This. Public schools, when properly funded, are the most effective and efficient way to educate everyone, rich and poor alike.
However, there are plenty of conservatives who want to suck at the government teat. So they try to pass laws so that public money gets channeled into their private pockets. Private schools are less efficient, but who cares about efficiency when you and your buddies can make an easy buck off a government contract, right?
It’s like outsourcing functions of the military to private contractors. They cost more and deliver less, but instead of the money going to working soldiers it goes into the pockets of private business men. Good for a small minority of business scammers, bad for everyone else.
I’d be in support of supplementary programs. If you can show your kid isn’t being served well by his or her school, you should be able to qualify for extra services, either reimbursed through tax breaks or some other vehicle. You could be compensated for sending your kid to Sylvan after school, for instance. Or if there’s a summertime academic program that would help prevent your slow-learner from “back sliding”, you could get a voucher to cover all or some of the expenses for him to attend.
Of course, this would require raising taxes…which is BAD BAD BAD. But my guess is this type of approach would have similar beneficial effects that placing a kid in a private school would, but without leaving schools in a “brain drain” situation.
It’s as close to national as anything short of the military. However much individual control districts and counties and states have, all are bound to common standards, goals and programs that tend to make them more the same than different.
The level of community funding and control is a very sharp 2-edged sword. On the one hand, Mississippi. OTO, small communities that manage the whole process, from taxation rates through spending through as much of the education process and standards as the state and feds will let them.
I think that vouchers or other government funding for religiously-oriented schools has majority opposition… only because the various sects are opposed to funding those “other” religions. The evangelical/fundamentalists in particular lust after paid Jeebus schools but choke on the idea that even Catholics would get the same privilege.
Well, opposition to vouchers does seem to be the majority view. A Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll asked “Do you favor or oppose allowing students and parents to choose a private school to attend at public expense?”; 70% of respondents answered that they oppose this and 29% that they favor such a policy. But I don’t know of any data on why such a large percentage of the public opposes vouchers; a desire to not have public money go to sectarian institutions is only one of several reasons why people might oppose school vouchers.
It’s simple. Vouchers are paid for by my tax money. In the public school system I can have quite of bit of input as to what is taught & how. I can vote out bad Board members, I can support good ones, I can influence others, including other elected officials. I can (and have) serve on the Civil Grand Jury which audits and oversees the schools.
Private schools can & do teach such nonsense as “Creation Science’ or other stuff. Trinopus, snowthx and DigitalC have also voiced this very real concern. They can also waste their funds (which are MY funds, remember?) as they wish with little or no oversight. Fire teachers for their beliefs. etc.
Now, if you force any Private school that takes vouchers to have it’s program overseen by elected officials, then fine.
ITR Champion: I have it on excellent authority that John Boehner goes to Morton’s Steakhouse every now and then. He also supports cutting food stamps. Is this the same level of hypocrisy as the Democrats mentioned in your OP, or greater?
If schools accepting vouchers were prevented from charging anything beyond the voucher payment, there might be some level of equality. If they can charge, we’d have the same unequal system as now with the better off being subsidized.
A lot of school success depends on parents. Why make the situation of kids who don’t get read to or homework support even worse by going to schools defaulted to by parents who either did nothing or got suckered in by school salesmen.
We have a kind of voucher system for college already - how are the for-profit colleges working out?
Have you seen some of the schools in WDC? I lived there for a year in the 80s while in the military, and squeezed enough out of my paycheck to send my two teens to Catholic schools. The local schools they would have been in were liked armed camps. My two youngest ended up in a predominately black elementary school in southeast DC, where they spent their days being treated like the minorities that they were. The oldest of those two still recalls that year with a shudder, now at age 37. I’m confident that my oldest two would have received a lousy education in their prospective schools. There weren’t enough books to go around, and neither of them came home that first day with any idea as to where their classes were. Given that sort of school system, I’d send my kids to private school, too.
I own a house, and I don’t have any children. So I pay WAY more into the public school system than I take out of it. And I don’t have a problem with that. I generally vote for school bonding bills, to raise my own taxes.
I oppose the idea that someone should be able to take “their share” of that public school funding and give it to a private institution, in the process reducing the funds available to the remaining students in the public schools. I haven’t agreed to pay part of the tuition for a very pricy school for the children of rich folks. I haven’t agreed to pay the tuition to attend religious schools. I have agreed to pay towards educating ALL kids.
I MIGHT approve of a system that lets the public school students transfer to a different public school, and take let’s say 2/3rds of the cost of one student with them to the new school. It would depend on the details.
Vouchers generally don’t help poor families get their children into better schools. They usually end up putting them in worse schools.
Vouchers won’t cover the tuition at most decent private schools. So they don’t help the poor people who can’t afford to cover the balance of the tuition.
The people who get helped are those who are already well enough off to be able to afford private schooling. Now you can make an argument about what social services the government should be paying for. But I think it’s hard to argue against the idea that if the government is going to pay for some social service, it should be spending that money on the people who are the poorest.
The result of this subsidy to wealthy and middle class parents is they spend less to send their children to private schools. With their children in private schools, they have less interest in the conditions at public schools and those conditions decline. So poor parents, who can’t afford private schools even with vouchers, are stuck sending their children to public schools that have been made worse as a result of voucher programs.
And as was already noted, most private schools in this country are run by conservative religious groups. So vouchers are a stealth program to funnel government money to these conservative religious groups.
Whenever this topic comes up, a lot of valid concerns are raised but they don’t ever get a good response. I wish the OP or someone else would address them.
Here are the “valid concerns”:
-Lack of oversight. Which schools get vouchers and how do we know that they’ll be better than the public option?
-Separation of church and state. Why should we use public money to support religious institutions and the inculcation of religious dogma? How do we ensure that private schools advertising themselves as secular just to get some voucher students aren’t actually teaching religious and/or crazy beliefs on the down low?
-What do we do about the “failing” schools left behind? The number of vouchers available for any given school or school district will be limited. There will always students who for whatever reason can’t avail themselves of vouchers. How does vouchers improve education for these kids?
Someone, anyone, please take a stab of any of these. Or else concede that this is a lost cause for your side.
The only reason private schools have better results than public schools, is they have the luxury of rejecting students with learning disabilities who are expensive to teach. They discovered the key to raising test scores is expel kids who fail tests.
Because vouchers will not help those poor children in failing schools and eliminating vouchers would better help those schools become non-failing schools