Did you even read my cite, or any other site to understand what is going on there? First the scores did not increase across the board. Scores in many subjects fell for lower income kids. For example:
And lest you think this is only happening in Chile, here is a study that looks at voucher system failures in other countries.
This is not true. There is growing evidence government contractors (for example) don’t save any money.
Except that the private sector cannot and will not take on the task of educating ALL of our children at current costs. Even if they could, increased costs of the kind you mention come with benefits as well. For example, worker safety has a cost that also has benefits to employees and society. Higher pay for employees typically means you can get more qualified employees. Tenure means you can pay teachers less in salary, etc. All these are not all net positives, but there are almost always costs and benefits which need to be accounted for.
Figure out how to evaluate teachers in a fair and impartial way, and you can feel free to dock their pay because of it. Either way, numerous studies have shown incentive pay does not lead to better outcomes in education. So if you think paying “good” teachers more will yield better results, you are wrong.
In short, it doesn’t work because you are trying to replace social norms with market norms in an environment where market norms cannot incentivize people to do better.
More importantly, there is a natural ceiling on what you can pay a teacher given that their individual work product is not really scale-able. Why would you pay a teacher, say, 200k to teach 25 kids when you can pay one 30k to teach 10 kids with only slightly less inferior outcomes? Plus, the benefits of great teaching are not captured by the people paying the bills. Beyond a certain point, why is DC (for example) gonna pay great teachers much more in order to teach kids who end up living in Silicon Valley or China?
But let’s just pretend this system worked, and we can reduce the whole thing to a situation where each point above 75 on standardized testing costs $5k more for the teacher’s salary. There clearly a cutoff long before 100 where school systems and parents start satisficing at the expense of students.
But merit pay doesn’t work in reality. Again, another idea like vouchers that works better in theory.
Except that private schools typically pay teachers significantly less over time. Since they are not rewarding good teachers, why do they often get better results? Could it be because they start with a much better product?
Do you really want to play this game? As if I can’t link to several schools in red counties that suck. As far as what Dems are doing, there are a variety of education and poverty mitigation programs that Dems champion.
Schools systems like DC spend more money because you have to pay people more up and down the chain. It’s a cost disease. They also have students who are in greater need of resources life after school care, free lunch, 504 plans, etc. They also are paying more to counteract the negative environmental stimuli many of the kids in poor areas are exposed to. Asking why a city like DC or NY spends more is like asking why it costs more to live in either place, or buy a nice dinner. It’s not primarily because people are wasting money.
They are opening charter schools, transforming entire neighborhoods (HCZ), starting race to the top, ensuring low interest college loans are universally available, head start, creating free online education sites, championing a vast variety of poverty reduction programs, etc., etc. See more here. This is not exactly a state secret. Especially if you work in education as you say you do. You may not agree those efforts are wise, but it’s not like they are doing nothing.
Either way, it’s become pretty obvious you are completely full of shit on this issue. If not just due to you selective reading and general ignorance, but also because in an effort to pin high per pupil school spending on democratic leadership failures, you posted an article which itself explain the causes for the disparities. To quote the article, in addition to cost of living differences that drive salaries:
Note that the low per pupil spending district (Alpine) spends 43% of its budget on teacher salaries. Funny how the article doesn’t seem to mention politics or ideology as a cause AT ALL.
It is true that charter schools are on the increase, and that in a few cases Democratic politicians have been the driving force behind them. However to credit the Democrats for that is absurd. Conservatives and libertarians are the ones who have been pushing for charter schools for a long time, while liberal Democrats have generally opposed them. The tide is starting to turn, but it would have turned a lot earlier if not for the Democratic Party, teachers unions, and liberal media naysayers standing in the way. Mentioning HCZ is also rather odd, given how some on the left have attacked it as an example of privatization of education.
As for Head Start, it’s a total waste of money. Citing that as an example of what Democrats are doing to improve education is ridiculous. It’s an example that demonstrates that Democrats only care about spending money, but don’t care about whether the money achieves anything.
Mentioning loans for college is off-topic in a thread about K-12 education. We’ve already seen examples of poor districts where a large majority of students don’t graduate from high school. Offering loans to the mainly upper-middle-class kids who go to college doesn’t help high school dropouts.
Educational disaster areas such as Camden have been disaster areas, consistently, for decades. The Democrats seem quite content; they are not pushing any serious changes to the status quo in those areas.
In this paper, we demonstrate that exploiting the power of loss aversion—teachers are paid in advance and asked to give back the money if their students do not improve sufficiently—increases math test scores between 0.201 (0.076) and 0.398 (0.129) standard deviations. This is equivalent to increasing teacher quality by more than one standard deviation.
A little over a decade ago students at New Plymouth Elementary were scoring in the bottom quartile of Idaho in K-3 reading. Our schools were faced with the daunting task of meeting the requirements of the new No Child Left Behind Act.
We needed to get better - quickly. We determined to do some things differently. We needed our teachers and principals to come up with new approaches, to collaborate, to set academic achievement goals and work toward reaching them. Rather than just giving pats on the back to teachers and grade levels that were able to positively impact student improvement, we decided to give small bonuses - as a thank you. As student scores improved, we continued to tinker with our performance pay system for several years before settling in on what is now the essence of Idaho’s teacher pay for performance (P4P) plan. Our demographics have not changed. Our district is now ranked No. 1 in Idaho in K-3 Reading on the IRI, and we are consistently in the upper echelon for all grades and subjects on the ISAT test.
But is there anything in the data the OECD has accumulated to give policymakers reason to believe that merit pay works? Do the countries that pay teachers based on their performance score higher on PISA tests? Based on my new analysis, the answer is yes. A little-used survey conducted by the OECD in 2005 makes it possible to identify the developed countries participating in PISA that appear to have some kind of performance pay plan. Linking that information to a country’s test performance, one finds that students in countries with performance pay perform at higher levels in math, science, and reading. Specifically, students in countries that permit teacher salaries to be adjusted for outstanding performance score approximately one-quarter of a standard deviation higher on the international math and reading tests, and about 15 percent higher on the science test, than students in countries without performance pay. These findings are obtained after adjustments for levels of economic development across countries, student background characteristics, and features of national school systems.
…
To see whether the education sector is an exception to general economic theory, a number of performance pay experiments have been carried out, and in Israel and India such studies have shown positive impacts on student achievement.
More Texas teachers stayed put and students saw a slight jump in their test scores at schools where teachers received performance-based pay in the first two years of a $400 million state program, a study indicates.
After studying and experimenting with teacher evaluation for six years, the Utah School Merit Committee has issued a report for the guidance of the state legislature. The report again approves the principle of compensating educators on the basis of the quality of their service. It recommends the gradual implementation of merit programs in up to five school districts of Utah annually.
Figlio and Kenny find that teacher salary incentives are associated with higher levels of student performance.
Actually it seems that I’m right, at least in the majority of cases.
I think the biggest issue at hand is that there’s a large segment of the poor (most even?) who just flat-out don’t value education.
The Head Start program is aimed at teaching children starting kindergarten the following school year the sorts of absolutely basic skills and knowledge that most people assume that 3-4 year olds already know- things like numbers, counting, colors, sorting, etc… Stuff that a lot of 2 year olds often know.
The idea is that if they hit kindergarten without those sorts of skills, they’re starting out behind most other students, and the Head Start program will teach them those skills so that they start on a level playing field.
Problem is, if the parents of these students gave half a shit about education, they’d have taught their kids basic things like their colors and numbers before they got to kindergarten, and likely before they hit Head Start. Plenty of poor families manage to teach their children these basic things- not knowing these things isn’t a poverty issue, it’s a parenting failure and/or a stupidity issue.
So it’s no wonder that they don’t continue to do well, even with a level playing field starting in kindergarten. There’s no emphasis on learning, and no emphasis on academic success for those people.
Gather up an entire school where the children of these people are the predominant sort of student, and you end up with an environment where even a student who’s excelling there may need remedial help when they hit a university environment because what passes for excellence in that one school is really remedial elsewhere.
The non-valuation of education is also why some poorly performing school systems can spend more per-capita money and get worse results than many other public and private schools who spend less money per student.
Voucher advocates see them as allowing the few students in these environments who do actually want a quality education to “eject” so to speak.
I’m personally not convinced that the school districts are the place to address the lack of valuation of education in some populations; it’s a bigger problem than just trying to motivate and inspire individual students; it’s a problem of changing culture.
So, uh, looks like the answer to my question is that you don’t have any evidence to back up your claim.
As for the question of whether I have a cite saying that the kids remaining in public schools do better when vouchers are offered, I do have such a cite, and have already posted it. If you’d read the first post in this thread, you would know that.
Why? They are often the ones creating, administering, advocating for, and funding these schools. Why do they not get credit.
Are you under the impression that the left and democrats are monolithic blocs? They aren’t. Just because some people disagree with one strategy doesn’t mean Democrats are for or against it in an overall sense.
First, your cite is by no means the most unbaised or complete report in the study done. See here. Either way, you asked for what some Dems are doing to improve education. I provided you with examples. Just because you don’t agree with the methods does not mean they are doing nothing.
You asked what Dems are doign for education. That is part of the answer. Just because it is beyond the scope of what you want to talk about is beside the point.
Bullshit. Look at the list on per pupil spending. Notice Newark up there. The same Newark that is trying all sorts of new things, raising unprecedented private funds, etc. Camden schools suck because Camden sucks. Why would anyone expect the schools to be good when the city is terrible? Schools are not laboratories that are unaffected by outside influences. And it’s not primarily government or poor leadership that killed Camden, it’s a multi-faceted problem.
Of course, like any controversial subject, there are gonna be cites on both sides. However, most of what you cited are anecdotes and non-scientific correlations some guy observed. Either way, the question is why exactly would merit pay work in these cases? Why would say $2k make a teacher better, when the first $40k or so didn’t? If pay is such an incentive, then why are poor districts where they often pay more money to teachers some of the worst performing schools? If these teachers know how to do better, why don’t they do it anyway? Financial incentives are extremely overrated in most sectors. Do you think Joe Flacco plays harder now because he got a bigger contract to play football? Would merit pay for musicians lead to better music? Do you think Toyota would get better selling cars if their engineers had merit pay? Would merit pay for cops reduce crime? Would merit pay for firefighters reduce the number of costly and deadly fires? There is a reason why most industries don’t use merit pay based on indirect appraisals of one’s work.
That’s not even included the fact that the best teachers often don’t have the best scoring students. One is not that highly correlated with the other.
You have no idea what the majority of cases say. Please explain why a fairly trivial, results-based bonus would lead to teachers being better educators?
I don’t really have the patience to read through a 36 page PDF of propaganda. Suffice to say that skimming it produced this little nugget:
Which defeats a central conservative claim that throwing money at the problem won’t fix it. Bad schools are bad because they don’t have the funds to expand class sizes or buy textbooks or provide the basic services that a public school should provide.
You want to fix schools? Fine, give school more money, pay teachers more, and make sure that legislators are not forcing science classes to teach creationism or bullshit like that.
But you’ll probably not want to talk about giving schools more funding. Nothing is accomplished by taking public money and giving it to private schools. Going back to the same quote above, the money used for those vouchers could be given to the school itself. If, like your cite claims, that “public schools are left with more money to serve students who remain” and that’s a good thing, then it makes little sense to take that money out of the school in the form of vouchers and give it to private schools. Why pay both public and private schools? Why not just put all public money into public schools? Private institutions can pay for themselves, or do you not value the free market? :rolleyes:
Your cite spends time talking about competition. Ok, sure, lets do that. We can drop the requirements many districts have that students come from close by. Let public schools compete with public schools. If its truly the competition that makes things better, there need not be a pillaging of public funds for private schools. Let the public schools compete with each other. This way, at least all of the funds will still remain in the public sector instead of disappearing into the ether of private institutions. If you’re truly in favor of competition, this way should satisfy you because a public school with no students will not get funding and would face the same kind of closure threat as one whose students are going to private schools instead.
Failing schools are often concentrated in inner cities or poor areas with a far weaker tax base. Instead of blaming Democrats for taking advantage of what is available, you should be excoriating Republicans for their hostile attitude towards funding public education and attacking teachers.
I didn’t answer it because, as you ought to know, there are two issues with such research:
Vouchers have never been available to the level to which rightwingers want them to be available; the levels that have occurred have had a relatively small effect on funding, but there’s a move to make them a universal means of funding education, which would drastically change the dynamic. It’s that proposed dynamic I’m discussing, not the trivial levels at which vouchers have been offered so far.
Unlike you, I don’t believe that correlation equals causation. In order to get rigorous research on this topic, you’d need a controlled double-blind study. Conducting such a study is fine if you’re manufacturing a new smartphone, but it’s unethical if you’re dealing with children’s education. That’s one of the reasons why research on best practices is difficult, and why there’s so much shoddy research out there. If you studied the issue a little more, you’d rely on your vaunted studies a lot less.
You should instead be asking, “what is it that Democrats are doing in poor urban districts that make poor urban voters overwhelmingly trust them to handle education more than they trust Republicans?”
I assume you respect poor parents enough to let them choose their educational system–and overwhelmingly they choose politicians that support public schools, not ones that support vouchers.
(Of course I don’t assume that, but I do enjoy your ideological contortionist act and can’t wait to see your response).
Personally I think that better decision comes from being informed by reading the best research that’s been done on a topic, rather than being proudly uninformed.
If all you know is that school type X has slightly better outcomes than school type Y, without understanding WHY, you don’t understand anything. Schools are just groups of teachers, administrators and students in a building. Are the teachers not teaching hard enough? Are the administrators focusing on the wrong things? Does the mix of socioeconomic backgrounds of the student body affect outcomes?
Why can’t a public school do what a private school does?
AFAICT, Republicans are banking on the mysterious effects of “competition” to make things work “better” without the burden of understanding how it works.
I see. So when you said that vouchers are “to the detriment of the kids who are left behind”, you did not actually have any evidence to back up that claim.
Nonetheless this thread is about voucher programs targeted at failing schools in the poorest areas. That’s what I put forward, and you made a specific claim about my “proposal”. Changing the subject to a hypothetical universal voucher program is, well, a change of subject.
Actually I don’t believe that correlation equals causation either.
Why? Obviously a controlled study is a good idea, and as we’ve already seen, the controlled studies that have been done overwhelmingly testify that vouchers lead to improved student performance. A double-blind study is used when researching questions such as whether a medicine reduces pain. Since pain is subjective, there’s a possibility that patients getting a pill will experience less pain due to the placebo effect; a blind study where the control group gets a placebo eliminates this factor. However, when measuring something objective such as the performance of students on math tests, there’s no danger of a placebo effect and thus no reason to prefer to a blind or double-blind study. I’d be very interested to hear you justify why we’d “need a double-blind experiment”. It looks a bit like a last-ditch attempt to ignore the scientific research that’s been done on the question of vouchers, necessary since such research overwhelming points to the opposite of what you believe.
The problem here is that you’re asking for evidence for the ludicrously obvious, namely, that taking money away from an organization that provides a service will affect the quality of those services.
The title is about opposition to vouchers; that’s what the OP is about. Those goalposts will stay put if I have anything to say about it.
We’ve seen exactly the opposite of this claim–or did you forget about randroid’s post already? It’s totally unacceptable to make a claim, have it refuted, wait a few days, and then repeat the claim.
:smack: This is my error, and I apologize: I was writing quickly and therefore sloppily. The word I should have used is “randomized,” not “double-blind.”
If the study isn’t randomized, then you have the obvious interfering effects of parent involvement and social support and even student initiative that make it difficult to isolate the effects of vouchers. If the study is randomized, you run into ethical concerns.
Is it your position, then, that urban voters prefer Republican candidates’ positions on education policy? If so, can you cite that? (And no, it’s not enough to repeat the polls that have already been challenged due to their wording and to ignore that different polls receive drastically different results–that would be the same sort of tactic you just used in ignoring studies about vouchers that don’t match your preconceived notions).
A quick scan of the PDF shows that your source is laughably biased. If I want to fight ignorance, I should not read your source, since it perpetuates it instead of fights it :rolleyes:
A printed copy of the voucher can be burned for warmth. A pithy amount of heat, to be fair, but better than nothing
If what you’re claiming to be true is “ludicrously obvious”, then providing the evidence that I asked for should be extremely easy. Yet for some reason, you haven’t provided an iota of evidence that backs up your position.
I don’t recall ever asking for evidence for any such thing. My proposal is voucher programs for poor students, similar to those already existing in many cities, counties, and states. You said, “Your proposal lets fewer kids fall a greater distance through the cracks, by allowing a few kids to escape to the detriment of the kids who are left behind.” I asked, “What evidence do you have to back up this claim?” Now we’ve already established at length, in this thread and others that you’ve participated in, that voucher programs cost less per student than public school education. Often times it’s a great deal less. Voucher programs therefore usually lead to an increase in public school spending per student. Since you’ve asserted that voucher programs hurt the students who remain in public schools, the burden of proof is on you to show why a program that increases per-student spending in public schools would hurt those schools.