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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

I believe very strongly in equality of opportunity, and the liberal tendency to zone everything to prevent development and keep out the poors is a glaring example of hipocrisy. I don’t know if charter schools are the answer, but certainly letting the family choose where to stick their education dollars could alleviate the vast difference in K12 education that keeps the “9.9%” in continuous power.

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> letting the family choose where to stick their education dollars could alleviate the vast difference in K12 education that keeps the “9.9%” in continuous power.

Could you elaborate what you mean by this? Wouldn't the best course of action to give each school the same funding based on the number of pupils, and additional funding for troubled areas in need?

A K-12 student's performance correlates strongly with the family's wealth [1], and interacts with several other factors like race category, stable home life, and the low incidence of everyday violent crime. If rich people successfully exclude poor people, which can be done with legal price mechanisms instead of illegal discrimination, public school performance remains high.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/04/29/upshot/money-...

Even without price there are other mechanisms - accumulation of rich in specific places by word of mouth alone... where the influence and money is accumulated and applied.

We see this even in primary education even in Europe, even in non-private schools. Then there are extracurriculars which take money amd time...

A typical person out of place won't be able to keep up.

This is an interesting observation. Basically freedom of association, like many freedoms, is working against equality. I'm nowhere near the 9.9 percent, but it unnerves me to think about restricting someone's basic freedoms even if it benefits me.

Also it strikes me as odd that we focus on relative wealth fluctuations. Shouldn't we be more concerned about the number of people who can't afford basic necessities? If the poor are getting poorer, it seems like we should be concerned about that regardless of the performance of the rich. If the poor are getting richer but less slowly than the rich, isn't that still a good thing, or am I naive?

Personally, I don't need to keep up with the 9.9%, but I'm content if my family's fortunes keep improving.

Correct. This is doable but the pushback is likely to be immense.

Not to mention such a programme is quite expensive and you will have to forcibly appropriate wealth in some forms. And probably introduce major savings too.

UBI potentially would work on this, the question remains if you'd buy of masses politically that way. That could be the end of republic as is known.

I’m not even advocating for any program in particular; just curious why we are laser focused on relative wealth metrics when absolute metrics seem more significant.

I think that we should let students from poor towns go to awesome schools in rich towns even if they aren’t residents of the rich town. The wealthy self-segregate by limiting low-income housing in their area to keep out the poors.

Similarly I think it should be easy to create a new school (charter or whatever you want to call it) to compete with bad schools in poor districts.

But even without option 2, option 1 would be great. Would also let rich kids interact with poor kids which will benefit everyone.

It is not just this. Pulling strings without separating out housing is enough.

If you build a new school it will still start or with the segregated out "worse material". The only way out is indeed to forcibly randomize and disperse - Even then there will be local social clustering.

I don’t want to forcibly do anything. I want to unshackle market forces to solve the problem in a better way. Don’t ban poor people from your town. Don’t create a monopoly on local education. The rules should forcibly ensure competition rather than forcibly control how people live and get educated.

In US, each school district receives money proportional to their students, with some places raising money via levys or bonds in their district. It takes a long time to make new schools. If people could go to any school, you'd overwhelm some districts with tons of students and you can't just make a new school in a year or two, it takes a lot of time for the district to figure out they'll need one long term, raise the money, make plans, build and hire teachers. So this would just be a disaster in the say 3 year time frame.

I think a major reason some districts do better than others is that wealth of the parents is highly correlated with educational attainment of the parents and the children. It's not that the big city schools just generally suck, they have many more problems to deal with, one being older infrastructure but also a lot more poorer kids, and less parental contributions.

Being in the Seattle area, every school district is overloaded, and is struggling to plan and build new schools, and has lots of temporary buildings (aka trailers) that they have some classes in. It's true on the east side, the more wealthy side. And on the wealthy east side, it's far more conservative politically than Seattle; compare Seattle to Bellevue, Kirkland, Redmond, Issaquah. Those are still moderate to liberal cities, but as an example Issaquah has a republican US Congressman, Reichart. These places are pretty strongly supportive of keeping the public schools the way they are.

OK, so build low-income housing in rich districts (unless you are saying the presence of poor kids destroys the good school) and stop using zoning to limit what kinds of residences can be built (lot-size, multi-family, building height, etc.). In the suburb of Saint Louis where my wife grew up, each lot had to be at least 1 acre, and had to be single-family. Given how expensive it was to live there, realistically the only properties that were profitable to build were McMansions. Amazing school district though!

Rich can and will move. You would need exorbitant force to keep them.

What is your proposed means of oppression to not make them move?

Next, even if housing is mixed, rich can pool resources and start smaller scale private schooling. Results in Japanese model.

You will have to prevent it by force as well.

It doesn't take much to outdo people who are preoccupied trying to make ends meet and being distracted with better education amd more attention.

I think we'd be better off if poorer people were not concentrated, of course today it's economic concentration or discrimination that makes it harder to equalize things. Not only am I lucky to live in a good school district for my kids, but people in my more wealthy area are much more willing to support school levys and donate money and time.

There is some lower income housing, but in a boom town like Seattle you get a second negative impact on poorer people, which is displacement through rising prices of homes and apartments. Poorer people have to leave because they can't afford rising rents. Their old neighborhood starts to get more of the better educated people who could help the local schools with their background and money.

It's not impossible to go up, but it feels like it is harder. In my family, my grandparents were both some of the first people to go to college during the great depression, with basically no money. They came from tiny high schools but managed to make it.

The reason housing is so expensive is that there isn’t enough housing, supply and demand. If you allow developers to build housing commiserate with demand, the prices don’t get to SF levels.

The easiest way to unshackle market forces would be to ban the state legislatures from mandating the public schools' particulars.

And "forcibly ensuring competition" doesn't seem like this is truly unshackling market forces. Unlike the free market there are genuine community-wide positive-sum benefits to oligolopic cooperation between schools.

I disagree that it's segregating or done on purpose, but it is deeply unfair that the price of a good "public" education is being able to afford the real estate in that catchment area / school district.

But it's ultimately the high price of the real estate in that area that makes the schools good. We live in an economy where intelligent academic achievers do pretty well. So expensive areas are highly skewed toward intelligent academic achievers. Guess what kind of children they have...

I remain skeptical of that part. There are, however, plenty of cities in the US where the school district boundaries are drawn very precisely to enable the imposition of property taxes that support the schools. It becomes a sort of private-public school, in the sense that all the homeowners in the district pay extra and those schools have sports teams and labs and orchestra and field trips that the kids on the other side of the line can only dream of.

(This is impossible in California, however, because the property taxes are set at the county level and school districts have no control over their own funding.)

Having grown up in Los Angeles, I can tell you that the best schools there are also in the wealthy neighborhoods, despite the funding issue you mention not applying in California. And that's because the children of wealthy people have the genetics and culture to do well in school.

"This is impossible in California, however"

Oh no it's not. Plenty of rich neighborhoods in California have, or have tried, to split out their own district from the larger, more heterogenous district.

> I disagree that it's segregating or done on purpose

Here's a random article which shows that often it's done on purpose: http://hechingerreport.org/wealthy-towns-able-secede-higher-...

In my experience people who want charter schools want one of two things, either to send tax money to a religious school, or to destroy the public school employees. There's a lot of actual knowledge and infrastructure behind running a public school. It's sounds appealing that you can do better than some terrible big city trouble-bound public school, and we should all strive for better educational opportunities, but the charter schools consistently show now benefit and generally worse results than public schools. And that's not from lack of funding from the billionaire class. For example, see https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED528633.pdf. That seems pretty settled.

I think a more productive question is what can we do to help under-performing public schools. My suggestion is more funding to help the kids from underprivileged backgrounds catch up. That includes free breakfast and lunch, food to take home on the weekends, pre-K education, more resources for the school including reducing class sizes.

When they create those new charter schools, they "compete" entirely on test scores. But no-excuses drill-and-kill for test scores is exactly the opposite of what's offered to the children of the elite, who get time to play and experiment, develop creativity and social skills, participate in arts and music, all in a non-restrictive environment.

I have no comments on how the charters are run, which is why I use them only as an example. I just think it's a tragedy that if you live in a district with a terrible school, with no capability of moving, your children are screwed out of an education.

You have more power to influence public institutions than you realize. In my city, we organize, attend Board of Education and PTA/PTO meetings, volunteer, raise money, lobby, write letters to the papers, and vote. We had about 400 people at the last Board meeting protesting a school closure. We'll never be a wealthy district, but an immense amount of energy is going into staving off "terrible."

Why would charter schools solve anything? Serious question. Letting rich people decide where to best educate their children already happens.

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