I am familiar with the DC voucher program. It isn’t the sort of voucher system that conservatives are pushing. It is more of a scholarship program that is ONLY avaialble to poor kids. In EVERY case I am aware of the DC voucher recipient is also receiving a scholarship for the rest of the tuition to that private school.
If you limit the concept of a voucher system to poor kids who get scholarships for the difference between the voucher and the tuition, then I think I might be OK with that sort of voucher system. But, that is not the sort of system that voucher advocates are talking about.
I am not against a voucher scholarship program like the one in Washington DC. I am against a voucher system that will give every kid a coupon to pay just a part of a school’s tuition with the rest coming out of their parent’s pocket IF their parents’ can afford the diffrence in the first place.
I was analyzing his response. If I were to look at your analogy, the major propblem with it is that you are comparing choosing between two cartons of milk sitting side by side and switching your kid between public schools here, there, and across the country. Essentially your complaint is that the poor people whose kids go to Slum High can’t up and decide to have the state bus their kids into Mansion High half a county away.
Rather obviously, these things are not comparable. Cartons of milk are pretty easy to transport and once they’re on the shelves it doesn’t really effect anyone else which you pick. You could pick a different brand of milk each week, if you could find it, and it wouldn’t significantly effect anyone else.
Schools, on the other hand, both have a harder time accomodating sudden surplusses and shortages in student population, particularly if the fluxes are large, and even if that weren’t a problem it would be rather a nightmare getting all the records and class assignments and whatnot to fall into place correctly upon arrival. Schools have resolved these problems by the practical approach of just assigning you your school, should you decide to take advantage of the public school system rather than some other (possibly more expensive) alternative. Which is sort of what you expect when dealing with the cheap option: less features; less choices.
Which isn’t to say it’s not possible to change public schools; just harder. But if you’re that desperate: move house. That’ll do it.
So that’s my reaction to your analogy: it ignores so many realities it’s inapplicable on the face of it. Damuri Ajashi’s great crime was giving the blatant flaws in it a pass and instead riposting with another analogy along the same food-based lines which handily exemplified the dubious underlying motivation behind pushing this scheme.
I don’t have any such problem, as I believe I’ve already said; I am under no illusions that public schools as they currently are are “optimized”, or the other nonsense you erroneously are attributing to me. What they are is freely available to all. I’m quite sure this voucher thing will not make private schools freely available to all - so if you advocate it, you are voting to throw the poor under the bus.
And, “Public schools harm poor people more than they help them.”? Compared to what? Private schools they can’t get into, with or without vouchers? Not going to school at all? Joining gangs, maybe? Seriously, what alternative are you relying on to make this true?
I did. And I also read Damuri Ajashi’s post which states that the voucher program isn’t pulling the weight you claim; the difference (which is over half of the private school tuition) is covered by scholarship. Unless I’m misreading him, or unless you are claiming that we can get private schools to give scholarships to every child that curently goes to public school, then no, the numbers do not suggest otherwise than I opine.
I fully understand that the voucher program is not yanking 24,000 out per student; however, that does not change or refute my opinion that vouchers cannot be an “out” for a significant number of students unless they are large enough that, by being used by a significant number of students, they cripple the educations of those left. And the fact that a small number of students can get scholarships to lower the effective cost of private school to within voucher range doesn’t really change this.
You try and go to the Dept. of treasury and ask them to give you your money back and see how far you get. Its not your money anymore, it is government money.
Yeah and your elected officials are the ones that have to decide to give it back to you in the form of a voucher. This thread is discussing whether or not vouchers are a good idea.
What part of voting don’t you understand?
The rule of law is just as important when you lose an election and the other guys are making the laws as it is when you win an election and your guys are making the laws.
Did you notice that you were contradicting yourself? Parents who are already sending their children to private schools are not going to start withdrawing their children from public schools.
Unfortunately, this is also pretty silly.
And this is even worse. It does matter what happens to poor people. They need the best possible education in order to escape their poverty. If we can bring about a better outcome for students, then we should do that, and whether or not it hurts the public school system is a matter of no importance.
You seem vehemently upset over something that makes almost no sense.
Suppose a school, the Freddie Washington Memorial High School. FWMHS is a lousy school - half its grade promotions are social, the average student reads at a third grade level, most of the students graduate to the local crackhouse or maternity ward, or both. There’s a core of students - about 15% - who are doing reasonably well, considering - they can at least read and do math well enough to get a reasonable job, or get into the local community college, and some even better than that. But it is not easy, with the other students either gabbing nonstop on their cell phones in class or in a drugged out stupor, or nursing an infant.
But overall, 80-90% are failing by anybody’s standard at any given time.
Now, a local Catholic order, the Little Sisters of the Divine Foreskin, want to open up another school down the block. It would be a private school. They have done this in the past, with modest success - their latest effort in Buzzard’s Bladder MO has 56% of its students able to do GED level work, and with a student demographic very much similar to FWMHS.
So now the local government proposes a voucher system. It currently costs $5000 per pupil per year to run FWMHS. The Little Sisters have agreed to charge exactly $5000 per pupil per year for their new high school, Temporal Indulgence High School. They have a facility set up, Sister Mary Elephant, the principal has her ruler ready to crack knuckles, His Excellency the Reverend Kiddiefiddler is ready to do the dedication, and all is ready to start.
Now, should they implement the voucher system, you know as well as the doorknob that all the top 40% of their students will be out the door to TIHS faster than a friar with a full bladder can say his Paternoster. And as a result, test scores, graduation rates, participation in the PTA and local bake sales at old Freddie High is going to drop like Paris Hilton’s underpants. And Freddy Washington High School, as bad as it is, is going to start looking a fuck of a lot worse.
My question is, why is that a bad thing? The students at Freddie Wash are already failing. This includes the 25% between the top 15% and the bottom 60%. Whereas, to the extent that the 25% are being dragged down by the bottom 60%, this will not be the case at TIHS.
So the top 40% get a much better education, and the bottom 60% remain at FWMHS and get, essentially, the same failing education they got before. The only difference is that the top 40 are not dragged down by the bottom 60.
Why, in other words, should those with some reasonable chance at a successful education be held hostage to the failures of others? The lousy students are not significantly worse off - failing before, failing after. The rest - failing before, for the most part, but with some increased chance of success after.
Your major objection seems to be that this would starve Freddie Washington High School of funds. To which I respond, whoop-de-doo. The administrators at FWMHS can try to figure out what to do to attract students. Or they can muddle along with the reduced funding - at least they can do no worse than they already are.
And for those at Temporal Indulgence, who are now getting an education previously denied them, it is up, up and away.
It is only the taxpayer’s money in the sense that the government belongs to the people but the money no longer belongs to the people that paid it. A wealthy citizen that has paid $1,000,000,000 in taxes this year has no more ownership of the treasury than a poor citizen that has no taxable income. A poor citizen that pays no taxes has more ownership of the treasury than a greencard holder that has paid millions in taxes.
Not if they send their kids to public or charter schools but if they want a check from the government to subsidize their kid’s tuition at Andover, then yes they are taking advantage.
We tax non-citizens just as much as we tax citizens. BTW, are you proposing that we return tax money based on how much they paid in?
How much of a voucher would you give the kids who can’t afford to send their kids to school? Would it be enough to send their kids to Andover? If so then how would you pay for those vouchers? With a tax perhaps?
And why wouldn’t a Charter School System take care of that?
This is an assumption that is not playing out in either the Milwaukee or DC voucher systems. Studies so far show that students switching schools from voucher use aren’t faring any better at their new schools after 2+ years.
Do you really not understand the point I was trying to make with that admittedly imperfect analogy or do you simply have no response other than to point out that my analogy was imperfect.
Future tax money that MIGHT be set aside for school funding for years 2010, 2011, 2012 … 2020 is already govt money?!?! No questions asked? Only clueless irresponsible citizens would agree to that!
We are not talking about vouchers that rebate money paid in 1970… that money is gone and spent.
Consider a parent that has a 5-year old child right now. He may enroll his child in school … public or private. He thinks about the property taxes will be paying and how it is best used for his child (and society) for the next 12 years.
You are absurdly wrong on this. The future tax money and how it is used is NOT THE GOVERNMENT’S money. At least not yet; and not without a good fight if citizens want to government to be accountable for education results.
Is it not an unspoken context of this debate that vouchers is something that would happen in the future and not the past? This leads to considering future rebates on that tax revenue — or possibly not taxing people the same amount at all if public schools were scaled back.
Yes, we are discussing the merits of vouchers and of course, the laws would have to accommodate that.
A Charter School System is a single payer school system where state run public schools and privately run charter school operate with similar budget formulas and substantially similar restrictions (charter schools must take all applicants on a lottery system (no cherry-picking) but they are not necessarily unionized and they are have more flexibility with the curriculum).
The unions hate this sort of system because it breaks unions especially when charter schools pay their teachers more than the public school system AND provide a better more gratifying work environment for teachers. This is not always the case but a well run charter system can achieve this result often enough that a student population as a whole is generally better off.
I think it is only for the children of low income families. I don’t believe it does anything for middle income families. In every case that I know of, the private school providing a scholarship for the rest of the tuition.
The two kids going to Sidwell Friends on vouchers are also on full scholarship.
No but they are now going to start getting vouchers that they will be able to defray the ccost of tuition they are already paying.
That’s not very well reasoned.
I agree. I just haven’t heard anyone propose a voucher system that will actually help poor students.
If sisters of the foreskin open up their school to everyone going to Freddie Washington and charge no more than what then government gives them, then they are basically a charter school.
Some people don’t like Charter Schools because there is cherry-picking going on (even in if they choose their applicants by lottery) because the only people who want to go to Sisters of the foreskin are the ones that care enough about their education to do something about it. The reason this doesn’t bother me is twofold. First, we already separate student according to ability with gifted programs and. Second, the disruptive students at Freddie Washington don’t get MORe disruptive, its not like the Erkels were a calming influence on the Mike Tyson’s of the school.
No, I don’t see where it says that. Perhaps if you read it again, you wouldn’t either.
How so? At best, they are an unintended draining of funds beyond what the public schools can afford to lose to compensate the remaining. And since this is a pretty intuitive effect of pulling money out of the schools, it’s hard to believe that persons advocating vouchers would be completely unaware.
No. I’m upset when arguments are made that either falsely pretend that vouchers are going to get every student out of public school, or who just cavalierly dismiss the fact that poor students will be left behind in underfunded schools - possibly with a flimsy justifcation for their apathy based on a nonsense argument that the free market will empty, bankrupt and close the entire government-funded school system.
Staggering. 'FWMHS is going to be a fuck of a lot worse, and there will still be students stuck there. But who cares about them?"
I note you’re equating “a fuck of a lot worse” and “essentially the same” - talk about cognitive dissonance. Seriously though, you’re not going to impress me with your silly claim that that public schools (and are you only offering vouchers to students of FWMHS? If not, then all public schools) provide literally no education at all. Not will you impress me by glossing over and then and then denying the fact your little voucher plan will, indeed, fuck over those left behind.
Summation: more complete dismissal of the plight of those too poor (a $5000 voucher?? Get out of here!) or too ‘undesireable’ to get into public school.
My *major *objection is that vouchers as argued here are just a scam to give money to those rich parents whose kids are already going to private school, at the expense of those who aren’t.
Against which you argue with insanity like $5000 vouchers, and some hallucinations about public schools being separate businesses. In reality of course, school districts don’t, and can’t “attract customers”. They’re assigned them, by region. In actual reality, the entire public school system is a single entity, and it does compete in the free market. It’s simply heavily (as in, completely) subsidized, in repayment for not doing profit-motvated things like refusing to do business with problem customers. You know, like the Little Sisters of the Divine Foreskin does.
I would accept lower funding for public schools if the money was going to a charter school.
Charter schools have to take all applicants in their district (on a lottery basis if there are too many applicants) and they get paid by the government.
There is no need for Charter Schools to filter students. We already have magnet schools that do that. There is a self selsection process. The kids that go to Charter Schools are the ones who have parents who care enough to enroll their kids in a Charter SChool innstead of just going with the flow and letting them go to some disfunctional public school (read the second paragraph of your post 48).
I don’t know that we necessarily disagree on anything except the idea of vouchers that can be used to pay PART of a tuition bill.
Do you think that we should give all the kids who go to Andover Prep a voucher to pay some portion of their tuition?
I don’t know about the Milwaukee voucher system but in DC, the students in the voucher program are generally very good students to begin with so they don’t have as much room for improvement and they suddenly find themselves in a more competitive environment and where they are no longer breaking the curve on every test.
If you look at the Charter School program, the students seem to have better graduation rates and higher rates of going to college.
By “similar budget formulas”, does that mean “It’s free to students/parents”? Because if so, this is all fine with me as a replacement for public schools. Otherwise it’s a nifty additional option to public schools…just like private schools are.
And for the record, I’ll join you in being fine with a “voucher” system that is actually a “government-supplimented scholarship” program. It would sidestep the sinister motivations of giving well-off parents who are already sending their kids to private school a tax rebate for no reason whatsoever, it would self-limit to mostly less affluent students (since there’s no profit in scholarshipping kids who can pay), and is would self-limit itself from being a substantial drain on public schools (due to costing the schools money too, whch would limit the number of vouchers granted).
Once again, what part of voting don’t you understand? What part of representative government don’t you understand.
I’m talking about tax laws. You are not lending the government your money in the form of taxes, you are not even donating your money in the form of taxes, you are PAYING your money in the form of taxes. If you want to argue for or against a voucher system, then make your case, but part of that case should not be “ITS MY MONEY!!! I WANT IT BACK IN THE FORM OF VOUCHERS!!!”
I could just as easily say “ITS MY MONEY!!! I WANT IT ALL SPENT GOLD PLATING THE TOILET SEATS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS!!!”
Its not an argument, its a tantrum. There is nothing about your statement that is more convincing than my statement.
Your control over tax money ends with your vote unless you run for office.
We are discussing what would make good policy and if you can make a good policy argument for your position then fine but this misguided notion of ownership of tax revenues may be appealing to people who don’t think about things but you know better than that and its about time you realized that we know better than that.
The problem isn’t that he was removing the Erkels - or even that the PTA would go inactive or whatever he implied the problem was. The real problem was that he was going to cut the school’s budget the entire calculated amount it cost to educate the kids who left - you know, including the cost of things like heating the building and paying the janitors. By my thinking that’s a pretty sure way to take whatever semblance of a difference the school had from a poorly-supervised concrete prison and remove it entirely, long before you’ve cleaned out the top %40 he said would get into Foreskin.
By similar budget I mean that it is free to all students and parents BUT they generally get less money per student than public schools. This is practically because the teacher’s union insists on it but it is philosophically because there is a recognition that there is significant self selection going on and the kids that go through the trouble of applying to charter schools are going to be a bit more interested in their education (or at least their parents will be). There was a concern that this would “brain drain” the public schools and things would just implode at the public schools but the history has been that while there is some degradation at some of the public schools, the improvement in student performance at the charter schools has brought up the district-wide graduation and college attendance rate. At least so far.