How can anyone oppose this Washington D.C. voucher plan?

Great Debates
21

I agree with the comment that vouchers often translate into funding for religious schools, and that is the main reason I oppose them, in general.

The argument goes like this: In poor urban areas, often the only non-public schools are religious schools. Also, religious schools are often cheaper than non-religious private schools. Thus vouchers tend to force people who want to get out of public schools (urban poor with little access to non-religious private schools and no money to pay the extra cost if they are available) into religious schools.

No one should be forced to choose between their religious beliefs and their children’s education.

All that said, I actually favor trying out voucher programs, so that we can tell how and whether they work.

22

How many here have kids in private schools, I guess not many. Vouchers will not open the doors to private schools. It’ll just raise tuition. My son’s tuition for this year was $13,000. Not a bad deal. That is not how much it costs per student to run the school–it’s about 75%. The other quarter comes from endowments and donations. The $10,000 I donated to the school last year was tax deductable. I also use the school’s in-house speech therapy services for about $10,000 a year as well, tax deductable too. I keep mentioning ‘tax deductable’ because part of the calculation into what to charge for tuition is depended on the amount of donations the school can expect to receive. You want to maximize the amount of monies going into the school and it’s endowment. So if the student population trends toward people who do not contribute beyond the tuition, the tuition must go up, squeezing those students out. A voucher in my hand would go to the school under the tuition bit, which is not tax deductable for most schools (it is for me), and I can feel free to donate as I have been. This is a double-win-win situation for the private student’s parent.

But this isn’t about money, is it?

-All said with a straight face.

23

Quoth december:

…But the indication is that the vouchers will be inadequate to fully fund a student’s attendance at a private school.

…And the District of Columbia is hovering at around a seventeen percent poverty rate. That of course does not take into account the statistically higher national poverty rate for minorities, which while improving is still at around 22 percent for African Americans nationally (same cite).

…And the median household income for the District is around $38K/year, a figure which might make paying extra for private school problematic for many families.

In fact, according to the cached Google document (which I usually have trouble linking properly–if a mod can help I’d appreciate it) at the bottom of this post, 62% of all families with children in DC were single-parent families, with even lower household incomes. In 1997, almost 37% of all children in the District were considered to be “in poverty.” In 1996, two out of three students in the District were receiving free or reduced cost lunch subsidies, which indicates that they come from household incomes which do not exceed 185% of the official poverty rate income.

I have not been able to determine what is the poverty rate for white children within DC, but nationally, white children rank the lowest of any race/ethnicity, at about ten percent. I also found it disturbingly difficult to find a breakdown of private school attendance in the District by race.*

I think that from these figures I can conclude that december is technically correct in saying that most of the beneficiaries of the plan would be minority students.

However, I think I can also say that most of the minority students will NOT be benficiaries of the plan, because their families cannot easily afford to pay the extra money that the inadequate vouchers require.

Because I cannot find those last critical figures which I strongly suspect would show that white children in the District come from families which have significantly higher household incomes, I cannot state this next damning sentence as fact , but you can take it as a newly formed (and hopefully informed) opinion:

Vouchers will make it possible for a greater proportion of white children to flee the District of Columbia’s public school system. While 96% of the students in DC public schools are minorites, there’s no way in the world that 96% of the voucher beneficiaries will be minority students.

And that, I think but cannot yet prove, is the exact intention of vouchers in general.

*However, I did find this document, which has this amusing quote: “Finally, I find that whites attend private schools that are less integrated than public schools, and blacks and Hispanics attend private schools that are slightly more integrated than public schools.”

Yeah, I’d bet my sweet ass that the private schools in DC are “slightly more integrated” than the 96% minority DC public schools, so long as “more integrated” means “a higher percentage of white children.”
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:9WR5ziDxFc0C:www.venturephilanthropypartners.org/usr_doc/vuln_youth.htm+district+columbia+single+mothers&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

24

I think there are very good reasons to oppose Bush’s plan for vouchers for Washington, DC. – mainly that the residents of Washington, D.C. have virtually no voice as to whether the plan goes forward or not.

Residents of Washington have no voting representation in Congress. We have but one non-voting delegate, putting U.S. citizens who live in the Capital City in the same representative league as those who like in American Samoa, the US Virgin Islands, or Puerto Rico… oh yeah, except that we pay federal taxes.

I’m not going to argue that DC should be a state, or that the federal government has no role in how DC is run. But we do have a mayor and a city council. Yes, things are still a mess in this city, but it’s better than it used to be. If the 600,000-plus people of DC want vouchers, how about letting us decide, rather than 535 voting representatives from everwhere else in the US except DC?

In short, I oppose the plan not because of any particular problem with vouchers, but because the people who live in DC shouldn’t be treated like political lab rats.

25

NOT IN THIS CASE

I’ll stick with my racism claim. What better way to sell such a program than to start with the minorities? That way nobody suspects racism.

[ul]:smiley: [sup]Well almost nobody.[/sup][/ul]

26

—throwing money at it won’t fix it.—

If this is so, then why do many conservatives so vehemnently oppose changing how schools are funded so that per-pupil funding is statewide, instead of paid for by local property taxes? You can’t consistently claim that money makes no difference, and then complain that your kids are being hurt because they get less funding as a result.

Also, what evidence is there that private schools have anything like the capacity to take on the public school students that want to go there, considering that their schools suck? What evidence is there that private schools will drop their admissions standards to allow in kids that want to go there? What about kids that are slower: aren’t they going to be stuck in the worst schools, without even the smart hardworking peers that used to be around them? Schools are incredibly expensive long-term ventures that take years to turn funding incentives into results.

27

Apos has hit the nail straght on the head here. If private schools are truly better than public schools (and that itself is still a big “if” in my book, which I’ve never seen conclusively proven), then that is most likely the result of two things. First, private schools get to place their own caps on how many students they accept, to keep acceptable student/teach ratios at all times. Public schools don’t have that luxury. Second, private schools get to cherry-pick their students based on their own standards. Generally, the students who can get into private schools are already high performers, so of course the private school numbers will often look better. Public schools certainly don’t have that luxury either.

Additionally, as this site point out, private school numbers are often misleading:

I have never seen a voucher program, including this new effort, which adequately addressed any of these issues. If vouchers are to even be attempted, the private schools will have to be placed at least somewhat under government supervision, removing their student caps and flattening the playing field for any and all students who apply. Until then, the inequities between the public school system and private schools doom these efforts to failure, and will doom low-performing students to be stuck in schools with less and less chance of improvement.

In other words, “No Child Left Behind” my red arse.

Those who complain that “throwing money” at the public education system won’t work (which I agree with to an extent) should take a closer look at the voucher programs they espouse. Without some organized change in how private schools run their affairs, it amounts to the same problem. The only difference is that you’re throwing money at private schools rather than public ones, and excluding more students from a decent education.

And to be honest, any voucher programs which do not address these inequities are a step in the wrong direction, and as such will not receive my support.

28

You don’t get it, it’s not how schools are funded that matters, it’s how they spend the funds they’re given. Californian schools in general, and LAUSD in particular, are horribly inefficient, and mismanage and outright waste the funds they’re given.

And giving raises to teachers is NOT good when the funds used to pay for those raises come from bond measure funds allocated for after school programs, repairing schools damaged in the 1994 Northridge Earthquake, modernizing equipment like air conditioning, etc. Instead they spent those monies on other projects, which proved to be horribly mismanaged and wasteful.

The middle school I attended in 1994 was quite heavily damaged in the earthquake. They did minor repairs for a little while, but then they just left damaged areas unfinished and unrepaired, and cordoned off for several months. Then they uncordoned the area, without doing any repairs! They only started repairs a couple years ago, after I had graduated from high school, and even then it was a half-assed job.

If you just throw money at the problem without actually fixing the problem, you end up with a school district like LAUSD.

29

Nobody has mentioned the natural monopoly problem.

Imagine a small rural town where each class has the minimum amount of students to run a school. Only one school can survive in such a climate. If a plurality of parents wanted a Catholic school, then all children (not just the plurality) would be sent to the Catholic school. Now if all the surrounding towns came to the same decision, you might be talking about putting kids on busses for a couple of hours each way just to get them to a place that has the resources to support a secular education.

30

It will likely raise them in another way, too.My kids go to a parochial school. The actual cost per child is $3000 per year. I pay $3800 for two children. The remainder is made up by a subsidy from the parish and by fundraising. The only way a voucher plan is likely to succceed is if those whose children are already in non-public schools are also eligible, both because their support will be needed, and because it hardly seems fair to help family A, whose children are in public school, while not helping family B, whose income and circumstances are the same, but send their children to a non-public school. (In fact, the last voucher plan I heard proposed in my city would have made every child eligible.) So let’s say I get a voucher worth $2000 per child? Is the tuition going to stay at $3800 for two? Of course not? Will it be $4000 for two? No, again. I’m already paying $3800. Will I refuse to pay an extra thousand or two over the cost of the voucher, if that’s less than I’m paying now? Of course not. With $2000 per child from the voucher and $1000 per child from me, they could eliminate the fundraising and the subsidy. Or continue the fundraising and subsidy and add services we don’t have now. Because as Jackmannii mentioned, a significant part of why parochial schools, in particular, seem to be less expensive is because of the services they don’t provide.

31

Well everyone knows that the only thing you can fix by throwing money at it is the military. Can I get an amen neo-cons! :wink:

Well, december is correct that D.C. has a high per student spending. According to this USAToday article (referencing the 99-00 census) D.C. spent $9,933 per student with the national average being $6,835 (New Jersey and New York were #1 and #2 at a little over $10,000). However, with the economic disparity in D.C. I’m sure that education money isn’t too evenly spread.

I’m just curious december, why is this particular voucher system so unique as to be irrefutable?

32

It’s not a step in the right direction. All it’s doing is making it easier for the people who can already afford to go there, at the expense of everyone else. How is that the right direction?

33

Because it doesn’t take money from the school system. The children are educationally deprived. Most of the needy recipients are minorities. These points respond to the usual criticisms of vouchers.

Of course, the program would serve the entire country in a way, by testing whether vouchers work or not.

Daikona, is it really true that, “All it’s doing is making it easier for the people who can already afford to go there, at the expense of everyone else”? Do you know the amount of the voucher? How much tuition parochial schools charge? Whether supplemental scholarships are available? Whether even poor parents might find a way to pay the difference between the voucher and the tuition in order that their children get a reasonable education?

34

The problem here is that it wont benifit the “needy” and probalby not many minorities. Sure the district is mostly minorities, but the poor WILL NOT be able to recieve these vouchers because they dont have enough money to make up the differance between the vouchers and the cost of private school.

So mainly white rich kids will get to use them, and the poor minorities will be stuck in the same school, with the same number of students, and with less money to run it. Because THE STUDENTS THAT WILL BE TAKING ADVANTAGE OF THE VOUCHER PROGRAM will be the ones that were already going to private school anyway.