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Conservative War on Education

PhDeac said:
Ugh. So you're saying it's best for kids to get shuffled from school to school for 13 years.
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If the parents believe that is better than the outcome generated by the current state of their applicable public school, then why isn't it the best available option?
 
Well then wouldn't it make more sense to devote resources to making the local public school better?
 
PhDeac said:
Well then wouldn't it make more sense to devote resources to making the local public school better?
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So why didn't Hope & Change do just that? As I said, you can keep hoping for it, but it ain't going to happen. So in the meantime, everyone for themselves.
 
ImTheCaptain said:
only one HS. It was idiotic, I guess. It was 80% full bus of kids over a widely dispersed rural area. I was outside the 'city limit' so I was included in the rural group vs the suburb group. Some kids had to be first and some had to be last on the route. I was towards the end of the pick up but right at the front of the drop off in the afternoon since they reversed the route.
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Yeah, we have mostly unified school districts in NC so no issue with county v city school boundaries.
 
2&2 Slider To Leyritz said:
So why didn't Hope & Change do just that? As I said, you can keep hoping for it, but it ain't going to happen. So in the meantime, everyone for themselves.
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I guess for the same reason NCLB didn't change anything.

So, ask your local school board, your county commissioners, and your state's General Assembly.
 
This is definitely not part of the "Conservative War on Education". However, earlier in this thread there was some discussion about education spending, and I questioned whether when calculating spending on education, sports programs were included. If so, the massive amounts spent on school competitive sports from 5th grade on through our university system would skew the spending numbers as compared to other OECD nations, where this sort of thing is almost unknown. I had this in mind when I read this article, in which a lowly library cataloger amassed a $4M fortune by being frugal, bequeathed it to his employer (a public university), which promptly spent $1M of it on a new scoreboard for the football stadium.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/09/15/critics-question-spending-librarians-donation-scoreboard?utm_content=bufferc3179&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=IHEbuffer

I have googled, but can't find any estimates of what percentage of the US education budget goes to sports. But there's no doubt that it is very, very expensive. These articles gives an idea of the scale of the problem. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/10/the-case-against-high-school-sports/309447/
http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaf/2013/01/15/division-i-colleges-spend-more-on-athletes-than-education/1837721/

Here is the most recent financial report for Guilford County schools. Athletic programs had $2.6 million in expense and $2.4 million in revenue. However, as best I can tell that is just the program cost (i.e. ticket sales, coaches salaries). It does not include capital outlays on athletic facilities. It is hard to tell where maintenance of those facilities is included in the budget.

Food for thought.
 
Totally agree with 923 on this. And one thing he didn't mention is that athletic budgets serve only a small portion of the student body. And the bigger the school, the smaller the percentage of students served by the athletic program.
 
Deacon923 said:
It does not include capital outlays on athletic facilities. It is hard to tell where maintenance of those facilities is included in the budget.
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I'll admit I don't know all of the funding sources, but the High Point high schools use the city's High Point Athletic Complex for football and track and field. I don't think any HP schools play on campus.
 
BiffTannen said:
Totally agree with 923 on this. And one thing he didn't mention is that athletic budgets serve only a small portion of the student body. And the bigger the school, the smaller the percentage of students served by the athletic program.
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Yep. And the bigger the university, the larger percentage of students who could care less about sports, even the major ones.
 
more on building schools in stupid places then paying to bus kids to the schools. http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2014/6/11/the-death-of-neighborhood-schools.html?utm_content=buffere4514&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

The large campus model standard is built on such a large scale that it’s hard to put into perspective how inefficient they are as a land use. Mankato’s new middle school covers 65 acres. So, I created some maps to help visualize.
original
Here’s how Mankato’s two existing high schools fit:
two schools
Both fit comfortably, along with four parking lots, two football fields, full-sized tracks, and a baseball and softball field. Let’s take it a step further:
college
Over 85 percent of the entire campus of Minnesota State University, with an enrollment of 15,000 plus students, can fit into the site (with room to spare).
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65 acres for a middle school.

That is completely insane.
 
To play devil's advocate, the traditional neighborhood school model led to the socioeconomic segregation in schools that I think you are against. The affluent neighborhoods get the good schools and the shitty neighborhoods get the shitty schools, for a variety of reasons. By choosing a neutral location inconvenient for everyone, the socioeconomic integration is forced. You can't have it both ways.

ETA: my high school (~1,000 students) was on a 157-acre former horse farm, and it was pretty badass. Lots of educational (especially science and agriculture) shit you can do on that sort of property at minimal or no cost.
 
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PhDeac said:
Well then wouldn't it make more sense to devote resources to making the local public school better?
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So...moar money? Just send moar money? No questions, just moar money, then?

Glad to know the plan never changes.
 
2&2 Slider To Leyritz said:
To play devil's advocate, the traditional neighborhood school model led to the socioeconomic segregation in schools that I think you are against. The affluent neighborhoods get the good schools and the shitty neighborhoods get the shitty schools, for a variety of reasons. By choosing a neutral location inconvenient for everyone, the socioeconomic integration is forced. You can't have it both ways.

ETA: my high school (~1,000 students) was on a 157-acre former horse farm, and it was pretty badass. Lots of educational (especially science and agriculture) shit you can do on that sort of property at minimal or no cost.
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Thinly-veiled reference to the reinstitution of slavery, amiriteDems? Why do you have children, deuces?
 
Slight change of subject - What is the logical argument against year round schooling?
 
2&2 Slider To Leyritz said:
To play devil's advocate, the traditional neighborhood school model led to the socioeconomic segregation in schools that I think you are against. The affluent neighborhoods get the good schools and the shitty neighborhoods get the shitty schools, for a variety of reasons. By choosing a neutral location inconvenient for everyone, the socioeconomic integration is forced. You can't have it both ways.

ETA: my high school (~1,000 students) was on a 157-acre former horse farm, and it was pretty badass. Lots of educational (especially science and agriculture) shit you can do on that sort of property at minimal or no cost.
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There are a lot of elements wrapped up in this. Mostly this is a land-use and urban planning problem that impacts education as opposed to an education-centric issue. However these far-flung, unwalkable schools absolutely form barriers to integration (socioeconomic or racial, and whether you do it with old-school forced busing or more modern magnet-program efforts). Consider, for a moment, the situation in Greensboro in 1957, before the post-war suburban explosion really got started, when they integrated the schools. At the time, black children had to go to a black school, even though a white school was often closer to their houses. From a transportation perspective, integration was a matter of getting kids from Dudley to Grimsley, which are less than 5 miles apart as the crow flies and about 9 minutes in a car. According to Google, even using GSO's crappy public transit system the distance can be covered in 37 minutes.


Then we had a half-century of sprawl. Broadly speaking, wealthier, mostly white people moved out to the burbs, poorer, disproportionately black people stayed in the urban neighborhoods near Dudley. Guilford County Schools made the decision to build new schools out in the burbs. Thankfully, many of our neighborhood schools have been preserved and relatively well-maintained. That's not the case in many cities. Sprawl increased geographic segregation. That's not the fault of the school system, but how they reacted to is. They built new schools on greenfield way out on the edge of town. By doing so, the school system directly contributed to the "good neighborhood:good school::bad neighborhood:bad school" situation you mention in your post.

The newer high schools are on the edge town, over double the distance and double the time by car, and there is no transit at all. Getting poor children who live in the city, or for that matter in the county, to Northwest or Northern requires a ton of busing. Busing is, obviously, expensive. Parents who don't have cars simply cannot access these schools to be part of the PTA or pick up their kids from after school activities.

School systems did not have to go out and build on the edge of town. They could have expanded existing schools and told the suburbanites to drive their kids in. They could have build new schools as infill development. I understand why they didn't, of course. The growth, the people, the money and the political power were on the edge of town, so that's where the brand new schools got built - meanwhile, the urban schools got stuck with trailers and make-do maintenance budgets.

Now we're reaching the end of the suburban experiment and growth is returning to city cores, to some degree. In this environment, school systems need to at least not repeat the mistakes of the past. That's most relevant when it comes time to make decisions about renovating an old school in a neighborhood or tearing it down and building on the edge of town.

ETA: I'm sure your school was badass. I'm glad you got to experience it. I hope that wherever you grew up, kids without your family's advantages were given good educational opportunities.
 
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