Vouchers are not a solution. They just help some people avoid the problem.
As others have said, most private schools do not accept vouchers as full payment. If a private school wants $20,000 a year in tuition and the state is offering a $5000 a year voucher, it’s not helping any poor kids get into private schools - they can’t afford the $15,000 a year they’d need. Vouchers are a system that has poor people being taxed to subsidize schools they can’t afford to send their own children to.
One question I have about vouchers is, who’s going to pay the tuition of all the students whose families are already affording to send them to private schools?
No doubt billions of non-tax dollars are being spent on private schools and if vouchers are implemented, these families will be first in line and the money (or a good chunk of it) they were spending on tuition will stay in their pockets. This will create a huge budgetary hole before any current public school students are transferred to private.
Your rich guy isn’t getting screwed any more than I, as a childless guy, am getting screwed by paying taxes to support public schools. The overall benefits of a well-educated society are obvious and we as society have agreed to spread the costs. To take a slightly frivolous example, I have never once seen the US Army come by and personally defend my house. Should the government give me a voucher to defray the cost of my shotgun and shells?
One of the best features of the Milwaukee voucher system is that it provides vouchers of a value that includes federal funding but since that student is no longer on the MPS rolls they no longer get that funding. A nice little double dip to help the public school system out.
Why in God’s name does this keep coming up as a “bad” thing for private schools? The thing that I think is ridiculous is that we plot a geographic area on a map and say, “Okay, all children between the ages of X and Y will attend school Z and have exactly the same curriculum”.
Kids are different and learn at different rates. What is wrong with a school saying, “We want kids with IQs of 115 and above so that we can focus on our accelerated curriculum” The school down the road specializes in low IQ students and other schools differentiate on different things. This “all for one and one for all” approach is one of the main things killing education.
Imagine if you had a swim class that had to accept everyone from a person who sank like a stone all the way up to Mark Phelps? Why not use the role of competitive advantage and allow schools to specialize?
In fairness, I don’t think anyone is saying that private schools shouldn’t be able to select who they want as students, provided there’s no illegal discrimination at work. The question is more of how to fairly distribute resources to schools to achieve the best results.
If private schools siphon off the brightest students, and those with learning disabilities or need remedial classes are left in public schools, it does not seem fair to me to subsidize the private schools with vouchers, thereby taking resources from the public schools. I’d rather invest more resources in helping the worse-off students get up to acceptable levels of knowledge for a high school diploma, rather than invest more public dollars in bright students who are probably going to go on to a good college anyway.
It’s an issue because private schools are always comparing their performance to public schools. It’s a biased comparison if public schools have to accept all students and private schools can refuse any students who’ll bring down the school average. And it’s an issue because people are advocating giving public money via vouchers to private schools. Once they start receiving public money their policies are open to public debate.
Um not everyone with an LD is gonna drag down test scores. There are a lot of those who are " Ummm Who’s President Obama?" but a lot of us are smart.
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YES!!! Vouchers would prolly be used by those helicopter parents who produce overacheiver offspring to send wittle Smashlie to Harvard…Sorry but those kids are the entitled spoiled brats who do NOT need more ops. We need to concentrate on the percentage of kids who are being underserved!
Got to draw a line somewhere, and this here folks, is where the middle class gets screwed again.
My ass hurts, I’m really really tired of getting screwed.
I disagree totally with this. I came from the South Side of Chicago and there are just WAY too many people who were totally disadvantaged that I went to school with and they did OK.
It was the lazy punked out kids who couldn’t be bothered, that failed. Whenever the parent said “You know you can achieve,” they did. When the parent said “You can’t win,” the kids copped out.
I’ve worked in mentor programs with teens and a lot of them simply cop out. By the time they hit their teens they don’t WANT to do anything for themselves. They have 100% convinced themselves they can’t achieve anything.
Part of the problme is the PC world we live in. It’s not politically correct to critisize anyone. In the book “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” the mother Katie sees her kids getting a free Christmas tree and says, “This is bad, they think it’s good, they got that tree for nothing. But it’s bad. Now instead of trying to better themselves they will make happiness out of this misery. They don’t see they live in a fithly building, in a filthy neighborhood, surrounded by a bunch of people who ain’t much good.”
Look at the show Good Times. The Evans family were never ashamed about living in the ghetto, but the Evans never celebrated that fact. They knew while the ghetto was nothing to be ashamed of, it’s nothing to be proud of either. It’s something to be gotten OUT of.
Now there are a few people that have the deck stacked against them and won’t win.
But the question needs to be asked, if one person can do it, why not two, if two can do it, why not three and so forth.
This morning I got up at 6am and waited in line for 2 hours with a bunch of other people for a job agency. I am a college grad froman excellent school (U of Chicago) competing with people there who didn’t even graduate high school. But we are all TRYING to better ourselves even though we all know of the hundred or so people in that line, only one or two will get a job.
Too many others are taking the easy way out. Saying "my chances of getting the job are next to none, (which is right) so why should I wait in the cold.
Again there are some people who do fall through the cracks and just have the deck stacked against them and I don’t mind people failing. We all fail, but you gotta try and we need to start teaching people HOW to work things.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to outlaw private schools? I know that private schools have been used to continue actual blatant segregation in the past.
I don’t think anyon thinks there is a problem with public education in rural areas (rural schools tend to be more one size fits all), the folks who want vouchers in rural areas basically want to send thie kids to religious schools. The place where the public education system seems broken are in cities (where the population density allows for all sorts of sepcialization and special programs).
You can have diversity of curriculum in public schools just as easily as you have it in private schools. Fairfax County Virginia is consistently ranked very higly for its public school system, it has a top magnet school, a very good gifted/talented program, a very comprehensive remedial program,etc. It also has among the most educated parents in the nation. But, go head into the city (Washington, DC), and you have a basket case school district.
The parents of the public school students there have lower than average education, high unemployment, high percentage of single parent households, hig levels of poverty, etc.
Do you really think the problem is that these parents don’t have a coupon that will let them send their kids to private school?
Most voucher programs are offered only to the poor.
Most voucher programs are offered only to the poor.
Most voucher programs are offered only to the poor.
Most voucher programs are offered only to the poor.
I posted this link earlier in the thread. You can check the eligibility criteria for every program in the country yourself. Most voucher programs are offered only to the poor.
Some voucher programs offer amounts in the range of $4,000 to $8,000. Even a family too poor to make any contribution would would still gain access to some private schools with that amount of money. In other cases, the voucher could be put together with a small amount of scholarship money. The bottom line is that private schools are cheaper than public schools. In Fairfax county, public schools spend almost $13,000 per student. In DC it’s much higher. So we could provide vouchers that would open the door the many private schools and still spend less than we do for public schools. Obviously poor kids will never go to the very most expensive tier of private schools, but that doesn’t change the argument. (And the most expensive schools aren’t always the best anyway.)
That’s ridiculous. A public school education is effectively free. At least there are not direct tuition costs. There are obviously indirect costs because people pay taxes for public schools - but they pay those taxes regardless of whether or not they use the public schools. And vouchers would add additional cost - they also have to be paid for by tax money.
And, as has been pointed out already, public school costs and private school costs are not comparible. Private schools have the option of keeping their costs down by refusing to accept students who need high-cost special education programs or have other expensive needs. If private schools were required to accept all students, you’d certainly see their per-student average go up.
Then get the conservatives to stop talking about a voucher program that will offer vouchers to anyone with a child (regardless of means) and maybe there would be more support for it but the voucher program that all the conservatives envision seems to hand out vouchers to all the parents of the students at Exeter and Sidwell Friends along with everyone else (anything else would be discrimination and un-American, why do you hate America?).
Nice link, seriously.
It seems pretty clear that the cheaper schools that fall into the range you are talking about are all religious schools. They get subsidized by the collection plate, Catholic schools also have really cheap teacher.
Not enough to base a national education system around.
As far as I can tell, the average non-religious private school tuition is about $18K-$25 in Fairfax County (and that’s just tuition).
Yeah non-religious private school tuition is higher too at Georgetown Day and Sidwell Friends too.
So how many nuns do you think we have in this country? I’m sure they’d try to make it work somehow but a parish collection plate simply cannot support a school district.
According to the website the non-religious private schools seem to be about as big a gap between secular private school and religious private schools as there is between religious schools and public schools. Secular private schools cost more so using your ridiculous logic, those secular private schools must be better, it has nothing to do with the resources of the parents at these schools or anything like that.
I also notice that you seem to be moving away from a need based voucher system.
So let me ask you bluntly, are you talking about a need based voucher system or a more general voucher system because it you are not talking about a need based voucher system then why the heck do you use the fact that most voucher systems are need based to knock down other people’s arguments?
If both public schools and catholic schools were fully funded by the government, catholic schools would still be cheaper because of the self selection and the nuns.
How do the proponents of vouchers think they (the voucher) are going to solve education problems? Saying more privates school students go on to college is just stating something so obvious as to be meaningless. If private school students did less well than public I really doubt they would get much business, other than some nuts who don’t want their precious exposed to the public.
Is the belief that any and all private schools can supply a better education for less money then the government is now spending? I see a quote of $13K a year for a Fairfax county (which happens to be my county) public school student. That is the complete operating budget for Fairfax schools divided by the enrollment - so it covers all the sports stuff, busses, buildings, special ed classes - everything. Now, if someone can find a good private school in the area for $13K, let me know - Browne academy (we looked there once), in Fairfax county, costs $21,500 for K-8. Their extracurricular activities include Basketball and a music program (period) and I don’t see any special programs to help kids with autism (for example) and I don’t think they have busses, so the parents all drive their kids. Is this really the model of a good school for all the voucher proponents? Sure, its great if your kid is smart and you have lots of money and free time; even better if you can convince Uncle Sugar to foot some of the bill. There is no question that parents who send their kids to private school would love to have the government pay part of the bill. The fact the these wealth few try to pass off their greed as charity for the poor says all I need to know about voucher programs.
Now, if all private schools were willing to take any and all students who come to their doors, including special needs students, and they were willing to meet the same laws and standards as public schools there may be some sort of argument. But that ain’t happening. What vouchers amount to is people saying “I want the government to give me back some money because I don’t use that service.” Well, I can think of a whole lot of services I don’t use and yet that silly government keeps spending money on them - shouldn’t I get a voucher for all the public parks I never visit? And the military budget, don’t even get me started on the slick home defense system I could afford with my share that.
The wealthy of America need suck it up and accept the fact that sometimes their dollars are going to get mixed in with the dollars of the rabble and it isn’t always practical for them to get every single dollar back out again in services ahead of everybody else.
Most Catholic school teachers these days are laity. There aren’t enough nuns (or priests, or monks) to go around anymore. In the old days it was easy to get a nun to teach for free (as her vocation); that’s one of the reasons why Catholic schools have gotten more expensive. You’re right about the self selection.
Yeah, but studies have found that getting whacked with a ruler doesn’t cure dyslexia.
Voucher programs are not just for the poor. As a matter of fact the thrust is for everybody to have the option . The voucher programs I see are for a maximum of 3,000 dollars. That does not get a poor kid into an exclusive high school. Your data does not match what I read and see in Michigan.