Why reinvent the wheel? Instead of putting money into charters, why not just fix the public schools? NYC has the largest school district in the country, and a lot of their charters suck.
How exactly? Throwing money at them does not work, as studied here and as evidenced by the fact that the United States spends the most per pupil (except Switzerland) out of all Western countries with pathetic results.
Sort-of-hijacky discussion of the charter system aside, it appears that almost everyone in this thread agrees that Romney’s plan is pointless. Interesting.
You can’t name any of the states you lived in because you’re afraid people will figure out who you are? :dubious:
I am very dubious of your claim that “money has already been siphoned” from public schools. I am pretty confident that almost any state you want to name, looked at over any significant time period, is going to show the same trend as the nation as a whole, of greatly increased spending. I could be wrong, and I’d welcome correction; but that’s a imrobable claim you’ve made, and I can’t put much stock in it without any support.
:dubious: Throwing money at charters isn’t proved, either.
It isn’t just money. Yes, schools need money, but what they need more than anything are early hardcore intervention programs, dual language programs and smaller class sizes.
And free sterilization clinics.
Because you can set up all the charter schools you want - it doesn’t help when a kid enters 9th grade with a 3rd grade reading level.
Of course it is pointless. Romney knows it’s pointless too. It’s $500/year per student - that’s not a “voucher”.
Example: Urban Prep, a school designed for inner city black boys. (No girls; sorry.) Low test scores, but gets a dillion dollars. Oprah is a fan.
It’s true - the reason why all schools can’t do this is because they can’t afford to give all kids laptops and suits and cell phones and summer school. But with all that attention, the boys are still scoring only 1 or 2 points higher on the ACT than their inner city neighbors.
Dude, I could’ve scored a 15 on the ACT when I was in 18th grade. Big stinkin whoop.
But as a teacher, it’s no shock that the urban ed program I went through showed us a little documentary on how AWESOME urban prep was. (It was designed to show that minorities teaching minorities was a great idea.)
If you read the link I gave, they reduced the ratios of kids to teachers to 12:1, dual language programs were not needed since for almost all the kids in those schools English was their native tongue.
See this quote from one of the proponents:
"No one was more disappointed than former school board president Sue Fulson. “I truly believed,” she told the Harvard Project on School Desegregation in 1992, “if we gave teachers and administrators everything they said they needed that they would truly make a huge difference. I knew it would take time, but I did believe by five years into this program we would see not just results, but dramatic results, educationally. And [the fact we didn’t] is my bitterest disappointment.”
That was 5 years into the project. 20 years into it, the results were the same. No improvement.
Yeah, right.
No, it doesn’t. What does work is throwing out those who disrupt and drag other students down. When will public schools be allowed to do that?
Vouchers in a nutshell.
In the end, they provide a subsidy to those people who already value private education enough to pay for it.
My kids are getting old enough (and we are well off enough) that from a selfish standpoint, I’m hoping to see vouchers come through - although from a long term public policy standpoint, I think they are a horrible idea. They aren’t likely to come through and ruin public schools while my kids are still in them, and if that is likely, then we can pull my kids into a $18k a year private school (and maybe get a credit! Although we are likely to income out of credits). But I can’t wait until vouchers are available for the Somali kids who populate the neighborhood in quantity to get send to a madrassa. They are overwhelmingly poor, crushingly so in many cases. They may arguably be better served in a school that understands their cultural, religious and language needs (the public school system has really been burdened by the adjustment) - although personally I think that having immigrant children in public school is one of the drivers for integrating immigrant communities into American culture in just a generation or two (we have a heavy Hmong population as well, and we are on generation two and three in the schools…generation three is as American as my kids are). And their existence and the use of vouchers to pay for them will cause heads to explode in an amusing fashion.
So basically it’s the home. So if we just create charter schools, the ones with the best parents and most motivation in students will succeed. And kids who can’t go to charter schools (transportation, funds, whatever) will suffer? And before you say, “It’s free!” a lot of charters still have school fees and before and after care costs. Here, it can run about $4000 a year.
Just as an FYI for those who may not know:
In Sweden, parents get a 100% voucher applicable at any private school they choose. Ireland and Holland have more complex but essentially voucher-like programs. These have been in place for many years now, and their school systems are fine. (There are also a number of voucher systems in place in the U.S., but most are not very old).
That doesn’t mean that vouchers a good thing, but the idea that they are inherently, necessarily, unworkable is clearly untrue.
And those students succeed anyway - the ones with the best parents and most motivation.
We live in a district with a lot of poverty and failing schools - and some wealth and parents of higher socio- economic class. My kids elementary school almost closed due to NCLB. The kids who you expected to do well did well (i.e. the ones who lived in the “good” neighborhoods, who had parents with professional jobs, parents who showed up at conferences and volunteered for the school carnival, and the kids that were motivated), the ones who were failing were the ones you expected to fail (poverty in the home, parents with maybe a high school education, parents who weren’t involved in their kids educations, and kids who didn’t give a damn). We have kids who don’t graduate high school, and kids who are National Merit Scholars.
Doesn’t have to be charter schools. Do two things:
- Allow public schools to kick those students that disrupt the classes and prevent other kids from learning out.
- Create special schools for those kicked out. Don’t expect much out of those schools. If the kid’s behavior/attendance/demeanor warrants it, allow for transfer back to normal school.
Watch the normal schools’ performance improve. And those removed from them - they won’t be doing much worse than they were doing anyway.
They also have tax rates to support them. Well, maybe Ireland doesn’t have the revenue stream to support them, but I think Sweden and the Netherlands are in pretty good financial shape.
I think the biggest risk in the U.S. is that we’d do a half assed job of providing vouchers - i.e. not a 100% deal for good schools, but more like a 80% deal for piss poor ones (that might cover the application fee at good ones). And then, sometime during the thirteen years we need to provide vouchers for stability in a kid’s education, we’d cut funding. Possibly when we realize that “our tax dollars are going to train terrorists in Madrassas” - possibly just when we decide that we don’t want to pay taxes or that the program is more expensive than we wanted. I don’t have confidence that the U.S. populace really wants to pay for education in ANY form - we have become a nation of selfish people with little look ahead depth - “I don’t have kids in school, why should I pay for yours.”
You’re going to compare the United States to Sweden? Yes, also please give me paid maternity leave, health care, and eradicate crime in the inner city.
:dubious:
We do, but it’s a long LONG process. It’s also called No Child Left Behind. And what constitutes as bad behavior is relative. Some schools are just bad, period. You gonna kick out 60 or 70 per cent of the student body? And what about good kids with bad grades?
We do. I work at one. It sucks money from the district. I’m sad that you don’t think we should ‘expect much’ from these kids. My students to enjoy a 1:10 ratio, though. Perhaps getting kicked out was good for them. I’d like to think so.
I don’t see how. It’s not as though the government is proposing to buy up (or seize) all private schools. That said, I think there should be more strings attached to money distributed under voucher programs.
Tax rates and revenue streams aside, the US spends more per-pupil than all of those countries, and among the most in the world.
Ooooo…don’t be a teacher when you say such things!
I was one of those rarities…a teacher that didn’t believe in universal education. Make no mistake, your proposal above is essentially this. I kept my opinion to myself because to say it would have made me the Devil Incarnate.
It’s not really an apples-to-apples comparison. School systems in other countries generally don’t build giant stadia* for school sports teams, driver’s ed facilities, and other things that are pretty much universal at US schools.
*a public school in Texas broke ground on a $60 million stadium earlier this year; hardly representative, but even if the average is $5 million it’s a huge additional cost, even if you don’t count maintenance and lighting and so on.