The U.S. Public School System Is Becoming The Land of The Poor

[Grand Potentate]

A long held believe of mine, finally being played out in official reports.

http://gawker.com/the-u-s-public-school-system-is-becoming-the-land-of-t-1447334194

The U.S. Public School System Is Becoming The Land of The Poor

In vast swaths of America, the conversion of the "public" school system into a separate and unequal educational system catering to the poor and powerless is almost complete.

A new study from the Southern Education Foundation shows that 17 US states have reached quite a notable turning point: the majority of students in their public school systems receive free lunches—which is to say, the public school systems in these states can now be properly classified as institutions that mostly serve the poor, rather than public institutions that serve a representative cross-section of society. This means that the concerns of the public school system can be more easily ignored on a statewide and region-wide level by politicians who care not for the interests of low-income people.

The states with majority-poor school systems, as seen in the map above, include almost the entire South, as well as Oregon, Nevada, and California. From the Washington Post:

“This is incredible,” said Michael A. Rebell, the executive director of the Campaign for Educational Equity at Columbia University..

“When you break down the various test scores, you find the high-income kids, high-achievers are holding their own and more,” Rebell said. “It’s when you start getting down to schools with a majority of low-income kids that you get astoundingly low scores. Our real problem regarding educational outcomes is not the U.S. overall, it’s the growing low-income population.”


There's a Simple Solution to the Public Schools Crisis
The ongoing (but maybe soon to end?) teachers' strike in Chicago is being viewed by many as an early skirmish in a coming war over the crisis in … Read…

No one who believes in the concept of universal free public education should have any illusions about this: if this trend continues (and it will, unless something powerful is done to stop it), public schools will become politically irrelevant and further neglected and less cared for in larger and larger portions of America, until the entire national public school system is threatened with destruction. This is why we need to outlaw private school.

[Image via SEF]

 

[Grand Potentate]

That's insane. The insanity of that borders on the pathological.

What's insane?

 

[Russell Street]

Hell, my income was barely $5/wk before college. :dave:

The school lunch thing is largely hooey. In NJ, school administrators (with requisite six figure incomes) had their own children collecting free lunches. The applications are rarely checked and the school gets mo' money the mo' po' students they claim to have, so it's mostly a big scam on the taxpayer.

Next, this article reaffirms the truth that schools and teachers are almost irrelevant in the development and education of children: it's all about parenting. Working, educated parents raise children in their image, underclass parents raise children that mimic them. The teachers are largely overpaid babysitters.

Public schools are intrinsically biased against the poor precisely because they have to go there. Offer charter schools, private schools with need-based (and merit-based) scholarships and the intelligent child born in a poor area has a chance. Only a demented sadist would think that banning the schools that work will somehow help the ones that don't. The opposition to choice in education is purely because public education (unions in particular) are uninterested in being competitive.

Also, it's just plain not about money. There is an almost inverse relation to how much a school system spends per pupil to the quality of education received. Many inner city schools spend amounts equivalent to pricey private day schools.