But private schools can game the system. They can refuse problem students while public schools are required to accept them. So private schools can cherry-pick the students that do well on tests and raise their averages. Meanwhile, public schools lose those good students and are stuck with the difficult students so their test averages go down.
I saw the same thing when I was working in a prison. Private prison companies would talk about how they had lower costs per prisoner - but they wouldn’t talk about how they refused to accept any high-cost maximum-security prisoners. Or the private delivery companies that refuse to make the high-cost deliveries the post office is required to make.
You can always get good results if you game the system and refuse to do the things that produce bad results.
I won’t call the conservative position hypocritical because they’re pretty much openly admitting it. But their position seems to be abandoning problem schools rather than fixing them. And they’re abandoning the families that use those schools as well.
If the conservatives were putting forth a plan that allowed every student to choose a private school then it would be a valid alternative. But as long as there are children who can’t go to private schools - even with vouchers - then we cannot abandon the public school system. So the Democrats deserve praise for at least trying to fix the problems of public schools rather than just running away from them.
My older brother went to public school, dropped out at age 16, and became a Mensa member in his twenties. This wasn’t just because he was a bright fellow, but also because our parents augmented his school studies with a home atmosphere that encouraged reading, learning, and the arts. What my anecdotes, drawn from life experiences, tell me is that it’s not the private vs public school part of the equation that matters as much as the supportive family vs dysfunctional family.
The issue that needs to be addressed is education. If public education is sub-par, then that’s the problem. If families of students who continually fail to meet base-line standards are not able to reinforce the formal education system, that’s the problem.
I don’t think private schools are that much superior to public schools in their ability to teach, but rather, in the composition of their students … frankly, the private schools have student bodies composed of wealthier kids, and far fewer minority kids. It’s the students that make public schools the hell-holes they are. and it’s the families of the poor students that are and have been dropping the ball.
It’s my position that if the Government paid full tuition for every poverty level student to attend private school (and forced the schools to admit them … these schools have admission standards), very soon, the private schools would resemble public schools. They would be full of unruly ignorant students who bully not only their classmates, but the teachers as well. Vouchers address a very limited group … the families too poor to afford private school, but who’s children are bright enough to pass the admission requirements. I think private scholarships should deal with these families, and/ or some sort of welfare that lessens some of the other financial burdens of the family so they can better afford private schooling.
I’m afraid vouchers will enable families that actually can afford private school to siphon funds away from public education. If my lower middle-class family could afford private school by making substantial sacrifices, I’m maintaining that others can as well.
What really needs to be the focus of education reform is the behavior problems and utter lack of discipline in lower income and urban schools … read that any way you like.
Show me those spending numbers, once the budget for English-as-a-second-language students, and disabled or special need students are removed. Show me the spending on a standard run of the mill non-trouble making student. I bet it’s much closer to your DC voucher numbers. I don’t begrudge those kids an education, but you are ignoring the fact that it costs the public schools more to educate them.
In that case, taxes should end. I’m sure a lot of your tax money goes to programs that do absolutely nothing for you, but benefit society as a whole. If you are going to fund education, fund it. Establish essential learning by grade level and let anyone who wants to teach MORE than that teach what they will. So while they learn Evolution, they can go to a private school that also teaches “Creation Science.” Who cares? A Muslim school would teach their ideals above and beyond the requirements, too.
If you make it so that if they accept the vouchers, the school can charge nothing after the voucher is accepted (my injection into the voucher idea), you can also make it so that they must accept all vouchers on a First-Come-First-Served basis until their facility is closed.
The private schools, in this case, can still decide to not accept vouchers. But the vouchers would also be usable at all public schools. Want to wake your child up at 4am and drive them 2 hours away? Eh, it’s your gas money.
It should also be law that if you contract with the government, the government sends you what you were contracted for. Prisoners, students, fighter jet rebuilds. You shouldn’t get to pick and chose. (I know, pie in the sky. )
This is a little different. It’s rare for the USPS to hand off packages or mail to another company and have them take it to where it needs to go.
If we ditch NCLB and establish a sane education policy and allow students to go to any public school or any voucher-with-strings participating private school, that sounds like a good idea to me. But maybe I’m missing the larger picture.
The empirical evidence on school voucher efficacy remains much more controversial than the linked summary lets on. Their phrasing is just laughably misleading:
You keep mentioning scientific evidence, but how many of those studies took care to identify a causal impact of voucher threats on public school performance? If public schools have improved then it could be due to increased competition; it could also be the continuation of the trends toward educational improvement that lead to a voucher program in the first place. Most of the studies showing a positive effect on public schools involved Florida, but on the other hand, see Figlio and Rouse (Journal of Public Economics, 2006):
Don’t get me wrong: I found and could cite other papers purporting to show the opposite. But that’s not really my point. Maybe vouchers work; maybe they’re the way we should move forward. You nevertheless do yourself no favors by quoting only the most transparently biased sources and repeating the word “scientific”.
To be fair, there was no deception in the original contracts. The private prison companies were clear about what prisoners they would accept and the government signed the contracts on that basis.
The “deception” was when the private companies later tried to burnish their public image by saying they were spending less per prisoner (which was true) while not mentioning they weren’t performing the same services the government was doing. If you compared the cost per prisoner for just medium security prisoners, you’d have seen that the private prisons and the government run prisons were virtually identical.
Or did you perhaps mean to say, “In both states, I have found examples of people who are aghast, but their reaction doesn’t create new law or policy in any way?”
I agree completely. I went to public elementary and middle school and private high school, and it was night and day. In middle school, there was a large segment of the student body whose parents were devoted to having their children educated as well as could be accomplished, and there was a large segment of the student body who was there because they were legally required to be- they had no aspirations to speak of. For good or ill, this breakdown was also more or less by ethnic group- the white and asian students (the school was about 20% asian) were the ones whose parents stressed academic success, while the black, hispanic and white-trashy kids seemed to just be along for the ride. No expectation of college or anything other than finding some job and making ends meet.
High school was at a Jesuit college prep school, and it was night and day. EVERYONE there had parents who deeply cared about their children being successful. We were all expected by our parents and the school to not only graduate, but go to college, and everything was geared toward that end.
The problem isn’t that the rich people set their kids up in better schools, it’s that people who value education get involved in their children’s education and set expectations and goals. People who don’t value education see it as something that gets in the way of getting on with life.
I’m not sure how to change that attitude- it’s the same old taking a horse to water but being unable to make him drink problem. No amount of funding will change that either.
Vouchers just let the odd few children at schools overrun with people who don’t value education get out and go somewhere that education is valued.
We agree that public schools are full of children who have been let down by their parents. We disagree that vouchers will solve the problem in an acceptable manner.
My solution is that, instead of being concerned that any school is made up of a certain quota or cross-section of diversity, that public schools be sectioned off into achievement calibrated campuses. There should be public schools that are labelled as “college prep specialty schools” and the students allowed to enter must pass strict entrance exams. With A and B, or even A, B, and C students isolated from gang members and general failures, the school system can go about the business of educating the kids that can be saved, and babysitting the ones that can’t. Now, at any time, the education system can work on improving the teaching methods at the “lower expectation schools”, and social workers can heroically address the issues facing the families of poor students … that’s a given. If a student can work toward passing the entrance exam of the college prep school, that student can move over to the specialty school.
We have special schools for learning-challenged students, why not special schools for learning-advantaged students so they can be educated without the distractions of a dystopian school full of threats and interruptions to learning?
And hasn’t WDC been controlled by Democrats for the last umpteen years?
As for the OP’s cite I found this about the author
[QUOTE=Acton University]
Dr. Greg Forster is a program director at the Kern Family Foundation, where he directs the Oikonomia Network, a national learning community of evangelical seminaries that equips pastors with a theological understanding of faith, work, and economics. He is also the editor of Hang Together, a group blog on religion, politics and national identity; a senior fellow at the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice; the author of five books and numerous articles in both academic and popular publications; and a regular contributor to online sources including The Gospel Coalition and First Thoughts. His writing covers theology, economics, political philosophy, and education policy. He received a doctorate with distinction in political philosophy from Yale University.
[/QUOTE]
So he’s evangelical and a political philosopher. Not to say that his view isn’t valid but I’m noticing a severe lack of any background in K-12 policy, pedagogy, administration, etc.
Second, his study evaluates empirical studies. This is actually not surprising because most educational papers are empirical in nature however there is no balance with quantitative papers. Those are the paper that would say whether or not a treatment (e.g. a voucher program) had a significant impact.
Third, most educational studies are crap. They contain significant errors most of the time. When I studied educational research for my master’s in sped, our class found that over half of the studies picked at random had at least one major error in research practices. At least with quantitative studies the crap factor is lower due to the statistical testing.
Fourth, let look at some of the results.
So if you choose your school rather than being assigned to one that you are happier with the school. Next you’ll say something crazy like if we go to a restaurant I’ll like my meal better if I choose it rather than some random person choosing it for me.
And Forster’s own methodology? (Fifth)
Very clearly written by someone with no practical experience in schools that has had to deal with changing demographics (common in suburban schools) or changing practices to satisfy the current whims of the state legislature.
That was followed up by this one
It had been pretty well established that standardized test tend to be cultural tests so if one group is dominated by the dominant culture then the results are skewed. Also these test put a heavy emphasis on reading so that must be accounted for stating where the ELL and SPED students are. If this study gave us the demographics of school voucher vs. non-voucher students we would know if the difference are significant - but we don’t and would have a hard time finding it on our own (remember the lack of references?). Oh and do they include ACT and SAT, test where rich parents can buy prep programs? I don’t know. We aren’t told.
But these are empirical studies right? Therefore no significance can be given to the results. If I give you a pretest and you score 35/50 and then on the posttest you score 36/50 then empirically you scored better but had this been a quantitative study we would find that you increase was well within to possibility of random chance and so the increase is insignificant an we would say in effect there was no increase. Forster’s results sound impressive but really are not.
Sixth, I pulled up one of the papers discussed and noticed the only statistics that actually measured student improvement was a 6 percentile gain. From the 30th%ile to the 37%ile (must be rounding) which is a gain of 0.25 s.d. Taking the ITBS test (the one used in the study) with a mean of 50 and s.d. of 21.06 I get that the z-score of the students went from -0.53 to -0.33 which is a gain of only 0.2. Be that as it may because of rounding, it means that at best the students got 5 more points on the test. Without knowing how many questions are on the test, I can only estimate the real life implications of this gain but typically on state test it would indicate the voucher group got on average 2 +/- 0.5 more questions correct so take that for what you will.
So far reading his paper, I can only arrive at two possibilities and the “PhD from a diploma mill” possibility has to be thrown out because he did go to Yale. So I can only conclude that he is deliberately writing this paper to sound very impressive to people who don’t have a background in research viz. most Americans but at the same time obfuscate the actual results. But if his results are valid, why do that? Why not use quantitative studies?
No, that’s not what I meant. To be absolutely specific, lawmakers (those who create the laws) are aghast that the laws they’ve created or propose creating, might include Islamic schools. Since they are lawmakers, their views can have a profound effect on the laws. You didn’t open either link, did you?
As sad as that is (and as unsurprising as that is, really) I don’t think that sort of thing should be stipulated by a governmental contract. If you are going to educate or house prisoners, you’ll get the kids that want to come or you’ll get the prisoners that we send to you.
But, of course, the private institutions wouldn’t make nearly as much money and no politician wants to step on that, unfortunately. It’ll cut back their contributions.
This “rats leaving a sinking ship” approach is pretty common to voucher fans. The rest of us in the “patch the sinking ship, ferchrissakes” brigade don’t find it convincing.
Public schools are an absolutely necessary social institution. Voucher programs are part of the longstanding Republican trend of taking resources away from public goods in order to funnel them to the better-off.
If your local public school is in trouble, get involved. Fix it. But abandoning the children there whose parents are unable or unwilling to get them out is an abandonment of the social contract, and is a despicable act.
Yes. Save the public schools’ funding, at the price of abandoning any hope for kids who would benefit from the voucher program. Who cares about them, right? There are principles involved!
That asshole you’re arguing with who said save the public school’s funding sure should be mocked. Who said that, again?
I said, quite clearly, fix the school. If that means firing incompetent faculty or administration, do it (and don’t whine about how difficult it is to do it, just freakin’ do it). If that means changing policies, do it.
But don’t abandon kids to a failing school. That’s unacceptable.
Additionally, schools are designed with a specific number of attendees in mind. Moving a bunch of kids out would most likely put a lot of strain on schools re: administrative costs. Unless you plan on knocking down the old schools to build newer smaller ones, which is most likely even more expensive, at least in the short term.
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