Started in the Jolita Berry/Teacher attacked in Baltimore/students posted video on the internet
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=463682&page=2
[QUOTE=Weirddave]
Yea, OK, so what? Private schools work. Public schools are broken. Advantage: vouchers
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If you know of a private school that works, there are two factors I’d consider:
- They can pick and choose whom they admit. As posted, they’d be foolish to take special education or ESL kids because they require a lot of time and money per student and do nothing for your test scores. Hell, here in Texas if a kid speaks zero English when they arrive, we’re supposed to have them ready to test in one year.
If public schools could pick, we’d be a lot more successful.
- The parents who enroll their kids in private school A) have the money to do it, hence a better home environment, and B) take a keen interest in education, because they’re putting their money where their mouth is. When that kid brings home a report card, I bet the parents scrutinize their investment carefully. Let public schools select those students and we’d be a lot more successful as well.
And btw, I don’t know if people are aware of this or not, but traditionally private schools pay teachers less than public schools. Sure, parents pay money (sometimes big money) to put their kids in private schools. But private schools can’t compete with tax dollars. If the argument is that higher salary draws better teachers, you’d look for them in public schools.
Requirements like degrees, certification, etc. generally are not in place in private schools, nor are reasonable safeguards for teachers. At my first teaching job, I was working with a guy whose wife taught business at a private school. She liked it a lot, said she avoided a lot of hassles we encounter in public schools. IIRC she had won some awards and recognition and had been there 20 years or something.
One day the principal called her in and told her she wouldn’t have a job the following year. She hadn’t done anything wrong; there weren’t any complaints. They were hiring a new teacher for her position. “He probably can’t teach worth a damn,” the principal admitted, “but the parents are pressuring me for a good football coach.”
[QUOTE=Weirddave]
Or, private schools that specialize in particular special needs will open, attracted by the voucher money, and these special needs kids will get not just better educations, but educations tailored to their unique situations. Advantage: vouchers
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Many public districts already have variations on this theme. It gets some results for some kids. But it’s always going to be limited by how much the parents are involved and expect from their kids, whether the school is private or public.
[QUOTE=Weirddave]
Again, great. I’m all for that. The stupid testing mentality imposed on school system by NCLB needs to be broken. There still nees to be some testing, of course, but test results shouldn’t dominate the focus of schools like they do now. Advantage: vouchers
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To criticize public schools based on test scores, then give the money to private schools without requiring the same tests is just ludicrous. You say testing shouldn’t dominate the focus…I agree. But that’s one very big thing dragging public schools into mediocrity. Rather than giving us a break from it, they use it to declare us unable to educate. Then they want to give the money to private schools, claiming they do a better job, but they’re unwilling to verify that claim with the same test? This deck is stacked.
[QUOTE=Weirddave]
So have the vouchers pay on a semester by semester or even month by month basis. If one school goes belly up, the student just transfers to another one. This is hardly a big deal.
If the result is more children being better educated than the current system, it’s an expense I’m willing to have the taxpayers bear.
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Again, absent an apples-to-apples comparison of tests, I’m not sure how we’d know if the experiment worked. And, without the state lording any expectations over the private school, what’s their motivation to provide a good education instead of just collecting the money? Giving money with no expectation for results is bound to go bad.
[QUOTE=Weirddave]
I’m all for integration, but if some parents and students chose to self segregate, who are you to tell them they can’t? In any event, it’s a moot point, any school accepting vouchers would have to follow federal discrimination law, so this is a non-issue.
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Suppose a Catholic school has a great science program and a Muslim student aspires to be a doctor. How about overtly homosexual students? They won’t let the Bible guide them on issues like these?
And there must have been a lot of people, black and white, against integration when the idea was introduced. What people are inclined to do and what’s good for society aren’t necessarily the same thing. It wasn’t easy at first but with time we’ve achieved some tolerance…so we ran that gauntlet for nothing and now we’ll let the clock roll back?
[QUOTE=Weirddave]
Fine by me, that’s [intelligent design] one issue that badly needs to be attacked. The Constitution prohibits the establishment of an official state religion, nothing more or less. This principle has been distorted beyond recognition by anti-religious people and activist judges to the point where the law states that anything that has anything to do with any type of faith cannot accept any government funds. This is complete and utter bullshit. (and I say that as an agnostic theist. My wife is almost completely atheist and she agrees with me 100% I only mention this so you don’t think I have a particular religious POV that I’m espousing here ) The important thing here is the child’s education, and parent’s ability to control that. If Catholic parents want to send their kids to Catholic schools, Muslim parents send their kids to Islamic schools, Jewish kids to Jewish schools, even, God forbid, Fundie parents sending their kids to the Jesus Horse Academy then they should be able to do so. As long as certain core curricula are taught, and students can pass basic competency tests in these core curricula, the rest doesn’t matter. Advantage: vouchers
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Tests? What tests? Not state tests, right? As I posted in the other thread:
[QUOTE=lobotomyboy63]
When I moved to El Paso, one of the districts (Ysleta) came under fire from TEA.
Says Wikipedia:
During the 1990s, the district operated at state minimum achievement levels. Due to changes in leadership, the district turned itself around and in 1998 it emerged the first urban school district anywhere in the state to be named a “Recognized District” for student performance on the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills test or TAAS. Ten district schools have been named National Blue Ribbon Schools while eight others are National Title One Distinguished Campuses.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ysleta...School_District
Before leaving the area, I saw letters to the editor in the paper that basically said, “Why is it that our kids can pass the Texas test but don’t do well on SAT, ACT, etc.?”
Answer: they don’t correlate. These tests are supposed to ensure a “minimum” level of skills, not a college-bound curriculum. So, thanks for chasing your tail and jumping through the hoops…and good luck to you with that college thing! WTF?!
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Conclusion: the state test isn’t all that great. But what would you test the private school kids with to know how they were doing? I mean, if we turn the school over to market forces then we need some means of comparing them so that the consumer can make an intelligent choice. What test would you use? SAT? That’s college bound and as you know, many aren’t planning on college. ITBS? Some critics say that test favors white America. Supposing there is a good test out there, how about telling the state to let US use it?
[QUOTE=Weirddave]
This makes no sense to me, could you explain further what you mean? Vouchers would lead to a greater number of smaller schools, greatly alleviating the problems of overcrowding and class size. Advantage: vouchers
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You presume that private schools wouldn’t allow overcrowding if it meant they would make more money.
But ok, imagine a school in the inner-city. If the voucher thing goes through, we would expect those students to be the first to flee. If half of them leave, the remaining half still require education. Staffing the building, heating it, and so on may not be cost-effective…they’ll be squeezed into other existing public schools, resulting in overcrowding.
Hell, here in Texas I’ve seen schools that were designed for X students and by the time it opened, it was already too small. I think this is largely due to illegal aliens…we can’t count them ahead of time. I can imagine a logistical nightmare for public schools trying to shuffle students around.
This sort of consolidation has happened in rural America for some time, I think. There isn’t enough tax base in a small community so they bus their kids to another town. At one school where I taught, kids spent 90 min on the bus each way…a total of 3 hours. How successful do we expect them to be?
[QUOTE=Weirddave]
This is the toughest question of all, and it’s one where the anti-voucher people have at least a bit of a point. There are always going to be some students who can’t/won’t/don’t learn. What do you do with them? Wherever they get put, they are going to disrupt the learning process for everyone around them. As it is currently, they get to disrupt the process for every one. Diversifying the school options and spreading the students across a wide variety of smaller schools will take most of the students out of their reach- a good thing, and an improvement on the current situation. Recognizing the simple fact some students are not going to be teachable using traditional methods (the “gangbangers”, as you call them), we should be willing to put these students in a reform school in a setting that emphasizes respect, discipline and real world skills. Accept that these kids aren’t going to be going to college and instead focus on giving them training that they can use in the real world. For many of them it will still wind up being a waste of time, but I bet you reach more this way than by fantasying that you’re actually training them for college. I still think vouchers give you the advantage here too.
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Unteachable and non-standard subjects=Anti-NCLB. In public schools we don’t have that luxury. We have to put them in the LRE (least restrictive environment) and mainstream them where we can. I don’t know many hardscrabble kids who are going to volunteer for a bootcamp type of school, either.
I don’t fantasize that all of my students are going to college. But honestly, I know many of them don’t want to go in the first place.