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In a State With School Vouchers For All, Low-Income Families Aren’t Choosing to Use Them
(www.propublica.org)
this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2024
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I'm just worried that admin will put pressure on teachers to retain as many students as possible to keep funding, when teachers should be focusing on providing the best education they can. Some schools could conceivable have larger class sizes (i.e. if the focus for that school is independent learning), while others could have smaller class sizes, and there shouldn't be pressure for any class to retain students who would do better in a different environment.
E.g. I would have done better in a larger class of independent learners, because I preferred to work ahead of the class anyway and the teacher was more distracting than anything (I learn better on my own with occasional accountability), whereas some of the kids next to me really benefited from more interaction with the teacher. Everyone learns differently, and school should be designed in such a way that every child can learn in the way that works best for them.
The problem for that is logistics. It would be more effective to have those different sized classes taught in the same building rather than different schools so that we wouldn't have to be bussing people all around the district. It would also require both an increase in counselors who can help with identifying learning styles and in teachers who can be matched with the class that suits their teaching style as well.
That would also require an increase in pay for many of these positions since people already don't want to do them because the workload is significant, and that would have to be without increasing the workload because that just keeps the imbalance in place.
Sure, and probably a reduction in administrative staff since we'd move a lot of those responsibilities onto more local staff. I honestly don't see a ton of value in school districts as a concept, and instead think we should be thinking in terms of what makes an individual school stand out. If we shift money from the districts to the schools, we could probably fund a lot of this w/o changing revenue.
One huge part of this, though, is replacing school buses with city transit. If kids are taking city transit to get to school, transferring to a different bus to go to a different school shouldn't be a big deal (just ride w/ the kids the first few times and they'll get it). This is where a lot of the cost savings should come from IMO, we shouldn't be maintaining two separate fleets of transit vehicles and employees, we should instead expand and improve city transit to cover both use cases.
One of the benefits of districts is that you can then afford to have magnet type schools that specialize in one specific field, like performing arts, science, etc. That allows for students who are excelling in that district to get more specialized instruction. As for the transit bit, yes doubling up is troubling but we would need to provide additional routes and runs on each route to improve coverage to the point that school buses become moot. I'm not sure which would be easier to do, though I do want to support the swap to public transit.
And if school buses are moot, then districts are largely moot. Why rely on a district to provide specialized services when you can just let the schools themselves decide what to specialize in to attract students? That works really well for universities, and the main limitation for K-12 schools to operate that way is transit. Moving students to specialized schools within a district is incredibly rare, and I've only seen it in one place (where I grew up, which spent a ton on schools and had an advanced placement school). In my current area, the only way you're getting school choice is if the parents bring the kids to/from school, because the buses only run for students in their boundaries.
I think this type of system would work pretty well in densely populated areas like city centers, though it would break down for smaller towns and whatnot. So we should probably keep the traditional model for rural areas, and migrate to school choice for urban areas.
But yes, transit is absolutely the key. And I think killing bus service would kick-start transit service, since parents would quickly get annoyed if they had to take their kids there every day.