<p>It is no “accident of geography” that some schools are better than others. It’s all about how much is spent per child on operations and capital, plus the legacy of both, which is typically funded by local property tax. If you own or rent in the district you are contributing; if you fradulently enroll in the school district, you are stealing. </p>
<p>I am no conservative, but I find it hard to understand the argument that we need to school any kid who shows up on the doorstep of our district that has no proper legal residence. How is this different if they walk into Target, put on a new outfit and walk out without paying? Just because Target is a large multi-billion dollar corporation, do you think they should clothe every homeless person that walks in?</p>
<p>Wow what a shame. It is too bad she just didn’t say she was homeless–in our school district, that completely stops any inquiry and the kid gets to enroll–I think this is the case almost everywhere. I hope the residents of that district get on the phone and give that superintendent a piece of their collective minds for piling on in what must be an already unmanageable situation. Agreed (in a way, well actually not at all) about the accident of geography thing too–there has to be a more equitable way to fund schools. We are wasting a lot of great minds that could contribute so much…public school quality should not be a have- have not demarkation</p>
<p>Did you know that “poor” school districts are actually very well funded, yet the students still fail to perform? “Poor” districts get a lot of federal funding and tend to have high per capita spending.</p>
<p>Second, in my state, the teachers/administration/etc (cost of education) is funded by the state while the buildings are funded locally. So the high-income district might have fancy buildings, but the staff funding is generally the same regardless. In my old state, local paid for most of the cost but the state capped per student spending to avoid have/have not spending. Still, high income cities outperformed low income, even when low income schools spent more per student.</p>
<p>Money, alone, won’t fix the problems in the schools with populations where true social pathology is the norm. If we aren’t willing to make the tough decisions and remove some kids from the homes, then those kids aren’t going to be educated and they are going to pull down their classmates. In some schools, the number of kids in that situation reaches critical mass. My kid attends an inner city public school in NYC. Some of the things that go on would blow your mind, but money isn’t the solution. They are well funded by the governments AND something that many people don’t realize is that, at least here in NYC, many corporations, law firms, private entities partner with public schools to the tune of big bucks. We had one kid in private high school, but put her high-achieving sister into public high school because of all those amenities. Like free SAT prep. My son is in a music magnet school for middle school. Money is just thrown at the program, from Broadway organizations to musical instrument companies, to cultural organizations. They learn a great deal about music, more than 70% of the students receive free lunch. There is no amount of money that could be offered that would stop the violence, the stealing, and the kid in my son’s honors algebra class who paints the walls of the classroom with his feces. Pulling the kid out of the home and offering major intervention might help.</p>
<p>If you think that quality of public education has little to do with socioeconomics, you have a lot to learn. Hopefully, you will learn it before you need the services of a public elementary school, for your child’s sake.</p>
<p>For example, an elementary school in our area was once an excellent school, with lots of parent involvement. As years went by, and new developments were built, many of these single income families moved out of the area served by this school. Initially, the families that moved in were two income families, who had less time to be involved with the school. Eventually these families moved on and now the school serves mostly poor, single parent families. The school, which once was an A school, now struggles as a D school. On parents night, 2 or 3 parents show up, in a class of 25 kids. It can take a week or more to get a parent to return a phone call about their child, most are too busy working. Teachers spend out of their own pockets so that these kids have the absolute basics. So, what caused the school to decline? It is the same structure, in the same location as it was in its glory days. And it is a beautiful old building, well maintained for it’s age. Many of the teachers have been there for two decades. But the population has changed, as has the affluence of the neighborhood. So, in my opinion, it is all about the money!</p>
I totally disagree. Unless the locality is willing to step and parent the children, there is no amount of money that can help a kid whose older brother is dealing drugs in the house or whose mother has multiple boyfriends or whose dad spends his paycheck on cigarettes and beer (as does my college-educated next door neighbor who has a good income and lives in a very nice neighborhood). Many kids are failing because they aren’t parented, despite the fact that the NYC school system offers breakfast and lunch all year round, as well as medical and dental referrals, in-house immunizations and vision and hearing testing. The school day in some schools starts with morning care (paid for from grants) beginning at 6:00 am and ends with aftercare (also grants) at 6:00 pm. This stuff is expensive, but many of those kids still aren’t learning. It’s not money.</p>
<p>^^^^ To say the least. It sounds like babyontheway’s state may be Candyland. Perhaps Tatooine.</p>
<p>As for poor districts getting “a lot of federal funding” – All of the federal funding that goes directly to school districts amounts to about $30 billion, or somewhat less than 0.6% of the total budget for primary and secondary education in this country. That direct money does go disproportionately to low-income school districts. Over half of it is the school lunch program, which doesn’t exactly represent spending on actual education, even though it is crucial to removing an important barrier to education. The rest – less than $15 billion – increases educational spending in at-risk school districts. It works out to something like $1,000 per student, on average – which is certainly significant, but only closing a small fraction of the difference between per-pupil spending in rich and poor districts around here.</p>
<p>Spend what Philips Exeter believes is necessary to educate a rich kid well - both in annual spending and endowment - add a little, 'cause the kids are poor (and hence don’t go on “enriching vacations”), do it for 13 straight years with poor kids, then come back and we can have a great conversation!</p>
How would increasing per-pupil expenditures help that? Do you think parents shouldn’t have to work to support their own children? In upper income neighborhoods, both parents have careers and can be difficult to get in touch with.</p>
Yeah, no. Unless you’re going to use the money to hire a personal tutor to live with the kid at night, on the weekends and over the summer, you’re not going to actually fix anything.</p>
<p>I saw this thread yesterday and didn’t comment because I didn’t know what to say. I think I agree with the final statement in the original article</p>
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<p>Why the school district has gone after this woman is very much puzzling to me but I would not assume they have a good reason.</p>
<p>I just want to reiterate a few points of the story that don’t make sense to me, other posters have mentioned them too. That idea that the schools in Stamford are measurably better than the schools in Bridgeport doesn’t sound right. Can anyone correct me on this?</p>
<p>How can this article say that this woman is from Bridgeport? Homeless people move around, they don’t have a permanent address. How can anyone say where she lives?</p>
<p>Finally, the school district says that she needed to register at the homeless shelter and she failed to do that. Do they have reason to believe that she wasn’t at the shelter and she is just saying that she was? Are there witnesses who can place her there. Or is it really just an matter of paperwork?</p>
<p>Reading between the lines of the original article, it looks like there was an effort to evict the friend from public housing, for reasons that originally probably had nothing to do with school registration. When the housing authority figured out she had allowed the kid in question to use her address, that became the grounds for eviction (probably much easier to prove than things like drug dealing, being a slob, or fighting with neighbors). The kid and her mother are just collateral damage from that strategy.</p>
<p>do it for 13 straight years with poor kids, then come back and we can have a great conversation! </p>
<p>Yeah, no. Unless you’re going to use the money to hire a personal tutor to live with the kid at night, on the weekends and over the summer, you’re not going to actually fix anything."</p>
<p>Well, try it for 13 years, and come back and tell me what you find. (The Exeter kids DO have tutors and others living with them at night and on weekends, and the kids get sent to all kinds of places with heavy adult supervision during the summers.)</p>
If you’re willing to make the tough decision to completely change the home situation, you’ll definitely get a change. But in the real world, we know that isn’t going to happen. So what actually can be done in the real world?</p>
<p>What can be done in the real world? Less and less. The demographics are running in the wrong direction as are the jobs in a global marketplace. Is society going to spend what Exeter spends? I live in a middle-class community and a poor community. The middle-class community provides support of around $10K per student and does an okay job. It makes the resources available but parents and students have to reach out to get them. Students can get a good education but it takes a family effort.</p>
<p>I don’t know what the poor district gets because I don’t know what the state aid numbers are but I’d guess that it gets more money per student overall. There is a tech school which does a very good job and is located on the suburban side of town but parents and students have to work to get into that school. The main high-school is gang-infested. It has been for decades. It’s a cycle and it isn’t obvious how to break it unless we get a boatload of jobs in the city.</p>
<p>Well, now that you agree that money COULD (and does) make a big difference, I will be the first to admit that throwing money into schools is not the best use of funds.</p>
<p>Actually, we know what works. Guaranteed housing. Support for parents (mothers) to stay home with their kids. Nurse home-visiting. Parenting ed. Free, easily available alcohol and drug treatment when needed. Therapeutic childcare. FOOD! and food security. Affordable, easily accessed medical care for parent and child. Books in the home. Free voluntary reading in school, with lots of books that the students get to choose for themselves and take home. LESS spent on teaching. LESS spent on schools.</p>
<p>It’s going to cost about the same as Exeter plus summer and vacations will. But none of it would be spent on schools. </p>
<p>But PLEASE don’t tell me we don’t have the money for this. We do, and we are paying it NOW. Costs of prisons, costs of jails, crime victim costs, costs in public health, costs in lower productivity, costs in less taxes collected as a result, costs in SSI, the list is almost endless, and we are paying it today. It’s not a matter of money, simply one of political will, and we don’t have it. </p>
<p>The reality is that in our culture, we don’t want that to succeed. So I think among the next best alternatives is to actively PROMOTE precisely what this mother did. I salute her for doing the best she could for her child, given difficult circumstances.</p>
Nope. It’s not money. It’s the courage to have the state parent children who aren’t being parented appropriately.</p>
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No. What we don’t want is to tell an entire group of people that they are incapable of raising their children to societal standards and taking away their right to do so. That goes against everything we believe and people don’t have the stomach to do that.</p>
<p>Money, in the amounts that society will and can support, doesn’t make
a difference. There’s certainly enough research to support this - New
Jersey’s three decades of experiments demonstrates this. The approach
over time was to file state lawsuits to get state level funding to
provide the opportunity for an adequate, efficient, appropriate,
etc. education. States have cooperated or resisted based on politics
and/or fiscal constraints.</p>
<p>You can talk hyperbole or converse realistically - adults try to do
the latter.</p>
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<p>Anyone think that it is?</p>
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<p>There are lots of struggling middle-class families that would love to
have an Exeter education for their children. But the mathematics of
what people make and what they can pay for is limited. I think that a
number of around $10,000 per student is pretty common across the
country. How do you propose to provide $30K for every family for
education?</p>
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<p>Singapore spends about $13,000 and has arguably one of the best
education systems in the world. Their culture is much more amenable to
education though and parents, rich or poor, put in the efforts that
they can to promote the education of their kids.</p>
<p>Why can’t we change our culture to move in that direction?</p>