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Comment by vladgur | Hacker News Reader

Public education system is definitely a positive thing that most of us will pay taxes for.

However when public education is not guided by improving meaningful outcomes, but by ideologues, it needs to be checked. Vouchers sounds like a good way to insert some market dynamics and to allow parents to walk away from schools that are on the path to fail to prepare their kids for the future.

My son is currently is in public elementary school here in Bay Area. If this idiocy persists, i dont believe i will keep him in non-STEM focused public school and will seek out better education for him that i will need to pay out of pocket.

I can afford it, but those who are less fortunate will remain trapped and thats a travesty of CA public education

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As opposed to parental ideologues? By letting parents choose, we'll be letting them go to different schools championing different value system and the customers will be parents, not the children they ostensibly are charged with educating.

By grouping parents with like-minded parents, we'll amplify groups and clusters, leading to not only further stratification but also further decoupling society and greater inequality.

> By grouping parents with like-minded parents, we'll amplify groups and clusters, leading to not only further stratification but also further decoupling society and greater inequality.

This effect is super obvious if you've ever sent kids to a private school. A big part of it is that you're opting in to a certain approach and set of attitudes and beliefs, even in secular ones. If you're not a fit for their program, you don't get to meaningfully agitate to change things as you might in a public school—they just tell you to go somewhere else, then pluck another candidate off the wait list to replace your family.

This can be awesome (though still risky, in some ways) if it's a good bubble, but of course they aren't all good ones....

Ultimately, it is your right as a parent to decide what values you want your minor children to be taught.

What is an alternative? Forbidding parents to pull their kids from schools that are ruining their future by following a system with historically worse outcomes?

Most importantly, original articles here provide data that show that teaching math the way CA is trying to do has led to worse outcomes across the ethnic spectrum(unless of course parents had a financial ability to complement with private school/lessons).

Ultimately, it is your right as a parent to decide what values you want your minor children to be taught.

So, we have the right to indoctrinate bullshit to children?

What is an alternative? Forbidding parents to pull their kids from schools that are ruining their future by following a system with historically worse outcomes?

We work by improving public schools. That's going to be easier said than done, but it's the right solution.

If the question is whether the state or the parent has the ultimate power to decide on what to teach their kids, the individual parent must almost always win in my opinion.

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