Someone posted in another, similar, thread around here about how schools in other nations stratify their students based on aptitude. Early on, the schools can determine who has the potential for study in more advanced fields (medicine, law, engineering, etc.), and who, well, does not have that potential. The students are then essentially segregated and then the teachers can focus on each group’s needs. This, as opposed to asking teachers to provide instruction to a wide array of learning levels and styles all in one classroom.
Anyone remember that? Or, do we have a poster with experience in such an envirnonment?
The public schools I attended from K-12 had something like that, though I don’t remember how early it started. But I do recall that by 4th grade we had 4 classes: 4-1, 4-2, 4-3, 4-4. But the only one that was segregated out was 4-1. So from grammar school on, those of us in 4-1 were always in the same class, which was clearly for those with more academic promise. A kid would cycle in or out of it every year or so, but the class stayed largely intact through high school. The other three classes were pretty much equal to each other.
I went K-12 (well, it was 1-10) in Soviet Union, graduated in '79. They had everyone-together education in grades 1-8. The last 2 grades were separated into the
“lower level” “professional” schools (PTU) where some profession was learned - plumbing, metalworking, carpentry etc., and “regular” school that continued the academic track. I am not sure if there were aptitude tests to decide which you went to or some other method.
There were also “special” schools - with emphasis on arts, or music, or drama, or languages, or (the one I went to) math/physics. For those you had to either pass extremely stringent entrance exams or “know somebody”. And in case of my school, “knowing somebody” may have gotten you in, but certainly couldn’t keep you in if you couldn’t keep up, academically.
Charters accept the state payment as payment in full, vouchers can not always cover the full tuition of the institutions that accept them.
Charter schools must take all comers, private schools that accept vouchers don’t have to.
Charter schools are generally better regulated and have better oversight.
It sounds like you are saying that you can’t evaluate how well a school is doing its job because you can’t get a perfect evaluation and you can’t be sure that its entirely reflective of performance along objective lines.
If so then this is bullshit. Its largely excuse making. Evaluations are rarely an exact science and sure you have all sorts of unintended consequences but you fix the problem and move on, you don’t abandon the notion of evaluating performance.
The question that started this thread was, why do wealthy Democratic leaders send their own children to private school but deny poor people the choice of sending their children to private school? (And implicit, why do rank-and-file Democrats accept this?) The answer I seem to be getting here is that wealthy Democrats are good enough to choose their children’s school, but that the poor just can’t be allowed to make the exact same choice.
So the Democratic Party is lead by people who not only are quite wealthy, but want to separate themselves from anyone who isn’t wealthy. Say it ain’t so!
I’d entirely agree that no practical voucher plan could ever give poor kids access to the same kind of extraordinary privilege that young Obamas and young McAuliffes enjoy at their schools. That’s not the point of a voucher plan. The point is to give poor children something better than a school that the government itself classifies as failing.
Again, vouchers won’t do that, and taking money out of schools will make the remaining children even worse.
Before you start thinking up a solution, you need to come up with a plan that also includes those who remain in the school system. Vouchers will not pay for every public school child to go into a private school, therefore your “solution” is unworkable on its premise. Try again
Vouchers do nothing to increase the opportunity of the poor to send their kids to private schools. They don’t pay 100% of tuition. Vouchers are only useful to families who can make up the difference.
I might support a voucher program with the following characteristics:
Accountability. Public schools are accountable to taxpayers, and private schools that accept public funds should be similarly accountable, via a similar range of measures. So: highly qualified teachers, EOGs to measure school growth, etc.
Service. Public schools must provide transportation, food, EC services, etc. A private school that accepts public funds must offer similar services, whether through an in-house operation or via contracts.
Open-ness. Public schools accept any student that comes and can turn none away. A private school that accepts public funds must offer a similar policy.
Cost. Public schools are wholly free for the individual student. A private school accepts public funds must charge no tuition beyond those public funds for any student with a voucher.
With those measures in place, I’m hard-pressed to think of a reason to oppose vouchers for private schools. I’m pretty wary of private schools teaching religious stuff on the taxpayer dime, but I’m not convinced that’s a relevant objection.
Not good enough to justify the “why are liberals denying poor kids the opportunity to go to private schools” argument. Most poor kids won’t get scholarships. Vouchers condemn most poor kids to public schools with even less resources.
I would agree to this, although I’m opposed to funding religious stuff with taxpayer money. Also, any private school that accepts vouchers must accept any student that would be eligible for public school, even if that student has special needs, without charging more. In other words, private schools would not be allowed to cherry pick voucher students, and leave the kids with more problems to the public schools.
Yet, you and people of your ilk are always barking about how they are primarily responsible for screwing things up. As if every dollar a teacher makes is one less dollar that can go to educating a kid. Money is fungible. There is no reason to frame the issue that way aside from trying to smear the teachers’ unions, and undermine unions in general. It’s just as fair to say every dollar that goes to paying garbage men, or that isn’t collected in taxes from a rich guy, or that goes to subsidizing a stadium is one fewer dollar that can go towards educating kids. If you realize that, then why is the teacher’s union even part of this discussion?
At least you are honest about you irrational prejudices. Just don’t pretend you are being impartial about the issue.
Nice try. Read the cite. The issue is not whether things got better in Chile, it’s whether voucher were responsible for those improvements (they are not). Additionally, the stated aim of leveling the playing field for poor kids has not come to fruition at all. In fact, those disparities widened largely as a result of the voucher policy.
Now I am sure your rejoinder is that Chile provided vouchers to everyone, not just the poor. Even putting aside the fact that such a system is inherently unfair, and would not likely hold long term, it doesn’t address the larger issue that the market does not provide desired outcomes just because only the poor can participate.
So if you think the power of market choice is secondary to culture, please explain why you think the poor people in the US, who have less access to, comfort with, and ability to exploit the educational system would be more apt to take advantage of market choice? Please tell me why poor people in the US would fair so much better than poor Chileans?
First, why do you think there are schools in all these areas that could and would accept that 80%, and be able to do it at a lower cost? And if these schools could do that, then why don’t you just replicate what they are doing at the failing public school in the first place? Is the building haunted or something? If you think the 20% are dragging them down, then why not just be honest and expel those kids? Or, just give the families the money in cash? Why not go full board and just give poor people the money to improve their circumstances as they see fit instead of tying it to another school? If being “locked” to a failing school is terrible, why is being locked to a failing neighborhood better? In fact, you could move all these people to places with better public schools for less money in most cases, and get the side benefit of having a better and more healthy overall environment. Some of these vouchers are upwards of $5k/year. The rent disparity in many places not nearly that much in a given areas (eg. Takoma Park, MD vs. Anacostia, DC). The reason they people like you don’t advocate that is because you don’t trust these people, and you don’t really care about their educations; you want to kill unions, subsidize private schools, undermine the idea of public education, and convince people that only certain people deserve government services and protection.
Only if you assume the status quo is doing nothing. It isn’t. The Dems in general are trying to make the schools better so that all thousand Bobs that attend can have a better life. It’s a harder job that is made much harder when the other side is committed to giving up on those who are more costly and difficult to educate.
Is there something preventing Bob from learning independently, moving, or applying for scholarships to these schools? Why exactly is Bob, whose family likely pays far less in taxes than they take out, entitled to public resources for his individual education? You can’t deny someone something that doesn’t belong to them. But again, if the chaff of the group is what is “preventing” Bob from succeeding, why are you not honest about just wanting to give up on them in stead of trying to funnel money to a few individuals here and there.
More importantly, the voucher Bob gets is likely not gonna cover his tuition at a private school. It’s also not gonna cover all the extra costs like transportation, books, etc. And in the somewhat rare event that things work out for Bob because of this voucher, society could have improved his circumstances in many other more effective and efficient ways.
They wouldn’t be in that situation because they (and their peers) give a shit about their kid’s education. It isn’t just wealth in many cases. Schools are allowed to suck in large part if the parents don’t hold people accountable and/or teach their kids to be productive adults. It’s not as if Obama’s kids and the poor kids in SE DC were on equal footing before they started school. Schools don’t create those disparities, they just allow you to leverage the opportunities you have more effectively. For example, “by the age of 4, children of professional parents had heard on average 48 million words addressed to them while children in poor welfare families had heard only 13 million.” Schools aren’t responsible for that, and neither are teacher’s unions.
Most wealthy people pay for the best things in life, including education. Their politics have little to do with it, and their decisions don’t mean they are blind to the circumstances of others.
Because giving people that choice doesn’t really improve outcomes, costs more money, is a Trojan horse to enact a broad variety of perverse conservative policies, and allows too many kids to fall through the cracks.
Why is this surprising to you? What exactly is the point of making money if not to provide the best for you and yours? The best things in life are always going to be exclusive by their very nature. What you are suggesting doesn’t end exclusivity, nor is it an indictment of the idea; it just might open the door a tiny bit for a handful of kids at the expense of many others.
Why would rank and file Dems not support people spending their money as they see fit?
Then we should continue to try fixing failing schools. Or, if you worry so much about poor people being poor, just give them money directly. Vouchers are just a jumble of bad and ideologically disparate ideas bundled into a incoherent plan that will allow conservatives to enact friendly policies. It has nothing to do with poor kids or their education. Even some honest conservatives have acknowledged that vouchers don’t work.
Ah, so your argument is that after Chile began offering education vouchers, the education system improved and became the best in South America, but that the vouchers did not cause the education system to improve. That rather begs the question of how you know that’s the case. I’m sure you’re not expecting me to accept a pure argument from authority.
The answer to this is perfectly obvious to anyone who’s familiar with government spending. First, if your compare how much it costs a government in the US do to something, and how much it costs anyone else to exactly the same thing, it always costs the government vastly more. I gave some examples in this post; countless others could be given. Various unions and interest groups have rammed through laws and regulations which require the government to spend a lot more than a typical business or non-profit, in order to accomplish the exact same thing.
Second, in addition to forcing governments to spend more money, unions and special interest groups have passed laws that forbid common sense practices in government. One such common sense practice is paying more money to the best teachers and less to the worst. In private schools, and in colleges and universities, and in most other countries this is basic common sense. In many public school districts, the unions and Democrats have simply made it illegal; lousy teachers must, by law, be paid the same as good teachers of the same level of training and experience. This was covered in the excellent Atlantic Monthly article by Joe Klein that I linked to earlier.
Obviously if you reward good teachers, you’ll get better teaching, just like in any profession. That’s one reason among a great many why we’d expect private schools to deliver a better education with the same amount of money, or even with less money, and the data show that they do.
In that case, I’ll ask you the same question that I asked to Left Hand of Dorkness, which he hasn’t answered.
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 those programs “make the remaining children worse”, surely you can cite some research which says so.
Really? What exactly are Democrats doing to make schools in poor, urban districts better? I’m under the impression that if I go to a city dominated by Democrats, such as Camden, Trenton, Washington DC or Boston, I’ll find a remarkably bad set of schools serving poor neighborhoods, and that it’s been that way consistently for decades. If the Democrats are trying to make the schools better, then why are these schools run by Democrats so bad?
(It surely can’t be money. As the article I linked to demonstrates, many of the worst school districts are spending the greatest amounts of money.)
Do you really want to go there? If you wish, I could make a short, hand-picked list of Republican controlled areas with horrible schools…but that would definitely be taking the low road.
brickbacon asserted that “The Dems in general are trying to make the schools better”. In response, I asked “What exactly are Democrats doing to make schools in poor, urban districts better?” If you have an answer, I’d love to hear it.