The Latest Crime Wave: Sending Your Child to a Better School • Hacker News Board

Re: The Latest Crime Wave: Sending Your Child to a Better School

#81

Post by Alex3917 » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 1:13 AM UTC

gamble wrote: post #52

aik wrote: post #15

>> In case you needed further proof of the American education system's failings, especially in poor and minority communities, consider the latest crime to spread across the country: educational theft. I'm not sure if it is entirely fair to single out the education system here (once again), or at least batch it in with "yet another failing". I believe more is at fault here. Unless I'm mistaken, tax payers in a particu…

The problem is that American cities are structured to keep the poor and minorities in nominally independent cities or suburbs that are geographically indistinguishable from the richer areas, but just independent enough to ensure that property taxes aren't shared. It's also hard to escape the fact that many, if not most of these suburbs were explicitly set up to keep out blacks, latinos, Jews, and other undesirable gr…

"just independent enough to ensure that property taxes aren't shared."

This is actually a good thing for everyone, in terms of improving the quality of schools for both rich and poor kids. What normally happens is that rich towns have higher millage, which poor town can't afford. Whereas poor towns tax the big box stores and businesses that tend to be more prevalent. When you combine the rich and poor districts you can't sufficiently tax either the houses of the rich people or the businesses, so the school quality for both declines. This is partly why Florida schools are so underfunded, because they only have 60ish districts for the entire state so they can't properly tax anyone.

Re: The Latest Crime Wave: Sending Your Child to a Better School

#82

Post by JupiterJazz » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 1:16 AM UTC

lurker19 wrote: post #77

delinka wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose the Free Market would make sure that their 'customers' had input into how tuition money is spent. After all, if the government isn't involved and you're free (Free Market, remember) to move your student, then the school needs to cater to your expectations or lose tuition money.

Yeah so it turns out that the education consumer doesn't tend to spend the education dollar on quality education. Consider the current mess in privately-paid higher education. Education is the vegetables on the dinner plate of life. I is a complicated long term investment to make good choices, but those choices have huge externalities. Parents make choices that affect their children (that is an externality) and those…

Don't forget that the for-profit colleges get 99% of their income from government financial aid. They don't have to serve their customers well; they just have to do the minimum amount of work to get the financial aid money.

Re: The Latest Crime Wave: Sending Your Child to a Better School

#83

Post by william42 » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 1:17 AM UTC

pyre wrote: post #71

guard-of-terra wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution is that you perhaps should be making bad schools less bad, instead of making the awesome schools more shiny and then digging moats around those.

Therein lies the problem. How? In general, bad schools suffer from a lack of funding and the political will to do something about it.

The answer is to stop funding schools locally. Until that's done, nothing we do education-wise matters.

Re: The Latest Crime Wave: Sending Your Child to a Better School

#84

Post by zeteo » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 1:23 AM UTC

jxcole wrote: post #76

zeteo wrote: post #66

>Ms. Williams-Bolar last year used her father's address to enroll her two daughters in a better public school outside of their neighborhood. This is not civil disobedience, it's just plain old falsification of records. If she had falsified another crucial piece of information - say, income level on a scholarship application - would Ms. Williams-Bolar still get all of this "end justifies the means" sympathy?

Obviously not. The whole point of the article is that poor, intelligent children do not have any way to enroll in schools that would allow them to excel. Presumably if you lied on the income level on a scholarship application, you would have the funds to send your kid to a nice school but you wouldn't want to pay for it. Note that if you were very poor lying about your income on your scholarship application would not…

No matter how worthy the purpose, falsehood is falsehood. Is it really such good education for your children to demonstrate that lying should be used to obtain the important things in life?

Re: The Latest Crime Wave: Sending Your Child to a Better School

#85

Post by theoj » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 1:26 AM UTC

JupiterJazz wrote: post #73

theoj wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Food companies don't price me out of the market. Car companies don't either. Do you think that you get good nutritious food by paying bottom dollar? You think those nitrates and high fructose sugar and other junk are really good for your health? You think that a low cost diet that lacks "expensive" fruits and vegetables has no impact on your health? The problem with a cheaper second tier education is that it perpe…

There is only so high in quality a product can get. How much better is a $1,000,000 car vs a $1,000 car? They both get you from A to B. Sure one might be a little faster but in terms of function they both perform at roughly the same base. One is for smart consumers and one is for rich people to show off. Keeping the government monopoly in place only serves the interests of the employees and unions of the public schoo…

Wow, the discussion here is really going down the tubes into the land of nonsense.

>> How much better is a $1,000,000 car vs a $1,000 car? They both get you from A to B. in terms of function they both perform at roughly the same base

$1,000 gets me a beat up car from the 1980s that barely works, breaks down all the time and surrounds me in noxious fumes. $2,250,000 gets me a Bugatti Veyron that has a top speed of 250 mph and does 0-60 in under 3 seconds. No difference there at all -- they're quite comparable!

Re: The Latest Crime Wave: Sending Your Child to a Better School

#86

Post by rdl » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 1:29 AM UTC

This is sad -- there is a need to restrict access to a limited resource, but for any individual parent, it's the right choice. The ultimate solution is to improve the quality of the bad districts, but that will take a long time.

For now, I think the best approach is strict enforcement of residency, but three tracks in for out of district students: cash payment substantially in excess of per-student marginal cost; competitive entrance for a limited number of students based on objective merit (not race based, like the PA/EPA system); and children of employees of the district (or maybe of city government in general).

I'd be fine with a parent who really wants to give a child a chance taking a job with the district primarily to get children into the schools. Maybe a second job, maybe part time, but the sacrifice should be made by the parent, not by other residents of the school taxing district. If this lets the district hire people more cheaply, or of better quality (which DOES happen in Palo Alto for just this reason), it's win/win.

Re: The Latest Crime Wave: Sending Your Child to a Better School

#87

Post by rdl » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 1:34 AM UTC

Alex3917 wrote: post #81

gamble wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that American cities are structured to keep the poor and minorities in nominally independent cities or suburbs that are geographically indistinguishable from the richer areas, but just independent enough to ensure that property taxes aren't shared. It's also hard to escape the fact that many, if not most of these suburbs were explicitly set up to keep out blacks, latinos, Jews, and other undesirable gr…

"just independent enough to ensure that property taxes aren't shared." This is actually a good thing for everyone, in terms of improving the quality of schools for both rich and poor kids. What normally happens is that rich towns have higher millage, which poor town can't afford. Whereas poor towns tax the big box stores and businesses that tend to be more prevalent. When you combine the rich and poor districts you c…

There are special cases like Palo Alto/East Palo Alto, which might actually be common. One city has a huge commercial tax base, and fixed institutions (Stanford) which can't move. The other, recently incorporated, has only poor people living in low value housing; no sales tax, high demand for city services like medical and police, and such.

Even if EPA's property taxes were 10x Palo Alto's, EPA would still be a horrible place. The only viable solution is to destroy it -- probably by absorbing it into neighboring cities -- so it would be diluted across a larger tax base.

(Palo Alto actually DID cherry pick certain assets, like a golf course and airport, and rerouted the creek which determines the border to take them as part of Palo Alto, a few decades ago)

Re: The Latest Crime Wave: Sending Your Child to a Better School

#88

Post by tokenadult » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 1:45 AM UTC

My state has a more rational state law. For more than twenty years now, all public schools anywhere in the state offer open enrollment to all students anywhere in the state, up to the limits of the capacity of each school district to receive students.

http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/Academic_Excellence/School_...

Funding of course is based on enrollment.

http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/hrd/pubs/mnschfin.pdf

More students means more enrollment, so school districts make efforts to provide attractive programs that will bring students across district lines. This competition among school districts has promoted innovation in programs and resulted in a fair amount of interchange among students who live in different neighborhoods. For example, the first public school program for "highly gifted" students in our state

http://www.invergrove.k12.mn.us/atheneum.html

began precisely because the offering district knew it could build a program that would attract in new students to the district (which was losing student population because it was in an inner-ring suburb with an aging population). That district enjoyed such success with its program that soon other school districts set up similar programs.

http://www.springlakeparkschools.org/schools/la/la_lighthous...

http://department.services.bloomington.k12.mn.us/modules/cms...

http://www.minnetonka.k12.mn.us/ACADEMICS/NAVIGATORPROGRAM/P...

And the main point is that school districts don't just compete with programs for "highly gifted" students, but also with programs for fine-arts-inclined students, or students who desire language immersion programs (Spanish immersion and Chinese immersion programs are both hot programs in Minnesota), and students with many other characteristics. Some school districts gain almost half of their enrollment from open enrollment, and correspondingly some of the historically worst school districts in Minnesota have lost large percentages of enrollment to families crossing district boundaries to look for better schools. (Minnesota also has a huge number of charter schools, which is a distinct form of competition for publicly subsidized students, but they cannot offer some of the programs that public school districts can.) This competition keeps all districts accountable for providing a good learning environment, and helps change the psychology of teachers and principals dealing with families from one of treating learners as a burden to one of treating learners as an opportunity to be grateful for.

Any other state in the United States could do the same, and a few already have.

http://educateiowa.gov/index.php?option=com_content&task...

http://www.ecs.org/html/offsite.asp?document=http%3A%2F%2Fww...

Re: The Latest Crime Wave: Sending Your Child to a Better School

#89

Post by patrickgzill » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 1:56 AM UTC

potatolicious wrote: post #62

tzs wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What decision? He simple stated, accurately, a fact. How can a fact be racially biased? White and Asian neighborhoods generally generate higher property taxes than black neighborhoods. Schools are largely funded by property taxes. Therefore it should come as no surprise that White and Asian schools are on average better.

His causality is off, way off. That's really the main issue. Both parents here have the same motivation, admirable enough, but one chooses to subscribe to an unreliable predictor for his decision making. A predictor that is toes a really fine line between statistical reliability and outright bigotry. In any case, we know that socioeconomic status is a far better predictor of educational success than race. There is a…

Motivation is not the same as delivering results.

I might have the same high motivation to be an awesome games programmer, but that still doesn't mean I will be as good as Carmack.

I don't fault LoveLinux for his viewpoints, as they are based on his observation; and he is trying to make the best decision for his kids... I think if what he/she had said, was said by Bill Cosby or George Lopez, we would be applauding their honesty...

Re: The Latest Crime Wave: Sending Your Child to a Better School

#90

Post by dredmorbius » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 1:57 AM UTC

zeteo wrote: post #66

>Ms. Williams-Bolar last year used her father's address to enroll her two daughters in a better public school outside of their neighborhood. This is not civil disobedience, it's just plain old falsification of records. If she had falsified another crucial piece of information - say, income level on a scholarship application - would Ms. Williams-Bolar still get all of this "end justifies the means" sympathy?

And no child born of a wealthy suburb with exceptional education ever lied.

As others have noted: there's a fundamental inequity here, often based on years of discriminatory practices and uneven funding. In my book, flouting the law to highlight a social inequity that hurts humanity at large is a good thing.