Interesting. I, on the other hand, read this article and was left more confused than I had been in the past, and that's saying something, because I get charter schools. I get charter schools because I worked on Davis Guggenheim's Waiting for Superman and because I read Elizabeth Warren's The Two Income Trap. Here's the situation: Charter schools are a shitty solution to a shittier problem. THE SHITTIER PROBLEM: The United States, for reasons of craven capitalism, funds its schools with property taxes. This means that rich kids get a better education than poor kids no matter what. Property taxes are also regressive, which means the crazy rich can afford to throw down massive moneybombs and only gripe a little, while the guys in the projects are crushed by every nickel per $1000 that the taxes are raised. End result: if you don't really need a public education because you can afford a rippin' private school, chances are good your public school is rippin'. On the other hand, if you're bright but poor you're pretty much fucked. Chances are good there aren't even any decent private schools anywhere near you. THE SHITTY SOLUTION: Take some of that money and fuck with it. Say you're the LAUSD, for example. You're so goddamn big you've got your own PBS station. Your school district encompasses Beverly Hills, La Canada Flintridge, Brentwood, etc. It also encompasses Compton. It encompasses Westchester. It encompasses shitholes like Lawndale. And while local property taxes go to local schools, they also go to the USD. So let's throw some sops to the proles. Let's open a "charter school" that will allow two or three of those benighted 2000 in Compton to go to a school that does more than raise convicts. And since even if we make it merit-based there will be ten times as many applicants as slots, let's throw it all in a "lottery" straight out of the Hunger Games. That way we give the proles "hope" and since they're barely paying attention, will take the lions' share of the money out of their funding instead of Beverly Hills'. THE SHITTIER PROBLEM: No Child Left Behind is abject bullshit and every educator you talk to will tell you so. Teaching to the tests has crippled education, has crippled faculty management, has essentially destroyed innovation in teaching. THE SHITTY SOLUTION: As a sop to the liberals, charter schools aren't necessarily bound to NCLB. This way they can use all sorts of funkalicious teaching methods to create bright-eyed, sensitive poets such as _refugee._ It also means that they can fuck off with most of the money and leave kids who barely know how to read because well-read NPR liberals aren't much checking up on, say, the charter school across the street from me, which has a 90% non-white student population within bussing distance of Compton. And which still has to pay its bills through twice-yearly bake sales and carnivals. THE SHITTIER PROBLEM: Shitty schools are the #1 annihilator of property values. As mentioned before, we've tied our education system to our shelter and a great neighborhood near a shitty school quickly becomes a shitty neighborhood. THE SHITTY SOLUTION: Charter schools can be built damn near anywhere since their students are generally bussed from far and wide. As such, property developers looking to make a killing will often buy up a bunch of properties in a wretched neighborhood and then go about building a charter school. Elizabeth Warren catalogs a neighborhood in Baltimore where the threat of an impending charter school raised real estate selling prices by 300% in the space of nine months. Market-savvy real estate developers are the ones making money on this, by the way, not NPR liberals. NPR liberals are far too idealistic about charter schools. THE ACTUAL PROBLEM: Our education system isn't geared towards teaching students, it's geared towards warehousing youth. As such, the warehouses are paid for by local property taxes, creating a system that wouldn't be unfamiliar to Edwardian England. THE ACTUAL SOLUTION: ...is too sweeping to ever happen, and it smells like socialism. That said, school needs to be paid for and administered at the federal level. You wanna reduce poverty? Have Beverly Hills pay for some of the education in rural Appalachia. You wanna increase equality? Let NoLA go to school on Manhattan money. You wanna advance education? Take the decisions away from these chuckleheads. I went to school in New Mexico. At the time, it was ranked #49 out of 50 for worst schools in the USA (it's currently #46). But I went to school in Los Alamos, New Mexico - home of the Atom Bomb, the Human Genome Project, BEAM robotics and a whole bunch of classified shit. And all these Nobel-winning scientists and their wives weren't about to throw their kids in the 49th best schools in the United States, so in order to make the schools better, the Department of Energy doubled the funding from property taxes (which was already high). That made my high school one of the best public high schools in the United States. It was like growing up in an embassy from a foreign country - we had a few friends that went to school elsewhere and holy shit, it was like they stopped learning in 5th grade. It wasn't even funny. Unfortunately, it'll never happen. So in the meantime, "charter schools" will still get a bye from liberals because "sensitive poet" and a bye from conservatives because "killing on property speculation." The lack of oversight also means corruption will always find a way; as with nearly every entitlement program, the people who really need it will never get it and the people who would do just fine otherwise are given free access. So now you know.
As the child of two teachers I salute you. If you were running things in my city I'd take a bullet for you. Our education system is completely FUBAR and that's just the way THEY like it.
Hey kleinbl00, Insightful stuff. One of your statements brought me to several questions based on my experiences as parent, homeowner, and educator.
You wrote: THE SHITTIER PROBLEM:
Shitty schools are the #1 annihilator of property values. As mentioned before, we've tied our education system to our shelter and a great neighborhood near a shitty school quickly becomes a shitty neighborhood. My Questions: Are "shitty" schools the annihilator of property values? Or, are the relatively "shittier" schools just a reflection of the socio-economics of the surrounding neighborhoods? Where is it that schools all-of-a-sudden go downhill and drag the property values with them? As I’ve known it, people shopping for homes look at the neighborhood schools as an indicator of the health of the neighborhood. If your schools are performing, then you must have neighbors with the money and time, therefore the ability to emphasize, a good education for their progeny.
Thanks for getting me thinking. I've got a feeling that if we can come up with the true-to-life answers to all of these questions, we may be able to fairly assess our problems with American Education and actually resolve to level the playing field of our educational system.
They aren't my insights - they're from the book Elizabeth Warren wrote with her daughter back when she was just a researcher at Harvard. Well, that and what I know about real property (I moderate /r/realestate, so even if I knew nothing I'd pick up a little through sheer osmosis). As to the question, a fairer depiction of the problem minus the idiosyncratic framing mechanisms is property values and school performance are positively correlated. In fact, if you google "correlation between schools and property value" you'll turn up a shit-ton of PDFS of scholarly papers on the problem, most of them from the Federal Reserve. For the record, I'm not an expert on this - but the experts seem to be mostly arguing about whether the relationship is linear or not. To answer your question more thoroughly, we'd need a survey of school districts in decline and then compare their property values over time. That's more googling and graphing than I care to engage in at the moment.
Here's a good test case. Take a look at current home prices in Bloomfield Hills, MI (where I currently live). The majority of Bloomfield Hills is in BH schools. BH schools are rated among the best in MI. However, the northwest part of BH is Pontiac schools, which I don't have to tell you is not considered a great place to send your kids. The same house in the part of BH that is in Pontiac school is probably selling for literally $100,000 less than a comparable on in BH schools. Not kidding. Take a peak around Realtor.com or Zillow. It's incredible what school district does to prices.Are "shitty" schools the annihilator of property values?
There's also the effect that Bloomfield Hills, West Bloomfield, Rochester Hills, and other affluent areas had on Pontiac. Those folks that had the money, could move to the more affluent neighborhoods to take advantage of living with more affluent folks, leaving the less-affluent behind. I've not researched it, but have been told by former Pontiac students, that Pontiac was once a well respected and excellent school district. From what those former students have told me, I've learned that the Pontiac School District started to fall apart sometime in the late 1960's or early 1970's when (the State Government?) required integrated bussing. People weren't ready for that sort of thing and a boatload of white folks freaked out and moved out. A sudden population drop then resulted in decreased funding.
In addition, this left many black folks that had recently moved from southern states (lot's of horrible crap going on there at the time, of course) to Pontiac to mostly work on auto assembly jobs for a decent basic wage, and I'd guess, not as much overt racism. Finally, and I'll have to research this as well, but I'm pretty sure it is like this. When the auto industry hit the skids in the early and mid 1980's, many of the assembly line jobs went as well and continued to dwindle to near zero currently. Same crap happened in Flint, MI too. Now, Pontiac Schools had some serious downsizing and a bunch of people that weren't getting any golden parachutes as they lost jobs on the assembly line. With high unemployment, I think education took the backseat as a high priority for many Pontiac residents as they were barely able to eke out a decent living. I have friends that taught in Pontiac too. They loved and hated their jobs. They found that high expectations for them were plentiful, but the resources to live up to those expectations, nonexistent. I hear that the kindergarten class sizes there currently hover around 40 kids per class.
UPDATED INFO: I just checked with a source in Oakland County's Intermediate school district. As of February 2013, to save money, Pontiac Schools has mandated that all k-6 classrooms have 40 students
Isn't that illegal? If it isn't, it should be. It what universe is sharing a classroom with 39 other students going to improve education? This is one of MI's biggest problems facing the future (and I would guess many other states, as well). They need to modernize the economy, because they don't have any money, but in order to modernize the economy, they need to make a giant education investment. We have a dismal proportion of citizens with college degrees, despite the fact that we have excellent universities. Doesn't add up. Study after study shows the ROI that education "spending" yields, yet we still continue to spend more on prison than college. If MI actually wants to grow, we should be offering world class education starting at age 4. Even if it takes a tax increase, I'd be the first to vote for a politician of either party who has the balls to propose one.... to save money, Pontiac Schools has mandated that all k-6 classrooms have 40 students
Crazy, isn't it? What seems even a bit crazier is that not one local news outlet has taken notice. If they're not your kids and the problem isn't as immediate as a pothole, people ignore it. Our society as a whole has been ignoring the fact that school funding is out of balance and we are creating lifelong deficiencies that will cost us future opportunities. Another kick in the clock-weights for school districts like Pontiac is the manner in which test scores are reported to the public. As if they are more than just a record of the general level of affluence of the families that attend the schools. (Socio-economics and test scores typically have a .9 correlation or more.) Take Pontiac's MEAP (Michigan Educational Assesment Program) scores. I looked at the MEAP 8th grade passing scores for nearby affluent Novi Schools and compared those with Pontiac. The mean average percent correct for Novi Schools students vs. Pontiac Schools students was plus three point seven percent. Not too bad if you imagine that you scored 3.7 percent less than a kid sitting next to you in some math class. Problem is, the State Department of Education uses cut scores in it's public reports. Cut scores that vary from year to year also. Instead the cut scores were set so 92% of Novi schools students passed the MEAP that year. Pontiac, with a 3.7% lower mean average was reported out at having a passing rate of 56%, giving the impression to many, that kids in a nearby district with less than four more questions correct in a hundred, may be nearly "twice as smart". Ouch.
We call that White Flight. It's the reason the San Fernando Valley exists.