# Why do conservatives like school vouchers? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [December 21, 2005, 6:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-conservatives-like-school-vouchers/336595 "2005-12-21T06:12:40Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 13\ **Page:** 6
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [December 21, 2005, 11:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-conservatives-like-school-vouchers/336595/101 "2005-12-21T23:36:32Z")
> [@](#): > > Most conservatives, including myself, consider it basically self-evident that things run by the government aren’t as efficient as the private sector. Maybe you missed the rest of my post. I provided a specific example, based on my own personal knowlege, of a situation where the private sector and the government directly competed in providing a service and the government did a better job. Maybe your premise isn’t as self-evident as you thought. If you want to claim private schools must be run better than public schools, in the same circumstances, then you’re going to have to offer more proof than your strongly held opinion that it’s true. ---
**Author:** ![doreen](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/858c86/32.png) [@doreen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/doreen)\ **Post date:** [December 21, 2005, 11:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-conservatives-like-school-vouchers/336595/102 "2005-12-21T23:46:34Z")
> [@Renob](#): > > As I understand it, the amount of the voucher is less than the per-pupil expenditure for Cleveland schools. Therefore, when a voucher student leaves he takes with him less money than was being spent on him in the public school. Thus the school district is actually making money on the deal since it has one less student to teach but the full per-pupil expenditure did not leave with the student. And how much do they make when my two children who have never attended public school get vouchers? ---
**Author:** ![OtakuLoki](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/ac8455/32.png) [@OtakuLoki](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/OtakuLoki)\ **Post date:** [December 21, 2005, 11:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-conservatives-like-school-vouchers/336595/103 "2005-12-21T23:55:21Z")
> [@Hentor the Barbarian](#): > > You act as if a school system is something imposed on a community, to be punished as if it is commiting a wrong against the community. A school is of, from and integrally enmeshed with, a community. Schools don’t have to have free lunch programs for no reason - they are part of a community suffering from poverty. It isn’t that you would look at a community and see a crumbling school surrounded by a lovely new art museum and state of the art municiple building. Punishing the school punishes the community. > > This whole thing smacks of a patriarchical approach to the welfare of certain children - “We know you are at a crappy school. Come away with us, and everything will be alright. We’ll let you come here, pat you on the head, and then send you back home to fend for yourself because we don’t really give a shit about what your _community_ is like. It just serves our purpose to demonize your _school_ so that we can get our tax money back in our wallet.” **Hentor** , you do realize: I’m not demonizing _your_ schools! If you’d read any of my previous posts, you’d see I’ve been demonizing _my suburban, relatively wealthy_ school! I’d love to have been a part of your rosy view of public schools where the teachers do their best to protect their students and teach them. That is not the experience I had. Frankly, I was damaged by my teachers in public schools. **Why shouldn’t I feel that the school district should be held monetarily accountable when they force a student out of the district in order to keep him from killing himself?** Try responding to me when you’re talking to points I’ve made, instead of points you want me to have made. As for the school being imposed upon the community? When the Teacher’s Union swamped the town meeting, (with, it was supsected, some out of town persons.) it sure seemed like they were imposing their standards over any attempt to reform the school. (The proposal on the table was to give the school board the ability to shift problem teachers from the classroom to administrative positions, IIRC. And once that one issue was defeated, all the teacher and teacher’s supports walked out the town hall.) **FisherQueen** , a question, and an observation: If the school’s burden of students to be taught is going down, shouldn’t that translate to decreased overhead? Certain programs and expenses aren’t going to be affected unless numbers are pretty large, of course - heating a building is still going to cost, and maintaining it, too, about the same, no matter how many students are in a given building. But if the district is getting sufficiently smaller that teachers have to be let go, shouldn’t that be also translated to closing or consolidating schools, too? As for school districts, and how they prioritize spending: I’ve worked in a field that had me seeing the underside of many school districts. I would visit the boiler rooms of the schools, and get a quick look at the schools. Then I would stop in and see the Superindent of Buildings and Grounds. Oddly enough, it always seemed that the best looking school systems had their admin offices in older buildings that were maintained to a lower standard than the schools. And the worse off a school system looked, the better the administration was housed. Anecdotal evidence, only - but still held through a largish number of school districts. ---
**Author:** ![Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bosda_di_chi_of_tricor/32/16845_2.png) [@Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor)\ **Post date:** [December 22, 2005, 12:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-conservatives-like-school-vouchers/336595/104 "2005-12-22T00:13:53Z")
> [@](#): > > Universal education is the most corroding and disintegrating poison that liberalism has ever invented for its own destruction. > Adolf Hitler You see, it is an issue of Doctrinaire with the archconservatives, Democrats & Republicans alike. ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Captor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/f17d59/32.png) [@Evil\_Captor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Captor)\ **Post date:** [December 22, 2005, 1:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-conservatives-like-school-vouchers/336595/105 "2005-12-22T01:39:18Z")
> [@Debaser](#): > > **Nemo** honestly doesn’t see any reason why public can’t be just as good as private. Most conservatives, including myself, consider it basically self-evident that things run by the government aren’t as efficient as the private sector. > > It comes down to all the same old questions. If the government made shoes, do you think they’d be in as much demand as Nikes? If the government made operating systems, do you think they’d be as widely used as Microsoft? > > Why should education be any different? Of course having the government run it is going to be less efficient than having the free market do it. Well, that’s just because you don’t understand capitalism. You see, in capitalism, those with more money tend to get better stuff. Especially the big ticket items like homes, cars, college educations. You cannot fail to have noticed that a man of really ordinary intelligence went to Yale (i.e., Dubya) while plenty of people whose minds would be better served by a topnotch college wind up at Iowa State or University of Texas. (No to say these are bad schools, just that they’re not Yale.) I think if the free market were to take over K-12 education, the children of rich folks would get topnotch education, the children of middle class folks would get a serviceable education that very closely tracked their parents’ incomes, and poor people’s kids would get an even shittier education than they get now, because they wouldn’t be getting any wealth transfers via taxes. That’s the way the free market works, boyo, just in case you haven’t noticed. ---
**Author:** ![furt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/439d5e/32.png) [@furt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/furt)\ **Post date:** [December 22, 2005, 3:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-conservatives-like-school-vouchers/336595/106 "2005-12-22T03:31:04Z")
> [@even sven](#): > > Regarding eduction… 😕 My request for a cite was for your assertion that > [@](#): > > Finally, conservatives in general have a lot of contempt for education. ---
**Author:** ![even\_sven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/dfb087/32.png) [@even\_sven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/even_sven)\ **Post date:** [December 22, 2005, 3:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-conservatives-like-school-vouchers/336595/107 "2005-12-22T03:56:51Z")
People don’t usually put quote marks around the things they like. ---
**Author:** ![furt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/439d5e/32.png) [@furt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/furt)\ **Post date:** [December 22, 2005, 4:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-conservatives-like-school-vouchers/336595/108 "2005-12-22T04:03:27Z")
> [@tomndebb](#): > > Given that we have had public schools throughout all of American history, this claim is, at best, odd. I should have been clearer: I was referring to universal _compulsory_ public schooling of the sort we have now, which began in Massachusetts in 1852 and was not nationwide until 1918. ---
**Author:** ![furt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/439d5e/32.png) [@furt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/furt)\ **Post date:** [December 22, 2005, 4:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-conservatives-like-school-vouchers/336595/109 "2005-12-22T04:12:37Z")
> [@even sven](#): > > People don’t usually put quote marks around the things they like. Given that he refers to other disciplines as “real” we can surmise that he is not anti-learning; ISTM what he is opposed to is the sort of opposed to are the methods of teaching and learning championed in the education departments of Universities. Neither do I, and I care enough about education to have been a teacher for most of the last decade. Besides which, mks57 \<\> “conservatives in general” ---
**Author:** ![furt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/439d5e/32.png) [@furt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/furt)\ **Post date:** [December 22, 2005, 4:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-conservatives-like-school-vouchers/336595/110 "2005-12-22T04:16:54Z")
> [@Little Nemo](#): > > Maybe you missed the rest of my post. I provided a specific example, based on my own personal knowlege, of a situation where the private sector and the government directly competed in providing a service and the government did a better job. I think the point is “competition.” At present, the massive cost difference for parents trying to choose between public vs. private schools means it isn’t anything like a fair competition. ---
**Author:** ![Magiver](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/4491bb/32.png) [@Magiver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Magiver)\ **Post date:** [December 22, 2005, 5:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-conservatives-like-school-vouchers/336595/111 "2005-12-22T05:04:56Z")
> [@the raindog](#): > > I would venture that whites, blacks and hispanics living in urban areas favor vouchers by solid majorities. That is, of course, historically Democratic and [presumably] Liberal. > > It would be interesting if each poster would have let is know just how much skin _they_ have in the game. > > Me? Parent of 3 children—12, 14 & 16, in an inner city environment. (Dayton, Ohio) > > I would not send my children to a Dayton Public School High School. Period. I’m also from Dayton and I agree. I’ve attended both private and public schools (in surrounding areas) and there is no comparison. Dayton schools consistently rank last among the surrounding school districts. This, despite a huge tax increase to fund the effort. So far we’ve built a number of shiny new buildings and the sports programs live on. Woo hoo. The only alternative (when I was growing up) was to attend a Catholic school. Despite all the political rhetoric on this debate, NONE of the parents at my school were rich and politics NEVER entered the equation. My parents struggled to pay for my education before vouchers were even a consideration. Parents want school vouchers so their children can get an education. If public school enthusiasts want my tax money to baby-sit their children that’s fine with me. I, in turn, want their money to educate my children. Not only do I have a right to that money I have the obligation to see that it’s well spent. ---
**Author:** ![Saint\_Cad](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/saint_cad/32/18907_2.png) [@Saint\_Cad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Saint_Cad)\ **Post date:** [December 22, 2005, 5:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-conservatives-like-school-vouchers/336595/112 "2005-12-22T05:20:29Z")
I am a conservative school teacher in LA Unified (one of four that still exist). School vouchers are a horrible idea! As long as state governments require school attendence, then they have an obligation to provide a functional level of education. A lot of money is mismanaged (especially in the larger districts) and many of the problems in today’s classrooms cannot be solved by throwing money at the problems, but schools are nortoriously underfunded and pulling money out of the school system will make the problems worse. “But aren’t private schools better?” NO!!! Teachers in private schools are not required to have credentialed teachers (one of the good parts of NCLB requires public school teachers to know their subject and be credentialed) and if you think that teacher retention is bad at $40,000/yr plus benefits and an unbeatable pension plan, try holding on to good teacher at 75% of that, poor medical plans, and no retirement. Private schools are perceived to be better because the school can expel students with behavior problems, do not have to service special education students, require parental involvement, and can keep class sizes low. If private schools started opening up their doors to everyone, these benefits will be lost. Which brings us to this point: we studied this question in my calculus of economics class and the results were that the majority of the people who would use the vouchers are those who would already send their child to private school anyways. In other words, it subsidizes the people it was not intended to help to the detriment of those who it purports to help (those that would be left in public school). ---
**Author:** ![Saint\_Cad](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/saint_cad/32/18907_2.png) [@Saint\_Cad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Saint_Cad)\ **Post date:** [December 22, 2005, 5:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-conservatives-like-school-vouchers/336595/113 "2005-12-22T05:28:18Z")
> [@SaintCad](#): > > “But aren’t private schools better?” NO!!! Teachers in private schools are not required to have credentialed teachers (one of the good parts of NCLB requires public school teachers to know their subject and be credentialed) and if you think that teacher retention is bad at $40,000/yr plus benefits and an unbeatable pension plan, try holding on to good teacher at 75% of that, poor medical plans, and no retirement. Private schools are perceived to be better because the school can expel students with behavior problems, do not have to service special education students, require parental involvement, and can keep class sizes low. If private schools started opening up their doors to everyone, these benefits will be lost. Please forgive the double post but I realized too late that I left out my thesis sentence in this paragraph. After “class sizes low.” add: It is not the school that is better, but the students themselves - a phenomenon also seen within large school districts. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-conservatives-like-school-vouchers/336595.md?page=5)