School Vouchers

Great Debates
61

Hey! This is my topic! You’re certainly finding technical objections to some of The Ryan’s ideas. I have already addressed these technical objections by changing my proposal. I’m trying to find a basis by which we can find a common ground.

doreen: I’m trying to find a middle ground between a totally private free market system (which has significant drawbacks) and a totally government controlled system (which also has drawbacks).

I want a middle ground. More like a hospital system: private companies are free to enter on an equal basis to public hospitals, but have to satisfy significant regulation.

douglips: The amount of regulation is only half the issue; the other issue is access to the market resource, just like a private hospital has access to medicare.

I already addressed the “payback issue”, third post from the bottom on page 1. Let’s move on.

The roads analogy is really not germane to this issue, pro or con. There is no “diversity of need” regarding roads. Everyone needs them to be flat, hard, and in useful locations. There is significant diversity of need in the school system. Therefore any analogy between roads and schools automatically excludes the fundamental difference noted above. Let’s move on.

I’ve also excluded “cherry picking.” Any school that accepts public money should accept all comers. Let’s move on.

Again the fallacy of the excluded middle. The current system or nothing? Bah! Obviously with nothing you have huge numbers of poor people with no opportunity at all for even a minimal education.

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away”. - Phillip K. Dick

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SingleDad:

That’s because The Ryan kicks total ass.

SingleDad:

Except in this case the excluded middle is schools not getting enough money to do their job and then being criticized for not doing their job.
I did say:

If you can still force people to educate their children, but make them pay for it, you get much of the benefits of a market economy - price competition for your child’s eyeballs, mobility, choice. If you then have additional welfare type assistance to people who cannot afford to pay, your hand-waving dismissal of the idea no longer applies.

SingleDad:

Hey, this is GD. I failed to make my point clearly at the start, and The Ryan brought up some excellent points. I’m enjoying this topic immensely. Once you posted this to GD, it became our topic. :slight_smile:

63

Let me try to reiterate an earlier idea.

We are faced with the following limitations:

  1. No matter how much taxes you collect, there will never be enough to give a “complete” education to every child of every need.
  2. There is no limit to the MAXIMUM level of learning that any given child can be exposed to, it can be a life-time thing.
  3. There is instrinsic value to a society to encourage an educated populace, without which the society as a whole suffers.

Given these limitations, I submit that whether you do it by lowering taxes, or by providing vouchers, any school should divide the curriculum and establish a nationwide MINIMUM standard of education, say the 3Rs (can have other diciplines also), but of extremely high quality. Then schools (even public schools) can establish optional education branches, say for specific areas such as Science, Sports, even Religion, and try to attract the students in competition to others. These can be paid for by additional tuition per diem, or by vouchers at the choice of the parents.

64

(the quoting device isn’t working for me, so)

SingleDad, I’m going to assume that refernces to brain-dead weren’t meant as an insult. But when you say that my “straw man burns at the merest touch of the flame of reason,” you need to actually use reason.

  1. You claim that I couldn’t use a Dionysian based curriculum. I’m guessing that you don’t know much about Dionysianism–you don’t show much knoweldge, which is okay, because I’m pretty much the only one out there. But here’s my sample reading list for a class:
    “The Bacchae” by Euripedes, anything about Falstaff by Shakespeare, London’s “John Barleycorn,” essays by Kinglsey Amis, any of a huge number of poems and ballads about drinking. None of them except “The Bacchae” is religious to outsiders, and Euripedes can sneak in because of historical importance.

  2. Comments against booze being prohibited wouldn’t fall under the “innapropriate religious activity” complaint, because the teachers can use social/medical/cultural arguments to respond. Also, students don’t legally have the right of free speech, so we can silence them on any topic we so choose.

  3. To pressure people into joining “voluntary” activites is long-standing. I have sat through prayers enough at public schools (sometimes generic, sometimes invoking Jesus Christ). I was treated to a gospel choir on the first day of Passover at one such school. Businesses can and do pressure people to “voluntarily” give money to the United Way, join the Lions’ Club, give money to candidates, take up golf, own and drive a new car, etc. etc. etc. If you think that social pressures don’t exist in schools, I need to know how you have led such a sheltered existence. Heck, at my brother’s school, kids are pressured to join the FFA and are ostracised if they don’t.

  4. No, propositioning a 16 year-old (and older) woman doesn’t violate any laws if we are both private citizens. If she consents, it is not statutory rape or child molestation. I couldn’t do this in a public school, but I can in a Dionysian one.

Make the analogy a school of Satan worshipers if this is easier. Simply put, if it is a “religious school” you cannot remove the religion from it. If you do, it is no longer a religious school.

P.S. My experience is that private schools usually have far less (such as nothing) for LD students.

Bucky

65

Rereading doreen’s post, I think it makes the most sense of the privatization idea. If the public schools aren’t doing a good job, you could set up experimental schools where a private company contracts to do the education. After a year, if they are doing well, let them continue. If not, ditch them and get more bids. Eventually, you’d have someone doing the right things and get decent schools.

Unfortunately, I still think that encompassing all the different levels of student that public/privatized schools must do will make the proposition more expensive than people would like to believe, and therefore there will continue to be the issue of “Where is all the money going?”

SingleDad, I don’t think your ideas are that far off from doreen’s description. Doreen starts with privately run public schools, and you start with private schools, but end up saddling them with regulations. In the end, I don’t see much difference.

In the end, I think vouchers will fail for one of the following reasons:
[ul][li]It will be ruled unconstitutional to give vouchers to religious schools, so the major backers will lose enthusiasm.[/li][li]It will be ruled constitutional to give vouchers to religious schools, so someone will form a pagan/wiccan private school and the Christian Right will completely delaminate.[/li][li]Private schools will balk at admitting disabled or slower-learning children. Without private schools admitting them, the public schools will spiral down into a morass of spending lots of money on a small number of difficult to educate children.[/li]Private schools will be forced to admit disabled or slower-learning children, demand more money, and we’ll realize we’re getting the same system we had before for a lot more expenditure.[/ul]

66

Before I address specific points that people have raised, I want to make a general point.

I have no problem with the overall quality of the public school system. I don’t believe a privatized system would raise the overall quality, merely distribute the existing quality more equitably.

Whether education in general receives sufficient funding, and how that funding is allocated on a national basis is a whole ‘nother can o’ worms.

The crux of the bisquit is diversity of need. There is really no single measure of quality in a school system. You have children of widely varying intelligence, and widely varying learning styles. No single philosophy, no single operating style, no single curriculum can efficiently address the needs of all children.

The current public school system, however, attempts to do just that. They have no structural need to educate all children, just the majority. The practical consequences of the structure are that the totality of resources are allocated to the majority of the need.

Now that’s all fine and good in many arenas. Yes, I derive more than my share of benefit from a good road system, because I drive a lot. However, I derive less than my share from welfare and unemployment insurance. All in all, it more or less evens out.

However education, especially primary and secondary education is the single most important factor that the public can offer to the success of each individual child. I maintain that a universal educational system that offers an optimized experice for each child is superior to one that completly optimizes to the majority of children, and thereby forces the minority of children to derive a substandard benefit.

I’m making the case that a privatized system, where private operators could operate on an equal basis to publicly operated schools would harness the power of market forces to provide the diversified optimizations to address the needs of all children.

67

douglips:

Of course. I was being rhetorical. But I still don’t want to get sidetracked over whether vouchers should or shouldn’t support religious schools. I think it’s enough of its own question that it deserves a separate thread.

Centerline:

I more or less agree. However you want to restructure things, I want a structure that is responsive to all students, not just the majority. I don’t see how just mandating it would actually provide that structural incentive, but we’re moving closer.

Bucky:
As you flesh out your straw man, you necessarily find yourself moving closer to my position!

Presumably you’ve made a curriculum thorough enough to pass the scrutiny of an academic cerification. You’re espousing a point of view explicitly secular and rational in nature.

As far as pressure goes, you can’t silence students completely or even very well; they can still tell their parents who can either complain if the activity is religious, or remove their child if it is merely disagreeable. In fact you even help me make my case that a privatized system might well be no worse than the existing public system (“I have sat through prayers enough at public schools…”).

I’m not going to debate the specifics of inappropriate or illegal sexual contact. Let me just say that if you’re withing the bounds of existing law, and everyone who can give consent does so, I don’t see how the behaviour should be deemed objectionable in any context.

This is exactly correct. No religious school should get public money. If you teach a set of principles from secular rational reasoning, and your curriculum is approved by a secular certifying authority, and your student and parents approve of the activities, then you’re within the bounds of reasonable diverserity.

Teaching a value that might be held by a religion as a secular principle is not teaching religion. The teaching of evolution is not equivalent to the teaching of atheism; nor is teaching people to be kind to one another equivalent to teaching Christianity.

It only becomes a religious teaching when the value is explicitly described as deriving from or being mandated by a supernatural or divine authority.

By the time you sucessfully “disguise” religious teachings as secular education, why, lo and behold, you become secular!

That’s because currently they don’t accept public money. Make that money available and if they want it, they will comply with the regulation.

douglips:

This would probably be the case. However, I’m not a politician or an activist. I’m interested in discussing the idea in vigorous debate. I lack the skill, talent and inclination to lead or even significantly participate in actual politics. But I do the best I can with what I have.

68

SingleDad: “I want a structure that is responsive to all students, not just the majority.”

I did not finish my line of thought, sorry.

By limiting the required education to a very few fundamental subjects, the state can probably have the funds to provide for the special needs of all. Say you only teach the 3Rs. It seems to me that there will be funds to concentrate on hiring teachers to teach the 3Rs to the disabled in all forms. There will not be mandated football teams, only optional ones, that take up a large chunk of the budget, etc. The schools become more like college, where not everyone take every course in every subject. These are choices mandated in an environment of limited resources.

69

[quote]
doreen: I’m trying to find a middle ground between a totally private free market system (which has significant drawbacks) and a totally government controlled system (which also has drawbacks).

I want a middle ground. More like a hospital system: private companies are free to enter on an equal basis to public hospitals, but have to satisfy significant regulation.

[quote]

But private hospitals are far less regulated than you propose the schools to be.Private hospitals can provide only the services they wish to.For example, an eye and ear hospital doesn’t need to have an emergency room. Except in emergencies, they’re not required to treat any particular person.As they accept government money (I think they’re called Hill Burton funds), they become more regulated,(have to spend a cetain amount on the care of the uninsured),but they’re still not forced to provide any particular service ( the eye and ear hospital doesn’t have to open an ER)Private hospitals do have to meet regulations regarding the standards of medical care,just as private and parochial schools currently have to meet standards

70

Centerline: Not to put too fine a point on it, but I really can’t see anything good about restricting the amount of educatation we provide our children in this complicated, crowded and technological society.

doreen: I was making an analogy between the public/private hospital structure and the school system; I don’t want to stretch that analogy too far. I drew it mostly to show that a publicly funded/privately operated structure already exists in some form. It’s not automatically a “it can never work” situation.

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away”. - Phillip K. Dick

71

[quote]
doreen: I was making an analogy between the public/private hospital structure and the school system; I don’t want to stretch that analogy too far. I drew it mostly to show that a publicly funded/privately operated structure already exists in some form. It’s not automatically a “it can never work” situation.{/quote]

I’m sorry,i guess wasn’t being clear. Private hospitals do not receive most or all of their funds from the government,so I would hardly call them publicly funded.What funds private hospitals get(from the federal government} are not taken from the public hospital’s budget, as school vouchers would be.I’m not at all saying a privatized system won’t work,only that schools accepting funds under your conditions ( no religion, must have appropriate programs for all)would no longer be private schools,but would be privately -run public schools,liable to have many of the disadvantages of public schools and not likely to gain the support of voucher proponents.The closer hospital analogy would be if a city were to fund a private hospital to provide exactly the same services under exactly the same conditions as its public hospitals.

72

What I want to know is, if for-profit secular private education is indeed so economically viable, then why aren’t we seeing more “school startups” even now? True, there are no voucher funds available for them yet, but there are communities in the “new lower-upper class” where there’s a market for high-quality “enriched-education” small schools, and the parents could afford to pay private-school tuition. Are there “educational entrepeneurs” founding new private schools there?

Do you really think that tuition vouchers on the order of $4000 per student will provide new schools the wherewithal to offer a basic education plus facilities for LD and other “special-needs” kids? (I completely agree with SingleDad, by the way, that every kid is in some way a “special-needs” kid and we ought to be working harder on individualized education; I just think we ought to do this through publicly funded public schools.) Have you noticed that almost all private schools have either a significant capital endowment (including owning their school buildings) or funding from their parent religious organization?

Do you really think that market forces have a tendency to fill all niche markets so that all consumers will be able to purchase what they need at about the same price? An earlier post about the ability of “the free market” to produce a school for a consumer base of twenty “left-handed deaf LD albinos” (or some such unusual combination) was a real eye-roller. Where do you think you’re going to get a concentration of twenty left-handed deaf LD albino students? Who’s going to take care of the educational needs of one left-handed deaf LD albino student while “the free market” is waiting around for
nineteen more (probably ninety more) to make a school start-up economically feasible?

How is a private school that has to meet all of its operating costs out of modest tuition (if such a thing is even possible; as I noted, in real life it’s extremely rare) going to maintain a stable budget and educational program during the inevitable fluctuations in enrollment? Do you want a sizable chunk of the school’s resources to go to an M&A budget to maintain enrollment levels? Do you want to be pestered by the school’s Alumni Relations office every year after your kids graduate for donations to help support the school, and do you want your children subjected to similar entreaties ever after? Do you want the courses and activities offered by the school to change unpredictably from year to year as tuition resources grow and shrink? Do you want to rely, as The Ryan seems to advocate, on comprehensive national standardized tests to make sure the school doesn’t cut corners on educational content? (Our nation hasn’t yet got a consensus on any kind of mandatory standardized testing, and here we’d be making accreditation solely dependent on such tests—presumably administered every year or so, so parents would have a frequent check on whether they were getting their money’s worth.) Who will pay for this national testing program, and who will design and implement it? How will we stop financially-strapped schools from cutting corners on other things such as teacher salaries or safety monitoring? How will we pay for that oversight? Do we want many children having to look for a new school every few years as many schools operating on such a narrow margin inevitably lose the battle for financial solvency?

In the late 70’s, I attended a small Friends
(Society of Friends = Quakers) private school in the Northeast. They had an endowment, they owned their own buildings, they offered a quite restricted curriculum and a limited set of “enrichment” items (meaning things like computers, arts, sports and other extracurricular activities), they paid their teachers a pittance, they gave us an excellent education and sent many graduates to good colleges, and they went broke before I graduated from college in 1985. It is just not very easy to make money providing quality education, even in a very basic format, even in a non-profit institution.

A few years ago I sat down with a friend who was interested in starting a private elementary school and wondered if I would teach in it (we are both college teachers and have strong views on ed. reform). His projected curriculum was absolutely minimal (the focus was on his educational philosophy rather than on fancy facilities): basic school curriculum, no technology, no sports, no “special-needs” provisions, no organized extra-curricular activities, no student transit. The budget items we were talking about were building rent, teacher/staff salaries, supplies, utilities. We were at an estimated tuition cost of over $5000 per student before we’d even started to discuss insurance. So much for that idea.

I’ve got nothing against private schools—as I said, some of the best education I got was at private school, and a non-secular one, too! Nor do I think that public schools are all just fine the way they are—bureaucratic nightmares of the kind SingleDad describes are all too common, and the quality of their education is sometimes very poor. But I think that those who invoke the magic of “the free market” as a simple and comparatively inexpensive fix for our public education problems are largely kidding themselves. The free market is very good at many things, such as selling shoes (although try finding a good shoe supplier in your local neighborhood if you have very flat or wide or other “special-needs” feet!); but there are some things that it’s not as good at, and quality universal education seems to be one of them. (Quality universal healthcare’s another, but that’s another thread!)

Kimstu

73

I attended a chapter national conference of the American Federation of Teachers last week. The thing I most remember is Nat Lacour, the Executive Vice President of the union, saying this: “90% of the students in this country go public schools; 10% to private schools.”

So my question is, even if all the other reasons against vouchers weren’t valid, “WHERE ARE YA GONNA PUT ALL THOSE KIDS.” The private schools are not 90% empty, surely?

More funds for public schools.

74

Very well thought out response Kimstu. Just as an aside, I also went to Quaker school in the 70’s (Brooklyn Friends), and my mother taught music there (for a pittance, indeed). I also have extra-wide feet (8 1/2 EEEE); I’ve found that Payless stocks a good selection of wide shoes.

Before I address specific points, the existing private school market is not a good model for a voucher-supported private school system; currently they have to depend on surplus money, not the basic resources for public schools.

First, special-needs kids require more resources; the voucher or reimbursment must be greater than for the average student.

And yes, I do think that if all children have the option of choosing their schools, that the availability of that tuition could indeed provide the resources to start new schools.

The beauty of the voucher system is that its implementation can be gradual. At first, the formerly public schools will get most of the money. The students who leave early will merely relieve overcrowding.

Assuming the concept were to prove viable, then low-interest loans and personal financing could provide the capital necessary to start small schools for niche markets.

No, but neither do public schools. I merely claim that voucher-supported private schools would meet more niche markets than public schools do.

The same way that any business maintains stability: by pleasing its customers. Remember, I’m asking for vouchers equal to the current public school spending, including that spent on construction and capital costs. And I don’t advocate competition on price, just competition on quality.

We are beginning to need to rely on comprehensive national standarized tests to make sure public schools are not cutting corners on educational content. Again, you can’t fault my idea for a flaw in the original.

And in a voucher system, the parents help make sure schools aren’t cutting corners. If I know my public school is offering an inferior education, what options do I have? As I have seen up close and personal-like, damn few.

Changing schools is not a horror, merely an inconvenience. I myself attended:

CT Cook Hill Elementary School: K
private Episcopal school: grade 1
Cook Hill: 2nd grade
NY Brooklyn Friends: 3-6 grade
KS South Jr. High: 7-8 grade
CA Head Royce: 9-11 grade

[quoteIt is just not very easy to make money providing quality education, even in a very basic format, even in a non-profit institution.[/quote]

The market for private education now is very limited, since most parents can’t afford it. It’s much easier to break even when the market is larger.

How much does it cost to provide a good education for a student? That’s what the voucher should be.

[query]But I think that those who invoke the magic of “the free market” as a simple and comparatively inexpensive fix for our public education problems are largely kidding themselves.[/query]

Education is expensive. Public, private, there’s no getting around that. We can’t try to perform the most important role as parents and as citizens of a democracy on the cheap. Warehousing children in classes with 30+ students in crumbling buildings is not education. Trying to apply enormous economies of scale do not work with kids. The public schools, even in middle-class district, even more so in poor districts is a cruel joke we are playing on the next generation of children.

I agree that if we pay vouchers equal to the pittance we pay for public schools, private schools will fail as badly as do the public schools. But if we pay them the amounts that are needed, I think private schools will provide a better education than the public schools for the reasons I’ve posted.

If Cecil Adams did not exist, we would be obliged to create Him.

75

I won’t try to compete with you guys intellectually; I know you would chew me up and spit me out!

BUT, my .02¢…

I pay about $300.00 per year in property taxes (very small property), but private school tuition would be about that a month. Vouchers sounds like a good deal to me.

However, I am against them, and it really doesn’t have anything to do with “separation of church and state”. We all pay taxes for things we don’t “use” (such as those childless couples that still fund eduction, those with health insurance coverage that still fund Medicare and Medicaid) so what is the problem with paying for private school tuition if I chose to send my child to private school? NOTHING!

If the public schools are so bad, then parents, get involved. Don’t count on the teachers or administrators, get involved! You work? So do I, and I am PTA president of my son’s school. I know most of the teachers, and he just transferred to this school last year. I make a point to find out what they are studying for standardized tests, just which standardized tests he will take, what extra learning techniques I can help with at home, and I push my son to learn. Boy, do I push him (you want to ask him?)! If the teacher doesn’t give enough math problems, or if your child is having trouble with the ones he does give, then make up your own and give him more. Trouble with reading? A public library, or any bookstore, can provide more books (as can the school (free!!!) library).

It is not the responsibility of the state to educate your child, it is their responsiblity to provide access to the education. You as a parent, have a moral obligation to be sure your child gets the education that is needed.

The only thing that vouchers will do is to take even more funding away from public schools, and that helps who? The ones that couldn’t get a voucher this year? What about those that make too much for a voucher but can’t afford the tuition? Sounds like a whole new socioeconomic class to me.

“My, my. Such a lot of guns around here and so few brains.”
~Humphrey Bogart