I’m tired of rural gop politicians killing school choice bills in state after state

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My understanding is that rural gop politicians oppose school choice bills because they don’t want inner city kids coming to rural areas to go to school

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Naw. They just don’t see a need to upset the apple cart for what they see as a “city problem.”

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Most of these rural schools should be shut down and combined with other schools anyways to create more opprotunities for the kids.

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But then you’d do away with a bunch of admin positions, not nearly as many kids on the basketball team and power bases shrink as they spread out.

(You are obviously right. Even in the cities.)

If they don't provide bus service, I don't have much problem with open enrollment.
In fact, I used open enrollment for our first kid because our zoned school had turned to shite in between birth and kindergarten. We did this until we moved to the other zone.

If you don't think there is reality to the fear that opening "good" schools to anyone would negatively impact the "good" school, then you should probably study school ratings in areas that had dramatic demographic shifts. It's not just bussing - it's developers slamming in high-density housing near good schools. It's political re-zoning of schools. It never has positive results.

Teachers spend more time on the slowest kids, and the kids in the middle to the top suffer. Students tend to be transient, and the flow of kids in and out is constant. Teachers and admin bail. Schools fail. Private school enrollments increase.

It's a cycle I've seen over and over. Just changing schools doesn't solve a problem if the families aren't committed to their kids' success outside of school, too. These kids STILL have to go back to their shitty families in their shitty neighborhoods with shitty friends.

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My understanding is that rural gop politicians oppose school choice bills because they don’t want inner city kids coming to rural areas to go to school

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Not sure about Louisiana, but in Texas this isn't the primary motivation. Generally the concern is more that kids in rural public schools may opt of their local schools, instead taking those dollars to either homeschool or to private schools. When you've got a smaller student population to begin with, losing students will have a significant impact on rural districts' funding.

Private schools are not required to accept every child either and will turn down those with behavioral problems or expensive special education needs. The public schools cannot turn down any child though, so they could end up as a "dumping ground" for those kids, and the schools will still have to serve all their needs with less funding. The same thing could happen in urban and suburban areas of course, it just goes back to having a smaller student population to start with so the issue isn't able to be diluted across 7,000 students like it can with 75,000 students.

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A lot of parishes don't really have much of a choice to choose from and the private ones probably cannot physically handle much expansion.

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Teachers spend more time on the slowest kids

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This isn’t the norm.

They spend more time on poorly behaved students. The average teacher abandons the lowest performing students.

I grew up in both public and private schools. I pay for my kid to go to private school for a reason. Crucify me. Idgaf.

Again I'm only familiar with school funding in Texas, which involves a convoluted formula on top of a basic allotment, so this a gross oversimplification but we'll go with the bare minimum of $6,160 per student. That amount is funded largely by local property taxes, with some state and federal dollars added in.

Using the average Texas property tax rate of 1.6% and the January 2024 median home price of $332,000, works out to an average homeowner paying $5,312 in property taxes. Again, oversimplified because I'm not going to try to figure out homestead exemptions, multifamily properties, etc.

School choice bills typically offer families a voucher of some set amount per child that a family could choose to use at a private school or for homeschooling resources. The recently proposed voucher amount in Texas was $8,000 per child. So it's already more than an average family is paying in property tax, and more than the current basic allotment per child. Not even going to get into comparisons of a homeowning family with one school-age child compared to a low income apartment family with multiple school-age children either.

In my area, that $8,000 would not cover tuition at many of our local private schools, especially the high schools. I agree this would be a great help to families who already pay for private school for their children, as they are currently "double paying" for their children's education. But for lower income families, usually living in the worst school districts, this wouldn't really move the needle if they don't have extra money to kick in to meet the tuition. Higher income families can afford to send their kids to private school with or without vouchers, so this doesn't really move the needle for them either. And I'm not necessarily opposed to a subsidy for middle class families, as they are often in the donut hole of not being "poor enough" to benefit from programs like this. I just think it's worth finding out in your state how much vouchers would actually pay and how that compares to your local private school tuition.