There’s a system in place, and in most instances it works, and works extremely well. The burden is not on the parents here. The burden is on you to demonstrate that the current system is in need of being dismantled. Do you even know what it would cost to dismantle the current system and transition to a voucher-only system? What would happen if parents simply didn’t not to pay whatever school they’re attending? We’re talking about dealing with reality here. Not some pie-in-the-sky thought experiment.
We don’t just sit and create government for its own sake, it has to be EFFECTIVE government. If it is not effective, don’t fund it. Government is a service. If the service is bad, stop paying for it. If you want government to be more effective and more accountable, you want citizens to take ownership of their tax dollars instead of blindly letting it go.
No true. A first class world class education is open to all, regardless of income.
You seem to be fixated on the mechanism of education instead of the real goal of education. The mechanism in question being public schools. Real “education” is insanely cheap.
Some examples:
3+5 = 8
the sum of angles of a triangle is 180 degrees
dog is noun,
run is a verb
That “education” knowledge is free and accessible to all. It is not hidden away in a secret room to be disseminated by decree of the government. It also shouldn’t cost $24000 a year to teach these knowledge like this. It can be taught by a parent, a sibling, a neighorhood community leader, a retired worker, or (gasp) even a teacher.
Presidents George Washington and Abraham Lincoln both learned to read without public schools. Abraham Lincoln was not rich boy in a rich family.
You’re trying to protect of the “institution” of public schools but that’s not quite the same as ensuring a first class education. You’re more focused on the mechanism instead of the outcome.
If education was structured as completely free market, poor people would still have access to the finest education. Just like they did before public schools were implemented in 1900s. The poor would get their education from a combination of private schools (with scholarships), public schools, home schooling, distance schooling with internet, free libraries, whatever it takes. Poor people will always be able to get as good an education as Bill Gates’ children.
Do Bill Gate’s rich children learn that trianges are 180 degrees but poor children learn that they are actually 179 degrees because they have less money? Therefore, they go through life with a flawed education of what a triangle is? Of course not.
What do the 4 walls of a public building called “school” actually do in the way of education? Not much. They do provide a place for disadvantaged kids to eat breakfast & lunch. They also provide a kind of defacto babysitting. However, meals and babysitting may be noble goals but they are not to be confused with actual education. Therefore, there’s no need to bestow some magic aura around them and treat them as sacred cows. They just happen to be one of many mechanisms for education; but they are a poor one and they are not required for low-income children to be educated.
Did you actually read the study or just the parts in bold of the executive summary? If you did bother to read the study you would have learned that while there was a statistically significant increase - it occurred in only reading scores. Nothing else. And that statistically significant increase amounted to the equivalent of a 3 month advantage. In other words, a 3rd grader who would have been reading at a 1st grade level in the public schools became a 3rd grader reading at 1st+3 months of school after 3 years of private school. And this increase came only on reading scores and nothing else. Yes, what a resounding success the DC voucher system is. We must all bow down and emulate it’s greatness.
How about questioning some of your underlying assumptions. It seems like a lot of your positions are centered around a Grover Norquist version of reality. It reflects a misunderstanding of a citizens relationship to their government. Every government is socialistic to some extent. It collects from the populus and spend the money in ways that are hopefully socially beneficial. The idea that vouchers are a better policy because it returns the money back into the hands of taxpayers is somewhat nonsensical. You have to explain why vouchers provide better educational policy not why it makes better tax policy.
Thank you, that is very nice of you but I am not a statist. I am a utilitarian with a strong streak John Rawls thrown in for good measure. I don’t have kneejerk reactions about whether the free market is better than the government or vice versa, I think that there are things the government is better at and things the free market is better at. I don’t like taxes any better than the next guy and I would like to reduce my tax burden (I pay more taxes than 99%+ of the population) but I understand that we have to pay for the society we have built for ourselves over the last couple of centuries.
They don’t have to prove it. They CAN’T prove it because they DON’T have the right to the money back. That money that was “extracted by force” is called taxes, it is what pays for your military, it is what pays for your police, it is what pays for your justice system and it is what pays for our public services. Public education is one of those public services. That is how government works.
Its not your property. It stopped being your property (except in the most indirect sense) when you paid it as taxes.
You do realize that congress has the ability to effectively disband the Dept of education by refusing to fund it, right?
In fact the Republicans have been rpomising to eliminate the Dept of Education since the mid 80’s. Reagan couldn’t get it done with a majority Democratic congress and when Bush got a majority Republican congress, he nearly doubled the size of the department. You also realize that the Dept of Education is closer to 60 billion than 80 billion (based on last years budget) and almost all the money is split between college financial aid (federally guaranteed student loans, work study programs, Pell grants, etc., 22billion), No Child Left Behind stuff (not entirely sure what most of this money is spent on but I know it increased their budget by 70%, 21 billion), special education grants (subsidizes state programs for disabled kids, 11 billion). I guess we could merge it back into the dept of health and human services, after all everything they do today (except No Child Left Behind stuff) used to be done by the Department of Health and Human Services back when it used to be called the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.
Our national budget (before all this stimulus stuff) was about 3.3 trillion dollars. The Department of education accounts for less than 0.2% of the federal budget. The real big mokey on our back is medicare, which is why we need universal health care (which sounds kinda counterintuitive but the government (federal state and local combined) already pays for 60 cents out of every dollar spent on healthcare, private health care carriers spend 30% of their money on administrative costs, medicare comes in at a 25 but thats another thread).
You are basically saying that our form of democracy simply doesn’t work. What would you propose we replace it with? I would note that several senators and congressmen and one president have stood up in and said almost exactly those words. Ron Paul, Bob Dole and Ronald Reagan come to mind.
And which of your objectives are not achieved by charter schools (assuming that looting public schools to subsidize rich kids going to Choate is not one of your objectives, if it is please just say so). Vouchersw are simply a bad idea for the country. They might be a great idea for the parents at Sidwell Friends or Georgetown Day but for the country, it sucks.
So it is a solution? Just one you don’t see as “good”? How is cheaper costs for a better product not “good”?
I am in support of scholarships on a need-based level, but not necessarily government provided. And charter schools are a move in the right direction, but not effective enough; there are not enough charter schools nor enough freedom within charter schools.
I feel this needs an added rebuttal. The voucher system is neither an attack nor a rejection of that idea. Can’t you see how it is a fulfillment of the idea of a chance of good education for all? Many of those (and I imagine most) that support vouchers, myself included, want to see more children getting better education, and the voucher system is undeniably a way to do this. I am not offering a Utopian vision of perfect education for all children everywhere - I am only offering a way to improve the education of many, many children. Why isn’t that enough?
Did you read my summary - I mentioned that it was only reading scores. And you realize this improvement was on a price tag of only $7500 tax dollars, vs. $24,000 for the public schools, right? If you could receive a similar, or even slightly better product for under a third of the price, why the hell wouldn’t you buy that?
Because vouchers are a bad idea for the country. There is nothing good a voucher program provides that a charter school system doesn’t provide. In fact the trend here is for Catholic School to convert to Charter Schools. They just get rid of bible class and change their name and they apply for Charter status. the reason for this is mostly because the archdiocese heavily subsidize these schools (at least the ones that serve in poor neighborhoods) and the charter program gets these schools off their boooks responsibly while keeping all the staff in place (in DC these charters are all run by a non-profit that is run by the Archdiocese).
BTW, those averages are low for the DC area.
The problem is that $7500 would NOT be enough. Sidwell Friends would not provide a scholarship to anone who showed up at their door with a $7500 voucher. They would provide vouchers to a couple of lucky or smart kids and the rest would have to go try and find a school for $7500 in an area where day care costs over $15,000/year or stay at a now underfunded public school. IOW, they would have to pay the difference. This works out great if you are already going to Sidwell Friends because your tuition just got $7500 cheaper but it sucks rocks if you can’t afford (or get a scholarship for) the difference between $7500 and what private school charge in the area (I believe catholic schools in DC cost between $12K and 25K, most schools provide parish and archdiocese sponsored scholarships).
Unless your point is that we should eliminate the taxes that go to fund public education, it doesn’t really matter if you are talking about how to spend money that has already been taxed and how to spend money that is going to be taxed, its still not yours when it comes time to spend it.
If you are in fact talking about eliminating the taxes that fund public education then please say so explicitly.
What about the taxpayers that pay little or no taxes?
Because there are other things that haven’t been tried yet that could be more effective. We have data for vouchers and their effectiveness (and its not all that great). Now lets try another route. Perhaps breaking up the school districts into smaller pieces or something so they’re not administrative nightmares.
Oh good lord. Thank Thor you’re kidding.
Or, if you’re a responsible citizen, you would do your level best to elect persons who you believe will be effective governors and try to get them to keep proper oversight over the process. If you really care about this, you run for office yourself.
Either way, you don’t try and take you ball and go home like a selfish child who doesn’t have a flipping clue what it means to be part of a community or society.
I wonder how many times I have to repeat that I have no particular affection for the public school system before that little fact gets through everyone’s durable skulls?
Oh, and by the way, you didn’t just argue for a voucher system, since everything you said is equally applicable to pretty much any educational system where we gather kids up and try to teach them things, notably including private schools. What you have just argued for is complete abolishment of all formal or organized educational systems.
And since I don’t agree that it would be a good idea to make kids do all their learning themselves on their own initiative by reading things off the internet like they did before the 1900s, I think I can pretty much blow all of this off.
Disbanding all schools everywhere is a solution; killing all children at the age of four is a solution, hiring every single child an individual private tutor is a solution. And if you ignore all anticipable negative effects, like you’re doing with these vouchers, then they’re all “good” solutions!
And even if you had convinced me that vouchers, with their predictable negative effects and negligible-improvement-based-on-available-data, were a better product than public education, you still haven’t convinced me that it’s the best solution - in any way. So yeah, I concede it’s as good an idea as good as hammering in screws is, when there are screwdrivers readily available. Meaning that we’d be morons to do it. Does that satisfy you?
I don’t see a problem with any of this. On the other hand, none of this is an arugment for the voucher system, either.
I deny that vouchers are a good way to provide a good education for all. Heck, I deny that it’s been shown that vouchers provide a good education for any. (A month-per-year improvement in reading only doesn’t impress me. At all.)
Succinctly, I still think it’s a scam, which can only be expected to provide serious benefits to rich parents who are already sending their kids to private school, and which will pay for these benefits by sucking them out of the financing for the education of persons still in the public system. A scam that suckers in well-meaning people who think that that anti-government free market is their hammer and that everything is a nail, but just a scam nonetheless. And nothing I’ve seen here convinces me otherwise.
Why wouldn’t new private schools crop up that don’t cost $25k? Why wouldn’t new schools be created to meet the increased demand of parents with vouchers? Or maybe Sidwell themselves would create a satellite school that doesn’t cost $25k. Many possibilities.
They could even use some of the empty commercial buildings that sit vacant because of the real estate bubble.
Bad for the country? You’re going to have to do better than that. You haven’t shown why they would be “bad for the country”, nor why I should care. The arguments and studies I have provided show that they are good for the students - and that is really all that should concern us: the education of the students.
The article you provided is interesting on two levels: one, because the formerly private schools are trying to become charters. And secondly, why? Not because charters are the end all and be all of educational practice, but because the charters schools are “free” because they are completely subsidized:
You mention the heavy subsidies the catholic schools receive from private donors, but what of the entire budget that the charter school receives from taxpayers? The move for these schools to become charters makes complete sense in the distorted market that is education in America.
Yeah, I figure they are low for the DC area, but as no one else is providing any numbers, they at least give some heft to the pro-voucher side of the argument. The point being, vouchers need not take the entire per pupil spending amount from a public school in order to aid families and students in seeking out better education.
Not funding government is an option if you don’t mind going to jail. Your proper redress is to find a better educational policy, prove why its better and then convince congress to vote for it. You are trying to say that vouchers are a better policy because taxpayers pay taxes. Thats kind of a silly argument.
Probably because you have not proposed a better mechanism.
I think you have simply failed to propose an alternative that would produce a better educational outcome for society in general and for poor kids specifically.
This is an imperfect analogy but that is kind of like saying that food is free and available to all because you can go out there and kill deer with your bare hands, cook it and eat it. A school is probably better than sticking a kid in a library and saying “go forth and learn”
Are you arguing for the abolishment of state funded education and just expanding our libraries?
And yet you are unable to make a convincing case for some other method of education outside of a school that can work on a national level.
Really, then who procides taht scholarship?
What sort of freedom do private school provide that charter school not provide, other than religious instruction in some cases? Or is that the point? If you want to send your kids to a religious school and have the government pay for it then please just say so because we can have a discussion about why that would or would not be a good idea (putting aside the issue of the establishment clause).
Because it is not really an improvement for the education system as a whole.
The public school probably saved less than $7500 when it lost that particular kid. Public education is a lot like medical care, there is a small cohort of students/patients that consume most of the resources. I can devise a private medicare program that will take provide better care to medicare patients for less than the average cost per medicare patient IF I get to choose the patients. I can do the same thing with students.
Another point you seem to be overlooking is that the DC voucher student is not getting a $7500 education that costs $7500, they are getting a $30,000 education with a $22,500 scholarship. Sidwell Friends is not going to give that scholarship to every student that shows up at its door with a $7500 voucher.
You missed the spirit of what I wrote.
I’m saying that no parent anywhere has to apologize to his child that he can’t provide a first class education as good as Bill Gate’s children – because it isn’t true. It doesn’t matter how poor that parent is.
Reducing the funding of public schools does not mean that structured learning just disappears. It can’t disappear if people want to learn. Private schools, and some public schools will still remain. The poor people will be able to take advantage of both.
Your fear that poor people will not be educated is unjustified and history has proven otherwise.
I specifically mentioned structured options for the poor such as private schooling and yet you still want to distort what I said via an analogy with hunting deer? Unbelievable.
Yeah, thats a very good point. I wonder why noone ever thought of that. They’re called Charter Schools. What exactly don’t charter schools provide that vouchers do provide besides give you the ability to send your kid to Sidwell Friends for $22,500 instead of $30,000?
If that is the reason you support vouchers instead of charter schools then I wish you would just say so, then we could address the issues that really concern you.
Charter schools are required to accept everyone. That’s a negative, not a positive.
Charter schools don’t help homeschool parents. Vouchers do. Keep in mind that homeschool parents are not rich.
The spirit of what you wrote is “anything is better than the current system. Anything. Literally.”
I disagree with that.
And even if that were true, I also disagree that it would means that any (and every!) other plan is necessarily a good thing to do.
Heck, I disagree with most of this post too. Though it’s at least a new twist to claim that kids all got stellar educations all throughout history, like say in the middle ages. It’s still the sorry old “public education can’t be any worse, so let’s pillage away!” argument, but at least it has amusement value.
Says you.
I’m not interested in helping the parents with this money. I’m interested in educating the kids.