No. But since the voucher will almost always not be enough, you will control how the tax money for your specific kid is spent, as well as some of your own money, in a voucher system.
In practice, that is hundreds to millions of times as much authority as your tiny voice is when you vote for a school board member or go to a meeting. (the broad range is because there are other factors that determine whether your voice matters or not)
This is a solution that potentially solves whatever problems you have with the public system, versus a system where you theoretically can object but most of the time, your objections will accomplish exactly nothing.
You’re still missing the point. Like k9bfriender, I don’t have a kid in the school system. That means I won’t be controlling any tax money for any specific child. You tell me that I have only a “tiny” voice in the public schools, but I will have absolutely no voice in any voucher-supported school. What’s my incentive to continue to vote for tax monies in support of this scheme when I will have no voice, no authority, and no opportunity to raise any objections?
What’s your incentive to do anything in a democracy? In reality, a democracy gives you the voter an amount of power so infinitesimally close to zero that it’s rational to just state that your power is zero. Those objections you talk about making, or that “authority” you talk about exercising is nonexistent.
And no one in the thread is blaming these parents. They accept and perhaps applaud your decision. What we do NOT do is ask that public funds be removed from the public schools to subsidize your choice.
My info is decidedly out of date, but I can confirm that throughout a decade mostly in the 1960’s a largish California school district had zero (0) black students, and extremely few Hispanics. Most of us were oblivious to this, but I learned that realtors were taking some prospective home buyers literally to the other side of railroad tracks.
So you concede that the voucher “will almost always not be enough,” which means that poor - and even middle-class - families who can’t afford the extra tuition won’t be able to use vouchers.
And I don’t know about the elections where you live, but around here, the voters turned down a tax increase, causing the school district to cut its budget by $5 million. Which is $5 million more than would have been cut from private school vouchers.
Do you really advocate using your tax money for a program that won’t help the people it’s supposed to help and has no accountability to the taxpayers who pay for it?
A school board election, or a school bond issue, gives me and all of the other voters like me a collective voice that is pretty loud. Individually we may not have a lot, but we have a bit, and collectively we have quite a bit. You want to strip all of us of every iota of power we might have so you can raid our pocketbooks. There’s a word for that, and it ISN’T ‘democracy.’
If you have the average number of kids, over the average amount of time you own a house, on average you pay in property taxes the cost of sending those kids to school. So my proposal, for most people, is not a raid - it’s an increase in their say over the money the state is going to raid from their pocketbooks regardless.
It’s a huge increase in power for anyone who has a kid.
So the more successful get to send their kids to school with other more successful people so they aren’t disrupted in the process to continue being more successful. Not the worst way to run a railroad.
We have a system in place for it already. It’s called private schools. Feel free to send your kids anywhere you want. Just don’t ask my kids to pay for it.
No, you don’t. Your basic premise is flawed because you apparently don’t understand how schools are funded.
Property taxes for school is spread among all of the taxpayers in your district (or your county or state or however your locale finances schools). Parents alone don’t cover the full cost; people who never have any kids at all pick up part of the cost, as do businesses. Furthermore, I don’t think there are any states in which property taxes alone cover the full cost of sending kids to school. Here in Kansas, for example, the state general fund (mostly income and sales taxes) covers about 55% of school funding; property taxes cover a little more than a third. (Federal funds, lottery monies, and various miscellaneous sources cover the remainder.)
Vouchers are a good idea. If you could renew your car tag at a competing DMV you would. If vets had healthcare vouchers that worked at places besides the VA they’d be thrilled. Competion is important. Of course teachers unions and the Democratic Party would disagree. And that’s because it’s not about private vs public. It’s about enriching special interests.
Yes and no. It was under the administration of a public school but even adults could take classes there. We had 2 guys, one was in his 30’s in the class I was in.
For example my neighbors kid doesnt go to the school in our district but to a neighboring one. All one has to do is ask for a district transfer.
In our area a child who attends a private school who needs special services can get those at a public school.
We also have Kansas School for the Deaf in Olathe and any deaf kid from the state, even if its 400 miles away, can attend there and there home district pays for it.
I just renewed my car tags this past week. I had to wait in line for three whole minutes, then spent five minutes or so up at the counter. If I hadn’t been down at the courthouse on other business anyway, I could have renewed via internet or mail. Why would I want to go somewhere else? (Of course, part of the reason we have a decent process for renewing car tags is that we elect a county treasurer; the last one came close to being removed from office for being so bad at the job, and efficiency was a significant issue in the election.)
Meanwhile, over in Missouri, family members report that the privatized renewal locations are no better than the government ever was. See, for example, the Yelp reviews of the Glenstone License Office, one of three in the city of Springfield that compete for business (all three are run by different contractors).
(Oh, and vouchers are indeed about enriching special interests, just probably not the ones you’re railing against. For example, in Michigan, about 80 percent of charter schools are run by for-profit companies. Do you think those companies are more concerned about enriching the lives of students or enriching the bank accounts of shareholders?)
But we don’t have a monopoly situation. School choice–be it magnet schools, charter schools, early colleges, etc. etc–is incredibly common. Places without some level of school choice are the places that wouldn’t have private schools under vouchers: rural areas with barely enough kids to justify one school.
There are some compelling arguments for school choice. Competition is fairly far down my list, but experimentation and specialization can be very good things. But I don’t see any reason why vouchers need to be part of that. Knee-jerk supporting “vouchers” because they are a type of school choice is a poor decision because there are so many potential problems with vouchers.
The OP seems to be thinking on the hyper-micro level: if everything else stayed the same and he personally got a check for $10k a year, he’d be able to send his kid to the nice private school he can almost but not quite afford. But everything else wouldn’t stay the same: the “good” private schools don’t want to be overrun by families in the OP’s income bracket. It’s fine to have some–kids with grandparents who are helping, or whose parents sacrifice everything to send them there. But if suddenly everyone had vouchers and the school was suddenly going to be more “upper-ish middle class” than “professional class”? They wouldn’t like that. They’d raise tuition to keep the school just as unattainable as before. Other private schools might open, but they would be different–and I tend to think they’d be a lot like the charters we already have.
Not really , yes, you have money in those cases flowing from one school district to another, or from a district to a private school. The difference is that it’s not solely the parent’s choice- a parent cannot just enroll their kid at the Kansas School for the Deaf without involving the local school district and the IEP concluding that KSD is the least restrictive environment. A parent cannot just enroll their kid in a school run by a different district without their being some agreement between the districts- maybe there you need three districts to get enough students for some special program , so one runs it and the other two pay per student they send there.
Same thing with a child getting special services at a private school ( not the situation mentioned in your post) - the district must provide an appropriate education, even if it involves paying for a private school but it doesn’t mean a parent can choose the private school if a district school provides services. A coworker of mine had the NYC Dept of Ed pay for a boarding school in Massachusetts for her daughter - but that was only because no NYC school provided exactly the services she needed. If NYC had decided to provide those services in a NYC school, my coworker would have had to pay tuition herself if she decided to send her daughter to the Mass school anyway.
On to the situation that *is *mentioned in your post- a private school student is entitled to certain services from the public school district. My problem is that this never seems to be accounted for in comparison between the cost of public education and the cost of private education. Each seems to simply take the budget ( for the school or district ) and divide it by the number of students. And it’s not so obvious that a district with a cost of attendance of 20K might actually have a lower cost per *average student * if the the costs of special education and services to private school students were removed from the calculation. Or that private school with a $10K cost of education might not be including the value of services provided by the school district, only those the private school must budget and pay for.