I would need to know which other developed countries you’re talking about. Some developed countries have moved towards more government and regulation in recent years. Others have moved towards less. Heritage’s Index of Economic Freedom site provides a tool to look at how economic freedom rankings have changed over the years, though unfortunately data goes back only to 1995. If we compare, for instance, USA vs. Canada, we see that the USA’s economic freedom has been sliding downward while Canada’s has moved upwards. Other countries that are often cited as examples of good big government have also moved upwards, including Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland.
Man, I endorse this post. Seriously, now how?
Stopping parents from having kids out of wedlock? You can’t do much to create a better home environment for the kids but I’d be interested in your take.
Then you also need to specify exactly which time period you mean by “recent years”, and justify why you think the Economic Freedom Index (which includes a wide variety of factors including lack of governmental corruption) is a valid proxy for “government spending” tout court.
I don’t know how, to be honest. We need to figure that out, though. Complaining about the quality of public schools is like blaming hospitals for the AIDS epidemic. Schools are often put in the position of treating the problems generated in other areas of our society (and to be clear, the problems I’m talking about are the stress and emotional/mental disabilities resulting from that stress, not the kids with the stress). That’s fine, we’re kind of on the front lines for treating those problems. But we need to quit pretending that we’re the cause of the problems, and we need to recognize that a true solution is going to happen outside of the school. You solve the AIDS epidemic by encouraging safe sex, and you solve the education crisis by encouraging effective parenting.
Obviously we work with the situation we have, so we teachers will continue to do everything we can to help kids in intolerable situations learn and thrive. But if we as a society are serious, we need to own up to the intolerable situations that our society tolerates, and figure out a way to end them.
A nitpick, but Charter schools are generally required to accept all eligible students. If too many kids apply, they hold a lottery. Your last sentence is correct and is a key reason for Charter school’s success: They self select for parents who have the desire and ability to fill out an application.
This is true in law, but not always in deed. A charter school does not need to provide free and reduced lunch. It does not need to provide transportation. It does not need to provide IDEA-compliant services (I believe). A kid living in poverty may not be able to attend a school if she cannot get transportation, and she may need that free midday meal for basic nutritional purposes. She may need exceptional children classes.
If a poor malnourished kid with an IEP is technically accepted at a charter school that doesn’t provide lunch, transportation, or EC services, how much is that acceptance really worth?
Oh, please; why should anyone trust anything that comes from a bunch of right wing liars like the Heritage Foundation? Somehow I doubt that their idea of what “economic freedom” means benefits anyone but the wealthy and the ruthless.
I didn’t claim that government never benefits the poor in any case. The title of the thread asks for evidence that government action considered in its totality is good for the poor. Obviously there are some government programs that benefit the poor, but if they are dwarfed by programs that benefit the rich and the middle class, then that destroys the main argument for government intervention that I hear around this board and elsewhere. Every day someone posts explaining that the people who want to cut government must hate the poor. If government vacuums up taxes, fees, and more from all income levels and benefits primarily the upper income tiers, then what’s the logic behind that?
In the USA, there’s a right to K-12 education; the question is whether it’s better for the government to provide it to people by forcing poor children to show up at a particular school that’s entirely controlled by the government, or by offering poor families a voucher that lets them choose where to send their kids to school. That’s an entirely different situation from the subsides which conservatives (and liberals) oppose. Those subsidies often encourage people to do stupid things.
Take the example of the National Flood Insurance Program. If it didn’t exist, Mr. Rich Bastard might think twice about building an expensive vacation home on the shores of a river where flooding was common, or a beach house that was vulnerable to hurricanes. But since the program exists, Rich gets subsidized insurance and if his house is destroyed, he gets it rebuilt without paying a penny. Undoubtedly this has motivated many people to build in places where it normally wouldn’t make financial sense. It’s another example of government benefits going mainly to those in the upper income tiers.
Again; the poor are neither overwhelmingly illiterate, nor are they starving to death on a regular basis. Those are things that millennia of non-government people and organizations failed to achieve. That alone demonstrates that the government is better than private groups at helping the poor.
Nonsense. Just because the poor don’t get their fair share, doesn’t mean that them getting nothing would be better.
The fact that they nearly always demonstrate disdain or outright hatred towards the poor makes the conclusion inevitable.
Under your voucher plan, what’s preventing every parent of every child from sending thier special snowflake to the best school? How does that work?
The entire point is that poor parents will be able to send their children to the best schools. That’s what distinguishes voucher systems from the system that rules in most American cities, where poor children are mostly trapped in lousy schools.
Point taken. Most of the charter schools I’ve been associated with do provide these things but I’m sure there are many that don’t. I don’t know what the laws regarding these things are in every jurisdiction.
I would be OK with a voucher system as long as the schools had to accept the voucher as full payment and the school were subject to the regulatory oversight.
BUT…
When people say voucher instead of charter school, they are referring to a voucher that Barack Obama can use to pay part of his tuition bill for his girls at Sidwell Friends. Or a fundamentlist religious school/madrassa. Or homeschooling costs (like private french tutors).
I know in Lake Woebegon all the children are above average. Where do you live, that all the schools are above average?
What I seem to be hearing is the idea that as long as the government provides some sort of coverage, that’s better for the poor than providing nothing at all. I agree. Outside of the Ayn Rand Institute, there’s no one seriously arguing that the government should do nothing for the health care needs of the poor. Right now, the government gives the poor Medicaid, and Medicaid coverage is really lousy. Yet I can’t recall hearing anyone putting a high priority on either improving Medicaid or replacing it with something better. The logic of big government seems to be that as long as we’re doing something for the poor, it doesn’t matter much what we’re doing. The same thinking seems to prevail in education. We have schools for the poor, they’re better than not having schools for the poor, so it’s okay to leave millions of poor kids trapped in schools that the government itself classifies as failing.
Wait…what? I think I’m not just speaking for myself when I say I have no clue what your thesis here is.
Is your thesis that the poor are not helped as much by government as the middle class? Or is your thesis that the government does more harm to the poor than good? Or is your thesis that, notwithstanding what good the government now does, it could do more?
Where on earth are you hearing that? Nobody but nobody is saying that. Are you hearing people saying that your voucher solution is a crappy non-solution, and thinking that if we don’t like your solution, we must love the status quo?
Medicaid is a kind of voucher system for healthcare for the poor - who of course go to private doctors. How is Medicaid lousy? Is it because it doesn’t cover enough people? Is it because it does not pay doctors adequately? Both of these things will take more money to rectify. Do you really doubt that in a voucher system for schools, even if it started with enough money, budget pressures would cut voucher amounts. And how do you propose preventing schools from charging money?
And you didn’t answer the question about controlling access to the schools. It will have to be rationed. I believe charter schools - which let kids get out of bad schools - have lottery systems.
In any case school quality is strongly dependent on parental concern and involvement. And income. In our district the best predictor of elementary school test scores is participation in the free lunch program. None of this gets fixed by voucher systems.
Cite? And to prevent someone building on a riverbank (and plenty of non-rich people do) how many ordinary people will get wiped out, people who live a bit inland. The parts of New Orleans that flooded the worst were not the richest parts, to put it mildly. I don’t think the French Quarter and the Garden District got affected much at all.