The current figure is around 10%, and that has held steady for 40 years. Fast Facts: Enrollment trends (65)
This is correct. However, nobody significant is proposing this.
Just a little snippet from a much longer post, but let’s start there.
If you don’t think that being smarter makes you a better teacher than I think that displays more contempt to the teaching profession than my belief that we should raise standards and pay teachers more. I just can’t imagine someone maintaining that being smarter doesn’t make you a better doctor, or engineer, or accountant. And yes I do think that while college grades do not measure intelligence, they certainly do reflect intelligence. Don’t you?
Teachers seem to have the notion that alone among professions, their’s defies any attempt to measure relative performance. Somehow we pay engineers based on merit even though they may be working on very different projects. The same is true of architects and lawyers and other professionals.
Arguing that the service you provide can not be measured is not a winning strategy. How on the one hand can you maintain that having smaller classes will result in a better outcome for students and then on the other hand say that it is impossible to measure outcome?
In any school it is pretty well known who the great teachers are. I’m sure if your children went to the school where you teach you would try and get them assigned to the better teachers. Why wouldn’t you want the great teachers to be paid more than the mediocre ones?
Instead we have the teachers unions acting like they are representing factory workers.
I remember when the Tories introduced a voucher system for nurseries in the 90s. All the teachers and parents with whom I spoke loved it.
I’m realizing that my posts may come across as anti-public schools or anti teacher, but that’s not my position. I think our public schools are underfunded and that teachers are hampered by poor administration and by-the-numbers policies. I know some incredible teachers: much smarter than I am and also having the patience and skill to work with children. I wouldn’t last a week in a class room.
But I also know some frighteningly dim bulbs who have managed to keep their teaching positions. One thought that Asians were genetically unable to pronounce "R"s.
Your link doesn’t load for me, but that sounds absurdly low.
I’ve never heard of any other type of proposal. Do you suggest there is a proposal that does not take part of existing public funds and provide them to students currently in private schools, or increases taxes to cover the additional cost of those students?
I think this is a perception thing. There’s the impression that private and charter schools are “better” in some way than public schools. Folks point to better outcomes than the kids in the public school, but don’t necessarily control for the selection bias. The public school defenders would say “We could do just as well if our whole student body was as interested in school as yours.”
On the other hand, I do think there is value in taking the academically minded students and getting them out of a toxic educational environment. Even if the building & staff are basically PS 2 Electric Boogaloo, the self selected student body is going to allow for a better overall environment.
Teachers aren’t necessarily dumb…but many of them are drawn from the lower quarter of the graduating class. 20 years ago, it was shown that 50% of all teachers were in the bottom 25% of their college class. I can’t imagine things have gotten much better since then.
Quality matters. If it didn’t, Professional schools/disciplines wouldn’t have such strict academic/smarts requirements for admission.
Having been a teacher many years ago, I saw that most teachers were not all that bright…maybe a smidgeon higher in intelligence than the general population…they tended to lack curiosity and also tended to be intellectually lazy. Many of them tended to be good at hiding these negative traits but it became apparent when they were out of their element or asked to do something different.
There are exceptions, of course.
Could you imagine the state of medicine/doctors if for the entire history of the U.S. they were paid poorly and drawn from the lower part of the college classes?
Quality matters. Teaching is no exception.
I’ve heard half the doctors in this country only tested at or below the mean. So things must be pretty bad right?
Seriously though, I agree with you. People graduating with higher grades are going to have more opportunities, and are seriously nuts if they choose public school teacher as a career. And if doctors were qualified for any higher paying jobs, we’d have the same statistics in medicine.
Seriously nuts…yea, that explains me back when I initially chose teaching as a ‘profession’. In my defense though I was first generation college in a remote rural area in buttfuck North Dakota. Still, should have known better.
It was amazing, though, how often teachers are told to ‘shut the fuck up or leave teaching’. One time the community even hired a speaker to come in during teacher orientation whose message was essentially ‘stop whining or leave teaching’. I finally took them up on it.
Oh good. I did forget to mention I meant ‘nuts’ in a good way, that I’ve heard teachers use quite often. Even though I do have a lot of problems with the way the educational system works and the role of teachers in it, focusing on teachers as the cause of the problem is kind of stupid. But it pervades the discussions on these topics so often that I end up doing it myself. Don’t blame the player, blame the game.
The link was to the official government stats. Here is the same data on the Census bureau’s site:
It may be that your locality is different from the national average.
Your original statement was “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.” (emphasis added)
Nobody is proposing a voucher system in which the same amount of public funds are distributed equally among public and private schools or students. The proposals are that some portion, usually a small fraction, of the government spending on education go to the schools in which the student is being taught.
So, for example, a school district currently spending $10,000 per pupil per year (about the national average) might give $1,000 for each student enrolled in a private school. The public school system keeps the remaining $9,000 to spend on its remaining students. Thus, voucher systems mean public schools have significantly *more *per-student money.
Ok, that link worked. It just doesn’t correspond to numbers of seen in the past, but it seems to be an authoritative source. Point yours.
I’m not sure what you are saying, so let me just clarify what I am saying.
If you take the same amount of money total, and distribute more of it to private schools, you will be reducing the amount of money per student in public schools. To maintain the current costs of public schools, taxes have to be raised, or enough students have to leave the public school system to equalize the cost. Since that reduces the advantage of scale in the public schools, a very large number of students would have to leave the public school system, eventually making it impractical, which is the intention of those who propose this.
Now I don’t disagree with the idea of government sponsoring of education from any source that can establish that it provides the minimal acceptable level of services. But only if people are willing to pay the additional cost of it. And I have never seen any indication that anything close to a majority of people are willing to do that.
All school voucher systems in the country give vouchers only to poor families. The definition of ‘poor’ may vary. Some use the federal poverty line, others may use 150% of the federal poverty line, and so forth. Nonetheless, most of the students who currently attend private schools without vouchers would never be eligible for vouchers if they were offered. Hence there’s no reason to fear that vouchers would direct money away from public schools. A voucher system would assign a certain amount of money to each student from a poor family, and the money would go to wherever the family chose to send that student.
Loads for me. Shows, for 2009, 50M kids in public preK-12. 6M in private preK-12. Source is U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics.
NO! I was agreeing with you! ..and I meant nuts in a bad way 
I was seriously naive with no resources/experience/mentors to help me out.
So you are simply pointing out that what I have said is already occurring. The amount of public education funds per student in public schools is decreased by the amount given to private schools. It’s pretty simple math, and these are pretty minimal programs currently.
It’s just another ploy to privatize all government/public functions and divert taxpayer, public funds to the private sector.
Corporations would run the schools (as they currently do the for-profit “colleges” which often cost more, use deceptive recruitment practices, esp. targeting the poor and others who qualify for government funding, offer worthless, unacredited/non-transferrable credits and “degrees”, leave students with the debt, and siphon 10s of billions in federal student funding annually away from legitimate, not-for-profit institutions like Community Colleges and State Universities.)
Cites:
Washington Post, Aug. 5, 2010
“Congressional officials on Wednesday identified 15 for-profit colleges where recruiters allegedly encouraged investigators posing as prospective students to commit fraud on financial aid applications or misled them about such matters as tuition costs and potential salaries after graduation.”
http://harkin.senate.gov/documents/pdf/4ecbc68473117.pdf
(GAO report, October 2011)
“Once comprised of local, sole-proprietor ownership, the nation’s for-profit institutions now range from small, privately owned schools to publicly traded corporations. Enrollment in such colleges has grown far faster than in traditional higher-education institutions. Moreover, during the 2009-2010 school year, for-profit colleges received almost $32 billion in grants and loans provided to students under federal student aid programs…”
They would hire non-unionized teachers at a much lower rate of pay (eliminating one of the last bastians of the unionized/middle-class in the country) and have as their ultimate goal the maximization of profit. Don’t be fooled into assuming they wouldn’t be subsidized by tax dollars, either; they would cash in on and divert those dollars just as the for-profit colleges (and the for-profit health clinics and medical supply businesses who leech billions from Medicare and Medicaid, often fraudulently) do.
Please note that this would be a VOUCHER system, in which taxpayer funds were used to subsidize students, as they are now. The difference would be that those funds would go to for-profit businesses rather than publicly operated schools.
And anyone who thinks that ADDING A PROFIT MOTIVE to the equation will result in CHEAPER education for the public (anymore than it has resulted in cheaper health care or insurance in the U.S.) is delusional. At the most, any savings on teacher compensation would be consumed by profit.
Franklin once opined, “When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.”
And when corporations BECOME “people” and exert unlimited influence on our electoral process and government to promote their interests (tax breaks, subsidies, lax oversight, privatization, government contracts, trade and labor policies which benefit their bottom line…) it represents the largest orchestrated theft of taxpayer money ever dreamed of (FAR exceeding the combined costs of every person receiving taxpayer assistance.)
THAT’S what I think of Romney’s voucher/privatization/corporatization plan for public education. :mad:
Allow me to be concrete:
In city X, there are 10,000 students enrolled in K-12. The district spends 10,000 per student (a bit below the national average), for a total $100 million budget. Let us imagine that a charter program is enacted by which parents in the district may receive a voucher for $4000 to towards private school tuition (don’t know the national average voucher, but that’s about typical), and let us further imagine that 25% of the parents take the deal.
Under those numbers, the district loses $10 million from their budget … but they also lose 2,500 students; meaning that per-student spending among the 7,500 students still in the public schools rises from $10,000 to $12,000. There may be advantages of scale between 7,500 and 10,000, but they’re easily offset by the increased per-pupil money. And the more students take the vouchers, the more per-pupil money the publics have.
I don’t know how to make the math any plainer.
As I said upthread, it might be an issue in very rural areas where schools are very small to begin with, which a reason to perhaps oppose a universal-vouchers system; but nearly all voucher programs are targeted towards the urban poor, who are in huge school districts.
That is pretty much exactly how all voucher programs I’m aware of work. In the example above, the parents have a $4,000 voucher. If the private school of their choice charges $7,000 for the year, the parents are on the hook for the remaining $3,000. Many parents who can’t afford $7,000 a year can afford $3,000. In some cases, private schools don’t charge more than the voucher, because they have other ways of making up the difference (e.g. private charity, or else enough non-voucher-eligible students who are paying the full $7,000).
Allow me to be concrete:
In city X, there are 10,000 students enrolled in K-12. The district spends 10,000 per student (a bit below the national average), for a total $100 million budget. Let us imagine that a charter program is enacted by which parents in the district may receive a voucher for $4000 to towards private school tuition (don’t know the national average voucher, but that’s about typical), and let us further imagine that 25% of the parents take the deal.
Under those numbers, the district loses $10 million from their budget … but they also lose 2,500 students; meaning that per-student spending among the 7,500 students still in the public schools rises from $10,000 to $12,000 (90 million/7500). There may be advantages of scale between 7,500 and 10,000, but they’re easily offset by the 20% increase in per-pupil money. And the more students take the vouchers, the more per-pupil money the publics have.
I don’t know how to make the math any plainer.
As I said upthread, it might be an issue in very rural areas where schools are very small to begin with, which a reason to perhaps oppose a universal-vouchers system; but nearly all voucher programs are targeted towards the urban poor, who are in huge school districts.
That is pretty much exactly how all voucher programs I’m aware of work. In the example above, the parents have a $4,000 voucher. If the private school of their choice charges $7,000 for the year, the parents are on the hook for the remaining $3,000. Many parents who can’t afford $7,000 a year can afford $3,000. In some cases, private schools don’t charge more than the voucher, because they have other ways of making up the difference (e.g. private charity, or else enough non-voucher-eligible students who are paying the full $7,000).
Ok, after recovering from my sense of deja vu, would you tell me where this system to pay people to opt out of the public school systems exists. I’d be really surprised if all the parents of kids already in private school didn’t object to being left out of the deal. Also tell me how $4000 is not less than $10,000, because that’s what happens to the public spending on students who take the deal, and everybody after the public school closes down, which was the intention in the first place.