Seems like he’s just throwing money at the problem.

Sounds like they should pay for better teachers

Certainly some shifting of funds could be in order to help with the overall teaching shortage, but it's not entirely a money thing. Call it burnout or demoralization or whatever you want, but turnover is extremely high. These urban districts already typically pay much more money than the suburbs, and those districts are largely working fine.

That's one bit of alternative spending I 100% support for failing districts like MPS.

Give every kid a voucher for the money that would've otherwise gone to the district and let parents choose where to send them. This only works if you also empower those schools to kick problem kids out if deemed necessary by that school.

The biggest argument against this is that you may wind up giving money to charlatans who aren't actually educating kids or further concentrating the worst kids. At the end of the day I think the overall benefits outweigh those risks. It can't be worse than the status quo.

Conservatives sure don't. Or did you forget it was their party that created that war? It's only now in hindsight that they're all trying to distance themselves from it.

Just like they will from Trump, eventually.

You told me your proposal models what most households do, and I've explained with examples how that is clearly not the case. However, you have now shifted to comparing to the private sector where, I agree, "one dollar one vote" IS more representative than "one person one vote". So you were wrong in your comparison. Now the question turns to this: why do you think government - which sets rules for all people - should model after a company and not a household?

You are restricting the influence of non-rich ADULTS. Saying "but you restrict the influence of kids" doesn't explain why this is a good idea. There is a continuum as kids get older and as with most continuums the exact cutoff where we call them "adult" and they gain various right and responsibilities that comes with it is, at the margin, arbitrary. However, we've agreed as a society that 18 is the time for that, and if the answer really ought to be 15 or 21 it doesn't change the fact that your argument fails.

they already pay enough so that the teachers can ship their own kids to great private school

That's the dirty secret the public system doesn't want people to know. The tuition cost for that private school was significantly less than the annual expenditure per pupil for MPS.

Better outcomes, lower cost. But you can be certain that after the 18th or 19th time one of my kids got in a fight or told a teacher to **** off, they'd have lost their spot.

I was responding to your post questioning whether the government makes bad decisions with taxpayer money. I'm not anti-government by any measure, but it's easy to come up with examples of government spending that I oppose. For example, I sure as hell oppose every dollar that is going toward the wall.

A lot of people (more Democrats than Republicans, for sure, but some of both) opposed the Iraq war at the time. And an even higher percentage of people opposed the war, or were more opposed to the war, after the initial stages. To some extent (a large extent on the GOP side), that's revisionism, but it's also partly a product of more information being available.

We weren't privy to the depth of the depravity in real time, especially the outright lying about evidence of WMDs.

You think kids expected to get better grades lose their spot as easily as those who are expected to do badly?

and what happens to the kids who lose their spot?

Kids that get kicked out of schools are either going to change their behavior in the next one to avoid a repeat, or possibly wind up in a dumping ground with other misfits like opponents of true school choice fear will happen. In my opinion, that's still preferable to having them poison education opportunities for dozens of their peers who may otherwise succeed in a more healthy environment.

"No child left behind" is a great sentiment and sounds good on paper, but so does a $100/hr minimum wage. Real life doesn't always accommodate what sounds good on paper. Don't sacrifice everyone in an effort to save a few.

You didn't respond to this bit
As for preference. I disagree with you a fair bit but either way it's no great mark of achievement to get better results overall when you can in some way 'unselect' kids who are likely to do worse. Even whether the 'selected' do better isn't clear.

I'm not entirely sure what you're getting at.

Are you suggesting that the "bad" kids won't have an opportunity to turn their lives around because they'll be stonewalled or be on such a short leash that they're effectively set up to fail?

I don't really buy that given the modern political climate, but even if it were 100% accurate, I still think you're better off by letting as many as possible escape from their current situation.

The first order of business shouldn't be trying to save the 5 kids in a class of 38 who refuse to be educated. We should focus on giving the other 33 the opportunity to learn in a non-toxic environment. Right now, they're collateral damage because of the aforementioned 5 who create absolute chaos.

its cheaper to send a kid to a private school than the state pays to teach a kid at some ****ty public school? you really think ppl are dumb enough to believe that?

“**** you, I got mine” seems to be the answer to OP’s question.

In the case of the one we attended, if people are too stupid to understand that $7,000 is less than $13,000, then perhaps they also should've avoided MPS growing up.

Not every private school is behind ivy-coated ornate iron gates with a sprawling green campuses and equestrian sports teams.

I just looked it up and MPS budget for 2020 is $1.2 billion, and they'll have enrollment of roughly 75,500 students. That actually comes out to just shy of $16,000 per student.

Edit: Per a quick google search, the average tuition for private schools in Milwaukee is under $5000 for elementary, and about $10,000 for high school. That's in line with our experience. We moved out of the actual city limits because when our oldest hit high school, we didn't want to pay the tuition bump. Cheaper to just buy a house in Wauwatosa, where the public high schools aren't awful.

Of course it is. That is like the most self-obvious thing ever. You really think a massive unionized government bureaucracy is going to be more cost efficient than a private business?

In addition, my understanding is that (within California at least) lower end public schools actually cost more $$/student than higher end ones, although I am guessing this is more than offset by private contributions from parents.

I mean that when it comes to the decision to kicking people out, it wont just be bad/disruptive behavior that is taken into account. The more academic (and those perceived to be more academic) will get more 2nd chances.

Disagree?

No, you're probably right. "Zero tolerance" rules are stupid, and taking extenuating circumstances into account is generally how life works.

However, with such huge amounts of money at stake and 100% parental freedom as to where to send their kids to school, I think the risks and consequences aren't as dire as you're imagining.

Presently they don't usually get a chance to do things right much less turn their lives around. Zip code determines outcomes in America to a truly ridiculous degree. That some people manage to beat their home zip code is just an indication that they aren't in fact inferior to people born in 'better' zip codes.

and whats the school budget in Wauwatosa?

It was $85 million for 7255 students in 2017-2018, or about $12k per student.

The 2019-2020 budget raises that to $12,200 per student, and it seems like every single e-mail that comes in from the administration not-so-subtly hints at their lack of proper state funding. So they wish they had as much as MPS does.

Edit: I looked, and that was an exaggeration. There were only 5 e-mails complaining about lack of funding between March 15th and May 21st this year. I was supposed to contact all the legislators before the vote on May 23rd.

At least in Insos case

This is a paternal/masculine perspective. Responsibility and accountability
Actually it is very well understood and you don't even have to avoid left wing think tanks like brookings for the answers. It involves responsibility though. They are fully in control of the largest contributing factor for the perpetuation of poverty. The left likes to purposely dismiss and ignore this in favor of their feminine maternal perspective of an oppressor vs oppressed narrative and applying empathy to the oppressed. Denying their empathy as an accurate diagnosis or a realistic solution results in them attacking you
In other words, the maternal oppressor vs oppressed narrative
maternal oppressor vs oppressed narratives leading to a dismissal of any validity to a paternal perspective of responsibility
I think the posting of vox articles is a hangover from the echo chamber. There's nothing wrong with posting vox articles, they offer counter articles and touch on subjects the left cares about. That said, its leftist activism with little to no literacy in social science. the article posted even includes debunked "implicit bias" nonsense that even its creators have come out and told leftists to pump the brakes with. Post vox articles til your hearts content but its kind of weird in the way its dropped as if its authoratative or solid social science. These are opinion pieces cobbled together by activists pretending to be journalists.

vox "journalist" yesterday
https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1155845434482548736

absence of responsibility. Another maternal opressor vs oppressed narrative.
Is making people responsible for their actions the right thing to do? sometimes. Clearly you're pointing towards the empathy to those misbehaving as oppressed. Maternal

Simple conservative solutions.

Drug addiction epidemic: Just say no.
Inner-city schools: Behave yourself.

This is probably a derail, but it touches on an interesting discussion of whether humans really have agency or not, and whether our social policies/attitudes should reflect this.

Clearly, the "personal responsibility" ethos assumes humans do have agency; whereas the "structural racism" ethos is more deterministic.