Several arguments have been made against vouchers in this thread. You focus on the School built for 1000 now only has 600 students
objection. That is, by far, the weakest and most easily-refuted anti-voucher argument. Why not focus on rebutting the strong arguments?
Your claim that diverting money from public schools to private schools will “ideally” not reduce public school quality is simply wrong.
Asking those who want a “more just, socialist society” not to post is laughable. Why not just say “This thread is only for Ayn Rand-style Libertarians”?
And the amenity value in the worth of their property, deriving from all the public services (not just schools) available to the community as a whole, on top of the specific aspects of those services that were of direct use to them.
This, in a nutshell, is what’s wrong with school vouchers.
It’s the idea that public schools are broken because educators aren’t… educating hard enough. That if they just tried harder, did their jobs better, everything would be fine. It also assumes that teachers and administrators literally do not care at all if their students get educated, what they care about is the sweet, sweet tax dollar that keeps flowing into their pockets. Watching some students fail year after year, doomed to a life of poverty as a result of their academic failure is not incentive to be a good teacher, or a good principal, it’s the threat of budget cuts.
Vouchers are a solution to a “problem” that utterly fails to understand what the actual problem is. The issues surrounding education are complex and difficult to solve. They won’t be fixed by whacking teachers and administrators with a stick and telling them they’ll be fired if they don’t start educating better.
Yes, I think Palo Alto and Sunnyvale and most nice places in the country have invisible barriers to non-white people. If not barriers, then hurdles, which make it far harder for non-white people to gain access. Same applies to the nicest jobs, the most capital, the highest political positions, et cetera. This would be the case even if we had magically eliminated all actual racism after 1964, because black people would still be two centuries behind white people in the accumulation of wealth and power. But it hasn’t. We’re still incredibly racist, we’ve just stopped admitting it. And all those power structures, even ones that are blatantly illegal, are still in place.
It was Vo-tec school for electronics. Other kids took auto body, auto mechanics, and nursing. I went there in 11th and 12th grade. We left at around 11:30 and got back by 3:30. The school was about 20 miles away and brought kids in from many area high schools. Our home schools paid the tuition.
I pay property taxes at both my home and my business, into two different school districts. I have exactly 0 children enrolled in either of those districts, and it’s not all that likely that I will enroll any in the future.
I still vote for school levies, and do what I can to support the schools. The reason that I do this is because an educated public is a good thing, IMHO, and I am willing to pay to support it.
Having an educated public gives me a neighborhood with less poverty and therefore, less crime, and gives my business quality applicants to choose from. That is why my tax dollars go to public education.
With school vouchers, my tax dollars are no longer going to educating the public, but instead, to educating your (royal your) children and enriching some for-profit school. This is not something I, as a taxpayer, support, not at the expense of educating the public.
The majority of people living in a school district are in this situation. They either don’t have children, or their children have graduated. This is necessary to support households like the OP, where they were paying 10k in total property taxes, but costing 22.5k just for their kid’s education. The benefit that we get from this is an educated public.
I vote for and campaign for school levies, as I feel that increasing the community’s education level is important, but if we had a voucher system, where my tax dollars are no longer going to the public, but are instead channeled through your child to make a profit for the owners of these schools, I would reverse this stance. I would do everything to reduce the amount of my tax dollar that goes to fund your kid and create a profit for the school he goes to, as will every one of the rest of us who have no children in school, and we outnumber you significantly. Nearly half of the childless households already vote against levies, as well as nearly half of the households with children in school, so it’s not like it’s going to take all that much of a change in attitude to take a district like mine, where we have passed every levy proposed in the last 15 years I’ve lived here, to stop passing not only levies that increase taxes, but also levies that maintain levels of spending.
This will hurt the public school, but not as much as the voucher system will, and I can use my saved tax dollars to donate to things like donor’s choose and other ways of supporting the public education that is necessary to maintain and improve my community. With the reduction of local support for public schools, your vouchers will become less valuable, and eventually, unless you could have afforded to send your kid to private school in the first place without the vouchers, then you will need to return your kid to public school, and the public school that you return your kid to will be much poorer than it was when you took him out.
That is not to say that I am not willing to support your kid. If your kid is exceptionally bright, and the public school does not have a program that challenges him, I am happy to support with my tax dollars scholarships, grants, and other subsidies to make sure that your kid gets the best education he can, but not if it comes at the expense of public schools.
I have been focused on rebutting the relative cost argument because I felt it was the strongest, actually. If the argument were successfully rebutted - if everyone concedes that kids leaving and taking voucher money with them leaves public schools in the same relative financial situation they were before (*ratio *between total budget and total liabilities the same) - what argument is left?
If the public schools are the same, and some parents are trying out the “adventure” of alternate private schools, who cares if it works out better or worse for those individual parents?
Obviously - other objections like whether the private school uses properly vetted teaching staff or is for profit or non profit or is religious - are things the state managing the voucher program would need to regulate. If the state fails to do so correctly, that’s not a failure of the idea of vouchers, just a failure of a specific state program. Which is outside the discussion of this thread, unless you can somehow prove that if a state regulates voucher eligible private schools correctly, no one would use it.
I did not mean to challenge the notion of racism and exclusivity. It is most certainly pervasive and corrosive, but these days, it has been papered over with “it is not as bad as it used to be”.
It might make sense to institute a sort of à la carte arrangement, where public schools could expand their horizons by establishing partnerships with other schools.
My view too: the peace and prosperity of the society around me, and the financing of my pension, depends on younger generations educated to keep the economy producing and developing. The childless benefit no less than parents.
Which is to say, viewed from the perspective of the long game, vouchers look like a way to introduce rot and decay into the public, and then the private, education system until not even bleached bones remain for the lion’s share of society. The middle class is now gone, so that would leave schooling available only to the upper crust.
If you prefer to ignore this argument, expect to be ignored in your own thread.
I fully understand marginal and fixed costs. This is high school economics. And I addressed it at least 5 different times. To repeat myself :
a. You calculate what the fixed costs are as a % of total school budget and make the voucher only for marginal costs.
b. Over a long period of time, a school district can adapt and reduce it’s fixed cost ratio. You force it to do so by making the vouchers gradually increase over a period of years. Closing schools or renting unused space is possible and school districts in districts that are shrinking do this today, so do retail stores, it’s bog standard straightforward business management problem that millions of people are trained to solve.
You have ignored both rebuttals, which are clear and straightforward solutions to this problem, in favor of declaring that a basic math problem is impossible to solve.
If a family cannot afford to send their children to private schools, even with the vouchers, they see no benefit from the voucher system, correct? They may very well see their public schools continue to decline, as the wealthier students depart.
How do vouchers help anyone below a fairly high income level?
Well, then again, you have ignored all rebuttals that were clear and straightforward descriptions of why vouchers are completely contrary to the principles of a civilized and cohesive society, in favor of declaring that unrestrained capitalism is a terrific way to run a primary education system, because it works well as a way of buying a washing machine. Not to mention, apparently a fine way to run a health care system, too. Principles that are implemented exactly nowhere in the civilized world.
That is a separate topic for discussion. If you wanted to make the system more fair, you could give poorer families money so they can spend it on choosing which school their kids go to. A centrally controlled, single point of failure system is not the only way to accomplish this goal (whether the goal is education or healthcare). Vouchers are still compatible with a more socialist society.
FWIW, my son starts at HPPM this fall in kindergarten, for all the reasons you mention. Skyview’s faculty, bless their hearts, try hard, but they’re dealt a crap hand from the get-go with all the super-poor apartment kids and various immigrants. ISTR hearing at some thing or other that they have something like 30 languages spoken by the various parents of their students and have huge problems with translating things to be sent home.
So how’s a school supposed to both challenge kids like my son, have a bang-up PTA, and get good test scores, if they have to translate everything into 30 languages to send home, and deal with 30 different cultures, on TOP of crushing poverty in most of their cases? Maybe a school of superheroic teachers can handle it, but I think your garden variety competent and dedicated teachers are only going to do so well.
And I can’t blame motivated parents with enough resources for choosing to send their kids elsewhere- hence my kid going to HPPM.
That’s great, if you have the resources to do that, and I am even willing to support foundations for scholarships and pay taxes for grants to help you out in that matter. But taking that money from the public school, which, as you mentioned is already struggling, in order to get your kid out of there, is not something I, as a childless but pro-public education taxpayer, would support.
He’s talking about a public magnet–in that specific case, a school that ws the legally segregated Black school through the 70s , and is still 50 % black and .more than 50% SES disadvantaged. They offer special programs to entice kids to the school, and run busses from the neighborhood schools. So you get real diversity and no one pissed about “forced” bussing.
Bu.p, check your PMs. Apparently we can be room parents together next year. Go Bobcats.
Magnets are an interesting mixed bag, some are good, some are terrible, and there often aren’t all that many ways to tell which is which just from stats alone. But, in any case, magnets are generally operated by their own levies, and voters get to vote on whether they want those schools.
Which brings up another point about vouchers. I get to vote for my school board members for the school my taxes support. As a member of the community and taxpayer, I have the right to go to school board meetings, and make my opinion heard. Will I have these controls over how my tax money is spent under a voucher system?