Private schools, like any other business, will charge what the market will bear. If vouchers are provided fees will increase. They still will take only the students that will make them look good and reject the others.
Unions? Tenure?
This claim that vouchers somehow hurt public schools by drawing away money comes up many times in every discussion, yet it’s flatly untrue. The actual empirical evidence shows that when a voucher program is implemented in a particular area, it leads to improved public schooling in that area. The competition keeps 'em honest. From this report, page 4:
Only if the vouchers pay 100% of the tuition to the school of the parents choice.
Perhaps I’m missing something, but that looks to me like an argument for getting as many kids out of public schools and into private schools as possible. Imagine little Billy who is bright and intellectually curious. In a public school, he’ll sit in the back of the classroom being ignored while the teacher deals with the head cases and the criminals. But if we gave Billy’s parents a voucher, they could send him to a private school where the head cases and the criminals aren’t allowed. Then it would be possible for the teacher to actually focus on him, challenge his intellect, and help him learn.
How long until OMG comes back and eats crow? I’ll say never.
Do you mean because this quote was in post #15, not #17 as he/she predicted?
nm
Not exactly a rich bashing post. Just pointing out that the gap will increase.
Unless your “Rich Bashometer” registers any post not directly praising the well-off as a bash, of course.
Absolutely a good deal for Billy.
What do we do about the head case and the criminal? And with the students that remain in the public school with them because their parents don’t have the money to augment the voucher and get into Billy’s private school?
Either we abandon the whole idea of universal education or the voucher schools have to accept any applicant (and have a lottery for over-subscription) for the cost of the voucher.
That’s great for Billy. What about the “head cases”? The “criminals”? What about the non-headcase and non-criminal student whose parents can’t afford the balance of the tuition for a private school after the voucher and are stuck in the old classroom? All of these types are still going to end up in your neighborhood when they’re done with school. I’d rather have public schools fully equipped to try to turn the head cases and criminals around before they become crazy and/or dangerous adults, with high-quality teachers trained and motivated to inspire students to make themselves better instead of sinking into the swamp.
I oppose school vouchers because it’s bad economics.
School vouchers are essentially a government welfare program for the middle class. (It’s ironic that many of the same people who oppose welfare and government spending in general are also advocates for school vouchers.) If you’re going to have any government welfare programs, they should be directed at people who need it, not people for whom they’re a convenience.
The key factor is that school vouchers do not cover an entire tuition. They just provide a partial subsidy. So only people who can already afford to pay most of the cost of private schooling are going to get any benefit from a school voucher. And the cost comes from taxation, which is paid by everyone - rich, poor, and middle class. So we have a situation where poor people are helping to fund the private educations of the children of people who have more money than they do. There’s a debate about whether or not wealth should be redistributed down the economic pyramid - but I don’t think anyone’s arguing it should be redistributed upwards.
And once you step out of the theoretical realm and into the real world, you realize that school vouchers have a political agenda. The majority of private schools in the United States are run by religious groups. School vouchers were invented as a means of funneling tax dollars to these conservative religious groups.
Around here there’ve been something like 40 charter schools set up. (A charter school is publicly funded but run privately. The “charter” is held by a college or some other instution that provides oversight.) They’re allowed to hire their own teachers, set up their own rules, etc. They follow all sorts of models from strict classical to highly experimental. In short, everything the free choice advocates could ask for. The results have ranged from pretty good to absolutely dismal, and the oversight has generally been lax.
No magic bullet. In fact, if you took all the students and put them on a bell curve, I doubt the results would differ very much from what they were achieving in public schools.
That can be done in a public school, although not a public school system.The problem is when people look at the costs of public schools, they don’t compare what it costs to educate Billy in a public school vs Billy in a private school. Instead. they take the average cost per pupil for a public school system ( including special education , which can be extremely expensive ) and compare it to a private school’s tuition charge ( which is often less than the cost of education ) Vouchers seem to make sense if for example, the average cost per pupil in public school is $15,000 and the voucher will be for $4000. For every Billy who takes a voucher we’ll save $11,000. Except that’s wrong. For every Billy who leaves we’ll save three or four or five thousand dollars or even much less- if one or two kids per grade leaves a school, there will be almost no savings. And there’s also the issue of vouchers to children not currently attending public schools- those cost the school system money.We might save $40,000 for each kid with a sign language interpreter who leaves, or $100,000 for each emotionally disturbed kid who leaves - but none of them will leave for a $4000 voucher.
That’s leaving aside the issue of how many more students the private schools can accommodate, students , or who would be staffing the private schools that would allegedly pop up after a voucher program is started.
Now if someone were to propose a voucher system that acknowledged that
a Public school systems would still have to provide special education.
b Vouchers will possibly decrease costs slightly when students leave the public schools and will raise costs when given to those students already in private schools
c Private school tuitions will be raised once voucher money is available and many parents won’t be able to afford private schools even with a voucher so there will not be huge numbers of children leaving the public schools to go private.
c Current budgets are most likely not enough to pay for special education and vouchers, so taxes would most likely be raised.
I’d be fine with it. Never seen one like that.
The reason behind vouchers is that some schools are bad and this is one idea for how to circumvent that right? Well, does it serve its intended purpose? Do the public schools where students get vouchered out improve to attempt to retain students? Do students who get vouchered out improve in national test scores?
I can’t be pro or con not knowing all the facts. We’ve done the voucher experiment so we should have some data.
The goal should be improving public schools. We have a problem, it should be fixed. Why not try different ideas and see which one works best and stick to the one that works?
This is flat-out wrong. Let me just quote a post from our previous thread on the topic: “Here’s a list of voucher programs, and you can click on each one to see the criteria for eligibility. Once you do so, you’ll see that most are available only to the poor. The D.C. program was open only to kids in families below the poverty line, the Milwaukee program for families below 175% of the poverty line and so forth. In other states like Florida and Ohio, the vouchers were restricted to kids in failing schools, and needless to say failing schools are almost always in poor areas.” Vouchers are not “for the middle class”; they are offered exclusively to the poor.
Voucher legislation certainly could be written that provided the full cost, and in many instances it is. The average cost per student in a public school is near $10,000 nationwide, obviously varying considerably from place to place. If we took that $10,000 and offered it as a voucher, poor parents would have access to a variety of private schools even if they couldn’t afford to chip in a penny of their own money. In my relatively small county of Culpeper, VA, there are four private elementary schools with tuition lower than that, and plenty of other options in neighboring counties. So with a well-planned voucher program, the poor could, in fact, afford to send their kids to private schools.
I think, ITR Champion, that you would find many folks agreeing with the Milwaukee approach (for example). The concern that I, and others, have is how such a program scales up. In the document you linked above, for example, the foundation that wrote the report encourages vouchers to be available for all students not just the poor.
Do you agree with the point that voucher-accepting schools should have to admit kids regardless of their academic ability or potential disabilities (this also appears to have been the case in the Mil. program)?
No, the government should not provide money for kids to go to private schools.
Because there should not *be *any private schools, or home schooling.
As things stand now, failing inner-city schools give nobody an education: not Billy, not the head cases, and not the criminals. With a working voucher program, Billy would be able to get an education. The head cases and the criminals would still be stuck in the failing public schools. But at least things would be better for Billy. He deserves an education and the current system denies him one. In the long term, though, a voucher program is good for public schooling; I’ve already linked to a summary of studies documenting this fact.
No, I can’t say that I do. The way I see it, there are some students who are more focused, talented, and devoted to their education than others. Those who honestly care about getting themselves an education should be offered the opportunity to do so, without having to be distracted, mocked, and irritated–and sometimes threatened and attacked–by inferior students. Private schools currently offer this opportunity to good students whose parents are rich or middle class, which means chiefly white students. Public schools, with the exception of a few magnet schools, deny this opportunity to good students whose parents are poor, which means a majority of black and Hispanic students from big cities. I personally do not understand why anyone would want to deny poor, mainly racial minority students the same advantages that we currently give to wealthier, mainly white students.