You cannot “reform” any of these corrupt, big city school systems…there is too much money and patronage at stake! Ever wonder why schools trash perfectly good textbooks? ((and buy new ones)? GRAFT is the answer. Suppose you are a newly hired DC school superintendent. You start trying to close older buildings, fire redundant staff, upgrade teachers who work hard. IMMEDIATELY, you come under fire-from the texbook salesman, the janitor’s union,etc. These school districts got the way they are, from years of political control…and the people who are on the gravy train will NOT give it up!
Just as soon as those schools which are willing to take vouchers start taking every student who shows up, and work within the confines imposed upon every public school, I’m amenable to talk. Until that happens, though, private schools can piss off.
You misspelled “Texas”. Not to worry, happens a lot with voucher fans. Ignorance fought and all like that.
Why? Why should these schools be forced to do that? The whole point of vouchers is to give students a choice. If you are going to insist that private schools be essentially turned into public schools, then vouchers lose all their effectiveness.
But then, how do you educate the students the private schools won’t take? Part of the problem with comparing public and private schools is that public schools have to take all comers and private schools don’t.
This, and a few other comments related to “public schools suffer without the best kids” are what irritate me about the anti-charter school/vouchers argument. What’s the basis for making enterprising children and families responsible for the life choices and lack of ambition of their peers? I find it morally reprehensible to make children who can escape the nature of their circumstances stagnate in an educational cesspool to ensure some overall sense of “everyone should be mediocre to make things fair.”
“TEXAS”-those creation “science” nutjobs (who force the schools to buy their textbooks)? I agree, allowing creationism into public schools will cost a LOT of money (publishers won’t object)
One, you are assuming there are a large number of voucher kids that private schools won’t take. With any of the voucher programs out there, I don’t think this has been the case. If it is, I’d like to see some proof of it.
Two, if there is a large-scale voucher program where all kids in a school district (or state, or whatever) get vouchers, then there may indeed be some kids that won’t be accepted by private schools. Of course, there may also be private schools created to cater to the variety of student needs – special ed students, gifted students, trouble-makers, etc. We don’t really know, since this situation is purely hypothetical. However, where charter schools have been allowed freedom to develop, this is exactly what has happened. In DC there are a variety of charter schools catering to different needs and desires.
But let’s say that there is a group of kids left in public schools. Yes, it will suck for them. They may not get a good education. But the situation exists today is that hardly any kids get a good education in DC schools. So should all the kids be forced to go to them? If it turns out that only a small group of kids are left in these schools, getting a crappy education, that’s certainly preferable than all kids being in that position.
I’m not really interested in comparing the two, to be honest. I don’t think we need a comparison if people are free to choose between them. The comparisons will be made by those who use them. If I don’t have kids in the school it doesn’t really matter to me what those schools do. It’s like if I don’t have a car it doesn’t matter to me if Pep Boys or AutoZone is better. Those who use the service will be the ones to make the determination if the service is meeting their needs, however those needs are defined.
Those kids will remain in the public schools.
I should have put this into my list of why conservatives like vouchers - conservatives believe in tracking. This means that top students go into the classrooms with other top students, etc. Voucher programs would make it easier to have specialized schools for both interests and academic ability.
You assume that public education is solely for the benefit of the students. It is not. Public education is for the benefit of society as a whole. I benefit if the adults of the future are educated, by having access to services and products that those educated adults offer or make. I benefit by having a society that consists mostly of literate members.
I do not benefit if a select handful of students get a good education and the rest of them are relegated to hellholes where they learn nothing. I’d like there to be more middle-aged accountants, police officers, firefighters, and teachers in 2030 than middle-aged McDonald’s crewmembers and A&P stockboys.
I agree. So you’re a fan of vouchers, then? Because the DC public schools certainly do not make the future DC adults educated and they are not producing any benefits to society. They are hurting society by not only failing to educate kids but by sucking up a huge amount of taxpayer money to fund that “effort.”
You say you are opposed to a “handful” of students getting a good education. If you oppose vouchers you are effectively preventing any students from getting a good education by consigning them all to DC’s crappy schools. Or, to be more accurate, you are saying that there will indeed be a handful of students whose parents are well-off enough to afford private schools and they will get a good education. For the rest of DC’s students, they will get crappy schools. In opposing vouchers you are opposing the efforts to increase the numbers of students who actually get a good education.
The meme that private schools are better performers than public schools hinges on the fact that private schools do not have to take all comers. If you don’t control for that fact, you aren’t doing an honest comparison. What voucher advocates are basically saying is that the kids with horrible home lives, the kids with mental illness, the kids with behavioral disabilities, the autistic kids, the kids whose lives outside of school are such that their lives IN school are disrupted and disruptive, those kids don’t count and can be left behind to rot. Those kids are going to be adults, as well, someday (god willing…if they live that long).
I have nothing against kids who do qualify for vouchers. I have nothing against kids who qualify to get into the private schools. I do have something against a system that abandons the kids who don’t qualify for either instead of trying to fix things for them, too. Does your voucher program do anything for the kids who filter out? Does any voucher program?
Where do we say that? In fact, there are a variety of private schools set up to deal with kids who have disabilities, kids who have behavioral problems, and the variety of kids whom you describe. In fact, these kids are being left behind by the public school system. So I guess I should turn the question around on you and ask why those who oppose vouchers want to leave all those kids behind to rot. Because they are currently rotting in many public schools, especially DC schools. And, of course, the other kids without problems are rotting there, too.
If we assume that private schools are only for the best and the brightest (which they are not, but let’s assume that for the sake of the argument), then you oppose vouchers for them because not everyone can use vouchers? So you are basically saying that because not all can get a good education that none shall? Everyone should be forced to go to crappy schools?
Let’s say vouchers do nothing for the kids who “filter out.” So what? Those kids are no worse off than they are today, right? But for all the other kids, they are better off. You’d sacrifice the benefits for the other kids just because some kids can’t join them? What kind of logic is that?
Wow! You certainly don’t miss much, do you?
Not so much assumption as statement of fact. I have watched private schools up close and personal. They quite simply will control for those they don’t want, and keep the students they do. It’s what they have done historically. Why on earth would they suddenly change their MO?
You can’t extrapolate one community and pretend that what exists there will happen in precisely the same fashion across the entire US. And I’ll just betcha that there are charter schools in DC that are tits up in a ditch, too. Besides, why should I drive my child halfway to hell and back five days a week to get her to the lone private school that will take her when there’s a perfectly lovely campus eight blocks away that refuses to consider allowing my child to darken their door?
As has been said previously, education is not a service. Nor is it a good.
Now, how are they gonna keep lying through their teeth if you keep giving away the goods like that?
That one’s already been answered:
The idea that as a society, we are interconnected and we have a duty to children, especially those whose parents are failures. The kid without the ambitious family has enough problems. Are you arguing that social systems and processes should grind them down even further and make it as horrible as possible for the kid who did nothing but be born to the wrong set of parents?
You could easily change that statement to read that the more involved parents should let their chilldren get a substandard education so that kids whose parents are failures may get a benefit.
The reason that this doesn’t work out is that people tend to be pretty selfish by nature. Human nature dictates that people will put the interests of their kids ahead of the others. What a lot of people are missing is that almost all the ambitious parents have taken their kids out of the DC Public Schools by either leaving the District which for the most part the middle class has done or by putting their kids in a private school. Its not like a voucher program will lead to an exodus of the children of the involved parents. Most of them left a long time ago.
I think the attraction for a lot of people is that the public schools don’t take all comers and that the troubled kids with a propensity for violence won’t be there. It is a pretty selfish instinct but most people are when it comes to their kids.
If education isn’t a good or a service what is it? No one is saying that the public schools shouldn’t be fixed. But for the most part, the people in DC have lost faith in the school system. The number of students in Charter Schools is climbing rapidly and the number of students in the public school system is dropping. Currently no one’s needs are being met by the DC School system except for the Washington Teacher’s Union and some of the politicians in the District.
I doesn’t work that way. You have it backwards. Nearly everywhere, schools get money according to how many students attend that school. Fewer kids, less money.
Besides, vouchers are rarely 3/4 of the cost of private school tuition. Parents who can’t afford private schools still can’t afford them with vouchers. It’s just a subsidy for the rich, who already have their kids in private schools. It’s like Congress giving out $4-off a pound coupons for lobster. It’s wonderful for the folks who can afford $14 a pound lobster, but it’s worthless to those who still can’t afford $10 a pound lobster.
I have a feeling my guesses about lobster are way off the mark.
Cite? It certainly seems that voucher parents in DC are able to send their kids to private schools with the vouchers provided.
I guess all the parents of DC kids who moved them out of public school into private schools due to this voucher program are imaginary?
Let’s examine this claim in detail.
The DC voucher program provides a voucher that maxes out at $7500. In addition to this, they collect money from private sources to make additional scholarship money available to students - this maxes out at $3000. It is clear that students are encouraged to take advantage of every funding source available, provided they are accepted into the program in the first place.
Archbishop Carroll High School has a tuition of $8700. Books and uniforms add an additional $700 to this. In addition, the archdiocese itself reduces tuition for needy students.
So right off the bat the 75% threshold you claim is rarely met is met in the case of the DC voucher program and the DC parochial schools - and this without the supplemental scholarships or the aid from the archdiocese. In practice, it doesn’t seem as if many of these students pay much out of pocket at all.
The valedictorian of Archbishop Carroll this year was a voucher student, Tiffany Dunston. Here is her story.
The figures for tuition and scholarship amounts came from here and here.
So given that we were discussing this particular voucher program, and considering that it does seem to fund a good portion of a low-income student’s education (and may cover the whole thing combined with the other scholarship opportunities described) I think I have to demand a cite of AskNott for the claim that it doesn’t do so.
Of course it’s taxpayer money. The IRS takes it from you and me, and it passes through the student’s hands to the school. It is only briefly in the student’s hands. If she tries to hang onto it, Uncle Sam wants it back.
I don’t care how long it has been going on, or whether it has caused the Republic to collapse. When the government pays to have a student indoctrinated with religion, it is contrary to the Constitution. You say it’s a wonderful experiment to hand over tax money to the churches, and you’d like to push it down the throats of all the schools all the way to kindergarten. I say I’ll continue to fight for the Constitution.