You have to assume that per pupil spending will increase and not just be put somewhere else in the budget. Oh, wait, you forgot overhead, grants, state and federal budgets, etc. So that screws up your logic right there! The projected per pupil spending in a certain district near me has decreased while the number of enrolled students increased. And yes, new charters opened this year. DPS has an open enrollment policy, btw.
And finally, charter schools still take districts’ time and money. Who do you think oversees them?
In your scenario, a district ‘lost’ 2,500 students. A high school. But these students are spread out from K-12. It doesn’t mean they lost all the overhead required for managing these schools. When a kid leaves the district, he doesn’t take a building, a teacher, a cirriculum officer, etc. with him. The shiny admin buildings are still there. The Superintendent is still cashing a nice paycheck. :dubious:
In the budget, right now. Our hypothetical district had a $10,000,000 budget.
Voucher programs, as they exist in nearly all cases, are only open to the poor and/or those in very bad school districts. Yes, there are some very poor people who are already paying full price for private schools, and for them the voucher would be a windfall; since they’re poor, they can probably use it. But more often, the people paying full-price for private school are middle-class or wealthy, and they aren’t eligible. They’re only “left out” in sense that they’re “left out” of food stamps or welfare.
So wait … your real objection is not that per-pupil spending for students in the public system would go down (you understand it won’t, right?). And your objection is not that a parent would balk at paying the difference (they will, and do). Your objection is that the money won’t get spent on that particular kid, even though the parent has opted out of it?
Is that right?
In other words, if the government was giving out $5 hamburgers to kids, and a parent said they’d rather have a $3 hot dog and you could keep the rest to spend on other kids or whatever else you wnated, you’d be opposed to them having that choice?
I’m a little baffled by this example since it’s only utility would be where the public schools are underfunded and this simply contributes to that. Why should we provide assistance to a few while leaving the rest in an underperforming school?
I have no idea what that means. Voucher systems take money out of the public school system, plain and simple. If you want to cover the costs of giving everyone a quality education, I’m all for it. But I only see proposals that continue to reduce the funding of public schools.
Inner city charter schools as a whole do not to better than public schools, so your supposition is incorrect. See here, here, here, and here. More cites if needed.
Why would you think a school could not fail under such circumstances? I don’t think this is particularly a mystery, nor does it really need an explanation.
What things do you think a charter school can do that a public school can’t, and why don’t those differences result in demonstrably and reliably better results? Seeing as they collectively don’t do better than public schools, I wonder why you think the solution lies with charters. That’s not to say they can never work, but seeing as we view success as outcome-based, I don’t think the market can guarantee the results we want.
You misunderstood. Your contention is that smarter people are better teachers. I would contend that most people who go to college and have professors who are probably, on average, smarter than most secondary teachers, would realize that those smarter professors are generally considered inferior “teachers”. It’s like arguing that if actors and directors were 10% smarter, we would have better movies. What about if our pharmacists were smarter, would the pharmacy field look different? What about if we had more intelligent politicians, doctors, judges, or garbage men? You are ignoring that fact that teaching is not (generally) about raw intelligence, it’s (largely) about being an effective and engaging communicator. Those two characteristics are not well correlated, so focusing on intelligence is misguided so long as teachers are smart enough to teach (eg. does the calculus teacher understand calculus). Yes, it would be nice if every 4th grade teacher was a genius, but that would not mean they would be better teachers, just smarter people who happen to teach.
No, not really. And the fact that you think being smarter makes you a better doctor makes me think you don’t know what most doctors do all day. Why do you think being smarter would yield better results for patients? Please keep in mind that the average doctor is already very smart. Why do you think being 10% smarter will make it easier for him to recognize a child’s cold, or bill insurance companies more efficiently. There are so few fields where more raw intelligence is that big an advantage over the median intelligence in that field.
But those things are not analogous for a number of reasons. Most obviously, lawyers who make a lot of money are providing more value in measurable, objective terms (eg. money). As such, it is easy to reward them using the same metrics. If you are some rainmaker who can bill 2500 hours/year at $900, you can easily demonstrate your worth, and can thus command a certain salary. They don’t pay those people more just for being “good at their jobs”, or for “being smart”, they do it because the person brings more value to the company in a seemingly measurable way. Even so, many lawyers and other professionals are still paid via a rough scale based on experience, just like teachers.
If you are a great teacher who can rightfully claim credit for raising kid’s scores 30%, who is going to realize that value? It’s not the teacher, the school board who hired the teacher, the state who pays the teacher, or even the student (in the short term). So why would you pay a teacher more for being better? It doesn’t directly contribute to your bottom line. Obviously, some places with money and resources might pay to attract great talent, but there is no pressure for them to do so. That’s why the average salary at Sidwell, the the Obama girls go to school is 56k, whereas it’s 66k at DC public schools. You seem to think people will pay for results for which they see no direct personal benefit. I don’t see any reason to think that’s the case over the long haul. People won;t even pay to keep their drinking water clean, what makes you think they will pay exorbitant teachers salaries because test scores went up 2%? That said, feel free to suggest a way to do it that is fair, accurate, and doesn’t cost much more money.
You also seem to be accepting as a predicate that engineers and lawyers, etc. are paid fairly and rationally, and that the public would support paying teachers in a similar fashion. I don’t think either of those things are true. Do you really think people would be okay paying a teacher fresh out of school 150k+ like some lawyers?
I didn’t argue either of those things.
First, you seem to be under the misapprehension that there are “good teachers” and “bad teachers” when in reality, that us usually not the case. It’s not static. It’s a moving target, and one that is very subjective. I have no issue with paying effective teachers more than others, but measuring that is very difficult, and would likely result in a year to year fluctuations that would result in fewer people wanting to teach.
You keep saying this, but you don’t explain what you are talking about, or why you think that is bad beyond the fact that you obviously feel factory work is not desirable work.
You are clear on the differences between “total government spending,” “total spending, public and private,” and “per-pupil spending” right? You can grok the idea that a school system can have a smaller budget, but still be spending more per-pupil, yes? And that by offering to pay part of the tuition, you’re incentivizing parents (and often donors) to invest their own money on top of the the government’s, you’re increasing the overall amount of money going into education?
I don’t really care if you agree. I’m just trying to figure out if you at least understand how it works.
As I mentioned in another thread, you’re using an unfair metric. Charter schools should not be compared to schools generally, but to other inner city schools, i.e., the ones they sprout up to replace. Through them, kids get helped that wouldn’t have much of a chance if the charter school wasn’t there.
I understand your utopian concept where just the right number of students are financed for just the right amount of money without anyone caring about the disapproportionate distribution of public funds or demanding lower taxes to account for the magic dollars saved. Not of it explains how a voucher system can work on a large scale basis without decreasing the cost of public funding per student or increasing taxes to cover the additional costs. Parents, donors, and taxpayers are disincentivized to invest in public education in your concept, which as I said before, is the reason for this idea. If you want to convert to a private education system, give every student sufficient funds for a minimally qualifying educaton and cover the costs somehow. Otherwise there is no way to ensure the right of a student to an education.
Hmmm. Maybe I should have qualified that statement by specifically limiting it to good charter schools. Oh, wait: I did.
I note your keen grasp of sarcasm
Look, I’m not really interested in debating this. I’ve mainly been trying to give information and explain facts here. If you’re really perplexed as to why anyone would support charter schools, you can take it up with a politician who I think is pretty good on ed policy:
Arne Duncan, said sec of ed, is about as vocal and enthusiastic champion of public charters as Obama could have named. And Obama is not some outlier: hell, Randi Weingarten has seen the writing on the wall and adopted an if-you-can-beat-em-join-em attitude towards charters. Like it or don’t, pretty much everyone who has juice thinks the future has a lot more charter schools.
Then what is your point? That good charter schools are better than shitty public schools? That is obviously true by definition.
When did I say I was perplexed as to why anyone would support charter schools? In fact, I have said they have been successful in limited circumstances.
brickbacon you may not have convinced me (yet) to change my views, but you state your case very well and are a strong counter example to some of the perhaps unfair stereotypes I have developed about teachers.
WHAT!!! That is effing offensive! Sped DOES NOT mean “cannot learn.” Most sped kids are LD or ADD style kids…not exactly Harvard level, but then again not exactly mentally unable either. A lot of the underacheivement in sped, especially with blind/low vision and deaf/hard of hearing is due to the fact that public schools can get away with proviiding minimal accomondations so the kid struggles instead of really thriving with the type of accomondations/training that would be available at a dhh or a blind/low vision school.
But yes, I do agree with you that autistic (and REAL autism not HFA/Asperger’s) and mentally handicapped kids do need their own special schools/facillites
IMO much of the reason public schools are currently “broken,” in the states I have lived in anyway, is because money has already been siphoned from them in the form of funding cuts that resulted when tax revenues were capped, largely by measures enacted to contain property taxes. In place of tax revenues, schools have increasingly supplemented their budgets by allowing/encouraging private sector involvement in the form of PTAs, PTOs, and foundations that are, with largely the best of intentions, injecting their agendas into the public school system. As a result, Johnny gets all the best teachers because Mommy Sue will make the principal’s life a living hell if he doesn’t; the high school gets a new astroturf football field because 80% of Podunk, USA’s citizenry turn out for Friday night games and it was easy to sell raffle tickets there to raise money; the middle school gets a fabulous new marquee because Sally’s dad, Mr. Bob, sells it to them at cost plus 20% (because 20% of something is better than 50% of nothing!) And all he had to do was convince his buddies on the Fabulosity Foundation to support the idea!; and elementary school A has a volunteer art teacher, who is a parent, while elementary schools B and C have music instead because their parents have collectively raised $80k a year to pay for programs. Nevermind that the districts’ history books all still say the Civil War was about states’ rights; disregard the fact that kids have to share Algebra books; so what if there’s no bus service anymore?
I’ve always been one of the active volunteer parents and I’ve generally been on, or friends with, the budget-supplementing organization’s officers. I’ve lived in four states–one on each coast and two in the middle. It is the same everywhere. Our public schools will fail to turn out excellent students at the rate industry requires them as long as we, as a nation, fail to establish a baseline for what constitutes a good education and ensure that our schools have the resources to provide it for each and every kid. After the baseline has been established and systems are in place to provide it on a nationwide basis (with federal tax dollars), then we can begin to talk about supplementary education that is paid for by mobile money at the state and/or local level.
In the meantime we will have a largely uneducated electorate that fails to investigate, or even support investigation of, the lies pumped out of our political campaigns; our jobs will continue to be outsourced to other countries where only the very brightest get a good education and become engineers, doctors, and other highly skilled professionals (that come at a fraction of the salary of the same in the US), while the remaining population can be happily employed for peanuts. And we will continue to decry the deteriorating state of education whilst complaining about the quality of teachers, all the while turning out fewer and fewer people interested in trying, or qualified, to fix it.
Who benefits in this scenario, you ask? Guys like the one who wants the vouchers.
YES! Looking at the overall success of all charter schools nationwide, most of which are only a few years old, is missing the point. The intention of creating charter schools is not that they will all succeed immediately; it’s that some will succeed and some will fail, and we learn from both. Kids entered in the charter lotteries (i.e. whose parents give a shit), but who do not win the lottery do not drastically outperform kids from the same populations who were never entered into the lottery. Kids who do win the lottery frequently do better --sometimes wildly so – and sometimes do worse, depending on which charter they get into.
Thus, the quality of the school makes a difference, regardless of whether or not the parents give a shit. Parental involvement can make a good school better, or it can mitigate the damage of a bad school, but at the end of the day the school matters, and it matters a lot. And thus, the answer to your question above (“How well do you thing public schools would be doing if they only accepted kids whose parents give a shit?”) is “better, but not as good as the effective charter schools – the ones everybody’s trying to reproduce – already do, because school quality matters.”