I agree with your philosophy here 100%, and as you pointed out early on, there are many “inner-city” issues to deal with.
The voucher idea, or rather, the privatization of the industry idea, is believed by us free-market promoters as fundamentally superior. Not that it would, by nature of it’s existence, wipe out the problems of the inner city, nor does it negate the fact that some public schools in some neighborhoods do indeed exceed requirements and expectations of education. In fact, I would fully expect that in affluent communities the education would be better, and in poorer it would be worse, regardless of whether the system were public or private.
You are wise to be skeptical, as this is no small matter to be trifled with. However, I am of the opinion that those who prefer the socialist method tend to dismiss any idea of privitizing education as a priori doomed to failure, and since it has never been tried in this country since the introduction of public schooling, IMO, quake in fear that one more vestige of their socialism might topple.
I am forever grateful, Kimstu that you are ever noble in holding your side and true to your principles.
*Originally posted by Kimstu *
**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… I quote:
"In education, there are several notable market failures. […] The ones which are most commonly listed are…
[/quote]
**
Kimstu – You have hit on one key to the voucher debate, “…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.” You think normal economic theory doesn’t apply to the purchase of education by students (and their parents); I think it does.
I appreciate your cite to the World Bank study. Unfortunately, it’s about a somewhat different subject – namely how much money an overall society should devote to education. The quotes aren’t relevant to our debate.
…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.
First of all, these things may be a good idea, but they aren’t going to happen. Also, even if they did, the inner city parent still would have no power over her child’s education. With vouchers, she’d have the power to select the school.
** 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.**
This is a another key difference. You think public oversight is more important than parental choice; I think the opposite. Public oversight is valuable when the consumer can’t tell on her own how good the product or service is. E.g., prescription drug effectiveness, bank solvency, food safety. But, parents can easily tell whether their children are learning to read or not.
**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. **
Fair enough. I saw a study reported in the NY Times that showed Black students on vouchers making big gains in math, with little change in their reading. I’ll try to find a cite or two.
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.
This timing is backwards. We have to try it first, in order to find out how effective it is. The education lobby is using all their power to prevent such experiments from taking place.
…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)
Huh? Public schools’ tax base comes from the value of the local real estate + per pupil state supplements. If there are fewer students in the public schools, then the funding per student increases.
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.
Holy smoke, Kimstu, do you seriously not know how to recognize self-serving bullshit? My daughter was hungry at some time during the experience period – she fasted on Yom Kippur! This is a statement by people involved in the hunger business. Please don’t use it as an excuse to deprive these kids of a decent education.
…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?
I can’t think of a polite way to respond to this. Suffice it to say, that many people in the past, including immigrants in my own family, managed to diligently pursue education although they had very little money.
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?
This boy got a great education living in a car and while hs family was living with another family. Why can’t a child living in a shelter learn how to read and do arithmetic?
If the inner cities can’t be improved, how are they going to attract private education providers to serve them?
This is where basic economics comes into play. People with money will attract providers. Welfare has been extremely succesful in attracting drug dealer to the inner city!
If you expected them [Head Start and School Lunch]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:
More self-serving bullshit. Note that the study says, “Most of the evidence regarding the long-term effectiveness of early intervention comes not from evaluations of Head Start, but from studies of “model” early intervention programs such as the famous Perry Preschool project, which took place in Michigan between 1962 and 1967, or the Carolina Abecedarian project, conducted in North Carolina from 1972 to 1985. The results from these two interventions have been particularly impressive and influential.”
In fact, Head Start produces NO long term gain in academic performance. The reason may be that Head Start has chosen NOT to teach reading readiness. If I find the cite, I’ll post it
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?
Sorry, I misstated. I meant to criticize School Lunch program, rather than Food Stamps.
What[voucher] experimentation? Again, where are your facts and your quantitative results?
Fair question. I’ll have to try to find some cites.
Also, as I pointed out above, your attempt to apply “economic theory” to this issue is significantly flawed.
I’d like to discuss this in greater detail. Your cite was not on point. Can you tell us which characteristics of education make the usual economic model inapproprate, in your opinion?
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.)
Cutting through this paragraph, I see that you are aware that Catholic schools have out-performed public schools. And Catholic schools spend far less per student. We can look for excuses or we can look for ways to get the benefit of superior education to as many students as possible ASAP. So in the last analysis, that [other approaches have repeated failed] is 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?
Three points
I think there is good evidence that vouchers will work. There are cites, which I will seek. Can any other posters find some?
Doing the same thing that has failed over and over is a guaranteed failure
Waiting for some ideal society to arrive is backwards. Teaching every kid to read and do math is a powerful and necessary step toward creating the sort of society the three of you are seeking.
(though he still ducked wring’s point that about the public school system’s economies of scale)
Huh – I listed 8 ways in which public schools are inefficient, any one of which more than offsets economies of scale. Actually I’m not sure that schools have ANY economies of scale. Economies of scale are often over-valued. I worked for a company that had a 4% overhead expense ratio. It was taken over by a larger company with 8% overhead. The combined company now has 10% overhead. Methods of operating had far, far more impact than “scale”.
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.
I certainly agree that public schools have served poor children well in the past, e.g., myself. That was before teachers unions, huge Federal and State Departments of Education, huge university education departements filled with dumbos, and goofy, restrictive court decisions. It’s unclear whether these powerful, reactionary forces can be overcome.
To me, that doesn’t prove at all conclusively that the best solution is to “phase out” public schools entirely.
My hope would be that faced with real competition, public schools would get the cojones to overcome the reactionary listed above. There are many economic areas where public and private provider compete, and both provide good service. Parcel delivery and Workers’ Compensation Insurance are two examples.
Kimstu, your final argument sounds almost like blackmail, as if public education were saying, “Don’t make us face competition, or we may not survive at all.” Well, if public schools can’t be made good enough to provide a competitive education, then good riddance!. *
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.
Interesting point. It’s not clear why for-profit schools couldn’t be started. Also, charitable institutions in addition to the Catholic Church might start schools, given a base of students with tuition money available. (On another thread, I mentioned the for-profit U. of Phoenix, which is doiong fine. Typically, the public education establlishment recently prevented them from expanding into New Jersey.)
** 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. **
Actually, that has been done to a degree. I’ll try to find a cite.
*However, I am of the opinion that those who prefer the socialist method tend to dismiss any idea of privitizing education as a priori doomed to failure, and since it has never been tried in this country since the introduction of public schooling, IMO, quake in fear that one more vestige of their socialism might topple. *
While I recognize that there are a lot of entrenched interests blocking useful innovation, in this as in any other field, I think you’re overstating it to call support for public education “socialist”. Remember, nobody is objecting to private schools or to free charity schools, for that matter; nobody is saying that the state should have a monopoly on education. We’re just concerned about the prospect of turning so much public money over to private concerns that are not answerable as public institutions, especially when there’s so little solid evidence that it would be an improvement over the current system. (And if we’re going to talk about ulterior motives, of course, we have to consider those of many voucher supporters, some of whom simply want to feed their own educational hobbyhorses at the public trough, and others of whom simply want to look as though they’re doing something about inner-city children’s education without actually spending the money to reclaim the inner cities.)
I think it’s also somewhat exaggerated to imply that there is equal opposition to any introduction of market leverage in childhood education. A number of educators (including, I believe, the NEA itself) have looked very favorably on programs involving charter schools, magnet schools, and public school choice, and worked hard to implement them. These innovations, though they certainly have been far from an unqualified success, do increase parents’ power to reward good schools and punish bad ones, without sowing taxpayers’ money broadcast over the private-education spectrum.
(december, the fact that the World Bank report was not specifically about the privatization of education does not invalidate the particular points it stated about market failures in education, which were mentioned in a section specifically titled “Market Analysis in Education”, which is about as “on-point” as you can get. Therefore, I repeat that in my opinion, the “characteristics of education that make the usual economic model inapproprate” are: its far-reaching externalities, its systematic undervaluation, and failures in associated markets. And I note that so far, you have still failed to provide a single damn piece of factual evidence to support your objections to this or any other of my points, though you feel qualified to dismiss the evidence I provided as “self-serving bullshit” simply on the basis of your own opinion. I’m afraid I don’t consider that an adequate counter-argument.)
This is a large problem, and one which december, like many voucher advocates, would have us believe is deceptively simple.
If your proscription drug doesn’t work, you can ask your doctor for alternatives.
If you are not satisfied with your car, grab an auto magazine, make a decision, and get another one.
Therefore, market believers argue, if you are not satisfied with your child’s education, select a more competitive school.
In the first two examples, when one is purchasing a product, it is relatively easy to cut one’s losses after a bad investment and move on. I do not believe that the reality for education is so cut and dried. There are several extra considerations one must make when evaluating schools.
[ul]
[li]Most commodities are such that you can make a trial of them first before committing yourself irrevocably. Education, however, requires a serious commitment on the part of the parent and the child. It is not such a wise course to yank your child from school to school until you are satisfied: one may window shop, but one school shops at his peril.[/li][li]Given the cumulative nature of education, it is not quite enough to say, "my child can’t read: time to send him to a new school. It can be extremely difficult to tell how to judge a child’s progress appropriately since an overwhelming number of variables, many having nothing to do with his education, play their parts.[/li][li]If a parent is given the opportunity to choose, on what data should he or she base his choice? Test scores? The jury is still out in the correlation between high test scores and good education. Do you trust self-congratulating propaganda issued by the schools themselves to attract students and parents? Do you believe every ad you see on TV? Or would you prefer to create another towering federal bureaucracy whose sole purpose is analyzing and evaluating charter and private schools?[/li][li]Finally, the very act of making a decision to change a child’s school interferes with his education. There are few education experts who would argue that moving a child around is inherently beneficial to his education. Therefore, with the exception of special needs, it simply doesn’t seem like such a good idea to be moving problem inner-city children around in order to place them in the most competitive schools. After all, when a child suffers after being moved, doesn’t this rather negate the benefit of the move itself? You can’t adequately judge a school until you’ve tried it, but once you try it, you foul up your own control group, namely, the child himself.[/li][/ul]
december, it seems that your contempt for the education industry is fueling your support for school vouchers. Please correct me if I am mistaken.
Frankly, I think correcting this country’s education woes is so important that it should not be subordinated to a particular political agenda. You have been asked to provide cites throughout this entire discussion. You say you will several times, but you have not yet put up. I think we would all appreciate it if you would either admit that your political/ideological agenda overwhelmingly informs your views on this matter or that you are simply unable to drum up the proof that you need to justify the voucher experiment.
*Originally posted by Kimstu *
**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… I quote:
"In education, there are several notable market failures. […] The ones which are most commonly listed are…
[/quote]
**
Kimstu – You have hit on one key to the voucher debate, “…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.” You think normal economic theory doesn’t apply to the purchase of education by students (and their parents); I think it does.
I appreciate your cite to the World Bank study. Unfortunately, it’s about a somewhat different subject – namely how much money an overall society should devote to education. The quotes aren’t relevant to our debate.
…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.
First of all, these things may be a good idea, but they aren’t going to happen. Also, even if they did, the inner city parent still would have no power over her child’s education. With vouchers, she’d have the power to select the school.
** 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.**
This is a another key difference. You think public oversight is more important than parental choice; I think the opposite. Public oversight is valuable when the consumer can’t tell on her own how good the product or service is. E.g., prescription drug effectiveness, bank solvency, food safety. But, parents can easily tell whether their children are learning to read or not.
**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. **
Fair enough. I saw a study reported in the NY Times that showed Black students on vouchers making big gains in math, with little change in their reading. I’ll try to find a cite or two.
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.
This timing is backwards. We have to try it first, in order to find out how effective it is. The education lobby is using all their power to prevent such experiments from taking place.
…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)
Huh? Public schools’ tax base comes from the value of the local real estate + per pupil state supplements. If there are fewer students in the public schools, then the funding per student increases.
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.
Holy smoke, Kimstu, do you seriously not know how to recognize self-serving bullshit? My daughter was hungry at some time during the experience period – she fasted on Yom Kippur! This is a statement by people involved in the hunger business. Please don’t use it as an excuse to deprive these kids of a decent education.
…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?
I can’t think of a polite way to respond to this. Suffice it to say, that many people in the past, including immigrants in my own family, managed to diligently pursue education although they had very little money.
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?
This boy got a great education living in a car and while hs family was living with another family. Why can’t a child living in a shelter learn how to read and do arithmetic?
If the inner cities can’t be improved, how are they going to attract private education providers to serve them?
This is where basic economics comes into play. People with money will attract providers. Welfare has been extremely successful in attracting drug dealer to the inner city!
**If you expected them [Head Start and School Lunch]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:
More self-serving bullshit. Note that the study says, “Most of the evidence regarding the long-term effectiveness of early intervention comes not from evaluations of Head Start, but from studies of “model” early intervention programs such as the famous Perry Preschool project, which took place in Michigan between 1962 and 1967, or the Carolina Abecedarian project, conducted in North Carolina from 1972 to 1985. The results from these two interventions have been particularly impressive and influential.”
In fact, Head Start produces NO long term gain in academic performance. The reason may be that Head Start has chosen NOT to teach reading readiness. If I find the cite, I’ll post it
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?
Sorry, I misstated. I meant to criticize School Lunch program, rather than Food Stamps.
What[voucher] experimentation? Again, where are your facts and your quantitative results?
Fair question. I’ll have to try to find some cites.
Also, as I pointed out above, your attempt to apply “economic theory” to this issue is significantly flawed.
I’d like to discuss this in greater detail. Your cite was not on point. Can you tell us which characteristics of education make the usual economic model inapproprate, in your opinion?
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.)
Cutting through this paragraph, I see that you are aware that Catholic schools have out-performed public schools. And Catholic schools spend far less per student. We can look for excuses or we can look for ways to get the benefit of superior education to as many students as possible ASAP. So in the last analysis, that [other approaches have repeated failed] is 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?
Three points
I think there is good evidence that vouchers will work. There are cites, which I will seek. Can any other posters find some?
Doing the same thing that has failed over and over is a guaranteed failure
Waiting for some ideal society to arrive is backwards. Teaching every kid to read and do math is a powerful and necessary step toward creating the sort of society the three of you are seeking.
(though he still ducked wring’s point that about the public school system’s economies of scale)…
Huh? I listed 8 ways in which public schools are inefficient, any one of which more than offsets economies of scale. Actually I’m not sure that schools have ANY economies of scale. Economies of scale are often over-valued. I worked for a company that had a 4% overhead expense ratio. It was taken over by a larger company with 8% overhead. The combined company now has 10% overhead. Methods of operating had far, far more impact than “scale”.
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.
I certainly agree that public schools have served poor children well in the past, e.g., myself. That was before teachers unions, huge Federal and State Departments of Education, huge university education departements filled with dumbos, and goofy, restrictive court decisions. It’s unclear whether these powerful, reactionary forces can be overcome.
To me, that doesn’t prove at all conclusively that the best solution is to “phase out” public schools entirely.
My hope would be that faced with real competition, public schools would get the cojones to overcome the reactionaries listed above. There are many economic areas where public and private provider compete, and both provide good service. Parcel delivery and Workers’ Compensation Insurance are two examples.
Kimstu, your final argument sounds almost like blackmail, as if public education were saying, “Don’t make us face competition, or we may not survive at all.” Well, if public schools can’t be made good enough to provide a competitive education, then good riddance!
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.
Interesting point. It’s not clear why for-profit schools couldn’t be started. Also, charitable institutions in addition to the Catholic Church might start schools, given a base of students with tuition money available. (On another thread, I mentioned the for-profit U. of Phoenix, which is doiong fine. Typically, the public education establlishment recently prevented them from expanding into New Jersey.)
** 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. **
Actually, that has been done to a degree. I’ll try to find a cite.
*Originally posted by Kimstu * I think it’s also somewhat exaggerated to imply that there is equal opposition to any introduction of market leverage in childhood education. A number of educators (including, I believe, the NEA itself) have looked very favorably on programs involving charter schools, magnet schools, and public school choice, and worked hard to implement them. These innovations, though they certainly have been far from an unqualified success, do increase parents’ power to reward good schools and punish bad ones, without sowing taxpayers’ money broadcast over the private-education spectrum.
This is true, as far as it goes. Trouble is that the NEA wants these charter schools, etc. burdened with all the same garbage that makes public schools ineffective. However, I agree that providing some choice to parents is a positive step.
december, the fact that the World Bank report was not specifically about the privatization of education does not invalidate the particular points it stated about market failures in education, which were mentioned in a section specifically titled “Market Analysis in Education”, which is about as “on-point” as you can get.
Not so. The WB report deals with whether a society will spend as much as they ought to on education. We are discussing whether vouchers could lead to a more effective, competitive education system
Therefore, I repeat that in my opinion, the “characteristics of education that make the usual economic model inapproprate” are: its far-reaching externalities, its systematic undervaluation, and failures in associated markets.
Earth to Kimstu:
“Far-reaching externalities” means that education benefits society as well as the individual.
“Systematic undervaluation” sometimes occurs, e.g., when a society is unconcerned about educating girls.
“Failures in associated markets” means it’s sometimes hard to get education loans.
None of these concepts apply to a parent’s decision to move her child from a lousy public school into a superior private school, when funding is available.
And I note that so far, you have still failed to provide a single damn piece of factual evidence to support your objections to this or any other of my points…
Fair enough. Try http://www.schoolchoices.org/roo/vouchers.htm
This is an enormous site about school choice. One could spend days reading the entire discussion, studies, etc. Here’s a small sample:
**though you feel qualified to dismiss the evidence I provided as “self-serving bullshit” simply on the basis of your own opinion. I’m afraid I don’t consider that an adequate counter-argument.) **
Sorry. I’m an expert in statistics, and this work is professionally offensive to me.
Please look again at the wording of the hunger statistic. The definition is extremely loose. Someone who was hungry just once is counted. Someone who was never hungry is counted, if he’s “at risk of hunger,” whatever that means. And, this must be a self-reported, retrospective survey – the worst kind. They called people and asked, “Were you ever hungry during a specified period?”
Given the nature of the organization, it seems apparent that it was in their self-interest to get a large total of “hungry” people, and they designed the survey to do just that.
Maeglin – I bet you haven’t had children of your own in school. 25 years ago my wife and I were big supporters of public schools. It was a bit traumatic when we put our older daughter into a small private school for 2 years (Black Pine Circle in Berkeley, CA). But, we had little doubt that the move was necessary. After she was there, it was glaringly obvious that she was much better off. Parents generally know this stuff.
In my mind, it comes down to letting the people who care the most make the decision about the child. My wife and I cared totally. The teachers cared some, but they were burdened with a lot of outside constraints. The principals were busy with other things. Outside parties, such as teachers unions, state and federal departments of education, university education departments – they didn’t know anything about my daughter.
I don’t claim that parents will always make the best decision, but I think they’ll have a much higher batting average then some education bureaucracy.
december - "earth to Kimstu? " was that necessary?
Given the hard time you gave her about her proof for kids going to school hungry, I find it downright funny that you offer, as support of anything for your argument, a cite from “schoolvouchersR Us” (ok, schoolschoice.org)
I agree that parents care enormously about what happens in their kids school day. I disagree that every parent will have the opportunities you assume they’ll have to deal with things.
you keep on giving anectdotal info. Well, ok, here’s the rebuttal to that. I was a single mom with child in inner city public school. There were some horrific teachers (but frankly there were some horrific teachers at the local Christian school, the local charter school, the local Catholic school and 2 other private schools that have opened up in recent times - one of them was arrested and convicted of picking up 2 girls, taking them to his house, giving them booze and screwing them - they were 14 years old each, but I digress). There were some awful administrators, too. But, there were also some absolutely terrific teachers, administrators and staff. Privitization doesn’t guarentee better teachers/staff.
I’m assuming that you point out the lack of unionization as a ‘money saver’ assumes that people will be paid less, perhaps with less benefits as well? And you believe this will lead to a higher quality of staff because??? While I don’t necessarily believe that high wages guarentee excellence in staff, low wages make it a real challenge.
Back to the ‘anectdotals’ since they seem to be the only way you understand. I was greatly involved in my son’s schools - especially the elementary one. I volunteered in his classroom for 2 hours every week, tutoring some of the other kids, doing art projects, helping the teacher etc.
Things I noticed that would not be helped in any way by what you propose:
Yes, there were kids who went hungry. Some of the families were so poor that the kids only had one or two outfits to wear. One teacher noticed a young boy who was teased constantly for being ‘stinky’ and discovered that he only had one pair of underwear. She made sure that was taken care of. Something like 80% of the school were eligible for free or reduced price lunches. Which guarenteed that they got one meal a day.
mobility - as I mentioned before (and linked with a site with numbers) the mobility of the students causes quite a few problems, especially in the early years - fragmentation of lessons on how to read, use arithmatic make for a large struggle. the homeless issue is just another more difficult facet - some of the kids parents become homeless and go to live in a shelter. I met people who had to catch two busses with their kids in order to get them to school from the homeless shelter, and then back again.
Many of the students came from homes with issues. In Ben’s class of 26 students, there were about 8 who had two parents. The rest were grand parents, one parent, one parent in jail, etc. In a single parent home, any event can become catestophic - car breaks down, no transportation for anyone to get anywhere - parent ill, sibling ill etc. There was one girl who sometimes brought her baby sister (age 2) to class, since there was no one else to leave the child with. Choice for the family: do without 1/5 of the weekly income, have Sheila stay home from school and miss class, have Sheila take sis to school.
Vouchers will be a really nifty thing for folks who have access to transportation, have enough disposable income in order to supplement the additional costs, have the parental time to devote to getting the child to the school, to after school events, to parent/teacher settings etc.; and for a school that has (as Kimstu has pointed out) an established setting, foundation upon which to draw etc.
In addition, public schools are required by law to act in the open, to have open meetings, and to be accountable. Present proposals for vouchered schools would eliminate the public access to ‘how is our money being spent’?
Again, I would ask for some support for your contention of economic savings, for example, that public schools have such an administrative overhead that it would count out the savings for large settings. (the costs for Catholic Schools would have to include the overhead that is provided by the supporting church for example).
december: *None of these [economic] concepts apply to a parent’s decision to move her child from a lousy public school into a superior private school, when funding is available. *
But they do apply to the ability and likelihood of unaided markets’ actually succeeding in providing superior schools, which is what I’ve been talking about.
*"Recently, a reanalysis of the raw data [on the Milwaukee voucher program] by statisticians and educational researchers from Harvard and the University of Houston found that choice students do indeed benefit academically from the program, showing significant gains in both reading and mathematics by their fourth year of participation. *
Well, if you’re going to complain about cites from self-serving institutions, you can’t exactly argue that the heavily libertarian “schoolchoices.org” is an unbiased source! In any case, the conclusions you mention are far from universally accepted as valid: consider this rebuttal (from a source with opposite bias, I note):
Doesn’t sound to me as though that constitutes very clear evidence that voucher systems are the solution. In fact, it seems to argue more for the claims of other posters that the special problems of education for poor inner-city children don’t go away just because they change schools.
Please look again at the wording of the hunger statistic. The definition is extremely loose. Someone who was hungry just once is counted. Someone who was never hungry is counted, if he’s “at risk of hunger,” whatever that means.
So you think that poor people in the U.S. don’t go hungry? Take a look at the Wisconsin Medical Journal’s discussion of another study (which was also mentioned at the FRAC site):
Like I said, what the hell do you think is implied by the existence of, and the often intense drain on, food banks and soup kitchens? That all the people using them are just too lazy to cook or too stingy to buy their own groceries? Do you really, honestly think that there isn’t a significant number of poor people in America who have trouble affording a regular supply of adequate food? Why? Never mind just griping about my evidence (though I think you’ll have trouble dismissing the USDA study in the same way), where’s your evidence to the contrary?
And all of this is an avoidance of my basic question in response to your suggestion that vouchers should cover “most” of private school tuition: to wit, how are poor people who have problems affording food and shelter going to pay tuition too? Your closest attempt at a real response was a moralistic lecture about how your own hard-working immigrant relatives “pursued education” although they were poor. Yeah, great, mine too. We could just define the whole problem of inner-city education out of existence with that kind of reasoning: everyone should simply overcome the disadvantages of their environment and work to succeed at their schooling! I’m beginning to agree with Maeglin that your intention here is not, as your OP misleadingly suggests, to identify the most likely candidates for real solutions to this problem, but simply to bash the government in general and public education in particular. Fine, have fun.
[Note added in preview: thanks wring, ya beat me to it. :)]
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Kimstu *
** But [these economic concepts] do apply to the ability and likelihood of unaided markets’ actually succeeding in providing superior schools, which is what I’ve been talking about. **
Sorry, I don’t understand. I explained what each concept meant why each of them don’t apply to this situation. Can you explain or demonstrate how each of them does apply?
**In any case, the conclusions you mention are far from universally accepted as valid: **
This is true. It’s controversial, as are most new approaches. But, you must admit that there have been a number of favorable results.
**So you think that poor people in the U.S. don’t go hungry? Take a look at… **
Impressive material. Perhaps there is a greater hunger problem than I realized.
Decades ago we saw hungry people on TV or in pictures. One of my favorite works of art is a photo called “Migrant Mother” by Dorothea Lange, which shows a mother and her children, obviously hungry, during the Depression. But, I can’t remember the last time I saw a hungry person on TV. Nor have I seen any on the streets of Newark, NJ, where my wife works. Neither has my wife mentioned ever seeing starving people in the inner city hospital and medical school where she teaches. I can’t refute your statistics, yet I wonder: Where are they?
And all of this is an avoidance of my basic question in response to your suggestion that vouchers should cover “most” of private school tuition: to wit, how are poor people who have problems affording food and shelter going to
pay tuition too?
Is this a rhetorical question? These very poor people couldn’t afford any co-pay. They would need vouchers and/or supplements that covered the full cost of private or parochial school. If that amount money were available, their children could attend private school as easily as public school. BTW if they did, the next generation might be able to read, and might not be so poor.
I’m beginning to agree with Maeglin that your intention here is not, as your OP misleadingly suggests, to identify the most likely candidates for real solutions to this problem, but simply to bash the government in general and public education in particular.
Illustrating an all-too-common difference between liberals and conservatives. I think we’re in a state of emergency, where 60% of inner city 4th graders are illiterate or so. I don’t believe the approach favored by you and Maeglin will help at all. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t question your sincerity and good will.
I did student teaching in an inner-city school in Inkster, MI. Inkster High is the name that sends shivers through the bodies of any school teacher that reads teaching magazines. It’s hands down the worst school in MI and is one of the worst in the country.
Imagine everything you think about inner-city high schools. This is worse. Children arrested daily right in the middle of class. 1/3 of the students are kids expelled from Detroit’s inner-city schools(pretty bad as it is) because of either prison sentences or other reasons.
Last year, the school board had allocated money so poorly that the school was finally bankrupt and was going to shut down. A company called Edison bought the entire school district to re-work it, but didn’t want the high school(no quick results from a high school). They were forced to take it and in the end, did.
Unfortunately, all Edison has done is bought the school new text books(12th graders are using 8th grade books) and left the school on its own. Their strategy has been to simply allow the current students to pass through the system and go to live in the ghettos like their families.
The students know this also. They know they are screwed. They know they are “stupid”(only in that they were not given an education) and that they are going to be living in ghettos while working at factories(taking jobs below what you would normally consider blue-collar).
How did it get this way? Most of the reasons are listed here and I’ll sum up what I have actually seen
Apathetic Parents- almost no parental involvement. 75% of these students were born illegetimitely and over half of those had the fathers ditch 'em. These kids barely see their mothers, who work nights and days to provide enough money combined with welfare to scrape by.
Apathetic Teachers- The teachers are worn out. Day after day of crime, apathy, and ignorance wears on teachers who have been there for a long time. Their hope has been quenched by the fact that over 72% of students who start ninth grade drop out by 12th. Another 15% drop out their senior year. The teachers don’t care. Just punching a clock for the most part.
Uncontrolled Crime and disease- Drugs, Sex, and Rock and Roll(or Rap). Because of their lack of parental control, these kids have traded in their entire future for pleasure for a few years. Over 95% of African American males have lost their virginity by the age of 16. AIDS is rampant. Pregnancy is rampant. Poverty produces Poverty. Death produces death. Drug use is beyond what you would imagine(kids here *can[/] smoke in the bathrooms, just as long as it’s not crack or pot- sort of a deal struck with 'em).
What can be done? I don’t know, but I can tell you what they have tried.
The school runs in what is called a “lockdown mode”, which is essentialy a prison-school. Every day, each student is searched and goes through a metal detector. An Inkster cop along with other guards walk the halls, ready to make arrests and stop any trouble.
When the bell rings, the kids are forced immediately into classrooms, even if that means not getting to their class sometimes(teachers take anyone anytime pretty much). The halls are silent during class.
The students I worked with(mostly 11-12 garders) spend most of their time filling out scholarships and college applications. The idea is that the school will help them with this on the off-shot that one in 40(that’s how pitifuly small the senior class has diminished to) will actually enroll, attend, and pass college.
All the students(within reason) get into college because of affirmitive action(poverty and race) and scholarships.
Almost none attend. Last year’s valedictorian did not attend college even. Those who do attend get expelled because they are not up to par(both academicaly and with relation to work ethic).
In the end, there is very little I can see that can be done with Inkster High school and all the simliar schools out there. Immediate change is nearly impossibe. Indeed, the current juniors and seniors are, in effect, screwed.
While I was there, I spent most of my time working one on one with students trying to help they raise their writing ability(which is at best at a forth grade level) to the level that will help them pass a remedial level comp. class at a community college(I taught English, by the way). I think some have hope in that area, but I tend to think that they will struggle with something else and ultimately fail. I know it sounds negative, but there is hope, at least in my eyes.
I just feel terrible for the students who have to attend there for the next 4-6 years while Edison is busy fixing the elementary and ignoring the high school. They have effectively been stamped “doomed”.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask. I was actually thinking of starting a “Ask the former Inner-City High school teacher thread” but there have been so many of those lately.
I also believe that crime is a direct byproduct of the environment you grew up in. For instance, I grew up in the middle of Phoenix, AZ. For those that know, Phoenix is not a rich city. It’s its suburbs that are decent with good funding, and I grew up in what you could only call the equivalent of South Central L.A. It only made matters worse that I was white. White people are automatically disrespected around there, it didn’t matter if you were poor or not. I grew up being called ‘cracker’, ‘white boy’, ‘Jew’(which is still in heavy rotation around there… it’s really uncool to be a Jew) and got into a lot of fights. My parents raised me to be a pacifist, though. So, through Elementary and Junior High School, I just took the punishment. But when I got into high school(Graduate of Alhambra High), I had to fight back. My life was in danger a lot of times. So, I fought back with everything I had, and just ended up getting into more fights with multiple people at the same time. I was fighting for my life, though. I’m not proud of it, but by the time I was out of high school, I’d killed two people. I earned their respect, but at a heavy price. I’m out of that neighborhood now, thank God, with a decent enough job to discover the Internet and the knowledge within.
Point is, if I had lived in Scottsdale, a rich suburb with funding galore, do you think I would have had the same experiences growing up? I doubt it. When you’re in a poor neighborhood, everything’s hopeless and it seems like there’s no way out. It’s all too appealing and glamorous when you see drug dealers drive by in brand-new Cadillacs with 3 women cruising along to just sign on with them and start dealing. You want to live the American Dream so bad that you’ll do anything to get out of that neighborhood.
Back to the OT: the only way to get kids a better future is to get better funding to those schools. You’ve gotta get rid of the poverty before anything good will happen.
The situation in the schools is going to mirror the situation in the homes and neighborhoods. I am a mail carrier and I am seeing this happen right now on my route and it upsets me to no end, but to solve the school’s problems would require solving the community problems.
The situation in brief … I have two apartment buildings on the route. The rest is single family homes with very few rentals. The neighborhood is about half black, half white, and considered to be a desirable and safe area. At least it was till now.
There is an elementary school located on a quiet street within walking distance of all the kids on my route. It has always been a good school with no real problems. Till now.
About nine months ago a woman and her boyfriend moved into the one set of apartments. (These are ground level apts with doors all leading outside) Soon thereafter, she moved one of her kids (with grandkids) in with her. They got their own apt in the same building, and she repeated the process with three other kids. There are at least a dozen grandkids now residing there.
These children are unbelievable. It’s not the poverty issue because none of the children in that area are well off. These kids are being raised by parents (most unmarried) who have filthy mouths, no respect for other people, no concern for the children, and they take no responsibility for the damage their children cause. They are also racist, which isn’t helping the situation any.
Now we have brawls on the playground. There used to be serious fights on the way home from school, but the school now releases the offending children ten minutes early. The idea behind that is to get them home before the other kids get out, but it doesn’t always work. There are police at the complex nearly every day. The quiet people are moving out and the place is overrun with garbage and bottles.
These people are still producing children. The only solution I can see is to take those kids straight from the maternity ward and drop them in the prison. They are headed there anyway and it could save everyone else a lot of grief.
december, I am really disappointed that you chose not to reply to my analysis in the spirit it was given. I gave you four, discrete bullet points of argument, yet you responded with a hackneyed anecdote.
If the shoe fits…
Yes, just like we are in a state of emergency with urban poverty and the utter decay of the skilled urban industrial base. Why do so many conservatives espouse radical changes in education yet balk at welfare or the Earned Income Tax Credit?
The fact is, you and everyone else who has tried to advocate vouchers on the boards has lost. Resoundingly. Vouchers have been defeated by referendum in every state they were instituted.
***…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? **
I can’t think of a polite way to respond to this. Suffice it to say, that many people in the past, including immigrants in my own family, managed to diligently pursue education although they had very little money.
**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? **
This boy got a great education living in a car and while hs family was living with another family. Why can’t a child living in a shelter learn how to read and do arithmetic? *
Its not just the poverty. Or just the hunger. Yes, hungry, poor people can indeed learn. Its that hungry, poor, lost people from the ghetto **no longer see any reason to want to learn. ** And if kids see no reason to learn, place no value on education, and have no logical wish to learn, they won’t.
Children from families that place value on education will strive to learn. Those are the families that vouchers will help. Vouchers would enable them to choose schools, etc. They will find the money and fins the spirit to learn when they are hungry because learning is more important for them than food.
Its the mulititude of families from a culture that places no value on education that vouchers will do nothing for or possibly harm. And until we, as a culture, can induce a value into education in the inner cities we will be unable to show children why they should study when they are hungry and there is pot to be smoked. Vouchers will do nothing for this. For these nearly lost souls, vouchers will merely cost them money they don’t have and encourage them to drop out sooner.
You’re right, we can’t just sit around waiting for society to be perfect. But to face this problem we have to look it full on and find ways to support both the willing and the unwilling. Vouchers only support the willing. Programs like Head Start are designed to try to inspire kids to place a value on education. They create a desire to learn, and when done well, that desire can combat homelessness, hunger, and poverty.
Without that desire however, vouchers are not even a partial solution.
*Originally posted by Maeglin *
**. december, I am really disappointed that you chose not to reply to my analysis in the spirit it was given. I gave you four, discrete bullet points of argument, yet you responded with a hackneyed anecdote. **
OK – I was busy responding to some others. Here’s yours…
**This [public oversight vs parental choice] is a large problem, and one which december, like many voucher advocates, would have us believe is deceptively simple.
– If your prescription drug doesn’t work, you can ask your doctor for alternatives.
– If you are not satisfied with your car, grab an auto magazine, make a decision, and get another one.
Therefore, market believers argue, if you are not satisfied with your child’s education, select a more competitive school.
…There are several extra considerations one must make when evaluating schools.
– … It is not such a wise course to yank your child from school to school until you are satisfied: one may window shop, but one school shops at his peril.
– … it is not quite enough to say, "my child can’t read: time to send him to a new school. It can be extremely difficult to tell how to judge a child’s progress appropriately since an overwhelming number of variables, many having nothing to do with his education, play their parts.
– If a parent is given the opportunity to choose, on what data should he or she base his choice?.. Or would you prefer to create another towering federal bureaucracy whose sole purpose is analyzing and evaluating charter and private schools?
– Finally, the very act of making a decision to change a child’s school interferes with his education. There are few education experts who would argue that moving a child around is inherently beneficial to his education. Therefore, with the exception of special needs, it simply doesn’t seem like such a good idea to be moving problem inner-city children around in order to place them in the most competitive schools. After all, when a child suffers after being moved, doesn’t this rather negate the benefit of the move itself? You can’t adequately judge a school until you’ve tried it, but once you try it, you foul up your own control group, namely, the child himself.**
Maeglin – I appreciate your setting out a list which defines your POV. Here’s my response:
I agree with you that the decision is not simple.
I articulated a principle that a government decision may be better when the public lacks the information or technical knowledge to make a good decision on their own.
I don’t agree with drug approval example. Neither the public nor an individual physician can evaluate a prescription drug’s safety and efficacy, so it’s desirable that the FDA to be in charge. of course, the selection of a particular medicine is up to the patient and her doctor.
You correctly stated my opinion regarding the purchase of a car. (Although I appreciate certain government requirements, such as standardized fuel efficiency figures.)
Reviewing your 4 bullet points, you seem to be saying that a parent is not well-equipped to choose her child’s school because there are complex aspects to the decision. Having raised children, I had argued that the parent IS pretty well equipped to make these decisions.
Now, I want to focus on the other side: How good are school system’s decisions for an individual child i.e., for *my[/] child? I contend they’re often mediocre. Why?
– Many people in the schools aren’t very smart. If you want to see evidence, spend some time perusing http://www.ztnightmares.com/
– Many are too overburdened with duties and with regulations to do much about the special needs of a particular child.
– Principles can take priority over individuals. E.g., A school in Berkeley wouldn’t let my daughter move out of a bad 4th grade class situation because the school was more focused on racial balance than on the quality of her education.
– A school system will have more psychological expertise than a parent, but I’m not sure all their theories are valid.
– Offsetting their technical expertise, the school doesn’t understand my child anywhere near as well as I do.
– The points above apply to GOOD school systems. Some schools are really bad.
Maeglin I actually agreed with your POV in 1970 when my first child entered school. And, some schools and educators were a lot better than others. I have learned from experience that parental involvement is crucial when making good educational choices for one’s child. In fact schools have sometimes stood in the way of the decision that was best for my child
Interesting, isn’t it that the self avowed ‘expert statistician’, offers up only anecdotal and op-ed pieces as evidence?
as in “many people in schools aren’t smart” and evidenced by the most outrageous examples of zero tolerance policies (which in general are often mandated by legislatures and not by the schools).
I submit that there is ample evidence at this time that december has a personal agenda. Which is fine, of course, everyone’s entitled to their opinion. However, once again, to offer up as ‘evidence’ of the claim ‘most people in schools aren’t smart’ that web site demonstrates an incredible lack of understanding of the common usage of the word ‘evidence’. Even if we take each and every example listed there as ‘proof’ that the persons involved weren’t ‘smart’, there certainly isn’t sufficient numbers there to justify the statement “many people in schools aren’t smart”.
No one has ever “lost”, whatever that means. That we might have failed to convince the anti’s that it’s a great idea, true, but we have always been successful at advocating vouchers.
In fact, I’ve never really ever seen someone “win” a GD, and that’s not even what we want to do! You see, if I break through Kimstu’s ultra-liberal barrier (if that’s even possible), she will no longer be Kimstu. Where would be the fun in that? Her ideas do sometimes gel with my own (us Libertarians are liberal on the social scale) but I would never learn anything if everyone agreed all the time.
And that vouchers, or any great idea, have been defeated by referendums mean nothing to those of us who believe in our hearts that the idea not only has merit, but that will change this country for the better. We just suck at convincing the uninformed.
No one has ever “lost”, whatever that means. That we might have failed to convince the anti’s that it’s a great idea, true, but we have always been successful at advocating vouchers.
In fact, I’ve never really ever seen someone “win” a GD, and that’s not even what we want to do! You see, if I break through Kimstu’s ultra-liberal barrier (if that’s even possible), she will no longer be Kimstu. Where would be the fun in that? Her ideas do sometimes gel with my own (us Libertarians are liberal on the social scale) but I would never learn anything if everyone agreed all the time.
And that vouchers, or any great idea, have been defeated by referendums means nothing to those of us who believe in our hearts that the idea not only has merit, but that will change this country for the better. We just suck at convincing the uninformed.
