In Pennsylvania, Approved Private Schools are funded at 40% by the local school district and 60% by the state. Are you suggesting that the Federal government would provide 60% of the funding for the education of those involved in the voucher program?
Wow. Do you also believe we fabricated the moon landing? Conspiracy theories of this sort may make you feel all warm and snuggly and superior, but they are completely ridiculous.
This could easily be said about the Democrats, too. Since a large portion of the underclass is reliably liberal, and if they became self-sufficient they would vote Republican, I think they want to keep these people without work (so they provide welfare to encorage laziness, impose high taxes on those who become productive, and propose legislation that would cripple the businesses that may employ them), without education (so they oppose vouchers which would allow them to escape their failing schools), and without their own homes (so they propose rules and regulations that make it very expensive to build homes and apartments). If we are throwing around ignorant conspiracy theories, I think this is just as plausible.
Mr. Moto, there’s plenty of partisan blame to go around. What about No Child Left Behind, which penalizes “failing” schools monetarily without giving them the resources needed to improve?
Robin
A person who can read and write can support themselves (actually, plenty that can’t do too); most children learn those things by eight or so at the latest. What essential job skills, without which students could not support themselves, do students acquire after third grade?
Please do not cite “a high school diploma,” as that begs the question.
If you don’t mind, I’ll take this one. You have it exactly backwards, Robyn. NCLB actually gives more money to “failing” schools in the first few years they are deemed failing. It certainly does not penalize them monetarily.
The hubris behind this statement is staggering. Allowing all parents to control their children’s education is an “in it for myself” mentality, is it? Gee, here I thought it was born of a desire to preserve and a respect for individual rights. No benefit from educating all American children? What ass are you pulling this shit out of? Please point to exactly where I said vouchers would be used to deny anyone education. On the contrary, vouchers would serve to vastly increase the educational opportunities available to this countrie’s poorest citizens. Vouchers don’t help rich people, they already have the means to educate their child wherever they want, isn’t that obvious? Vouchers give poor and middle class people a much greater selection when it comes to education. The busloads of children are being left behind NOW. Volunteer at an inner city school sometime if you don’t believe me. Poor people have exactly one choice now: send their kids to public school, no matter how terrible the schools in their district are. If you created an entirely new market for education services with vouchers, a new supply of education choices would very quickly appear to provide it. Suddenly, the same poor people who previously had no choice at all except for Tookie Wallace High School now have the option of sending their kids there, or to a small school specializing in ADHD kids, or a vocational training class to learn to be a mechanic, or to a school attached to the local church, or to a school designed to accommodate the special needs of teen mothers or to…the list would go on and on. The selfish choice here, Hentor, is to stick with the status quo, because all many of our poorest schools are doing is warehousing kids for 6-8 hours a day until they are old enough to be warehoused in the prison system.
The irony in this statement is vomit inducing. What made America great was not huge socialist government programs. What made America great was individual choice, freedom and responsibility.
Actually, it does. The “first few years” cash is directed at a limited number of programs, such as reading, that appear to address the issues. However, none of the money (and no other assistance) is provided to address issues of infrastructure or systemic neighborhood problems that underlie the actual failures. Once the school has “proven” that a couple of bucks thrown at a reading program is not enough to change the education outcome of the majority of students (as determined by arbitrary test numbers), then the money is withdrawn.
In addition, when a school is deemed to be failing, it is not just the Needy Children Left Behind money that is cut off, but all Federal support (which has now been bundled into NCLB), leaving the school with less funding that it originally had.
If the NCLB progrm had included actual measures to address the situation of children coming to school hungry, constantly transferring from one building to another throughout the school year as their parents flee evictions, and an external culture that does not encourage reading/learning, then it might have made sense. Instead, it simply throws out an ass-covering stipend in the first year or so that can be used to withdraw all funds once the school fails (as most people know they will) based on reasons that are not supposed to be issues of the school.
So wht has been the result? We have created situation where administrators routinely cheat in preparing the numbers, test scores, etc., because to show a bad number is to doom their charges to receive ever less funding in neighborhoods where there is insufficient tax base to support them. (Yes, yes. It is terrible that those administrators would ever cheat. On the other hand, it is an ancient aphorism in industry that people will deliver what they are tested on, regardless what is good or right. If the money is based on test and attendance scores, rather than on education, then they will provide test and attendance scores rather than education–particularly when the system is designed to destroy those least able to defend themselves.)
Well said. It’s a testiment to Hentor’s twisted worldview that he can read evil in your post the way he did.
Really? May I ask where that was?
I grew up in the Fairport public schools and went to HS in Wayne County. I would characterize those as excellent learning institutions that could hold a candle to any private school. I thought that was the standard in that whole area. Am I wrong?
I should have quoted this specific portion, rather than expecting someone to read through all three of the lenghty paragraphs of the post I referenced:
They didn’t pay twice, as doreen suggested. Framing the issue this way is completely self-centered, and ignores the purpose of asking an entire community (even the child-less or those with grown children) to pay for the education of children in the community. Asking about the fairness of the proposition that we all owe an obligation to educate American children is self-centered.
I am unable to discern from your cogent response the specific areas in which you disagree.
Our strength as a country lies in our ability to come together, not to splinter apart.
This is just another example of how this immense bureaucracy simply cannot respond to these issues.
Already, schools are serving many students free or greatly reduced price breakfasts, lunches and an after school snack. Furthermore, this program has been expanded in many areas to a year round eligibility. The kids get these meals even when school is not in session.
This is while their families qualify, in many cases, for food stamps and other aid.
Would you have the government cook all meals for these kids, not just a majority of them? And how does doing this encourage self-reliance?
And is it the job of the schools to house these kids as well?
Several members of my family are teachers, and they constantly complained that being tasked to play social worker interfered greatly with actual education. Besides, they were trained educators, not social workers. And the two jobs are not the same.
You would worsen this problem, not help it.
But this argument: The one paying the piper has the right to call the tune; seems to be at the heart of school vouchers from my point of view. It’s the only way to give parents back some opportunity to be informed consumers. As it is, people choose housing based on school performance, and that leads to anyone with the cash getting out of urban areas. For the most part, if there are problems in the school with teachers abusing their positions - there’s damn-all a family can do about it.
As for emotionally disturbed children: what about those being created by the public schools? In my experience with public and private schools, the private schools I went to had a number of students with developmental disabilities, or emotional, or mental problems.
I want to make it clear - I’m not against universal education. I’m not even against public education. I do believe, however, that many public school systems are so far broken that starting over elsewhere might be better.
I don’t approve the mini-vouchers that some systems have tried: $2k or so per year per student. Not enough to let lower income families partake of the program, without other help. But also, on average about $6K less than the average per student cost that is paid to most school districts. Now, because of the various special ed requirements, that $8K figure isn’t an accurate measure of how much money is spent on most students. So, discount that figure to $5K or $6K, to give to the parents, and suddenly the vouchers don’t look quite so elitist.
Without a real potential for ALL students to make use of vouchers, I’d never vote for a voucher program.
On preview: tdn - no argument about the Fairport schools, or any others here in the Rochester area. The city schools are in some trouble, but they also have things that the suburbs can’t match, like the School of the Arts. Unfortunately, my elementary education experience was in Eastern Massachusetts. I can be more specific if you want it, but I doubt you’ll actually find it all that enlightening.
Before anyone jumps to any conclusions, this was a suburban school that did fairly well on most standardized tests. But every class seemed to have one or two students who would fall afoul of the same two or three teachers every year. My parents had the wherewithal to get me out of there.
I have a younger sister, and she went all through the public school system. But until she got past Jr. High, where some of the problem teachers were still teaching, she was getting regular comparisons to me, asking her why she wasn’t as smart as I. Which is first, a damned lie: She’s as bright as I am, just not as geeky; secondly, can any of you with children, or involved in teaching, think of a better way to make sure that you’ve poisoned sibling’s relationships than continually harping on that?
Your point goes to the larger issue I think we can both agree on – no legislation can ever really improve education until larger societal problems are addressed. If you come from a crappy family that devalues education you are probably going to fail in school. No amount of school reform or funding will change this.
With vouchers, however, at least the parents who care about their kids will be able to salvage some sort of education for them.
I agree. Of course, in some areas like DC, if the teachers is teaching to the test that’s a great thing. It’s better than the teaching they were doing before, which resulted in essentially no education for the students.
I also like your point about how we base funding on test scores and attendance now, which skews the system. A few years ago a guy ran for State Superintendent of Public Instruction in Idaho making the very point about attendance. He pointed out that the way the system was designed was that school were funded on attendance, and schools did attendance very well. Schools did not, however, do education very well, so the system needed to be designed to stress that. As may be expected, the teachers’ union went all-out to destroy his candidacy and as a result he was the only Republican that year to lose statewide election.
I teach in one of those schools. Fact of the matter is that those meals are, quite often, the only real meals those kids get. When the single parent they typically live with spends the gov’t assistance check on alcohol/illegal drugs and then sells off the food stamps for fifty cents (or less) on the dollar for more of the same, the kids tend to get the shit end of the stick. For that matter, even if the welfare money is spent on necessities, it doesn’t finance the lavish Cadillac-driving lifestyle that some conservative ditto-heads seem to think.
With all the stupid-ass things the government pisses money away on, spending a relative pittance to feed some kids (whether you think they deserve the meals or not) is pretty far down my list of things to worry about.
Let’s talk about self-reliance, too. These kids lead harsh lives. On a daily basis they deal with stuff that I bet you don’t. They’re poor. They have abusive and/or neglectful parents in many cases. They live in the middle of high violent crime areas. Thye go to school in crumbling buildings and have to use textbooks and other materials far past the point where they should have been replaced. People in positions of power either don’t really care about them or are scheming on ways to abdicate any esponsibility for them. The fact that most of them grow up to be good, productive people in spite of all that speaks rather well for their self-reliance, I’d say.
You are kidding yourself.
When I was born, my folks were living in Clairton, PA, which had, then as now, substandard public schools. They promptly moved to Washington County, and I attended school in Ringgold. Ringgold has its problems, but it was then and now vastly better than Clairton. I received a very good education there.
That was a loss to Clairton, though, of yet another middle income white family. The town and the school system suffered greatly throught the aggregate effects of numerous moves like this one.
I know you know the area and the schools involved, and I think you would agree that this represented a significant splintering apart of the town.
Now, had I been able to attend class at St. Clare of Assisi School, my folks might have stayed in town.
Indeed, that would be self-centered. It sure is a good thing that I didn’t do that, isn’t it? All I said is that the current system is not fair. Indeed, it is not fair on both ends. Prosperous people are forced to pay for the same service twice (if there is a certain dollar amount that all members of society must pay for the education of society’s young, and this dollar amount is collected through taxes, than the well off ARE paying it. Requiring them to go out of pocket over and above this amount to ensure a quality education is paying twice for the same thing, I don’t see any logical way you can deny this), while the system is not fair to poor people because they lack the choices that rich people have. Vouchers would address both problems by allowing the rich to use the money spent through taxes for the education of their children without requiring them to pony up more while at the same time giving the poor the same type of opportunity the rich have to chose the best educational facility for their children to attend. It’s win/win for everyone except the teacher’s union who would see their influence wane as more and more different types of schools took them out of their monopoly position. That’s a good thing too, actually, call it win/win/win for rich, poor and for society.
Do you need some more straw?
I have pointed out that the Needy Child Left Behind program did not seriously address the issues that result in the poorest education in the poorest communities and, further, that it explicitly penalizes them. I have not proposed that the schools do anything, in particular, only noting that this Right-wing equivalent of a Left-wing “feel good” program is suffering the usual problems of unintended consequences.
I freely admit that I have no great answer to the issue, which is societal, rather than educational. However, it is still fair to point out how a feel-good program is going to make things worse, and NCLB does.
(At this point, based on the Cleveland model, I think vouchers are pretty much of a joke, as well: giving money to people who are already sending their kids to private schools at a higher cost in taxes than the public school education while leaving the majority of kids in the deteriorating public schools minus the funding siphoned off for the vouchers. (And, in a poignant flip-off to the notion of “free enterprise conquers all,” those private schools that have been established for the purpose of collecting those voucher kids (as opposed to the schools that existed before vouichers who have too little capacity to accept more students) have been showing very little better scores than the Cleveland schools against which they compete.)
This does not mean that vouchers are a bad idea, but it indicates pretty clearly that, as implemented, they are not the panacaea that some proclaim.
Probably not, although I’m curious. Over the years I’ve met a fair number of Eastern MA students (and former students), and they’ve run the gamut from barely educated to very educated. Mostly the latter. But I agree wholeheartedly that abusive teachers are a real problem. We had a few of those in Fairport as well.
I don’t begrudge anyone their lunch. But while we’ve been serving all of these meals, has American education improved much?
Yeah, well, I had it way better than lots of these kids, in that my parents stayed together and didn’t abuse anything or anyone. However, it isn’t like I farted through silk all of my life.
Dad was a steelworker, and he got laid off or went on strike sometimes. Mom was a cleaning lady and waitress. When my dad was laid off, me and my brothers would help my mom clean offices and homes, to boost the income coming into the house.
My dad in these times would paint houses.
When immigration debates spring up, and people talk about jobs Americans won’t do, it always strikes me that my family of Americans were doing these jobs only a few years ago.
So yes, I have certain ideas about self-reliance. I’m not averse to prople getting help, but it should be help designed to lift them up, not leave them in misery.
The school system in D.C. fails this last test miserably.
Stow schools, actually. If you want the names and years of the public schools and the private schools, I’ll be glad to give them to you, but I’d prefer to do it in email.