No cite is possible, but common sense suggests that it would be virtually true. Give 1.4 million kids in New York almost $10K for school each, and I hardly see how you could fail to have lots of schools open up that would be affordable to them even without a cent of contribution on the part of the family – there are already plenty of private schools in the city that fit the bill.
Even if this were the case (though I contend it’s not), I still don’t see how they would be segregated by income to a greater extent than they presently are.
Incidentally, it’s not my contention that public schools are “horrible,” just that we should expect private schools (on balance, over time) to be better and more efficient.
Startup and maintenance costs exist. What makes you think that a public education system can pay them while a comparably funded private education system cannot?
VarlosZ, one question WRT your numbers: Why are you assuming that spending on all students is equal?
I don’t think you can make that assumption. Special ed costs are part of the total used to get the figure you started with, for per capita spending. I don’t have any exact figures but my understanding is that Special Education may start at 100% of the funding requirements for so-called normal students. And rises from there. Just to pick one example not quite at random: at least one method of mainstreaming Special Needs students requires a Teacher’s Aide for every two or three students. That’s going to sky rocket your individual spending for certain students. And no voucher plan I’ve heard or seen makes any assumption other than that the most profoundly damaged students are going to be anywhere but in the public schools. So, unless you’re planning to increase education spending by 25% or so, you’re not going to be able to make things even out, if you take from the public schools the average per capita student spending for your vouchers.
Any voucher plan that begins by planning to distribute 100% of the per capita spending in a given school district to the families of the students is being unrealistic right from the get-go.
I’m presenting spending on all students as equal just for simplicity’s sake. I would hope that any voucher plan actually put into practice would pay more attention to such details than I do in a message board post that takes 10 or 15 minutes to write.
As for the specific problem you bring up, I suppose there are a few ways to handle it. You could, in fact, significantly increase total education spending (I doubt anyone in this thread is terribly opposed to the idea in principle). If you don’t want to do that, you can continue to have the regular-ed kids subsidize the special-needs students, just through a slightly different mechanism. In New York City, for example, you could just subtract, say, $500 from the $9,800 you’d give to each student in order to give a lot extra to each special needs student, as required. Or if, for whatever reason, it doesn’t seem like the private sector will be able to adequately handle special-needs students, you can hold back a similar amount in order to keep public schools that provide that service adequately funded.
In a discussion such as this one we’re all necessarily talking in generalities. Just because no one here has thoroughly planned for every detail and circumstance doesn’t necessarily mean we’ve failed to take into account something obvious or vital; it may just mean that it’s beyond the expected scope of this discussion and/or our expertise.
I think the issue is the definition of “have.” The rich send their kids to private schools already, and vouchers will make absolutely no difference - the discount will be trivial. How ever there is a large class of upper middle income people for whom private education would be a hardship. They’ll do it for religious reasons, which is fine, and sometimes for racial reasons. When we lived in Louisiana there were a ton of private schools, far more than here. Most of the regular schools, at least in reasonable neighborhoods, looked fine, though since we didn’t have kids we couldn’t tell for sure.
As for most private schools being religious, when we moved to the Bay Area and looked for schools, the nearest non-religious private school was across the Bay, a good 20 miles away. There are two religious schools within walking distance, and I don’t exactly live in the Bible Belt.
In our schools there is a good mix of incomes, religions and ethnicities. Do you really think this mix will be maintained under vouchers? Don’t you think that there will be a sorting by the ability and willingness to pay? Don’t you think that poorer parents who care might wind up going into debt to give their kids the same education as those in their neighborhood who have more money? There is a good deal of income variation even in good neighborhoods.
Not you, but it seems lots of people supporting vouchers think this separation is a good thing. Those who don’t really need to address it. No one knows what will really happen, but you have to admit that it is a possibility.
Here is some prices for private schools from Massachusetts. Out of 13 listed, only 3 have tuition under $15,000, not counting books and fees. Schools in New York are going to cost more than this, given real estate values and rents.
Do you have any data showing that private school tuition today is anywhere close to per pupil costs for public schools?
Our large district had one GATE administrator for 5 high schools, 5 middle schools and about 30 elementary schools. Do you think a private school could afford to have someone take the time to learn all the issues? No doubt they would give someone the title, along with five other titles. That’s an example of how large districts can afford more specialists.
Do you think there is no gap between haves and have nots in regards to medical care today? Why don’t you think the same factors wouldn’t kick in for schools? The only way it wouldn’t would be if every kids got the same amount (excluding special needs cases) and wasn’t allowed to pay more for school. That’s probably illegal and maybe unconstitutional, so it will never happen.
Consider the schools in my link, and say ever family gets $15K. (Way high.) neglect the fact that the increased demand for established schools will drive their prices up. The families will sort themselves out based on how much additional they can pay a year. Don’t you think this isn’t at least a bit plausible? Everything in our society, from cars to houses, works this way. (And colleges would if they didn’t make an effort through scholarships to prevent it.) Why not schools?
Thanks, that helps. I see now why you mentioned the religious nature of most private schools, though I’m still a little unclear on why you think vouchers would mean increased segregation according to income.
For the most part, yes. I concur that there’d probably be more splintering of student bodies along religious lines, which I’m not wild about, but religion wouldn’t be the only consideration for parents, so the splintering ought not to be severe in most places. That’s largely conjecture, though, and my own experience might be coloring my judgment on this specific issue: I went to Catholic schools through Grade 12 even though my parents didn’t care about religious education. It was just that the local Catholic schools were better than public schools and cheaper than secular private schools.
But there’s already a sorting by ability and willingness to pay. Part of the virtue of vouchers is that they reduce the discrepancy in said ability. Again, why is this more of an issue with vouchers than with the current system?
No, I would assume that the average private school tuition exceeds the average public school expenditure per pupil, mostly for the obvious reason that private schools are presently catering almost exclusively to parents who can afford to pass up a free public school education. Change the group of prospective students and you’ll change the nature and price of private schools to accommodate it.
Alternately, it’s an example of a centralized bureaucracy stifling innovation and applying uniform solutions to diverse circumstances. One administrator setting the policies for a GATE program that applies to 40 different schools in 40 different situations? Of course, neither “example” is telling the whole story.
The concerns about economies of scale that have been brought up are legitimate, but it’s not as cut & dried as has been suggested. For one thing, in a voucher system there would presumably be large, corporate school systems that could take advantage of economies of scale in the same way that large public school systems do. Also, as I alluded to above, there’s a downside as well as an upside to this sort of centralization. Bureaucratic inertia and the tendency to apply static rules to dynamic situations both increase along with size. I would propose that public entities tend to be worse at dealing with these problems than private entities, but I have no evidence.
Of course there will be a sorting based on how much they can pay, and we know this because there already is, which has been my point. It’s just that most parents are able and/or willing to pay $0. In places where public schools are good, this isn’t a big problem. In places where public schools tend to be poor (generally urban areas), this leads to huge educational inequality.
Hypothetically, say that with a voucher system, after subtracting the amount of vouchers, you have a some $0K schools, and then some $2K schools, and some $5K schools, and some $10K schools. Once again, how is it that this situation leads to more inequality than the present one, in which there are $0K schools, then $12K, and $15K, and $20K?
I’m not terribly opposed to increasing spending on education in principle. Good luck in getting the rest of NYC to go along with it. The voucher plans I’ve heard of don’t provide for any such increase.
I’m not against vouchers in principle. It’s the practicalities. I can’t speak for your school, but I know that each of the three Catholic schools my kids have attended would immediately raise tuition if a voucher plan were implemented.Maybe not by the entire value of the voucher, but if I’m already paying $6000 a year in tuition, I won’t have a problem paying $3000 or $4000 in addition to the voucher and the schools know it.
Voucher advocates seem to make a few assumptions, for example, that schools will spring up which will cost parents $0 after the voucher is subtracted. Maybe they will, I don’t know. This
is probably true, but doesn’t go far enough.
Where are all the teachers and administrators going to come from? Most likely from those who have been excessed from the public schools that close down. Same buildings, same teachers , same students ,same parents. What reason is there to expect better results ?
Will individual students do better?Maybe. Or maybe not. I went to a NYC high school that looked bad on paper even 25 years ago when I graduated. I got a better education there in many ways than my kids got in Catholic schools. The fact that 50% of the kids who entered with me didn’t graduate did not affect me at all.
Not really. There is a common denominator, and that is national standardized tests like the SATs. In a very quick search, I found some numbers that indicate this:
You’re missing that in science “theory” is as certain as it gets. You start out with a hypothesis, and see how it matches the data, and publish, and get piled on with criticism from other scientists in the field trying to pick holes, and if it stands up under that you have a theory, which stands until somebody proposes something that proves an even better approximation of reality. Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation is a theory; so is Einstein’s.
By that standard, BTW, intelligent-design “theory” is still at this point only a hypothesis – and will, in fact, never be a theory, because it is not only unprovable but nonfalsifiable.