reform the education system, is not commonly done in internet arguments with trolls. Neither have you provided any detailed analysis of your point. I venture to say, the rest of the world does NOT make their policy decision based on something posted in an online argument.

Because you can’t feasibly make public schools better. There are too many entrenched players and layers of bureaucracy.

> If you want to 'choose' to indoctrinate your kids into your particular religion of 'choice', that can be done at home. But everyone should learn the old Reading/Writing/Arithmetic.

Afaik charter schools are already obligated to teach the minimal set required for standardized testing.

People have tried. The problem is the governance structure that creates a race to the bottom. It's not a question of funding anymore.

The reason that private school is so successful? It's run by teachers. People who have gone to school, received training and degrees as professional educators. Not only are they able to get together to talk about new techniques, figure out the best ways to teach and improve what they do, how they teach, what they think is important to teach...but they also have to convince parents that the school is the best place for their kids to be so there's a natural balance factor in play of "teacher collaboration", "parental buy in" and "is it actually working for my child"?

What sold me was the tour we did when my son was getting ready to start K5. Everything looked great on the tour of course. I was happy with everything that I saw, but then I started asking questions.

This was during the time that common core was being rolled out everywhere and I was seeing my friends with parents of older kids talking about how students who were previously getting straight A's or perfect scores in math were suddenly getting bad grades because they were getting the right answers the wrong ways. They were turning into stressed out, anxious basket cases who hated school. That system was being thrust on everybody so quickly by careless governance that it was causing chaos.

The dean's answer? "We also use common core here, but we decided on that a few years prior after our teachers researched it and decided it would be best. It was gradually implemented over 4-5 years and parents were communicated to about the changes along the way. The entire process was very smooth."

That sold me. We actually live where we live because it is zoned for a good public school. The option to have a school experience for my kids that wasn't going to be disrupted by dramatic changes after every election was more important to me. I wanted a stable elementary school experience and we planned to move them out to public in middle school.

Then Covid hit and the school handled things much better than public schools did for those 2 years. Now we're on to high school and the political climate is just about the strangest it's been in my lifetime with so much politics aimed at school boards, so without ever planning to there's a good chance that they'll continue here for high school too.

The educational factors are important, yes. It's a rigorous school. But the stability factor is more important. My kids love school. I didn't when I was a kid and I'm very thankful that they are in an environment that gives them that.

The religious aspects for me are good, but they would get most of the same in church. But I do like knowing that the same values we teach our kids are being modeled in their daily environments.

"But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law." - Galations 5:22-23

Is this what you want to teach your kids. Search Stoning, literally can't get through the day without being stoned. This is how we become Ameristan.

---- Did you work on Sunday? Dead

Exodus 31:15

"Six days may work be done; but in the seventh is the sabbath of rest, holy to the LORD: whosoever doeth any work in the sabbath day, he shall surely be put to death."

---- Little Victim Blaming, Dead

Deuteronomy 22:23-24

“If there is a girl who is a virgin engaged to a man, and another man finds her in the city and lies with her, then you shall bring them both out to the gate of that city and you shall stone them to death; the girl, because she did not cry out in the city, and the man, because he has violated his neighbor’s wife. Thus you shall purge the evil from among you.

------ Pretty Harsh - we'll be killing a lot of people to comply with this law. Dead.

Leviticus 20:10

“If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death.

---- No Bad Words, or you are Dead.

Leviticus 24:13-14

"Then the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, “Bring the one who has cursed outside the camp, and let all who heard him lay their hands on his head; then let all the congregation stone him."

----- Wave the bloody Sheet or, Dead.

And father fined.

Deuteronomy 22:20

"But here is the proof of my daughter’s virginity.” Then her parents shall display the cloth before the elders of the town, 18and the elders shall take the man and punish him. 19They shall fine him a hundred shekels b of silver and give them to the young woman’s father, because this man has given an Israelite virgin a bad name. She shall continue to be his wife; he must not divorce her as long as he lives. If, however, the charge is true and no proof of the young woman’s virginity can be found, 21 she shall be brought to the door of her father’s house and there the men of her town shall stone her to death. She has done an outrageous thing in Israel by being promiscuous while still in her father’s house. You must purge the evil from among you."

------- Women are property, and the Bible lists a price sheet. Rape is just fifty silver shekels. Not dead, but now married because you were raped.

Deuteronomy 28

"If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, 29he shall pay her father fifty shekels c of silver. He must marry the young woman, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives."

----- Some Sexy Times

Ironically, the least offensive thing here.

Ezekiel 23:19-21

"There she had longed for her lovers. Their private parts seemed as big as those of donkeys. And their flow of semen appeared to be as much as that of horses. You longed for the time when you first became impure in Egypt. That was when you allowed your breasts to be kissed. And you permitted your young breasts to be touched.”

Have you read it to understand it or just pulled excerpts?

If you’re looking for a reasonably quick path to that, you should check out “The Bible from 30,000 Feet”. It’s a great companion.

The Bible Recap podcast will also provide you with a lot of study, guidance and insight as you read over the course of a year.

I often advocate that Christians should read the Bible. For two reasons,

1. Most Christians advocate/believe things that are not in the Bible and if they are going to so passionately drive the country off a cliff, they should at least know what is in it.

2. Reading it kind of cures them, there is no 'atheist' argument against the Bible that is as strong as just reading it. Read all the parts that churches cherry picks around. Actually reading it will cause most people to realize they don't believe it.

Christianity was viewed as a 'mystic cult' from the beginning, it is almost 'pagan' in its beliefs, which sounds strange today. But seeing a group chanting and talking about Democrats being possessed by demons and thus we need a war to kill them, it all looks very much like a bad horror movie.

-> It really is an argument for why religion should NOT be in politics, because politics is messy and the religion is then tainted by the politics. By being involved in politics the religion is diminished.

If you really want to spread the word of Jesus, then how is politics helping that, unless you are doing it for control. Look at me, I'm open to trying to understand the Bible, but if all I see are evangelicals talking about demon possession, and the need for guns to fight a holy war, and chanting around the president, that is not helping spread the word. It's the opposite, they look crazy and scary.

2. I had the opposite experience. I was an atheist/agnostic (and an angry one at that) for about 8 years. Then God changed my life in a manner so direct that it left me with no doubt at all. I read the Bible over 3 years to understand what happened to me and I helped a lot. Then I started doing studies, joined a Sunday School class, a men’s Bible study and even guest taught a few lessons. I was greatly encouraged to find that I was allowed to disagree with people during Bible studies and we would all learn together. This blew away all my misconceptions about church in general. I always assumed everybody agreed about everything. That’s not the case. Everybody is there to learn. The more you study, the more you can contribute.

If you’re curious, I blog about it at https://www.readnotmisled.org

As far as politics, the biggest thing people push for is the freedom to live without being forced to do what they believe is wrong or to have their children forced to participate in things that violate their faith. I can’t see any problem with that.

Guess why this subject gets heated is because Christians do tend to think their freedoms are infringed upon by others having freedom. Like "other people being allowed to be gay, infringes upon my freedom to not allow gays to exist". (gay as just example here).

That is the problem with Religion. If my holy book tells me that something is evil, and I truly believe that god is real, and this book is divine, then now I'm duty bound to go fight evil, even if it is not infringing upon me in anyway. I now must go out and stop it, and take away others freedom.

Pick any hot button issue they are fighting now, and it is very Cherry picked. All of the passages against being gay also include not eating shellfish, so where is the outrage over seafood restaurants?

I think a closer look at all of these issues, Christians are not being forced to do anything against their beliefs, instead they are actively taking away others freedoms. Lets say you do have a religious based food restraint, is there really a school somewhere tying kids down and forcing them to eat it?

In all cases, the need for religious schools is NOT to prevent kids from doing something against their religion, it is to allow them to practice their parents religion while in school, it is to purposely to keep them from knowledge, so that the message they receive is controlled.

Christians are so indoctrinated in the belief that they are the meek, the victims, that they feel justified in fighting anybody that does not believe like them, then prostrate about being the 'victim'.

In any case. It is good to hear about positive experiences. Just seems like for the typical 'user' of the text, the Bible leads more people astray, than it does leading them to any realizations. There are more wrong paths, than paths to your type of experience.

EDIT Other good example, super hot button: Prayer in School.

But, NOBODY in a public school is forcing kids to pray to the 'wrong' god'. It is Christians actively wanting to force everyone else 'to pray'. You say you don't want to be forced to do something, but this is explicitly a case where that happens, Christians want to force others to pray, then turn around and act the 'victim', because they can't force others.

And understand, in the last post, those are just some examples. Like recently, 'gay' is no longer the hot topic it was 10 years ago, now Transphobia has taken its place to fire up the religious base. So not sure the bible quotes apply. (It can get confusing, there are legit genetic disorders why victimize them?, and if a woman is infertile, is she still a woman? The religious split hairs in each case and get backed into a corner)

Not to open a whole new line, but the intersection of Religion and Technology(not science) is maybe problem. Like Blood Transfusions, some sects say the bible doesn't allow them. Or invitro fertilization is not allowed. The bible doesn't really have specific opinions on these new things, they are just shoe-horned in.

Don't know. Every Christian Sect has some interpretation. Really, on both sides here, my side too, the arguments are old. Really hundreds of years old, with many notable names.

I do say and mean this, if Religion helped you, then good, if it is something that helps you get through the day and cope with the world, then good. I'm all for people finding some solace. Just keep it private. It's only a problem when someone has a meaningful experience, then gets fired up to make everyone else see it too.

> They are taught about world religions, evolution, have chapel twice a week and allow prayer. It’s also the best school in the entire state. My kids go there because it's a great school.

I also went to a private christian high school and it was all that you say here. However I also remember many very rich, ultra religious parents that ousted three principles over religious horseshit while I attended until my latin teacher became Principal and told them all to pound sand or go somewhere else.

I also went to a private catholic elementry school. While it was good at the time, recently it's falling apart. The church has distanced itself from it, attendance YoY is falling, and it'll likely close in the next few years. However unlike a public school, these private schools can close and lean on the public system to catch all of the students they shake out. Unlike the private and charter schools, the buck stops at Public schools.

> The reality is that the only people with true choice in school selection have to either be able to afford private school, afford to move to a house zoned for a better school or afford to have parent who can facilitate a home school group.

Charter schools kick out kids as well, so all of these problems apply to them too. The only purpose of charter schools is to make their lobbyists (like Bill Gates and Betsy DeVos) rich by siphoning public money like defense contractors. All this talk about Charter Schools is about Options for students/parents, but nobody is talking about who is Obligated to those students, parents, and the tax payer. When a charter or private school closes, it dumps its students into the pubic system [0].

> Consider City High School in Los Angeles, California, which received a $575,000 grant from the federal government. The school had barely started its second year when it suddenly closed, leaving 116 students scrambling for a new school. Similarly, a charter school in Wilmington, Delaware, received a grant of $350,000 but closed just five months into its first school year, forcing 206 students to look for a new school.

> The Acclaim Academy charter school chain in Florida received grants of $375,000, $175,000, $175,000, and $19,198 for its four schools. One never opened, another was taken over by the district due to financial concerns and mismanagement, and the two other closed suddenly with no notice, in the middle of the year, leaving students, some of them seniors preparing college applications, searching to find new schools.

Then there is the low attendence and fraud.

> The report locates much of the blame for this waste of taxpayer money on the Department of Education’s practice of awarding grants to states with few rules and virtually no accountability. Often, grants were “doled out to individuals who had no credentials or experience to open up a new school,” according to the researchers.

> The report also identified a “pattern” of charter school operators—even before their school opened—funneling money from grants to their own personal accounts, to purchases of expensive equipment, and to “for-profit consulting and education management organizations” that do not publicly divulge how they spend money. The report concluded that, due to these practices, the charter school grant program “has become a magnet for grifters, consultants, and charter entrepreneurs who see an easy way to cash-in.”

The kicker:

> When members of Congress repeatedly referred to those findings when questioning Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, she dismissed the findings as “political.”

History is littered with corpses and bailouts. At the end of the day, it's all about privatization of public institutions for private profit.

It's also an open secret that private schools rose as a response to desegregation [1] [2].

Privatization is cancer.

[0]: https://progressive.org/public-schools-advocate/new-report-w...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segregation_academy

[2]: https://southerneducation.org/publications/history-of-privat...

> Private schools may have a long, honorable tradition in America that goes back to colonial times, but that tradition ended—at least in the American South—in the last half of the 20th century when they were used as safe havens for Southern Whites to escape the effects of the impending and ongoing desegregation mandates. This exodus from public schools began in the 1940s, when private school enrollment in the 15 states of the South[1] rose by more than 125,000 students—roughly 43 percent—in response to U.S. Supreme Court decisions outlawing segregation in graduate and professional schools in the South.[2] While the decisions only concerned institutions of higher education, it signaled to watchful Southern leaders that desegregation might soon spread to their public elementary and secondary schools, compelling them to react in ways to defend their way of life.

> By 1958, the South’s private school enrollment had exploded, increasing by more than 250,000 students over an eight-year period, and boasting almost one million students in 1965. This growth was catalyzed by Southern state legislatures, who enacted as many as 450 laws and resolutions between 1954 and 1964 attempting to block, postpone, limit, or evade the desegregation of public schools, many of which expressly authorized the systematic transfer of public assets and monies to private schools.

> During this time, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) vacillated in its allowance of tax deductions for private schools. In the early 1960s, facing growing backlash from civil rights organizations, the IRS temporarily suspended applications of avowed “segregation academies” for federal tax exemptions, a tax status permitting taxpayers in Southern states to reduce their federal taxable income when contributing to racially exclusionary private schools.

> As the IRS trudged along with implementation of non-discrimination policies and went back-and-forth in a series of proposed administrative procedures and Congressional hearings, private school enrollment in the South continued to grow. What was once the South’s 11 percent share of the nation’s private school enrollment had reached 24 percent in 1980.

But after 9/11, trillions of dollars got funneled to Christian nationalist groups loosely aligned against Islam and diversity in general, who wouldn't have otherwise received that money, that work tirelessly to underline American values like the separation of church and state that you mentioned. Now whole generations have been raised under an MTV that doesn't play music videos. It seems like it's the same, because we have reality shows and influencers and people who are famous because they are famous. But it's not the same.

Private school is not the same as public school and it never will be. I would even go so far as to say that it misses the point of education altogether. Like a for-profit church or hospital. Privatization is making America a caricature of itself.

They’re not “siphoning public dollars” as some third-party cabal; members of the public are choosing to allocate their dollars (in benefits) to what they believe will be best for their children.

Edit:

It’s not “siphoning” because the allocation is made by the beneficiary of those funds, who is choosing their preferred service provider. There’s no diversion of funds: they’re being utilized by the intended beneficiary in the manner they deem to best suit their needs.

That’s in contrast to traditional school systems, where funds are diverted by administrators to engage in politicking unrelated to education.

Edit 2:

I understand that many people are upset the beneficiary of a public benefit is allowed to make their own choice of service provider. People that in their wisdom, they know better how other people should run their lives!

But it’s indisputably the case school allocations are to benefit the student — the intended beneficiary. Admit you’re in a huff because you’re being told you can’t control what other people do with their benefits.

You’re like people yelling candy shouldn’t be allowed with SNAP/EBT funds. Next you’ll be yelling about “muh welfare queens!” or whatever.

Everyone in my area pays local taxes, whether they are parents or not, including businesses; the bulk of these local taxes are allocated to fund schools. Most of us don't want our taxes going to charter schools or religious schools, and I'm tired of entitled parents siphoning from the system and leaving everyone worse off. If you want to make changes, fix the rules under which schools operate and allow disruptive kids to be expelled.

It’s as much theirs at it is any other citizen’s.

> entitled parents siphoning from the system

Very loaded choice of words.

Parents who feel entitled to what? A quality education for their children?

> If you want to make changes, fix the rules under which schools operate and allow disruptive kids to be expelled.

Foisting the responsibility on individual parents to push huge political changes through seems entirely unreasonable.

Thus "siphoning": common public moneys being used to pay individual interests. If you want a private education for your kids, go right ahead and pay for it, don't ask the rest of us to subsidize you.

And yes, we all want a quality education for all children. Make schools better for everyone, not just the entitled or well connected.

This is old school Conservatism since before the founding of the country. There is no convincing conservatives that they have any obligation to the public. Money is a means to separate themselves from the public. There's a lot more in common here with feudalism than anything modern or enlightened.

I'm willing to bet more often than not, any expulsion should be applied to the parents. i.e. they are the problem, and the kid is acting out. Punishing the kid has long been a proxy for punishing parents. A more sophisticated system identifies this and gives more (with strings attached) privileges and responsibilities to problem kids. Not in every case. But certainly don't have policies that increase contact between problem kids and bad parents. Where are they learning most of their coping mechanisms? Get them away from bad influences as much as possible.

Guess it depends on the state.

In my state, public dollars are literally, pulled from public schools, and given to private schools, which can then teach religion as fact.

How is that not 'syphoning'?

The responsibility is to provide a minimum education standard. Teach logic, science, math, reading. Give all kids equally some minimal ability to function.

Why do some kids get choice and others do not?

If a lot of parents choose to indoctrinate their kids to be Scientologist, that would be wrong wouldn't it? That would have negative consequences for everyone.

What about teaching them that honor killings if they have sex before marriage is ok?

Even the bible teaches if a women cheats, she should be stoned. Is that where we are going with our 'choice'? What if a large portion of the population 'chooses' to stone women because that is what their school taught where their parents 'choose' to enroll them. At some point that changes society, and that is the goal of the religious right in promoting private schools.

If the Taliban choose to teach stoning, it's Evil, if Christians do it, it's 'Choice'?

How did we get to a point where people are ok with tossing out the separation of church and state?

People are willing to die for the second amendment, but really like cherry picking everything else.

Well, in the case of school vouchers it would be is the point, and thats ok.

With regards to paying your local fire department, it would be impractical to try and get people to "choose" which fire department to be covered by. Fire department vouchers wouldn't work.

But with schooling, it very much is possible for parents to move their children between schools, therefore a voucher/charter systems works quite well.

> The responsibility is to provide a minimum education standard. Teach logic, science, math, reading. Give all kids equally some minimal ability to function.

Yes, it is good to provide those things. But that is the bare minimum. There is lots of room for additional schooling choice that go above and beyond teaching the most minimal necessities.

EX: If some parents want their kids to focus much more on intensive science or technology schooling, thats fine.

Morality is beyond laws, in a sense, and you might think "immoral acts" is more proper. I don't feel like going down that rabbit hole, but I felt I had to mention it.

The problem is when teaching that immoral acts are 'correct', that they are actually 'moral'. As in 'I was just taught that stoning was a valid response to cheating, hence I can feel moral in stoning someone'.

I think you are wrong that Morality is beyond law. If morality can shift based on how you were raised, and then people do want laws to reflect their morality, a society can get to a point where stoning is ok with the law, is legal and moral.

The dance of which morality is correct and should be enshrined in law (I think anything that is "clearly" immoral should be prohibited by law as a 1:1 mapping; the law is therefore a reflection of morality) is not one I like to partake in. Even if we all agree to discard current major religious beliefs around morality, there will still be many points for people to disagree on. Some people will be very left out and others slightly; that's what I meant by "morality is beyond laws". There is an inherent impasse that arises at this junction.

There is definitely a problem with splitting hairs on finer and finer points, until everyone is subdivided, until each individual has their own religion, their own morality. No two people are identical, and it is also impossible to force or convince everyone to be identical, thus there is always something different to disagree on.

So all arguments on religion are really fruitless.

I guess I come back to, how to get to a best common good. And in todays US, there is such a wide split between people, that there is also a wide range of things where there could be compromise to have a better society. Every difference is a chance to find a solution.

So how do we get to commonalities if kids are indoctrinated (brain washed) from an early age. Religion blocks progress, because if someone truly believes in their god, then they wont compromise. Then there are religious wars, persecutions, inquisitions, etc... And sadly, the US is moving that way with the blurring of the split between state and church.

We don't have to agree on all points of religion to make progress, we just have to agree to some basics like maybe treat everyone equally, don't beat up trans kids. Religion should be taught in the home, not in the schools. There should be a lot of room to come together before we get to an impasse.

The 'left' is trying to do good, make things better, 'to progress', and they are clueless that the 'right' is actually in a Holy War without compromises where anything goes. It's an un-even fight. This country went to the moon, I never in a million years thought we could backslide into religious dogmatism. So, all of this arguing in this thread that religious schools are ok, is really not looking at history.

The profit motive belongs far far away from education.

While there is certainly self-selection occurring here, it would be a mistake for policy makers to dismiss the problems with public schools as just being due to that. They should introspect instead of seeking excuses.

Why is having competition among public schools, with parents having a choice as to which to send them, so bad? It doesn’t make any sense.

That is, I believe, misrepresenting the problem. Rather, it's more like

> It's fine for the small subset to self-select among many private schools. Apparently it’s only a problem when the masses similarly have choices.

And that makes sense, because 0.5% of people/funding/etc being taken out of schools isn't a big deal... but 20% starts to make a big impact.

Public schools in NYC spend yearly twice per child what the cost is for the average private school in the city. ($38k vs $19k). And on the private school side of the equation that average is skewed upwards by a minority of very expensive ($60k/yr) schools.

If you're spending more money for worse results, we SHOULD divert funding to better-performing alternatives.

The data doesn't really say this. Two things to know about education:

- A large percentage of school outcomes are dictated by home life. Interviewing parents or just picking from the population of people who can afford $20k a year allows you to pick from a higher achieving cohort.

- Private schools don't have to provide the same level of services to children who require additional care. This is a significant cost saving. Most schools I've worked at had multiple staff dedicated to the care of just a handful of children.

This is a language immersion school. Kids with IQ of 50 and lower are getting no benefit.

But siblings go there to so the parent doesn’t wanna make two stops.

My wife’s class was mostly shutdown for 6 months because she got six special needs kids and her kindergarten class at the beginning of the year. A mix of non verbal, Violent and or extreme low IQ.

It took that long to go through all the legal processes to get them moved to the proper rooms. She had quite a few injuries from it all. Lot of parents were unwilling to admit that kids had any issues.

Plus a lot of these issues were not caught in preschool since the pandemic had those shut down.

It gets worse. I've seen multiple staff dedicated to a single child, and not the sort of child you would think needs that much. It is mostly behavioral issues that result in some kids needs near-constant dedicated staff.

And we had plenty of braindead but normal kids too. Their parents paid out large donations to get their useless children passed through school and at least an attempt to educate them.

Examples: https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/new-york-lowers-bar-...

Meanwhile major cities have the highest per pupil spend for public schools, with frighteningly poor outcomes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/03/30/bal...

Fix K-12 schools (no, more money on bloated administrations is not the answer), and the need for affirmative action goes away.

Charter schools create duplicate systems with duplicate costs, reduce funds available for traditional school students in sending schools, and are a waste of taxpayer resources. When students leave traditional public schools for charter schools, the traditional public school is unable to reduce costs in proportion with the loss in per-pupil revenues. Students in public schools are left with fewer resources.

1. Engaged parents.

2. Social Norms that normalize learning behaviours.

Parent's can control the first directly and the second indirectly by "choosing" a non public school option or moving to a district that has the proper norms.

Charter schools are one of a class of escape hatches that less advantaged parents can choose in order to impact the second factor for their child. I strongly believe that these escape hatches should exist for the Parents who can't easily move or choose a private option. Improving education outcomes for the children of those parents who do care requires giving them tools to support their children whether the environment itself does or does not.

It seems unfair to force those parents to fail just because their community is failing around them.

Have we learned this? I don't remember a single time in my life when teachers were generally considered fairly paid.

Charter schools are a mechanism for opt-in flexibility within the public school system to enable identification of generalizable improvements; if there isn’t systematic evaluation and feedback into the broader system, that’s definitely an issue, but (unlike vouchers, which are low-accountability subsidies to nonpublic schools), that’s what charters are for.

it also increases the divide between rich and poor (https://www.seattletimes.com/education-lab/do-charter-school...) all while taking resources away from the public system setting it up to fail more while also removing all incentives for politicians to fix it (their kids go to the private schools)

here is a video going into charter schools and showing a number of rather negative outcomes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_htSPGAY7I

Not to mention in time you’ll just get charter school mega corps that don’t have too compete.

private prisons are not Goverment granted monopolies and that has gone horribly wrong.