A few weeks ago, Amy Chua made headlines as the nefarious Tiger Mother — the woman would drove her kids to excel at music and academics, at the expense of a social life, self esteem, and creativity. The drama unfolded. Poor kids. Poor misunderstood mom who was terribly exploited by the media. She was even a feature at the stupid Davos conference.
The real Tiger Mother isn't a petite law professor in a snooty neighborhood. The real Tiger Mother is Kelley Williams-Bolar.
Williams-Bolar was jailed last week for fudging the residency of her children, so they could attend a better public school in her ex-husband's district. The stupidity of the sentencing is one angle of the story, but I want to talk about the crime of forcing people to attending failing schools.
Williams-Bolar lived in a district with a failing school. She risked everything, because she knew that a better school would give her kids a better shot at life. If I'm not happy with my local school, I can move or send my kid to a private school. Maybe people don't have those resources. They are forced to attend crappy school and their children suffer.
Tim Burke wrote,
If you must sentence someone, sentence the legislature in Ohio. Sentence the superintendent in both districts. Sentence the idiot bureaucrats who use attendance or some similar metric to set the funding of schools, giving them an incentive to demand enforcement of these kinds of policies. If they’re not guilty, no one is.
In the much maligned and compromised NCLB, there was one section that said if a school fails to make adequately progress three years in a row, then students would be eligible for school vouchers to use at the school of their choice. I'm not sure how many states implemented that section of the law and how many children benefited. Research for another day. But I'm a hundred percent supportive of the vouchers for failing schools plan.
NO CHILD SHOULD BE FORCED TO ATTEND A FAILING SCHOOL
Why do we have these unfair residency requirements for education?
Of course, a lot has to do with the fact that schools are funded locally, and local people want their money used on their own kids. But there's more that. It's also about race.
In Ohio, they passed a voucher law several years ago, but the voucher plan was confined to the boundaries of Cleveland. The Republican state representatives from the suburbs wouldn't pass a state-wide plan. Why not? Because they didn't want the black kids from Cleveland going to their school. They didn't want to deal with urban problems in their kid's science lab. They didn't want to bring down the test scores from the school.
That's why education reformers say that schools are the next civil rights movement.
Apt. 11d 
Ok, but just a small correction: the mom claimed her father’s home (the kids’ grandfather) as the district they were living in. I don’t believe the kids’ father is in the picture.
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If they do end residency requirements for education, that would be the best real estate speculation opportunity since the interstates were plotted.
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They’re not unfair residency requirements. We pay taxes in a very expensive district so that our children can attend the schools in that district. In essence, we are purchasing a share in a collective good provided to the residents of our area, by the residents of our area. People who don’t pay those taxes are free-riders, taking advantage of a collective good paid for by others. Sending your child to school in the district where I am paying taxes and you are not is the equivalent of your taking up residence in my house where I am paying the mortgage and you are not. It’s essentially breaking and entering.
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You also need to implement block funding by state in order to make it fair. (i.e. total budget divided by number of students in that state). Then all the students will have the same funding no matter what neighbourhood.
You probably would still need some residency requirement or at least a lottery for out of district students to manage the numbers.
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Laura, if you do sell your house and move to a more expensive house in a district with higher taxes, how are you going to feel about residency requirements?
When I went through the residency policy fight with my district, people either thought I had something to hide (I didn’t) or thought I didn’t want any requirements. That wasn’t the case. I knew some fraud would happen, but it would be based in some truths; in other words, in the case of Williams-Bolar, her father did live in the district and did pay taxes. The same goes on in my community. What generally happens is that the kids are staying with or being cared for by relatives in CorruptSmallTown anyway. Or like Scalzi mentioned, they used to live here, but then moved, and the parents don’t want to take them from the school. Or a divorce happened and one parent is here, but they live most of the time with the other parent. I really don’t care about other people getting what they “don’t deserve.”
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Here’s my dilemma with vouchers/school choice: My kids go to a school that is nearly 70% low income and mostly minority. But it is NOT a failing school. It’s a great school – amazing teachers, safe environment, wonderful kids. Test scores aren’t high (too many kids who speak English as their second language) but they are decent and improving. Eventually, under NCLB, we will be deemed a “failing” school, but we’re not there yet.
But most of my neighbors choose not to go to this school. They either go private, or manage to get into one of the other public schools in the city that doesn’t have a high poverty rate. (School choice is not the norm, but smart people who know the system can work their way around it.)
I’m all for letting parents avoid failing schools. But I worry that some people would use that as an excuse to avoid any school that looked “different” and we’d self-segregate – either by race or income. And I don’t think that would be a good thing. I see it happening in my community without a school-choice policy, so I worry about what would happen if it were the norm.
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You’re the exception, K. Most of our country is self-segregated by race and income right now.
I’m sorry, Anna, but I totally disagree with you. We can’t say that we’re from Town A and that Town B and C aren’t like us. They can’t have what we have. Public education has to be that. It has to be public. It has to provide equal services to ALL children. People who have more money should pay more taxes to education, just as they pay more taxes for roads and bridges that all members of the community use. The system of local funding of education has truly warped our minds and screwed up the nation. It cements inequality. I’m done with it.
Right now, we have to face facts. We claim to have a system of public education in our country, but we don’t. We had towns creating private schools for its members. We have rich towns with rich PTAs supplementing the crap out of their schools without any documentation.
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You also need to implement block funding by state in order to make it fair. (i.e. total budget divided by number of students in that state). Then all the students will have the same funding no matter what neighbourhood.
Akron receives $2k more per student than Copley-Fairlawn.
In Ohio, they passed a voucher law several years ago, but the voucher plan was confined to the boundaries of Cleveland. The Republican state representatives from the suburbs wouldn’t pass a state-wide plan. Why not? Because they didn’t want the black kids from Cleveland going to their school. They didn’t want to deal with urban problems in their kid’s science lab. They didn’t want to bring down the test scores from the school.
This seems muddled. I guess you’re not talking about EdChoice, which is statewide. I think of voucher systems as being about money following kids. What was in the law that supposedly made the racist legislators so terrified? Did this law also have a section compelling all public SDs to accept out-of-district students?
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Actually, I really know what I’m talking about here, Siobhan. Dissertation topic. I was referring to the Cleveland voucher program, ten years back. The racist legislators didn’t want Cleveland kids going to the suburban school districts, so they only approved of a law that was restricted to the geographic bounds of Cleveland. Kids weren’t allowed to apply to any school outside of Cleveland.
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Where I live, Wake County, NC is dismantling the school system to go backward and appease suburban transplants (I am from CT btw). It is going to be the next big civil rights issue.
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Doesn’t every citizen win when all children are in a school system that is a level playing field? That is fair with respect to resources and funding?
Other communal resources like power, water, and transit do not vary by the economic wealth of particular neighbourhoods, so why should educational resources vary?
It is difficult enough to jump social classes without using education as a way to pull up the ladder and prevent people from obtaining a proper education.
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Other communal resources like power, water, and transit do not vary by the economic wealth of particular neighbourhoods, so why should educational resources vary?
Unless you’re in Europe or something, it is way too early to start drinking.
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Jenny, the situation in Wake County just makes me want to cry. I used to live there (though not when I had kids). I frickin’ hated Cary back then, and I hate it now (no offense intended if you live in Cary ;).
Education is the big issue where Republicans can find common ground with Democrats – often in bad ways (i.e., many socially liberal Democrats will turn into Michelle Bachmann over the issue of education). And some Republicans are really quite sensible on education issues. In terms of the culture war, this is the GOP’s ace in the hole.
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Cary is where SAS comes from and without SAS I would have trouble earning a living.
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Laura, AMEN to being done with the system of local funding of education. Me too. Where is the Obama administration at with implementing national standards?
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“They can’t have what we have. Public education has to be that. It has to be public. It has to provide equal services to ALL children.”
Do we want “equal” services or appropriate services? They’re not the same thing.
“Other communal resources like power, water, and transit do not vary by the economic wealth of particular neighbourhoods, so why should educational resources vary?”
Transit is particularly iffy. Road quality is very different in the US depending on what side of town you are and different parts of the US vary immensely with regard to public transit. And that wouldn’t just be the US, either–not everybody in a decent-sized country is going to be able to live the same distance from a metro/subway station, and buses do not run on exactly the same schedule regardless of population density and location. A city resident who has the choice of three different metro lines is in a totally different position from an end-of-the-line suburbanite, even in a metropolitan area that has good public transportation, and there’s no cure for that. On the other hand, the city resident pays for that convenience in oh so many ways.
One issue that hasn’t been brought up is the labor issue. If the local moms are bringing cupcakes and volunteering and the non-local moms are not (transportation issues, distance, lack of time or interest), that could cause a lot of tension and possibly a spiral of doom where local moms bail on volunteering or pull out of the school.
I personally think we should think of public schools as being basically private entities, a sort of co-op run by local communities, and it is entirely fair to ask what outsiders plan to contribute.
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One thing slipped by me in Sandra’s comment. While water and power may or may not be public utilities and are of roughly the same quality, if you don’t pay for your personal consumption of water and power, you’ll get cut off pretty quick.
(I’m sitting here at home enjoying rolling blackouts in Texas, so the mutability of electricity is on my mind. We were getting about three minutes of electricity at a time this morning, but things seem to be improving.)
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Rolling blackouts because of the snow or what?
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It’s just the cold that shut down the power plants. Dallas’s recent low temperature was 9 degrees. Our power has stayed on for quite a while since the later part of the morning, but who knows what will happen tonight.
http://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local-beat/Power-Grid-Taxed-Rolling-Blackouts-Ordered-115093224.html
Just a few days ago we were at 74 degrees.
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I’ve heard of ice knocking down the local transmission wires, but I’m fairly certain the power plants are supposed to work just fine in the cold.
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Amy, I agree that transit may not be the perfect example but it does translate somewhat as analogy – for the most part transportation is adequate while still adapted to location whether urban/rural, etc. No one expects a subway line out to the middle of a farming community but they do have roads.
Kids from middle and upper middle class families enjoy enough relative privilege without adding a significant variation in education funding to the mix.
Perhaps a municipal analogy might work better – I am happy to skate at my local outdoor ice rink in my neighbourhood park paid for by my property taxes while knowing that they also pay for rinks and playgrounds and parks for kids in neighbourhoods that are across the city that I may never visit. I am happy that my taxes subsidize two city-owned ski hills so that kids can access skiing at rates far below market.
Why should my daughter have a better education than another child in the same city just because we are lucky enough to enjoy an economic privilege that another family does not?
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Equality in resources or equality in outcome? I’ve noticed that the worst performing schools in our county get more money per student than the best performing ones.
Clearly, the money is not slanted enough toward the worse performing schools to adjust for problems of poverty, variation in parental engagement, etc.
How does a government ensure quality of PTA’s?
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You can’t really tell from the articles exactly what happened, although they do mention ice storms. From the WSJ:
“The ice storm hitting Texas disrupted the grid just days before the Super Bowl is scheduled to be played in Dallas Sunday. The grid operator, the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas, wasn’t able to say how long the blackouts would last.”
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“I personally think we should think of public schools as being basically private entities, a sort of co-op run by local communities, and it is entirely fair to ask what outsiders plan to contribute.”
I would see this as dismantling public education. If public schools are basically “co-op private entities”, then why should people without kids pay?
I emphatically disagree with the notion that tax-payer funded schools should be a “private co-op” run by a subgroup of parents who run the co-op. If that’s what we had (and charters and vouchers could turn into that), I’d stop supporting tax-payer funded education.
Our state does have state-based funding of education (including “equalization” funding that transfers money to districts without levies or levy bases). In other words, a rich urban area votes extra levy money, but then poor rural areas get more state based funding — yes, in our neck of the woods, it’s the urban area that has more money.
Unfortunately, state-wide funding isn’t a panacea (I used to think it might be), because it encourages a decrease in overall funding to the public schools. The equalization tends to trend towards the lowest common denominator for funding. And, it usually doesn’t account well for the varying costs of educating different students (including those with special needs, or those who come from disadvantaged and high poverty backgrounds). So, you end up with underfunded public systems mixed with private systems.
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“I would see this as dismantling public education.”
I’m just describing the status quo. I’m not dismantling anything–that’s how things are now. It’s a quasi-private system disguised as a public system.
“Unfortunately, state-wide funding isn’t a panacea (I used to think it might be), because it encourages a decrease in overall funding to the public schools. The equalization tends to trend towards the lowest common denominator for funding.”
Of course.
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Wendy, I live in downtown raleigh, right near NC State. My husband and I picked here because we have adopted children and wanted diversity. Our public school has a good diverse bunch of kids…but the county has now self segregated by white/black/asian/indian. Seriously, Asians live in one area of Cary, Indians another area of Cary..etc.
It makes my husband and I sick that our school board is being run by members of private school boards and people who have no children or any experience with education. And have no concept of poverty. While allowing PTAs in some schools to provide funding for extra teachers/technology.
THe problem here is growth no schools to put kids so the poor kids suffer.
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“While allowing PTAs in some schools to provide funding for extra teachers/technology.”
1. How do you propose to stop them?
2. Isn’t it better from your point of view for the PTA to pay for teachers and technology, rather than individual families keeping the money and paying for private tutors and educational software that never leaves home?
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I think there may be more to the original story than made the papers. The news stories did mention that 99% of other school residency cases were settled without going to court.
There would be fewer episodes of (what to call it?) faux residency under an open choice system. If each student had a public school voucher value, a parent could choose to enroll her children in a neighboring school district–and the district would be paid for educating those children. There would need to be controls, as enrollment could rise uncontrollably in the “best” schools.
Our state does have a choice program. Districts can opt to allow students to “choice” in. (I’ve heard the noun used as a verb. Apologies.) The districts can limit openings by grade, evening out dips in enrollment. They get paid by the “sending” district. When given the freedom to choose, parents don’t always choose to send their children to the “better” district. I know one family which chose to send one son to a school in a neighboring town, to be with his football buddies.
If all towns would become choice districts, the better schools would be paid to educate out-of-district students. Our school district is not a choice district. It’s thought to be a good district, but I know people who would love to “choice” out of it.
I can think of two families which were approached by the school about residency issues. It wasn’t caused by racial animus in those cases–rather by a desire to control school costs.
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Sending your child to school in the district where I am paying taxes and you are not is the equivalent of your taking up residence in my house where I am paying the mortgage and you are not. It’s essentially breaking and entering.
Yow, so how would you characterize the situation in which the childless pay taxes for your children to go to school?
Personally, I think of it as, “A chance to pay back the larger community for their investment in my education,” or, “A small price to pay so that I can find well-educated fellow employees to work with me.” Some sort of universal funding sure seems like a win.
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Jenny, we lived in Cameron Park when we lived there (90-93).
Cranberry, I have to agree that there are probably details we don’t have, but on the other hand, remembering the asshole who was superintendent of our district, I can also readily believe that they were just being assholes trying to send a message.
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Seriously, Asians live in one area of Cary, Indians another area of Cary..etc.
Cary isn’t “Centralized Area for the Relocation of Yankees” anymore?
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I forget where I saw this, but somebody recently did a model for residential segregation. What they found was that starting with a totally random assignment of position, all you need initially is a preference to live near at least a few people like yourself for very segregated neighborhoods to arise.
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(OK, kids are finally in school and I can take the time to respond to comments.)
re: money expenditures for education. If you just look at expenditures from town to town, it can be misleading, esp for urban areas. It would appear that urban areas spend more per kid than some new suburbs, but it’s not entirely accurate. Urban areas and even some rougher suburbs spend a lot on maintaining older school buildings, special education, and at-risk kids. It doesn’t mean that the ordinary kids will have more school supplies, smaller class size, and better compensated teachers.
Schools fail for a lot of reason. It’s more than just $$. A lot has to do with the social capital of a community. Wealthy communities have a lot of resources, in addition to more tax dollars. They have better administrators, more experienced teachers, more involved parents, and more money that ends up in the classroom.
re: PTAs supplement a lot. In some communities, they raise 100,000s that buy everything from computers to teachers. No, there’s no way to regulate PTAs to ensure that there is more equity between schools, though it has happened in some cases. In NYC, the board of ed has prevented PTAs in wealthier neighborhoods from purchasing teachers. I’m not sure that is the right thing to do. Instead, public school choice would mean that active PTAs could keep doing what they’re doing, but that more kids could benefit.
I also just want us all to be honest about public schools in this country. They aren’t equal. They aren’t open to all. The best schools are only open to those who can afford to live in that zip code. This system of covert private education that we have in this country cements inequality.
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I forget who pointed me to this:
The friends of my friends down the street are from Norway. She works for the Norwegian embassy. He owns an accounting business. They lived in Maryland for a while before moving back to Norway with their two sons and, thanks to my friends, I met this very nice couple and got to make polite conversation and ask them if they had liked living in the United States. They did. I got to ask them what they missed about the United States after moving back to Norway. …
“We loved your schools. They cared about our children as individuals. They were wonderful.” …
[Good section about how many good public schools there are.]
Eighty percent of wealthy families send their kids to public school. Forbes Magazine cuts it down even further to the slice they call “affluent” families at 66% in public schools and even further to show that 55% of the “mega rich” (those who make over $10 million) pick public schools over private schools. Come on, now. Raise your hands. How many of you have always believed that Rich Folks send their kids to private schools? Now you know the truth: The majority doesn’t. The rich choose public schools because they live near excellent public schools.
[It’s all worth reading.]
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Urban areas and even some rougher suburbs spend a lot on maintaining older school buildings
Also, if the area has a declining population or school enrollment, physical plant costs (on a per student basis) get blown through the roof. Politically, it can painful to close 1/5 of the schools even when you have lost well over 1/3 of the students. Add in a willingness to explode office jobs to avoid layoffs and you can double spending without increasing educational effort at all.
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I don’t know if I am a weird parent or not, but the thought of sending my children to a private school stresses me no end even though we probably could afford it. First, I don’t want my children to hang around rich overachieving kids. Second, I don’t want to drive them to a private school outside of our neighborhood every morning. I have enough difficulty just getting them out the door. Third, even though according to this map we’re getting only an average return on investment in our public schools, I still feel that it’s good enough for my kids.
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Wendy, that’s why I like parochial schools. You get a broader mix.
On your map, our public school district was very low for return on investment, which is what I expected.
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MH, well, as I lack any religious sensibility whatsoever, parochial schools are not for me. And in our neck of the woods growing up, parochial schools were for white people who wanted to avoid black people, so not much diversity there. Bill O’Reilly grew up in my school district, but he went to a parochial HS.
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Where I was raised, being Polish counted a minority. Pittsburgh is more varied, but the city Catholic schools are far more racially mixed than public schools in the rich suburbs even if you figure than for these purposes Asian doesn’t count as diverse.
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I know of at least one public school teacher with a kid in our school.
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Our state publishes per-student spending. Boston and Cambridge outspend many affluent suburbs.
Wendy, interesting map. Return on dollar spent doesn’t necessarily translate to good education, though. My cousins’ hometown is green on the map–that’s just because the town is really, really frugal.
Private or public? To each his own. I think the rise of charters has gravely damaged parochial schools in the cities. I suppose my children count as the “rich overachieving kids.” Their private schools are more diverse than our suburban schools. I am grateful to their schools for educating them.
I’m not a fan of spending on more computers. Computers are great tools for education, when they’re used well. Possessing computers, or teaching the kids to do one Powerpoint presentation a year, doesn’t mean a school’s using them well.
PTA spending is a mixed bag. If I thought the money was being spent wisely, I’d be up in arms about the difference. In our (family) opinion, our PTA has supported programs which sound glamorous, but don’t improve the education.
So much of what happens in the classroom is determined by factors with no direct connection to school. Peer groups matter. I’m reading Laurence Steinberg now, _Beyond the Classroom: Why School Reform Has Failed, and What Parents Need to Do_. The book makes sense.
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“We loved your schools. They cared about our children as individuals. They were wonderful.”
About the Norwegians–I think I’d want to know how big their kids were. Were they in early elementary, later elementary, middle school, or high school? (If I were a betting woman, I’d bet that their kids weren’t in middle school.)
From what I hear about French schools, by our standards, teachers in France are pretty mean and parents from Anglo countries tend to get pretty shell-shocked by the experience of having children studying there. On the other hand, French test scores are better than ours.
Here’s the story of an American high schooler in France:
http://www.hepg.org/blog/14
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I looked at Wendy’s map. Our city public school system rated so-so (a dirty orange color) while the suburban public schools scored well, from light green to dark green.
I can’t quite tell what the current state of affairs is in Texas, but we seem to have already had over a decade of attempts to equalize school funding.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Hood_plan
I had a look at my home school district in Western WA and it’s also a dirty orange (so-so ROI), with a neighboring Indian reservation slightly worse and a latte district having slightly better ROI. Puget Sound (the greater Seattle area) has quite a number of dark green (high ROI) districts.
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Among many other reasons, we have kids in private school because it enables us to live very compactly with our home, my husband’s work, and the kids’ school forming a smallish triangle. With luck (and favorable gas prices), we spend about no more than $100 on gas a month. My husband has a short walking commute to work and it’s about a 7-minute drive to get the kids to school. In our part of the city, public elementary schools range from 2-4 out of 10 on greatschools.org. There are much higher ranked public schools (in more prosperous parts of the city or in the suburbs), but it would create a commute for my husband as well as the need for a second car.
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I love interactive maps. I’m surprised by the disparity between lowest and highest spending in our state (ranging from 5000 to 12000), but suspect it has something to do with their correction methodology. Interestingly, in their “corrected” per pupil spending measures, all of our highest spending districts are “remote rural” districts. It’ll be interesting to delve into their numbers further.
Our neighborhood schools all get 10s at greatschools.org, but we still send our kids to a private school. In our case, our choice really can’t be blamed on the inadequacy of our public school choices.
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“Interestingly, in their “corrected” per pupil spending measures, all of our highest spending districts are “remote rural” districts.”
In my home district in WA, the school had to pay for a neighbor with a van to get the 8 or so kids on our road out to the highway to meet the school bus. From there, there was a 30-minute ride into town. The reservation kids (who were at the end of the bus line) probably had a 40-45 minute bus ride in the morning, followed by a 40-45 minute bus ride in the afternoon. It’s got to be pretty expensive to pay all those drivers and keep the big yellow buses rolling all over two counties.
Less excusably, the same held for athletic travel. Any time the school went to any sports competitions, the athletes would miss most of the school day just getting to the event, and there’d be occasional overnight trips.
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First, I’m glad my mother was never arrested. I was one of those kids whose parents divorced and rather than take me and my brother out of the excellent junior high school in the middle of the year she drove us to the bus stop. After selling our home we moved to a very crappy area with bad school. My mother was uneducated and without an excellent paying job, unable to “afford” the old school district. Make no mistake about it “OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS ARE NOT EQUAL.”
What’s interesting is that while some folks comment on diversity in term of race/ethnicity, what about income diversity? My economist friends one of whom is Asian, and the spouse is Caucasian said, “I don’t care about race/ethnicity. Talk to me about income diversity, and now we’re really exposing our sons to diversity.”
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First, I’m glad my mother was never arrested.
Not arrested in general or not arrested for educating with false papers?
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Are you referring to this program?
Click to access d01914.pdf
If so, it says that the vouchers were allowed to be used in suburban districts, but they declined to participate, which is what I was arguing makes more sense from an implementation standpoint.
Is a copy of your thesis online? I’d be interested in reading the racist statements the legislators made.
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Yes, that’s the program, Siobhan. I don’t have an electronic version of my dissertation due to a horrific computer incident. Ugh. Still makes me upset.
For my dissertation, I interviewed key players in Cleveland, Akron, and Columbus several times over two years. I was eight months pregnant during the last set of interviews. I interviewed everyone from the heads of the major teachers’ unions to the Secretary of Education. Everyone told me that suburban areas didn’t want school vouchers because their schools were good and because they didn’t want urban kids in their schools. Even the most conservative Republican state legislators, who would theoretically be in favor of school vouchers, fought against them. “Declined to participate” isn’t true. They actively fought against them and only agreed to vote for the program after they were assured that they wouldn’t have to accept Cleveland kids. No, they didn’t go on the record and say something so crude, but that’s what happened. This was true, not only in Ohio, but in every state across the country. That’s why the voucher advocates of the 1990s have moved on to fight for things like online education. They gave up on creating big state-wide programs, because of the suburban-urban impasse.
Perhaps the right word for suburban resistance isn’t racism. Perhaps it’s anti-urbanism or anti-poor kids. I didn’t come out and use the word “racism” in the dissertation, because it’s so inflammatory, but my dissertation adviser thought I was being too cautious.
Whatever the word, there is no doubt that there is a protectionist element to education in this country, an unwillingness to share resources. And, being a big commie, that disturbs me.
And, Macaroni, thanks for sharing your story. Your mom was a brave woman to do the right thing for you and your brothers.
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Whatever the word, there is no doubt that there is a protectionist element to education in this country, an unwillingness to share resources. And, being a big commie, that disturbs me.
How do you reconcile that with your desire to move to an even better school district?
If we all agree that money is not the main issue, it’s the peer group and involved parents and cultural capital etc., then what is the solution? If the county — as in NC — said that regardless of where you move, your kids were going to be put on a bus for a 45 minute one-way ride to another failing school in the interest of economic diversity, would you — as a “big commie” — celebrate that as the only way to share the resources that really matter?
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Laura:
Have you read the book about school integration in Columbus?
“Getting Around Brown: Desegration, Development, and the Columbus Public Schools”
by Gregory Jacobs? (1998, Ohio State University Press)
http://www.ohiostatepress.org/
I’m guessing you might have, but I guess it would depend on when your thesis was written.
I found the book fascinating, ’cause we were the experiment. I was in 9th grade when the schools in Columbus were integrated, so I got to see the history they describe in the book playing out on the ground. The book describes what happen from the legal/business standpoint in Columbus, and the eventual effects on the city in all its forms.
Now, in spite of the fact that the effect on the student population was significant and occasionally traumatic, I still think it was the right thing to do. There are always ripple effects to any plan that shares resources; for a liberal, that doesn’t mean that you give up and retreat to a wild west world where everyone fights for what they need, even at expense of everyone else.
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Moving is a cop out. No doubt about it. But i’ve done my best to improve the situation, including volunteering large amounts of time to a foundation. I’m totally burned out advocating for a special needs kid on top of everything else. One parent can’t change a system in time for their own kid to benefit. I’ve spent the morning painting and working on getting the house ready to show. We don’t want to move — good commute for Steve, some lovely friends, a funky house — but we have to do the right thing for the kids. Moving might not be an option if the housing market still sucks this spring, but we’re keeping our options open.
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“but we have to do the right thing for the kids.”
Yes, we all do. That doesn’t mean that we can’t also advocate for communitarian solutions that help everyone.
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I voted for tax increases, and think we should have passed them We’re going to have significant disruption of a wide array of services because we said no taxes, and made it even harder to raise revenue. But, I’m not planning on making voluntary donations to the state, even though I’d be happy to pay the extra amount if others who are similarly situated would do also so.
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Public school choice is different from heavy-handed desegregation plans. NYC, to a certain extent, has a system of public school choice, which works quite well. Parents apply to various schools across the city. Priority goes to the kids who live in district, and then the remaining spots are chosen by lottery or by merit or other criteria. It isn’t a perfect system. It benefits parents who are on the ball and can fill out applications and do the research, but it works. It also works, because financial resources are spread out evenly among the schools. The other resources, including the social capital of the parents, do get clumped up in the “good” schools. So, inequities still exist, but more kids have access to the good schools and there aren’t the same barriers to entry that exist elsewhere.
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laura, Are you sure that’s really the case in NYC, or are you mostly thinking Manhattan? My students who have gone on to become teachers tell absolute horror stories about inequality in educational conditions in the outer boroughs (excluding Brooklyn — none of my alums teach there).
As to equality, I am still unconvinced that equality of spending would lead to equality of outcome. Before, I noted that per-student spending in northern Jersey tended to be slightly higher in poorer performing schools than high performing ones. The area for which I have the data is not urban and the numbers are for instructional spending, not building upkeep.
These data tell me that the spending needs to be MORE unequal — much more spending need to be invested in poorer performing schools — to achieve equality in outcome. As most have noted here, the problem is even more urgent for urban areas with more severe problems of poverty and inequality.
Ostensibly, No Child Left Behind was a law designed to construct some equality in outcome, although the schools that are considered acceptable or even excellent by those standards might not please many parents. This limitation makes me question a federally based governmental solution — even if such a thing could be passed in this political climate.
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We don’t want to move — good commute for Steve, some lovely friends, a funky house — but we have to do the right thing for the kids. Moving might not be an option if the housing market still sucks this spring, but we’re keeping our options open.
I completely understand.
I just wish that in discussions about education among people, almost all of whom live in and have their kids in wealthy white school districts, there was a more generous spirit toward other people making those very same decisions. I have pure motives for moving to Fox Chapel, but those other people are clearly wild-eyed racist white flighters.
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“These data tell me that the spending needs to be MORE unequal — much more spending need to be invested in poorer performing schools — to achieve equality in outcome. ”
I also think this is true. The programs that would help kids in areas where there is high poverty, high crime, low social resources are expensive. They include things like extended school days and years, social support in the form of counseling and follow up (home visits, calling when kids are late), food, health care, . . . . Those things are all expensive.
Equality of funding comes no where close to providing those resources.
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Oh, I approved of court-ordered busing in Columbus. I was not using it as an example of a bad thing. I do think it’s different from school voucher systems.
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Laura:
Is you data point for choice working NYC? Is there data/analysis on how choice works there, and how it benefits lower SES populations?(i.e. our “Tiger Mother”)?
Our school district experimented with choice and has state-wide funding of schools (largely). Neither of those things were in any way a solution for our most significantly failing schools. In our newest iteration of the school system, the school district has retreated completely from choice. Why? 1) transportation costs, without which “choice” programs are largely unusable by a low SES student population 2) without a FRL or racial tie breaker, choice usage was increasing segregation in the district, rather than decreasing it.
Graphing the data available from the schools shows a hole in the percent FRL populations in individual schools. In this (liberal, fairly affluent city), folks were willing to stay in schools that were 30-40% FRL, but left (including to both public and private options) if the FRL population tipped to the 50% range. So, those schools would end up tipping to more FRL students (making them even less popular) and needy.
Our school district is 40% FRL, so, it’s not the same situation faced by districts like Newark, where city-wide choice programs would offer the choice of a number of poor schools. Choice within our urban district itself actually offers opportunities (one doesn’t have to choose between (as a quick and dirty tool) schools with Great School rankings of 1 and 2. We have the full range of 1-10 within the urban district. But, having choice (which involved distance + lottery, not simple lottery, thus buttressing residential segregation).
We’ve now switched to a system where choice is only available if schools have spots after accepting all their neighborhood students. Of course, this means that the more popular school have no spots for the students in less popular schools. We’re in our first year, but I predict less SES segregation under the new system. This policy wouldn’t work in school systems that are, say, 90% FRL, because a much smaller percent of the middle class population would tolerate that distribution — but in a school where FRL populations will range from 20%-60%, there’s room to balance the needs of that population among a larger more affluent set of students.
There remain some very poor schools, but at least one of these schools is receiving extra resources to implement the intensive model of all-around education for high poverty students.
I’m using segregation to mean SES segregation, and in fact, in our district, the racial dynamics are complicated enough that this isn’t a code word for black v white.
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I have pure motives for moving to Fox Chapel, but those other people are clearly wild-eyed racist white flighters.
Yeah, you’re about in the middle of the continum. For white flightiness:
Cranberry > Ligonier > Sewickley > South Strabane > Fox Chapel > Aspenwall > USC > Mt. Lebo > Edgewood > Swissvale > Wilkinsburg.
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I have two dogs in this discussion so to speak. On the one hand, I think the US really can do better with regard to instruction. In so many different academic subjects, American students are in the position of competing for the 100 meter dash at the Olympics while hopping forward in a potato sack. However, I think that’s true across the board, in rich American schools and poor American schools. In some cases, as some might argue (Cranberry?), affluent districts just waste larger amounts of money with greater elan (Smartboards!), although even poor districts can make a splash (like Detroit with its laptops for every 6-12 grader).
http://detnews.com/article/20110105/SCHOOLS/101050345/Detroit-students-gain-laptops–lose-bus-attendants
At the same time, I think the problem with the discussion of “good” schools and how mean it is to keep urban kids out of them is that to a large extent under the current regime, what makes those schools “good” or “bad” is the kind of kid and the kind of family that populates the school. I think it’s been mentioned here before by somebody else that test scores and free lunch numbers seem to vary inversely very precisely–the more free lunch kids you add to the mix, the lower the test scores go.
I don’t know exactly how to combine those two ideas, but here’s a try.
1. Nearly all US schools could do a better job on instruction
2. Just moving kids from one building to another will not necessarily improve their education, unless the instruction itself is better.
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Amy P, when I look at the state test scores broken out by subgroup on our state’s DOE website, it’s clear that wealthier districts do not necessarily do a better job educating all students. It varies. Some districts which participate in the local voluntary busing program post better results than the state average for low-income and minority students, but some don’t.
Our local affluent public high school posts results for all students which are higher than the state average, but results on tenth grade mathematics for a subgroup which are lower than the state average for their subgroup. The subgroups are small enough that yearly fluctuations in performance could make a large difference in the figures, but still, changing from one school to another doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll receive a better education. It depends on the schools.
Amy P, I would say that PTA funding often spends money (when permitted) on things which are “nice to haves” but not necessarily “need to haves.” A school may have one outstanding teacher who uses a Smartboard to good effect in his classroom. Buying every classroom a Smartboard does not transform every teacher in the school into an exceptional teacher, just as buying my husband a router would not transform him into a cabinet maker.
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“Some districts which participate in the local voluntary busing program post better results than the state average for low-income and minority students, but some don’t.”
Has anybody figured out what the difference is?
One of my husband’s colleagues wanted to have a Smartboard installed in a classroom so that he could mark up student papers on a board that everybody could see. In this particular case, it’s a heavy-duty writing course, and there’d be a substantial benefit. Anyway my husband spent a couple of days experimenting with some Smartboard-like software (I can’t remember the name of it) and a Wii remote and some other stuff, and it turns out that you can simulate the function of a Smartboard at much lower expense (assuming that the classroom already has some sort of screen setup). I’m not at all the techie that my husband is, but there seem to be a number of similar examples where purveyors of technology prey on the gullible. The Smartboard wouldn’t be such a big deal as an “investment”, if it weren’t for the fact that technology changes so quickly, so you could shell out thousands of dollars each for something that will be a white elephant in four years.
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I’m on second Smartboard in 6.5 years. I burned out my first smartboard when it was under warranty. I love my Smartboard. As a history teacher, I use it in ways that Amy’s husband does, but also to get into every major museum in the world. The virtual field trip thing is awesome (also good for touring archeological sites). And speaking of wii’s, there are a ton of freeware programs for using wiis connected to Smartboards to do particle physics simulations. All that said, (and yes my K-12 has a Smartboard in every classroom) Smart really didn’t know what they had. Two of the teachers at my school became trainers for Smart because they developed their own programs or techniques that Smart hadn’t anticipated (in History and Math) and when Smart found out about it they hired them to start training other teachers. They are still playing catch-up between what the technology can do and the programs and training that come with it. Really, the most valuable software is the Smartideas program that is really sophisticated brainstorming software. It allows incredibly depth and compexity. You could easily use it do anything from a short essay to a full book project. Yet the folks at Smart keep emphasizing you can use it to play Jeopardy style review games. Sigh.
Plus google-earth plus Smartboard = geography gold mine.
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MH: Heh. But those last three shouldn’t even been on the spectrum, as they’re places that people white flight into Pittsburgh from.
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Fascinating essay: http://www.city-journal.org/2011/21_1_teen-pregnancy.html
Thanks to the feds, urban schools like mine—already entitled to substantial federal largesse under Title I, which provides funds to public schools with large low-income populations—are swimming in money. At my school, we pay five teachers to tutor kids after school and on Saturdays. They sit in classrooms waiting for kids who never show up. We don’t want for books—or for any of the cutting-edge gizmos that non–Title I schools can’t afford: computerized whiteboards, Elmo projectors, the works. Our facility is state-of-the-art, thanks to a recent $40 million face-lift, with gleaming new hallways and bathrooms and a fully computerized library.
Here’s my prediction: the money, the reforms, the gleaming porcelain, the hopeful rhetoric about saving our children—all of it will have a limited impact, at best, on most city schoolchildren. Urban teachers face an intractable problem, one that we cannot spend or even teach our way out of: teen pregnancy. This year, all of my favorite girls are pregnant, four in all, future unwed mothers every one. There will be no innovation in this quarter, no race to the top. Personal moral accountability is the electrified rail that no politician wants to touch.
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Wilkinsburg, yes. But Edgewood and Swissvale are still more white that Pittsburgh. If it weren’t for the combined school district the courts forced on them, that would be much more expensive real estate.
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Amy P, I don’t know if anyone’s looking for the difference. I think expectations are very powerful in education. In very small groups, one or two students’ performance can change the group’s overall performance.
On the other hand… the scores were for 10th grade students. By the 10th grade, many students in inner city schools have dropped out. Thus, the comparison between the students bused to suburban schools and the inner city students in the 10th grade may be more accurate, because the groups are more similar in motivation. Also, for non-Asian minorities, the state average will reflect the performance of students in the large cities.
The state has encouraged charter schools in cities and struggling areas. In the 10 years since the bussed students started kindergarten, Boston has gained many schools which focus on student achievement.
In my opinion, any parent should look for schools led by people who are not ashamed to talk about achievement for all students. If the school committee and the school administration publicly express fears that academic stress is harming students, that’s a bad sign. I’ll see “Race to Nowhere” soon. I wonder how the performance of minority kids in communities which show that movie compares to minority kids in good, performance-oriented charter schools?
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MH: White, but bereft of kids (we came really close to moving to Edgewood, but the census numbers were dim). If we think of white flight primarily as people with kids, it’s definitely a problem for Edgewood and Swissvale, too.
One of my husband’s colleagues wanted to have a Smartboard installed in a classroom so that he could mark up student papers on a board that everybody could see. In this particular case, it’s a heavy-duty writing course, and there’d be a substantial benefit. Anyway my husband spent a couple of days experimenting with some Smartboard-like software (I can’t remember the name of it) and a Wii remote and some other stuff, and it turns out that you can simulate the function of a Smartboard at much lower expense (assuming that the classroom already has some sort of screen setup). I’m not at all the techie that my husband is, but there seem to be a number of similar examples where purveyors of technology prey on the gullible. The Smartboard wouldn’t be such a big deal as an “investment”, if it weren’t for the fact that technology changes so quickly, so you could shell out thousands of dollars each for something that will be a white elephant in four years.
Reminds me of this essay:
“In my short time as a teacher in Connecticut, I have muddled through President Bush’s No Child Left Behind act, which tied federal funding of schools to various reforms, and through President Obama’s Race to the Top initiative, which does much the same thing, though with different benchmarks. Thanks to the feds, urban schools like mine—already entitled to substantial federal largesse under Title I, which provides funds to public schools with large low-income populations—are swimming in money. At my school, we pay five teachers to tutor kids after school and on Saturdays. They sit in classrooms waiting for kids who never show up. We don’t want for books—or for any of the cutting-edge gizmos that non–Title I schools can’t afford: computerized whiteboards, Elmo projectors, the works. Our facility is state-of-the-art, thanks to a recent $40 million face-lift, with gleaming new hallways and bathrooms and a fully computerized library.
Here’s my prediction: the money, the reforms, the gleaming porcelain, the hopeful rhetoric about saving our children—all of it will have a limited impact, at best, on most city schoolchildren. Urban teachers face an intractable problem, one that we cannot spend or even teach our way out of: teen pregnancy. This year, all of my favorite girls are pregnant, four in all, future unwed mothers every one. There will be no innovation in this quarter, no race to the top. Personal moral accountability is the electrified rail that no politician wants to touch.”
http://www.city-journal.org/2011/21_1_teen-pregnancy.html
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“At my school, we pay five teachers to tutor kids after school and on Saturdays. They sit in classrooms waiting for kids who never show up.”
That reminds me of my stints doing volunteer tutoring in high school in rural WA and college in inner city LA–there was usually a superfluity of tutors and a shortage of tutees. (That said, I was never quite sure what to do for the students who did show up. Hopefully, those teachers are better prepared.)
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“I wonder how the performance of minority kids in communities which show that movie compares to minority kids in good, performance-oriented charter schools?”
It would be an interesting comparison to do — but depends critically on how you define “good” charter school. If you define it, as often seems to be done in these studies (of both teacher & school performance) as a school that performs above average (usually on test scores), then you’ve built your conclusion into your experiment. I would be interested in seeing a comparison between the performance of disadvantaged populations (we can use FRL) in a suburban school v in schools with particular plans (KIPP schools, which are defined by a method, and not by their schools, for example, or other schools with different strategies).
The essay of the Title 1 school sounds a bit like the stories of welfare queens. Is the school identified? Can I go visit it’s gleaming hallways and well equipped library? Our Title 1 schools are not particularly shiny, and are no shinier than our other schools.
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The Boston Globe published an article about Boston charter schools today: http://tinyurl.com/62bbcxu
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