If you had no personal interest in the public education system, would you vote to increase taxes for education?

Everyone should have a personal interest in the public education system. Just because you or your family does not directly benefit from a service doesn’t mean that it has no impact on you or the broader society you live in.

I definitely would. I don’t have kids, but I definitely want all kids to have access to the type of education they deserve, without having to rely on private schools. The better educated kids from lower-income families are, the better chance they have to earn a good living.

If I thought it was needed, I would support the tax increase. If I felt they could meet the need by reducing waste or not replacing retiring staff, I would not.

It would depend on the situation. I will never just blindly vote for a tax increase for anything. In fact, most of the time, money is not the problem. I agree with @WestRiverrat. My neighbor works as a teacher at a charter school and their budget is lower than almost all of our public schools nearby but their results are always much better.

Edit: When I say their budget is lower I am comparing the cost per student. I will also mention that it is a year round school and doesn’t follow the typical school year. Great school and great results. She (teacher) is non union.

Ah, anecdotal evidence.

I know of some schools that are underfunded and are crap. Likewise I went to a wealthy public school and got a great education.

I agree that money is not the whole issue in public education but this is not a question that can be adequately addressed by your extremely limited personal experience.

I still would because it’s idiotic to think that only your spawn can meaningfully impact society. Public education determines how our future will look, because children are still going to grow up and shape this world.

Because of the high standard of living and high costs of living resulting in necessarily high wages (compared to the rest of the world), the western world becomes less and less suitable for industrial production. You can see this verified by the fact that most of the stuff you buy is made in low wage third world countries.
The only alternative is therefore becoming a country of innovation, technology and science, and that inevitably requires investment in primary and secondary education on a large scale.
Nothing less than the future economy of your nation is at stake here (and by extension, your standard of living in the future), and by not supporting investment in education, you are helping sabotaging your country and yourself in the long run.

Better funding for public education is never a bad thing.

If you want to send your kids to a charter school or a private school or whatever, that’s fine. The issue is whether public schools need more money. The answer is “yes”. Kids are going to elementary schools that don’t have librarians or enough books in the library for them to be able to take them home. Kids are in classrooms that are stuffed full of desks because there aren’t enough teachers.

Better educated kids lead to better educated teenagers lead to better educated adults. I don’t see how this would be a problem for anyone.

We are becoming an increasingly selfish society. So many people can’t see past their own nose. It makes me sad.

@Seelix I agree. You would think supporting education would be the least controversial thing imaginable. Yet, people not wanting to support it is clearly proof that some people will do anything for their tax money. And not because they have some convoluted libertarian belief about purpose of one’s self and being disconnected from others, blah blah blah. If they buy into society and work for this fake thing we invented called money, they should buy into the future as well.

@Judi and @Simone_De_Beauvoir What I don’t understand is this selfishness. Why do people think that education has nothing to do with them unless they have a school-age kid in public school?

I always, always, always vote in favor of the school budget even if it does mean an increase in taxes.

Hopefully your wife’s colleague won’t be murdered by someone whose lack of educational opportunities lead to a life of crime. As others have said, improved education is a benefit to everyone, it improves the economy, and will ensure that future generations will be able to take care of current generations when we age. Pennywise, pound foolish.

@wundayatta I don’t know why. They are self-important, they think they worked ‘really hard’.

I have voted for tax increases for the school system and I don’t have kids. It is impossible to say someone has no personal interest, because if the kids are not getting educated, in a generations all of society will likely be worse. Not that everyone should ote yes for every increase, one still has to evaluate if the increase is worthwhile, effective, and necessary.

No. After having attended both private and public schools and then worked for a public school district administration office, I saw a whole lot of waste, mismanagement and apathetic teachers/parents/kids in the public system I don’t believe can be remedied with just money.

It’s my personal opinion parents don’t play a part as strongly as they could and assume the kids are learning everything they need to know, even socially, during their school hours. It’s my observation though that kids are getting the bare bones of book work and education, anything extra has long since been done away with as superfluous and it really shows by college level when young adults act and speak like 13yr olds still.

I’m down for paying more if it helps schools. I don’t have kids and never plan on it. But I look at it as paying back for the education I got.

@wundayatta, I don’t agree with your wife’s colleagues , they sound very selfish and short sighted.
I usually vote for tax increases for school the millage. I agree with what many of you have stated, a well educated population is much better for society as a whole.
I also agree with @WestRiverrat and @missingbite and @Neizvestnaya .
I have seen a lot of wasteful spending and mismanagement in the public school system. I attend every school board meeting in my district. I try to find out what is going on and ask questions and make sure that I think that the increase is necessary.

@Neizvestnaya, so your solution to the problem is… what?

I agree with you that bad parents are a huge problem. This would seem to be an argument to increase funding for public schooling so that children of problem parents can have the same opportunities.

Also, there is waste in mismanagement in every large organization.

And your personal anecdotes about how you’ve witnessed waste and mismanagement is not a valid argument or indictment against the entire system.

Everybody in a society has a personal interest in the public education system of said society so the question (and the position of the work colleagues) is a fallacy to begin with. However, I will not blindly support tax increases for public education due to the waste and mismanagement I have also witnessed. In total, my kids have attended (so far) 4 elementary schools, 2 middle schools and 2 high schools in four different states. I have seen very well run public schools and very poorly run public schools. The things I have witnessed have run the gamut from throwing money at every problem (with very little result) to rewarding/encouraging parents to be more involved (which seemed to help more.)

I tend to lump the people who don’t want to pay for someone else’s education in with the people who are against universal healthcare. I would want to review the reasons for the tax increase but, ultimately, I think I would vote for it. I do not think I would vote for it if it was going towards, say, pay increases of non-teacher faculty, but if the money was meant to hire more teachers, or expand schools so that more students could go there, or even if the money was going to be used to clean up a neighborhood with a school in it, I would be in favor of a tax increase.

More money does not always equate to improved education. I attended 6 schools in 3 states. The one that had the most per pupil funding was actually the worst of the lot. It was badly mismanaged, but it always was the first in the region with the newest teaching tools and replaced the busses every other year.

The best school I went to had a much lower per pupil funding, they had one 20 year old bus for extra curricular activity. It was a rural school district, it was cheaper to pay parents to drive their kids to school than it would have been to bus the students. The college placement in this school was about 5 times the rate of placement in the first school I mentioned.

I would not support a tax increase for the first school under any circumstances. The second school I would not hesitate to support.

Why is it that we think we can just throw money at a problem and fix it? Our education system has been deteriorating for years and keeps getting more and more money. In 1980 we were the envy of the world. We had a higher educational level than any other country. Then we decided to create the Department of education. Created in 1980 and began operation in 1981. Since that time, we have slipped to 17th in the world and increased our per student spending by more than 50% in inflation adjusted dollars. We have let the DoE create this massive bureaucracy, that steals money from the classrooms to pay for administrators. We’ve allowed them to create rules that force the brightest students to slow down to the level of the dimmest. We don’t have a money problem in the schools we have a bureaucracy problem. Declining to pay more tax is not a vote against the students but rather a vote to fix the system. Raising taxes is not a plan, it is the result of a lack of having a plan. And denigrating anyone that sees this problem is just another way to be divisive. Get a plan instead of a bumper sticker.

Oh, @Jaxk, you and your “facts.”

I’d love to hear how you explain the fact that many of the nations that have surpassed the US in education have heavily centralized and well-funded government education bureaucracies.

I’d also love for you to support your assertion that the DOE is overall less efficient than the combined local administrative patchworks it is quote “stealing money from.”

And what rules are you referring to that force bright students to slow down to the level of the dimmest? That has never been my experience in the public school system or anyone I know, and I am unaware of any such rules.

Where I live we are voting this week ( by mail) on the fifth parcel tax for education in five years. Some went to the high schools, and some to the elementary schools.

The previous four have passed with over 70% in favor. Why? Because our schools are funded well enough to be among the best in the state, and thus property values in our town are about 15% higher in the next town that keeps voting down the parcel tax.

When $450 year in added property tax means $100,000 on your house valuation, it makes a lot of sense.

@WestRiverrat: In a case like that, I think it would be ideal to figure out where the first school you mentioned was lacking and to ensure that the money went to deal with those problems specifically. I wouldn’t want my tax dollars to go to renovating the cafeteria when kids couldn’t all have their textbooks. I think the situation also depends on what can be done outside of getting more funding. For example, if a school is lacking in school supplies, that’s something that could potentially be dealt with in ways other than raising taxes. People in the community could donate school supplies and if enough got together, local businesses might be willing to donate lots of school supplies. I think it’s also necessary to take a look at what the school is already spending money on. If a high school has an extremely low graduation rate but a beautiful, well-tended football field and a well-equipped football team, well, that’s a disparity that needs to be dealt with before that school gets any more funding. If our taxes get raised just to replace the astroturf when there are thirty-five kids in one classroom with only one teacher, well, that’s a problem.

@KatawaGrey I agree, but if the School Board does nothing to address the problems except ask for more money, they are not addressing the problem. If the school administration denies there is a problem, then they don’t need more money.

To blindly throw more money at a school because they say it is to educate the kids will not fix anything, especially if no one admits there is anything to fix.

“The world abides only for the sake of school children”. I don’t know where this lovely quote comes from but I hope it answers the question.

@Qingu

“and I am unaware of any such rules.”

Why am I not surprised? The ‘No Child Left Behind’ scheme may have looked good on paper but it is not working out. Leaving a child behind that is not getting the material is very difficult these days. Consequently teachers must devote more time on the material than the average student would need and much more than the brightest would need. This leaves a larger portion of the class bored and restless while still not providing much benefit to the student that is having trouble. To make things worse there has been a major push to bring handicapped students into the mainstream. While I would applaud that effort the result is a distraction for the majority of the student body. My brother is a Superintendent of Schools. That means he manages many schools. He has students so handicapped that they require a nurse to be present at all times. Whereas I bleed for those students, the cost and special attention distracts from the learning at hand.

Disciplinary action is a total nightmare. The bureaucratic mess we created for any disciplinary action weighs on both the administration and the teachers. Time consuming and generally fruitless. And the kids know there is not much that can be done if they act up. The federal government supplies money to adhere to thier regulations but generally not enough to cover the bureaucracy. Consequently local schools must cut elsewhere to make up the difference.

And to add insult to injury, we are slowly eliminating activities that keep a student interested in school. Playground games that provide a distraction and a release of energy for students are dying out. Extra curricular activities such as sports or band are going by the wayside. So all that is left is a serious study environment and most young kids need some other activities to keep them interested.

We rank third (behind Switzerland and Austria) in spending per student among the industrialized countries. And that includes the much lower cost Charter schools. When you are comparing our school system to other countries remember that they are about the same size as our states. Which by the way, is where the education is supposed to be funded and delivered. Countries like Canada don’t have a department of education at the federal level. We have a serious problem and need more than just a knee jerk reaction of give them more money. It hasn’t worked, it won’t work, and it’s time to come up with real solutions.

@Jaxk My oldest son has this particular problem. He is so bored in school because the same topic is taught 2, 3, 4 or 5 times. I will be honest and say he quit even paying attention in school a couple of years ago because he gets so frustrated. He still aces most of his tests but… his grades are for crap because he stopped doing homework he felt was a waste of his time because teachers always say homework is for practice and to reinforce what you learned in class. He figures he knows it as demonstrated by his test scores. (Yes, we have explained, disciplined and everything else we could think of.)

@optimisticpessimist

Your story is not unique. It is the unfortunate outcome of all this federal involvement. I find it quite interesting that my brother is constantly asking me to vote for one school bond issue after another. But if you ask him straight out, to choose one of two options:

A. Raise taxes to increase revenue to schools

B. Eliminate all federal funding and eliminate federal regulation.

Bear in mind that eliminating federal funding would be about a 10% cut. He would pick option B in a heartbeat. He spends way more than the 10% on federal compliance. By cutting the federal funding he would actually have more money for education, smaller class sizes, and less trouble. Yes dear hearts, our DoE has been a boon to our education system and the aspiring gifted students are paying the price. And the feds are screaming for more money and more regulation. I wonder how that will work out.

@Qingu: My kinda solution to “The Problem” would be for people to have more realistic expectations of what publicly funded education can/should be within the current economy. I’d like to see parents and guardians accept more responsibility for the children they breed and not assume it’s up to the rest of society to raise and support their kids for them.

Yes. I am affected by educational standards of those around me. A better educated populace means better daily encounters with people and the ability of a community to attract more jobs.

If only the energy spent on bitching about throwing money at schools, for god’s sake, can be utilized to rebel against throwing millions of dollars more into the military industrial complex.

@Simone_De_Beauvoir We do need to cut military spending. I think we need to pull our troops out of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. Pull all the troops stationed in Europe and east Asia back to the US as well.

NATO has served its purpose and should have been dissolved with the break up of the Warsaw Pact.

I would definintely support a tax increase to improve the education system in America. I’m not even old enough to have kids and I find it appalling that the standards for the public school system are set so low. The current generation is the first generation ever to have a literacy rate lower than the one before it. That’s right. Less children know how to read now than in the preceding generation. Scary, no? It’s really sad how far behind American children are terms of education. There is no way we can compete in the international job market. The lack of education (especially related to global matters) is also painfully evident even in college.

It’s pretty sad when a community of 3000 people can easily pass a referendum to sell alcohol in the city limits, yet struggles to pass a referendum that would provide students the educational opportunities they need to help them succeed. This is the community our family just moved from. Threatened were the jobs of many teachers, the pre-k program for at risk students, field trips, after school activities including band and scholastic bowl, and consolidation with a larger city in the area, meaning larger classroom sizes and less one-on-one contact between the students and teachers. Where are the priorities?

I understand alchol sales would bring in money to the community, but I can tell you the majority of people wanting that referendum to pass did so because they didn’t want to travel the extra few miles out of town to get their beer.

Education is our biggest priority. These children will be the adults that take care of us in the future. I will always support our educational system, even when my children are grown and living on their own. Looking the other way by not supporting the children of our communities because some school districts fuck up is….. fucked up.

@global_nomad You would be surprised (or maybe not) how many students are willing to pay my oldest son to do their homework for them. He’s a freshman in college. Sad. :/

Everyone has a massive personal interest in continuing to live in a literate, well educated country. So long as I knew the funds would actually improve education or ensure it remains available to all, absolutely I would vote yes.

@global_nomad

Do you find it coincidental that the previous generation was educated before the establishment of the Dept. of Education? And that since they have been mucking with the system our education has deteriorated? Probably just a coincidence, nothing more.

@Jaxk The Department of Education was created the year before the Reagan Revolution began. Since 1980, right-wing free-market all-for-the-oligarchs policy has predominated almost all of American politics. There is a massive right-wing drive to defund education at the state level now and to transfer it to a voucher system, effectively taxing Americans for Wall Street’s benefit. Failing schools work very well to pour gasoline on that fire too. But hey, could be just a coincidence.

There seems to be a lot of mistrust of government, and in particular the ability of folks to manage school systems. It seems like some people want to micromanage the school system, deciding to spend money on books here and football fields there. Or not.

So why are our government and our school managers so incompetent that we don’t want to trust them with any more of our money? Where do these people come from, anyway? How the hell did they get into office—those incompetent nincompoops! Those crooks!

Let’s eliminate federal funding. That ought to smarten up those idiots right quick! Let force them to work with less money. That’ll show ‘em! There’s waste everywhere. Why can’t they find it? It’s perfectly clear. Let’s cut their salaries! How the hell do they even get on staff, anyway?

All I got to say is that if you think you can run the schools better, then get yourself hired. Otherwise give people the resources they need to do the job you hired them to do. Otherwise you’re condemning the future capabilities of the people in this nation.

@wundayatta Well said! I could not agree with you more! My husband, who was English, cannot fathom why we vote on the school budget when we do not vote on any other parts of the budget; but like me, he always approves it.

@wundayatta There are very well run schools and there are very poorly run schools. I would not blindly vote for a tax increase without knowing why the extra money was needed. I do not feel the need to throw good money after bad if the problem is not lack of money but lack of good administration of the money. I will stipulate though, if the school was run very well as demonstrated by student achievements, I would feel less inclined to delve into their financial history. As this is public money and public education, there should be public accountability.

@Jaxk, while I share many of your reservations about No Child Left Behind, what you describe is not “forcing bright students down to the level of the dimmest.” It’s a misallocation of teacher resources.

And I’m not sure what your solution is. Don’t let the stupid and mentally handicap kids into the public school system? Then what happens to them?

I’m also not sure what your specific issue is with disciplinary action, or what your solution is.

In fact, you don’t really seem to have any specific issues with the federal government’s oversight of education in this country. You just have an anecdote and some vague assertions. And you certainly haven’t shown that things were better before 1980, or how you would reform the system in a way that is not sociopathic.

My point, @optimisticpessimist, is that you hired the people who manage the school system. If you don’t like the way the school is run, why don’t you hire someone new; someone that you trust. If you say there is fraud and waste in the system, you have to point the finger at yourself, since you’re the only who put those people in office. Why would you put people in office and then pull the rug out from underneath them?

It’s just so weird to me. People elect someone to govern them, and then make it impossible for them to govern, and then blame their elected officials for doing a bad job of governing. As my mother always said, that’s cutting off your nose to spite your face.

@wundayatta What makes you think I or anyone not willing to pay more taxes for the public school system hired these people? On top of that, just because I voted to elect an official doesn’t mean they are running things the way they said they would.

In todays economy, ALL ELECTED officials are going to have to show me that they are eliminating waste in all areas before they get one cent more from me.

@wundayatta As @missingbite said, I do not personally hire these people. But I have to live with the choices others make. Yes, I hope they make wise ones. Perhaps I thought they would which is why I may or may not have personally voted for them. However, during their term I have to live with their choices unless they do something really stupid which can get them removed from their elected position.

This argument is actually a little pointless in my current position as the schools in my current district are very good. I have personal feelings about it because this has not always been the case and I have had very little to do with local politics because I am not usually around long enough in one area to have a really good grasp on what needs to happen in that particular area.

My point, @missingbite and @optimisticpessimist is that you did hire these people by voting for their bosses. If the underlings do a bad job, what is the point of hurting them, when it is their bosses that are responsible, and, indeed, their bosses bosses—the voters. Not only are you punishing the wrong target, you are also punishing yourselves. Poorly educated people hurt us all.

@wundayatta I did not miss the point. However, I think you missed mine. If a school system is mismanaged, throwing more money at it will not fix the problem. Therefore, it will not keep the people from being poorly educated. I am not punishing the wrong target because providing more money does not guarantee a better education. I said if the system was run well I would have no problem with voting to give more money. I did not say reduce how much is currently being spent. I said show me how you are spending what you already have. The elected officials are not personally elected by me alone so if I vote for the person who lost, I still have to live with the decisions of the one who won the election whether I agree with them or not.

@optimisticpessimist I don’t think that’s a productive way to go about it. Maybe more research about what creates effective schools will help.

@wundayatta I think there has been plenty of research in that particular arena. However, what can and does work in NYC is not necessarily the same that will work in rural NE nor will the money be needed for the same things. Example: I would guess there would be a higher cost/need for transportation in a rural area than in an urban area where most students can presumably walk to school.

@wundayatta My point is that I may have voted for the losing candidate so I didn’t “hire” that person. I didn’t “hire” our president, but I am stuck with him and refuse to let more of my tax dollars go for programs I don’t approve of. Same with local schools. Not to mention that I too feel the DoE is way past it’s need. (federal dollars) Back to local dollars that I would have to vote for a tax raise on….. I am not going to increase my tax dollars for education while our local school board president still has his family in Michigan and he is working in Louisiana. My tax dollars are flying him home on the weekends and they wonder why our kids can’t give change from a $5.00 bill without a computer.

@Qingu

I know much of the information is difficult to find. That probably accounts for usual response of Nah uh. Nonetheless, the information is out there. For instance if you look at reading scores from 1971 through the 2000s there is a marked difference before and after the DoE came into existance. If you look at the test results from 1971 through 1980 there is general improvement in the scores. After 1980 the test scores flatten or go down. That may be a coincidence, I’ll let you decide.These are just the scores in the US and it is generally recognised that we are losing ground on the world stage (I can supply references if you need them).

One other point I think needs to be recognised. If you look at the education level of the parents there is an astonishing trend. In a world where education is touted as the most important thing in life, the educational level of the parents has been declining since 1980. Who woulda thunk.

As for the rest of your post, I’m not sure what you want. If you have a class of thirty students, you need to insure the brightest are encouraged and kept involved as well as giving the necessary help to the struggling or handicapped ones. Sometimes that means leaving a child behind to repeat a grade or moving them to special education. Not everyone can be mainstreamed if it means holding back the rest of the class. here is a letter describing the legislation for speech impaired students. The problem with this is the cost and complexity of these evaluations. And this is only for speech problems. There are a myriad of other handicaps to deal with. Sometimes the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

@optimisticpessimist If you know of any research that definitively shows how to best spend education dollars, I’ve love to see it. Maybe it would put an end to the careers of most of the people in the Education school where I work. However they seem to keep on doing research in this area and are still unable to say much about what makes for an effective school. Except maybe to reduce class size. Of course, when you reduce budgets for schools, class sizes will increase.

As far as I know, there’s only one way to decrease class size—hire more teachers and provide as many rooms as are necessary for those teachers to teach.

And I agree that every community is different, but I do not agree that people (not just children, but people) learn in significantly different ways. Much is known about what the most effective teaching methods are. Unfortunately, they all cost more than the industrialized version of education.

So let’s look at this. We use the industrial version of education. A lot of kids get bored (and who wouldn’t) and tune out and then drop out. Taxpayers see the drop-out rates increase and so they provide less support for schools as a kind of punishment, somehow expecting people to buckle down, cut waste and improve the schools. Then they have the temerity to be surprised when schools get worse? SO they take away more money.

The best teaching methods require greater investment in teachers and in teacher training. But those are the first things that are thrown away when the budgets get tighter. And of course public education is going to be more and more hopeless as it is defunded more and more.

So lets get a voucher system and let the kids go to private school, and so what about the kids who can’t afford that. And once again, we maintain the economic divide in this country, and the rich people think they are getting richer, but imagine how much richer they could be if they invested in education for poor people.

@wundayatta The voucher system is intended to allow parents that cannot otherwise afford alternative schooling to be able to pay for it. The systems I have seen in place as tests were set up so the voucher recipients were means tested. If you could pay for the schooling without needing a voucher you didn’t get one, or got a smaller one than someone that could not otherwise afford private school.

@Jaxk, Jaxk, Jaxk, what am I going to do with you….

1. The reading scores do not go down. They remain relatively stable, fluctuating a bit. In some groups there is a “marked difference”—they go up, particularly amongst blacks and hispanics. Did you even look at your data?

2. Who would have thunk that less educated people would have more kids? That’s not exacting shocking to me, and I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make.

3. I can’t open your letter at my computer here. But a letter is not evidence or data, as I’m sure you’re aware.

I’m not surprised that when I asked you to support your argument, you supplied a letter, a tangent, a set of data that does not actually support your argument, and some more bromides.

I also wonder about the utility of determining the value of the public education by looking at test scores in the first place. Are we normalizing for the quality of admitted students to the system? For example, have more intelligent students gone to private schools since the 70’s and 80’s? (I don’t know.) It’s a very sloppy and rather stupid way of determining a program’s efficacy, but then even so the data doesn’t support your point.

@Qingu

Why am I not surprised (again). The fact that the reading scores have not improved since 1980 IS my point. The rest of the world is improving and we are not. I am not surprised that you ignore the improvement from 1971 to 1980 either. Nor I suppose, should I be surprised that no improvement would be a sign of success in your mind.

And I love the way you discard the letter from the DoE clarifying the regulation as non pertinent. I don’t have a problem if you can’t open it or read it, but how can you dismiss what you don’t know. Must be a product of the public schools.

And just so I’m clear on your reasoning. Are you saying that more affluent students are more intelligent or are you saying that if your intelligent you send your kids to private school?

No, your point was:

“If you look at the test results from 1971 through 1980 there is general improvement in the scores. After 1980 the test scores flatten or go down.”

This is false. The data says they flatten or go up. In particular they go up for minority populations who tend to be poorer and thus would stand to benefit the most from the DoE.

As for why they aren’t improving as much as in other countries, I’m sure there are a number of reasons. I mentioned one possibility (quality kids exiting public school system for private in increasing numbers). The countries with better scores also tend to spend more on government-run education, which directly contradicts your point that government-run education is bad. I don’t really see how you can go from “other countries are improving faster than the US” to “therefore the DoE isn’t working.”

Does the letter contain useful stats? If so I’ll retract my statement.

On my reasoning: I’m not saying anything about intelligence. Affluent students tend to do better in school. Affluent parents can afford to send their kids to private school. Depending on how large a phenomenon this is, this could easily skew the data for public schools in America—much like how private universities tend to attract the best students and leave the chaffe with public colleges.

According to this website (and its links) it looks like private school attendance has not increased markedly since 1992. The question is also complicated by the prevalence of religious schools (which may or may not be higher quality than public schools and parents have different reasons for making their kids attend them).

But, wealthy students do disproportionately attend private schools. For those with 100k incomes or more, 20% of kids go to private school. For the general population it’s 11%.

@Qingu

I don’t know why you think that my point is government run education is bad, I merely think it needs to be fixed. Not eliminated. I also don’t understand why you are beating this drum about minorities unless your point is that the DoE’s chief mission is to enhance minority education rather than all education. Even that would be quite a stretch given the numbers. I suppose you could make a case that female students have improved while male students have deteriorated. So that means they’ve improved. The truth is the numbers are flat. Trying to isolate a group where the numbers go up ever so slightly is hardly a good case.

As for religious schools they seem to get better results. At least based on the SAT scores. Does that mean they’re higher quality? I let you decide. More affluent parents choose private schools because they consider them better than public schools. I think that’s a problem. Public schools should be just as good as private. If you think it’s OK for public schools to under perform, that’s your decision.

Frankly I believe an inner city black kid can be just as intelligent as a suburban white kid. Or for that matter, just as dumb. But there are a few reasons why they may not perform as well. One is parental involvement. But if the school is not stimulating the kid to learn they will fall by the wayside. This is where I believe the public schools fall down the most (just my opinion). I have trouble believing it has anything to do with teachers salaries since teachers at private schools get paid about 20% less than public schools and seem to get much better results (I’‘ll let you link stand as the reference for this). I think it has a lot to do with the government bureaucracy primarily from the DoE. I’ve submitted some evidence which you don’t seem willing to give much credit. Maybe you could supply some evidence that the DoE has done anything productive for our educational system. Afterall, the DoE has a $50 billion budget and the federal government spends twice that for all education. I think something to support that bill would be in order. If they’ve had any success, surely you can point to it and say “Looky here”.

I don’t know why you think I’m “beating a drum about minorities.” I pointed out that minority states have markedly improved since 1980. But you’ve certainly taken what I said and… gone places with it.

Look, @Jaxk. You started this argument by saying that since 1980, reading scores flatten or go down. You cited this document. But the document said no such thing. It doesn’t even say the numbers “are flat.” For whites, yes, but for minority populations they largely go up.

You either lied, or you didn’t bother to even look at the data you cited. And this isn’t the first time something like this has happened. You could have apologized for your mistake, but no, of course not. Here’s a question: why the hell should I bother even having a rational discussion with someone like you? I’m going to go back to my policy of not conversing with you until you manage to get some integrity.

@wundayatta Sorry, it took so long to get back to you. Here is a good article and some quotes from it.

“And while many people say, “We need to spend more money on our schools,” there actually isn’t a link between spending and student achievement.
Jay Greene, author of “Education Myths,” points out that “If money were the solution, the problem would already be solved… We’ve doubled per pupil spending, adjusting for inflation, over the last 30 years, and yet schools aren’t better.” ”

“American schools don’t teach as well as schools in other countries because they are government monopolies, and monopolies don’t have much incentive to compete. In Belgium, by contrast, the money is attached to the kids—it’s a kind of voucher system. Government funds education—at many different kinds of schools—but if a school can’t attract students, it goes out of business.”

Research about competition for students “Overall, the schools facing either the prospect or the reality of vouchers made substantial gains compared with the results achieved by the rest of Florida’s public schools. They also made strong gains relative to those earned by schools serving similar student populations, which had nonetheless avoided receiving an F.”

Jay P. Greene has performed a lot of research in this area and there are many links to the research and results from this page.

In essence most of this research says it is not about how much money, but about how the schools get the money. Meaning if the money is attached to the student and the parents/students get to choose what school to go to in the public system, improvements are made within the schools because schools are in competition and want/need to be the best to get the students to attend. The students are also in ‘competition’ because there are only so many seats available so those students (and parents) who value education are induced to get higher grades and achieve more scholastically.

I want to watch a documentary I heard about and if it is any good I will let you know.

@Qingu

If you take a group of students and over time some do better some do worse overall the scores don’t change in any meaningful way. I call that no improvement. You want to prattle on about the ones that improved, ignore the ones the declined and call that success. We obviously have different definitions of success.

If you want to ignore my posts, it won’t hurt my feelings. You obviously have no talent for debate nor logic as a tool.

[mod says] Flame off, folks. No need to make this personal. Please remember to disagree without being disagreeable.