Okay, so I accidentally found myself watching the 700 Club, and they mentioned results of a new study out on vouchers. It referred to a study conducted on the schools in one of the states (Wyoming? Wisconsin?) that recently had a voucher program law overturned by federal courts. The reported results were that there was a marginal but clear support for better performance from students who participated in the voucher program. They mentioned a USA Today mention of it.
Anybody heard about this study? Anybody looked at it to see what it says?
You sure you weren’t watching a rerun from some time back, Irishman? I have no idea where the “700 Club” gets its information on school voucher programs, but I have not seen any major new studies out very recently on the Milwaukee system (I presume that the state you’re vaguely remembering is Wisconsin, because only Milwaukee and Cleveland currently have public voucher programs). Here’s a Christian Science Monitor article on the subject.
As for the voucher program being overturned in the courts: huh??? Last November, the Supreme Court refused to hear a suit challenging the constitutionality of the Milwaukee program’s giving taxpayer funds for education to religious schools, so I can’t imagine why the “700 Club” would be upset about that. If nobody else has any better luck in figuring out exactly what it is we’re supposed to be talking about here, I move we drop the debate for lack of supporting facts.
(Note added in preview: thanks DDG, but I couldn’t identify a clear connection between any of those and the supposedly recent events that the show was supposedly referring to. Irishman, this’ll teach you to watch the “700 Club”, eh?)
december, that’s the USA Today article that the 700 Club was referring to. No supporting information there explaining it.
Kimstu, most certainly could have been a rerun. I normally avoid that show, but had just finished watching Exploring the Unknown, and was flipping through my channel guide to see what was on worth watching, so it was running in the background.
Ducky and Nanook, thanks for the links. It’s a start. Reading the articles I see the following:
There have been dozens of local stories on the Cleveland voucher system. I’d be interested in the actual report from the Indiana study–and what they considered “statistically significant” (and who paid for the study). The reports I saw (from both pro and anti voucher groups) indicated that the kids were not doing better overall, and had fallen in some areas. The pro people were claiming “not enough time to evaluate” when the numbers came out.
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*Originally posted by Irishman *
So we should support vouchers to make private schools financially viable?
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More to the point, we break the back of the government-imposed monopoly and allow competition. Since families are being taxed to death in the USA, we can allow familes to use some of the tax dollars going to one school and apply them to another. That way, real choice is available to more than just the wealthy.
More to the point, we break the back of the government-imposed monopoly and allow competition. Since families are being taxed to death in the USA, we can allow familes to use some of the tax dollars going to one school and apply them to another. That way, real choice is available to more than just the wealthy.
Uh, yeah. And what happens when the schools raise their prices? “Whoops, all the kids from the poor and disadvantaged families get to go to the same crummy schools again, because their vouchers alone aren’t enough for them to afford the higher tuitions! Too bad for them!”
And it’s hardly a surprise to me that private-school advocates loev to trump the academic success of their students. After all, they are able to refuse admission to the slow-learning students, the troublemakers, and anyone else who may negatively impact the school’s academic scores – unlike the public schools, who are required to accept everyone. Oddly enough, I haven’t heard of a school-voucher advocate who suggests comparing public and private schools on an equal basis…
Tell me something, rjung. If Hoxby’s data as presented by Irishman is correct, what harm do vouchers do to the public schools? That is, if (obviously) class sizes decrease while spending per student increases, what exactly are the drawbacks? I suppose I’m hopelessly naive to miss them, but I’m curious.
Secondly, I fail to see why your compaint about private schools being selective is remotely relevant. Of course they are; that’s the reason they have better results in the first place (i.e. by being selective, they can get quicker learners and therefore, one would suppose, a better learning environment)! Now obviously, a massive influx of students to private schools would have a negative effect on them, but if vouchers have minimal effects on public schools while allowing a few more kids to go to a private school where they’ll get (arguably) a superior education, why the opposition?
To be honest, my biggest problem with vouchers is that if many people were to use them, I’d naively expect that private schools would see a degradation in performance because they’d start to run into the same issues that public schools run into. In other words, moving students around en masse makes no sense as an answer, but moving just a few might be worthwhile.
gg:To be honest, my biggest problem with vouchers is that if many people were to use them, I’d naively expect that private schools would see a degradation in performance because they’d start to run into the same issues that public schools run into. In other words, moving students around en masse makes no sense as an answer, but moving just a few might be worthwhile.
Apparently that sort of effect is in fact being seen among Milwaukee’s voucher schools. As this LA Times article notes,
In other words, school competition has its good points, but it doesn’t seem to be a “magic bullet” for the problems of educating poor inner-city children. Education for people on the margins of society is an intrinsically difficult and expensive service to provide, and simply throwing the field open to more market choices isn’t really going to change that.
Since Kimstu has already addressed the issue of student distribution by social class (and, IIRC, we probably read the same article in the Times), I’ll just comment here by saying that almost all of the voucher initiatives I’ve seen do threaten public education – either by reducing funding for public education to pay for the vouchers, or by proposing to eliminate public schools all together (often by turning public schools into voucher schools).
Either way, the proposed vouchers are funded by sacrificing the public school system, which leads to the problems I’m worried about, hence my opposition. If there’s a voucher initiative that does what you say – e.g., having minimal effects on public schools while helping students opt to go private if they want to – I haven’t heard of it yet.
Proponents claim that vouchers will actually improve public schools. One reason already mentioned here is that they increase the available public education money per student. A more important reason is that competition with private schools is supposed to induce public schools to improve.
Time will tell whether or not these claims prove to be correct. Meanwhile, I find it impossible to oppose the Jeb Bush voucher plan in Florida. That plan provides vouchers to students at failing public schools, after those schools have had 3 years to fix themselves and failed to do so. It seems unconscionable to keep kids trapped in a school like that.
Furthermore, the threat of vouchers should induce educational improvement in schools that need it most. During the 3-year warning period, the failing public schools will be under tremendous pressure to fix their problems, to avoid losing students. I’d expect most of them to reach a state of adequacy within the 3-year window, so that the vouchers would seldom come into play.
How is taking students from a given school (hence reducing class sizes) while increasing the amount of money available on a per student basis “sacrificing the public school system” as a whole? The most tenable argument I can see off the top of my head is that the students who choose to leave may be among the best and brightest, and thus their absence might be felt in worsening the learning environment for those kids who stay in the public school system. (This seems to me to be, basically, an argument that says we should force the best students to sacrifice their well-being to help the other students, and I hence find it morally reprehensible, but YMMV. It also disregards the counter-argument that with more funds/student and fewer students/teacher, things may even be expected to improve. The two effects no doubt would compete, and I see no reason to assume that the one would dominate over the other.)
There are, no doubt, a whole host of other conceivable philosophical objections, but you know what? I don’t care about philosophical objections unless they’re born out by real world observations.
That being said, do you have any statistics whatsoever to demonstrate that after a suitable time has elapsed[sup]**[/sup], the performance of those students who stayed at a public school when a voucher system was enacted demonstrated worsening performance? That is, do statistics bear out the idea that the average student is worse off when vouchers are an option than otherwise, or is your assertion that you haven’t head of a voucher system that doesn’t sacrifice the public school systems as much a matter of ideology as is the counter-assertion that vouchers are the cure to our education problems?
Vouchers are not a magic bullet solution; I doubt there is a simple solution. But to categorically reject them as even a component of any possible solution a priori is, to my mind, quite foolish.
** obviously, there would be some initial problems due to students moving around and public schools having to perhaps restructure the way they do things. To draw inferences from the initial effects would be utterly absurd; one should give the system enough time to work through the initial problems before making conclusions about it. How long the period required would be is something that I honestly can’t address.
