The Latest Crime Wave: Sending Your Child to a Better School

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903285704576557610352019804.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

by petercooper • 15 years ago

151 139 15 years ago

online.wsj.com

shithead• 15 years ago

used her father's address to enroll her two daughters in a better public school outside of their neighborhood. After spending nine days behind bars charged with grand theft, the single mother was convicted of two felony counts

Slightly insane, eh, what?

I can think of a few people roaming around foot-loose and fancy-free, and even pocketing scores of millions of dollars, who should be doing that.

maxklein• 15 years ago

America is still a deeply segregated society. And the segregation is built in such a way that it tends to keep people where they always where.

SoftwareMaven• 15 years ago

The segregation is not all systemic. I remember reading an article discussing research discussing how neighborhoods change as a result of very slight preferences of "I'd rather be by somebody of my race than a different race." This applied to black and white neighborhoods.

Taken over time and populations, these very slight differences in preference (and, realistically, in the USA, it is unlikely to be "slight") lead to segregated neighborhoods.

If anybody has the original, I'd love to see it again and find out what I've mis-remembered. I couldn't find it.

burgerbrain8• 15 years ago

I compare it to boxing matches. If I'm watching a match between someone who is identified as German, and someone who is identified as Italian, without other influences, I am going to tend towards cheering for the Italian, because I identify more with Italians. Never mind the fact that I'm 3/4th German and only 1/4th Italian, and certainly don't have anything against Germans. It's purely a unconscious tribal reflex, rarely even noticed unless given a chance to magnify (time and numbers provides this magnifying factor in communities.)

akkartik• 15 years ago

I know the article you mean but couldn't find it. But the Schelling Segregation Model seems to fit the bill: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Schelling#Models_of_Segr...

LoveLinux4• 15 years ago

Is there something wrong with groups of people wanting to self segregate?

andrewljohnson2• 15 years ago

If by "wrong" you mean "leads to worse outcomes" - then very possibly yes.

viraptor2• 15 years ago

It depends. Is it because they don't want to be in an unfamiliar environment, or because they don't want an unfamiliar environment to be around them?

If they're hostile to other groups in some way, that's not a good thing (I don't want white/black/pink/red/... people around my house). But there's nothing wrong with staying in some area because you want to be close to your family (which leads to "natural" race concentration within that area).

yogsototh• 15 years ago

Self segregate means less communication between people.

Thus communication problem directly impact the frustration of each party about others. Then more violence will occurs.

To be more precise. Yes, everybody want to live with people which share the same values. But this local optimization have a bad effect on the society viewed in its totality.

Taking my own example, I believe that not being segregated in school had made me lose some hours of good Math. But I believe this experience made me more tolerant. And it is also certainly true for the others.

There is no perfect society model, but my inclination is to believe that more communication is never a waste and that any lack of communication is potentially dangerous.

patrickgzill2• 15 years ago

No, "freedom of association" means exactly that, in both the positive and negative forms. You are free to associate with someone, and free to not associate with someone.

mattdeboard8• 15 years ago

I'm not sure if, as I progress through my 30s, I am becoming more liberal, more cynical or more jaded, or what, but it seems like every day I read some article about the United States which elicits a, "What the FUCK?" from me.

This is one of those articles. Seriously? Prison??

notaddicted• 15 years ago

The article neglected to provide any rationale whatsoever for the "other side" which may be the triggering the WTFs. I'm not saying the logic is good, but here it is: A proportion of the school's budget comes from property tax. I found a pdf that says it is about 20% of the budget in California [1]. Thus:

Expensive neighborhood -> lots of property tax -> rich school

So essentially the laws punish freeloaders of education. Out of all the things a person can "freeload" education is probably the most noble, which I guess is why the law seems so dicey.

[1] http://www.edsource.org/pub_QA_BudgetProcess06.html

mattdeboard8• 15 years ago

I don't really care about the other side. Why are we putting people in prison over this? Having the law/rule is one thing, I guess, but the punishment is extremely excessive. 10 days in prison, and 3 years of probation? She's lucky she got commuted by the governor. Not everyone will be so.

dlokshin• 15 years ago

Why do you associate this with becoming more liberal? Seems the reverse should be true.

_delirium• 15 years ago

One of many reasons the single-axis scale is misleading. :)

It does somewhat fit the traditional fault lines over school districting, though. Traditionally, conservatives quite strongly opposed to allowing school attendance to cross boundaries, supporting separate districts in which each district was funded exclusively by local taxpayers and attended exclusively by children resident in that distrct. Mix of reasons, ranging from (on the nicer side) federalism/decentralization to (on the less-nice side) maintaining de-facto segregated schools.

In addition, liberals have tended to be the main ones behind aggregation-with-choice programs, in which many smaller districts in a metropolitan area would be aggregated into one organizational district, where parents could choose to send their kids to any school in the district. Conservative suburbanites have tended to prefer keeping their schools separate, without cross-boundary enrollment permitted.

LoveLinux4• 15 years ago

In general, "Better school" means a school with more whites and or Asians. "Bad schools" means a school with more black and Hispanic students.

showkiller• 15 years ago

Not sure by your statement if you have children or not. But I just finished enrolling my children in a private school instead of the local public school. I really don't care if they are black or white I want my children to go to a school where the parents value education as much as I do.

LoveLinux4• 15 years ago

I have mixed race children and do whatever it takes to make sure that they are in schools that made up of mostly white, Asian, or Indian (India) students. Black and Hispanic students have shown no signs of valuing education and the schools usually plagued with violence. I'm not alone in this thinking; every single Asian family I know does the same.

mattdeboard8• 15 years ago

Have some stats to support this assertion? You've not only got to support the assertion that it is more likely than not that a school with >=51% black and Hispanic students is going to be a "bad school" (which you've failed to define, but I'll take it to mean "underperforming"), but in addition yo'uve also got to prove that a school with >=51% white or Asian students will be a "good" school, or a school that is performing up to some standard. (Which?).

aik3• 15 years ago

>> In case you needed further proof of the American education system's failings, especially in poor and minority communities, consider the latest crime to spread across the country: educational theft.

I'm not sure if it is entirely fair to single out the education system here (once again), or at least batch it in with "yet another failing". I believe more is at fault here.

Unless I'm mistaken, tax payers in a particular school district (or county) fund the school district they're part of. A consequence of this fact, in the name of fairness for the parents, is the necessity for your child to attend a school that you are directly funding (and not attend a school you're not funding, which is what the mother in the story is doing). As long as we're sticking with this system of funding our own schools in this manner, we will naturally be encouraging segregation of classes and have no choice but to turn down those who try to get around it.

So I agree a woman shouldn't be jailed for trying to circumvent the system in this manner, but with the above knowledge of how the system operates, it doesn't surprise me that she would be punished, as I'm sure many others are as well.

Allowing people to attend any school they like (which this article is arguing for I believe?) is a pretty fundamental shift in the system.

mtinkerhess• 15 years ago

Funding varies state-by-state. For example, in Michigan most school district funding comes from the state level, and local districts are limited in their ability to raise more funds.

http://www.michiganinbrief.org/edition07/Chapter5/K12Funding...

guard-of-terra8• 15 years ago

Her father, registered in that school district, obviously pays the taxes; So there's no reason why it would not cover the tuition of her chidren.

You're just dropped back from "it's fair that way" to "the rules say that way".

It's not like that his taxes are of a different color than her taxes, right? So it should not matter where the children go to school, it's still fair.

burgerbrain8• 15 years ago

"It's not like that his taxes are of a different color than her taxes, right?"

I'm not sure, but I believe that people with children in their household pay more school taxes.

guard-of-terra8• 15 years ago

Mandatory Herluf Bidstrup: http://www.herluf-bidstrup.ru/bidstrup1_30.htm

bconway• 15 years ago

Many states allow you to opt out of paying for schools in your property taxes after a certain point (usually retirement age). It drops the tax rate significantly for older folks, obviously shifting the burden to those in child-rearing years.

gamble2• 15 years ago

The problem is that American cities are structured to keep the poor and minorities in nominally independent cities or suburbs that are geographically indistinguishable from the richer areas, but just independent enough to ensure that property taxes aren't shared.

It's also hard to escape the fact that many, if not most of these suburbs were explicitly set up to keep out blacks, latinos, Jews, and other undesirable groups. Until the sixties, houses in these communities often carried a restrictive covenant that explicitly prohibited sales to non-whites.

Canada shares a lot of the basic educational structure as the US, and sadly a good share of the racial baggage as well, but our cities are far more monolithic than most American cities. There are only two school districts in my city (pop. ~1 million) and students can register in any school throughout the district. The only choice I make as a taxpayer is which district, public or Catholic, I want my property taxes to fund.

sidek2• 15 years ago

Yes. In Edmonton, although schools have "attendance areas", there's always spots for students outside attendance areas. If a school fills up there's a lottery to determine who gets in from outside the attendance area, but only one high school ever goes to lottery (Harry Ainlay) and there's schools like Lillian Osborne that are just as good as Harry Ainlay. Even students in the Edmonton suburbs can go to any school in Edmonton as long as the school doesn't go to lottery. I've always found this to be a good system.

Alex3917• 15 years ago

"just independent enough to ensure that property taxes aren't shared."

This is actually a good thing for everyone, in terms of improving the quality of schools for both rich and poor kids. What normally happens is that rich towns have higher millage, which poor town can't afford. Whereas poor towns tax the big box stores and businesses that tend to be more prevalent. When you combine the rich and poor districts you can't sufficiently tax either the houses of the rich people or the businesses, so the school quality for both declines. This is partly why Florida schools are so underfunded, because they only have 60ish districts for the entire state so they can't properly tax anyone.

anamax5• 15 years ago

> It's also hard to escape the fact that many, if not most of these suburbs were explicitly set up to keep out blacks, latinos, Jews, and other undesirable groups.

Actually, it's pretty easy to escape that "fact" because it simply isn't true.

Yes, there were some covenants like that, but they were relatively rare.

And, most of the housing stock is newer than that, so even if such covenants were somewhat common and were still in force, they'd cover a small fraction of the population.

Since they haven't been in force for decades....

> Canada shares a lot of the basic educational structure as the US, and sadly a good share of the racial baggage as well, but our cities are far more monolithic than most American cities.

More "monolithic" is right. Canada is about as diverse as Minnesota.

Permit• 15 years ago

As a Canadian, I'm not entirely familiar with your education system. That being said, wouldn't schools receive funding based (at least in part) on the number of children enrolled at them?

I would have thought that would have made more sense than taking a percentage out of the incomes of the residents in a community and funneling that to the school.

The point I'm getting at is Ms. Williams-Bolar pays taxes. If schools receive funding based on enrollment, then her money essentially went to that school regardless.

bd_at_rivenhill2• 15 years ago

Doesn't work that way; property taxes in the geographic region of the school district go to fund the schools in that district and nowhere else (if you ignore the effects of equalization lawsuits). If someone living in a low-tax district puts their child in a school in a high-tax district, they are free-riding. The case in Connecticut involves a mother from Bridgeport, which is a poor area, putting her daughter in school in Norwalk, which is much wealthier.

bzbarsky2• 15 years ago

School funding setups differ wildly in the US.

There's a mix of local funding, typically from property taxes (which is independent of number of students enrolled), state funding from state general revenue, and sometimes federal funding. In some school districts, specific school levies may also be passed as sales or property taxes; these may be time-limited to pay for infrastructure or ongoing. The mix of all of the above varies from state to state and school district to school district.

The real estate tax funding takes a percentage of the home values of the residents in a community, not a percentage of the incomes, of course. That said, the percentage is typically not fixed.

Furthermore, the state funding formulas differ from state to state and are not time-invariant. They do tend to depend on number of student, but not necessarily kind of student (e.g. students in special education programs may or may not get more funding).

Note that "depend" doesn't mean "determined by"; in Massachusetts, for example, state funding per student depends on how much money the school district is putting in from its real estate tax base and on the per-student spending in the district; the formula is somewhat complicated but the upshot is that the richer districts get _more_ per-student state funding. Yes, this is way backwards, and isn't even the most screwed up thing about school funding in this country...

In any case, in many school districts the bulk of school funding in fact comes from property taxes on the residents of the school district. That's the whole issue in this case: Ms. Williams-Bolar was not in fact paying property taxes in the district in question.

dalke• 15 years ago

The article mentioned Florida: "School districts in Florida, .. all boasted recently about new address-verification programs."

In Florida, each county is its own school district. 54.15% of school funding comes from property taxes says http://www.fldoe.org/fefp/pdf/fefpdist.pdf .

Therefore your comment about tax "fairness" only make sense if you mean students who cross county lines in order to go to school. This is going to be rare just from a geographical standpoint.

In the 1970s we lived in Miami with my grandparents. My parents bought and moved into a house across the street. The street was the boundary line for another elementary school. My parents didn't want us to switch schools so we continued to claim my grandparents' address as our residence. The boundary had nothing to do with differences in tax levels.

Your logic also contains the implication that people with more children are taking more unfair use of the school system, unless they also pay more taxes. Do you really mean to make that association?

halostatue3• 15 years ago

The mother used the (divorced, non-custodial) father's address. The father is funding the school they were sent to, even though the children (who don't pay taxes, obviously) don't live at the father's address.

Not only should she never have been punished, but the very idea that this is a 'grand theft' felony is offensive.

That said, I think the article is a confused mishmash. It went from talking about the abuse of the legal system by the school authorities to railing against teachers' unions to suggesting that the two groups (school authorities and teachers' unions) are working in cahoots to keep parents out of the loop on their children's education. Real educational reform is required in the U.S., for certain. But blaming the teachers isn't reform: it's scapegoat-ism.

Laws like the one that opened the article need to go away. Quickly, as they're offensive to everything that America claims it holds dear.

bmj• 15 years ago

This is hardly anything new. 20+ years ago, I knew kids with parents that did the same thing (though often for athletics instead of academics). Even within the city (where, at the time, you were required to attend the neighborhood school), parents found ways to game the system.

mchusma• 15 years ago

Good examples of the effects of government getting involved in education, particularly tying it to location. The solution to this problem is clear but politically difficult: limit government involvement in education to vouchers at most, preferably none at all.

jleyank• 15 years ago

If government is not involved in education "at all", then you have the situation that people pay $$ for schools and then have no say in how the money is spent. This would not go down well...

delinka• 15 years ago

I suppose the Free Market would make sure that their 'customers' had input into how tuition money is spent. After all, if the government isn't involved and you're free (Free Market, remember) to move your student, then the school needs to cater to your expectations or lose tuition money.

Volpe• 15 years ago

<sarcasm> That's right, poor people shouldn't have an education! </sarcasm>

That's what you are advocating with "Government shouldn't be involved in education." Is that really what you mean?

JupiterJazz3• 15 years ago

Why would it be in the interest of private schools to hoard their products from me? I only make $18000 (about half the median wage) and food companies don't price me out of the market. Car companies don't either. Given that nearly every human being is in demand of an affordable education it makes no sense for companies to not accept low income students. The only reason private schools are expensive now is because the government monopoly makes it imposible for them to compete on the low income section of the market.

potatolicious2• 15 years ago

Are you seriously proposing we go back to pre-public schooling society - you know, the one where the vast major of the population was completely uneducated since education was strictly reserved for the wealthy?

Laissez-faire brings out some admirable qualities in people, but it is also an extremely unequal system with many detrimental effects on society (including the rich). There's a historical reason why we invented public schools, public libraries, public parks, etc.

I find it difficult to understand how someone with an awareness of history can support a completely laissez-faire society where the default answer to everything is "let the market figure it out". This is not a new idea, and the present state of the world only exists because we had to suffer through centuries of unbridled capitalism and classism.

lhnn2• 15 years ago

Now that we have things like affluence, the 'primed pump' of an educated society, the NEED for an educated society, and finally, the Internet, I don't see why we need nearly the government involvement in education that we did 50-100 years ago.

jamesaguilar• 15 years ago

> "The solution to this problem is clear . . ."

It's not clear that this would solve the problem. Particularly, instead of only being able to send their children to bad schools, the poorest would instead perhaps not be able to send their children to school at all.

guard-of-terra8• 15 years ago

AS if anybody cared - how it works in Russia:

- There are virtually no private schools, every school is public.

- There are better schools and worse schools. In a big city there are a few really good ones and a bunch of mediocre ones.

- A school have to accept anyone living in a proximity, but it may also accept anyone else. So the good ones set up entry exams. Mediocre ones enroll everybody.

- I guess there are some bad schools, some really poor ones, but there are probably none or a very few "failing" ones, with meaning as in article.

By the way, where do illegal immigrants' children go to?

LoveLinux4• 15 years ago

The problem with that in America is that allowing entrance to schools based entirely on tests scores results in large numbers of Asians and whites and very few black and Hispanics and you end up with this racial discrimination mess.

guard-of-terra8• 15 years ago

The solution is that you perhaps should be making bad schools less bad, instead of making the awesome schools more shiny and then digging moats around those.

burgerbrain8• 15 years ago

Efforts must be made to eliminate systematic biases in standardized testing. When we are reasonably convinced that has been done, as far as I'm concerned it's all just how the cookie crumbles. Make sure that you're acceptance policies are merit based, and damn the consequences.

viraptor2• 15 years ago

Same process in Poland (start by enrolling anywhere, later exams from the previous school matter), yet the difference was big. High schools in my home town got between 98% and ~10% people advancing higher. I guess 98% wasn't 100 because kids moving to schools abroad were counted as "not on the list of local universities".

For primary school you pretty much started in a mixed, local group, without any visible bias, so chances were really very similar for everyone.

guard-of-terra8• 15 years ago

I would argue that it's more because of self-selection, not because of good schools being that good:

Those who have the motivation and background to continue to higher education also tend to shift towards "good" schools. They would continue even if they didn't go to a "good" school.

tlogan• 15 years ago

In general, schools in America have much much lower quality than ones in Russia. Some immigrants families here in Bay Area are quite frustrated because schools here seems to have a goal to be "a safe and pleasant place where you put your kids so you can go to work" instead "place where kids learn stuff".

Basically, schools are made in such way that no real hard work is actually done at schools and that everything needs to be done at home (evenings, weekends, etc.). I believe that is reason schools with Asians and Whites kids are much more successful.

So my theory is that there are no "good" or "bad" schools here in America: all schools are of a equally low quality, there are only "good" and "bad" neighborhoods.

aamar• 15 years ago

To answer your question at the end: a child born in the U.S., whether born to illegal immigrants or not, is a citizen and therefore a legal resident and therefore can attend public school.

Children who themselves illegally immigrated to the U.S. can also attend public school without cost (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plyler_v._Doe).

0x12• 15 years ago

Only in the US will you find people that go to prison for arranging better education for their children.

Utterly ridiculous. The best way to ensure that people do not do stuff like this is to make sure that all schools are held to the same high standards.

mattdeboard8• 15 years ago

I agree with you that it's ridiculous they'd go to prison over it. However, "holding all schools to the same high standard" is impractical with the way the system is now.

NY_Entrepreneur2• 15 years ago

Don't try to send them to a 'good' school, certainly not an 'academically good' school. Bluntly, the K-12 teachers don't know anything worth much serious study or effort.

The best can hope for from a K-12 school is that it will do no harm.

Find a school that has a nice 'social atmosphere' and otherwise is RELAXED, e.g., with as little homework as possible.

Then for the real learning, have your children do that at home -- evenings, weekends, summers, and/or school study hall.

What materials? Sure, academically by far the crown jewel is just math. So, get them through math to the college sophomore level ASAP. The next best subject is physics. So, get them through freshman physics based on calculus ASAP. How? Get the best texts (good used copies are FINE, especially for the math) and work through them. If need some help, ask some friends who know the material well and/or find an appropriate, helpful college prof. Or have one parent enroll in, say, a community college course and there learn enough to guide their children and be able to ask the prof questions.

After math and physics, emphasize writing, say, letters, notes, blogs, whatever.

Sure, get 'computer literacy' and also learn the basics of programming.

Then emphasize geography, history, and art history. For English literature, at least learn about the basics of 'drama' and 'formula fiction' and touch on the more famous works. For as many of the works as can, start by watching a movie of the work. For more in drama, understand how movie and TV dramas work.

Somewhere get some basic coverage of 'people and personality', especially about human emotions. E.g., lacking anything else, read E. Fromm, 'The Art of Loving'.

For more, have the child take some community college courses, e.g., biochemistry and biology.

For more, look at the International Baccalaureate program and pick and choose from that or, maybe, just go through the whole thing.

During the last 2-3 years of the 'high school' time, review what else, if anything, is required to do well on the SAT tests.

For more? Maybe learn piano?

Likely could study accounting and take the CPA exam. A CPA would be nice to have.

For more? Jump into college material at the junior level and keep going. Get through college ASAP and then go for graduate or professional school.

For K-12? Don't ask for much and mostly just circumvent it.

bd_at_rivenhill2• 15 years ago

I think these parents are trying to get their kids out of schools that can't even enforce basic discipline in the classroom. There's a big difference between an environment where teachers don't know anything worth much serious study or effort and an environment where teachers spend almost all of their time trying prevent a riot from breaking out in the classroom and thus spend almost no time actually instructing students.

Also, it can be very hard to support real learning at home if you are a single parent working two or three jobs to make ends meet.

NY_Entrepreneur2• 15 years ago

What you wrote with:

"almost all of their time trying prevent a riot from breaking out"

is quite similar to what I wrote with:

"The best can hope for from a K-12 school is that it will do no harm.

"Find a school that has a nice 'social atmosphere' and otherwise is RELAXED, e.g., with as little homework as possible."

So we are at least partly agreeing.

What to do about a school with knife fights in the classrooms, drug deals in the halls, and pimping at lunch time is to get the hell out: Such a school fails on "do no harm" and "a nice 'social atmosphere'".

If just have to leave and can't afford a wealthy neighborhood, then pick a small town in a rural, farming area in one of the more northern states; there essentially any school will do no harm.

Also good, pick a college town. Even if sweep floors, flip burgers, wash pots, and act as a security guard, will be able to do a terrific job getting children ready for college and life.

My good news is that don't have to move to some neighborhood with all millionaires. Instead, quite sufficient is JUST "do no harm" and a 'social atmosphere'. Academically relaxed is also good.

This is a radical recommendation: For good work in actually learning for college and life, mostly don't depend on the school. Don't mostly depend on the school even if in one of the best school districts in the country or even are sending children to one of the best private schools.

Why? Again, yet again, to repeat, bluntly the K-12 teachers don't know enough to teach much of anything to be taken very seriously. The K-12 years are some of the very best years for learning, and it is a grand disaster that those years are turned over to the K-12 system and, thus, largely wasted.

Also implied but not stated was, get the heck into college level material ASAP. In the US, the good academic material starts in college and continues into graduate and professional school. K-12 is wildly different and, academically, is a really bad joke -- mostly can just skip it. For most parents who want good education for their children, this is radical but good advice.

With my advice, careful parents, and a one-room school house in a serious, rural farming community will totally knock the socks off ANYTHING in formal K-12 education.

For your:

"Also, it can be very hard to support real learning at home if you are a single parent working two or three jobs to make ends meet."

True.

So: (1) Young people, listen up: Work however hard is necessary to form stable marriages and, really, stable, larger families. Marriages and families are IMPORTANT. Again, listen up.

(2) Unless you want a series of disasters for the rest of your life, delay having children until you can form a stable marriage.

(3) In the home, set up a 'culture' of learning instead of TV, cars, fashion frocks, popularity competitions, cell phone gossip, pop culture, fast food, sports, wild parties, etc.

Then, get the children started and going on learning, largely independently, ASAP. Then the children can learn on their own time with minimal time from parents, so little that there still is a chance for a single parent.

But this matter of a 'culture' of learning is just CRUCIAL. If there is any doubt about the culture in your home, then disconnect the TV. Keep children away from 'pop culture'. Emphasize LEARNING and, then, curiosity.

cafard2• 15 years ago

Forty years ago, I remember hearing from a neighbor that the Arizona school district she had worked for took some pains to see that the snowbirds didn't just drop their kids off for instruction. Her oldest child was probably born in 1951 or 1952, which suggests a terminus ad quem for her teaching days of about 60 years ago.

Now and again the New York Times will write about the efforts New Jersey districts will take to investigate suspicious enrollments. I've never read of such investigations resulting in more than a kid shipped from one school to another.

And it strikes me as utterly disingenuous for the WSJ to be going on about this.

lhnn2• 15 years ago

How is it disingenuous for the WSJ to talk about this issue?

zeteo5• 15 years ago

>Ms. Williams-Bolar last year used her father's address to enroll her two daughters in a better public school outside of their neighborhood.

This is not civil disobedience, it's just plain old falsification of records. If she had falsified another crucial piece of information - say, income level on a scholarship application - would Ms. Williams-Bolar still get all of this "end justifies the means" sympathy?

jxcole• 15 years ago

Obviously not. The whole point of the article is that poor, intelligent children do not have any way to enroll in schools that would allow them to excel. Presumably if you lied on the income level on a scholarship application, you would have the funds to send your kid to a nice school but you wouldn't want to pay for it. Note that if you were very poor lying about your income on your scholarship application would not be necessary.

If you're still not convinced, let me ask you: Would you not lie about where you lived if it meant you could get a better life for your child? I am not sure you could be called a good parent if the answer to that question is no.

zeteo5• 15 years ago

No matter how worthy the purpose, falsehood is falsehood. Is it really such good education for your children to demonstrate that lying should be used to obtain the important things in life?

dredmorbius2• 15 years ago

And no child born of a wealthy suburb with exceptional education ever lied.

As others have noted: there's a fundamental inequity here, often based on years of discriminatory practices and uneven funding. In my book, flouting the law to highlight a social inequity that hurts humanity at large is a good thing.

maxxxxx2• 15 years ago

I am not sure this is the whole story. The Wall Steet Journal lately seems to be on a mission to discredit any form of government. Of course it's different when they wear a uniform, do things in secret and tell us they are there to protect us...

rdl3• 15 years ago

This is sad -- there is a need to restrict access to a limited resource, but for any individual parent, it's the right choice. The ultimate solution is to improve the quality of the bad districts, but that will take a long time.

For now, I think the best approach is strict enforcement of residency, but three tracks in for out of district students: cash payment substantially in excess of per-student marginal cost; competitive entrance for a limited number of students based on objective merit (not race based, like the PA/EPA system); and children of employees of the district (or maybe of city government in general).

I'd be fine with a parent who really wants to give a child a chance taking a job with the district primarily to get children into the schools. Maybe a second job, maybe part time, but the sacrifice should be made by the parent, not by other residents of the school taxing district. If this lets the district hire people more cheaply, or of better quality (which DOES happen in Palo Alto for just this reason), it's win/win.

mckoss• 15 years ago

Why not use a lotery? I don't see why any public district shouldn't be available to any state resident. What would be the rationale for any preference to residents or district workers?

Any other policy serves only to preserve the inequality of the education offered between districts.

rdl3• 15 years ago

They're funded locally, not by the state (in most states). There's just as much of an argument for a national lottery as a state lottery, if you want people outside the funding area to have an even shot of coming in.

tokenadult• 15 years ago

My state has a more rational state law. For more than twenty years now, all public schools anywhere in the state offer open enrollment to all students anywhere in the state, up to the limits of the capacity of each school district to receive students.

http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/Academic_Excellence/School_...

Funding of course is based on enrollment.

http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/hrd/pubs/mnschfin.pdf

More students means more enrollment, so school districts make efforts to provide attractive programs that will bring students across district lines. This competition among school districts has promoted innovation in programs and resulted in a fair amount of interchange among students who live in different neighborhoods. For example, the first public school program for "highly gifted" students in our state

http://www.invergrove.k12.mn.us/atheneum.html

began precisely because the offering district knew it could build a program that would attract in new students to the district (which was losing student population because it was in an inner-ring suburb with an aging population). That district enjoyed such success with its program that soon other school districts set up similar programs.

http://www.springlakeparkschools.org/schools/la/la_lighthous...

http://department.services.bloomington.k12.mn.us/modules/cms...

http://www.minnetonka.k12.mn.us/ACADEMICS/NAVIGATORPROGRAM/P...

And the main point is that school districts don't just compete with programs for "highly gifted" students, but also with programs for fine-arts-inclined students, or students who desire language immersion programs (Spanish immersion and Chinese immersion programs are both hot programs in Minnesota), and students with many other characteristics. Some school districts gain almost half of their enrollment from open enrollment, and correspondingly some of the historically worst school districts in Minnesota have lost large percentages of enrollment to families crossing district boundaries to look for better schools. (Minnesota also has a huge number of charter schools, which is a distinct form of competition for publicly subsidized students, but they cannot offer some of the programs that public school districts can.) This competition keeps all districts accountable for providing a good learning environment, and helps change the psychology of teachers and principals dealing with families from one of treating learners as a burden to one of treating learners as an opportunity to be grateful for.

Any other state in the United States could do the same, and a few already have.

http://educateiowa.gov/index.php?option=com_content&task...

http://www.ecs.org/html/offsite.asp?document=http%3A%2F%2Fww...

aik3• 15 years ago

Very interesting. It's clear that Missouri (where I used to live) doesn't have open enrollment. A huge amount of resources are spent on ensuring students do NOT cross district lines. As a personal example, certain ESL students in my mother's class are visited at home very often to validate that they truly do live where they say they do.

When schools have to serve students that they're not getting paid for, the incentive to keep those students out is surprisingly strong.

tokenadult, Are you aware of any downsides/negatives to the open enrollment system?

surfsurge• 15 years ago

I dont't want to generalize, but if there is one thing I have learned from my limited experience working in both a Title I HS district and a fairly affluent K-12 district is that these problems are very, very complex.

aik, Here's one example of a downside: Even relatively well-performing school districts can struggle when their student population starts moving to a new charter school in the area. Since many of the costs for education are fixed within a certain margin, it becomes difficult to shed costs to compensate for the lost funding for each student that left the district.

nazgulnarsil• 15 years ago

underground history of american education and an econ 101 textbook. These are the bare minimum of material you should be familiar with before spouting policy prescriptions on this subject.

nasmorn• 15 years ago

This reminds me of how european peasants could not move to a different parish then the one they were born in unless the priest would accept a transfer.

The land of the free. Free to move to any trailer park in the whole country.

callmeed• 15 years ago

I was so close to doing this for 2 of my kids this year—we were to the point of signing the papers. Our neighborhood was in the region of the worst-performing school in the district (not even the closest, either). My mom owns a house 3 blocks from a great school and we were going to use that address. My mom wasn't comfortable with it so we opted for private school.

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