So stop trying to pay the same amount for every student and instead explicitly allocate more money to students who are legally required to be provided with more services. If you're paying for it either way you might as well have an accurate line item in the budget and mitigate the perverse incentive.
That would be my preferred option, too, especially if it allowed for things outside of school hours or locations more effectively, but it’d be a big change legally. School lunch is similar: arguably food insecurity should be dealt with separately but that’s a political minefield and so we have schools sending kids home with care packages over holidays because doing it directly is too hard to get through.
Then why would the charter schools avoid those students? They'd get more money. This would only not be the case if the funding isn't an accurate accounting of the costs.
You also gave them a graduation rate mandate, that’s why.
A school with half the funding full of healthy children of white collar professionals in the ‘burbs will graduate more kids than a school with full funding teaching kids who speak broken English, whose parents move them around a lot between schools because they’re not housing-secure, who don’t always eat breakfast or dinner, and who are on an IEP for a learning disorder.
By far the easiest way to hit a graduation rate target is to try to take as few hard-to-teach kids as possible. The funding to make up the difference in difficulty is… I dunno, astronomical. Maybe pay for their family’s entire living expenses or something.
> You also gave them a graduation rate mandate, that’s why.
If some people take longer to learn things than others, you pretty much have two options. Either you teach them slower, and then accept that they're not going to graduate on time and those students aren't going to get a high school diploma until age 21. Or you teach them less, and relax the graduation requirement so they can graduate on time. Both of these are unpleasant, but you have to pick one or you get the default option where they flunk out and never graduate.
At least in the US there is the concept of classes as denoted: AP, honors, standard. If I child can’t pass the standard class threshold, then fine, fail them.
I imagine most of us remember being in high school and there was always that kid in _every_ class that gave the teacher a hard time, caused distractions, etc.
There are, imho, two ways to handle that. Either drop the hammer on the kid, or do a home a visit. Or perhaps, both.
If the home visit shows the kid is just a jerk, keep dropping the hammer. If the kid has a shit home life, I imagine that 38k/yr could be spent in much better ways.
> If I child can’t pass the standard class threshold, then fine, fail them.
Now suppose the child has a medical condition and they have to spend half their time in the hospital getting treatment. Or they have a mental health condition and the meds only work until they build up a tolerance and then they have to switch medications and spend three months in a stupor trying to find another one that works.
They can pass the standard classes if you give them twice as long, but then they're learning one semester's worth of material every two semesters. What do you want to do with them?
> The funding to make up the difference in difficulty is… I dunno, astronomical. Maybe pay for their family’s entire living expenses or something.
Yeah, these days I lean towards housing as the root of a lot of these problems but that feels kind of that that “now draw the rest of the owl” joke. There’s so much pent up demand for affordable housing and each density improvement takes long enough that the kids affected today will probably be adults by the time we see improvements.
