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Okay, NOT intended to be a political post, I just want to hear from those well-versed in the education field. I posted on a thread in the politics forum and did not get an answer. I want to know what to expect now that Betsy DeVos was elected? Specifically, what's going to happen to areas which already have an excellent public school system? Are they going to be affected and lose a lot of funding, or will the local/ state levels compensate for it? I don't know enough about how school funding works, so I'd love to hear from someone who does. As a family with very young kids who just settled and bought a house primarily for its fantastic schools, just how concerned should we be?? I'm worried to be honest.
I sent my child to private school to avoid the public school system.
Where we are, the public schools are so good they're on par with private in terms of test scores and demographics; the only advantage they have is more individualized attention and some better extracurricular offerings and facilities. But many of the area's professional upper class families don't bother with private because the public ones are perfectly good.
I'm just afraid it's going to come under threat now that the crazy lady wants to take funding away from public schools and give it to religious charters and the like under pretense of 'vouchers'
Or am I worried for nothing and it's not going to affect a good school district in an affluent liberal state?
Well, the department of education may very well be eliminated by 2018. (Probably won't pass, but still)
So unless you live in a wealthy state that is willing to fund all their schools, there will probably be alot of schools shutting down. Maybe for profit charters will open instead.
On Tuesday afternoon, Massie introduced H.R. 899, a bill to abolish the Department of Education as a whole by Dec. 31, 2018.
“Neither Congress nor the President, through his appointees, has the constitutional authority to dictate how and what our children must learn,” Massie said in a Facebook post.
Location: We_tside PNW (Columbia Gorge) / CO / SA TX / Thailand
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Originally Posted by EvilCookie
...Specifically, what's going to happen to areas which already have an excellent public school system? .... I don't know enough about how school funding works, so I'd love to hear from someone who does. As a family with very young kids who just settled and bought a house primarily for its fantastic schools, just how concerned should we be?? I'm worried to be honest.
Need some specifics on our "already have an excellent public school system", Granted there are some (few) good points in our public school system and I would not worry about that one bit. Excellence will not suffer, but 'fluff' and 'access' (to allcomers) may get axed.
As an employer who has to hire US Public School Grads, and a 40+ yr property tax payer (~$20k / yr for all properties) with 50%+ going to public schools, and a public school volunteer and a homeschooler....
I'm all for drastic change / rebuilding the entire US Public School system, it would save me LOTS of 'training' dollars and damages to my company assets and customer base. $10k / yr in taxes is peanuts compared to funding a decent edu for your kids.
Best bet... get a job in Singapore and have your kids educated by their Public School System! (Worked great for several US friends). 10+ yrs post college, their kids are very well employed (internationally), happy , and successful.
Multi cultural, multi lingual, well schooled in basics (especially STEM), very talented in the arts (mandatory in elementary grades)
We specifically chose an excellent, safe, high end neighborhood known for its excellent schools in order to buy our home just three years ago. We're fairly happy with the school system here as it is now, particularly the fact that there's a great gifted program for our oldest son who needs it. The high schools are similarly great with lots of opportunities for students. I had no reason to be too worried about the schools until now that there's talk about basically dismantling public schools nationwide. The people in our community who work in education are worried.
It's important to remember that the entire Department of Education didn't exist until 1979, when Jimmy Carter created it (insert reason for creating it here).
If you graduated from public school in 1978 like I did, you'd be hard pressed to point out a specific deficiency in your own "pre-historic" education that the federal Dept. of Ed. fixed in the following years.
My kids have graduated high school but they are both still in college, including one at a public at one at a private college. Sorry, but I'm just not worried.
A work colleague whose husband is a fairly high level educator (they are liberals) also has a low opinion of both Arne Duncan and John King, and has said the department should be abolished, and that was before Mrs. DeVos was confirmed.
Need some specifics on our "already have an excellent public school system", Granted there are some (few) good points in our public school system and I would not worry about that one bit. Excellence will not suffer, but 'fluff' and 'access' (to allcomers) may get axed.
As an employer who has to hire US Public School Grads, and a 40+ yr property tax payer (~$20k / yr for all properties) with 50%+ going to public schools, and a public school volunteer and a homeschooler....
I'm all for drastic change / rebuilding the entire US Public School system, it would save me LOTS of 'training' dollars and damages to my company assets and customer base. $10k / yr in taxes is peanuts compared to funding a decent edu for your kids.
Best bet... get a job in Singapore and have your kids educated by their Public School System! (Worked great for several US friends). 10+ yrs post college, their kids are very well employed (internationally), happy , and successful.
Multi cultural, multi lingual, well schooled in basics (especially STEM), very talented in the arts (mandatory in elementary grades)
It’s true that we’ve got a huge gap between students in our country — one that grows with each grade level as kids advance from kindergarten into high school. But that’s not because we have an education problem in America. It’s because we have a large, and growing, child poverty problem in our country.
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Yet even students facing immense home challenges — single parents, foster care, parents working multiple jobs who are rarely home, parents who can’t speak English or who didn’t complete school themselves — are still learning and advancing in our public schools, even if they continue to trail those students who have the advantage of living with educated parents who earn a living wage, or better. Test scores in all socio-economic categories continue to rise in our country. Our public school teachers are doing their jobs. Our schools just need more teachers, and more resources to help close the gap between those children whose birth gave them a head start — like my kids — and those whose birth didn’t.
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A Stanford University study found that students at charter schools were more likely to score worse than public schools students than they were to outperform those students — 37% percent of charter schools did worse than comparable public schools, while only 17% did better. The rest, 46%, scored the same.
My kids went to our local public schools in Evanston, IL. My ds has a masters in chemical engineering from Northwestern University (his BS was from Washington University of St. Louis). My dd has a degree from Carnegie Mellon University though not in a STEM field.
My granddaughter is a freshman in high school this year. She is taking 10th grade classes (called pre-AP) and keeping up As and one B despite marching band which took up a lot of her time. She did Algebra I in 8th grade, so she is in geometry pre-AP in 9th grade. She plans to follow in her dad's footsteps with an engineering degree. Her school system has a lot of dual credit courses as well - kids take jr. college courses and can graduate high school with an associates degree.
I don't think that *fluff* is what you think it is. Should they cut art, music, theater, etc.? Those are not fluff at all, but good programs that keep the kids in school. Should they cut ESL? Then what happens to the kids who don't speak English yet (in the school I taught in in Chicago, there were a lot of kids who moved in from South American countries in high school who needed ESL as well as kids who came in in elementary school)? Should we cut special ed? What happens to the kids who need the extra help to become productive citizens?
What *fluff* should we cut? How about football or other sports? That will never happen in Texas.
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, and successful.
