Just listened to the episode and it struck me that Beth used not having AC at school as a sign it was under funded. I live in Michigan and many of our schools don’t have AC (even new ones) so it made me curious what other things one state may need in a school that others can easily go without 🤔
I have to admit I get frustrated with these discussions. We're a military family, and at the mercy of the Air Force when determining assignments. That means we can go from northern Virginia, or Colorado, with their excellent public school systems, to Alabama or South Dakota, consistently ranked amongst the worst, with little to no say in the matter. Or we can be sent overseas, where DoDEA runs some pretty decent schools thorough the US military. BUT. Sadly, we're only a part of a community for a couple years, and I definitely feel the pressure as a mom to honor their academic strengths AND to make sure my kids are ready for those excellent school systems regardless of where we're assigned.
We used public charter schools for most of grade school, and they were a Godsend in so many ways! The biggest benefit was being able to choose the KIND of instruction base our kids received - which allowed us to choose classical liberal arts based pedagogy. Basically, it's the same education I grew up with, with a much larger emphasis on world history, rather than the computer-based education that the public schools were so proud of. We valued things like history, cursive, and physical books & taking notes by hand on paper; and were able to find schools that met our family's needs. The second biggest blessing was that the schools were nearly free (just had to pay for uniforms)! We couldn't have afforded to send our kids to private schools every year, and the public charters were free tuition - BECAUSE they were publicly funded as a percentage of public funding. (To my understanding, they received anywhere from 50-70٪ of what a public school received per kid).
At our last assignment we were in a state that consistently ranks among the worst in the US, in an abysmal school district, and did NOT fund public charter schools. For the first time we had no charter options. The public school was sadly not an option - our kids were easily 1-2 YEARS ahead of their peers. We had to pay $10k/yr to send our kids to private schools (which was still at least a semester behind our kids), because that was the only way they stood a chance of keeping up when we got back to an area with better schools. It sucked. We had to pull money out of the kids' college accounts to pay for it, and now we're having to rebuild those funds.
I am not unique in having to move every 2-3 years, and not all that unique in not having much say in where we go. And I feel that our concerns are muted in these discussions, because we have no real roots in these communities even as we need their resources.
Loved this episode, and I always go into state specific episodes thinking ah, maybe I could skip this, it won’t apply to me. Here to tell you, I am always wrong! Very enlightening regarding school choice. Also, what a pleasure to hear from such a lovely young man who makes me feel like there is a bright future in this country!
As a public school teacher in WI I see our students bounced from voucher schools after the official count and sent back to public, woth no flow of dollars.
As the wife of a school board president who is working to get a school referendum passed while we watch money get siphoned away, at a rate higher than our per pupil funding, be sent to cover private school tuition for families that don't need it.
Voucher schools never ever support the struggling kids. It's a financial break to those already sending kids to private schools!
Re: the memory conversation: Love that you mentioned Brian Williams! That episode of revisionist history is something I think about at least once a week. I had a lot of anger toward him about the plane (or helicopter, whatever it was) because I grew up watching him on the Nightly News with my mom and felt somewhat betrayed by the fabrication. But Gladwell’s exploration of memory helped me release a lot of that and just understand that our memories are often faulty and it likely wasn’t intentional.
I posted this as a comment on Instagram, but want to share with the premium community, as well. I recently co-launched @momsforindiana, an Instagram account dedicated to advocacy and political action in the Hoosier state. One of our key focus areas is public education, and we just put out two reels on the impact of Indiana's voucher program in our state. Chief takeaways are: 1) ballooned taxpayer cost from $15.5 million in 2011 to $300 million in 2023 and expected to double to $600 million this year; 2) diverted $1.6 Billion away from public education in 13 years; 3) literacy rates have been in decline for over a decade and students who attend voucher schools typically see learning loss in their first year; 4) 36% of new education funding from the IN General Assembly last year went to just the 7% of students who use vouchers leaving the other 64% to fund the 93% of students in public school; 5)
average voucher user is now a white female who never attended public school and comes from a family making over $99k/ year; 6) religious schools who are using this money are able to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity without consequence even while using public dollars; 7) the practice of push-outs was found to be prevalent among Indiana voucher schools. It has been straight up devastating here and I hope KY doesn't follow suit.
This is where the Like button is woefully inadequate. What a horror show.
When I visited Indianapolis several years ago, a resident told me that there were several school districts just within the city, an attempt by powerful community members to segregate the system in their favor. This voucher system sounds like an extension of that.
Per the memory discussion, I think we need to be careful about framing the topic of memory in absolutes, i.e. that it's always unreliable. In my experience, such a narrative makes it easy for gaslighters to call their victims' memory into question, even when they have no supporting evidence to counter the victim's experience. The stronger memory narrative, the "correct" memory, can come down to who has more power in the relationship.
As for Kathy Bates, I wonder if her real anguish came from not acknowledging her mother the way she wishes she had. Given the build up, I expected the award clip to show her making a big point to thank her mother, when really she was just one in a list. Bates's memory of her mother's comment about her award not being a big deal makes me wonder if there was a more complicated comeback to her mother playing out in her head, something she couldn't really resolve in an acceptance speech on national television.
All's to say: memory is more complicated than the judgement "unreliable" can capture.
Yeah, I had similar thoughts about Kathy Bates’ reaction being more complicated than just not remembering. Her mother’s reaction was completely dismissive of her achievement which makes me wonder more about that dynamic. Wondering if the shame over “not thanking” her mother came from having a mother whom she could never please (who may have even gaslit her into believing that she hadn’t thanked her). Really jumped out at me as I’ve had to work through a similar dynamic.
My husband definitely looks at his tax dollars the way that Sarah was talking about, in terms that he is owed something for giving it to government. He complains about government spending and money mismanagement as one of his concerns.
He talks about wanting a system where certain percentages of taxes are allocated to the necessary things needed to keep everything moving, but then a certain percentage of our paid taxes can be allocated by the citizens to fund things they want to fund. He looks at it as a way to give more power to entities that an individual (he’s totally just thinking about himself here) feels more strongly about.
For me, it’s really been clicking into place lately based on different topics and themes coming up in pantsuit politics lately about how much we’re all taught to act and think like a consumer. I’ve never liked my husbands view or thoughts on taxes and government spending, and I think some of it is coming more in focus as to why I’ve felt this way through the conversations had on the podcast lately.
I would love that, too, as I'm a huge fan of NPR & PBS. And... considering we are the only bomber fleet in the ENTIRE group of our allies - NATO, for instance, as well as Japan, S. Korea, Australia, etc - I sadly think that would endanger us and our allies more than help us. One thing that stays Putin or Xi's hands from going further in their ambitions is the knowledge that we can, and will, drop a bomb anywhere in the world in less than 24 hours.
Nah. If we doubled the money we give to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, we'd will be allocating more than $819 billion to the military. If we just pay for three less F-35s, CPB funding doubles.
When the lieutenant governor talked about how teachers aren’t thinking about outperforming a “competing” school, that really resonated with me. I teach at a school that is consistently ranked very highly in the state (and I have all kinds of questions about how those ranks are determined. Not because I don’t think we are doing a good job but because I don’t think we are necessarily UNIQUELY good) and I really am paying attention to the kids in my room and the learning that is going on there. I think this connects clearly to something else that Sarah and Beth have talked about which is commodification and capitalism being the drivers in society. Schools at their best are deeply democratic. I think the push for school choice comes from a more capitalist standpoint. Grateful as always for the thought provoking dialogue. Thank you PSP!
Perhaps this was touched and I missed it but all of our kids and grandkids attend public school. Then we all went to Christian or church related colleges for undergrad. We’ve always felt that being a part of the community was part of what kids need to learn. And we live in rural areas where the public school is the only option and rural schools that are large enough to provide good teachers and services and great activities in sports, music, theatre, and technology. Seems like those who want only private schools want to keep kids with only certain kinds of other people. There may be good reasons for this but we are folks who want to be part of the local community.
It sounds like you are blessed with a great option of a public school. What if your local community/school was unsafe? What if it had structural issues like crumbling walls? What if the roof & ceilings leaked every time it rained? What if there was gang activity or dangerous students within your school? What if the school could not maintain proper staffing and had to double or triple up classes per teacher? Would you still be local folks, or might you look for other options? There’s a wide variety of circumstances and reasons people choose what they do for their kids, it’s not always simple.
Lisa Genova wrote a great book about memory and there is something great she says at the end for people with dementia diagnoses that is something like, even if your memory is gone, you can still remember how to feel love. ❤️ (if I remember the quote correctly!)
This is not meant to be an argument in favor of the Amendment being discussed, but these discussions always feel a little disingenuous to me when they seem to have an undertone that public school offers some sort of equal availability of equal education to all, which is a false premise. Public school is not even close to that. The Lt. Governor used the phrase “re-segregation of schools by socioeconomic status.” Where is the “re-“ part of this? Public schools are already wildly segregated by socioeconomic status. A large part of the reason suburbs came to exist was to create what I call “private” public schools, or elite public schools, and specifically and very intentionally create them with a large economic barrier to entry - high property taxes and very few, if any, renting opportunities. This still exists all over the country. I like the idea they discussed of the current public school choice in Kentucky - the ability to choose any public school in the state. But, that has to have limits, right? It wasn’t really discussed, but let’s say there are 5 high schools in an area, each built for an enrollment of around 500 per year. Then let’s say school #5 is way more desirable than schools 1-4. School 5 can’t be expected to take on up to 2500 students because they choose that school, right? So, I would guess even this choice has its limits? The details of the choice system weren’t really discussed, though. What I think would feel like a more genuine argument would be a variation on the “your tax dollars are not yours to decide how to spend” and the idea of public schools being a larger community investment, and a common good, to create educated citizens. What if all the property tax dollars for education in a state were put into one pool, then divided back out to each school in the state on an equal $/student basis? So the suburban, high property tax neighborhood school would get exactly the same amount of money per student as the poor rural and urban schools. Wouldn’t that really be the most community-minded, common good method of funding public schools? Wouldn’t it also create a whole new group of people BIG mad about where “their” tax dollars are going, and that they can no longer buy their way to better schools for their kids based on an ability to afford high property taxes and hoarding those tax dollars in their neighborhoods & districts? It’s all good to point the finger at people trying to claim “their” tax dollars, and I’m not saying it’s wrong to point that finger, but I also think a whole lot of people pointing that finger, would shift a lot closer to feeling the same way about “their” tax dollars if the ability to benefit from having “their” tax dollars create an exclusive school district was being threatened.
My tl/dr from the post above: equal distribution of funds won’t work. The funding model needs to put more dollars per student in low income areas. Separate but equal already failed.
That was my same exact question - how does school choice work in reality in Kentucky? My kids in another state were in a "persistently failing school" that entered receivership. Part of the deal with being in a school in receivership was that students could choose to go to another school IF THERE WAS ROOM. Of course, there wasn't room in any other school for the 900 kids in that school. If fact, there wasn't room in any other school for any of the students, with the exception of one other school that was also heading towards receivership.
I’ve been thinking all day about the comments generally, and I admit that I don't know where you live or the specific things your thinking about when you come to this conversation.
I have radical ideas about public school, so I want to start there and own that.
But I guess I feel like the thing about “failing” public schools is that it is a community responsibility to fix it: elect school board members, donate money to your PTO, become a volunteer, read to kindergartners.
I am often frustrated by my community because people have decided that a certain school is “bad.” but the thing is, if the people who are opting out by going to a choice, charter, private, or home school devoted the money and energy they're giving to make sure “their” kid is okay to making sure ALL the kids are okay, we wouldn't have a problem.
“But I guess I feel like the thing about “failing” public schools is that it is a community responsibility to fix it: elect school board members, donate money to your PTO, become a volunteer, read to kindergartners.”
Sure, that’s all fine and good where it’s possible, which is typically the district’s that are already financially well-off to begin with. There are so many places where much of that will never happen, though. So many of the parents are disengaged for a variety of reasons - long work hours, no ability to afford extras like donations, mental health or addiction issues, etc., that these things will never happen. So, the kids need to suffer for the failings of the adults? That doesn’t really seem fair. It’s like that meme that says something like “why don’t poor people just buy more money.”And some of the disparity in wealthy public districts versus poor ones is really kind of insane. Does one district need a multimillion dollar athletic facility with an indoor pool, indoor track, state of the art weight room, on-staff trainers, etc., while a school a few blocks away can’t afford basic supplies for every kid? How is that kind of system at all justified? It seems like, at least partly, it’s justified by people thinking they should have a say over where “their” tax dollars go.🤷🏻♀️
I mean, but I do decide where my tax dollars go when I vote for my state reps, governor, school board, city council…but when those dollars go to the private Christian school down the street that asks parents to sign a form verifying that they aren’t living a “sinful homosexual lifestyle” I don’t get a say or accountability about that.
I live in one of those places. My kids are not getting the best education available to them at their title I school, but (again, I’m acknowledging my radical viewpoint here) I feel like a thing I can do with my education and privilege is send my genius kids to their neighborhood school where they will get top scores on all the standardized tests, and with the extra time and money I have by not paying tuition somewhere, I get an annual pass to the science center, order kiwi crates, subscribe to online learning options, and make sure they have a place where they get to work closer to the ceiling of their ability.
And I go and I knock on doors when it’s time to vote for school board and donate money to local politicians who don’t suck.
And I probably sound like a megalomaniac, but I think it makes a difference. My kids and three other families raised more than half the money my kid’s school needed for a (badly needed) new playground, my small business sponsored a guest speaker to a BMX bike show to bring enrichment to ALL the kids, we cleared all the library fines one year. Our PTO’s advocacy got the school board to finally update the plumbing, get a pavilion built for the kids to have shade during PE, and other improvements that those parents you’re talking about don’t have the time to advocate for (and they certainly can’t drive their kids across town to private school every day), but they love their kids, too, and want them to do well. And I feel like there’s so much about systemic inequality that I can’t fix, but I can do this, and I feel like I (and also other people) should take one for their community in this way.
I think you would be surprised by how little effort and care it takes to make a big a difference.
It helped more to have a really good school board in place for four years (sigh). We have a board that has been overrun by Moms for Liberty, and it’s the one thing that makes me wonder how long the carryover of the good work done before can hold on before the (really quite bad) work happening now drags things back down.
Again, owning that my views are radical (not necessarily correct) but I think schools are a place where we can make a huge difference by volunteering, showing up, donating, and caring.
Here in Minnesota, we have had open enrollment for a long time and districts can decline to allow kids in based on enrollment limits.
I think there is definitely an equity issue based on the schools are funded with property taxes. I don’t know what the answer should be, but we need some smart people working together on ideas to address it!
I think that is a great idea. We are voting on raising taxes in Austin to help fund the public schools. I just learned that 1/4 of the funds raised will go to Austin schools and 3/4 go to rural schools who don’t have enough tax dollars funneling in. I found that interesting but also wondering if funds are distributed evenly within the city…
San Antonio resident here. You'd have to see how the different school districts are structured. We have multiple districts here, and your tax dollars go too your district, which then funds the schools. I'm not sure how the assets are divided up from there.
I agree with most of your points, Chris. My only push back is something I learned from a podcast on school segregation that NPR did a while back that was eye opening. I had a similar thought to disengaging the property tax base to the schools, pooling all school funding and putting dollars to students equally. And I know there isn’t a good solution but… the issue with a giant pool is that with equal distribution doesn’t address the higher need of a student in a low income house vs a well off household. Access to food, laundry, consistent adult presence tends to be lacking, regardless of judgement on the people in either situation. Higher income schools are more easily able to have parent volunteers because they might have more stay at home parents. Kids come to school already having eaten breakfast and they had dinner the night before. The allocation of the pool of funds, I agree, let’s take that out of districts…but then the distribution gets really tricky. And to Sarah’s big point…we have to live with these folks coming from public schools regardless of where we attend or where our kids go. How do we help the rising tide lift all boats?
I guess I’m not exactly following the reasoning. We should wait until all of the low income families’ problems at home no longer exist before we try to provide a better method of funding their school lives? The school system will never fix all the problems students face while away from school, but that doesn’t seem like a reason to avoid trying to better fund their at-school experience. But, maybe I’m just not understanding what the podcast you referenced was discussing?
Loved this! The discussion on memory was fantastic. I think this absolutely coincides with how disparate our perspectives are about what has happened politically. It gave me a flash of grace for those that seem to have lived in a different world over this last decade. As one with a terrible working memory thanks to neurospiciness, I'm constantly on guard to not lose the parts of memory I can hold onto and i'm constantly being proven fragile in these attempts. Many aren't given constant glaring glimpses into the fragility of even the best of memories. maybe?
Just listened to the episode and it struck me that Beth used not having AC at school as a sign it was under funded. I live in Michigan and many of our schools don’t have AC (even new ones) so it made me curious what other things one state may need in a school that others can easily go without 🤔
I have to admit I get frustrated with these discussions. We're a military family, and at the mercy of the Air Force when determining assignments. That means we can go from northern Virginia, or Colorado, with their excellent public school systems, to Alabama or South Dakota, consistently ranked amongst the worst, with little to no say in the matter. Or we can be sent overseas, where DoDEA runs some pretty decent schools thorough the US military. BUT. Sadly, we're only a part of a community for a couple years, and I definitely feel the pressure as a mom to honor their academic strengths AND to make sure my kids are ready for those excellent school systems regardless of where we're assigned.
We used public charter schools for most of grade school, and they were a Godsend in so many ways! The biggest benefit was being able to choose the KIND of instruction base our kids received - which allowed us to choose classical liberal arts based pedagogy. Basically, it's the same education I grew up with, with a much larger emphasis on world history, rather than the computer-based education that the public schools were so proud of. We valued things like history, cursive, and physical books & taking notes by hand on paper; and were able to find schools that met our family's needs. The second biggest blessing was that the schools were nearly free (just had to pay for uniforms)! We couldn't have afforded to send our kids to private schools every year, and the public charters were free tuition - BECAUSE they were publicly funded as a percentage of public funding. (To my understanding, they received anywhere from 50-70٪ of what a public school received per kid).
At our last assignment we were in a state that consistently ranks among the worst in the US, in an abysmal school district, and did NOT fund public charter schools. For the first time we had no charter options. The public school was sadly not an option - our kids were easily 1-2 YEARS ahead of their peers. We had to pay $10k/yr to send our kids to private schools (which was still at least a semester behind our kids), because that was the only way they stood a chance of keeping up when we got back to an area with better schools. It sucked. We had to pull money out of the kids' college accounts to pay for it, and now we're having to rebuild those funds.
I am not unique in having to move every 2-3 years, and not all that unique in not having much say in where we go. And I feel that our concerns are muted in these discussions, because we have no real roots in these communities even as we need their resources.
Loved this episode, and I always go into state specific episodes thinking ah, maybe I could skip this, it won’t apply to me. Here to tell you, I am always wrong! Very enlightening regarding school choice. Also, what a pleasure to hear from such a lovely young man who makes me feel like there is a bright future in this country!
This episode speaks to my soul.
As a public school teacher in WI I see our students bounced from voucher schools after the official count and sent back to public, woth no flow of dollars.
As the wife of a school board president who is working to get a school referendum passed while we watch money get siphoned away, at a rate higher than our per pupil funding, be sent to cover private school tuition for families that don't need it.
Voucher schools never ever support the struggling kids. It's a financial break to those already sending kids to private schools!
Re: the memory conversation: Love that you mentioned Brian Williams! That episode of revisionist history is something I think about at least once a week. I had a lot of anger toward him about the plane (or helicopter, whatever it was) because I grew up watching him on the Nightly News with my mom and felt somewhat betrayed by the fabrication. But Gladwell’s exploration of memory helped me release a lot of that and just understand that our memories are often faulty and it likely wasn’t intentional.
I posted this as a comment on Instagram, but want to share with the premium community, as well. I recently co-launched @momsforindiana, an Instagram account dedicated to advocacy and political action in the Hoosier state. One of our key focus areas is public education, and we just put out two reels on the impact of Indiana's voucher program in our state. Chief takeaways are: 1) ballooned taxpayer cost from $15.5 million in 2011 to $300 million in 2023 and expected to double to $600 million this year; 2) diverted $1.6 Billion away from public education in 13 years; 3) literacy rates have been in decline for over a decade and students who attend voucher schools typically see learning loss in their first year; 4) 36% of new education funding from the IN General Assembly last year went to just the 7% of students who use vouchers leaving the other 64% to fund the 93% of students in public school; 5)
average voucher user is now a white female who never attended public school and comes from a family making over $99k/ year; 6) religious schools who are using this money are able to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity without consequence even while using public dollars; 7) the practice of push-outs was found to be prevalent among Indiana voucher schools. It has been straight up devastating here and I hope KY doesn't follow suit.
If interested, the reels are linked below:
Part 1: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DBeiyK_ReBW/?igsh=MXE5ZWIyMW9uZzJyNA==
Part 2: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DBhZH9MxiLe/?igsh=MWw3Z3l3NWh4eTAxYg==
Just watched the reels - excellent work! Thanks for sharing, and for doing this important work.
This is where the Like button is woefully inadequate. What a horror show.
When I visited Indianapolis several years ago, a resident told me that there were several school districts just within the city, an attempt by powerful community members to segregate the system in their favor. This voucher system sounds like an extension of that.
Per the memory discussion, I think we need to be careful about framing the topic of memory in absolutes, i.e. that it's always unreliable. In my experience, such a narrative makes it easy for gaslighters to call their victims' memory into question, even when they have no supporting evidence to counter the victim's experience. The stronger memory narrative, the "correct" memory, can come down to who has more power in the relationship.
As for Kathy Bates, I wonder if her real anguish came from not acknowledging her mother the way she wishes she had. Given the build up, I expected the award clip to show her making a big point to thank her mother, when really she was just one in a list. Bates's memory of her mother's comment about her award not being a big deal makes me wonder if there was a more complicated comeback to her mother playing out in her head, something she couldn't really resolve in an acceptance speech on national television.
All's to say: memory is more complicated than the judgement "unreliable" can capture.
Yeah, I had similar thoughts about Kathy Bates’ reaction being more complicated than just not remembering. Her mother’s reaction was completely dismissive of her achievement which makes me wonder more about that dynamic. Wondering if the shame over “not thanking” her mother came from having a mother whom she could never please (who may have even gaslit her into believing that she hadn’t thanked her). Really jumped out at me as I’ve had to work through a similar dynamic.
My husband definitely looks at his tax dollars the way that Sarah was talking about, in terms that he is owed something for giving it to government. He complains about government spending and money mismanagement as one of his concerns.
He talks about wanting a system where certain percentages of taxes are allocated to the necessary things needed to keep everything moving, but then a certain percentage of our paid taxes can be allocated by the citizens to fund things they want to fund. He looks at it as a way to give more power to entities that an individual (he’s totally just thinking about himself here) feels more strongly about.
For me, it’s really been clicking into place lately based on different topics and themes coming up in pantsuit politics lately about how much we’re all taught to act and think like a consumer. I’ve never liked my husbands view or thoughts on taxes and government spending, and I think some of it is coming more in focus as to why I’ve felt this way through the conversations had on the podcast lately.
I would love to take my entire taxes out of bomb making and put them into PBS.
I would love that, too, as I'm a huge fan of NPR & PBS. And... considering we are the only bomber fleet in the ENTIRE group of our allies - NATO, for instance, as well as Japan, S. Korea, Australia, etc - I sadly think that would endanger us and our allies more than help us. One thing that stays Putin or Xi's hands from going further in their ambitions is the knowledge that we can, and will, drop a bomb anywhere in the world in less than 24 hours.
Nah. If we doubled the money we give to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, we'd will be allocating more than $819 billion to the military. If we just pay for three less F-35s, CPB funding doubles.
Considering we already know they're lemons, I'll agree with you there. 😆
When the lieutenant governor talked about how teachers aren’t thinking about outperforming a “competing” school, that really resonated with me. I teach at a school that is consistently ranked very highly in the state (and I have all kinds of questions about how those ranks are determined. Not because I don’t think we are doing a good job but because I don’t think we are necessarily UNIQUELY good) and I really am paying attention to the kids in my room and the learning that is going on there. I think this connects clearly to something else that Sarah and Beth have talked about which is commodification and capitalism being the drivers in society. Schools at their best are deeply democratic. I think the push for school choice comes from a more capitalist standpoint. Grateful as always for the thought provoking dialogue. Thank you PSP!
Peter sounds better than most of the politicians in this country. It is very hard to believe he’s a high school senior.
Perhaps this was touched and I missed it but all of our kids and grandkids attend public school. Then we all went to Christian or church related colleges for undergrad. We’ve always felt that being a part of the community was part of what kids need to learn. And we live in rural areas where the public school is the only option and rural schools that are large enough to provide good teachers and services and great activities in sports, music, theatre, and technology. Seems like those who want only private schools want to keep kids with only certain kinds of other people. There may be good reasons for this but we are folks who want to be part of the local community.
It sounds like you are blessed with a great option of a public school. What if your local community/school was unsafe? What if it had structural issues like crumbling walls? What if the roof & ceilings leaked every time it rained? What if there was gang activity or dangerous students within your school? What if the school could not maintain proper staffing and had to double or triple up classes per teacher? Would you still be local folks, or might you look for other options? There’s a wide variety of circumstances and reasons people choose what they do for their kids, it’s not always simple.
Lisa Genova wrote a great book about memory and there is something great she says at the end for people with dementia diagnoses that is something like, even if your memory is gone, you can still remember how to feel love. ❤️ (if I remember the quote correctly!)
This is not meant to be an argument in favor of the Amendment being discussed, but these discussions always feel a little disingenuous to me when they seem to have an undertone that public school offers some sort of equal availability of equal education to all, which is a false premise. Public school is not even close to that. The Lt. Governor used the phrase “re-segregation of schools by socioeconomic status.” Where is the “re-“ part of this? Public schools are already wildly segregated by socioeconomic status. A large part of the reason suburbs came to exist was to create what I call “private” public schools, or elite public schools, and specifically and very intentionally create them with a large economic barrier to entry - high property taxes and very few, if any, renting opportunities. This still exists all over the country. I like the idea they discussed of the current public school choice in Kentucky - the ability to choose any public school in the state. But, that has to have limits, right? It wasn’t really discussed, but let’s say there are 5 high schools in an area, each built for an enrollment of around 500 per year. Then let’s say school #5 is way more desirable than schools 1-4. School 5 can’t be expected to take on up to 2500 students because they choose that school, right? So, I would guess even this choice has its limits? The details of the choice system weren’t really discussed, though. What I think would feel like a more genuine argument would be a variation on the “your tax dollars are not yours to decide how to spend” and the idea of public schools being a larger community investment, and a common good, to create educated citizens. What if all the property tax dollars for education in a state were put into one pool, then divided back out to each school in the state on an equal $/student basis? So the suburban, high property tax neighborhood school would get exactly the same amount of money per student as the poor rural and urban schools. Wouldn’t that really be the most community-minded, common good method of funding public schools? Wouldn’t it also create a whole new group of people BIG mad about where “their” tax dollars are going, and that they can no longer buy their way to better schools for their kids based on an ability to afford high property taxes and hoarding those tax dollars in their neighborhoods & districts? It’s all good to point the finger at people trying to claim “their” tax dollars, and I’m not saying it’s wrong to point that finger, but I also think a whole lot of people pointing that finger, would shift a lot closer to feeling the same way about “their” tax dollars if the ability to benefit from having “their” tax dollars create an exclusive school district was being threatened.
My tl/dr from the post above: equal distribution of funds won’t work. The funding model needs to put more dollars per student in low income areas. Separate but equal already failed.
That was my same exact question - how does school choice work in reality in Kentucky? My kids in another state were in a "persistently failing school" that entered receivership. Part of the deal with being in a school in receivership was that students could choose to go to another school IF THERE WAS ROOM. Of course, there wasn't room in any other school for the 900 kids in that school. If fact, there wasn't room in any other school for any of the students, with the exception of one other school that was also heading towards receivership.
I’ve been thinking all day about the comments generally, and I admit that I don't know where you live or the specific things your thinking about when you come to this conversation.
I have radical ideas about public school, so I want to start there and own that.
But I guess I feel like the thing about “failing” public schools is that it is a community responsibility to fix it: elect school board members, donate money to your PTO, become a volunteer, read to kindergartners.
I am often frustrated by my community because people have decided that a certain school is “bad.” but the thing is, if the people who are opting out by going to a choice, charter, private, or home school devoted the money and energy they're giving to make sure “their” kid is okay to making sure ALL the kids are okay, we wouldn't have a problem.
“But I guess I feel like the thing about “failing” public schools is that it is a community responsibility to fix it: elect school board members, donate money to your PTO, become a volunteer, read to kindergartners.”
Sure, that’s all fine and good where it’s possible, which is typically the district’s that are already financially well-off to begin with. There are so many places where much of that will never happen, though. So many of the parents are disengaged for a variety of reasons - long work hours, no ability to afford extras like donations, mental health or addiction issues, etc., that these things will never happen. So, the kids need to suffer for the failings of the adults? That doesn’t really seem fair. It’s like that meme that says something like “why don’t poor people just buy more money.”And some of the disparity in wealthy public districts versus poor ones is really kind of insane. Does one district need a multimillion dollar athletic facility with an indoor pool, indoor track, state of the art weight room, on-staff trainers, etc., while a school a few blocks away can’t afford basic supplies for every kid? How is that kind of system at all justified? It seems like, at least partly, it’s justified by people thinking they should have a say over where “their” tax dollars go.🤷🏻♀️
I mean, but I do decide where my tax dollars go when I vote for my state reps, governor, school board, city council…but when those dollars go to the private Christian school down the street that asks parents to sign a form verifying that they aren’t living a “sinful homosexual lifestyle” I don’t get a say or accountability about that.
I live in one of those places. My kids are not getting the best education available to them at their title I school, but (again, I’m acknowledging my radical viewpoint here) I feel like a thing I can do with my education and privilege is send my genius kids to their neighborhood school where they will get top scores on all the standardized tests, and with the extra time and money I have by not paying tuition somewhere, I get an annual pass to the science center, order kiwi crates, subscribe to online learning options, and make sure they have a place where they get to work closer to the ceiling of their ability.
And I go and I knock on doors when it’s time to vote for school board and donate money to local politicians who don’t suck.
And I probably sound like a megalomaniac, but I think it makes a difference. My kids and three other families raised more than half the money my kid’s school needed for a (badly needed) new playground, my small business sponsored a guest speaker to a BMX bike show to bring enrichment to ALL the kids, we cleared all the library fines one year. Our PTO’s advocacy got the school board to finally update the plumbing, get a pavilion built for the kids to have shade during PE, and other improvements that those parents you’re talking about don’t have the time to advocate for (and they certainly can’t drive their kids across town to private school every day), but they love their kids, too, and want them to do well. And I feel like there’s so much about systemic inequality that I can’t fix, but I can do this, and I feel like I (and also other people) should take one for their community in this way.
All of that is wonderful and certainly impactful. I just question if there is really enough of it available everywhere?
I think you would be surprised by how little effort and care it takes to make a big a difference.
It helped more to have a really good school board in place for four years (sigh). We have a board that has been overrun by Moms for Liberty, and it’s the one thing that makes me wonder how long the carryover of the good work done before can hold on before the (really quite bad) work happening now drags things back down.
Again, owning that my views are radical (not necessarily correct) but I think schools are a place where we can make a huge difference by volunteering, showing up, donating, and caring.
Here in Minnesota, we have had open enrollment for a long time and districts can decline to allow kids in based on enrollment limits.
I think there is definitely an equity issue based on the schools are funded with property taxes. I don’t know what the answer should be, but we need some smart people working together on ideas to address it!
I think that is a great idea. We are voting on raising taxes in Austin to help fund the public schools. I just learned that 1/4 of the funds raised will go to Austin schools and 3/4 go to rural schools who don’t have enough tax dollars funneling in. I found that interesting but also wondering if funds are distributed evenly within the city…
San Antonio resident here. You'd have to see how the different school districts are structured. We have multiple districts here, and your tax dollars go too your district, which then funds the schools. I'm not sure how the assets are divided up from there.
I agree with most of your points, Chris. My only push back is something I learned from a podcast on school segregation that NPR did a while back that was eye opening. I had a similar thought to disengaging the property tax base to the schools, pooling all school funding and putting dollars to students equally. And I know there isn’t a good solution but… the issue with a giant pool is that with equal distribution doesn’t address the higher need of a student in a low income house vs a well off household. Access to food, laundry, consistent adult presence tends to be lacking, regardless of judgement on the people in either situation. Higher income schools are more easily able to have parent volunteers because they might have more stay at home parents. Kids come to school already having eaten breakfast and they had dinner the night before. The allocation of the pool of funds, I agree, let’s take that out of districts…but then the distribution gets really tricky. And to Sarah’s big point…we have to live with these folks coming from public schools regardless of where we attend or where our kids go. How do we help the rising tide lift all boats?
I guess I’m not exactly following the reasoning. We should wait until all of the low income families’ problems at home no longer exist before we try to provide a better method of funding their school lives? The school system will never fix all the problems students face while away from school, but that doesn’t seem like a reason to avoid trying to better fund their at-school experience. But, maybe I’m just not understanding what the podcast you referenced was discussing?
There is absolutely no way I was as erudite, collected, and sharp as Peter when I was a high school senior 😆 The kids are alright y’all.
I don’t even think I’m that way now and I’m almost 40! 🤪 as a mom of boys I found myself emotional listening to him. How proud his parents must be!
Same!
Loved this! The discussion on memory was fantastic. I think this absolutely coincides with how disparate our perspectives are about what has happened politically. It gave me a flash of grace for those that seem to have lived in a different world over this last decade. As one with a terrible working memory thanks to neurospiciness, I'm constantly on guard to not lose the parts of memory I can hold onto and i'm constantly being proven fragile in these attempts. Many aren't given constant glaring glimpses into the fragility of even the best of memories. maybe?
I didn’t quite catch what Lt Gov said about the Kentucky Derby. “You can’t win the Kentucky Derby ….?” Can someone help please?
I do love how you have such interesting people onto to interview.
"...with a pack mule." (?) Something along those lines. :)
Pack mule