Is Public Education Broken?

Great Debates
21

Re: Vouchers

Again, Fleeing in droves to where? Once all the good schools are filled (and most of them are already), then what?
You have to consider why it is that private schools are preferable to public schools. Smaller class sizes, more disciplined students, higher academic standards, nuns…
The main thing that makes private schools so successful is that they weed out students who don’t fit the mold, they have no obligation to educate the student who doesn’t walk a straight line, color nicely, and has difficulty sitting still. That kid gets kicked out of private school.
It’s easy (by comparison) to show good results if all you have are smart, well behaved kids, and not too many of them.
With vouchers, what changes about that formula?

Re: Education as an industry.

I think that’s a problem in perspective. Education shouldn’t be viewed as industry. It should be viewed as a cooperative effort between parents, teachers, business, the community, the students, all of us. It’s something we do because we want educated people, not becuase we want to “win.”

When you use competition to foster education, you are treating the learning as a by-product, a side effect of the higher goal which is winning. This is how we rob children of their natural curiosity and turn their desire to learn into a chore.

To think of education as industry is what’s obtuse.

22

Back again. I wrote a brief article a while back on class-size reduction. Here’s the article, which has links to my sources at the end:

http://alfredo.ucdavis.edu/satori/article.cfm?art=15
And as far as school competition, skutir, hiring business consultants and management professionals isn’t what I had in mind. Businesses do that frequently, as well, and they have similarly poor results. In general, shelling out big bucks to have an efficiency expert come in and reorganize is a poor use of resources. I was talking about good old fashioned competition. Schools are funded on a per-student basis, generally. When the students start fleeing, the teachers and admins will be forced to improve, or else there are going to be layoffs. If the people running the schools know they have job security whether they do a good job or not, do you really think they’re going to put much effort into improvement?

There’s empirical evidence to support the success of school competition, as areas where voucher programs are in effect throughout the nation, in the long term, see improvements in both the public and private schools. I’ll try to find some cites for this, but it was stuff I read offline, so wish me luck.

And KnowItAll, that $13,500 price tag isn’t the same everywhere. Private schools in my area are significantly cheaper - much more in line with the $4000 price tag I mentioned, and some much cheaper. It’s a function of demand and supply.

What I would also like to see are more charter schools. They seem to do remarkably well, and would be much more affordable. Perhaps that could be a viable alternative for areas where parents couldn’t afford private schools even with vouchers.

The main reason I support vouchers, though, is just a matter of fairness. I don’t think parents should be forced to pay for their kids to be sent to crappy schools. If there’s an alternative out there, parents should be given a chance to take advantage of it.
Jeff

23

I see you cite the highly objective Heritage Foundation in your article, Jeff. Unfortunately, the link to the HF resource fails.

Here’s some reading for you:

http://tampatrib.com/News/columns/MGAYC699Q4D.html

http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/shb/suarez_14_2.html

http://www.aclu-or.org/national/vouchers.htm

http://www.vsba.org/Voucher2.htm

http://www.thewebbschool.com/content/sw001.htm

In the last one, note:

There have been two experiments performed in the extensive cities of Milwaukee and Cleveland. In Milwaukee, the children that participated in this voucher program had to have been from relatively impoverished families, and only nonsectarian schools could participate. The money, which was roughly $2,500 per student annually, went directly to the participating schools. In the fall of 1998, 6,200 students attended 57 religious schools and 30 secular private schools with the aid of these vouchers(Public 25). In Cleveland, the $240,000 study commissioned by the Ohio Department of Education measured the performance of a sample of third graders over eight months. The results found that voucher recipients in private schools haven’t done any better academically than their public-school counterparts. Despite the intensity of this debate, there is no conclusive evidence on the academic impact of school vouchers.

It’s easy to find such documents. Just do a web search for “scam.”

24

Re: per capita funding

Many of the costs of educating a student are fixed. ie) You can’t pay the janitorial staff to clean only half the school if half the students go there, you must keep the entire building lighted and heated, and teacher salaries must be maintained. I think you dramatically overstate the savings of siphoning off large numbers of public school students.

I’ll grab some cites for this, but I also disagree with your assertion that increased teaching salaries will not have a long term effect on the quality of teaching.

I really wanted to be a High School math teacher for a long time, but many of my choices in college were the result of thinking how to pay off loans and have financial stability. If I had any faith that I would be paid a living wage and not have to deal with inflexible narrow minded administrators, I’d start teaching next semester!

25

I would teach high school or middle school if it didn’t mean taking a 50% pay cut. I’d even take the pay cut if I could still afford to make my mortgage payments and support my family (me & three cats).

26

First of all, skutir, sorry about the broken link. The article was written several months ago, and it worked fine then. I should’ve double checked it before I posted - my bad. That being said, there are four other links there, all of which are working fine, thank you very much. Did you bother to go to any of them?

As far as your suggested reading, I saw much blathering about separation of church and state, and a couple mentions of one study in Milwaukee. However, I also saw in these links claims that schools in the US aren’t performing badly at all, and that there is no evidence that students from private schools perform better - both claims are patently ridiculous.

Regarding the Milwaukee study in particular, I’ll let Paul Peterson, a Harvard researcher who studied the test results, speak for me:

Jeff

27

panache:

I think you may have misread what I wrote. I stated a couple times that I think we desparately need to raise teachers’ salaries.

You do, however, make a good point regarding fixed costs of schooling. I would like to see some figures on how the breakdown of that $8k/student works out. I would guess that a lot gets lost in beaurocracy, which would limit how much of that savings can be passed to the schools.

Jeff

28

Ah, I see. You have to compare successful students at private schools to unsuccessful students at public schools to prove private schools are better. I apologize for presenting corrupt date.

29

Where did you get your data?

Counter example:

I was privately schooled K-12. My schools didn’t care where the kid came from, as long as their parents could front the money. Some of my classmates were diagnosed with ADD/ADHD. Others had been expelled from the local public schools. There were even a few with criminal records.

Those that couldn’t color nicely, or other related tasks, got points taken off their assignment.

Those that had difficulty sitting still were slapped on the hand with a ruler or sent to detention.

Those that couldn’t walk in a straight line walked into walls (both literally and metaphorically).

Now, take into account that under the system I experienced, 70% and below was an F. Those with two or more F’s were held back. Within a year, grades and behavior (typically) improved drastically. The only notable exception was the boy who was mentally retarded, who was held back three seperate years.

30

I, for one, would gladly ax the ‘mandotory’ bit. If a student wants to skip classes, not turn in assignments, or whatnot, I say let them leave.
Paying teachers more would be great. Generally, by the time someone is qualified to teach a topic well, they can get a better paying job elsewhere.
Does anyone have any good ideas on how to keep fundamentalists off school boards?

31

Jeff – excuse my last post, it was too brief and has an error.

I had mistakenly assumed the children in the study had been selected based on academic achievement and you were suggesting they be compared to less successful peers. I see upon re-check there was some sort of lottery in place. So we’ll ignore that last remark of mine. However, one can speculate that Peterson-Greene set out to disprove (not verify) the study, and their own methods are equally questionable. See the response by the original research team:

http://www.aft.org/research/reports/private/GPD/witte.htm

Also, regarding the Heritage Foundation link, my point wasn’t really about the link being broken, but about the HF in general as a resource. They do not do legitimate research – they are funded to manufacture scholarly-sounding support for politically conservative ideas.

The “blathering about separation of church and state” in the articles I link to is concern about the unconstitutionality of vouchers. Are you suggesting that the U.S. Constitution has no purpose in directing national policy?

32

Okay, so with regards to the Milwaukee study, we basically have two people of comparable stature claiming different things. Without spending time learning statistical research techniques, I’m not qualified to go in and figure out who’s right and who’s wrong, so this boils down to a stalemate. However, it should be noted that the parents participating in the program seem to like a quite a bit. I would think that should count for something.

Speaking to the legitimacy of HF, I don’t deny that they’re a conservative think-tank. That doesn’t mean that everything they say is bogus, any more than everything the EPA says is bogus just because they have definite pro-environment agenda. Also, I fail to see how the issue of class size is a conservative or liberal issue, so I don’t see why they’d have a stake in the matter one way or the other.

And since the SCOTUS already determined that the Cleveland and Milwaukee voucher program is perfectly constitutional, I would say that continued “blathering” is rather moot.

Jeff

33

Gaijin:

So, my anecdotes are no good but yours are just fine?

Is it really your contention that private schools really do invest in working with children who have behavioral or learning difficulties?

Great that your school did, but was it geared toward the difficult student population? Marketed as such?

Incidentally, a smack on the hand with a ruler really isn’t the best way to treat ADD.

34

**In fact, of all methods of improving performance, reducing class size is the least efficient. Yet for some reason, it’s the mantra of the teachers’ associations that class size reduction is the be-all-end-all of performance boosters. The cynic in me suspects that job security factors in there somewhere, but surely self-preservation wouldn’t be a driving force in something so noble as the teaching profession. **

Reducing class size is a good idea. Imagine providing critical feedback on a three page written assignment for 130 students instead of 90 students. Frequently these large classes have students with special needs. For instance, I have had classes with ESL kids, emotionally disturbed, and learning disabled. These students require modifications that are impossible to implement in large classes.

I will support vouchers when these private schools are required to accept all students. Private schools are more successful because most parents that send their kids to private schools are college educated and involved in their children’s education. I have more than a handful of students that have parents that are 1) convicts 2) unsupportive… many of them have not had success in school so they are less likely to trust and respect teachers or the educational process 3) have moved more than three times during a school year 4) live in poverty 4) substance abusers and the list could go on and on. My point is that public schools could compete with private schools if they could select their students.

35

There’s one in every crowd.

Sixteen ounces to the pound. Eight fluid ounces to a cup, 16 to a pint, 32 to a quart, and 128 to a gallon. No, I did not have to look that up.

Robin

36

ElJeffe:

You keep harping on this idea that vouchers would provide “competition” for teachers. Having spent a couple of years working in public schools, I can tell you that teachers are not “coasting” or slacking off in any way. They work their asses off, in fact.

Most of them make salaries in the range of $25-35,000 range. They have to buy an awful lot of their own supplies, not only for themselves but for their students. A lot of the kids in the poorest neighborhood schools (where I worked) have parents who cannot or will not supply them with basic necessities such as pencils and notebooks. The teachers themselves provide these things to the kids and they do not get reimbursed.

Teachers also have to deal often with parents who are apathetic or worse about their children’s performance in school. If the parents don’t care then the kids don’t care. No matter how hard a teacher may try to inspire her students, she does not have the same profound influence as a parent.

Most parents, even in the worst neighborhoods, love their children. Many of them are caring and involved and supportive of the teachers. Some others are well-meaning but may lack some basic knowledge or skills. More than a few became parents when they were teen-agers themselves. I saw rare examples where such individuals were able to mature into exemplary parents. More often they were immature, overwhelmed or both.

Then there are the true slimeballs. The ones who get drunk and use their kids as punching bags. The ones who dump them with an “aunt” and disappear for three weeks. The ones who leave them alone for three weeks. The ones who abuse their kids in worse ways. This has a major effect on the kids’ performance in school and on the teachers’ ability to educate them.

Some kids come to school hungry. Some kids come to school with black eyes. Some kids just got raped the night before. Some kids have parents who smoke crack. I knew at least one kid whose mother was a prostitute. All of these things make it extremely difficult for a kid to care about spelling or long division.

Despite all this, these teachers persevere. They try hard to reach these kids. They care about them. They stay in these jobs BECAUSE of the kids. And you know what, sometimes they DO reach a kid. Sometimes they can tap into something about the kid, find a talent for drawing, for writing stories, for crunching numbers that the kid didn’t know he had. It is amazing what a little bit of praise can do for a kid, a seed of self-esteem, of self identity. This is the greatest pay-off a teacher gets from her job. I guarantee it’s not money. There IS no money.

Very few of these kids would really be helped by school vouchers. Private schools are not going to accept a kid who sometimes lives with his dad, sometimes his grandma, sometimes a state-run group-home. They are not going to take a kid who has suffered grotesque abuse at home and who sets fires in the bathroom. They are not going to accept third graders who curse in the classroom and call the teacher (male OR female) “bitch.” These are not hypothetical examples, they are real kids I worked with.

Something like a third of the kids I worked with were Asian Buddhists. The only available private schools would be Christian. What would Christian parents do if they had to decide between public school or a Buddhist private school? How about a Muslim school? Why should children have to attend a school where they are taught that they will go to hell for their faith? Why should my taxes go to religious schools at all? Hello? Establishment clause, anybody?

I think school vouchers are a scam. I think it taxes the lower classes to help the upper classes. I might feel differently about vouchers if I could be guaranteed that a) Private schools must accept all children who apply, and b) Only secular schools would be eligible.

Where are all these private schools anyway that supposedly are going to take on an onslaught of millions of new students? Aren’t most of them already full?

I happen to know skutir IRL. I can assure that he dutifully follows every link which is submitted to him in a message board debate. This is a virtue which, I must confess, I myself do not possess. :wink:

37

Re vouchers, I think the theory is that if vouchers of X thousand dollars per year were available, the result would be that new pvt schools would be founded that charged X thousand dollars per year.

38

Providing adequate funding for schools in poor communities is most cirtainly something that needs to be done. I see no liklihood, however, that it will be done. And should such a thing be done, all it would accomplish would be to bring the schools in poor communities up to the level of schools in middle class communities – schools which, for the most part, look good only in comparison to the schools in poor communities.

39

Are these schools just going to spring up out of the ground over night? Who’s going to front the money to build them? The amount of $ proposed in the GOP voucher scheme would not be enough to maintain a school funded solely by vouchers. In fact, they would actually be running on LESS money than a public school. There would not, therefore, be any incentive to start new private schools. There would not be any profit in it.

40

I attend public school in Virgina, and am a high school sophmore. Some of my classes are actually quite small, but that is only because I am in some of the higher levels of subjects that aren’t actually required to graduate. However, in classes that are required, there are large class sizes and many unruly students. The problem is that a public school doesn’t really have the option to kick out diruptive students, whereas a private school can. That’s actually one of the reasons that I am planning on taking so many AP classes next year- the basic levels have people in them that would disrupt learning.

Alot of people say that the teachers in public schools are bad. That is definately true for some of them. Because salaries are so low, they don’t exactly have much of a selection to chose from when picking teachers. However, it’s not always the teacher’s fault. Frequently, a teacher just can’t do everything he/she would like with the class because of the kids in it.

A really big complaint of mine is the lack of funding in the schools. About once a year, we’ll even have a paper shortage because there just isn’t enough money for more. Also, what money there is isn’t spent responsibly. For example, the school system had a little “extra” money last year. Instead of buying more school supplies, we ended up with an awning in our cafeteria (and the cafeteria is inside). It’s only purpose was decorative.

In conclustion, the biggest problems with the public schools is the quality of some of the students (there are great students, too, but the bad ones ruin it for the rest of us), lack of funding, and occasionally a bad teacher. There are also more problems; however, this about sums it up for now.