Considering the weak-kneed snowball detritus that has spewed from public schools in the last 20 years, Why not? (I am being only mildly sarcastic, because the grand aim of public schools in the last 2 decades is to force students into college - whether they were suited to it or not - and to eliminate any education that would give students the tools to gain non-college jobs.) The grand aim of teachers unions, as with 80% of other unions, is to make union leaders rich while crapping on everyone else…
From the OP: “The voucher idea seems like a good one.” The operative word here is “seems.” The idea of school vouchers appeals greatly, at first glance, to me and other with libertarian ideals. The problems are perceived at fourth or fifth glance, when you start focusing on the actual effects of implementation.
Two comments. (1) In today’s kleptocracy, the “failure of the state to properly regulate” private schools receiving public money is a feature not a bug. There is a huge private school industry filled with hucksters ready to reap enormous profits. (Look no further than Trump University for an example of fraudsters running schools!) Legislators are reacting to the most generous lobbyists, not any unfeigned concern for children’s education. The “failure of the state to properly regulate” private schools receiving public money is a feature, not a bug, for the education hucksters and right-wing politicians leading the movement.
(2) You speak of “penalizing” public schools as though that were a good thing. Perhaps I’m taking your word out of context, and it can be argued that “spare the rod, spoil the school;” but a faulty mindset may be behind the suggestion that a proper goal is “punishing” rather than “improving” public schools.
There is much wrong with school vouchers. Other Dopers have already pointed this out:
I worked in local government looking after schools when vouchers were introduced over here (UK) in the 90s and they were wildly popular with both the schools and the parents.
That’s a chilling statement. How general do you intend it to be?
This is excellent (and true).
One problem with this message board is that I’ve addressed the “public school fixed cost” problem in several posts now. TLDR, it is a problem, but not so great that the voucher scheme can reasonably be dismissed. I pointed out that public school districts of variable size already exist, and therefore, since smaller districts aren’t instantly going broke, it is possible to run a smaller district.
Therefore, the problem is at the transition - if the voucher system triggered rapid shrinkage of the public system, sure, it would cause financial problems for them.
The simple and easy fix is to make the early voucher years be smaller vouchers. If the public system gets $10,000 per student per year, the year 1 voucher would be $5000. Year 2 voucher would be $6000. And so on. (or some precisely worked out cost scaling created with spreadsheets - these are example numbers)
So early on, each student that leaves actually means the school district has more money per student.
And I proposed another fix. These private schools that are forming have to go somewhere, and the simplest method is to just stick some sheetrock walls in the middle of the high school and split off several sub-campuses. They would share some common resources and there would be corresponding payments.
The whole point of the voucher system is to allow for :
a. Competing management of a school. If a public school is incorrectly managed, this creates a choice.
b. Parents who have the means to spend more on their kid than the state minimum.
As for the private school cherry picking the best kids - so? That’s already how it works now. If you want a job that pays a consistent 6 figures later in your career without risking your life, pretty much the only game in town are various high end professional positions that you need to go to college and grad school for. Colleges and grad schools cherry pick heavily. Basically every really good job in America first requires you to jump hurdles set by admissions boards.
And has already been established that a. is bullshit and b. happens already. It has also been established that:
c. choice is not necessarily a “good.” If it was, we wouldn’t have any laws at all.
d. the idea that competition leads to lower costs and higher pay for the best anything is bullshit and rife with abuse that would make a robber baron green with envy.
e. totally cuts loose the majority of the kids in the country to favor the few
f. dooms the country in the long run to less-than-Third-World status.
First they want to kick all the furriners out, then they want to cripple the domestic population to the point that they will be completely unable to do any of the new jobs that the future will bring, so they’ll have to farm them out to more furriners.
The day we embrace vouchers is the day we just roll over and die as a country.
Well that’s, like, your opinion, Man.
Of course it’s possible to run a smaller district - but until it’s enough smaller to close some schools or at least eliminate some classes, what happens is that the cost per student goes up. I’m going to give an example of a school - the private grade school I attended. It ran from first grade to eighth grade with about 800 students. There were three classes (and about 100 students) in each grade. Let’s say 100 students left the school, so there are only 700 students. And let’s say it was evenly distributed , so that 12 or 13 students left each grade.You can’t get rid of a single teacher, because no grade lost enough students to eliminate an entire class. Building maintenance costs the same, so the only savings is in consumables like paper and soap.
Even if by some miracle, all 100 students who left were in first, second, and third grade and you could therefore free up three classrooms and eliminate three teachers, what private school is going to rent three classrooms? Maybe a day care center or a pre-K might rent three classrooms, but schools don’t necessarily meet the standards for pre-K or day care centers*
And you haven’t addressed the issue of current private school students getting vouchers- NYC is probably an outlier, but something like 20% of NYC K-12 students attend private schools.** How much does the school district save once they are giving the vouchers to students who leave public schools, vouchers to the students who were never in public schools and still operating public schools for the kids who didn’t end up in private schools for whatever reason?
*My kids went to the same grade school years later. Enrollment had dropped so that they were able to add kindergarten and pre-K. But the pre-K had to be located on the third floor as there was a state requirement that pre-Ks had to have restrooms on the same floor as the classroom for their exclusive use. It was a major pain to walk up and down three floors with a 4 year old everyday, and I wouldn’t have done it if it was a pre-K that was independent of the school. I’m sure I’m not the only one and I therefore don’t know if a private pre-K or daycare would even be willing to rent such a space from a public school
**And they aren’t all rich people sending their kids to super-expensive private schools. Most of them attend religiously affiliated schools which are less expensive than the rich people sort - the school my kids and I attended currently charges about $5000/yr for one child and about $10,000/yr for four. And the tuition would surely go up if the students were eligible for vouchers.
This is not a “simple and easy” fix; this is a simplistic and ill-conceived fix.
If $10K won’t cover the entire cost of sending your kid to private school (and other posters have already noted it won’t), then $5K sure won’t. That means the only people who will be able to take advantage of the vouchers in those early years are the ones who will be able to make up the difference out of their own resources. You’re giving subsidies to the upper-middle class so you can penalize the kids whose families are lower on the ladder. The kids most likely to be in need of help get zero help.
Meanwhile, if the public schools receive $10K per student, then they receive $10K per student who is actually enrolled; there’s no “extra” money in any year. [I.e., if they have 500 students, then they receive $5,000,000; if they have 400 students enroll, they receive $4,000,000.] That means all of the fixed-cost problems still exist. You are assuming that the school district is in charge of passing out all of the money, which isn’t true everywhere. In fact, I suspect that it remains true in relatively few places. In most states, a fairly large percentage of the school budget comes from the state; in Kansas, for example, about 65% of the typical district’s budget is state money, all of it doled out based on headcount enrollment as of a particular date in mid-September. Lower enrollment = lower funding.
Your “fix” could only possibly work in places where local school district gets most of its money locally, and even there, the political problem of being seen to collect huge increases in per-pupil spending means this isn’t likely to be viable (“your spending per kid went up 20% in this one year!!! that must mean my taxes went up 20% too!!! rawr!!!”).
There is also the fact that smaller schools are generally not as good as bigger schools. So even if the transition is made smoothly, you are still left with a school that has less to offer the students.
I agree the public schools are in trouble … I spent a couple years going through our local school’s operations and could find no lack with the resources available … the problem was the public …
Very few of us who post here are old enough to remember when having a parent in the classroom was very common, sitting quietly in the back just watching … when almost every child came home after school to a waiting parent … back when every parent showed up to PTA meetings …
Back when one parent was the bread-winner and the other was a homemaker …
Now, in the OP’s case we start with parents who care more about affluence than their own children … and as we’ve seen throughout this thread … they want somebody else to fix their problems … the government … the school board … the teacher’s union … anybody but the parents because, you know, both parents have careers that take all their time …
I firmly believe that the public schools would work just fine if they didn’t have to raise the children themselves … these systems were designed when the parents did the actual raising and were a meaningful part of their children’s education … (it’s not the school’s responsibility to help the parent deal with a problem child, it’s the parents’ responsibility to help the school deal with the problem) … and that means being in the classroom with your child, sitting at the dinner table while your child does homework, being fully invested in your own child’s education …
I understand quitting your $5,000/mo job only leaves you to scrape by on the SO’s $8,500/mo … living near poverty sucks … just remember you’ve put a dollar amount on your child’s worth to you …
Go ahead a pay the private boarding school to raise your child, and pay with your own money … you still have to pay for the public school slots … that’s your choice, it’s not for the taxpayers to have to fund it …
I don’t think you understand what a fixed cost is.
For example, is it possible to build a building to house 6oo students rather than 1000? Of course. And it’s very easy to choose one or the other if you’re starting from scratch. However if you have a building that houses 1000 then you’re stuck with it for quite a while, even if you now only have 600 students. As financially difficult as it is to do that, it is even more costly to switch buildings.
And there are other costs that have similar issues.
You’ve also not answered my question - what is your plan for the students left behind?
I am not familiar with these data. Please point us to them.
You didn’t read the rest of my post. I addressed that. There are marginal and fixed costs. If the number of kids in a district are less for a prolonged period, gradually, over time, reorganization can be done to reduce those fixed costs. Until then, the vouchers would be less. I gave example numbers but they were made up - I would assume the actual numbers for the voucher program would need to be hammered out with access to exact spreadsheets of real costs.
My plan for the kids who are left behind is the same plan our society has for the kids who didn’t get into Harvard or even a good state school. Our society says “fuck em”. I’m not proposing changing any of that, just making the system more desirable for families who are not the uber rich and want to help their kids more than the typical taxpayer.
If you want to discuss a more just, socialist society, that’s a completely separate line of discussion and it should go in a different thread. This is a plan to make the current system more efficient for at least some people. (and it would remain the same for the rest, ideally. I can see problems arising if all the smart white/asian kids leave the public system, leaving it more violent. Same problem with the well off whites fleeing inner cities. But it’s not inherently unjust, per say. One tenant of capitalism is that you get what you are able to pay for and what you (or your family) has earned. ).
The nonlinear scaling issue is less of a problem for larger school districts. But I wondered how common those are. Turns out the median school district only has 2-3 schools total. There are about as many rural schools as town/suburb/city schools combined. I’ll link to the ED.gov report when back at a computer. But the take-home is that we have a wide range of school situations and a problem or solution in one situation may not apply elsewhere.
Larger schools have the ability to offer a wider array of classes, services, and extra curriculars than small schools do.
If you go to s small school, it may only have one language to choose from, rather than the several I had to choose from at my much larger public school. Smaller schools do not have enough advanced students to fill out AP and college prep classes, so they are usually not offered. Smaller schools do not have the ability to field nearly as many extracurricular activities as large schools do, limiting the student’s choices in that catagory as well.
Smaller class sizes are a good thing, and that is what people think of when they think of smaller schools, but smaller schools do not guarantee a smaller class size, and due to limitations, smaller schools will often have larger class sizes than the larger school, if receiving approximately the same funding per student, especially in any elective classes.
I’m not sure that k9bfriender was talking about “better” in terms of data. For example, I know someone who sent her kid to a tiny high school because according to her, he had Asperger’s syndrome. Whether he did or not, he was definitely socially awkward. And with only 200 students, it was possible for him to end up ostracized in a way that wasn’t possible in my 4000 student high school. My daughter’s 500 student high school offered two languages while my son’s 2000 student high school offered four.
I addressed your proposal upthread–your plan, with any set of numbers, doesn’t actually do anything to reduce those fixed costs in a manageable way.
No, your plan has the result of taking kids who are already being fucked over and making sure they get an extra-strong, extra-prolonged fucking over. You are taking a bad system and making it worse, just so it can be possibly “better” or at least more efficient for a select subset. This isn’t well-off whites deciding to flee the inner city; this is the government/taxpayer PAYING well-off people to leave.
And how, exactly and precisely, did well-off families “earn” extra taxpayer money to put their kids in private schools? (Earning their own money to pay for private schools, sure, that’s a thing; you’re talking about giving them extra benefits out of the public purse for that same purpose.)
PS: The word you’re looking for is ‘tenet’; ‘tenants’ are renters.
The public purse was already going to spend X dollars per head if they went to a public school. You’re simply giving them the same benefit at a private one. Over a long enough period, the well off family is almost certainly going to pay as much money in property taxes (probably several times as much) as the public spent on schooling their kids. You’re just playing with words to support your argument to make people knee-jerk react to it. The public purse isn’t being raided. And you are correct, I meant to type tenet. Must be that shitty public schooling I got.
My specific family : property taxes are 10k a year. 3 kids. School district spends about 7500 a head. They have been there 35 years. So they paid $350,000 in property taxes, and got about 270k in schooling. If they had wanted to send their kids to a private school, not having to pay property tax those years would be a start.