The underlying but never spoken reason conservatives push for voucher programs is to get religion into schools. Private schools can talk about god or creation as much as they want whereas public schools cannot.
Now, you might say students will have a choice but chances are, in most places, they won’t.
I would agree that public money shouldn’t be spent towards religious education. Though I’d also be ok with the school financially isolating their religious section, and requiring a separate payment from the parents if they want their kid indoctrinated in that.
I mean, sort of ok. To be honest, I think religion is a self replicating mental disease and spreading it should not be legal - but obviously my view is not going to go anywhere in a democracy like ours.
In many parts of the country (i.e. rural), the public school is the only school. So how do vouchers help students there? There’s no other school to go to with the money.
As it stands now, if a family has means, they’d simply move to an area that self selects on income and send their kids to the better public schools in that area.
I’ve looked around at the local private schools - I could pay $40K/year to send the kid to private school, or I could simply move to where the public schools are better because the houses are $2M and the $40K goes to the delta in mortgage and property tax. It’s probably cheaper to move to the wealthier area because you’d only be paying for the one public school, rather than paying for both the public school that wouldn’t be used AND the private school. I think it’d be better for everyone to have a chance to go to a school of their choice, rather than just those that can afford to move.
One of the major advantages of a private school is that it can break the teacher’s union.
Isn’t there already an US-wide test applied once a year to public schools, and schools which perform low enough get their funds cut?
Also, you need a standard curriculum first, not a multiple choice test, in order to evaluate whether public schools are meeting the minimum or not.
How can it be a good choice if private schools lie about their performance, are not required to hire qualified teachers, are not required to teach the same subjects (like religious schools not teaching biology)?
How much time can each parent spend digging up information for more than one private school, in order to make a good choice?
The better way is to get a panel of experts (that is, people who know their field, not “people elected with a few hundred votes from the general population who have a special agenda”) in pedagogy and in the subjects, to devise a balanced curriculum, and pedagogic measures to help children who fall behind.
Look at Finnland, who devised a decades-long strategy of improving first their teachers, picking only the best, and revising thei school structure and conditions for teachers, resulting after some decades with very good schools and well-educated pupils.
Again, people who inform themselves know how to improve schools. It’s the will that’s lacking to apply solutions that work elsewhere.
I think your conception of the type of education available in public vs private schools is out of whack. Many school districts provide an ipad or chromebook style device for their students nowadays and it was only upon transferring to a public school that my younger brother was given the opportunity to take robotics classes because the public school had over 300 students in each year when my school was lucky to crack 15.
And our lunches came off the exact same Aramark truck that serviced the public school.
All these things you mentioned are things the property tax payers don’t want to pay for. It’s already a burden to pay property tax - just sitting in a house that has some theoretical value, you have to pay a huge chunk of money every year even if you “own it*”. Somewhere like Finland, they may fund things differently in a way that doesn’t cause the local voters to resist any increases.
So the voucher system allows parents to willingly pay for their kid to get a premium education, with the help of the tax money that would have been spent in the public system. Much more popular than raising property taxes, which all residents in an area have to pay, even ones who don’t have a kid and never will.
*you don’t own it, you are just renting from the government
Then parents can go ahead and do that. But I’d be opposed to a government program that offered to pay half the moving costs.
Of all the ideas for improving education, I’m pretty sure paying teachers less is among the worst.
Private schools cement the segregetaion along money lines. Vouchers don’t help poor people.
Because selecting only students with good grades selects against poor students, who are largely perfomring badly due to the many problems in their background.
Provided they aren’t a minority/ non-white, where moving faces invisible barriers even if the income is there.
Why is that a good thing?
And wouldn’t that only apply if private schools continue to be unregulated by the state, thus being able to hire not-qualified teachers? (And wouldn’t these teachers also want to form a union to get better wages? With private schools, there is the incentive to make money by paying lower wages.)
Because teachers aren’t people and don’t have rights.
Yes, that’s one of the broken basics of the US education system. In Finland, like most of the “socialist” European countries, people pay income tax, and that goes into the general budget, and the general budget pays for general things like schools. The idea that people living in a poor neighborhood will never be able to improve themselves because they can’t afford a good school on account of being poor (not enough books for each student), but on the other side of the track, parents who can already afford to pay private extras for their kids, the schools have a computer lab and other stuff.
(There is property tax if you are wealthy enough to own a piece of ground, but that goes to the community for general purposes, not specific for schools.
No, a parallel voucher system means that the taxpayer - including poor people - pays twice, for public schools and the vouchers - which only help rich people’s kids - while giving worse service to the poor kids.
Look, you already admit that you are okay with inequality. You have made your reasons clear. No need to give untruths.
Because 1. Just because a school is private doesn’t make it better than a public school. Religious school are really bad for biology. And in order to make a profit, private schools have hired unqualified teachers. So vouchers give the parents the possibility to send their kids to be indoctrinated with other white kids in anti-democratic authoritarianism, or to spend taxpayers money to make a profit for a handful of people running private schools.
You may feel secure that the brainwashing of American Dream has kept the population silent so far not noticing how they are being screwed, or that deflecting the anger onto minorities has worked well enough, but there’s no guarantee this will continue to work.
Then why not go the McD route and get robots?
Where’s the fun in shitting on robots? They have no feelings or dignity, which means that there’s no joy to be had in hurting their feelings or breaking their dignity.
You’re taking money from public schools, which are required to accept all students – and importantly, mentally and physically handicapped students – and giving it to private schools, which can pick and choose their students, and furthermore often teach and favor religion, thereby bringing up establishment concerns. That’s in addition to the fact that you’re mostly favoring students of wealthier parents while consigning poor children to public schools that now have even less funding and resources. If public schools are bad, we should improve them, not kick them while they’re down.
However, I’m okay with a sort of private school flex savings plan where a portion of your own income is put into a tax free account where it can be used to pay tuition or other school related expenses. Just like the healthcare FSA, though maybe with a higher cap than $2500.
I personally send my kid to a private school because the local public schools are terrible in every way. So I sympathize with the problem vouchers are trying to solve. It just seems to me it’s not a very well thought out solution.
As you can see in this thread, vouchers are a good or bad solution, depending on what problem you are trying to solve:
Problem: Public schools are in bad condition, we need to improve them so that all children are better educated and have better chances, and we have a smarter population:
vouchers are bad solution
Problem: Public schools are bad, so I want what’s best for my child (fuck everybody else) and want to pay as little as possible; I don’t want my kid to go to school and learn about sex and biology, so I’ll send them to a private school; I don’t want my kid to go to school with kids from other backgrounds (atheist, non-white), so I’ll send them to private school; I want to break the teacher’s union:
vouchers are a good solution.
I have a question.
Suppose the private schools don’t WANT your kid?
Suppose the private school wants to brag about its graduates’ 100% college acceptance rate and your kid tells the dean that he’s going to play in a band full-time and has no interest in college?
Suppose one of the reasons the school keeps its academics high is because it doesn’t do remedials, and if your kid isn’t in the top 25% in every test, they don’t want to waste their time on him?
Suppose the school thinks the best way to enforce discipline is by corporal punishment?
Suppose it’s a religious school, and they say your kid has to take a daily religion class and go to chapel once a week? And by the way, they’re expected to go through Confirmation/Bar Mitzvah/subscribe to the Schleitheim Confession/apply to go on their mission trip as a condition for graduation.
Suppose the school decides that all students should come from intact, two-parent families, or they institute a “one strike and you’re out” code where even a parking ticket is grounds for expulsion?
Suppose the 400 families with kids in the public schools decide to take their $10,000 vouchers and send their kids to private schools, and the private schools say, “Okay, we have 200 openings this year, so we’ll start the bidding at $20,000 per child”?
After all, they’re PRIVATE schools. There’s not a single thing on that list that isn’t legal and completely enforceable. In fact, it will be in the contract (with appropriate forfeiture of tuition and disqualification of your other kids if you don’t comply) that you will sign.
Then you don’t exercise the voucher and you’re no worse off than you were. Duh.
Making public schools better is a good idea. So is regulating any private ones more stringently (like requiring qualified teachers and honest advertising)
But : a. In a perfect world with excellent public schools and honest disclosures by private ones, almost no one would exercise their vouchers and it’s just an option that isn’t used.
b. In a realistic world like today’s, at least some kids getting a better shot is a better situation than it is now. It takes a student away from the public school equal to the money it takes away, so in the long term, it doesn’t hurt a public school. (it might hurt one in the short term if they opened up a campus expecting 1000 students and 200 of them leave for private, but not long term)
c. There are solutions to this problem. Private schools can just lease space from the public ones. So the public school district suffers no financial penalty towards student’s leaving - if it works the deals right for leasing of space and services, it might even come out ahead.
Actually, you are, because the public schools got a bunch of money sucked out of them to pay for vouchers you aren’t even going to use. Remember, the side most in favor of vouchers don’t think that public education should even be a thing at all. Hell, some of them are even opposed to mandatory school attendance. That makes their motives, and potential actions should they get their way, suspect at best.