I don’t think the solution to the performance of our public schools is vouchers, because that isn’t going to help the public schools at all, in fact its going to make them worse and worse over time due to all of the best kids with the most involved parents being siphoned off to private schools with public dollars. The problem with comparing public schools and private schools, is that it isn’t a fair comparison. Private schools get to choose their students, whereas public schools must take every child in that district. Every child with parents who don’t give a shit if they’re failing, or even go to school, and half the time don’t even know where their kid is. Every autistic and special ed child, some of who are pretty severely handicapped and really should be in some sort of special facility, but their parents are poor, so they can’t afford that kind of place, so the public schools must attempt to educate them as best they can. What do you think kids like these do to your test scores and performance? Private schools don’t have this problem. First of all, those worthless parents who couldn’t care less about their child won’t even bother to look into this voucher system, so they won’t have to deal with them at all, and if the kid fucks up or is failing, well you can always just expel him and send him back to the public schools. And the rest you can just choose to not accept to your school. So the kids that get sent to the private schools on vouchers are the ones that actually have involved parents, and as a result will tend to take their education more seriously. You take all the kids like that out of the public schools and what do you have left? Then you compare the private schools with the public schools after you leech all of the best kids out and leave the rest of the kids that the public schools have no choice but to teach? How on earth is that a fair comparison? That’s kneecapping your opponent in a race and then pointing to him from the finish line to prove how much faster you are.
The fact is, we as a society long ago decided that every child deserves to have access to a quality education. Right now, we have some work to do in this regard, but if we just cripple the public schools this way we will really be doing a disservice to a lot of kids who will still be in those schools and who have parents that for whatever reason don’t send them to private school. If we are serious about the idea that every kid deserves a shot at a good education, then we can’t just handicap the public schools and leave them to die because then what do we do with all of the kids that right now have to be in public schools, but would not be desirable to private schools? Do we then mandate that private schools must accept all children of the area? What is that going to do to those test scores, huh? Or do we just get rid of the idea that all children deserve a chance at a good education?
I’ll even help you. Question: is the method of disputing the validity of SCOTUS decisions valid, or not?
If the method is valid, then how is this possibly a tu quoque? No one has done anything wrong, and I am simply advising Terr on a proper rhetorical technique.
Agreed?
If it’s not valid, of course, then you have a point; that would certainly make it a tu quoque fallacy here.
Don’t be ingenuous. The question posed by Czarcasm was clearly “What justification do you have for declaring that government involvement in education is unconstitutional?” Your response boiled down to “Look! It’s Halley’s comet!”
We all know that you are well-versed in legal argument and if there was a plausible case to support Terr’s contention, you could have cited chapter and verse. Instead you decided to argue like an 8 year old – “In some other unrelated thread, a liberal poster who’s not even involved in this argument disagreed with a court decision, and that apparently means that any random conservative poster who claims that something is unconstitutional must henceforth have their claim honored.” What the hell kind of argument is that?
Well, it’s not an argument – it’s smoke and mirrors, similar to the way you simply accuse me of not knowing what * tu quoque* means. It’s a contemptible form of debate.
Let’s get the thread back on topic. The subject is Romney’s plan and school vouchers in general, not the failings of anybody’s style of argument or what they did in another thread. The Constitutional issue hasn’t been pertinent to the discussion so far either, so either explain its relevance to what Romney is proposing or drop it.
Not true for charter schools, though. They also have to take every child and they deliver the same performance at lower cost.
So this says to me that the public school system is broken.
So the children that could do better are shackled to kids that can’t? Drag down the kids who will benefit from a quality education so that the lower performing kids get theirs?
No. Pointing out that you have no damn clue what tu quoque really means may FEEL contemptible to you, but that’s probably because it exposed your poor grasp of the concept.
And you still don’t. Answer the question: is Terr able to hand wave away a SCOTUS decision? Yes, or no?
If the Constitution didn’t give the government the power to pass laws providing for “the general welfare” you’d have a point, but it does so you don’t.
Here’s the issue. I support public schools as I get to vote on how they are run. If the Directors do something stupid, like decide to stop teaching Evolution, I can vote the bastards out.
If a Church decides to do that thing, there’s nothing I can do.
It’s a much-repeated claim that private schools only accept the best students, but it’s largely a myth, especially in the inner-city environments where most voucher programs occur. (Ironically, it is more true in white/suburban areas where the public schools are much better anyway).
See this or this or this for studies. If you’re under the impression that inner-city private schools are succeeding by plucking the best kids, you’re misinformed.
Certainly it’s true that kids signed up for a voucher program obviously at least have parents who care, and not all kids do. But where do we go with that? Do we limit the ability of a parent to get the a good education for their kid precisely because they want to? Do we tell kids that they have to stay in crappy schools because other kids’ parents don’t care enough?
The whole “Constitutional” issue is a hijack and the argument over whether anyone in particular can argue the point (or understands tu quoque), is more of a hijack.
If it is important to you to argue those points, open a new thread.
You don’t see how these two things are obviously contradictory? How well do you thing public schools would be doing if they only accepted kids whose parents give a shit? Not only that, but many private/charter schools require ongoing parental involvement and volunteerism. If public schools could demand the same, the calculus would be very different. It’s like if you had to register to vote every year, on a certain day, months in advance of an election. How many people do you think would vote, and how different would that group be in almost every regard?
Considering every teacher must graduate from college, meaning they have higher educational attainment than roughly 70% of the population, I don’t see how you can think they can collectively be described as dumb. Furthermore, if you are going to make such a baseless statement, you should at least attempt to prove some of the spurious implicit claims you are making. For example:
Many teachers are not intelligent enough to teach well
Being smarter makes you a better teacher
College grades reflect your intelligence.
I am curious as to how you think teachers unions would be better if they functioned more like the ABA? You seem to think the ABA is going around ensuring that every lawyer out there is a competent, upstanding member of the profession. They don’t. They mostly censure or disbar people for criminal activity, serious substantiated ethical breaches, and noncompliance with licensing requirements. All things that would likely get you booted from teaching as well. If the argument is that if the NEA was more like the ABA we would have fewer shitty teachers, I question the logic.
The AMA comparison is similarly off the mark. Especially because doctors and teachers are not evaluated in the same ways. How do you think doctors would fair if they were just graded on how healthy their patients are, or how accurate their diagnoses are? To simplify this point a bit, we pay doctors for their time and expertise. We don’t base their standing on patient outcomes that are often beyond their control. If a doctor tells you you have diabetes, and that you need to do x to stay healthy, it’s not held against him if you don’t do x. The same is not true for teachers.
If you are focusing more on the unions advocating for pay based on experience, I would ask how you would design a method of determining teacher effectiveness that works, and doesn’t add significant additional cost to the system. I would also like to know how such a system would not drag down wages significantly seeing as teaching is not particularly scalable or measurable. Since a teacher can only teach so many students, and the value added for an individual student is based on much more than the teacher’s teaching ability, why do you think anyone would ever pay a teacher 100k when you can hire one for 40k? As a result of hiring people are 40k with no expectation if higher pay, why would you expect MORE people to want to be teachers?
If everyone has a school voucher, they aren’t worth much. The poor private schools will cost “1 voucher” and the good private schools will cost “1 voucher + $X thousand,” leaving the poor pretty much where we started. Such is the way of capitalism.
No, I don’t think vouchers are a rich vs. poor deal at all, nor about academics. Instead, it’s all about “public schools do X and I don’t like my child being in a school that does X.” X can be just about anything from sex ed to having a “liberal agenda” to having the audacity to allow teacher to unionize, but in my experience, X is usually all about the lack of religion in education. The types of people that are the most vocal about vouchers tend to also be the most vocal about home schooling for that very reason.
Somewhat better, yes. Even in the inner-city, the number of parents who really don’t give a shit about their kids is fairly small. Certainly the fact that kids who win a charter/voucher slot via lottery usually do significantly better than the kids whose parents also signed them up but lost the lottery says parental involvement can’t explain it all. Are you going to seriously argue that the enormous difference in success levels between students in good inner-city charters and inner-city publics is completely due to the contagion effect of their being in the same room with the kids with non-shit-giving parents?
And for that matter, what about bad charter schools (they do exist, though they tend to lose their charters), where students have less success than public-school peers? How is the failure of such schools possible, given that they only accept kids whose parents give a shit?
Many do; though not all. In contrast, Inner-city publics have been less-than-receptive, if not downright hostile, to parental involvement, despite umpteen zillion studies showing how valuable it is.
And that leads us back to the question of what we’re supposed to tell people whose kids are in bad public schools and who want something better. “We’re sorry that your kid’s school sucks, and we know you want to help him learn, but while a voucher program would help your kid out, it’s better for society if he stays right where he is while we keep looking for a way to improve public schools. Mind you, there’s been no significant improvement in inner-city publics for 40 years, despite massively increased spending, but we’re sure that we’ll figure out something sooner or later. Tell Johnny to give us just five or ten more years.”
There’s plenty of blame to go around, but there’s no doubt that traditional public schools, especially inner-city ones, have a love-hate relationship with parental involvement.
Your original statement said, “In contrast, Inner-city publics have been less-than-receptive, if not downright hostile, to parental involvement, despite umpteen zillion studies showing how valuable it is.”
And then you provided cites from 20 years ago that said young single urban parents are uncomfortable getting involved.
Um, I’ve worked in two ‘urban’ districts and while they aren’t Chicago or LA, I can’t count the times that we’ve tried to get parents involved. Our parent teacher conference rates are dismal, parents don’t drive for field trips, it’s often impossible to get a fucking call back when your kid is failing, parents can be outright HOSTILE to the teachers (“Yous a dumb white bitch! You don’t know how to teach!”) and etc.
Some schools even try to bribe parents with food just to come to an event.
Now, I’m a young teacher and all, but I’ve never had a parent help in the classroom. Three classrooms, three urban hard-to-serve schools. And yes, we invite them.
But nevermind, inner city teachers are the dums. Especially compared to private school teachers (who are often paid less and often have alternative licenses).
P.S. Most big cities have an office for parent involvement, and most schools have a person in charge of that at the big schools. Like, it’s their JOB to get parents and community involved.
"Only 47 percent of teachers believed in strong parental involvement in school policy and affairs."
"Parent involvement may be further devalued for inner-city teachers, who hold beliefs that parent competence is reduced by socioeconomic challenges."
I was making a general statement, not an absolute one: lots of inner-city schools love parental involvement, and lots of suburban schools hate it. But both research and my own experience leads me to the conclusion that, as a generalization, parental involvement is much more encouraged in white/suburban schools. I’ve given you cites; I can get more if you really want, but if you wanna get involved in a cite war you’re gonna have to start providing some of your own instead of just referencing your own authority as if you’re the only person who has first-hand knowledge.
You may also want to try and keep track of who is making what statements and stay on-topic. e.g., I am not fumster.
I don’t know the current figures, but at one point close to 40% of school age children were in private schools, receiving little or no public money for their education. Any voucher system that distributes the same amount of public funds among all students will sharply reduce the amount of public money per student available. No one has honestly been able to justify the economics of a voucher system, it is simply a tactic in an attempt to destroy public education in this country.