All of the money is not taken out of their school. One student leaves, and takes their portion of funding with them. This reduces the cost of the school by one student.
That sounds like a problem in how the law was written for St. Louis, not a problem with vouchers or school choice. The losing district should hand over their 50%, and the gaining district gets the rest of the money from the state.
No, it doesn’t. Many costs are not per-pupil costs (e.g., building maintenance, basic administration, EC services). Part of the reason why schools want more students is because that means each kid is paying a smaller portion of those overhead costs, and therefore there’s more money available to every kid for the per-pupil expenses.
We need to go to the school right now!
The school? What is it?
It’s a big building with teachers and students, but that’s not important right now.
Jokes aside, schools are just collections of people in a building, what makes one school a success and another school a failure?
Is it the decisions of the administrators? If so, hire better administrators in your public school, problem solved.
Is it the quality of the teachers? If so, get teachers from the same pool of talent that private schools use, problem solved. (of course, this will take time, however we’ve believed that our school system sucks ass for decades, plenty of time to adjust our hiring policies)
Is it the socioeconomic dynamics of the student body? If so, you’re completely fucked, because
are eligible for vouchers, same as everyone else, and will infect your private schools just like they do public schools.
Yes, it does. I can use Pell grants and Sallie Mae loans to go to Oral Robert University, Notre Dame, Liberty, etc.
The money goes to the students, they choose where to take it.
So fix the law about revenue sharing in the public schools. This is easily addressable.
And don’t whine about how hard it is to fix the law.
I disagree that they’ll infect the private schools.
Those kids probably need EC services. They probably need transportation to school. They probably need help from a social worker. They probably need a cafeteria lunch. And they probably need an involved parent.
A private school just has to say, “Sorry, we offer excellent academics, but we don’t offer EC services, transportation, social work, free hot lunch,” and suddenly, without denying admission to anyone, those kids aren’t going to show up.
Most importantly, those kids are likely to be the kids whose parents aren’t emphasizing academics very strongly in the home, for whatever reason. Those kids are the ones who aren’t likely to have a parent applying for vouchers. So they won’t get into the school in any case.
There’s a great local charter school in my community that offers an arts-based curriculum. I know more than one family who’s delighted with the education their kids are getting there. It’s about 20 minutes outside of town. Wanna guess whether they offer a bus? Wanna guess what percentage of the kids at that school come from families that can’t afford a car?
If their academics aren’t far better than the ones at a public school, they’re squandering their situation. Without actively excluding anyone, they’ve filtered out the kids with the most needs from their population.
And that’s fine, as long as we recognize what’s going on, and don’t crap all over the public schools that don’t apply such a filter.
Not whining, dude. But since I’m not convinced that vouchers are the way to go, I’ve got zero incentive to fix a bad idea. If there are problems with your bad idea, YOU fix it and come back to the table with a slightly less bad idea.
So this whole thread is about one student? Why didn’t you say so! That’s a horse of a different color!
I don’t consider it a bad idea. The only issue I see is ensuring there is an accreditation body checking on the private schools (as is done at the university level), and determining the value of the voucher to reflect the variable cost of educating a student.
We are adding school choice, charter schools, and vouchers - all of this in response to perceived and real problems in the public school system.
Right–I get that you don’t consider it a bad idea. I do, because I think it’s going to make things worse for the kids left behind, and that’s not a problem easily fixed by changing the law. The overhead issue I mentioned earlier is a real issue, but it’s minor compared to other problems.
Charters? Great. Vouchers? No.
Why are Charters OK but Vouchers bad?
I’m not quite sure what you’re talking about. The paper I linked to gathers the results from ten matched-pair experiments comparing students who used vouchers to attend private schools to students who were denied vouchers and remained in public schools. All ten of those experiments measured student performance by numerical measures: test scores and, in some cases, graduation rates. In addition to this, some of the experiments surveyed the parents regarding their satisfaction. Overwhelming, parents were more satisfied when their kids attended private schools, rather than public schools. This is not surprising; it’s one of the many predictable advantages of a voucher program.
Greene’s study, which can be read in its entirety here, is a randomized study. A body of poor families in Charlotte applied for vouchers. Some children were chosen at random to get vouchers, others were denied. Those who were denied vouchers became the control group. Since the determination process was random, the voucher group and the control group had the same demographics. That’s exactly what a randomized assignment process in an experiment is supposed to achieve.
Perhaps I missed it, but I don’t see where you’re getting the “2 more questions right” data point. The study says this:
After one year, the results show that students who used a scholarship to attend a private school scored 5.9 percentile points higher on the math section of the ITBS than comparable students who remained in public schools. Choice students scored 6.5 per- centile points higher than their public school counterparts in reading after one year.
Using a statistical technique known as instru- mental analysis to adjust for the potential bias of non- compliance yields results that remain strong and positive. The results of this analysis show that, after only one year’s time, attending a private-school improved student performance on standardized tests in math and reading by between 5.4 and 7.7 percentile points.
On average, a scholarship raised students from the 30th percentile to the 37th percentile. This is a fairly large gain—approximately 0.25 standard deviation in math and reading. To put this gain in perspective, the difference nationwide between minority and white students is approximately 1.0 standard devi- ation. The benefits of the Charlotte CSF program are roughly one-quarter as large at the end of only one year.
If my kid is already in private school (let’s say he gets a partial scholarship) because the local public school is a low-performing school, would I be eligible for a voucher to pick up the remaining cost?
Is simply being from a low-performing school suffiicient for getting a voucher? If so, how do you stop middle class parents from moving into poor neighborhoods so they can snatch up all the vouchers?
Or if all you have to do is demonstrate that the school is failing your kid somehow, how will this be determined? Should a D student with high test scores get a voucher to go to a fancy-pants “genius” school so she can be challenged? Why not? Why should the voucher only be used to advanced the education of those with the lowest ROI?
What evidence do you have to back up this claim? Voucher programs have been implemented in dozens of states, counties, and cities in this country. If there’s a measurable “detriment” to the kids who are left behind, surely you can cite some research which says so.
In the same post, you seem to be saying, “hey, so what if vouchers don’t really help the poor. isn’t helping SOMEONE better than helping noone?” and later on you seem to be saying “hey, education is supposed to be the great equalizer especially for the poor so we really need this voucher system”
So at the same time that you seem to admit that voucher systems as they currently exist don’t help the poor, you use helping the poor as the argument for adopting a voucher system.
I could support that (it really just sounds like a charter school system).
If it actually helped the situation, I might be convinced to accept this sort of side effect.
Or you could redistrict and sell the surplus schools. Heck, one of the fanciest condo developments in DC used to be a school (high ceilings, huge windows, large open spaces, lots of parking and plenty of room for customization).
Obama clearly supports charter schools… As does the American Federation of Teachers. What makes your voucher plan better than charters?
You can’t buy prepared ready to eat food with food stamps.
So why do the children of poor immigrants (whose parents frequently can’t even speak english) manage to overcome this disability so regularly?
I don’t know what the answer is (and I don’t think its vouchers) but its not just poverty.
I thought we stopped beating up on teachers after Newtown but I guess enough time has passed that we can revert to calling teachers bloodsucking leeches who put their own pecuniary interests over the welfare of their students. I wonder how many teachers have to throw themselves in front of flying bullets for people to stop bashing teachers for a whole year.
You are sugegsting that the government will bail out private schools. They have not done this with failing charter schools in DC, why would they do this anywhere else.
Hrmm, in DC, charter schools can’t cheat quite this much.
They are very closely regulated and the also get consistently better results than other charter schools. I think the devil may be in the details.
Charters are still overseen by Public officials, not a Church leader.
Is it even possible to measure the effectiveness of a school using standardized tests? ISTR one criticism of NCLB was that schools seriously concerned about funding in the context of NCLB would simply teach the students how to get good scores on the test, sometimes at the detriment of their broader education. The only real way to assess school performance is to look at the students a decade or two after they graduate – are they junkies, doctors, drug dealers, politicians, bank robbers or stock brokers? It really is a grey area that standardized testing simply cannot reach, and since contemporary outcomes (very former students) may not accurately reflect the current state of a given school, rating a school becomes a matter of guesswork at best.
Here’s the thing though- should schools and legislators be overly concerned with the failing poor students to the possible detriment of the other students, or be primarily concerned with getting the best overall outcome which may well involve doing a sort of “educational amputation” and letting the poor kids do their thing, while they concentrate on the less poor to get a better overall outcome?
That’s really what the voucher argument comes down to, I think, and it’s an interesting question to ponder.
I get where you’re coming from. For a few years of my teaching, I was fighting an uphill battle to give advanced students their due: in order to meet NCLB goals, I was told to let advanced students work independently, because they’d be fine passing the test. I ignored those directions because I considered them deeply unethical.
That said, I do think we need to treat it not as an either/or situation. We certainly need to give a lot of help to advanced students (which is, to be honest, my specialty: while I can teach students who are behind, I’m really damned good with kids who are advanced). But we must not do so by letting the kids in poverty be ignored.