I heard this story on NPR’s “Here and Now” this afternoon.
Summary: Students in a low-performing school district want to take advantage of the state’s “school choice” law, which allows them to attend a better school in another district as long as there is space. The problem is that residents in the “better” school district don’t want this population messing up their schools. Their arguments harken back to those made during the forced bussing/desegregation days.
Most conservatives are pro-voucher and school choice. But conservatives also tend to favor localized authority–such as a school district being able to decide who can and cannot gain entry into its schools. The St. Louis case illustrates where these two positions conflict with one another. An individual’s choices are only as wide as the options available to them. If all the school districts decide that individual is not worthy of their educational offerings and none of the private schools want to take him either, then all the vouchers in the world don’t do him any favors. To provide true “school choice” to an individual, some principle has to give.
What would be the ideal conservative solution to this problem?
Based on the summary on NPR’s website–I can’t listed to audio at the moment–this doesn’t seem to have anything to do with vouchers. Vouchers allow poor students to escape from failing public schools by attending private schools instead. Each private school has its standards for admissions, and any poor student who meets the standards can attend. This case has to do with a different sort of program, which allows students at failing public schools to move to other public schools.
It’s worth noting that vouchers are not a conservative cause or issue. Liberals happily and proudly promote the same basic idea in many areas. For example, way back when, this country attempted to provide housing for all poor people by herding them into gigantic housing projects constructed and run by the government. That was a total failure, of course, so now the government instead gives poor people housing vouchers and lets the free market take charge of decide where and how to build the housing for the poor. Likewise, the health care “exchanges” under Obamacare will use the same general principle. The free market decides what to offer and what to charge, subject to certain regulations, and the government provides subsidies to the poor so that they can afford to buy something of their own choice.
The real mystery is why liberal Democrats are almost uniformly opposed to education vouchers while at the same time being happy about vouchers in other areas.
Well, I sure don’t want one of those Bible-thumper schools around here! Got some Pentecostal cousins, and they’re crazier than a duck on acid.
Handle snakes, you know. Bible says venomous snakes won’t hurt them, if they have sufficient faith. If a Pentecostal doesn’t have enough faith and gets bit, he may die. Bites a Methodist, the snake dies. Unitarian, both the snake and the Unitarian die, but the Unitarian is not a hundred percent sure that he’s dead.
For the near future, most children will be educated in public schools. Public schools have disadvantages compared with private schools; for one thing, unlike private schools they cannot reject applicants.
Thus, however strong the arguments for school vouchers may be, the majority of American children will be adversely affected if voucher programs “scoop off the cream” and reduce funding for public schools.
I think many progressives support such programs when they’re part of a plan to cooperatively improve education overall. Instead, some of the programs are motivated just by a philosophy of “I want mine. Screw you.” and a pretense that public schools will benefit from their own creative destruction.
Expensive tests requiring excellent English. Inside connections would help too.
I don’t see how a school can refuse to admit a qualified student. But that’s me. :shrug:
My wife is a public school teacher. Our school system is very large (I think 20th largest in the country, but I could be wrong.) We have often discussed this issue as she teaches in an affluent school with supportive parents and very active PTA. Terrific community support and parents who will hire a private tutor if their child is struggling academically. My daughter is also a public school teacher in a smaller district with significant challenges. They are a “Title I” school.
Let me say right off the bat that money isn’t the “answer” to our problems. Parents are the biggest determination of how well a child does. The parents of a child in a failing school has the right to either have the district (and state) pay for private school using a voucher. Problem is that with limited resources, the poor schools will have even less and a student base that is even more problematic. We tried “choice” in our district for 10 years and it didn’t help all that much.
Over the past 3 or 4 years due to declining enrollment district wide some schools needed to be closed. An unintended consequence of closing schools (the schools closed were older, in disrepair and generally in poorer neighborhoods) has been that new school boundries were drawn and the district as a whole has been showing improvement. So maybe the answer is simply to close failing schools and redistribute the students from those schools into higher performing ones.
Testing in many schools districts need not be that expensive. Usually standardized tests are already available. If the student is so motivated that ahe would leave her former school to seek more of a challenge and provide her own transportation, I don’t see why he shouldn’t have the right to be admitted. Those schools can always add on the mobile classrooms that the poorer districts had to live with for so many years.
I believe you, now, when you say that administrators at the stronger schools may not want their doors flung open. (I’ve changed my mind a lot about the power of racial bigotry that still thrives in America.)
But I am concerned, too, about the teachers who are assigned or who choose to teach in the poorer schools. Once their best and brightest move along, will their evaluations be down-graded? Will their evaluations consider that they spent their own money to provide clothes, backpacks, and school supplies? Sometimes parents just can’t afford to air-condition school rooms. Meanwhile, across town, parents donate money for lots of extra things. And God bless them for it. But are teachers in these schools at an advantage? Of course.
Zoe, but there shouldn’t be a need for testing to enter a public school unless it is a magnet public school. Well, that and zoning, but assuming the families are giving the chance to switch school zones, that part does not apply.
Now, it could happen that the higher performing school may then apply or change itself to become a magnet school and require admission test, but that would (should) also affect the current student population. Because even high performing schools have duds and lower achievers that will not pass the testing require to enter (should it become a magnet school).
Perhaps something like what NotDeadYet proposed should/could happen. That is the most positive outcome, so far.
Being right here in St. Louis (I live in one of the districts involved) I can tell you the problem isn’t NIMBYism, it’s racism.
The ideal conservative option is to have white, rural districts fail instead of black, urban ones. School choice will work just fine if people just like us choose the same schools we would.
This is exactly right regarding the St. Louis issue. The protesters in the districts being asked to accept students from the failed schools aren’t even being subtle about it.
I’m not sure what the true conservative answer is, because from what I can tell it’s just to ignore the problem (similar to the current GOP position re: uninsured/uninsureable Americans). If you live in a failing district you should be able to go to another school. But my school shouldn’t have to take you. That seems to be the long and short of it, likely with some type of “given a marketplace a functional school will spring up to properly educate these students” argument. Whether you buy that line or not probably correlates to how much time you’ve spent inside a failing school or school district.
Mostly because of the way conservatives want to implement vouchers. Most of the voucher program proposals that were floating around DC a few years back fell into two categories. Really small selective programs that were effectively scholarship programs and larger programs that were really a way for people who sent kids to private schools to subsidize their private school tuition. Otherwise, you would just support charter schools.
We had the same sort of reaction to school bussing when I was a kid. It was veru divisive but SCOTUS tells us racism is virtually gone now so this timeit should be different.:rolleyes:
An update: today was the deadline to apply for transfers from the two failing districts. More than 2,500 students have applied, about 25% of the combined enrollment of the two districts.
The tuition cost to the failing districts will be enough to bankrupt them probably within two years.
And the districts which are supposed to receive those students say they only have about 600 slots open without violating their policies for class size. A lottery is set for tomorrow to decide which students get to transfer.
Some educators warned 10 years ago that something like this could happen at some point, but neither the state legislature nor the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education ever addressed the problem.
ALL students have equal rights to a good education. Only one percent of Special Education funding goes to gifted students. That is really wrong.
If professional teachers didn’t have to spend so much time on clerical work, maybe they could fulfill their potential. Teachers spend too much time proving they are good teachers. That’s time that could be spent in being good teachers.
The people who make the most decisions about schools are the people who are most removed from the classrooms.
Absolutely - and yet less than 4% of US hospital systems are run by physicians. Once any system gets big enough, the business folks take over… often to the “shareholder’s” (literal or figurative) delight and the “customer’s” (and employees’) chagrin.
You had me 100% until “Shouldn’t hospitals be run by doctors?”. Hospitals (and school systems) should be run by administrators who have been trained to manage. Teachers have been trained to teach and the best of them should not be siphoned off into administration for counting paper clips.
Hospitals and school systems are two different animals. In some places, the school system is the largest employer with huge budgets. Those who run these mega-systems must have excellent administrative skills but also have a passion for education.
Florida just “lost” it’s 3rd education commissioner in less than 3 years. The governor keeps naming people who have a palpable disdain for public education and would prefer to see children educated in “for-profit” charter schools funded by the taxpayers.