What should America do to fix education for the poorest children?
Various suggestion have included:
– smaller classes
– improved teacher training
– mandatory summer school
– reform Head Start
– more use of student testing
– use of uniform tests
– teach reading using phonics rather than whole word method
– allow students achoice of public schools
– provide vouchers, that can be used in private schools or in parochial schools
I notice that all the suggestions you mention seem to involve only rather narrow manipulations of educational procedure. Isn’t it likely that educational problems for the poorest children, especially in the “inner cities” of your thread title, are also strongly linked to the problems of the inner cities themselves? Shouldn’t we also be considering strategies for poverty reduction and reconnection of the inner cities to the more successful communities around them? William Julius Wilson discusses some of these issues here.
Actually, I think the recognition of “Ebonics” was a step in the right direction. Pity the public misinterpreted it and pulled the plug too soon.
(Nobody ever proposed teaching Ebonics for foreign language course credit, or treating English as a non-native language for Ebonics speakers. They merely sought to recognize Ebonics as a real dialect so that kids who grew up speaking Ebonics-English around the home could more easily be taught the mainstream English way to say things. As far as I know.)
It seems to me that the real problem is parental involvement. Many kids do well in lousy schools because their families value education; many languish in good schools because the parents never pick up a book on their own or talk to the child’s teacher. But for the most part, middle-class parents seem more inclined to become active participants in their children’s education, both directly (attending parent-teacher conferences, setting aside study time in the evenings) or indirectly (taking the child to libraries and museums instead of turning on the TV).
However, I don’t have any brilliant ideas about how to change parental attitudes. Setting up adult literacy / continuing ed programs in poorer neighborhoods seems like a good start; if kids see mom and dad reading and studying, chances are they’ll want to get involved too. And of course, the schools need to work harder at selling the idea that education doesn’t stop when the buses roll away, but I’m reluctant to say it’s the teacher’s responsibility to establish contact with the parents (hell, haven’t teachers got enough to do)? Maybe there needs to be a school / community coordinator position, somebody who can meet with parents in small groups and discuss how they can get involved with their kids’ schooling. Dunno; just throwing out ideas here…
Two big factors that degrade education: the lack of respect for it and the willfulness to disrupt the educational process. Problem is that respect is gained by a portrayal of success and excellence on the part of the teacher as well as the receptive students. Then there are in place stringent due processes against disruptions in classes on part of the students, and betralyals of trust on the part of the faculty, that takes intolerably long to conclude, and for the most part, conclude most unfavorably to the school public at large. I mean that the process is too hard to kick the rascals out. What has to be done are the following
Have teachers instill demand for excellence on part of the students.
Any serious disruption in class should be handled like the real world: arrest the perpetrator and prosecute in court. That’s right: have police get involved in keeping the peace and serenity required for a good education.
Class size is not really that important: I think it is better if two teachers conduct one larger class.
Hopefully this won’t degenerate into incomprehensible rambling, but as a single parent with three children in middle school, this is a subject that hits very close to home.
Class size does matter. The smaller the class, the more accessible the teacher and the more productive the learning environment. There are statistics that back this up.
Recognition of different learning styles and speeds, i.e.; don’t teach the same way and at the the same speed to all students.
Head Start is one of the best precursors for academic success-particularily for children in poverty (there’s loads of statistics to back this up as well). The program doesn’t need revamping, but like any institution, administration has run amok. Time to eliminate the dross, and that goes for all education, not just Head Start.
Make education meaningful, maybe if more time was spent showing how what the kid’s were learning actually applied to adult responsibilities and needs, the kid’s would be less apathetic about learning.
Respect for others in not neccesarily learned at home (although I feel it should be). Perhaps if the society at large and in particular the media were to demonstrate even a modicum more decency children would follow suite.
What my kids think would help…(these are just a few of their suggestions)
Kid #1
study groups for struggling kids
programs for disabled children
sensitivity programs for “bullies”
empowerment programs for the bullied
Kid#2
less immobility, more activity
mentor programs (kids helping kids)
year round school
more trade classes
Kid #3
more time to finish projects
more study hall time
educators need to be more attentive to ‘isms’ (classism, racism, sexism, etc.)
And, of course, more money for impovershed school districts would help. A better educated society is a better society in general, no?
I’m a schoolteacher in Florida (not in the IC, though). I’d like to see a wider variety of opportunities for students. I mean by this that we should expand education to include job-related education in addition to Classical Education. Around here, job-related education is called Vocational Education.
Unfortunately, we seem to have a stigma associated with VoTech. If parents could better accept VoTech as a serious, excellent educational opportunity, then more students would take advantage of VoTech. So how do we get parents to agree that their children would be great as welders or auto mechanics instead of Art History PhD’s (a valid degree, IMHO)?
I thought about this a lot when I was in high school and I ponder it now when I talk to my friends who didn’t go on to college for various reasons. I think it would be a good idea if kids who aren’t inclined to go to college were given job training so they could get a good-paying job once they graduated. However, I think there are a few stumbling blocks to this:
-I readily admit I interacted with a limited segment of people when I was in school, so I could be wrong about this, but I’ve never met any teenagers who talked about being welders or plumbers when they got older. I think increasing vo-tech would require practical students who don’t think they’ll stumble onto a high-paying, low-skilled job the second they get out of high school.
-I grew up in a middle-class family, and it was always assumed I would go to college after high school. Luckily, I liked to read and was academically inclined, so this was a realistic goal. My brother wasn’t as grade-focused, but he also grew up knowing he would go to college. To get parents behind vo-tech, it would require them to give up the mindset that their kids shouldn’t go to college. I don’t know how many parents would be honest enough to say,“My Bobby just isn’t cut out for college. He should learn to be a mechanic.”
-High school, at least in my experience, is oriented towards preparing students for college. I took a lot of AP classes, and one history teacher had us practice class presentations because, in his words, we were the people who would be managers and leaders and would need public speaking skills. I think high schools are leery now of drawing a line between their students and saying to one group,“You should go to college, you’ll do well,” and to another saying,“You’re really not cut out for this. Why don’t you do something else.”
I could ramble on forever about this, but I have to go to a review session for a final exam.
Inner city public education cannot be fixed, because:
State and Federal education department involvement increases year by year. However, they are harming education, because they reduce the opportunity for the teacher and the school to take appropriate local action.
Educational theorists have a great deal of power over curriculum and teaching methods, but they have their heads (you know where). They aren’t well-trained in the scientific method. They don’t have day-to-day involvement with the schools. Their goal isn’t student learning, it’s developing novel programs, whether they work or not. (And, most of them don’t.)
Various judicial decisions have tied the teachers’ hands, particularly in dealing with problem students.
The powerful teachers’ unions work for the benefit of the teachers, often to the detriment of the students.
More money and smaller classes have been tried for the last 30 years, but educational results have gotten worse and worse.
Many inner city school principles are focused on politics, rather than education. This can be especially true when the principle was appointed as a representative of some ethnic group. (At least that’s true in NYC.)
THEREFORE: it’s time to introduce a widespread, generous vouchers program. The vouchers should be adequate to pay most of the cost for a student to attend a private or parochial school of her parents choice.
It is conceivable that competition with private schools will induce the public schools to reform. However, the decision to go to a vouchers approach doesn’t depend on that hope. The key is educating the students. The fate of the public schools is not as important as the ability of all our students to read and write.
As a parent of a student in an inner city school, as a director of a non profit agency, as a former member of committees on the inner city schools…
Kimstu has correctly pegged the problem. The ‘problem’ of inner city schools is not a single faceted issue. When you have students that move, many times during their grade school years (hell, in my son’s fifth grade class the class pictures were taken in October, and delivered in December, and by that time 12 of the 25 kids in that class weren’t there anymore), when you have students in families that are in disarray, when you have students attempting to walk to school through drug infested neighborhoods, attempting to study in a house where the electricity was turned off, when they’re hungry, tired, scared, test scores should become the least of your concerns.
How to solve this? Multi-disciplinary approaches - and I’ve seen them work. For example - in one inner city school in my town, they discovered that many of the kids didn’t have access to health care. A clinic was brought to the school, and the surrounding neighborhood now had access to routine medical interventions.
RIF (reading is fundemental) programs put new books into the hands of kids whose families couldn’t afford them (yes, there are libraries, but not close to the neighborhoods).
A partnership with the local university has brought in college students for mentoring and tutoring kids who need the help.
Another special program, brought about by federal monies, donations from local attorneys etc. has brought peer mediation programs to most of the middle schools, (where they’re most needed), and a high school, several elementary schools. It’d be most helpful for them to be available in all of them (I was part of the parent team helping sponsor the award winning program at the middle school).
One other thing - often the ‘flavor of the month’ new technique is brought in, everybody’s retrained to do this new gig, and when the test scores go down the next quarter, the next ‘flavor of the month’ is tried. Each of these programs need time to establish themselves and allow for improvement.
The issues faced by the inner city school are entertwined with the status of the parents, as well. Programs for substance abuse treatment have huge waiting lists. For those who are in the grip of addiction, and their families, more availabilty would be of benefit.
And that’s just the beginning. For those who think that a band aid approach “well, just let them eat cake/have vouchers to another school” will work, I suggest that you spend some time working with the people involved.
wring’s got it. You can’t just pick one thing and make it work. A friend of mine (I was in several of his classes in high school, but have since graduated) took a poll earlier this year. 75% of his freshmen have an immediate family member in jail. The girls are getting pregnant, the boys are getting knifed and shot. They have more immediate concerns, and until you can give them a safe environment and get them to value education as a community, not much else is going to work well.
Why should they bother about a C in algebra when they don’t know if they are going to eat that week? If they will be in the same house for the rest of the month? Unless you can reset survival priorities, its a rough haul.
december: *Inner city public education cannot be fixed, because:
State and Federal education department involvement increases year by year. However, they are harming education, because they reduce the opportunity for the teacher and the school to take appropriate local action.*
Cite, please.
*2. Educational theorists have a great deal of power over curriculum and teaching methods, but they have their heads (you know where). They aren’t well-trained in the scientific method. They don’t have day-to-day involvement with the schools. Their goal isn’t student learning, it’s developing novel programs, whether they work or not. (And, most of them don’t.) *
Cite, please.
3. Various judicial decisions have tied the teachers’ hands, particularly in dealing with problem students.
Cite, please.
*4. The powerful teachers’ unions work for the benefit of the teachers, often to the detriment of the students. *
Cite, please.
*5. More money and smaller classes have been tried for the last 30 years, but educational results have gotten worse and worse. *
This is actually partially contradicted by the source you cited in your OP, in which it is stated that higher-performing students have improved in recent years. Apparently, giving schools more money and smaller classes does help in some cases, or at least it can be accompanied by improvement. The trouble is that it doesn’t seem to be effective in the case of the most troubled schools with the worst-performing students. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a bad idea, just that it’s not adequate to counteract the troubles of really bad schools. As I indicated in my first post, I incline to the view of wring and Medea’s Child that the problems of inner-city schools are inseparable from those of inner cities in general, and we won’t fix them with new education strategies alone.
*6. Many inner city school principles are focused on politics, rather than education. This can be especially true when the principle was appointed as a representative of some ethnic group. (At least that’s true in NYC.) *
Cite, please (and I’d take it as a personal favor if you’d spell “principal” correctly, too).
Now as a matter of fact, I don’t think all of your points 1–6 are entirely without merit, although I still want to see your evidence for them to discourage the un-Straight-Dopely practice of simply pulling assertions out of (you know where). However, even if all your statements so far were absolutely true, they wouldn’t be evidence for the following conclusion:
*THEREFORE: it’s time to introduce a widespread, generous vouchers program. The vouchers should be adequate to pay most of the cost for a student to attend a private or parochial school of her parents choice. *
This, IMHO, reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the problems of failing education. You seem to think that simply throwing the enterprise open to competition—as though inner-city parents were shoppers restricted to one lousy overpriced convenience store, who just need the chance to shop at Wal-Mart or Kmart instead to have all their consumer needs satisfied—is enough to provide good education for the most deprived and worst-served kids.
Not hardly. In the first place, as you may have noticed, there are not a whole lot of private and parochial schools operating in or near the inner cities. Do you think the ones that are there will suddenly have room to serve all the kids now in failing public schools, even if vouchers provided “most” of their tuition? (And where would the money for the rest of the tuition come from, pray tell? How do you think the poorest families, who often don’t even have adequate food or shelter, are going to be able to pay even a fraction of private school fees?)
In the second place, are most inner cities these days going to strike potential founders as appealing places to start new private or parochial schools to serve the voucher kids? IMHO, that’s not going to be feasible until we address the systemic problems of the inner cities as a whole that have been mentioned in previous posts.
In the third place, even if the environment were more appealing, it’s not likely that we’d see a burst of new high-quality private schools rushing to serve this market. This is because, as I keep pointing out on every damn school-voucher thread that crops up on these boards, high-quality elementary and secondary education is not a money-making proposition. Correspondence courses and night schools for adult learners are often profitable, but they are a very different kettle of fish from all-day schooling for children and teens that really provides them with the stimuli and support they need in order to learn well and learn much. Have you noticed that good private schools tend to have endowment funds, paid-for buildings and grounds, generous alumni, constant fund-raising drives? And that parochial schools, in addition to being supported by the bajillions of the Catholic Church, employ many clerical and lay members who choose this path as a vocation rather than a career, and whose salaries are accordingly low? What makes you think that the lure of state-funded tuition vouchers alone, unsupported by endowments, campuses, alumni networks, or other important sources of private-school funding, is going to be enough to bring entrepreneurs rushing to fill the void in the quality education market?
In the fourth place, private and parochial schools are at liberty to accept the students they think will be successful and tractable, and to reject the “problem kids” (which is an important but usually-unmentioned factor in the much-publicized success of parochial schools in poor communities). The poorly-performing and troubled students aren’t likely to get any benefit from them.
In the fifth place, how is a voucher-funded system of competing schools going to help the many children who don’t have families sufficiently well-informed, concerned, or competent to care about their educational options, or to make a good choice among them? What’s to prevent them falling prey to opportunists of the sort that I mentioned on a previous thread as operating publicly-funded “charter schools” that merely take the money and let the education slide?
In short, if you really care about having the poorest kids get a decent education, I think it’s going to take more than just allotting them x-amount of tax money and telling them to solve their problems by means of the free market. Even if all the accusations you make about public education were reliably true, and even if they really implied that the existing system “could not be fixed”, there would be no reason (no matter how many all-caps "THEREFORE"s you used) to conclude that the system you propose would work better.
I highly recommend this book. Also, I observed some of these problems when my daughters and niece and nephew were in school. There is a web site for discussion of terrible math teaching methods, which are in vogue. (One of those approaches messed up my older daughter big time.)
*6. Many inner city school principals are focused on politics, rather than education. This can be especially true when the principal was appointed as a representative of
some ethnic group. (At least that’s true in NYC.) *
My cousin taught in one of these schools. She’s now blessedly retired.
Now as a matter of fact, I don’t think all of your points 1–6 are entirely without merit
Thank you.
You seem to think that simply throwing the enterprise open to competition—as though inner-city parents were shoppers restricted to one lousy overpriced convenience store, who just need the chance to shop at Wal-Mart or Kmart instead to have all their consumer needs satisfied—is enough to provide good education for the most deprived and worst-served kids.
Yes, I do. This is routine economic theory. The key is that the parent is far more concerned about her child’s educational success than any government employee. The people who care most about the results need to have some power. I’ll refrain from boring you with a discussion of other government programs that run better when there is competition than when they are monopolies.
In the first place, as you may have noticed, there are not a whole lot of private and parochial schools operating in or near the inner cities. Do you think the ones that are there will suddenly have room to serve all the kids now in failing public schools…
Kimstu – Are you saying that a partial solution should be resisted? Even if fewer than 100% of these kids learn to read and do math, what’s wrong with that?
How do you think the poorest families, who often don’t even have adequate food or shelter, are going to be able to pay even a fraction of private school fees?
Do you have a cite for poor families who “…often don’t even have adequate food.” In the inner city, obesity is a problem, not hunger. Regarding shelter, did you hear about the homeless boy who scored 1600 on his SATs. I saw him on TV last week. (This boy had been home-schooled.)
In the second place, are most inner cities these days going to strike potential founders as appealing places to start new private or parochial schools to serve the voucher kids? IMHO, that’s not going to be feasible until we address the systemic problems of the inner cities as a whole that have been mentioned in previous posts.
Been there, done that. I would have agreed with you in 1964. But, 35 years of experience have shown that this approach was a dead end.
What makes you think that the lure of state-funded tuition vouchers alone, unsupported by endowments, campuses, alumni networks, or other important sources of private-school funding, is going to be enough to bring entrepreneurs rushing to fill the void in the quality education market?
Fair question. Obviously nobody knows how much good a new program will do. (E.g., I mistakenly thought Head Start and Food Stamps would do a lot of good.) I think vouchers are worth a try. Economic theory predicts that they will work. Experimentation has shown positive results. Unfortunately, because of resistance from so- called “reactionary liberals” it has been difficult to even experiment.
**private and parochial schools are at liberty to accept the students they think will be successful and tractable, and to reject the “problem kids” (which is an important but usually-unmentioned factor in the much-publicized success of parochial schools in poor communities). The poorly-performing and troubled students aren’t likely to get any benefit from them. **
Studies show that parochial schools have out-performed public schools for all types of students. This excuse isn’t supported by the facts. Also, shouldn’t we should help some students, even if we can’t help all of them?
What’s to prevent them falling prey to opportunists of the sort that I mentioned on a previous thread as operating publicly-funded “charter schools” that merely take the money and let the education slide?
Fair point. Unfortunately, they’ve already fallen prey to opportunists – the educational establishment – and they have no way out. With vouchers, at least parents would have a fighting chance ot pick a school that works for their kids.
**In short, if you really care about having the poorest kids get a decent education, I think it’s going to take more than just allotting them x-amount of tax money and telling them to solve their problems by means of the free market. **
Maybe so. But, these other approaches have been failing for over 1/3 of a century. Isn’t it time to try something new?
perhaps you’re not familiar with the word “proof”, since once again you offer as ‘proof’ of the truth of your assertions (in this case # 1-6) a link to a book penned by a columnist.
Mr. Sowell is an economist. He’s entitled to his opinions about what to do re: the education system, as are you. However, when you’re debating the topic here, you are expected to offer some substantiation for the position that you are taking. Data for example.
Case in point your “State and Federal education department involvement increases year by year. However, they are harming education, because they reduce the opportunity for the teacher and the school to take appropriate local action” In order to continue to use this as a support of your position, you should demonstrate that, in factState and Federal education departments have increased their involvement, (which of course necessitates a definition of ‘level of involvement’ ) and then demonstrate by facts and figures that it is that involvement which reduces the opportunity for teacher and the school to take appropriate local action (after having demonstrated that there was appropriate local action to be taken and that it was not able to be done).
In the meantime, exactly how would having a charter school address the issues of increased mobility of inner city children? which at this school was 66%
and, as a fan of economist theory, can you explain to me, how it would conceivably be less expensive to have a system of many independant schools vs. a larger one (where the costs of administration can be spread out over multiple schools, the buying power of a large entity vs a small one should be able to lower routine costs for supplies and perhaps maintenance etc.)
Wring – this is simple. Many public schools are incredibly inefficient. (Many other large organizations are, too.) I don’t want to write a book, but here are a few examples.
Today’s schools spend inordinate money on new textbooks. When I was in school, textbooks lasted a good 15 years.
Many of today’s textbooks are AWFUL. They are wastes of money.
There are too many administrators. (I sent to daughter to a small private school for two years, which had almost no administrators.)
They are locked into expensive union contracts, in some cases. E.g., the NY janitors effectively control the use of the school buildings, making it difficult and expensive to schedule summer school
Some teachers stink, but they can’t be fired because of tenure. (Not that principals would necessarily have the intestinal fortitude to fire them.)
Centralized administration means centralized control, which often makes decisions that are ineffective at the local level.
Stuff provided from special state or federal programs is especially wasted, since it’s generally free. I remember visiting my daughter’s classroom and seeing a stack of something called SCIS – a special science teaching approach. The material had come free. The teacher had no intention of using it, so it just took up shelf space.
Some teaching methods are ineffective, hence inefficient.
A personal experience – I went to grades 1 - 6 in the Bronx with big class sizes. There were so many students that I couldn’t go to Kindergarten. In first grade, I had to share a seat with another student for a few days. There was very little money. And, we all got a good education! So, I know it can be done.
Kimstu, I should probably know better than to get into a disagreement with you, but I honestly don’t feel you’ve thoroughly thought out the benefits that the voucher system can bring. You have gone through great effort to arm yourself against the voucher system, but this statement
makes me feel gipped.
No one ever said in any voucher thread that I’ve seen that, a)new schools will pop up overnight once the voucher switch is flipped, and, b)that it won’t need a great deal of patience and effort (and money) while they are woven into our society and the public schools are phased out.
I’m no economist nor businessman, so I can’t say with any certainty that any private schools will appear at all; but when there’s a customer with money, I’m sure the void will be filled. And endowments and other contributions to the process are not to be excluded… sure the whole map hasn’t been drawn up, but you can’t tell me that philanthropists won’t rise to the occasion, either.
If we, as a country, decide that it is in our best interests to go this route, I have little doubt that the safety nets will be there ad nauseum, to quell the many fears that private education will ruin our already strained system.
Now all I need is Satan to join in on the anti-voucher side…
I’m not against vouchers as a part of a solution. But they will do no good for families that have more pressing concerns than education.
Single parent families with no money, no dependable transportation, where mom/dad works several jobs and is always tired/cranky/high/in jail/in fights/at the bar simply don’t have the foundation to make a voucher system work. Why should they pay money for school? Public school always took their kids before. Why should they pick a different school? most parents can’t be bothered with getting their kids to the public schools now. Why would it be any different in a voucher school?
Many of these kids are on thier own, no background support. Education is not valued by the families. That means kids who try to do their homework in leaking houses with no electricity are ridiculed for spending time on something that is useless.
Vouchers are great, for parents who pay attention and care enough to take their kid to a school across the city every day. For the knotted up problems of inner city education, its not a magic bullet.
These kids don’t see the future. They see the now, and its better in thier eyes to protect themselves from their environment, school does nothing toward that goal. When the community can put value into education, nothing will stop kids from excelling at it. As long as the drug dealers, overpaid atheletes and rappers are seen as succeeding in life, money nor vouchers nor public beatings are going to improve education.
december replied to me: *“You seem to think that simply throwing the enterprise open to competition […] is enough to provide good education for the most deprived and worst-served kids.”
Yes, I do. This is routine economic theory.*
This seems to be your central problem, then: you don’t understand the ways in which education differs from the typical goods and services of “routine economic theory”, which make simple market models inadequate to deal with them. Of course, that’s not to say that there are no market forces at work in educational structures, just that there are important other features that routine market models don’t capture. Take a look at this World Bank report on “The Public Economics of Education” for some more details. I quote:
*The people who care most about the results need to have some power. *
I completely agree with this, which is why my preferred “root-cause” solutions to the problems of inner-city education involve changes that genuinely empower their residents: e.g., municipality tax-sharing plans and other strategies that strongly reconnect cities to their wealthier surrounding environments. What you haven’t shown at all is that simply giving inner-city parents money for private school fees really will empower significant numbers of them to make education more successful for their kids, as opposed to just providing the illusion of choice with less public oversight and support.
*Are you saying that a partial solution should be resisted? Even if fewer than 100% of these kids learn to read and do math, what’s wrong with that? *
Depends on how much of a partial solution you think you can achieve, which is why I and several other posters here keep bugging you for factual quantitative evidence, which you seem singularly resistant to providing. If a voucher system significantly improved education for 50%, say, of the poorest kids and didn’t hurt the others, I’d consider it definitely worth trying. On the other hand, if it proved really effective only for about 5% of kids while significantly reducing the options for maybe 40% (since as you doubtless know, public schools receive supplementary funding in accordance with their enrollments in addition to the basic cost-per-pupil derived from their tax base, which is one of the ways voucher programs can have a negative impact on the students who remain in public schools), I’d be hard put to justify it as a better solution.
*“How do you think the poorest families, who often don’t even have adequate food or shelter, are going to be able to pay even a fraction of private school fees?”
Do you have a cite for poor families who “…often don’t even have adequate food.” In the inner city, obesity is a problem, not hunger.*
Holy smoke, december, do you seriously not know that there is hunger in U.S. inner cities, particularly among children?! Yes, I have a cite for that, since you seem to need one! The Food Research and Action Center lists several studies on hunger in the U.S., particularly the Community Child Hunger Identification Project (CCHIP) and various USDA studies. According to their results, “approximately four million American children under age 12 go hungry and about 9.6 million more are at risk of hunger” at some time during the period under study. For mercy’s sake, haven’t you heard of food banks and soup kitchens? Do you really imagine that just because many poor people are fat, there aren’t also ones who go hungry sometimes, or that fat people themselves can’t go hungry sometimes? Even if chronic Bangladesh/Somalia-style starvation is not a serious problem for us in the U.S., don’t you see that even intermittent hunger indicates a degree of poverty that makes it highly unlikely that those suffering from it will be able to scrape up enough money to pay even a small part of private school tuition?
*Regarding shelter, did you hear about the homeless boy who scored 1600 on his SATs. I saw him on TV last week.
(This boy had been home-schooled.) *
Honestly december, your ability to get distracted from the point under discussion is absolutely breathtaking sometimes. What the @#^#$! does the (highly laudable) academic success of one homeless boy have to do with my question about how people who can’t afford adequate shelter are going to be able to pay even a fraction of private school fees?
*"In the second place, are most inner cities these days going to strike potential founders as appealing places to start new private or parochial schools to serve the voucher kids? IMHO, that’s not going to be feasible until we address the systemic problems of the inner cities as a whole that have been mentioned in previous posts. "
Been there, done that. I would have agreed with you in 1964. But, 35 years of experience have shown that this approach was a dead end.*
Even assuming that your defeatist assessment of the total impossibility of improving basic conditions in the inner cities was correct (which I doubt it is), don’t you realize that you’ve merely begged the question? If the inner cities can’t be improved, how are they going to attract private education providers to serve them?
Obviously nobody knows how much good a new program will do. (E.g., I mistakenly thought Head Start and Food Stamps would do a lot of good.)
Humph, you think they haven’t? If you expected them to abolish poverty, naturally you’re going to be disappointed. However, you may wish to look at this report on the actual performance of Head Start programs:
I think that counts as “doing a lot of good”. Same for food stamps. You seem to think that “partial solutions” are worth supporting when they’re provided by privatization schemes, but not if they’re due to government programs. Double standard much?
I think vouchers are worth a try. Economic theory predicts that they will work. Experimentation has shown positive results.
What experimentation? Again, where are your facts and your quantitative results? Also, as I pointed out above, your attempt to apply “economic theory” to this issue is significantly flawed.
Studies show that parochial schools have out-performed public schools for all types of students. This excuse isn’t supported by the facts. Also, shouldn’t we should help some students, even if we can’t help all of them?
Where are your studies showing that parochial schools that accept and retain all applicants, the same way public schools have to accept all students, outperform the public schools? Nowhere, because there aren’t any such parochial schools, which was my whole point: parochial and other private schools’ success across the socioeconomic spectrum depends partly on their freedom to avoid the worst and most disruptive students. (And even with that advantage, there is evidence that the superior performance of Catholic and other private schools is overestimated.)
*“In short, if you really care about having the poorest kids get a decent education, I think it’s going to take more than just allotting them x-amount of tax money and telling them to solve their problems by means of the free market.”
Maybe so. But, these other approaches have been failing for over 1/3 of a century. Isn’t it time to try something new?*
So in the last analysis, that’s the best defense you can offer for your position? You pay no attention to systemic problems and external factors of the sort wring and Medea’s Child have been pointing out; you simply complain that poor students’ test scores have kept going down and so you demand a whole new approach to public education, even though you can’t show any actual evidence that it would work better than the system we have now? That’s your idea of prudent public investment?
Sheesh, december, why do I even bother debating with you? I could be spending the time arguing issues with other conservatives (or at least, other posters more conservative than I) like Sam Stone, ExTank, Jackmannii, tracer, waterj2, or Wrath, who actually understand the need to back up assertions with evidence and who are able to keep to the point under discussion.
Heck, I think I’ll do exactly that. Turning gratefully to Wrath’s post:
*No one ever said in any voucher thread that I’ve seen that, a)new schools will pop up overnight once the voucher switch is flipped, and, b)that it won’t need a great deal of patience and effort (and money) while they are woven into our society and the public schools are phased out. *
I completely accept that you are not so unrealistic as to expect that, and maybe most other voucher advocates aren’t either. But when december talks about “giving parents power” and “giving them a choice” and “taking advantage of the greater efficiency of private schools” (though he still ducked wring’s point that about the public school system’s economies of scale), he seems to be implying that the multiple options for quality private education for poor inner-city children will actually be there. My question is, since they’re not there now, how will they get there and what will it take to bring them? If, as you admit, it will require a “great deal of patience and effort (and money)”, then how can we be sure that the same patience and effort and money applied in more fundamental ways to the existing system’s problems wouldn’t work better?
See, I am highly suspicious of attempts to portray the failures of inner-city public schools as somehow inherent in their nature as public institutions. Such attempts completely ignore the many improvements in educational results within public schools in wealthier and less troubled communities. And they also ignore the fact that people like december and my own father got good public-school educations in the inner city in past decades, when there were already plenty of ineffective teaching methods, janitorial unions, bad teachers, and redundant administrators. Public schools are obviously not incapable of serving children well, even poor children. Equally obviously, they are not succeeding with the children in the worst environments today. To me, that doesn’t prove at all conclusively that the best solution is to “phase out” public schools entirely.
*I’m no economist nor businessman, so I can’t say with any certainty that any private schools will appear at all; but when there’s a customer with money, I’m sure the void will be filled. And endowments and other contributions to the process are not to be excluded… sure the whole map hasn’t been drawn up, but you can’t tell me that philanthropists won’t rise to the occasion, either. *
As I pointed out above, though, quality education tends not to be a big moneymaker; most places that do it well are not in fact making a profit off it. This is why the “routine economic theory” that suggests that all it takes to “fill the void” is “a customer with money” doesn’t apply so well here: because of the many externalities, it’s very hard to achieve a robust educational market solely with market forces. As for the suggestion that philanthropists will shoulder some of the burden, I think that would be great, but I’m a bit skeptical. After all, philanthropists can perfectly well start charity schools to provide free private education to poor kids right now, without demanding tuition vouchers to bear some of the cost. I rather doubt that the mere existence of tuition vouchers is going to inspire enough hitherto uninvolved philanthropists to make large numbers of new high-quality private schools economically self-sustaining.
