Closing old schools and renovating or building new costs a lot of money. You also get additional trasportation costs because you have to bring in students from a greater radius to the new school. Right now, we have 500 students in a building constructed in 1920 for a student body of 2000 or so. It is a big, energy hogging, crumbling ruin that we can’t afford to repair or replace.
The evidence shows that not closing schools and building new ones costs money as well.
As for you, Hentor, you seem far more focused on protecting schools than students. So no, I’m not on board with your plan.
Given that we didn’t have public schools for most of American History, the irony of this is amusing.
:dubious: Yes, I love me some school buildings. Children - who needs 'em.
What? You must hate school children! My plan would provide parents with the liberty and independence to give their children the type of education they prefer. At the same time, it would make sure that no other children would suffer as a result, and in fact may allow resource-strapped schools to make much needed improvements.
How can you oppose it, given your heart-felt and extraordinary concern for the plight of poor school children?
Did you think I was saying that public schools are what makes America great?
Seriously?
:eek:
Voucher money can be both a carrot and stick here - other public and private schools will compete for this money, and improve their offerings. The school that does not improve will lose in this race.
Your system would only allow the University of Pittsburgh to grow and improve its educational offerings if Penn State were paid off as well. That makes no damn sense to me.
Which is really the root problem in a nutshell, IMO; for many people education IS school, and they cannot concieve of an alternative to it. Ergo what’s good for “schools” (or teachers) must necessarily be good for “education” which must necessarily be good for students.
My OP set off an unexpected amount of responses and I haven’t had time to digest them all.
First off, I hadn’t wanted this to turn into a debate on whether or not school vouchers were a good idea - that’s a seperate issue. I was wondering why school vocuhers are a popular conservative idea when they seem to contradict other principles conservatives hold.
It would seem to me that if I were trying to guess what kind of educational proposals an imaginary conservative was going to make, I’d have guessed a free market school system. The government would get out of education and everyone would give their own children whatever kind of education they wanted to pay for. Presumedly some charitable or ideological organizations would offer free education to children. This would seem to be the libertarian plan. But it’s not what conservatives are suggesting.
Some people have suggested that it might be a different group of conservatives that are setting the agenda on education. Libertarian conservatives have handed the issue off to their religious conservative bedfellows. And I can see the logic of this. While private schools might theoretically embrace the full ideological spectrum, as a matter of reality, the current majority of private schools are organized by religious groups. A program to divert government education money from public schools to private schools would therefore mainly benefit these religious groups.
I’m confused by your introduction of secondary educational systems.
To keep it at the appropriate level, my system would allow both schools the chance to flourish, rather than one. You do seem to feel a strong need to punish schools, which makes no damn sense to me. You know that their infrastructure is poor, that they have proportionally more students with special needs, that they are in communities that require greater security, that they have less funding than other school districts, yet you show this strong need to see these districts suffer. Something is wrong here - you aren’t making all your motivations clear, in my opinion.
On the issue of private schools vs public schools, I’ll offer the following views.
I work in a prison. In the last couple of decades there was a widespread program of “privatizing” prisons - having prisons run by corporations rather than governments. The idea was that the corporate prisons would work more efficiently than the government prisons and would manage to cost less to run even while earning a profit. Hopefully, people can see some obvious parallels between this issue and the topic of this thread.
Early reports talked about how much better the private prisons were running. They showed that there cost per prisoner was less than the government’s cost per prisoner. But quite frankly, they were cooking the figures. The government had to take all prisoners - everyone from teenage car thieves and white collar embezzelers to hardcore murderers and organized crime figures. The corporate prisons only bid for the easy prisoners - those who required less secuirty. When you eliminated the upper end of the security spectrum that was only being handled by the government, and compared the cost per prisoner between the minimum security prisoners who were being held by both corporate and government prisons, it was found that the government prisons were being run for the same money than the corporate prisons. In some cases the government was even spending less - the bottom line was that both types of prisons can duplicate any cost cutting measure in managing a prison that their “competitor” comes up with. But a corporate prison always has the additional expense of paying its dividends to its owners that the government prison doesn’t have. Most private prison corporations ran into this wall and have since gone bankrupt.
I foresee the same pattern in education. Society is currently placing the problem students in public schools and then condemning public schools for having all the problem students. If we switched over to a system based on private schools, then private schools would have to deal with these students and would face the same problems public schools now face. The answer isn’t to move the problems around, it’s to solve the problems. And any solution that can be applied in a private school can also be applied in a public school. There’s no reason our public schools can’t work like private schools and do so at a lesser cost.
It is about motivation. There is no motivation for some schools to improve. Doing so would mean some people get fired, maybe some salaries need to go up, some buildings need to close, some need to be built, some restructuring needs to be done.
The crisis in some districts requires major changes to a disfunctional system. This is politically painful, so hard choices never get made.
If people had a genuine chance to leave, though, this would motivate leaders there to make those hard choices, instead of just coasting by and churning out another generation of illiterates.
Waiting for reforms in places like DC have gotten us nowhere.
I do agree that this is a pretty radical notion, and I support it for the worst failing schools only, at least at the outset. Students there truly have nothing to lose - typical students in DC graduate four years behind their national peers. If it works, it can be expanded, to provide greater flexibility for all.
Given that we have had public schools throughout all of American history, this claim is, at best, odd.
The earliest public schools date to the middle of the 17th century. The Northwest Ordinance (1787) specified that one section of each township created was to be set aside to be sold and the proceeds dedicated to the construction of schools. The anti-Catholic riots (which led to the creation of the American Catholic School system) occurred in the 1840s and 1850s.
Where in the world did you come up with the idea that public schools were a recent (as in subsequent to 1896–if we measure half way back to the Constitution, or subsequent to 1890–if we measure half way back to the Declaration of Independence) phenomenon?
Nemo, you answer your own question right here:
Conservative <> libertarian.
Conservatives don’t want no government at all. They just realize that government is inherently inefficient and should be limited in scope and mimic the more efficient private sector whenever possible.
Families being able to make choices about education is a good thing. Competition is a good thing. Vouchers employ both of these concepts. That’s why conservatives tend to like the idea of them.
I think most conservatives do realize that government has a responsibility to educate. It’s just that they have a different idea of how best to do it, that’s all.
(Disclaimer: Generalizations are tricky to begin with and generalizations about political groups are even more difficult. I’m speaking more to my opinion than trying to represent the views of ALL people who would consider themselves conservative.)
There certainly is. At a public school if you are dissatisfied you have no recourse except through the political process. You can campaign for new school board members who may or may not have the authority to do anything. Or you can campaign for new state legislators who may or may not have the authority to do anything. In the end, there is very little you can do to actually change the behavior of the public school. And, short of moving, you have not option to place your child in a different public school.
With a private school, however, if you don’t like it you take your kid out and the school instantly loses money. If enough parents do this the the school closes. That is real accountability.
Furthermore, public schools are bound by rules and regulations and strangle any sort of reform efforts. Private schools are not bound by such rules and regulations. And, of course, teachers unions at the state level prevent any attempts to enact legislation that may result in any teachers (good or bad) being fired. Private schools do not have this problem.
In short, reform of public schools simply will not happen. We’ve been talking about it forever and it gets stopped at every turn.
I would have posted sooner on this. At this point so much of what I wanted to say has already been said. I’m still posting some things because, damnit, I just spent a good chunk of my afternoon researching it.
For the county where I live:
The cost of private schools runs from about the same as the county school system to $1500 less. ($3000 to $4500 per year)
Average salary for a public school teacher $36,407.
This statement is anecdotal. I have met some private school teachers. Their pay is substantially less than that. Some of them lack the credentials to work in the public school system.
And yet the private schools that I found who publish their test scores, the average is some 30 points higher than the county school. (SAT 1037)
To the best of my knowledge there are no metal detectors at the private schools. Violence is not an issue with them. I know two people who are teachers in the county schools, violence is a problem.
From what I’ve seen private schools do a better job with a smaller amount of money and the children are safer.
If I were a parent why wouldn’t I want to send my children to them if I possibly can? Why wouldn’t I welcome any program that would make it possible?
Why wouldn’t any parent, conservative or liberal?
No dark motives have to apply. As much as I am not a conservative, I am surrounded by them. They’re not out to destroy the public school system. They want what’s best for their children and they want it now, not five years from now.
As to how much “skin” I have in this, I have no children. I am, however, the product of 11 years (grades 2 through 12) in the worst public school system in America – Mississippi’s. It’s the state that Arkansas used to thank god for because it kept them out of last place. Year after year, Mississippi scored last in the nation in test scores. (At least it did when I was growing up in it and I don’t think anything has changed.)
And, yes, if I’d been given the option to go to a private, non-religious school I would have gone.
I was going to jump on this quote also, but Renob has beat me to it:
This is one of those great quotes in a debate that just perfectly sums up some of the differences in thinking between the two sides.
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.
I’ll take that a step further. I’ve been an atheist all my life and I’d go to a private religious school over a public one if I had been given the choice. (And I only go to church at a wedding or a funeral! ;))
When I attended a private school, they required the teachers to have real degrees, not degrees in “education”. My history teacher had a degree in history. The chemistry teacher was a retired research chemist for the federal government. Even though the school paid less than the public school system, they had no trouble attracting excellent teachers.
Regarding eduction…
I am a public school teacher. I am a proud member of a teachers’ union. Make of that what you will.
I believe in the public schools. I believe that the public schools are an important part of what makes our country great, and I believe that they can do even more. Society is isolating- we can spend our whole lives encountering mostly people in our class, of our belief system, who see the world the way we do and have the same priorities. Public schools are one of the few places where everyone, all the different sorts of people who populate our country, come together. Okay, not always in a hold-hands-and-sing-the-coke-song kind of way, but it’s a place where we all get to discover that the whole country doesn’t look and act and think like we do.
Public school is a place where we can teach kids the basic ideas and history and values that we aspire to as a country.
Public school is where kids who grow up in utter, abject poverty get what they need to rise out of it. Again, this doesn’t always work- but sometimes it does, and the idea that every American has a chance to be more than her parents were is a fundamental part of the American idea.
The latest numbers I have seen indicate that, in test scores, charter schools score lower than public scores, on average.
I have taught in one private school myself, and that limited experience was at a school with very little government oversight, very little reason to strive to improve, a place where the kids were getting a very substandard education which got a little worse every year. I do not doubt that there are excellent private schools. But the parents are not always wise enough to know the difference between a school that is teaching effectively and one that just gives their child A’s.
Vouchers allow conservative parents to send their children to religious schools, and urban parents to send their children to segregated schools (they exist for several races). Bully for them. Many of these schools do not attract excellent teachers, and exist more to promote a specific view of the world than to educate well. Some exist primarily to earn a profit for their investors.
When many parents use vouchers, the public school has less money. The students who stay in the schools which are guaranteed to provide them with a free public education are deprived of basic necessities- books, adequate teaching staff, basic repairs to the building. These are students who don’t deserve to be penalized.
In my school district, the combination of declining enrollment and high-cost NCLB requirements has led to a major budget crisis. This year at my building, we laid off several good teachers, including a math teacher whose students are now being taught by a substitute who isn’t trained in math. I don’t have enough textbooks, my budget to buy supplies is frozen, and they’ve just announced that teachers are not allowed to have coffeepots because the distict can’t pay for the electricity. I am limited to a copy quota that is about three pages per child per week on our occasionally-functional copying machine. I taught for a year with chairs so badly broken that children cut themselves on them, and I waited for two years to get whiteboard markers, post-it notes, and staples. I’m not unusual, and I’m doing better than some teachers in my district.
Is it so unreasonable to ask that the school be funded adequately? Vouchers take money directly away from the public schools, which are already desperately underfunded. And the children who go to other schools are being deprived of the opportunity to be educated with a variety of kinds of people, and to learn more than one view of the world. Everyone loses.
This is my opinion, which many disagree with, based on what I’ve seen teaching in one private school and two public schools.