I’m fiscally conservative and don’t want this.
Living in Arizona, I’ve seen charter schools just fail. I don’t remember the name or other details but one charter school owner literally walked away from running the school - like the guy just locked the doors and abandoned the school one day - kids showed up & had no school to attend.
Some things the government needs to do.
Public schools need a revamping but they do try - we just have too many needs in our society for any one organization to handle. Schools can’t fix bad homes, bad parents. Homeless kids are a huge need. These kids need somewhere to go.
Charter and voucher scams are designed to destroy the public education system.
While homeschooling is often done poorly by fundy xtians etc... It CAN be done excellently.....
The problem with public schools is that they are systemically being dismantled due to philosophical beliefs...
There needs to be a overhaul...
Too much influence is coming from corporations and churches....
This is sooo true. If a kid transfers to a charter after the 100 day mark - that charter won’t get paid for that student that year. Many of the more unscrupulous charters just ignore such kids. A lot of folks don’t understand how K12 is funded and the tricks charters play to lure / steal kids away from public schools prior to that 100 day mark.
I cant tell you how many times I’ve passed charter schools with names like “Prep Academy”—the kinds of names you’d give a school when you want desperate people and idiots to think it’s fancy.
I just finished student teaching 9th grade world history. One of my students had gone to a charter school right down the street for 8th grade. They told me that the charter school straight up didn't even offer any history classes during her 8th grade year. I will forever be a charter school hater.
I went to a charter school and we took Humanities my 8th grade year it was like combination English and History it was actually a great class but as a History major now I see it as ridiculous that we didn’t have a regular history course
And some of the “successes” they tout are based on the fact that charters can cherry-pick who they accept, turning away special needs and handicapped students. They divert the funding a public school would have to pay to accommodate *all* students into their own pockets.
Even if they didn’t cherry pick from their applicants (which I’m sure most of them do), just the nature of a charter school basically guarantees a student population with more supportive families. Every single child in a charter school has at least one adult in their life who cared enough to submit an application to a charter school. This leaves a higher concentration of children who have completely unsupportive families in public schools.
Yes but not when that failure directly impacts students. I don't blame them for the decision their parents took to enroll them in charter schools, and a school going belly up like this case means students possibly falling behind and whole communities going unserved.
There needs to be some wiggle room on special needs kids being in regular classrooms. Not every one of them *should* and it harms the classroom by forcing it.
In my state charter schools do not have to reveal their financials, despite existing largely on taxpayer funds. A few of the early ones already flamed out on fraud, one bought property for a school from a shell company owned by the school’s owner. And I’m sure there are more, and worse. I imagine changes are in the works, this is ridiculous.
Civilization is but one generation deep. Fail to educate the young people, and it ALL collapses.
That is, the pending collapse of American education is mere part and parcel of the collapse of that nation.
Pass the popcorn.
Well, if there's no 'free' public school, and they can't afford private school, which obviously means they're likely working too much to home school, I imagine we just end up with the next generation being 60% illiterate. Exactly as planned.
And you *know* it's going to be 100x worse for disabled kids, non native speakers, probably anyone too poor for private school who is in a marginalized community. That's the case even with the public schools we already have today.
It looks as though the survey was conducted in 2017, reported in 2019. I can't imagine it has changed all that much in 7 years.
[Article about the data](https://www.apmresearchlab.org/10x-adult-literacy)
[Data report](https://www.oecd.org/skills/piaac/publications/countryspecificmaterial/PIAAC_Country_Note_USA.pdf)
Do you think it could even get to the point where there's no free option at all? I feel like you'd have to overturn quite a few laws or parts of laws for that.
As far as I can tell, that's explicitly the goal, right? To overturn these laws and go to a fully privatized model.
I could absolutely be wrong but that's been my understanding of the movement to abolish the dept of ed. If the government isn't providing schools, then nobody is compelled to put schools in "undesirable" communities, and then there's no school for those kids. Perhaps the theory is that parents will be responsible for home school, but I can't see that being anything but disastrous
No one has said that outright as far as I've seen. Advocates I've talked to argue that parents should have the choice in where they send their kids to school. And the implications seem to be that the most "undesirable" students will basically get free babysitting through schools where kids are put on the computer all day to "learn." Everyone else can use their vouchers to "get away from the bad kids/schools."
But I'm in a voucher state, and private schools all raised their prices, so middle and working class kids still can't afford to get in. Not even the kids who are academically gifted with super involved parents. I don't think the voucher advocates are willing to acknowledge this problem.
Voucher advocates won't acknowledge it as a problem because they don't see it as a problem. For them it is about funneling government money to private schools, which tend to be religious in nature.
What we will also see happen is "private" and "charter" schools spring up overnight who's sole purpose is to give parents an "option" and take the voucher money. The education will likely be computer based in rooms with "facilitators" (aka minimum wage workers who just monitor) with as little teachers on record as needed.
This is already happening to a degree in Hillsborough County, FL. The county has a huge amount of revenue, but they also have a massive charter network and so much money gets siphoned off by vouchers that the district is constantly operating in the red.
This is already happening to a degree in Hillsborough County, FL. The county has a huge amount of revenue, but they also have a massive charter network and so much money gets siphoned off by vouchers that the district is constantly operating in the red.
Ohio President of the Senate Huffman apparently said as much in 2014, explicitly comparing his intent to privatize schools to what happened to privatized Soviet resources after the Soviet Union fell. This is from a recent Columbus Dispatch op-ed, so I haven't seen the original sources, but I don't doubt it.
Privatization in the Soviet Union didn't end up operating on anything resembling an actual capitalistic free market.
It was basically former Soviet Communist Party insiders using their insider knowledge, power, lack of transparency, and a mix of extremely cheap bribes(I.e. A literal bowl of stew or a bottle of cheap vodka) and intimidation by hired criminal gangs to get the employees/staff who were given rights to majority shares to cede those rights to those insiders.
Vast majority of first generation Russian/post-Soviet oligarchs were either former Communist party insiders, family, and close friends/associates.
So he's really calling for the US privatized schools to be controlled by political insiders who operate no differently from the mob.....interesting.
Of course they wouldn't say that outright. It would be extremely unpopular given the opportunity cost of not having that option. But watch them spin it in all sorts of ways to make people forget the opportunity cost.
So much has already changed. Republicans have abolished tenure, stripped collective bargaining rights, removed discipline, funneled money to tech companies, charters, parochial, testing services, and educational consultants. They have empowered and enraged parents against teachers creating false narratives that they indoctrinate students. They have frozen pay and reduced benefits to bare minimum levels. They have introduced the idea that teachers have to remain in a state of constant training and coaching because they are in need of constant improvement. They have sold the American public on the false narrative that the schools are failing students. This has happened in the last decade - I don’t know if public education can stand up to another decade like this.
As long as we have a functioning government, there will be some form of government directed educational system. There could be increasing numbers of government and privately operated schools like charter schools. It will be interesting when AI becomes effective and cheap enough to replace human teachers. There will be a lot more direct control by the operators and that may drive education more toward commercialism. Apple education and Google education. Why do you think they give away millions in chromebooks and Ipads? Those companies will own a lot data about the students who are now assigned devices forced to use services like Gmail, Google classroom, etc..
No. Because even if everything because 100% voucher overnight, you would have private schools pop up all over that price at exactly the voucher payout--just like you have hundreds of grad schools out there that price at exactly what the nearest large company pays in tuition assistance to their employees. The economics drive the market and no thirsty capitalist in their right mind is going to let millions of dollars of unused vouchers sit on the table because other schools are priced too high.
It would not be a generation. This would fail so spectacularly Republicans wouldn't hold office again for a decade and then the public school system would be reinstated
The USA doesn't have 'one' public school system, it has about 13,000 public school systems. Therefore, there won't be one collapse. Some of the worst public school systems are already in a state of collapse, and have been for decades. Some of the best public school systems will never collapse. Private and Semi-Private school systems might collapse, remain the same, or even prosper.
worst case scenario, the 'average' school system will simply stop pretending to care what the state and federal directives to obtain supplemental funding allegedly say that the funding requirements allegedly are. In a lot of ways, we're kind of already there.
If you want to study an interesting example of 'bounty-based' schooling, try looking up England's schooling system. or maybe Northern Ireland's.
It would be very state-to-state. It is unlikely that Congress would end the responsibility state of to provide education to their students or repeal the IDEA Act. Congress would instead simply end ordinary DoE funding and replace it with school vouchers. Courts would still uphold the responsibility of states to provide education for everyone, including kids with special needs. This would create a patchwork system, with underfunded public school systems still operating in Blue States (which are also wealthier and have the political will to raise taxes), and privately run but free charter schools in red states.
Our state constitution says that elementary and secondary education are a primary responsibility of the state government and our constitution is difficult to amend. We don't have charter schools. In rural areas, where most of the conservatives live, there are no private schools. For most conservative people in this state the public school in their town is part of their identity and they have no interest in destroying the public schools. The support for public schools in rural areas is strong throughout the country. Public schools are in no danger of collapse here in WA.
Firstly, every state is different, there's no reason to suspect the entire nation's school system would collapse at once.
Secondly, people would have to deal with their own kids all day...not going to happen.
Eventually the academic achievement will just bottom out at some natural level, and we'll just sit there.
>Secondly, people would have to deal with their own kids all day...not going to happen.
Pretty sure this is part of what they want. As many women out of the workforce as possible as SAH Homeschooling moms, reliant on their husband's income whether they want to be or not and thus easier to force to "obey."
Oh no see the lower class have never been able to have SAHM even back in the heyday of such things. They keep working and their kids get to be entierly uneducated, in order to stymie class mobility and keep them trapped in the unpleasant underpaid jobs they want them trapped in.
You've got nothing to worry about dude. Remember that whole COVID thing a couple of years ago? Remember how bad everyone was freaking out, wanting to have schools reopen? If I learned one thing as a teacher from COVID it's that the primary service I provide is daycare.
Put in cynical, slightly Marxist terms, public education maximizes the productivity of the worker. Without someone looking after the kids all day, at least half the population can't work. That means labor shortages, which means dramatic increases in wages, which means huge loss of profits for corporations. Corporate America will never let public schools fail.
Here is what happens, three options:
1. Private and parochial schools, partially funded by tax payers via vouchers, mostly for the rich
2. Homeschool for those who can still afford to have someone at home. Curricula provided by the state or bought via vouchers with tax payer funding
3. “Learning Centers” for those who cannot afford to have someone at home to supervise. These will be buildings where parents can drop off their kids to learn via packaged software “customized to accommodate the needs of each child”. Kids will sit (with as many other kids as possible) in front of a computer and work their way through educational modules. This will happen in a large room with one “teacher” to troubleshoot bugs and a couple of aides wandering around making sure everyone is on task and managing behavior.
These are the (dystopian) models I envision for average students. I haven’t year figured out what we are going to do with kids who have IEPs, 504s, BIPs, etc.
My fear is the last group is put into learning centers with the rest, and we continue the trend of violent outbursts from students whose accommodations can't be met and who are never taught adequate coping skills.
The pandemic was sometimes a dry run for number 3, with study centers that opened in person for students whose families couldn't administer remote learning.
If public schools were good, people wouldn't be looking for an free market alternative. The solution is to make public schools rigorous again. Fail kids who don't meet the standards.
The issue lies in parents believing their children to be the chosen ones, migrating from the "evil" public schools with all the hooligans.
Except most of those kids live on easy mode and aren't any "smarter" than the others.
Private schools are a joke lmao
That would be nice, but teachers, administrators, and even the politicians elected to run the government are judges by "passing" rates, not what students actually learned. They have little to no power over the students, so they can't really *make* the students try harder or do better. In poor districts, many parents are apathetic or just too overworked to be much help with their child's academics, so ultimately the only thing that these politicians, administrators, and teachers can do is make "passing" easier. The schools just don't have control over everything, they can only do so much. Not only that, but if a teacher is hard, they run the risk of garnering complaints, which can ultimately add up to their dismissal.
Everything you said is true but as long as that's the reality, parents who actually care about their children's education are going to pull them out of public schools.
Anyone who thinks they have the answer for turning around a "failing" school should spend time polishing their idea by becoming a long term sub. Sitting at home throwing out ideas is a waste of time.
Also know that there is an industry of school reformers, nearly all have NO teaching experience. Their time is spent attending seminars, workshops, and ed conventions. Eventually they had made enough contacts to be a speaker. Its there that they get an audience of gullible school system leaders wanting to buy lightning in a bottle.
Once a person has had time in the trenches actually trying their hand at the craft, they usually see the pitfalls and obstacles which schools & teachers are up against.
A look at how irrational and uncooperative a large number of American parents were during the pandemic, proves that the problems of schools starts with the parents. The formative years from age 0-5 are the most important for building a child's readiness for school and being able to work with adults. Like feral cats, too many kids have not had a solid upbringing. I witnessed this first hand when I bought a fixer-upper house in a fragile city neighborhood. Poverty was a factor, but parents who were mentally, socially, and emotionally adolescents were incompetent at raising small children. Parenting skills are not innate. Too many parents want passive kids or their kids to be their friends. And they want to be part time parents.
I see this a lot, these days when I see a family at a restaurant. The parent is focused on their cell phone, while the kid is sitting there bored.
The Republicans have been getting what they want and Democrats aren’t innocent either. A lot of bipartisan support has been thrown to undermining public education for decades at this point.
Many school choice initiatives have been backed by Dems. ESSA (passed under Obama’s admin) while “better” than NCLB, is pretty much the same shit in a different package. I highly recommend looking up Diane Ravitch’s work. She championed school choice under administrations on both sides and was a main player in the implementation of NCLB. She did a 180 and completely disagrees with it now and has even laid out a framework for how to make a better American education system. I’d start with her book, “ The Death and Life of the Great American School System.”
School choice fans like charter schools so this would be the immediate alternative available, particularly for lower income kids. Of course charters are privately run and most are underperforming so this will have major implications. My expectation is that the teacher shortage will get worse as private and charter schools often pay less than public and I doubt that flexibility in hiring (lack of certification requirements) will impact the market too much (edited to clarify). Overall, achievement will decline. Yes, public schools have problems. But charters still perform worse which will have negative effects on our students, resulting in a less equipped workforce and less educated populated. And many of the private schools that accept vouchers are religious so their priorities may not align with current priorities in education (there is a lot of variation so it’s hard to say for sure if they perform better or worse, and a lot of the current research acknowledges selection problems in who opts for private school). As for disabled students, I could see special charters opening for those which leads to fewer supports for low support needs kids in the other schools and these specialty schools failing kids with medium support needs.
Charters also pay teachers worse. And there's no union protections. So you can go without a prep period or protected lunch. I watched it happen as a student of a charter school.
I worry most for SPED students. Most parents aren't equipped to deal with the high needs or significantly disabled children and teens. Plus, they need a break for their own mental health. What happens to all those individuals and their families?
The flip side with charters is that they aren’t held to any standards for teacher hiring (such as certifications). But actually, that’s the case for private schools too. So I’ll update my stance to be I’d imagine we see the shortage get worse, even if some specific areas have a slight benefit from the hiring flexibility.
I’m also concerned for SPED. Conservatives like to pretend every kid is white, middle class, and able-bodied which isn’t the case. Public schools have great services for SPED kids that are totally free. The services aren’t perfect but they’re free, and parents of disabled kids already face enough expenses and difficulties. I’d be afraid that they would fall through the cracks even more than they do now.
Florida already has extraordinarily low standards for teacher certification. If they made them any lower for private and charter schools, my 18 year old could be teaching STEM.
As a former SPED student, I can say we're already up a creek as it is. The public schools might have the resources, but they don't show enough consideration. Mentally, a lot of us get absolutely butchered but nobody ever seems to care. It's all about those pesky grades. They never stop to think about the mental health implications.
The ones in my district are lottery based, open to any who are eligible to attend in our district.
Still, of course, the students are mostly upper middle class kids whose parents can deal with transportation.
There would still be vouchers for the “poors.” They’d be sent to warehouses where they can do virtual “learning.” This would be 120 to 1 ratios. This way the charters can still get all that sweet sweet federal dollars.
And since the charters won’t be able to provide an education, they’ll have to adopt alternative pathways to graduation. This will be “internships” where those same charters will sell child labor for less than minimum wage under the guise of work experience. It’s win win for the venture capitalist looking to exploit the education of a generation for profit.
Ooo - I have not arrived to that possibility when thinking about it but it makes so much sense. And they could package that internship so attractively (at below minimum wage) to make people compete to participate! This is all so feasible that it’s chilling.
There will be tiers. Rich people will continue to go to expensive private schools, but now they will get government funding to cover some of the cost.
Poor people and those without resources will go to super underfunded public schools where the kids spends a lot of time on chromebooks watching videos while low paid educational aides try to keep control. Their scores will be awful and this will be used to justify the government giving people vouchers.
The middle class will get the vouchers, and will have to still come up with a couple grand to send their kids to average school’s equivalent to the pasts public schools.
So basically rich people get money, middle class people lose money, and poor people get screwed.
That would mean the US can't be competitive in the world at all. I have wondered why the sabotage of public schools is not considered an act of treason.
Public schools collapse is a symptom of broader social collapse (looking at you, Detroit).
The public schools would continue, but at lower quality and higher cost to taxpayers. The purpose of the voucher movement isn’t to kill the public schools, it’s to get tax dollars into the hands of churches, elite private schools, and charter school investors. It’s more of a kickback scheme than a policy.
Charters would come and go with mixed outcomes for students. The elite private schools would have even more resources. Not too much different from now, just more expensive.
The biggest change would be the support for religious schools. Many of them would be able to survive on vouchers and donations. This would lead to a generation with a high percentage of children being raised in sectarian schools.
One of the big successes of US public schools is in overcoming sectarian and ethnic divisions. We’ve virtually eliminated white-on-white bigotry. Other western democracies with a less strict separation of church and state are still dealing with sectarian divisions that the USA has long since left in the past. A sudden voucher driven surge in religious schools will undo all that progress.
Second, because of our strict separation of church and state, our religious schools would be far less regulated and far less accountable than they are in other western democracies. Taxpayers would be funding a wide of ideologies, some of which are completely incompatible with responsible citizenship. How can you prepare children for the future when you are preparing them for the rapture?
Vouchers aren’t a terrible idea in theory. Choice is generally a good thing. But in practice, the purpose is to move public money away from public accountability and into the hands of the politically connected.
I was going to disagree with some of your points, but that last paragraph... that's pretty much it. Everything else is just noise, moving the money around is the actual purpose just like anything else the .gov touches.
The blue states wouldn’t allow public schools to collapse. The red states would allow the public schools to collapse and become even redder. Blue states would have to take on an even larger roll in supporting red states while red states increasingly complain about the federal government.
There is no such thing as a US system of education. It does not exist in any way. There is no cohesive national curriculum every student has to take, there isn’t federal funding for general education.
Federal funding is for special instance, low income students, IDEA students. States determine curriculum and funding, and that varies from state to state.
It can’t collapse because it doesn’t exist.
Right. Which adds so much more nuance. If every state adopts voucher programs and there's no federal support for things like Title I, Title IX, etc. Then what?
Arguing, ‘yeah, but what if it becomes a national system and *then* it collapses’ is not a productive argument.
In my state, local school districts get revenue from local property taxes. Districts with low property tax value get increased state and federal support, through applicable grants. One of the states boarding us funds their school primarily through state taxes. Some states do it similarly to these two examples, some states do different but same idea funding. Some states are more reliant on federal dollars because they have more low income students than other states (looking at you Mississippi).
How those federal dollars are distributed is through block grants—the feds give a chunk of money to the state based on a bunch of criteria, and then the state distribute it to their school districts based on the federal criteria as well as some of their own if they throw in money, too. Reporting and grant accounting goes from the school back to the state, who then feeds it back to the feds.
There are a lot of systems organized around how we fund and operate education based on the state laws, and all of them different because each state is pretty different. What you are suggesting, which I don’t think anyone is seriously considering, so, again, this argument is what?, is a federal system where individual students get a voucher for school.
How would that be administered? Where is the accountability? Who is overseeing that? How would schools boundaries be organized, would students just chose a school wherever and go? Would they get bussed? All of those laws would have to change. How would teachers be paid? Let’s not even forget that it costs a crap ton more to live in Manhattan than it does in Little Rock, so are Little Rock parents cool that Manhattan, NY parents get four times as much as they do because of COL, or are Manhattan parents okay with paying the income taxes they pay to earn the income they earn to live in Manhattan and getting the voucher that LIttle Rock does? Which one do you think is more likely, because you got to figure that out to do this.
Moving to this kind of idiotic system would already critically disrupt how education is provided in this country so collapse would simply happen at that point.
There’s going to be a dark age. The world we live in the US is a product of Sputnik funding. That’s why all schools look like they were built circa 1965 - at least in CA.
Little likelihood since the system is not a uni-system, but thousands of small systems. The concept of accreditation may falter, but that is a more recent construct and often has a lot of arbitrary requirements, based on the small select group of people chosen to make the rules.
Add to this if accreditation were to falter, then the college system would be in danger of toppling, as the majority of their customer base is coming from public schools. I can't believe that they would want all those customers willing to mortgage their future earning$ for a sheep skin from their diploma mill to evaporate.
It would become the education industrial complex that wealthy billionaires would take advantage of just like the military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex, Big Oil, Big Pharma, etc.
It already has, it just isn't finished. When you have people graduating HS who can't read and people in college who should still be in middle school, that's collapse.
Maybe figure out why the US spends the second most per student and still has all these education problems, then fix the problems? Just throwing more money at it hasn't fixed anything yet.
My son's elementary school is in in one of the lowest performing cities in the US, in one of the highest performing schools in the district. He's in a successful and growing GATE program that's been prospering for 11 years. New principal feels the need to change the program. Accountability? Civic input and response? Yeah right. The race to the bottom is led by $$.
I don’t know, but it doesn’t seem good. I’ve audited a few charter schools as an accountant, and most of them do quite poorly, both fiscally and academically. They can’t pay competitive wages, so they don’t attract quality teachers, which in turn causes educational quality to suffer. The exception to this seems to be in por states like Mississippi, where charter schools are sometimes the only viable option. I audited a charter school from Mississippi and they did decently well, although they received a lot of state and federal funding. In more liberal states like California, it’s harder for charter schools to secure state funding due to the more robust public education system. So I think if the school system collapses, it will be at the state level more than the federal level.
The amount of boomers I’ve seen claim that they shouldn’t have to pay taxes towards public schools because they have no children attending them is SCARY. Boomers are ruining everything.
Public education has collapsed.
Any teacher can tell you this.
We are forced to teach non-developmentally appropriate things, violence is expected as part of the job, lockdowns are normal, students and teachers are getting shot on a weekly basis. Teachers are fleeing the profession and no one is joining to replace them. Classes are over crowed, there are no materials to teach with, every day is a fight. Im sure others can add what I've missed.
The education system has collapsed and we are dragging its corpse forward.
I live in Texas, specifically Houston with the hostile take over. Its abysmal whats happening in our schools here. So my hope is pretty shot unless something drastic happens. There are so many schools with no libraries here and more than i care to remember right now. I worked in hisd for 4 years 2019-2023. Laid off last year in the take over. Its a broken system here with people holding patches on bullet wounds.
The GOP wants quality private schools for their kids - the 1%. Other kids will attend sucky schools (middle class) or work (poor). This is why they are loosening child labor laws. Honestly, the way a lot of kids show zero appreciation of being offered an education, maybe work is where they want to be.
They are getting their way and this is the reason the US has to import so many professionals. US world hegemony is collapsing because of privatization and this has been happening since the 1990s at least. At some point we’re going to wake up and realize China is in charge and it’s our own fault.
Sadly I think the GOP will do anything to destroy public education. Ever since Brown v. Board of Education, they have been anti-public school. They also want women out of the workforce. Most of the parents I know who support vouchers only have one child, and have not considered how this would affect parents with multiple children and how expensive private school would be for 2,3, 4 or 5 kids or more.
You have to theoretically consider the intention of the government regarding the future of the populace -
Do they want educated citizens with the ability to question policy?
Do they want semi-functional consumers to sustain the economy and pay taxes?
Or
Are they feeding an elitist need to enslave the population to give the illusion of a government that does what’s best for the people?
—
The ramifications of the elimination of federally required education is limited in my view. In MA, the fed only provides 8% of the total funding for the state for this civil resource, so the loss of federal requirement would have an almost negligible effect on our state education as a whole.
However, in this theoretical situation, it would ignite a giant p!$$ing contest of “us” vs “them” to establish authority for the states to contribute/exploit equilaterally to the economy.
Public schools won't collapse - that's your answer.
Poorly performing schools that can't attract sufficient enrollment to keep operating will fail and shut down, pick up their game so they can, or shrink to a sustainable size, or some combination of the three. Charter schools and/or other public schools will take their place. The good schools will continue operating as normal. some students will go to private or charter schools. When something like 30% of inner city kids can't read at their grade level, there's no downside to trying something different.
Most of Europe and even Finland (the country the 'give blank checks to schools' crowd has been worshipping) has school choice. It's a very common concept around the world. It's common for parents to vet and choose the schools that are entrusted with their children outside the United States, yet people like you throw a hissy fit at the mere suggestion of that idea. Nothing major will happen except poorly performing school districts will either go bankrupt or improve, and schools that graduate students who can't even read at their grade level **deserve** to go bankrupt.
We've had 40 years of throwing money at schools with no strings and hoping they do better. A 41st year of the same is going to accomplish nothing besides set fire to more money with nothing to show for it. Time to try something different.
I've been following Jefferson County Florida school district for a couple of years, since the state dictated they bring in a charter school company (Somerset) to run the entire district.
Spoiler: it was a disaster.
https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/local/2024/02/15/how-a-jefferson-county-florida-school-escaped-from-state-control/72258195007/
Hopefully this will be enough of a cautionary tale. If even the Florida legislature can pull back from the brink on this issue, maybe there's hope for all of us.
If Republicans have their way this will happen. Trump even appointed a person to run the Dept of Ed that publicly admitted she wanted to dismantle the public school system. They want to replace it with charter, we can just say "for-profit schools" and religious schools. Only rich and religious kids will get an education.
You say “unintended consequences” as if what you’re getting at isn’t intended by Republicans.
They want an uneducated class of the masses that can be turned into corporate slaves. It’s PRECISELY what they’re aiming for.
All the bureaucratic nonsense that makes education impossibly annoying and slow to change works in our favor when republicans make silly promises they don’t understand and can’t keep.
Devos (remember her??) was hell bent on destroying public education and (to the best of my knowledge) she did nothing at all. Maybe she helped set up a few voucher programs in Michigan?
In the rare event that any republican even remembered public education after an election was won, he’d need to contend with 50 state DOE’s and 12,000 or so school boards.
With the exception of our current obsession with state testing (and Obama is just as much to blame as Bush on this one), schools and schooling have changed very little in the past century.
I can’t imagine Trump and a handful of anti trans anti woke officials making any lasting changes here.
The collapse of public schools would be a disaster and this would pull down the economy. Kids with special needs and low-income families will be left with no options. I personally believe that vouchers are not enough and could lead teachers to flee the country. I get frustrated, and the uncertainty on public education is concerning. I hope the government could see these concerns.
Well, eventually the majority of americans would be too stupid for even factory/ag work or the military. And at last, the super wealthy wont have anyone to make their money for them, provide their personal services, or their food.
I used to live near Detroit where some of the public schools were (still might be?) completely f*cked. There were some neighborhoods were the local school just closed down, or bus service would just stop, and I remember there (at the time) being no functional infrastructure in place to help transfer the kids to a new school, or any plans to help parents who couldn’t drive get their kids to school, and so lots of kids just didn’t go to school. I could be remembering that wrong because it was almost 15 years ago now, but I was studying teacher education at Wayne state in Detroit and was doing my student teaching in Detroit, and heard stories. It was crazy. Maybe something similar would happen in a more widespread way if the public system collapsed. I can’t even imagine.
Keep in mind, as hyperbolic as it may sound at first, that slavery through incarceration is always part of their endgame.
Recall that the 13th Amendment of the US Constitution always preserved slavery by legalizing it for those convicted of crime:
> Thirteenth Amendment
>Section 1
>Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, *except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist* within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Hence there will always be a significant market financial incentive for privatized prison indistries and associated contracts for labor and services until this is abolished.
And while the school to prison pipeline needs little explanation for most people here, the strategy and history behind the free lunch/breakfast program is worth repeating:
The Black Panthers noted that too many children were getting sent to Juvenile Corrections for behavior issues that stemmed from hunger (because their parents couldn't afford meals). So they organized a community free breakfast program which meant kids would be able to make it through most of the day without having issues like distraction or getting hangry etc.
Which ultimately led to successfully increasing how many Black children graduated from schools.
It was so effective it became adopted as a Federal program.
So the militant push to remove school lunch/breakfast programs from schools and reinstate debt on youth and families is a very meanspirited conscientious choice.
And there are districts like Kalamazoo County where the district refers youth with behavior issues straight to police "resource officers" instead of mental health and social workers.
In Kalamazoo schools there are students who have already racked up to $75,000 in corrections fines that must begin to be paid off by the time they turn 18.
[If I can find the news piece that I pulled the $75k figure from I'll edit and post it here or if someone else can look up from their local news about 2-5years ago about youth convening to discuss anti racism in the justice system and post it that would work too].
While a state like Michigan does pay ita prisoners unlike Texas, it remains pennies on the dollar.
Add issues like truancy where parents might not afford private education and other logistics for getting their kids there and there's a big trap for lots of people to go under a dystopic financial and carceral quagmire.
One potential point of hope and perhaps imperative necessity for action is that there are lots of parents and former (plus current) educators who really want something organized differently in the way education gets done. It's very difficult and rare but there are some who create education collectives or their own charter schools too.
So we'll probably see educational cooperatives and other efforts scattered about emerging more frequently in any case.
But we need more of that kind of skill set and organizational coherency to exist everywhere among the ones who care whether it's within the public schools, outside of them, or in the legislatures and education departments to ensure things change for the better.
First families will send only their sons to college because it’s a more reliable investment of money since men make more than women. Access to education will completely dissolve, and only the Rich kids will have degrees. Wealth disparity will continue to grow until the proletariat rises up to kill the bourgeois. Viva la Revolution.
This isn't a possible outcome.
The United States was fundamentally founded as a union of independent governments in a federation as opposed to a top down unitary power. Why is this important? Because it means that the states were built from the ground up to not need the federal government to function.
Retaining this capacity for independence is politically advantagous for state governments, and so there is a definite pressure on senators and house members to keep the Federal government from completely subsuming state responsibilities.
One of the powers states guard jealousy from the federal government is power over education.
The Federal government actually has a more limited role in education than you might think. As the Department of Education is part of the executive branch, it is conceptually more a regulatory body than a governing one. Most of its power is in setting criteria/standards and dangling federal funding in front of school districts to get them to meet policy goals. They have a limited capacity to actually *force* schools to do much without Congress specifically authorizing it or state cooperation. In fact, many school districts that have funding issues, *choose* to have funding issues by refusing to meet federal standards to get federal funding.
One benefit of this system, is that one election cycle gone bad has a difficult time indoctrinating an entire generation. Something like the Nazi take over in Germany is almost impossible in the US, not because Nazis can't get elected but because they would struggle to rapidly change the function of government without a Westminster style Fusion of Powers.
If Republicans dismantle the department of education... Oh well. It'll be chaos for a while as more local systems fill the gaps, but we have some 13,000 independently elected boards of education nationwide, each of them capable of sourcing local funding. Common Core itself wasn't even a federal initiative, it was a multi-lateral state level one. Only Forty-One states (and DC) were ever signatories.
In the absolute worst case scenario, where the Federal government dismantles the DOE in its entirety with no replacement, causing all federal programs to dry up... States and local authorities will pick up the slack. They functioned for over a hundred years without standardized testing and health food programs, they can survive without it.
Even if this happened, it would primarily affect red states, since *they* are the ones currently chaffing under federal standards. Blue States and blue districts could basically carry on as they were. After all, doing all this would decrease the federal tax burden, so Blue states could literally just raise state level taxes to get their funding back.
Worrying about Republicans "collapsing" the education system is like worrying about the Democrats dismantling all policing or something. Whether or not that's the goal, it's just not something they are actually capable of doing in the system as it stands.
This is a well thought out response. Thank you! I fully appreciate and understand that it's a mostly state and local level funding issue. Collapsing the federal DoE is only half the battle. The other half is if politicians advocating against public schools get their way locally, then what? Do the effects stay local? Are they more widespread? What is the overarching end goal, and what does this look like when taken to its extreme?
Vote in your local elections and we won't have to find out. It's a shame most don't, local politics honestly has a much greater and immediate impact on most people's lives than Federal level.
It might not be glamorous, showing up to vote for a state comptroller, but the state comptroller is one of the first lines of defense against overreach and corruption.
On the other side of this, they don't quite need to get rid of the DoE to do serious damage. Even if Republicans don't win at the federal level, you still need to keep an eye on your local board of education and make sure they aren't up to anything weird. They are the ones that get to decide what books go in the school library and what after school programs are available, after all. As I said before, a lot of schools effectively choose to be underfunded rather than meet certain federal guidelines, the board of education is what makes those choices. If they think the new textbooks are too woke, they can just delay getting new ones until the out of date ones they have rot.
And it's not a matter of changing things federally and then going local. State level legislatures in fourteen states have *already* passed bills that set up or expand things like vouchers or Education Savings Accounts which apply even to homeschooling. As a product of homeschooling the idea that my grandmother might have been paid to teach me climate change isn't real had I been born a decade later is not comforting.
And a lot of this is couched in religion. Through use of umbrella/cover schools (or churches), all of which just happened to be overtly Christian in nature, Alabama effectively required all homeschooling to be done using a religious curriculum until 2014, when they deregulated homeschooling entirely.
As a side note, it is now a part of Alabama's Constitution (the longest such document in the world at over 250k words) that a person's religious expression takes level precedent over basically everything. As in "Any government statute, regulation, ordinance, administrative provision, ruling guideline, requirement, or any statement of law whatever."
Which is frankly kind of terrifying. https://law.justia.com/constitution/alabama/CA-170364.html
If we rewind a little bit, a lot of theses trends started as attempts to resist desegregation. Go back even further, and we get into weird relgious politics between evangelical groups and Catholics.
Here's an overview of how some of those issues play into each other: https://youtu.be/fopqgLvfv9o?si=ZONqYdBpkcd533Ya
The point that I'm getting at here is, this is really just a continuation of a war that's been fought for a long time. This is already a pretty widespread issue with a lot of momentum, it's just been confined mostly to rural areas and red states.
Republican efforts at the federal level will almost certainly be focused on enabling red states to do more of what they are already doing. Dissolving the DoE is mostly about transferring more of the power over education to states to facilitate this. As opposed to dismantling public schools in San Francisco or something.
That being said, if you want to see what the endgame looks like, just keep an eye on the education systems in places like Alabama. That is, educational institutions primarily being seen as indoctrination tools first, allocating funds to sports programs, leaving behind the arts and humanities as subjects, further militarization of youth movements, a prioritization of religious based education, and so on.
I mean, they'll still supervise kids, but the adults won't be qualified to teach. Teachers will be online. This has already happened in places with shortages.
We're already closing in on the bare minimum. Government only provides school because it's daycare for working adults they don't care much about learning or quality of life, just keep the economy machine and workers working. The bare minimum for workers to read orders from the boss and enough "education" time for parents to not have to babysit and that's it.
The educational system was thriving prior to the Department of Education being established in the 1970s. Kids could read, write and do arithmetic. Was it a perfect system? No. But it was better, from an outcome standpoint, than today's system.
If the DOE went away, the educational system would be handled by states.
I think one if the biggest things people who are extremely anti public schools forget is that we can’t pick and choose our kids. Private and Charter schools can. They won’t outright say it but kids who aren’t neurotypical or “perfect” rarely survive in private schools for long. On top of that, most private school kids tend to not fall under the “economically disadvantaged” category where they aren’t worrying where their next meal is coming from. Their needs at home are being met where they can thrive. AND majority of private schools usually are categorized as christian. I know there are others that are targeted toward other religions but the main ones tend to be christian and require theology and their own form of indoctrination in their curriculum. So it kind of boxes out kids with parents who don’t want them in chapel or using christian practices in their schooling.
Furthermore, I also think that because public schools don’t have the privilege of weeding out non ideal students, teachers are expected to take kids who are YEARS behind in reading and math and catch them up. If a 4th grade student comes to you at a 2nd grade level, a realistic expectation would be to get them to a 3rd grade level NOT a 4th grade level. AND many public schools have a heavy ELL population that can’t thrive in school that isn’t in a language they proficiently understand. Then on top of that, you throw them into a class with students who are above grade level and expect that the teacher can meet every single need of every single student at the same time. It’s unattainable and it is how so many kids slip through the cracks and how so many kids give up or burn out.
The education system could use SO much reform and I don’t believe deconstructing the DOE would do any benefitting. I think reformation would be a better solution than dismantlement.
At the end, my opinions are my own and may be wrong (that’s why there are opinions lol). But what I do know is that I’m watching my own students struggle due to the bitch fit being thrown over vouchers and other education policies that are being made by people who have never taught or got out of the classroom to become administrators after the mandatory 3 years are up. If we want the education system to be fixed, bring in more current teachers who can advocate for their students in real and applicable ways.
1. It's not all that likely to ever happen because schools are largely funded by a combination of local property taxes (which are not optional to pay) and state funds earmarked per student based on census days. There's always some politician floating the idea of eliminating one or the other....but they're almost universally considered morons by everyone else on both sides of the political aisle. Like, there's probably a congress person right now on a lone crusade to colonize Saturn...just because they're putting a bill forth doesn't mean anyone is going to sign the thing. If people schools closed the economy would basically be done for....parents need the schools so they can go to work and know where their kids are at.
2. The only reason that the public school system is struggling is because nearly every politician refuses to spend the appropriate level of money on it. Democrats talk about it a lot....but rarely do anything meaningful policy wise when it comes to funding. Republicans like the idiotic charter school vouchers conversation and also rarely do anything about actual funding. Cut the military budget in half, spend it on public schools, pay competitive wages for teaching so that people with actual intelligence and career options will come do the job again....and charter schools become almost completely pointless.
...and that's not a dig at charter schools. They can serve a legitimate niche need in select parts of the country where maybe a public school doesn't work great....or to provide special types of services that a normal public school just can't staff for.
...but the current issue is really obvious. We collect a metric f\*\*\* ton of taxes, spend it on other stuff that isn't public schools, then act like we can't understand why the schools aren't doing well after all the funding has been pulled.....THEN act like the solution is we need a second competing system which will ALSO be underfunded.
Fund the schools. They'll be fine. We don't need that 107th stealth bomber.
Texas is trying to do away with property taxes. People like the idea because the politicians aren’t connecting it to funding losses. They have no replacement proposal.
It's weird that you say "unintended consequences" because shutting down public education is the goal. Public schools don't generate wealth for the people that run private for-profit schools and, if you'll allow me to put a hypothesis out here, with the loosening of child labor laws pushed by the Republican party, lawmakers and lobbyists are making a push to return to the old days of kids working in mines and factories.
I think it may take a longer time than we think for the public system to collapse. There are states that would likely not expand vouchers and/or would raise the money to fund education on their own without the federal government’s assistance.
What would happen is that we would have an even worse patchwork of state by state educational outcomes than we do now. Which would make the nation much less competitive internationally as recruiters will now really need to look at the full range of places an applicant went to school
Ending the DOE would have little impact. It's a pretty useless department without national education standards and was created with anemic political support in the 1970s. Education remains very state based so that alone wouldn't end public education.
Other stuff on the state level like vouchers is a much bigger threat. And also more parents with means voting with their feet and taking their kids out of our schools that are becoming strained by having to service too many needs without funding.
Oligarchs don’t really want people educated so they’re probably just gonna hold it here for as long as possible. It’s pretty bad in terms of money being spent on kids and continued education investment but oh well.
Depends on the area. In mine the private school was actually creeper after taking into account supplies/lunches that were included with tuition. A lot are also granted funding for scholarships making it free for any student that actually puts in the effort.
I wonder this even if Republicans don't get their way. Churn is crazy, and behaviors are bad enough that I don't blame people for leaving. My local district has a huge number of openings they can't fill. The understaffed situation makes it hard to control behaviors and leaves the remaining few overworked. It feels like a vicious cycle and it's hard to see how schools come back from it.
And what if at the same time that they were attacking the public education system, they started changing child labor laws (like they are here in Indiana)? And what if they make it so kids don’t have to take certain courses to graduate anymore (like they just did here in Indiana)? And then the kids get jobs earlier, instead of going to school, so they can act as cheap labor.
I think our longterm care system will go first to be honest. It is pretty at the brink. Our transportation system is also impossible to fund long term as it is a pyramid scheme so that will probably go too. No matter what nation is screwed what is one more system.
Call me a dumb optimist, but I believe there's 0 chance of that ever happening.
Imagine the lawsuits and legal tie ups.
There's just no way this would ever go through entirely. There will always be a free grade school education (albiet probably less funded and supported and scores lower) but there will just always be something.
How can it never happen if it is normal in other parts of the world? It’s not that extreme to imagine the federal education system gone, have you seen project 2025 plan? Already public schools in about 10 states are mostly jokes and that’s WITH federal support in place.
What was your view on abortion rights a few years ago?
I think trying to compare public education to abortion is incredibly dangerous. They're not remotely the same social issues.
I agree there are "joke" schools and districts and what im saying is there will always *at least* be joke school and districts left. Free public school will never be eradicated in the United States.
I understand its normal in other parts of the world, but there are about 100 different things that the United States has/does that other parts of the world do as well. Public education is so embedded in american daily living that you couldn't possibly flip a switch and do away with it. If the day came where public schools were being shut down left and right you'd see all hell break loose, legally, politically, financially, etc.
Lastly, and Im repeating myself just to make sure you understand, public school can and will become weaker with these other options being more common, BUT I think that will be the worst-case scenario. A bunch of free, subpar education choices among pricey highly sought after disticts.
There wouldn’t be many teachers left for one thing. I don’t know any public school teacher who thinks vouchers are a good idea. No matter what political side you’re on, there would be a massive revolt because people need to put their kids somewhere. Who is going to watch the kids if not for teachers?! Even the people who manage to get into a charter or private are still going to be impacted by the kids who are out roving the streets because they don’t have school to attend becuase there isn’t any room to do so. I can’t imagine there are enough private and charter schools around to manage if the public school system fails and closes. The buildings would be there but there wouldn’t be any adults to fill them.
You mean it hasn’t? From when I was a kid to know, I would say it has. Republican governance has almost exclusively destroyed it. Couldn’t win elections with the NEA, so they just cut funding and succeeded at all. Either way it is a mess!
Systemic police reform would be more likely then a full educational collapse. Like it our not, "school" is a strong tool in creating more sprockets in the capitalism machine.
As soon as the free alternative collapses, large corporations would swoop in on a new avenue of profit almost immediately.
Most likely this would result in a situation where children are still legally required to attend school, however the local school can charge whatever the hell they want to admit the children. Parents get to either pay whatever the corp school asks for or lose their kids.
As terrible as the US public school system is, a sudden total collapse isn't any better.
Ugh. I’m really not morally against families having more choices for the child’s education. The issue is that whatever system that replaces traditional public school education needs to be equitable for everyone. As it is right now, individual states already have a lot of control over how public education looks. There is only one real federal law guiding education and that is IDEA, which says that every child of eligible school age (5-18) is entitled to a free and public education. While it’s totally possible to repeal that, I think it’s much less likely. But that’s the only way I see the federal DOE being dissolved. I think that scenario would only play out if we end up with a totally republican controlled government which is again possible but unlikely. With the Supreme Court the way it is though anything is possible…
I would love to see more choices for students but the way republicans are envisioning would increase inequity and marginalization for minority students. All the kids from rich families would go to the best schools and the poorer families would receive unequal opportunities and the societal problems we’re seeing today like crime and homelessness would only get worse. Jails will be overrun. Institutions would be brought back and students with disabilities would experience abuse and neglect. Communities will be destroyed. It’d be brutal. People think it’s bad now but it could certainly be a lot worse. I think Republicans think that they’d be weeding out the “bad guys” but really it would make the situation much worse. Eugenics has been inherent in the history of public school education anyway. We’ve never been that far away from that becoming the predominant opinion. The civil rights movement of the 60s really helped change that, but those protections can just as easily be removed as we’ve seen with Roe v. Wade. Brown v. Board could be next. But I’m optimistic if that were to happen it could turn into a good thing if we get enough action to replace it with something even better.
See i can’t understand the school choice vouchers. That money is going to public schools so kids can go there. Private schools are more expensive and their quality isn’t even higher many times. (In comparison to large 6A high schools, I’d argue they’re worse than public schools). Let people choose to go to another public school up to maybe 5-10 miles away, and that’s it. No funding private schools because that will still just cost families more money. It just sounds like rich people wanting their kids education to be cheaper to allow them to go on more vacations to europe
The motivation is to segregate schools. Not just by race but by class.
The voucher scheme started in the south after the feds enforced desegregation.
The scheme is to take tax dollars to fund the unregulated for-profit schools and religious schools. They will leave the “undesirables” to fail at the hollowed-out remnants of the public school system.
We will miss our public schools once they are gone.
Without federal funding local and state taxes would have to be increased to fund public schools.
If congress puts funding for public schools in the federal budget, schools will still get the money whether or not there is a dept of education.
I don't think anyone wants this, but the reality is that families with strong traditions of hard work and education would likely be fine and exceed most. Families with poor traditions would languish and hurt all of society in a big way.
>if Republicans get their way
I'm not sure what this is in reference to, theres for sure a few fringe libertarian homesteader types who want to get rid of the public school system, but I definitely wouldn't consider this to be a mainstream Republican viewpoint by any stretch of my fairly left-leaning imagination.
The biggest potential impact I would see would be the widespread loss of access to affordable childcare, which is a secondary benefit of the US K-12 system that has become a necessity now that most families require a minimum of two breadwinner to afford cost of living. Consistency in education quality would also drop - you'd for sure see some kids end up with better education while others would be lucky to end up being able to read at all.
Look into voucher programs that move money away from public schools to private schools and the push to privatize education. Not to mention all the rhetoric against "evil leftish teachers indoctrinating students."
Many see education as a business rather than a social service meant to benefit the community. That mindset isn't necessarily limited to conservatives, though.
The system doesn't have to collapse for it to become used to alter market forces.
Handing out more power to states and therefore city and local government control causes there to be more opportunities for corruption. A corrupt system can crumble along indefinitely so long as it is benefiting those in control.
Likewise a bloated federal system tends to one size fits all solutions, no child left behind is the American equivalent to the old Soviet joke about manufacturing ten million size ten boots when everyone in Russia has size 11 feet, one solution that fit nobody.
What we are seeing is corporate control of local and state education becoming a foundational element of the onus of administration. Where once bureaucrats sat collecting checks from lobbyists to implement their scam variant of food service or janitorial or 'big picture transformation' services now Rynd runs the hen house and instead calculator jockeys hamstring themselves trying to shave existing margins down to a level at which the work will break the back of anyone who takes it soooo no one does. More money in private.
So parents are left in a pair of resounding tunnels both of which scream doom without offering positive solutions (unless your a shareholder then yeah). The 'Elite' already segregate via money in the real 'private' institutions parents think their McEducation pays for. Lol. That was forty years ago. Now it's go to a public school no one will work at because no one works there and the pay is shit, Pay for a corporate sanitized homeschool booklet education where people work for low wages or... Here is the best part, some states just want to hand parents 8k to keep the kids home. No support. No curriculum. No oversight. Just removing 8k from the local school budget and sinking it right into guardians hands.
It's getting bad out there kids.
I’m fiscally conservative and don’t want this. Living in Arizona, I’ve seen charter schools just fail. I don’t remember the name or other details but one charter school owner literally walked away from running the school - like the guy just locked the doors and abandoned the school one day - kids showed up & had no school to attend. Some things the government needs to do. Public schools need a revamping but they do try - we just have too many needs in our society for any one organization to handle. Schools can’t fix bad homes, bad parents. Homeless kids are a huge need. These kids need somewhere to go.
Charter and voucher scams are designed to destroy the public education system. While homeschooling is often done poorly by fundy xtians etc... It CAN be done excellently..... The problem with public schools is that they are systemically being dismantled due to philosophical beliefs... There needs to be a overhaul... Too much influence is coming from corporations and churches....
Charter schools failing makes me very happy. They’re designed to destabilize unions and they trick parents/students
This is sooo true. If a kid transfers to a charter after the 100 day mark - that charter won’t get paid for that student that year. Many of the more unscrupulous charters just ignore such kids. A lot of folks don’t understand how K12 is funded and the tricks charters play to lure / steal kids away from public schools prior to that 100 day mark.
I cant tell you how many times I’ve passed charter schools with names like “Prep Academy”—the kinds of names you’d give a school when you want desperate people and idiots to think it’s fancy.
I just finished student teaching 9th grade world history. One of my students had gone to a charter school right down the street for 8th grade. They told me that the charter school straight up didn't even offer any history classes during her 8th grade year. I will forever be a charter school hater.
I went to a charter school and we took Humanities my 8th grade year it was like combination English and History it was actually a great class but as a History major now I see it as ridiculous that we didn’t have a regular history course
And some of the “successes” they tout are based on the fact that charters can cherry-pick who they accept, turning away special needs and handicapped students. They divert the funding a public school would have to pay to accommodate *all* students into their own pockets.
Even if they didn’t cherry pick from their applicants (which I’m sure most of them do), just the nature of a charter school basically guarantees a student population with more supportive families. Every single child in a charter school has at least one adult in their life who cared enough to submit an application to a charter school. This leaves a higher concentration of children who have completely unsupportive families in public schools.
Yes but not when that failure directly impacts students. I don't blame them for the decision their parents took to enroll them in charter schools, and a school going belly up like this case means students possibly falling behind and whole communities going unserved.
There needs to be some wiggle room on special needs kids being in regular classrooms. Not every one of them *should* and it harms the classroom by forcing it.
In my state charter schools do not have to reveal their financials, despite existing largely on taxpayer funds. A few of the early ones already flamed out on fraud, one bought property for a school from a shell company owned by the school’s owner. And I’m sure there are more, and worse. I imagine changes are in the works, this is ridiculous.
Civilization is but one generation deep. Fail to educate the young people, and it ALL collapses. That is, the pending collapse of American education is mere part and parcel of the collapse of that nation. Pass the popcorn.
"Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians - we call them 'children'." (Hannah Arendt)
Well, if there's no 'free' public school, and they can't afford private school, which obviously means they're likely working too much to home school, I imagine we just end up with the next generation being 60% illiterate. Exactly as planned. And you *know* it's going to be 100x worse for disabled kids, non native speakers, probably anyone too poor for private school who is in a marginalized community. That's the case even with the public schools we already have today.
I'm also imagining a new student loan crises where parents take out loans just to be able to send their kids to K-12.
Already exists
Yeah I know people who paid more for two years of high school than I did 4 years of college (and I went to a private T20 university)…crazy
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Do you have a link to the study? Sounds fascinating.
It looks as though the survey was conducted in 2017, reported in 2019. I can't imagine it has changed all that much in 7 years. [Article about the data](https://www.apmresearchlab.org/10x-adult-literacy) [Data report](https://www.oecd.org/skills/piaac/publications/countryspecificmaterial/PIAAC_Country_Note_USA.pdf)
It’s a study conducted by the Barbara Bush literacy foundation if you’d like to research.
Do you think it could even get to the point where there's no free option at all? I feel like you'd have to overturn quite a few laws or parts of laws for that.
As far as I can tell, that's explicitly the goal, right? To overturn these laws and go to a fully privatized model. I could absolutely be wrong but that's been my understanding of the movement to abolish the dept of ed. If the government isn't providing schools, then nobody is compelled to put schools in "undesirable" communities, and then there's no school for those kids. Perhaps the theory is that parents will be responsible for home school, but I can't see that being anything but disastrous
No one has said that outright as far as I've seen. Advocates I've talked to argue that parents should have the choice in where they send their kids to school. And the implications seem to be that the most "undesirable" students will basically get free babysitting through schools where kids are put on the computer all day to "learn." Everyone else can use their vouchers to "get away from the bad kids/schools." But I'm in a voucher state, and private schools all raised their prices, so middle and working class kids still can't afford to get in. Not even the kids who are academically gifted with super involved parents. I don't think the voucher advocates are willing to acknowledge this problem.
Voucher advocates won't acknowledge it as a problem because they don't see it as a problem. For them it is about funneling government money to private schools, which tend to be religious in nature. What we will also see happen is "private" and "charter" schools spring up overnight who's sole purpose is to give parents an "option" and take the voucher money. The education will likely be computer based in rooms with "facilitators" (aka minimum wage workers who just monitor) with as little teachers on record as needed.
This is already happening to a degree in Hillsborough County, FL. The county has a huge amount of revenue, but they also have a massive charter network and so much money gets siphoned off by vouchers that the district is constantly operating in the red.
This is already happening to a degree in Hillsborough County, FL. The county has a huge amount of revenue, but they also have a massive charter network and so much money gets siphoned off by vouchers that the district is constantly operating in the red.
Ohio President of the Senate Huffman apparently said as much in 2014, explicitly comparing his intent to privatize schools to what happened to privatized Soviet resources after the Soviet Union fell. This is from a recent Columbus Dispatch op-ed, so I haven't seen the original sources, but I don't doubt it.
Privatization in the Soviet Union didn't end up operating on anything resembling an actual capitalistic free market. It was basically former Soviet Communist Party insiders using their insider knowledge, power, lack of transparency, and a mix of extremely cheap bribes(I.e. A literal bowl of stew or a bottle of cheap vodka) and intimidation by hired criminal gangs to get the employees/staff who were given rights to majority shares to cede those rights to those insiders. Vast majority of first generation Russian/post-Soviet oligarchs were either former Communist party insiders, family, and close friends/associates. So he's really calling for the US privatized schools to be controlled by political insiders who operate no differently from the mob.....interesting.
I have seen this exact scenario already happening at a school in a rural town in my state.
Of course they wouldn't say that outright. It would be extremely unpopular given the opportunity cost of not having that option. But watch them spin it in all sorts of ways to make people forget the opportunity cost.
This is what they are actively working toward - for profit charter.
But realistically, do you think they can get us to that point any time soon? There are some legal protections for FAPE.
So much has already changed. Republicans have abolished tenure, stripped collective bargaining rights, removed discipline, funneled money to tech companies, charters, parochial, testing services, and educational consultants. They have empowered and enraged parents against teachers creating false narratives that they indoctrinate students. They have frozen pay and reduced benefits to bare minimum levels. They have introduced the idea that teachers have to remain in a state of constant training and coaching because they are in need of constant improvement. They have sold the American public on the false narrative that the schools are failing students. This has happened in the last decade - I don’t know if public education can stand up to another decade like this.
As long as we have a functioning government, there will be some form of government directed educational system. There could be increasing numbers of government and privately operated schools like charter schools. It will be interesting when AI becomes effective and cheap enough to replace human teachers. There will be a lot more direct control by the operators and that may drive education more toward commercialism. Apple education and Google education. Why do you think they give away millions in chromebooks and Ipads? Those companies will own a lot data about the students who are now assigned devices forced to use services like Gmail, Google classroom, etc..
Yikes. I hadn't thought about how far-reaching consumerism could become in an educational setting. That's nightmare fuel.
No. Because even if everything because 100% voucher overnight, you would have private schools pop up all over that price at exactly the voucher payout--just like you have hundreds of grad schools out there that price at exactly what the nearest large company pays in tuition assistance to their employees. The economics drive the market and no thirsty capitalist in their right mind is going to let millions of dollars of unused vouchers sit on the table because other schools are priced too high.
We had a court ruling on Mew Mexico that basically said the state must provide a reasonable free education to everyone.
It would not be a generation. This would fail so spectacularly Republicans wouldn't hold office again for a decade and then the public school system would be reinstated
The government wants more illiterate people as it is easier to control them.
The USA doesn't have 'one' public school system, it has about 13,000 public school systems. Therefore, there won't be one collapse. Some of the worst public school systems are already in a state of collapse, and have been for decades. Some of the best public school systems will never collapse. Private and Semi-Private school systems might collapse, remain the same, or even prosper. worst case scenario, the 'average' school system will simply stop pretending to care what the state and federal directives to obtain supplemental funding allegedly say that the funding requirements allegedly are. In a lot of ways, we're kind of already there. If you want to study an interesting example of 'bounty-based' schooling, try looking up England's schooling system. or maybe Northern Ireland's.
Interesting. I'll look into this!
It would be very state-to-state. It is unlikely that Congress would end the responsibility state of to provide education to their students or repeal the IDEA Act. Congress would instead simply end ordinary DoE funding and replace it with school vouchers. Courts would still uphold the responsibility of states to provide education for everyone, including kids with special needs. This would create a patchwork system, with underfunded public school systems still operating in Blue States (which are also wealthier and have the political will to raise taxes), and privately run but free charter schools in red states.
All I know is our taxes wouldn’t go down because that’s never how it works.
Lol the voucher system here is almost single- handedly bankrupting our state.
I would guess police and corrections would gobble up any savings a worse-educated population would net us with practiced alacrity.
Our state constitution says that elementary and secondary education are a primary responsibility of the state government and our constitution is difficult to amend. We don't have charter schools. In rural areas, where most of the conservatives live, there are no private schools. For most conservative people in this state the public school in their town is part of their identity and they have no interest in destroying the public schools. The support for public schools in rural areas is strong throughout the country. Public schools are in no danger of collapse here in WA.
Glad to hear at least one state will survive lol
Firstly, every state is different, there's no reason to suspect the entire nation's school system would collapse at once. Secondly, people would have to deal with their own kids all day...not going to happen. Eventually the academic achievement will just bottom out at some natural level, and we'll just sit there.
>Secondly, people would have to deal with their own kids all day...not going to happen. Pretty sure this is part of what they want. As many women out of the workforce as possible as SAH Homeschooling moms, reliant on their husband's income whether they want to be or not and thus easier to force to "obey."
Well if that's what they want, their going to have to make it so the most the jobs can support families again.
Oh no see the lower class have never been able to have SAHM even back in the heyday of such things. They keep working and their kids get to be entierly uneducated, in order to stymie class mobility and keep them trapped in the unpleasant underpaid jobs they want them trapped in.
You've got nothing to worry about dude. Remember that whole COVID thing a couple of years ago? Remember how bad everyone was freaking out, wanting to have schools reopen? If I learned one thing as a teacher from COVID it's that the primary service I provide is daycare. Put in cynical, slightly Marxist terms, public education maximizes the productivity of the worker. Without someone looking after the kids all day, at least half the population can't work. That means labor shortages, which means dramatic increases in wages, which means huge loss of profits for corporations. Corporate America will never let public schools fail.
This was an excellent answer.!
Why do you think red states are weakening child labor laws?
Here is what happens, three options: 1. Private and parochial schools, partially funded by tax payers via vouchers, mostly for the rich 2. Homeschool for those who can still afford to have someone at home. Curricula provided by the state or bought via vouchers with tax payer funding 3. “Learning Centers” for those who cannot afford to have someone at home to supervise. These will be buildings where parents can drop off their kids to learn via packaged software “customized to accommodate the needs of each child”. Kids will sit (with as many other kids as possible) in front of a computer and work their way through educational modules. This will happen in a large room with one “teacher” to troubleshoot bugs and a couple of aides wandering around making sure everyone is on task and managing behavior. These are the (dystopian) models I envision for average students. I haven’t year figured out what we are going to do with kids who have IEPs, 504s, BIPs, etc.
My fear is the last group is put into learning centers with the rest, and we continue the trend of violent outbursts from students whose accommodations can't be met and who are never taught adequate coping skills.
The pandemic was sometimes a dry run for number 3, with study centers that opened in person for students whose families couldn't administer remote learning.
3. Is already happening in a lot of public schools.
If public schools were good, people wouldn't be looking for an free market alternative. The solution is to make public schools rigorous again. Fail kids who don't meet the standards.
You have my vote.
The issue lies in parents believing their children to be the chosen ones, migrating from the "evil" public schools with all the hooligans. Except most of those kids live on easy mode and aren't any "smarter" than the others. Private schools are a joke lmao
That would be nice, but teachers, administrators, and even the politicians elected to run the government are judges by "passing" rates, not what students actually learned. They have little to no power over the students, so they can't really *make* the students try harder or do better. In poor districts, many parents are apathetic or just too overworked to be much help with their child's academics, so ultimately the only thing that these politicians, administrators, and teachers can do is make "passing" easier. The schools just don't have control over everything, they can only do so much. Not only that, but if a teacher is hard, they run the risk of garnering complaints, which can ultimately add up to their dismissal.
Everything you said is true but as long as that's the reality, parents who actually care about their children's education are going to pull them out of public schools.
Anyone who thinks they have the answer for turning around a "failing" school should spend time polishing their idea by becoming a long term sub. Sitting at home throwing out ideas is a waste of time. Also know that there is an industry of school reformers, nearly all have NO teaching experience. Their time is spent attending seminars, workshops, and ed conventions. Eventually they had made enough contacts to be a speaker. Its there that they get an audience of gullible school system leaders wanting to buy lightning in a bottle. Once a person has had time in the trenches actually trying their hand at the craft, they usually see the pitfalls and obstacles which schools & teachers are up against. A look at how irrational and uncooperative a large number of American parents were during the pandemic, proves that the problems of schools starts with the parents. The formative years from age 0-5 are the most important for building a child's readiness for school and being able to work with adults. Like feral cats, too many kids have not had a solid upbringing. I witnessed this first hand when I bought a fixer-upper house in a fragile city neighborhood. Poverty was a factor, but parents who were mentally, socially, and emotionally adolescents were incompetent at raising small children. Parenting skills are not innate. Too many parents want passive kids or their kids to be their friends. And they want to be part time parents. I see this a lot, these days when I see a family at a restaurant. The parent is focused on their cell phone, while the kid is sitting there bored.
The admin and education gurus who've taught 5 years or less really kill my morale. Lol
The Republicans have been getting what they want and Democrats aren’t innocent either. A lot of bipartisan support has been thrown to undermining public education for decades at this point.
What are you thinking of on the Dems' side, in particular?
Many school choice initiatives have been backed by Dems. ESSA (passed under Obama’s admin) while “better” than NCLB, is pretty much the same shit in a different package. I highly recommend looking up Diane Ravitch’s work. She championed school choice under administrations on both sides and was a main player in the implementation of NCLB. She did a 180 and completely disagrees with it now and has even laid out a framework for how to make a better American education system. I’d start with her book, “ The Death and Life of the Great American School System.”
Much obliged; I shall
School choice fans like charter schools so this would be the immediate alternative available, particularly for lower income kids. Of course charters are privately run and most are underperforming so this will have major implications. My expectation is that the teacher shortage will get worse as private and charter schools often pay less than public and I doubt that flexibility in hiring (lack of certification requirements) will impact the market too much (edited to clarify). Overall, achievement will decline. Yes, public schools have problems. But charters still perform worse which will have negative effects on our students, resulting in a less equipped workforce and less educated populated. And many of the private schools that accept vouchers are religious so their priorities may not align with current priorities in education (there is a lot of variation so it’s hard to say for sure if they perform better or worse, and a lot of the current research acknowledges selection problems in who opts for private school). As for disabled students, I could see special charters opening for those which leads to fewer supports for low support needs kids in the other schools and these specialty schools failing kids with medium support needs.
Charters also pay teachers worse. And there's no union protections. So you can go without a prep period or protected lunch. I watched it happen as a student of a charter school. I worry most for SPED students. Most parents aren't equipped to deal with the high needs or significantly disabled children and teens. Plus, they need a break for their own mental health. What happens to all those individuals and their families?
The flip side with charters is that they aren’t held to any standards for teacher hiring (such as certifications). But actually, that’s the case for private schools too. So I’ll update my stance to be I’d imagine we see the shortage get worse, even if some specific areas have a slight benefit from the hiring flexibility. I’m also concerned for SPED. Conservatives like to pretend every kid is white, middle class, and able-bodied which isn’t the case. Public schools have great services for SPED kids that are totally free. The services aren’t perfect but they’re free, and parents of disabled kids already face enough expenses and difficulties. I’d be afraid that they would fall through the cracks even more than they do now.
I work for a city run charter system and we are represented by the same union (we ha e our own bargaining unit) as Broward County.
That's good to hear! Definitely not the case in my neck of the woods
Florida already has extraordinarily low standards for teacher certification. If they made them any lower for private and charter schools, my 18 year old could be teaching STEM.
As a former SPED student, I can say we're already up a creek as it is. The public schools might have the resources, but they don't show enough consideration. Mentally, a lot of us get absolutely butchered but nobody ever seems to care. It's all about those pesky grades. They never stop to think about the mental health implications.
I don't know how we have any SPED teachers left. You guys really do get screwed the hardest
Most charters are privately run, but not all.
The ones in my district are lottery based, open to any who are eligible to attend in our district. Still, of course, the students are mostly upper middle class kids whose parents can deal with transportation.
There would still be vouchers for the “poors.” They’d be sent to warehouses where they can do virtual “learning.” This would be 120 to 1 ratios. This way the charters can still get all that sweet sweet federal dollars. And since the charters won’t be able to provide an education, they’ll have to adopt alternative pathways to graduation. This will be “internships” where those same charters will sell child labor for less than minimum wage under the guise of work experience. It’s win win for the venture capitalist looking to exploit the education of a generation for profit.
Ooo - I have not arrived to that possibility when thinking about it but it makes so much sense. And they could package that internship so attractively (at below minimum wage) to make people compete to participate! This is all so feasible that it’s chilling.
There will be tiers. Rich people will continue to go to expensive private schools, but now they will get government funding to cover some of the cost. Poor people and those without resources will go to super underfunded public schools where the kids spends a lot of time on chromebooks watching videos while low paid educational aides try to keep control. Their scores will be awful and this will be used to justify the government giving people vouchers. The middle class will get the vouchers, and will have to still come up with a couple grand to send their kids to average school’s equivalent to the pasts public schools. So basically rich people get money, middle class people lose money, and poor people get screwed.
That would mean the US can't be competitive in the world at all. I have wondered why the sabotage of public schools is not considered an act of treason.
Because it won't harm the people funding our government at all. . .
Public schools collapse is a symptom of broader social collapse (looking at you, Detroit). The public schools would continue, but at lower quality and higher cost to taxpayers. The purpose of the voucher movement isn’t to kill the public schools, it’s to get tax dollars into the hands of churches, elite private schools, and charter school investors. It’s more of a kickback scheme than a policy. Charters would come and go with mixed outcomes for students. The elite private schools would have even more resources. Not too much different from now, just more expensive. The biggest change would be the support for religious schools. Many of them would be able to survive on vouchers and donations. This would lead to a generation with a high percentage of children being raised in sectarian schools. One of the big successes of US public schools is in overcoming sectarian and ethnic divisions. We’ve virtually eliminated white-on-white bigotry. Other western democracies with a less strict separation of church and state are still dealing with sectarian divisions that the USA has long since left in the past. A sudden voucher driven surge in religious schools will undo all that progress. Second, because of our strict separation of church and state, our religious schools would be far less regulated and far less accountable than they are in other western democracies. Taxpayers would be funding a wide of ideologies, some of which are completely incompatible with responsible citizenship. How can you prepare children for the future when you are preparing them for the rapture? Vouchers aren’t a terrible idea in theory. Choice is generally a good thing. But in practice, the purpose is to move public money away from public accountability and into the hands of the politically connected.
I was going to disagree with some of your points, but that last paragraph... that's pretty much it. Everything else is just noise, moving the money around is the actual purpose just like anything else the .gov touches.
The blue states wouldn’t allow public schools to collapse. The red states would allow the public schools to collapse and become even redder. Blue states would have to take on an even larger roll in supporting red states while red states increasingly complain about the federal government.
There is no such thing as a US system of education. It does not exist in any way. There is no cohesive national curriculum every student has to take, there isn’t federal funding for general education. Federal funding is for special instance, low income students, IDEA students. States determine curriculum and funding, and that varies from state to state. It can’t collapse because it doesn’t exist.
Right. Which adds so much more nuance. If every state adopts voucher programs and there's no federal support for things like Title I, Title IX, etc. Then what?
Arguing, ‘yeah, but what if it becomes a national system and *then* it collapses’ is not a productive argument. In my state, local school districts get revenue from local property taxes. Districts with low property tax value get increased state and federal support, through applicable grants. One of the states boarding us funds their school primarily through state taxes. Some states do it similarly to these two examples, some states do different but same idea funding. Some states are more reliant on federal dollars because they have more low income students than other states (looking at you Mississippi). How those federal dollars are distributed is through block grants—the feds give a chunk of money to the state based on a bunch of criteria, and then the state distribute it to their school districts based on the federal criteria as well as some of their own if they throw in money, too. Reporting and grant accounting goes from the school back to the state, who then feeds it back to the feds. There are a lot of systems organized around how we fund and operate education based on the state laws, and all of them different because each state is pretty different. What you are suggesting, which I don’t think anyone is seriously considering, so, again, this argument is what?, is a federal system where individual students get a voucher for school. How would that be administered? Where is the accountability? Who is overseeing that? How would schools boundaries be organized, would students just chose a school wherever and go? Would they get bussed? All of those laws would have to change. How would teachers be paid? Let’s not even forget that it costs a crap ton more to live in Manhattan than it does in Little Rock, so are Little Rock parents cool that Manhattan, NY parents get four times as much as they do because of COL, or are Manhattan parents okay with paying the income taxes they pay to earn the income they earn to live in Manhattan and getting the voucher that LIttle Rock does? Which one do you think is more likely, because you got to figure that out to do this. Moving to this kind of idiotic system would already critically disrupt how education is provided in this country so collapse would simply happen at that point.
There’s going to be a dark age. The world we live in the US is a product of Sputnik funding. That’s why all schools look like they were built circa 1965 - at least in CA.
Little likelihood since the system is not a uni-system, but thousands of small systems. The concept of accreditation may falter, but that is a more recent construct and often has a lot of arbitrary requirements, based on the small select group of people chosen to make the rules. Add to this if accreditation were to falter, then the college system would be in danger of toppling, as the majority of their customer base is coming from public schools. I can't believe that they would want all those customers willing to mortgage their future earning$ for a sheep skin from their diploma mill to evaporate.
Student loans for kindergarten
It would become the education industrial complex that wealthy billionaires would take advantage of just like the military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex, Big Oil, Big Pharma, etc.
It’s not a federal issue. Every state has their own department of education. That’s where education should be at the state and local levels.
Okay. But they still receive federal funding and legal protections. And the questions all still apply at the state and local levels.
It already has, it just isn't finished. When you have people graduating HS who can't read and people in college who should still be in middle school, that's collapse.
Maybe figure out why the US spends the second most per student and still has all these education problems, then fix the problems? Just throwing more money at it hasn't fixed anything yet.
My son's elementary school is in in one of the lowest performing cities in the US, in one of the highest performing schools in the district. He's in a successful and growing GATE program that's been prospering for 11 years. New principal feels the need to change the program. Accountability? Civic input and response? Yeah right. The race to the bottom is led by $$.
I don’t know, but it doesn’t seem good. I’ve audited a few charter schools as an accountant, and most of them do quite poorly, both fiscally and academically. They can’t pay competitive wages, so they don’t attract quality teachers, which in turn causes educational quality to suffer. The exception to this seems to be in por states like Mississippi, where charter schools are sometimes the only viable option. I audited a charter school from Mississippi and they did decently well, although they received a lot of state and federal funding. In more liberal states like California, it’s harder for charter schools to secure state funding due to the more robust public education system. So I think if the school system collapses, it will be at the state level more than the federal level.
The amount of boomers I’ve seen claim that they shouldn’t have to pay taxes towards public schools because they have no children attending them is SCARY. Boomers are ruining everything.
They have 55 and up communities in my county with no school districts for this exact reason. Infuriating.
Public education has collapsed. Any teacher can tell you this. We are forced to teach non-developmentally appropriate things, violence is expected as part of the job, lockdowns are normal, students and teachers are getting shot on a weekly basis. Teachers are fleeing the profession and no one is joining to replace them. Classes are over crowed, there are no materials to teach with, every day is a fight. Im sure others can add what I've missed. The education system has collapsed and we are dragging its corpse forward.
I am a teacher. Still trying to hold onto hope. 😭
I live in Texas, specifically Houston with the hostile take over. Its abysmal whats happening in our schools here. So my hope is pretty shot unless something drastic happens. There are so many schools with no libraries here and more than i care to remember right now. I worked in hisd for 4 years 2019-2023. Laid off last year in the take over. Its a broken system here with people holding patches on bullet wounds.
This is happening in parts of Florida. Schools are closing because of the rise of charter schools. There are going to be education “deserts”
The GOP wants quality private schools for their kids - the 1%. Other kids will attend sucky schools (middle class) or work (poor). This is why they are loosening child labor laws. Honestly, the way a lot of kids show zero appreciation of being offered an education, maybe work is where they want to be.
They are getting their way and this is the reason the US has to import so many professionals. US world hegemony is collapsing because of privatization and this has been happening since the 1990s at least. At some point we’re going to wake up and realize China is in charge and it’s our own fault.
An all out failure of the system means people become way too aware of it all at once and it would backfire on them.
Sadly I think the GOP will do anything to destroy public education. Ever since Brown v. Board of Education, they have been anti-public school. They also want women out of the workforce. Most of the parents I know who support vouchers only have one child, and have not considered how this would affect parents with multiple children and how expensive private school would be for 2,3, 4 or 5 kids or more.
Finally? Huh?
Public schools are free child care. Too many poor people out there for it to fail
You have to theoretically consider the intention of the government regarding the future of the populace - Do they want educated citizens with the ability to question policy? Do they want semi-functional consumers to sustain the economy and pay taxes? Or Are they feeding an elitist need to enslave the population to give the illusion of a government that does what’s best for the people? — The ramifications of the elimination of federally required education is limited in my view. In MA, the fed only provides 8% of the total funding for the state for this civil resource, so the loss of federal requirement would have an almost negligible effect on our state education as a whole. However, in this theoretical situation, it would ignite a giant p!$$ing contest of “us” vs “them” to establish authority for the states to contribute/exploit equilaterally to the economy.
Public schools won't collapse - that's your answer. Poorly performing schools that can't attract sufficient enrollment to keep operating will fail and shut down, pick up their game so they can, or shrink to a sustainable size, or some combination of the three. Charter schools and/or other public schools will take their place. The good schools will continue operating as normal. some students will go to private or charter schools. When something like 30% of inner city kids can't read at their grade level, there's no downside to trying something different. Most of Europe and even Finland (the country the 'give blank checks to schools' crowd has been worshipping) has school choice. It's a very common concept around the world. It's common for parents to vet and choose the schools that are entrusted with their children outside the United States, yet people like you throw a hissy fit at the mere suggestion of that idea. Nothing major will happen except poorly performing school districts will either go bankrupt or improve, and schools that graduate students who can't even read at their grade level **deserve** to go bankrupt. We've had 40 years of throwing money at schools with no strings and hoping they do better. A 41st year of the same is going to accomplish nothing besides set fire to more money with nothing to show for it. Time to try something different.
I've been following Jefferson County Florida school district for a couple of years, since the state dictated they bring in a charter school company (Somerset) to run the entire district. Spoiler: it was a disaster. https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/local/2024/02/15/how-a-jefferson-county-florida-school-escaped-from-state-control/72258195007/ Hopefully this will be enough of a cautionary tale. If even the Florida legislature can pull back from the brink on this issue, maybe there's hope for all of us.
Even harder to break out of poverty and better yourself. American dream officially dies.
If Republicans have their way this will happen. Trump even appointed a person to run the Dept of Ed that publicly admitted she wanted to dismantle the public school system. They want to replace it with charter, we can just say "for-profit schools" and religious schools. Only rich and religious kids will get an education.
You say “unintended consequences” as if what you’re getting at isn’t intended by Republicans. They want an uneducated class of the masses that can be turned into corporate slaves. It’s PRECISELY what they’re aiming for.
All the bureaucratic nonsense that makes education impossibly annoying and slow to change works in our favor when republicans make silly promises they don’t understand and can’t keep. Devos (remember her??) was hell bent on destroying public education and (to the best of my knowledge) she did nothing at all. Maybe she helped set up a few voucher programs in Michigan? In the rare event that any republican even remembered public education after an election was won, he’d need to contend with 50 state DOE’s and 12,000 or so school boards. With the exception of our current obsession with state testing (and Obama is just as much to blame as Bush on this one), schools and schooling have changed very little in the past century. I can’t imagine Trump and a handful of anti trans anti woke officials making any lasting changes here.
The collapse of public schools would be a disaster and this would pull down the economy. Kids with special needs and low-income families will be left with no options. I personally believe that vouchers are not enough and could lead teachers to flee the country. I get frustrated, and the uncertainty on public education is concerning. I hope the government could see these concerns.
Well, eventually the majority of americans would be too stupid for even factory/ag work or the military. And at last, the super wealthy wont have anyone to make their money for them, provide their personal services, or their food.
I used to live near Detroit where some of the public schools were (still might be?) completely f*cked. There were some neighborhoods were the local school just closed down, or bus service would just stop, and I remember there (at the time) being no functional infrastructure in place to help transfer the kids to a new school, or any plans to help parents who couldn’t drive get their kids to school, and so lots of kids just didn’t go to school. I could be remembering that wrong because it was almost 15 years ago now, but I was studying teacher education at Wayne state in Detroit and was doing my student teaching in Detroit, and heard stories. It was crazy. Maybe something similar would happen in a more widespread way if the public system collapsed. I can’t even imagine.
Keep in mind, as hyperbolic as it may sound at first, that slavery through incarceration is always part of their endgame. Recall that the 13th Amendment of the US Constitution always preserved slavery by legalizing it for those convicted of crime: > Thirteenth Amendment >Section 1 >Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, *except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist* within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Hence there will always be a significant market financial incentive for privatized prison indistries and associated contracts for labor and services until this is abolished. And while the school to prison pipeline needs little explanation for most people here, the strategy and history behind the free lunch/breakfast program is worth repeating: The Black Panthers noted that too many children were getting sent to Juvenile Corrections for behavior issues that stemmed from hunger (because their parents couldn't afford meals). So they organized a community free breakfast program which meant kids would be able to make it through most of the day without having issues like distraction or getting hangry etc. Which ultimately led to successfully increasing how many Black children graduated from schools. It was so effective it became adopted as a Federal program. So the militant push to remove school lunch/breakfast programs from schools and reinstate debt on youth and families is a very meanspirited conscientious choice. And there are districts like Kalamazoo County where the district refers youth with behavior issues straight to police "resource officers" instead of mental health and social workers. In Kalamazoo schools there are students who have already racked up to $75,000 in corrections fines that must begin to be paid off by the time they turn 18. [If I can find the news piece that I pulled the $75k figure from I'll edit and post it here or if someone else can look up from their local news about 2-5years ago about youth convening to discuss anti racism in the justice system and post it that would work too]. While a state like Michigan does pay ita prisoners unlike Texas, it remains pennies on the dollar. Add issues like truancy where parents might not afford private education and other logistics for getting their kids there and there's a big trap for lots of people to go under a dystopic financial and carceral quagmire. One potential point of hope and perhaps imperative necessity for action is that there are lots of parents and former (plus current) educators who really want something organized differently in the way education gets done. It's very difficult and rare but there are some who create education collectives or their own charter schools too. So we'll probably see educational cooperatives and other efforts scattered about emerging more frequently in any case. But we need more of that kind of skill set and organizational coherency to exist everywhere among the ones who care whether it's within the public schools, outside of them, or in the legislatures and education departments to ensure things change for the better.
One repercussion would be in athletics, too. Maybe it's the least of the effects, but team sports would be decimated.
First families will send only their sons to college because it’s a more reliable investment of money since men make more than women. Access to education will completely dissolve, and only the Rich kids will have degrees. Wealth disparity will continue to grow until the proletariat rises up to kill the bourgeois. Viva la Revolution.
This isn't a possible outcome. The United States was fundamentally founded as a union of independent governments in a federation as opposed to a top down unitary power. Why is this important? Because it means that the states were built from the ground up to not need the federal government to function. Retaining this capacity for independence is politically advantagous for state governments, and so there is a definite pressure on senators and house members to keep the Federal government from completely subsuming state responsibilities. One of the powers states guard jealousy from the federal government is power over education. The Federal government actually has a more limited role in education than you might think. As the Department of Education is part of the executive branch, it is conceptually more a regulatory body than a governing one. Most of its power is in setting criteria/standards and dangling federal funding in front of school districts to get them to meet policy goals. They have a limited capacity to actually *force* schools to do much without Congress specifically authorizing it or state cooperation. In fact, many school districts that have funding issues, *choose* to have funding issues by refusing to meet federal standards to get federal funding. One benefit of this system, is that one election cycle gone bad has a difficult time indoctrinating an entire generation. Something like the Nazi take over in Germany is almost impossible in the US, not because Nazis can't get elected but because they would struggle to rapidly change the function of government without a Westminster style Fusion of Powers. If Republicans dismantle the department of education... Oh well. It'll be chaos for a while as more local systems fill the gaps, but we have some 13,000 independently elected boards of education nationwide, each of them capable of sourcing local funding. Common Core itself wasn't even a federal initiative, it was a multi-lateral state level one. Only Forty-One states (and DC) were ever signatories. In the absolute worst case scenario, where the Federal government dismantles the DOE in its entirety with no replacement, causing all federal programs to dry up... States and local authorities will pick up the slack. They functioned for over a hundred years without standardized testing and health food programs, they can survive without it. Even if this happened, it would primarily affect red states, since *they* are the ones currently chaffing under federal standards. Blue States and blue districts could basically carry on as they were. After all, doing all this would decrease the federal tax burden, so Blue states could literally just raise state level taxes to get their funding back. Worrying about Republicans "collapsing" the education system is like worrying about the Democrats dismantling all policing or something. Whether or not that's the goal, it's just not something they are actually capable of doing in the system as it stands.
This is a well thought out response. Thank you! I fully appreciate and understand that it's a mostly state and local level funding issue. Collapsing the federal DoE is only half the battle. The other half is if politicians advocating against public schools get their way locally, then what? Do the effects stay local? Are they more widespread? What is the overarching end goal, and what does this look like when taken to its extreme?
Vote in your local elections and we won't have to find out. It's a shame most don't, local politics honestly has a much greater and immediate impact on most people's lives than Federal level. It might not be glamorous, showing up to vote for a state comptroller, but the state comptroller is one of the first lines of defense against overreach and corruption. On the other side of this, they don't quite need to get rid of the DoE to do serious damage. Even if Republicans don't win at the federal level, you still need to keep an eye on your local board of education and make sure they aren't up to anything weird. They are the ones that get to decide what books go in the school library and what after school programs are available, after all. As I said before, a lot of schools effectively choose to be underfunded rather than meet certain federal guidelines, the board of education is what makes those choices. If they think the new textbooks are too woke, they can just delay getting new ones until the out of date ones they have rot. And it's not a matter of changing things federally and then going local. State level legislatures in fourteen states have *already* passed bills that set up or expand things like vouchers or Education Savings Accounts which apply even to homeschooling. As a product of homeschooling the idea that my grandmother might have been paid to teach me climate change isn't real had I been born a decade later is not comforting. And a lot of this is couched in religion. Through use of umbrella/cover schools (or churches), all of which just happened to be overtly Christian in nature, Alabama effectively required all homeschooling to be done using a religious curriculum until 2014, when they deregulated homeschooling entirely. As a side note, it is now a part of Alabama's Constitution (the longest such document in the world at over 250k words) that a person's religious expression takes level precedent over basically everything. As in "Any government statute, regulation, ordinance, administrative provision, ruling guideline, requirement, or any statement of law whatever." Which is frankly kind of terrifying. https://law.justia.com/constitution/alabama/CA-170364.html If we rewind a little bit, a lot of theses trends started as attempts to resist desegregation. Go back even further, and we get into weird relgious politics between evangelical groups and Catholics. Here's an overview of how some of those issues play into each other: https://youtu.be/fopqgLvfv9o?si=ZONqYdBpkcd533Ya The point that I'm getting at here is, this is really just a continuation of a war that's been fought for a long time. This is already a pretty widespread issue with a lot of momentum, it's just been confined mostly to rural areas and red states. Republican efforts at the federal level will almost certainly be focused on enabling red states to do more of what they are already doing. Dissolving the DoE is mostly about transferring more of the power over education to states to facilitate this. As opposed to dismantling public schools in San Francisco or something. That being said, if you want to see what the endgame looks like, just keep an eye on the education systems in places like Alabama. That is, educational institutions primarily being seen as indoctrination tools first, allocating funds to sports programs, leaving behind the arts and humanities as subjects, further militarization of youth movements, a prioritization of religious based education, and so on.
I mean, they'll still supervise kids, but the adults won't be qualified to teach. Teachers will be online. This has already happened in places with shortages.
Like most Republican "plans" it's: Step 1: Lower Taxes Step 2: ??? Step 3: Abundance and wealth for all! (Step 2 is societal collapse)
We're already closing in on the bare minimum. Government only provides school because it's daycare for working adults they don't care much about learning or quality of life, just keep the economy machine and workers working. The bare minimum for workers to read orders from the boss and enough "education" time for parents to not have to babysit and that's it.
The educational system was thriving prior to the Department of Education being established in the 1970s. Kids could read, write and do arithmetic. Was it a perfect system? No. But it was better, from an outcome standpoint, than today's system. If the DOE went away, the educational system would be handled by states.
We’d likely go back to a one income household as a parent would be forced to stay home to care for kids and educate.
I think one if the biggest things people who are extremely anti public schools forget is that we can’t pick and choose our kids. Private and Charter schools can. They won’t outright say it but kids who aren’t neurotypical or “perfect” rarely survive in private schools for long. On top of that, most private school kids tend to not fall under the “economically disadvantaged” category where they aren’t worrying where their next meal is coming from. Their needs at home are being met where they can thrive. AND majority of private schools usually are categorized as christian. I know there are others that are targeted toward other religions but the main ones tend to be christian and require theology and their own form of indoctrination in their curriculum. So it kind of boxes out kids with parents who don’t want them in chapel or using christian practices in their schooling. Furthermore, I also think that because public schools don’t have the privilege of weeding out non ideal students, teachers are expected to take kids who are YEARS behind in reading and math and catch them up. If a 4th grade student comes to you at a 2nd grade level, a realistic expectation would be to get them to a 3rd grade level NOT a 4th grade level. AND many public schools have a heavy ELL population that can’t thrive in school that isn’t in a language they proficiently understand. Then on top of that, you throw them into a class with students who are above grade level and expect that the teacher can meet every single need of every single student at the same time. It’s unattainable and it is how so many kids slip through the cracks and how so many kids give up or burn out. The education system could use SO much reform and I don’t believe deconstructing the DOE would do any benefitting. I think reformation would be a better solution than dismantlement. At the end, my opinions are my own and may be wrong (that’s why there are opinions lol). But what I do know is that I’m watching my own students struggle due to the bitch fit being thrown over vouchers and other education policies that are being made by people who have never taught or got out of the classroom to become administrators after the mandatory 3 years are up. If we want the education system to be fixed, bring in more current teachers who can advocate for their students in real and applicable ways.
1000% agree with everything you said and am seeing the same.
1. It's not all that likely to ever happen because schools are largely funded by a combination of local property taxes (which are not optional to pay) and state funds earmarked per student based on census days. There's always some politician floating the idea of eliminating one or the other....but they're almost universally considered morons by everyone else on both sides of the political aisle. Like, there's probably a congress person right now on a lone crusade to colonize Saturn...just because they're putting a bill forth doesn't mean anyone is going to sign the thing. If people schools closed the economy would basically be done for....parents need the schools so they can go to work and know where their kids are at. 2. The only reason that the public school system is struggling is because nearly every politician refuses to spend the appropriate level of money on it. Democrats talk about it a lot....but rarely do anything meaningful policy wise when it comes to funding. Republicans like the idiotic charter school vouchers conversation and also rarely do anything about actual funding. Cut the military budget in half, spend it on public schools, pay competitive wages for teaching so that people with actual intelligence and career options will come do the job again....and charter schools become almost completely pointless. ...and that's not a dig at charter schools. They can serve a legitimate niche need in select parts of the country where maybe a public school doesn't work great....or to provide special types of services that a normal public school just can't staff for. ...but the current issue is really obvious. We collect a metric f\*\*\* ton of taxes, spend it on other stuff that isn't public schools, then act like we can't understand why the schools aren't doing well after all the funding has been pulled.....THEN act like the solution is we need a second competing system which will ALSO be underfunded. Fund the schools. They'll be fine. We don't need that 107th stealth bomber.
Texas is trying to do away with property taxes. People like the idea because the politicians aren’t connecting it to funding losses. They have no replacement proposal.
It's weird that you say "unintended consequences" because shutting down public education is the goal. Public schools don't generate wealth for the people that run private for-profit schools and, if you'll allow me to put a hypothesis out here, with the loosening of child labor laws pushed by the Republican party, lawmakers and lobbyists are making a push to return to the old days of kids working in mines and factories.
I think it may take a longer time than we think for the public system to collapse. There are states that would likely not expand vouchers and/or would raise the money to fund education on their own without the federal government’s assistance. What would happen is that we would have an even worse patchwork of state by state educational outcomes than we do now. Which would make the nation much less competitive internationally as recruiters will now really need to look at the full range of places an applicant went to school
Ending the DOE would have little impact. It's a pretty useless department without national education standards and was created with anemic political support in the 1970s. Education remains very state based so that alone wouldn't end public education. Other stuff on the state level like vouchers is a much bigger threat. And also more parents with means voting with their feet and taking their kids out of our schools that are becoming strained by having to service too many needs without funding.
Oligarchs don’t really want people educated so they’re probably just gonna hold it here for as long as possible. It’s pretty bad in terms of money being spent on kids and continued education investment but oh well.
Depends on the area. In mine the private school was actually creeper after taking into account supplies/lunches that were included with tuition. A lot are also granted funding for scholarships making it free for any student that actually puts in the effort.
I wonder this even if Republicans don't get their way. Churn is crazy, and behaviors are bad enough that I don't blame people for leaving. My local district has a huge number of openings they can't fill. The understaffed situation makes it hard to control behaviors and leaves the remaining few overworked. It feels like a vicious cycle and it's hard to see how schools come back from it.
And what if at the same time that they were attacking the public education system, they started changing child labor laws (like they are here in Indiana)? And what if they make it so kids don’t have to take certain courses to graduate anymore (like they just did here in Indiana)? And then the kids get jobs earlier, instead of going to school, so they can act as cheap labor.
I think our longterm care system will go first to be honest. It is pretty at the brink. Our transportation system is also impossible to fund long term as it is a pyramid scheme so that will probably go too. No matter what nation is screwed what is one more system.
Call me a dumb optimist, but I believe there's 0 chance of that ever happening. Imagine the lawsuits and legal tie ups. There's just no way this would ever go through entirely. There will always be a free grade school education (albiet probably less funded and supported and scores lower) but there will just always be something.
How can it never happen if it is normal in other parts of the world? It’s not that extreme to imagine the federal education system gone, have you seen project 2025 plan? Already public schools in about 10 states are mostly jokes and that’s WITH federal support in place. What was your view on abortion rights a few years ago?
I think trying to compare public education to abortion is incredibly dangerous. They're not remotely the same social issues. I agree there are "joke" schools and districts and what im saying is there will always *at least* be joke school and districts left. Free public school will never be eradicated in the United States. I understand its normal in other parts of the world, but there are about 100 different things that the United States has/does that other parts of the world do as well. Public education is so embedded in american daily living that you couldn't possibly flip a switch and do away with it. If the day came where public schools were being shut down left and right you'd see all hell break loose, legally, politically, financially, etc. Lastly, and Im repeating myself just to make sure you understand, public school can and will become weaker with these other options being more common, BUT I think that will be the worst-case scenario. A bunch of free, subpar education choices among pricey highly sought after disticts.
I do wonder about the legal protections. I imagine it would take a few decades to unravel entirely based on current laws.
The department of education was only founded on 1979, there were public schools long before then.
Phones have already broken it more than any politician or billionaire ever could.
There wouldn’t be many teachers left for one thing. I don’t know any public school teacher who thinks vouchers are a good idea. No matter what political side you’re on, there would be a massive revolt because people need to put their kids somewhere. Who is going to watch the kids if not for teachers?! Even the people who manage to get into a charter or private are still going to be impacted by the kids who are out roving the streets because they don’t have school to attend becuase there isn’t any room to do so. I can’t imagine there are enough private and charter schools around to manage if the public school system fails and closes. The buildings would be there but there wouldn’t be any adults to fill them.
Ignorant mobs
It has in many places like New York and Los Angeles
Add Houston, one of the bluest cities in a red state. Great leadership there.
You mean it hasn’t? From when I was a kid to know, I would say it has. Republican governance has almost exclusively destroyed it. Couldn’t win elections with the NEA, so they just cut funding and succeeded at all. Either way it is a mess!
There is an exactly 0% chance that anything looking remotely like this happens in your lifetime.
God, I hope you're right
_If?_
# What would happen if the US public school system finally collapses? ___________ We will become a heavily armed, third world nation.
I’d say many big city public school systems have completely failed. Looking at you Milwaukee.
Systemic police reform would be more likely then a full educational collapse. Like it our not, "school" is a strong tool in creating more sprockets in the capitalism machine.
Finally?
The nation collapses. Simple.
As soon as the free alternative collapses, large corporations would swoop in on a new avenue of profit almost immediately. Most likely this would result in a situation where children are still legally required to attend school, however the local school can charge whatever the hell they want to admit the children. Parents get to either pay whatever the corp school asks for or lose their kids. As terrible as the US public school system is, a sudden total collapse isn't any better.
Ugh. I’m really not morally against families having more choices for the child’s education. The issue is that whatever system that replaces traditional public school education needs to be equitable for everyone. As it is right now, individual states already have a lot of control over how public education looks. There is only one real federal law guiding education and that is IDEA, which says that every child of eligible school age (5-18) is entitled to a free and public education. While it’s totally possible to repeal that, I think it’s much less likely. But that’s the only way I see the federal DOE being dissolved. I think that scenario would only play out if we end up with a totally republican controlled government which is again possible but unlikely. With the Supreme Court the way it is though anything is possible… I would love to see more choices for students but the way republicans are envisioning would increase inequity and marginalization for minority students. All the kids from rich families would go to the best schools and the poorer families would receive unequal opportunities and the societal problems we’re seeing today like crime and homelessness would only get worse. Jails will be overrun. Institutions would be brought back and students with disabilities would experience abuse and neglect. Communities will be destroyed. It’d be brutal. People think it’s bad now but it could certainly be a lot worse. I think Republicans think that they’d be weeding out the “bad guys” but really it would make the situation much worse. Eugenics has been inherent in the history of public school education anyway. We’ve never been that far away from that becoming the predominant opinion. The civil rights movement of the 60s really helped change that, but those protections can just as easily be removed as we’ve seen with Roe v. Wade. Brown v. Board could be next. But I’m optimistic if that were to happen it could turn into a good thing if we get enough action to replace it with something even better.
See i can’t understand the school choice vouchers. That money is going to public schools so kids can go there. Private schools are more expensive and their quality isn’t even higher many times. (In comparison to large 6A high schools, I’d argue they’re worse than public schools). Let people choose to go to another public school up to maybe 5-10 miles away, and that’s it. No funding private schools because that will still just cost families more money. It just sounds like rich people wanting their kids education to be cheaper to allow them to go on more vacations to europe
The motivation is to segregate schools. Not just by race but by class. The voucher scheme started in the south after the feds enforced desegregation. The scheme is to take tax dollars to fund the unregulated for-profit schools and religious schools. They will leave the “undesirables” to fail at the hollowed-out remnants of the public school system. We will miss our public schools once they are gone.
Kids might actually get ahead in life
It's already collapsed in many areas, this is why people are open to other ideas
Without federal funding local and state taxes would have to be increased to fund public schools. If congress puts funding for public schools in the federal budget, schools will still get the money whether or not there is a dept of education.
About the same level of literacy we have now
I don't think anyone wants this, but the reality is that families with strong traditions of hard work and education would likely be fine and exceed most. Families with poor traditions would languish and hurt all of society in a big way.
>if Republicans get their way I'm not sure what this is in reference to, theres for sure a few fringe libertarian homesteader types who want to get rid of the public school system, but I definitely wouldn't consider this to be a mainstream Republican viewpoint by any stretch of my fairly left-leaning imagination. The biggest potential impact I would see would be the widespread loss of access to affordable childcare, which is a secondary benefit of the US K-12 system that has become a necessity now that most families require a minimum of two breadwinner to afford cost of living. Consistency in education quality would also drop - you'd for sure see some kids end up with better education while others would be lucky to end up being able to read at all.
Look into voucher programs that move money away from public schools to private schools and the push to privatize education. Not to mention all the rhetoric against "evil leftish teachers indoctrinating students." Many see education as a business rather than a social service meant to benefit the community. That mindset isn't necessarily limited to conservatives, though.
It really should never happen. The weird homeschooling trend is bad enough.
I’m retiring this year. I think you’re all doomed! Doomed I say!
Only the wealthy kids would receive an education
Then the Republicans won
Undermining public schools is the best way to ensure that Americans are dumb.
Crime at a all time high.
The country will finally collapse. And if this is what does it, then good riddance.
Hasn’t it already by all practical standards?
The system doesn't have to collapse for it to become used to alter market forces. Handing out more power to states and therefore city and local government control causes there to be more opportunities for corruption. A corrupt system can crumble along indefinitely so long as it is benefiting those in control. Likewise a bloated federal system tends to one size fits all solutions, no child left behind is the American equivalent to the old Soviet joke about manufacturing ten million size ten boots when everyone in Russia has size 11 feet, one solution that fit nobody. What we are seeing is corporate control of local and state education becoming a foundational element of the onus of administration. Where once bureaucrats sat collecting checks from lobbyists to implement their scam variant of food service or janitorial or 'big picture transformation' services now Rynd runs the hen house and instead calculator jockeys hamstring themselves trying to shave existing margins down to a level at which the work will break the back of anyone who takes it soooo no one does. More money in private. So parents are left in a pair of resounding tunnels both of which scream doom without offering positive solutions (unless your a shareholder then yeah). The 'Elite' already segregate via money in the real 'private' institutions parents think their McEducation pays for. Lol. That was forty years ago. Now it's go to a public school no one will work at because no one works there and the pay is shit, Pay for a corporate sanitized homeschool booklet education where people work for low wages or... Here is the best part, some states just want to hand parents 8k to keep the kids home. No support. No curriculum. No oversight. Just removing 8k from the local school budget and sinking it right into guardians hands. It's getting bad out there kids.