How, exactly, do they “up their game” when they are given fewer resources, have fewer involved parents, and have a higher percentage of students with disabilities, behavioral problems, socioeconomic disadvantages, and so forth? “Up their game” is basically meaningless; what specific steps are you expecting them to take, or to be able to take?
Got a cite for that? And, you know, you can means test for vouchers.
You’re assuming no poor students have good grades. You should, instead, assume that some poor students have very good grades but all poor students don’t have the tuition to attend private schools. That’s what it means to be “poor”. Vouchers allow more poor students to attend private schools than the present system. Are you fighting the good because it isn’t perfect?
Let’s get down to the basic question.
WHY BOTHER TO HAVE PUBLIC SCHOOLS AT ALL?
Why don’t we just skip this vouchers bullshit, eliminate the middleman, cut out the education bureaucracy, end public education and let the marketplace fight it out?
In the world of the free marketplace, entrepreneurial education enterprises (let’s call them EEE, for short) will spring up everywhere, right? And we won’t have to worry about quality, because they’ll all be in competition, right? Parents, freed from the burden of forced taxation, will be able to spend their hard-earned money on the very best EEE they can find for their kids.
Think of the boom in business when50 million children become educational free agents. And both local communities and the EEEs will benefit when nearly 99,000 public school properties can be reused as schools or repurposed into taxable uses.
Of course the new EEEs will attract top teaching talent, because private industry always does that. Freed from the oppression of teacher’s unions, the best teachers can bid themselves out to anyone at anytime, just like top talent everywhere else.
To quote the OP, “What is wrong with this idea?”
Bolding mine. You seem to have a bug about teacher qualifications. Perhaps you could clarify what you think makes a teacher qualified or not, and show us how that correlates to student outcomes.
I respectfully submit that every one of these posts has completely missed the mark. The OP and others are supposing that the point of vouchers is to improve public education. Some have supposed that vouchers is a back-door way of inserting religion into public ed.
Both are wrong.
The point of vouchers is much simpler.
The point of vouchers is to siphon public money into private coffers.
That’s it. No grand plans. No reforms. No religion. Just plain, simple, ordinary greed.
Vouchers take public dollars and give them to unaccountable private school operators. Some of them will be religious schools and they will benefit from being able to use those public dollars to further their faith’s goals. However, you can be sure that commercial operators will appear from nowhere, just like roofers after a hailstorm.
The OP is flawed in that he/she believes that the purpose of education vouchers is to improve public education. That is not their purpose, nor has it ever been their purpose.
[By the way, I belong to the National Education Association, the largest teacher’s union. A couple of posts criticizing the person who posted about busting unions drew moderator rebukes, but the person who posted such an offensive comment drew no such rebuke. Not cool.]
…because they didn’t build facilities and hire staff for 30,000 students, only to suddenly have their enrollment fall by two-thirds. In those cases where that did happen (areas that suffer sudden and extreme, localized economic downturns, perhaps), yeah, they’d be in a world of shit.
Come up with situations that actually match what’s being talked about next time, ok?
There’s a powerful benefit to taking a “we’re all in this together” approach, with roads or schools: it keeps rich folks from bailing, leaving things worse off for poor folks.
With vouchers, this manifests differently, for one excellent reason: the folks making the decisions about which school a kid attends are not the primary (or IMO even secondary) beneficiary of the decision. The parent decides, the child–and society at large–benefit.
I had an overnight field trip I was organizing for my students once. Every kid got their permission slip back, but one. I sent home additional copies, I put reminders in her binder, I called home, I texted. Two days before the field trip, a parent agreed to come in to sign it, but never showed up. The day before, I offered to drive the form to her house, but her parents declined; I stayed late so I could meet the parent who’d texted me saying they’d come in, but they never did. They said they’d come in the morning of the trip. Which, of course, they didn’t. The girl didn’t get to go.
This kid? She ain’t gonna benefit from vouchers. The folks who’d need to be involved enough to get vouchers working for her won’t do it.
I maintain that we must have a baseline educational system that meets her needs and that doesn’t rely on her parents to step up. With vouchers, the devil’s in the details, but the proposals I’ve seen endanger the baseline educational system such that kids like her will suffer more. That’s unacceptable.
Except your taxes just paid for somebody else’s kid to go to private school.
If people’s tax dollars are funding education it should at least be used at a school their kids can go to.
The reason for the existence of most private schools, AND the reason why many public schools have problems, AND the reasons why most of the people doing so have pushed for voucher systems, are all the same, and most of them are extremely bad.
I’ve skimmed over most replies so far, for and against, and I’ll hit a few points based on those:
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No one pays even REMOTELY as much in taxes, as the cost of private schools. Anyone who imagines they are paying “thousands” in school taxes every year, are either so insanely rich that they have no need of vouchers, or they have never once bothered to look a what the taxes they do pay, are spent on.
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There are two main reasons why private schools get going: to make money for investors, or to promote a specific ideology. Profit motive is not directly conducive to a good education, despite claims that it is. After all, unless a school offers complete refunds, should the student have trouble later in life, the profits the school makes wont be dependent on how good a job they do, so basic capitalism wont exert its best influence. There’s nothing magic about profits: they have NEVER been known to “cause” high quality.
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The above brings up the problem with WHY too many people have pushed for a voucher system lately: politics and political bias. Republicans in particular have not suddenly decided to push for school vouchers in order to improve the QUALITY of education, they’ve done it in order to take advantage of the fact that many private schools are owned and operated by pro-Republican owners, who they think will encourage an anti-Democrat, anti-liberal education. Many others want a religion based education for their children, and want vouchers in order to have the State (i.e. their neighbors) pay for that RELIGIOUS education.
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The two main reasons for the creation of a public school system to begin with, did NOT include concerns about sharing COSTS. There were two very practical considerations, and both still apply today. They were and are
a) to create a ready supply of suitably educated workers for the nation, so that private industry would not have to be held back by having to teach all of their employees basics of reading and math and so on before beginning to derive useful work from them;
b) to knit the nation together as a unified people, with a united understanding of America’s history and beliefs.
Private schooling defeats BOTH of those primary concerns, because they are NOT unified, and because they are not available to everyone equally, due to high cost, and location.
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using vouchers that are truly useful to “repair” bad public school systems has never been tried anywhere. That is, in order to be truly useful, everything required for the prospective student to attend the private school would have to be paid for by the state, including books and supplies, transportation to and from, insurance, the education itself, and so on. Vouchers that thorough would strip the state of money to the degree that all other services would have to end, or taxes would have to rise intolerably.
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In order for a voucher system to be anything other than a bonus checks being paid to the upper classes, it would have to insure that ANY citizen of the state could enroll in ANY school they chose. That would require in addition to the high cost, that all of the once Private schools would have to adhere to all of the strictures that the public ones are shackled by, and the ONLY reason to have them available at all would be defeated.
Bottom line, there is NOTHING MAGIC ABOUT PRIVATE SCHOOLING. Anything that they are doing right, can be done in Public schools, if people have the will to arrange it to be so, except for the negative things (such as religious indoctrination).Educations don’t scale down linearly. If you want to teach students math, you need to hire a math teacher. You can’t decide to only hire three quarters of a math teacher because your budget got reduced by twenty-five percent. You either pay your teachers twenty five percent less (and how do you think that will affect the quality of the teachers you’re hiring?) and you call your math teacher, your science teacher, your history teacher, and your English teacher into your office and have them pull straws. The one that gets the short straw is laid off and starting tomorrow your students don’t get taught that subject.
And there are other fixed costs involved in operating a school. It costs the same amount to heat a school and clean the floors and plow the parking lot regardless of whether there’s seven hundred students in it or eight hundred.
You can’t just plug in a formula and say ten percent less students equals ten percent lower budget and the quality per student remains the same.
That’s nice. But the transportation costs of busing all those students to Fantasy Island would really eat up the budget.
In the real world, no employer has ever seen the dissolution of a union as an opportunity to raise wages.
If public schools are bad because they’re supported by taxpayer money, how will giving taxpayer money to private schools improve things? Won’t it simply spread the problem further?
Several of us have noted that vouchers don’t necessarily cover all of the costs, and I haven’t seen you respond to this point.
For example, as I mentioned above, a private school is not generally required to participate in the free/reduced-price meal program; in my local district, a child who qualifies for free breakfast and lunch saves about $4/day, or around $700 over the course of a school year. That’s a non-negligible amount for a family on the lower rungs of the ladder. How does means-testing for a voucher help the kid whose family can’t afford that?
Sure, you can work around that problem by demanding that the schools accepting vouchers must participate in that program; you can make all sorts of similar demands for each of the various other programs and costs (e.g., if the private school accepts students from XYZ neighborhood, it must also provide transportation from that neighborhood, as convenient as and costing no more than transportation to the neighborhood public school; if the private school requires or encourages participation in extracurricular activities that have costs, the school will provide means-tested scholarships for those costs, etc., etc.) What kind of bureaucracy are you going to implement to develop and oversee all of these regulations, investigate failures to comply, etc., and how much will it cost?
Why would you think that?
Vouchers are about giving people a choice. Some people will make poor choices, and others will make good choices. Forced spending into public education eliminates that choice. If we must fund education, we should do so in a way that preserves the most choice in how that funding is used. I want my kids to have the best opportunities possible, and I think I am better at making those choices than the government. The opposition believes that the government is better at making that choice. That’s the divide.
I have worked in charter schools in an underserved area. In my experience, our charter high school received around 75% of the ADA funding that a district school would receive. We were a public non-profit and accepted any one. We did have the benefit of taking over an existing school campus so facilities were already in place. That also meant that we took the same population of students that previously attended. I started in year 1 of the operation and we offered all of the same services and extra curriculars that were previously offered, and added many more. The biggest thing we did was eliminate 100% of the teachers that previously worked there, and gave them an opportunity to interview for the newly opened positions. We paid better than they previously got, including doubling their retirement contributions through CAL STRS and through a fully vested 401(k) matching. Out of something like 80 previous teachers, we retained less than 10. That type of change just isn’t possible at a government school.
Off the top of my head, the population of seniors who met the minimum requirements for state college was about 14%. After our first year it rose above 70%. We had a minority population greater than 80% and over 70% were eligible for free and reduced lunch. This was in a poor underserved area and I remember seeing both prostitutes right outside of school and handmade signs from the neighbors that said “no hooking”. It wasn’t in the top 10% of schools nationwide for sure, but the charter that we installed was head and shoulders better than what was there before.
Results can be good or bad depending on execution. Vouchers give people a choice who may not otherwise have had one.
Cost of education may not scale linearly, but districts deal with changing populations on a regular basis. They match staff with enrollment with funding levels. This is not a new or unsolvable problem. Adjustment may be difficult, but it’s no real barrier.
So now you have a school that has 87% of it’s previous students and 87% of its previous funding. But it won’t have 87% of the previous expenses because you can’t hire 87% of a first grade teacher and 87% of a third grade teacher or even 100% of a first grade teacher and 72% of a third grade teacher. The whole building has to be heated and the whole roof needs to be repaired. There probably won’t be any space to rent to a private school because the distribution of the kids who leave may not even free up a single classroom - and even if three rooms are freed up, what private school is going to operate with only 3 classes? But even after all of that, there’s a bigger question -where does the money come from to pay for the vouchers for the 150 kids who were always in private school? Because it is not going to be politically possible to offer vouchers only for kids who leave public schools for private schools - a plan like that would lose the support of the parents who currently send their kids to private schools.
No, we should do so in a way that provides the best outcomes.
The thing is, a lot of morons think that too. And they’re wrong, and because they’re too stupid to know how stupid they are, their kids are the ones who get screwed over. That’s not an acceptable outcome.
Parental choice usually leads to overall worse outcomes for the kids. And it’s the kids that matter, not the parents’ egos.
What an incredibly weak “argument.” Changing enrollment a couple of percentage points year-to-year is not at all the same as losing 10%, or 20%, or more funding all of a sudden. The two aren’t comparable at all.
One “choice” I saw in one place was for teachers to lose their job if they did not take the hit of working for less hours when becoming a 4 day school. (I worked part time on the office, so I was not affected by the changes, in any case I worked in another school too)
So, I can say also that yes, it depends on execution, IMHO having more choices is good when some students with different personalities can do better in less populated schools. But in general the data does not give a significant advantage to the charter schools.
It would be the kind of bureaucracy we already have. As you probably know, what you’re discussing is virtually a second department of education dedicated to private schools which would operate alongside the existing one that’s dedicated to public schools.
Exactly. We’d have TWO fair-sized bureaucracies each trying to solve what are basically the same problems. That’s not competition; it’s just duplication of effort.
Not quite, because the private schools could teach jesus, which public and charter schools are not allowed to do. They could teach anything, as long as the students are able to mark a lot of the correct boxes on those test things.