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

#111

Post by lsc » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 4:40 AM UTC

lurker19 wrote: post #72

burgerbrain wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Efforts must be made to eliminate systematic biases in standardized testing. When we are reasonably convinced that has been done, as far as I'm concerned it's all just how the cookie crumbles. Make sure that you're acceptance policies are merit based, and damn the consequences.

Merit-based access to education is an extremely debatabe proposition. Should a quality education be limited only to the already brilliant? Is it a better outcome to make a high-potential kid very well educated or a medium-potential kid basically educated? Remember that both become voters in a democracy. West Wing had a nice conversation about this with regard to Affirmative Action beteen the black intern and the cons…

I don't know. My own educational experience? it was a waste of time and money. I stuck with it through highschool graduation then got a .com job (that 'required' a college degree) right away. I'd be measurably more wealthy now if I had left when I passed the equivalence test a year and a half earlier and worked another year during the boom. (I graduated and got my first .com job in '97-'98, so I didn't have long to grow into a position that would last me through the crash. I mean, I made it, but judging from how my salary was going before and after the .com, I'd have entered the crash with another ten grand a year in salary, which would help, 'cause I stayed employed, but my wages didn't move at all for a few years after the crash.)

So yeah, I feel like I got negative value out of my public school experience. But, my mother was a teacher; and she taught me to read and supplied me with books. Without reading as much as I did? I would have gotten nowhere. My dad? mid-level IT manager. My step dad? a computer programmer. I had access to computers from the age of three, programming environments, and parents who would help me learn about that shit.

My experience would indicate that the children of people who don't have valuable skills to pass on to their children would benefit much more from a public school "education" than I could.

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

#112

Post by Daishiman » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 4:41 AM UTC

va_coder wrote: post #92

william42 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You want the Federal government to fix the school system?

Works in many places in the world.

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

#113

Post by zeteo » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 4:41 AM UTC

wnight wrote: post #108

zeteo wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I'm not purporting that "falsehood is never wrong" (you meant "never right", I suppose). In context, I was talking about falsification of records with an intention to obtain educational benefits otherwise disallowed.

So falsehood is okay when midwives save infants' lives, but not when teachers educate them?

It's not OK to falsify records in order to get into a better school without paying extra; look at the original post, that's what the argument was about. Taking a subsequent phrase out of context and stretching it to bring in baby killing is not exactly adding to the conversation.

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

#114

Post by ojbyrne » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 4:44 AM UTC

anamax wrote: post #99

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…

> 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 groups. Actually, it's pretty easy to escape that "fact" because it simply isn't true. Yes, there were some covenants like that, but they were relatively rare. And, most of the housing stock is newer than that, so even if such covenants were somewhat common and we…

I was mostly with you till that Canada/Minnesota comment. Perhaps Minnesota is exceptionally diverse...

Because Canada is very definitely more diverse than the US.

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

#115

Post by zeteo » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 4:54 AM UTC

mcherm wrote: post #106

zeteo wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Under certain circumstances, Yes. Would it be moral, do you think, for a parent in Nazi German to lie when asked if their child was half Jewish in order to prevent the child from being taken away to the concentration camps? In my mind, it would -- and it would be a good lesson for the child: that truth is LESS important than saving a human life. Now suppose that the situation were more starkly clear-cut than it is he…

If the only justification for doing something illegal is that sometime during WW2 someone might have had to do something similar in order to escape Hitler, I'd say that's a pretty weak justification. The continuum you suggest does exist, but it's a very lopsided distribution in this case.

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

#116

Post by astrec » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 5:11 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…

Tragically it's an excellent predictor, but his rationale for believing it so and subsequent gross generalisation is extraordinarily ignorant.

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

#117

Post by rdl » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 5:21 AM UTC

mckoss wrote: post #102

rdl wrote: post #86

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; com…

Why not use a lotery? I don't see why any public district shouldn't be available to any state resident. What would be the rationale for any preference to residents or district workers? Any other policy serves only to preserve the inequality of the education offered between districts.

They're funded locally, not by the state (in most states). There's just as much of an argument for a national lottery as a state lottery, if you want people outside the funding area to have an even shot of coming in.

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

#118

Post by nasmorn » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 5:36 AM UTC

This reminds me of how european peasants could not move to a different parish then the one they were born in unless the priest would accept a transfer.

The land of the free. Free to move to any trailer park in the whole country.

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

#119

Post by bzbarsky » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 5:50 AM UTC

Permit wrote: post #80

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…

As a Canadian, I'm not entirely familiar with your education system. That being said, wouldn't schools receive funding based (at least in part) on the number of children enrolled at them? I would have thought that would have made more sense than taking a percentage out of the incomes of the residents in a community and funneling that to the school. The point I'm getting at is Ms. Williams-Bolar pays taxes. If schools…

School funding setups differ wildly in the US.

There's a mix of local funding, typically from property taxes (which is independent of number of students enrolled), state funding from state general revenue, and sometimes federal funding. In some school districts, specific school levies may also be passed as sales or property taxes; these may be time-limited to pay for infrastructure or ongoing. The mix of all of the above varies from state to state and school district to school district.

The real estate tax funding takes a percentage of the home values of the residents in a community, not a percentage of the incomes, of course. That said, the percentage is typically not fixed.

Furthermore, the state funding formulas differ from state to state and are not time-invariant. They do tend to depend on number of student, but not necessarily kind of student (e.g. students in special education programs may or may not get more funding).

Note that "depend" doesn't mean "determined by"; in Massachusetts, for example, state funding per student depends on how much money the school district is putting in from its real estate tax base and on the per-student spending in the district; the formula is somewhat complicated but the upshot is that the richer districts get _more_ per-student state funding. Yes, this is way backwards, and isn't even the most screwed up thing about school funding in this country...

In any case, in many school districts the bulk of school funding in fact comes from property taxes on the residents of the school district. That's the whole issue in this case: Ms. Williams-Bolar was not in fact paying property taxes in the district in question.

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

#120

Post by timtadh » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 5:54 AM UTC

zeteo wrote: post #113

wnight wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So falsehood is okay when midwives save infants' lives, but not when teachers educate them?

It's not OK to falsify records in order to get into a better school without paying extra; look at the original post, that's what the argument was about. Taking a subsequent phrase out of context and stretching it to bring in baby killing is not exactly adding to the conversation.

Agreed. I used the passage not to equate the two but to illustrate moral issues are not always straight forward. I personally am not sure that lying your way to a better school is the right approach.