Might I ask, because I really don’t know how the system works over there; is there a national set of standards that private schools must reach in order to qualify for this voucher system? Is there an auditing board (similar to our Ofsed) that goes around and checks out public and private schools, or are they seperate? To what extent is there cost accounting by the government on money given by them to public schools (for example, that they must spend at least so much money on textbooks, so much on teachers, etc), or with private schools?
You can with a voucher system, which is what we are talking about.
It would be ridiculous, which is why I am not arguing it.
The assertion that there is no possible way to educate children except thru a public school is merely ridiculous, and requires no more refutation than simply to point that out.
Currently there is no wide-scale voucher system in the USA.
Private schools are (or can be) accredited. But they are not eligible for public funding even if they are, for the most part.
Teachers and teachers’s unions often will attempt to co-opt a voucher system by forcing any school receiving voucher money to subject itself to the same problems that are supposed to be addressed. That is, private schools accepting voucher money would not be allowed to kick out the trouble makers any more easily than public schools, the private schools would also be subjected to oversight by school boards rather than by parents, no on-site supervision, and (especially) teachers would be required to join unions, pay dues, and be subject to the same union rules of seniority and tenure.
The basic idea is to say, “We will compete with you, provided you are not allowed to do anything different.” Part of that is the natural tendency of any bureaucracy to perpetuate itself, another part is a genuine fear that non-public schools will skim off the top students, educate them (at a greatly reduced cost) and the public schools will be left with the trouble makers. Then the public schools will have to innovate and get rid of the dead wood, a painful process for any industry and a particularly painful one for what has been a de facto monopoly. Some twenty-year administrator who spends his day shuffling paper for the Department of Education doesn’t want to lose his job, either.
Regards,
Shodan
Oh, I doubt if it would work out that way. Not all the parents are going to pull their children out - some like their public schools, some aren’t paying attention to their kids’ education anyway, and a good many would want their son to play football or something no matter what.
One of the advantages of a voucher system is that we could really see if public schools are doing as good a job as they say. They often claim that they do as well or better than private schools. OK, well then they can put up or shut up. If we implement a voucher program and the private schools (without a lot of burdensome regulations and bureaurocratic foolishness imposed by the government) do just as well as public schools - no harm done, and some good, if the parents are more satisfied with their choice. If not, then we might be able to tell where the problems of the public schools stem from. But we aren’t going to be able to tell that until we try.
Regards,
Shodan
School vouchers are not designed to help poor kids. School vouchers are based on the free market model of competition with no stipulations for admission or state regulation. It is a means to subsidize expensive, elite private schools that require screening and testing. Poor and low performing students will not have access to these schools. The voucher will not cover the cost for exclusive, predominately white, prep schools. Instead, poor kids will be relegated to one of the private religious schools that account for 85 percent of private schools. This will result in two school systems and increased inequality.
Religious schools consistently under perform public schools because of no regulatory standards and the inability to attract licensed teachers with a competitive salary. Furthermore, it is unconstitutional to fund religious based schools. This should not even be a debate in this country.
Charter school performance
School vouchers are not designed to help poor kids. School vouchers are based on the free market model of competition with no stipulations or state regulation. It is a means to subsidize expensive, elite private schools that require screening and testing. Poor and low performing students will not have access to these schools. The voucher will not cover the cost for exclusive, predominately white, prep schools. Instead, poor kids will be relegated to one of the private religious schools that account for 85 percent of private schools. This will result in two school systems and increased inequality.
Religious schools consistently under perform public schools because of no regulatory standards and the inability to attract licensed teachers with a competitive salary. Furthermore, it is unconstitutional to fund religious based schools. This should not even be a debate in this country.
Charter school performance
I certainly wouldn’t want to co-opt a voucher system in that way (though of course my vote does mean zero). My worry would be that money going towards public schools has to be accounted for, as any money from the government should be, whereas it seems like the money from a school voucher program could be spent anywhere by private schools. What, for example, stops a private school from taking all that money, spending a cursory amount on books and equpment, and paying themselves the rest, or on some other non-academic scheme (not to say they don’t deserve pay, but you get what I mean).
Likewise, I would be worried that we don’t know what we’re paying for. A public school system, with a system of accreditation, standardised testing, and the like, means we know what a public school will be aiming for (if not always achieve). I as a taxpayer know what i’m getting for my money, and even as a non-parent i’d like kids to get a good level of teaching so that they can be my doctors or whatever in the future. But with a school voucher system, I don’t, without going through the literature of each and every school eligible. They may have the capabilities, thanks to my money, to do a good job teaching; but what do they claim to teach? What do they actually manage to teach?
I find myself very confused by the school voucher system, since it seems to me pretty opposite to fiscal conservative ideas; giving money with very few safeguards as to where it actually goes. To put it in crass terms, it sounds like throwing money at the problem. Have I entirely misunderstood the idea?
Sorry for the double post - the board isn’t cooperating.
But see, it’s throwing money at the right people…
…which is surprisingly close to the truth. The idea is that parents who care about their kids’ education will monitor the performance of the private schools, leading to competition between those schools to provide a better education - giving them money gives them leverage, while throwing money at failing public schools doesn’t necessarily do much. Of course, kids of parents who don’t care two shakes for their education are still stuck in crappy schools, but that’s pretty much the case now - at least their educationally-minded peers will have new opportunities.
How will they monitor this performance? And what guarantee is there that private schools will not merely improve their standards so that they remain above public schools, and then spend the rest of the money elsewhere?
Certainly “giving money with very few safeguards as to where it actually goes” sounds like contemporary conservatism to a T, with the condition that it goes to people or businesses that contemporary conservatives like. Which in this case they would.
Of course, any connection between the conservatism of the past three decades and fiscal conservatism is purely coincidental.
This is not generally a problem with private colleges. I am not sure why it would be so for private primary and secondary schools.
Did you happen to read the link about accreditation?
Well, yes, I think you have misunderstood the idea.
I already mentioned private colleges and universities. To take another example, we give retirees in the US money in the form of Social Security with no assurance at all that it will be spent wisely, on food and clothing and so forth. Yet relatively few Social Security recipients die of starvation. Why would you assume that parents are so unconcerned with their children’s education that they would not bother themselves with questions of how efficiently they are spending their education vouchers?
No, it shouldn’t, because the Supreme Court has already addressed the issue. However, their findings were not that it was un-Constitutional. Just the opposite, in fact.
Regards,
Shodan
For one thing, college students are (or should be, in order to get into a college) able to understand whether or not they’re getting their money’s worth. As the people actually exposed to the teaching, they’re in the best position to know whether they are actually being taught well. A child, even a teenager at a high school to some extent, is less able to understand that.
Secondly, at least over here, there’s a system of accreditation with professional bodies with some degrees. For example, I took a psychology degree that the British Psychological Society allow as part of an acceptance within their body. Many other degrees likewise have their course accepted as part of proof of eligibility to join such bodies. Lower-level schools have less of an ability to do this. If this isn’t the same as over there, then this is obviously not a point against it.
Thirdly - how do you know that doesn’t happen with those colleges? What percentage, for example, do Harvard spend on academic purposes as opposed to non-academic purposes? Do you have avaliable figures for all private colleges across the country - since they are given leeway on this, you’d need seperate stats for each college to know the overall amount spent reasonably.
I’ve read some of it; it’s quite a large site. I got the idea from what you said, however, that private institutions don’t need to sign up to it. I presume the idea is (as with most accreditation schemes) that parents are more likely to choose an accredited school than one which is not. So the question is this; are parents more likely to choose it? How well known is this scheme? There’s 130,000 private school signed up to it - how many private schools are there altogether in the U.S.? What protection is there against corruption within this (also private, AFAICT) system of accreditation? Would you want any private schools given money to have be inspected by any kind of government or private accreditation agency?
I do not. I would point out, however, that food and clothing retailers *do * have standards they must abide by. And likewise it is considerably easier to tell when you’ve had enough food and enough clothes; are you hungry or are you cold? OTOH, it’s considerably more difficult to tell whether you’ve got enough schooling; you could judge by the marks your child gets, but without standardised testing there’s no guarantee of a reasonable test. You could judge by the jobs school-leavers get, but private schools are under no obligation to provide these details, or even get them. You and others have been repeating that parents would be interested, and of course they would. That’s a given. But how might they find out efficiency, when stats are not required, accreditation is not required, finance information is not required, information on where public money is going is not required, unemployment level of school-leavers is not required, and, in fact, the school is under zero obligation to provide any results whatsoever to parent regarding performance and that which they do provide is under zero obligation to be accurate?
I think we are confusing two points.
There is currently no voucher system in the US. I mentioned this earlier. There are a number of private schools, however, and most of them are accredited. It works out relatively well as far as accountability goes.
If we did implement a voucher system, I would expect that the system by which we determine if a school is eligible to receive voucher money would be something like the system we have now. What I want to avoid would be something I mentioned earlier - forcing private schools into the mold that public schools are in now. That would not be a genuine reform, and I believe the current US educational system is in need of reform.
But this notion that a voucher system necessarily means handing out money willy-nilly to anyone who claims to be a school is a bit of an excluded middle fallacy. We have a system of accreditation now that works pretty well to prevent the horrors you seem to expect; I see no reason why it would be significantly worse if we had vouchers.
Much of the problems perceived nowadays with the US public school system is a lack of accountability for the money spent. We have increased spending on education faster than inflation every year for decades (cite available on request), yet there still exists relatively little correlation between the amount we spend and the results we get. We don’t close failed schools very easily. It is difficult to fire even incompetent teachers.
So the problems of accountability you suggest apply at least as much to public schools as they do to private. And this, even though public schools are supposed to be the way that we guarantee every student an education.
But it often doesn’t work. So many of us would like to try something else.
Regards,
Shodan
How do you know? Both in terms of most of them being accredited and it working out relatively well in terms of accountability.
As far as I can tell, the things you highlight as problems with the public school system are not the things i’ve highlighted as problems with private schools. I understand what you want to avoid, but I don’t think the things i’ve suggested infringe on those particular problems.
How do you know it works well?
I see it being significantly worse on the basis that both there would be more in it for unscrupulous types and less appeal to public schools. And i’m not just talking about “anyone who claims to be a school”; i’m talking about genuine schools that skim the cream from the top of voucher money, too. I think positioning my argument as having an excluded middle fallacy in this way is itself an excluded middle; even the best, top public schools, with excellent achievement records, accreditation, and excellent college acceptance rates, could be spending a realtively paltry amount of voucher money on the pupils. Why does that matter if they get a good education? Because, in general, if they could do better with less money then they should get less money, under the whole “don’t throw money at it” idea. I’m sure you’d sympathise with lower taxes? 
No, they don’t apply “at least as much”. Standardised testing, for one, is a method of accountability that private schools would not require. I am unfamiliar enough with the American school system and funding to not know whether government funding in public schools must be applied to certain areas (and whether this is checked or not). And I might suggest that perhaps an answer to this might be to increase accountability at public schools, rather than abandon them entirely.
Your alternate method has all the problems of the old way - plus some shiny new ones. It means less accountability for scholastic achievement in proportion to money given. It means less accountability for how much money is actually spent on pupils. It means, unlike public schools where there may be some standard between them, a seperate list of paperwork for each individual school which must include everything that applies to them alone, increasing the bureacracy. Let’s add in a problem i’ve only just thought of now i’m thinking about this; hiring practices, unsupervised or regulated.
I agree with you that the current system often doesn’t work. There is every reason in the world to want a better system. This does not appear to be a better system. For the pupils, for parents, or for the taxpayer. It is not good fiscal responsibility.
I guess I think that the link between our education system for all and the state of our public school system is too important to gamble on some theory that a Pell gant for kids will create a better system. I’d like to see it work on a state level before we federalize it. Can you point to a system that has pell grant for kids that has worked at a state level?
So it’s a way to outsource education to the public sector, right? Instead of having government-run schools, we give money to for-profit companies and let them educate the children?
Haven’t we had enough problems with this tactic (including but certainly not limited to Halliburton, KBR, etc) to realize that it’s not exactly a panacea?
No, sir, not alone. The purpose of education spending and of education policy generally is also to benefit society. Just as individual parents have a dual duty in parenting – to raise children who can thrive as individuals, but also to raise children who will be assets rather than burdens to society.
Vito Corleone was not a good father.
Neither was George H.W. Bush.
This ruling was handed down by the conservative and frequently polarized Supreme Court with Rehnquist at the helm. The same court ruled in favor of Felony Murder, confessions made by the mentally ill, execution of the mentally retarded, and public school drug testing of minors. Probably the most important decision made by this court was choosing a president.
Rehnquist gave a dissenting opinion on prohibiting the death penalty for minors, the unconstitutionality of teaching creationism in public schools, and flag burning as free speech. Rehnquist Court cases
I don’t consider the voucher ruling constitutional and hope it is overturned.
Personal experience. Also, please read the cite.
Accreditation requirements for private schools vary by state. Again, you may want to actually read the cites provided.
Parents are free to withdraw their children from private schools that misuse funds, or do not perform to the level expected by parents. This is not always the case for public schools. Thus, private schools are by necessity more accountable than public schools. One of the purposes of a voucher system is to allow parents the same option of accountability for public schools as for private. If parents feel their public school is failing, they are not constrained by finances from pulling their child out and sending him to another school.
Public schools? Do you mean private?
Are you talking about public schools, or private schools? Why would it be the case that public schools are spending less on students?
Well, there, of course, you are quite straightforwardly wrong. Private schools currently use standardized testing. My children both attended a private school for several years. Both took a number of standardized achievement tests. Their private school as a whole scored significantly higher on those tests than any of the local public schools, which draw on the same geographic population.
Clearly.
Your first two points are wrong, and the last incomprehensible.
Again, that simply isn’t the case - all the teachers in my children’s schools, public and private, have been college graduates, licensed as teachers.
Which has nothing whatever to do with what benefits the public school bureaucracy or the teachers’ union.
Private colleges and universities accept Pell grants.
Since, as far as we know, you don’t sit on the Supreme Court, your opinion doesn’t change the facts, now does it?
Regards,
Shodan