(07-03-2023 07:56 AM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  

(07-02-2023 12:46 PM)RiceLad15 Wrote:  

(07-02-2023 11:58 AM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  

(07-02-2023 11:08 AM)RiceLad15 Wrote:  

(07-02-2023 09:19 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  There is an opportunity for republicans, if they had any political sense, to solidify things with their base and possibly defuse some of their opposition. The root problem, obviously, is that poor and minority children are deprived of educational opportunity because of the poor quality of their elementary and secondary schools. Improving school quality should be a major issue for republicans. Not by throwing money at bad solutions, like democrats do, since the USA already spends far more than anybody else on education, but by coming up with better solutions.

Take a look at those other countries that get better results while spending far less on education. What do they do?
1) They put students on separate tracks--gifted/advanced, mainstream university prep, and vocational--and their vocational tracks are far more advanced.
2) They focus on basics--the three R's--instead of all the woke indoctrination crap; cutting those out saves megabucks
3) In most cases, school choice--in Germany, high school students have a choice of 7 public options, plus private and religious schools with government paying part of the bill.

Giving inner-city parents an alternative to sending their children to failed schools should pick up a substantial number of votes.

Not disagreeing with some of your recommendations, but funding is part of the issue, though, in rural school districts. Great article in Texas Monthly on the struggles of rural Texas districts (focusing on Fort Davis in west Texas).

Quote: With each passing month, his rural district inches closer to financial ruin. If nothing changes by next summer or fall, Fort Davis will have depleted its savings. He doesn’t know the exact day that his school district will go broke, but he can see it coming.

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politi...-that-way/

I thought Robin Hood was supposed to correct this. Guess it didn't work.

I went to school in a rural district, and sent my sons to public school in a rural district. Results: 3 BAs, 1 MBA, 100% of loans paid off. At Rice, I dated a girl from Fort Davis.

So I guess being rural doesn't have to mean failure.

Not quite following the last two statements - was there anything in the article or that I wrote that suggested rural students meant failure?

And it sounds like Robin Hood isn’t working and is very complex. From the article:

Quote:I It’s easy enough to grasp the basic problem in Fort Davis. But what’s going on beneath the surface is another story.

During my twenty years of reporting on Texas politics, I’ve often heard that only a handful of people in the state understand the school-finance system, with its complicated formulas, allotments, maximum compressed tax rates, guaranteed yields, and “golden pennies.” A former colleague of mine, who once spent months trying to make sense of the topic, warned me against writing about it. Karr, the school finance consultant, compares the process of making sense of our public education funding to encountering a fire at a roadside cotton gin on some lonely West Texas highway. “You drive off into that smoke and you might never drive out,” he said. “You might end up getting killed.”

Sure seemed like it to me. Talking abut a school district unable to afford things and students doing without.

Part of the problem is funding, to be sure - but money alone won't make qualified teachers want to live in Fort Davis.

Robin Hood was meant to help poorer districts with funding. So I guess in 1994 somebody thought the problem was funding.

Frankly, OO, that's quite the logical leap and it seems like you posted that to pick a fight and suggest that I have some bias against rural students. Nothing that I wrote came close to saying that rural students = failure. I literally don't know how you came to this conclusion based on the words I wrote.

It was pretty clear that what I was saying was that rural school districts do face an issue with funding. And funding is a significant enough issue that, when speaking of how to improve schools/educational outcomes, one can't ignore funding across the board.

I also did not come close to arguing hat funding is the lone issue that these rural districts face. Again, I was very clear in saying that funding is an issue that needs to be addressed.

I'm pretty sure funding in rural school districts has been a problem for ages - they cover large areas of land with small populations. Their struggles likely only overlap slightly with those or urban areas. Not sure why the "age" of this issue matters. It still needs to be considered and addressed.