Comment by teawrecks | Hacker News Reader

Comment by teawrecks | Hacker News Reader

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The article's focus on "parent choice" seems like a red herring to me. Bussing isn't any more about parent choice today than it was in the 70s. Though I'm sure one could easily find anti-civil rights publications from back then trying to make that same appeal to tradition.

The fact is that integration never really happened in the US. The powers that be used arguments like "parental choice" to stymie progress, and we ended up in a good-enough middle ground where the privileged class could pretend something was done, and racism was over. Meanwhile school funding remains directly tied to standardized test scores, creating virtuous/vicious cycles of classism in virtually every city across the country.

The point of establishing public schools was to break the cycle of only the rich being able to afford a good education. IMO the fact that there is such a thing as good/bad public schools means the system has failed. I'm totally in favor of bussing as much as I am the use of online tools like KhanAcademy and subsidized child care.

> Meanwhile school funding remains directly tied to standardized test scores, creating virtuous/vicious cycles of classism in virtually every city across the country.

Unequal school funding is a common talking point, but, on average, the spending per White/Black/Hispanic/Asian pupil is nearly identical. Black pupils receive 105% as much funding as White, or 101% if adjusted to cost of living in the school district [1].

For those wondering how this is possible, when school funding is tied to property taxes in the district: It's because roughly half of school funding comes from state budgets, and is allocated based on necessity, so school that receive less district funding, get more state funding.

[1] https://www.heritage.org/education/report/the-myth-racial-di...

My SO taught in some inner city schools while we both had attended suburban schools. The issue is complex, though parental circumstances and starting points vary widely. When a relatively young school system is filled with kids whose parents have time and energy to develop their kids then those kids will thrive. When older systems are flooded with overworked parents they cannot succeed without massive changes.

At one school my SO saw the whole district being reorganized, subdividing overcrowded or otherwise troubled administrations into new smaller administrations and schools. Community challenges remained though.

Then why is it that the public schools in affluent and largely white suburbs are so very different from those in more urban and/or diverse neighborhoods? I’m talking facilities, test scores, programs, I mean you name it there’s a big difference. Could it be that property taxes provide a more stable funding source from year to year compared to state funding?

My guess would be that poorer schools spend their funding on meals for students and other basic necessities, whereas richer districts can allocate their funding to better programming and facilities, etc. Test scores are however more a result of parenting: attention to kids’ needs, stability in the home, etc. Kids in poorer schools face a lot of challenges outside the classroom that affect their ability to learn.

That article and entire website are the epitome of, "the powers that be used arguments like 'parental choice' to stymie progress, and we ended up in a good-enough middle ground where the privileged class could pretend something was done, and racism was over."

I'm not going to convince you of anything, I know, but you're not going to convince anyone with decade old articles from a conservative think tank propaganda site.

I'm confused - are you disputing their findings? They use official Dept. of Education data. And a 2019 peer-reviewed paper gives broadly similar numbers [1]:

on average, both Black and Latinx total per pupil expenditures exceed White total per pupil expenditures by $229.53 and $126.15, respectively. This is anticipated due to the strong relationship between race and poverty (Reardon & Owens, 2014) and the increased federal funding targeted toward stu- dents in districts with concentrated poverty (Cascio & Reber, 2013). - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23328584198724...

Why would this not be convincing on the narrow question of average education spending per pupil?

Thanks for the more reputable source. TIL. I'll admit I didn't know about the per-pupil expenditure stats, and probably was just regurgitating something I had heard. This gives me something to research into.

Still, I find this to be a superfluous detail in relation to the point I was making. The fact remains that,

> "The authors find that when Black students are increasingly concentrated in separate school districts from White students in the same state, total revenue shifts in a way that disfavors the typical Black student’s district, even after controlling for racial differences in poverty."

which is the point I was referencing. No one needs statistics to be convinced that social status coincides very closely with race in the US. So either 1) there are a series of systemic issues at play responsible for the pattern, or 2) there is something inherent about certain races which determines their social status relative to other races. Given that 2 is the definition of racial bias and racism, 1 must be where we find ourselves.

> social status coincides very closely with race in the US

So I'm curious about this statement. As I wrote elsewhere in this thread, twice as many whites than blacks are in poverty. If social status were almost substitutable for race, how come there are 17M white people in poverty?

https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/poverty-rate-by-ra...

Edit. For reference, a nice databook from Pew Research, with income distributions by race in 1970 and 2016, though lacking absolute numbers presentation:

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/07/12/appendi...

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