I don’t buy this logic, I don’t agree with it all all. The system is broken, it needs to be blow up. You’re saying that we shouldn’t institute a program that would improve things for X% of kids (40? 60? 90? IDK) because X<100. That’s stupid. Blow it up, improve the situation for that X%, then reevaluate and see what can be done for the remaining 100-X%.
Schools like that already exist in the public school system. I know I’ve said that repeatedly but you keep ignoring it.
Then please provide some of your own. You haven’t.
Please show a cite where there is or has been any voucher plan that will fully reimburse a student to go to whatever private school he wants, regardless of cost. There is no private school that can afford to run on $1000/per kid, nor even three times that. I think the onus is on you to prove that your idea is workable.
Yeah, just like we fixed Iraq by blowing it up. Just like that, you guys only consider the best case scenario. Vouchers may improve things for some kids, but I’m betting it will make things much worse for even more kids. A lot of districts now allow kids to change schools within the system, which is great.
Just a few questions:
-
How much regulation of the private schools would you accept in your system?
-
How do we keep the voucher amounts safe from the hands of the tax cutters, who will say that cutting it will force the schools to be more efficient. I’m sure they would be able to find inefficiencies even in the best run schools, and get to yell waste.
-
How do you ensure that really good schools show up in poorer regions, where no one is going to have the money to add to the voucher amount?
-
How are special needs kids funded? Averaging current spending is not going to leave money for them.
California community colleges might as well be on a voucher system today. The tuition charges are very low, and the colleges get a certain amount per student. This turns out to be a problem for nursing education, which costs a lot more per student than math or English. The nursing schools have long waiting lists, and have to beg money from the state or private industry to keep up. Result - shortage.
-
How are the parents who don’t participate in their kids’ schooling today navigate the new system. How do you keep the crooks out? Even if you prosecute eventually, how do you make up for the lost education resulting from no real teaching for a year or two or three? Are you going to blame the parents, the way people blame those who got ripped off by dishonest lenders today? Around where I live there are a bunch of kids with parents who have no clue about how the schools work, but who do really well in the public schools. How are these parents going to navigate the system?
-
To encourage diversity, are you going to limit the number of schools any company can have, or will we see gigantic companies take them all over? There are a lot of economies of scale in being big, economies the current system enjoys. What happens to your free market when a lot of little schools get priced out of it? We’ll have McHighSchool and HighSchool King fighting it out, all cutting costs to the bone to satisfy the stock holders.
Just sounds like another overly simplistic right wing fuck up.
No. This is going to increase the gap between the haves and have nots. Sure the really rich use private schools already, but most people, when comparing free public school to expensive private school, use the private schools for religious reasons mostly. When we moved to California we looked at a private school, and it was a lot more expensive than the per pupil cost in California. Someone already mentioned that this will turn out to be a discount for the well to do.\
Do you think that every kid with apathetic parents goes to a ghetto school? There is a distribution of intelligence across schools and across kids, even those with dumb parents. I was on site council for my kid’s high school. Some parents threw their kids out at 18 (and not because the kid was in trouble.) The parents of kids not doing well never showed up, the parents of kids doing well always did. There were plenty of kids whose parents weren’t involved who were making use of the resources of the school and doing very well.
I really don’t see resegregating by parents willingness to pay is going to help close the gap.
Well, how would you adjust for population if not by using statistically proven regression methodology?
The analogy I would draw about private schools is that they’re like gyms. You might meet some buff people and ask them where they work out. They tell you gym X so you join that…but if you’re not willing to do the work, you’ll stay flabby. The gym could coach you in terms of which machines are good for pectorals or what will give you a good cardio workout…but it doesn’t have a magic wand that actually forces you to do the work.
Of course, public schools have a lot of the same “machines” that private schools do—more, in fact. Public schools are changing a lot, trying to improve, but it never seems to be enough. Many of us acknowledge that too many kids aren’t coming to school ready to be taught. As burundi points out, some are already in dire risk by age 7. Unless we turn that 7 year-old around, they’re likely to lose more and more ground until we can’t reach them any more.
Trying legislate parenting raises major flags, with the spectre of Child Services going Nazi on everybody. But I think it’s necessary.
E.g. I posted earlier about truancy…in one of my searches, I found a judge sentencing parents who allowed the kid to miss 100 days of school! I’m not sure whether to call that negligence or abuse, but I am sure it’s unconscionable.
-
What kind of future does a kid have without a basic education? Everybody knows there are high school graduates who can’t read their own diploma, so what does it mean when some don’t even finish? There will be those who learned enough to be functional, but some will be functionally illiterate.
-
Education is compulsory. It’s the will of the state and people aren’t supposed to be able to act on their own “better judgment” about this.
-
Education is compulsory for multiple reasons. In no particular order…
A) We need an educated workforce so we keep bringing up the next generation of doctors, lawyers, and so on that we need in order to be a functional society.
B) We need to be competitive in the world economy.
C) We need to educate so that people know the rights and responsibilities they will have as adults.
D) We need to keep teenagers off the street.
E) We need to keep integrating society.
And so on.
Beyond that, truant students are wasting resources. They throw away taxpayer money on one hand, and sometimes use taxpayer money when the cops have to arrest them or they end up on welfare etc.
As long as we focus on what’s wrong with the school like it’s a gym that isn’t “making” our children’s muscles grow, we’re screwed. We can try this and that but as long as we’re not getting school-ready kids, it will be SSDD.
Truancy is the place to start. Get the kids in school so they have a chance to learn. If the law has to take the parents to task on that, so be it.
And we need a third alternative. Kid attacks teacher…A) try the kid as an adult and punish them severely, or B) he’s just a kid, here’s a slap on the wrist. I think this is primarily a question one for the law, not the school. I say this b/c I know there are already things schools can do, but are reluctant to use.
But this isn’t all about sticks. We can create some programs. E.g. I taught at a middle school where they had an afterschool program. Kids did arts, crafts, whatever: the point was that many parents couldn’t get off work till 5:00. The school was able to provide supervision so that the kids would stay out of trouble, helping out the parents.
I don’t know why we can’t offer parenting classes, like workshops. Honestly, I’d like to see schools as community centers where parents don’t even wait until their kids are in school to start planning. “What you need to know about the terrible twos” ought to be offered for parents at schools, along with “Understanding your child’s addled-essence.” If I had kids, I’d sign up.
Finally, no one thing is going to fix it all. But we have to start someplace…soon.
An excellent post, and I especially agree with this portion.
Unlike you, I am actively concerned about the spectre of too much power being given to CPS. Without getting into specific details, CPS is a bureaucracy, and one that seems to put more effort into protecting its privileges and prerogatives than it does in protecting the children it is supposed to be supervising. My disagreement with the axiomatic assumption in this thread (and elsewhere) that public school** teachers give a shit* about their students is as nothing to my frustrations with CPS.
IMNSHO, the biggest problem can be summed up with a realization I had a few years ago: A lot of people put more thought, and planning, into the question of whether to get a pet, than it seems that many people make before choosing to become parents. Having the biological ability to engender a child does not equate to the mental, emotional, or moral ability to raise said child.
I don’t know how to go about changing that - the classes you suggest would certainly offer a starting place, though.
*Please note, I’m not making any specific accusations against any teachers, here. I just don’t make any specific assumptions about why someone might be a teacher. It’s something I can believe of many teachers, that they do do the work out of a desire to help and better children, but it is demonstrably not true for all teachers. Until I see evidence of that, I maintain my right to withhold judgment.
** Of course this applies just as much to those people who end up teaching in private and parochial schools.
I don’t know, it kinda struck me as unimpressive that the Department of Education would conclude that public schools are actually as good as private schools, but, not having looked for a counter-site, I didn’t feel comfortable pointing out the potential for bias. Once I did start looking for a counter-site, it took about 30 seconds to find an independent study that takes the NCES study to task. Link (pdf):
Quoting the whole exchange because I’m just not following your responses. How exactly would vouchers increase the gap in mean quality between schools attended by the poor and those attended by the well off? Granted that vouchers would be somewhat regressive, as they would in many cases represent a subsidy for the wealthy, but how is that relevant to my specific question? I also don’t see the relevance of this: “. . . but most people . . . use the private schools for religious reasons mostly.” (Nor am I entirely convinced that it’s accurate, but that’s neither here nor there.)
Could you make it a little clearer, please?
First paragraph: Yes, naturally.
Second paragraph: Again, I’m not following. It seems like a bit of a non sequitar, and how is a voucher program “resegregating by parents willingness to pay” any more than the current system?
Thanks!
Touché. I glissed over the CPS thing too much in my post. That’s another of the organizations in government that really needs some reform. When parents fear being reported, they can’t do their job as parents.
As for public school teachers who don’t give a shit, I’ve known some. In many cases it’s the frustration of not being able to do what’s best for the kid because of all the restrictions…or feeling betrayed by society…or whatever. But, we’re human and there are bad teachers just as there are bad dog catchers or bad lawyers or bad actors.
Tod (Keanu Reeves), from “Parenthood” ~ *You know, Mrs. Buckman, you need a license to buy a dog, to drive a car - hell, you even need a license to catch a fish. But they’ll let any butt-reaming asshole be a father. *
I agree completely.
It could be they would attract the people who are already concerned about their kids and would find answers on their own, anyway. But I think you could also push the networking angle (connecting them to other resources already in the community) and hopefully establish an alliance early rather than wait for the kid to be in trouble so that it turns adversarial.
No offense taken here. And you’re right—there are some teachers who need to get out of the profession.
I think that the social pressure aspect shouldn’t be ignored. There will be some fraction of people who wouldn’t choose to go to such classes on their own, who would go if it becomes the societal norm - much like birthing classes, now. I suspect that you’re old enough, like me, to remember when those were new things, and viewed a bit askance, but now ISTM that they’re de rigueur, and expected of all prospective parents.
But this is a generational change we’re talking about. Not something that would see substantial results in five, nor ten years, I don’t think. I do agree that for the most part, the initial people going through such classes would be the ones who would get much of the same information through other sources.
My husband used to be a juvenile prosecutor in one of the nastiest counties in southern California. He would get a file with a perp who was 9 years old, living in a home with multiple jumped-in gang members (in one case, an uncle, two brothers and a grandmother!). There were cases where he fought against placement, because some group homes were worse than a shitty home. There were lots of kids who he was fighting for, whether or not they knew it.
The job was a bitch, and he burned out quickly. Part of that burnout was our first child being born. He had a harder and harder time sentencing children to jail, knowing that he had helped to facilitate their doom. Most of those kids would never know anything except the system, to the detriment of themselves and the rest of us.
Why are we as a society “okay” with the idea of letting kids slide off the end of the plank, knowing damned well that they are the criminals, homeless and crushingly poor of tomorrow?
If they’re getting the same info, it’s still good review. I said I’d sign up for such classes; I have practically a bachelor’s in psychology. But I like the idea of peer pressure exerting some influence. It would be great, too, if it could be shown that participation correlated highly with graduation and other success factors in life.
-
I imagine that the high schooler who smacked down the teacher in Baltimore was NOT an angel prior to this. If we could intervene, say, in 2nd grade, so much the better. Schools could offer the workshops nicely…at first. Later they could be an alternative or additional requirement for dire consequences like suspension. The goal is straightening out the parent so they can straighten out the student, IMO. In too many cases if you don’t make the parent suffer a little, they’re not going to take it to heart.
-
If it is a problem happening outside school (e.g. kid spray painting graffiti on a bridge), the court could require the parent to attend a workshop.
Kids with special needs cost more money to educate. A full tuition voucher that covered the entire year’s education for a regular ed student would not cover the entire year for a special needs student. If the poor student is average, but is still going to qualify for free lunch, that costs more. Overall, then, private schools are going to be disinclined to accommodate these needier students. There is some question now as to whether or not they can be “forced” by law to accommodate them.
Everything costs money. The government winds up paying any which way since, fundamentally, education is a public good. It seems silly to me to pretend it isn’t.
I don’t quite follow this. Are you saying that a group home would be worse than living with gang members? If so, wow, how does the court choose the home?
Schools aren’t willing to step in and be the bad guys, in a lot of cases. IANA administrator, but I suspect a large part of that is from fear of being sued. Then kids get emboldened because there aren’t any consequences and pretty soon, you have things like students assaulting teachers.
I’m also unclear about the plank question…is it rhetorical/observation, or aimed at where you quoted me? I personally don’t think it is ok, but I recognize that some kids aren’t getting anywhere in their school. They need a different school or some other form of intervention. Leaving the kid in school where he isn’t successful, and where his misbehavior prevents other kids from being successful, solves nothing for anyone.
Teachers have had to step up a lot in the last couple decades to discipline because some kids aren’t getting it at home. So what happens when both the parent and the school can’t or don’t get the job done? Court, CPS…
We have to innovate other solutions.
I can’t speak for the specific situations that EJsGirl’s husband encountered. But I’ve talked to a lot of people who were run through the foster care system here in NY. (Note some selection bias is taking place here - these were people I met being treated for various mental illnesses.) To say that child abuse in the foster care system is endemic only touches on the situation.
I’ve talked to a couple of people who went from one abusive home to another, after being recognized as being victimized. I’m no more eager to brand all people in the foster care system as being abusers than I am to so brand all teachers. But if one assumes that there’s a 5% incidence of abusers (a figure I’m pulling out of my ass, but one I suspect is low) within the system as a whole - consider where those people will gravitate. A good foster home will, more often than not, want to keep the same child for years or longer. A less good foster care provider may choose to act as a crisis home - stabilizing a situation for a child whose situation is changing rapidly, or temporary before a full Family Court hearing.
And the standard for proof of such things is such that I can readily believe that a worker in CPS may suspect that the next home up for a crisis placement is one of those abusers, but is unable to prove it. It gets even worse if the CPS field worker is a relatively new hire, say two or three years in, and the foster care provider has been there for decades. Institutional inertia is going mean that it will be the rare supervisor who investigates on such ‘feelings.’ Especially if it’s someone whom they count on to provide emergency services.
Again, I’m not accusing CPS nor foster care providers of all being abusers. But, for much the same reasons that the Catholic Church (and others) hid abusers, or had abusers in the system using it for their purposes, it’s a niche where the smart monster could work the system to their advantage.
Before you say that it’s unthinkable that the supervision would put the rights of the foster care provider above the good of the children in their care, I’m tempted to start bringing up a local case where the local teacher’s union worked to get a known pedophile teacher back into the classroom. (I’ll dig out the cite, if you require it, but I don’t have it, now.) Bureaucracies become social organisms of their own, and start to weigh things by the rubric of what’s good for the organization, not what’s in the best interests of their charges or responsibilities.
At the risk of injecting some bile back into what has become (in this corner, at least) a fairly civil discussion, it’s that social organism that I hope may be prodded with vouchers. By instituting a financial cost to school districts that is easier to impose than a full-fledged lawsuit would be (and one that is smaller than a lawsuit award, and so not likely to be viewed come budget time as an extraordinary charge on the ledgers), I hope that it could provide an incentive that is currently lacking for the public schools to police themselves.
@Otaku & EJsGirl: I’ll plead ignorance on the matter of foster homes. I’ve known a few people who were foster parents and they were pretty decent. But I don’t have nearly enough background, anecdotal or otherwise. I’ll take your word for it (no cite needed for my benefit).
Reviewing then, we have:
Too many uninvolved parents
Too little success in public schools
A foster care system that’s perilous
A legal system that sometimes throws out the baby with the bathwater
Economic downturn (30K jobs lost last month, the predatory lending debacle…)
A social security system that has to fail
Foreign competitors that are hungry and willing to do the work for less
A couple wars we can’t win and countries we’ll rebuild when we’re done not winning.
Other than that, it looks pretty rosy!
True, but that fact is only a problem for a voucher system that ignores it. Special needs kids cost more under the current system, and in all likelihood they’d cost more (one way or another) in a voucher system.
But this is a problem that a voucher system would ameliorate, not exacerbate: private schools are going to be extremely disinclined to accommodate those needier students if they have no means of contributing any money to the school.
There would naturally be inequalities in a voucher system, but in order to answer my quoted question, someone has to show how those inequalities would be greater than in the current system. In my estimation, no one has done that yet – they’re looking at said inequalities in a vacuum, rather than in relation to the alternative.
Take a look at average expenditures per student by state. In NY it’s over $12,000 per kid. It would be a lot more for special needs kids. Do you think we can afford to pay for vouchers for all our students? How do you decide who would get it and who wouldn’t? It’s a lot of money, and that does not take into account creating a new infrastructure. I don’t think you’re really thinking this idea of giving vouchers to everyone through completely.
Yes. From a previous thread on the topic:
How much new infrastructure would actually need to be built? Some, admittedly, but all the necessary infrastructure is already there; it would largely be a question of transferring it from public to private hands to whatever extent there is a flight from public schools.
Finally, though I hate to harp on this point, I’m still not seeing any support for the charge that a voucher system would increase the disparity in educational opportunity between the haves and have-nots. It’s a serious charge that’s been repeated several times in this thread, and it seems completely counter-intuitive to me. Someone should either post a plausible rationale for the charge or rescind it.
Would a voucher system allow every student, even those who can contribute $0 towards the cost, to afford to attend a private school and cover the full tuition? I’d like to see a cite for that. If not, then the poorest kids are going to wind up still in the public schools, which you say are so horrible they should be abandoned. They will now be segregated by income level. Is this a desirable outcome?
Also, what do you think it costs to build a school, staff, equip, insure, and run it? I’m curious. It’s costing our district $1M just to fix our roof and ventilation system and replace some lockers that are falling apart.