This is from the thread on the GOP, but continuing the discussion there sidetracks that thread and this is its own fight.
Vouchers may hand the money to the parents who in turn hand it to any charlatan who promises that “are kids are the best”*
Before vouchers and school choice this district had swim teams and golf teams. There were bands and orchestras, art classes, home ec. classes and shop classes. There were theater clubs and with plays and gymnastics, and cheerleaders. Now, with the exception of the Milwaukee School of the Arts, schools mostly make do with an art teacher or a chorus teacher who they share with another school or two. Only a couple of schools have band and orchestra, and as far as I know, none of the charters do. Only Bradley Tech has shop classes, and no one has home ec. Most schools manage to put up a boys basketball team and maybe a girls volleyball team. There are pretty much no other sports.
It is almost impossible to get parents involved in the school. If they have a problem, they pick the kids up and move them to another school. No one stays to fight for the school, and the kids play it. Not doing well in math, tell mom your teacher hates you, and boom you have a brand new fresh start in a new school.
All of the suburbs still have all of the extra curricular things. They start out with more money and, funny thing, they haven’t been handing their money to bunches of other schools. The suburbs have parents that go to the schools and fight to change things they see as wrong. They also tend to phone the school when their kid comes home and says the teacher doesn’t like them, instead of shipping the kid to a knew school, they might found out junior hasn’t done his homework in a month and the teacher likes him just fine.
*Actual sign in front of one of the local choice schools, and clearly written by an adult.
Right. So that’s the airtight logic against vouchers.
Furlibusea asserts parents would give their money to charlatans. Therefore, vouchers are bad.
Wait. I can do it too…watch!
IdahoMauleMan claims the actual charlatans are the buffoons running the public school system in just about any major city, along with a large portion of the unionized teachers.
Therefore, I claim they shouldn’t be entitled to my money.
Wow. That was easy! This is a Great Debate, indeed!
I’m confused by one facet of vouchers. Critics say that this means less money for the school district. I get that. However, if they have fewer students because they’re going elsewhere, they don’t really need that money. Am I missing something?
Odesio
PS: This is an honestly asked question and not a leading one meant to make some grand point.
I suppose yes, but I’m not sure it matters. Or if it’s a valid criticism.
Sort of like McDonald’s not wanting a Burger King to open up next store, because that means less money for McDonald’s.
Well…so what? If you get less money from your customers, that’s because they have decided to take their business elsewhere. That’s sort of the whole point. The current school district isn’t entitled to one red cent if the parents’ don’t want to take their business there. It’s the parent’s choice.
Let’s say that it costs $100 to give one kid an average education and so you get $100 per kid from taxes. You get ten kids and have $1000. But some of the initial expenses were already paid for by the first couple kids and spread out over the class. Or maybe you get a discount on chalkboards when you buy 3. So you have $1000 but only “need” $800 of that to give each kid a $100 education. You can spend the extra $200 on an art program or extra science equipment or something to make the education a little better than average.
You lose five of those students and you only have $500, of which you need almost all of it. Goodbye art program. Goodbye new microscopes.
Well, start with the issue of economies of scale. When there were about 25 high schools there were 25 principals. Now there are 100 principals. Many of the charters do not pay the same as the district, and don’t offer the same benefits but still you have about 75 principals you didn’t have before. Next look at buildings. They have closed a few schools down, but you still need to pay for about 100 more school buildings. There are more janitors and teachers. Even the schools that still are around have been broken into a little schools each with secretaries.
Next there is the issue of special education. While all of the charter schools take some special education students, there are none of them set up for the very worst cases. These are the kids who need to be fed and changed and have someone with them at all times. Now, the cost of educating the average kid is a few thousand dollars. ( I am thinking 5 but I sort of forget) but the other kid runs about 35 thousand by the time you pay for his aid and extra transportation costs. He stays in the main school district, but there are fewer kids to ameliorate his cost. This means that you need to cut programs. The law says he is entitled to a free and appropriate public education.
The other problem is, the parents did not pay that tax. It is not their money, it is taxpayer money. It was paid by them and by the old lady down the street and the business up the road. In a lot of cases with kids who get free or reduced lunch the parents paid no money at all into the pot.
The people who did pay the bill have the right to know that the people that are getting the money they have paid into the system is actually going to schools, not some guy buying his wife a Mercedes. (One of the fraud cases.) While I absolutely admit that there are big problems with how we educate inner city kids, the charter schools are not the fix. They are a distraction to make it look like we are doing something rather than actually addressing the issues.
The real issues involve poverty, hunger, broken families, a 50% rate of employment for African American males within the city, poorly designed welfare systems and even worse welfare reforms, joblessness, hopelessness, lead poisoning, drug addiction and a host of other problems that are difficult to fix with slogans.
Vouchers are wrong for two very fundamental reasons:
They are based upon a false assumption (the assumption that the money the government is willing to spend on educating their child should belong to them as “the” taxpayer), and
They are inherently incompatible with the notion of socialized education, since they are based upon free-market principles.
If society wishes to stop educating children on a “socialized” model, and wants to turn the concept over to free-market forces, then it needs to make that decision, not try to create a free-market in education through the back door, hamstringing the ability of the socialized system to accomplish its mission.
Slightly off topic, yet not, since these viewpoints tend to go together: if socialized education hasn’t killed off private education, why is socialized medicine going to kill off private medicine?
Fixed costs are huge for a school. Just because you have fewer kids, doesn’t mean you can turn down the temperature proportionally. If schools had been designed to be “resized” you could probably reduce costs significantly by shutting down 1/4th of the building - but a lot of schools in this country were built a long time ago in configurations that can’t be resized to only heat part. The teacher gets paid the same if there are 24 or 32 kids in her class (there are some capacity break points where you can combine classes - two classes of 16 turns into one class of 32. But two classes of twenty second graders should not be made into one class of forty second graders).
Busing kids around also takes money - so the more you have kids leaving the neighborhoods to go to school, the more buses you are running, the more educational costs are going into just moving kids around. When gas prices were so high last year out school district took a huge budget hit and dropped participation in the inter-district program - basically because the inter-district program tripled the transportation costs while benefiting a small proportion of the population. Or you put the burden on the parents to get their kids to the school - you can go to any school you want if you can get there - which really turns into “only those with the means (time and money) to schlep their kids out to the 'burbs every day can really get their kids into the better schools.”
I was rather fortunate to have gone to an excellent school district in Texas that had the resources for not only an outstanding academic curriculum but extra curricular activities including many different sports teams, two different bands, an orchestra, many arts programs, as well as a bunch of other activities that I can’t even remember. I didn’t start college until about 11 years after I graduated and I found that my high school education had prepared me fairly well for the experience. (I still had to start with bonehead math though.)
It wasn’t until many years after my graduation that I realized my high school experience was not typical. When I was a freshman I found that other students had not been exposed, or, their exposure was very limited, to literary works such as the Canterbury Tales, I had a decent grasp of international geography, and I knew that a proper paper was supposed to start with a conclusion, include a few paragraphs, and then end with a conclusion. I didn’t realize how good a high school experience I had compared to others until I went to college.
I’ll get to the point. How frustrating must it be for people who are stuck in a school district where students are not provided with decent learning opportunities. Worse yet, what about those who are stuck in dysfunctional school districts? Other than pulling up stakes and moving to another district they have very few options.
Oh, something else happens when you dismantle or reduce usage on neighborhood schools.
Communities and neighborhoods form around neighborhood schools. You know the people in your community because your kids go to school with them. Kids are one of those “forced to get to know your neighbors” experiences - and that is a good thing for a community. The kids all know each other from school - and in an age of video games and kids who don’t roam neighborhoods, this is the place they meet friends and find out where they live.
The parents I know that have sent their kids to charter schools that are not neighborhood schools might like the education they are getting - but all of them have talked about the social burden - getting to a playdate is no longer a bike ride down the street or a five minute car ride - for some of the parents I know its a half hour drive to get their kids to their school friends homes. In one case, the family is in the process of house shopping to get into the district they have “school choiced” into so that they have shorter social and dropoff commutes. Their eventual solution has been the traditional solution - move into the district.
But its deeper than just getting kids together. You don’t run into your kid’s friend’s mom at Target. When your neighbor is outside, you no longer all talk about the third grade teacher’s maternity leave or the upcoming school carnival or how the high school football team is doing. School creates a common set of experiences within a community that creates a cohesiveness - and some neighborhood activists think that neighborhood schools are essential to creating SAFE inner city neighborhoods because they create a community incentive not to tolerate drugs, gangs, etc.
I went to one of those schools. But how about we work on making sure that all schools have similar opportunities, rather than a few schools are great. And I don’t really have an issue with magnet programs - not everyone is interested in college level English Literature in high school, or having an orchestra. But generally, I’d rather see resources going towards making bad schools good than moving kids around to great schools.
This makes very little sense. You’re saying that there’s no room between ‘socialized education’ and ‘free market education’. Why can’t you bring in programs which add a modicum of market incentives to a socialized system to make it a little better?
As for the financial argument, every proposal for vouchers I’ve seen sets the voucher value significantly below the school district’s cost per child. In other words, if the school says children cost $6000 each per year to educate, the voucher might be worth $3000. If that child leaves the public school system, the tax base left for the schools should be in better shape, because $3,000 that would have been spent on that child is now available to be split amongst the others.
Really, the major opposition to voucher programs comes from the teacher’s unions, and it’s all about the fact that it opens the door for non-unionized teachers to compete with them. Can’t have that. So even highly successful voucher programs like the one in DC get shut down.
As for vouchers creating more classrooms, schools, administration, and support personnel, I thought that lowering class sizes was a major goal of public school reform advocates? Higher teacher-to-student ratios? That also means more schools, more teachers, and more support staff. But that’s all good so long as it’s all controlled by the government and the teacher’s unions. But as soon as its done through the market, oh my God it’s a big problem.
And I guarantee you that moving more kids into private education will dramatically lower both the cost of education and the number of administrators and support staff you need. Check out the size of the administration of the Catholic school system in New York, and compare it to the size of the public school administration. It’s shocking.
Wow. Talk about false assumptions. I had to stop counting 5 seconds into your post.
Let’s look at your point number 1.
‘…the assumption that the government is willing to spend…’
You’ve already shown your colors right there.
Since when did the government have money, and make decisions to spend based on their role as a consumer? The money belongs to the taxpayers. And the ‘buyer’ of services in this instance is the parents.
Twenty words into your post, and you’ve already obsfucated the notion that the government has extracted taxes by use of force, and has separated the buying decision from the most interested party in the deal…the parents. Once you do that, all sorts of contorted logic can enter the picture. Which indeed it does in the rest of your post.
I didn’t realize there was a ‘notion’ of socialized education, that somehow we had all agreed to. I thought the only ‘notion’ was that parents wanted the best education for their children, and would like to exercise as much control and choice as possible over that decision.
So you throw up two ginormous, whoppers of strawmen, and then claim that violates ‘fundamental’ principles. Right. Well done.
The problem with this logic (and I have heard it many times) is that when the number of students rises…this logic is all of a sudden no longer valid. MORE money is now needed. This can happen even in the same year…one school district has 5% less students but NO…cannot cut the budget the world will explode if you do…while a neighboring one has 5% more students and WE NEED MORE BUDGET!
