Conservatives know they have lost the Constitutional argument regarding the Establishment Clause. Therefore they have lost the primary Culture War of today.
There will be no Creationism/Prayer return in public schools.
For this reason they must destroy public education via “vouchers”.
My challenge? Convince me that conservatives are sincere in their quest for school reform via SECULARISM.
Cite, please?
Yes, I agree. It is substantially about keeping God in education.
Ehhh, I vote Republican but am not religious in the least. Although conservatives are certainly mostly pro-religion just as they’re pro-life I don’t think that’s their main issue with public education. Their main issue is that they don’t like anything (aside from the military) to be run by the government. Same reason they’re not crazy about things like public transportation or the Postal Service. They prefer private enterprise that’s behooved to the more natural laws of supply & demand rather than arbitray political ones. They also recognize (rightly I think) that govt-run agencies are always wasteful & inefficient and public schools are certainly no exception.
Obviously schools are closer to agencies like police & fire depts, things that are required for the public good and so are payed for by taxation. But anyone who owns a home will tell you that school taxes can be ridiculously high (more than both income & property tax) and are almost never linked to whether or not you have school-age children. Plus because public school officials & teachers etc. are almost always liberals they have absolutely no qualms about fleecing the public (and the states) for bigger budgets. They have an elitist view that they’re the ‘gatekeepers of future generations’ and are often ignorant and dismissive towards financial realities.
Creationism and prayer are really minor issues. But they’re emotional and provocative so they get all the press!
Hail Ants is a better man than me, as demonstrated by how he writes out a polite, logical response to yet another ‘Republicans eat babies and want to destroy the world’ thread. In my experience it’s simply not worth spending time on, since the people who start these things generally don’t try to defend once someone responds to what they say. But in case this is an exception, here’s what I have to say.
In any situation where there’s a question about the public schools, whether it’s vouchers, pay-for-performance, or something else, it’s generally the conservatives who are in favor of improving public schools and the liberals who are in favor of maintaining the status quo where halfof all public schools are failing. (The fact that voucher programs are good for student results in public schools is presumably known by all.) Hence the claim that conservatives hate public schools is obviously false, while if someone were to claim that liberals hate public schools it would match the empirical evidence. (For the record, I don’t believe that. I think the behavior of the Democratic Party on K-12 education is much better explained by the hypothesis that they want a large body of well-paid public school teachers, part of whose union dues flow continuously into Democratic coffers, while they’re largely indifferent to the quality of the education in the schools.)
I wouldn’t say they’re failing. They’re failing to meet the arbitrary standards imposed by No Child Left Behind… which is a bullshit law to begin with.
Oh come on, an advocacy site? You’re going to have to do better than that.
Vouchers are not about improving education. They’re about paying religious institutions with taxpayers’ money to teach kids that humans and dinosaurs coexisted a few thousand years ago. Just look at Louisiana, it’s a mess.
I don’t think it is the fundie, creationist wing of conservatism that is leading the push to destroy public schools, it is the financial oligarchs, who want to turn education into a for-profit business, another way of extracting money from the proles i.e., us, the 99.9%).
And their main focus of attack is not vouchers (any more), it is the campaign for the at-will firing of teachers, and the breaking of the teaching unions.
You have it backwards. You need to convince us that your thesis is correct. It is not incumbent on us to disprove your unsubstantiated assertion.
But you might start out by defining what you mean by “conservatives”. They don’t all toe the same line, you know.
Not technically. The challenge was to “Convince me that conservatives are sincere”, not “Conservatives are not sincere”. There’s no way for force Linden to have a default opinion on something. And why should the default opinion be secularism, anyway?
Is this your recounting of conservative positions or yours? Do you really believe that liberalism leads to people “fleecing the public” for bigger budgets?
nm
So everything the government says about the evaluations of its own schools is not valid and I should not believe it? Yet at the same time, you presumably want me to trust the same government, run by the same politicians, to run those same schools? The exact same people who can’t be trusted to legislate the evaluation of the schools can be trusted to control those schools? Don’t you think that’s a little bit ridiculous?
Okay, let’s compare the quality of research in my cite to the quality of the research that you and Linden Arden have cited.
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Oh, that’s right. You haven’t cited any research.
I challenged Linden Arden and others in other threads to back up their claims about vouchers with cites. They never did. I hereby challenge you to do the same.
There is no “technically” about it. He made this unsubstantiated claim in his OP:
I don’t really have a dog in this fight, but you are aware that No Child Left Behind is a federal law, and that schools are generally run on a county and state level, correct?
I think that the claim that the Republicans want to destroy public schools is pretty out there in terms of plausibility.
Since this is about a political party, I’m moving it to Elections from Great Debates.
True, although federal power over education has expanded quite a bit in recent years, and Obama is quietly trying to expand that power. The point is that we have two vying approaches to control of education. One puts governments in control of everything: curriculum, hiring, salaries, and anything else you care to name. The other gives the government responsibility for paying for a voucher for poor children, and lets private schools have control of decision-making, within the bounds of accreditation. One approach means maximum government power, the other minimum. Those who oppose vouchers support maximum government power, so it’s somewhat odd to see one of them simultaneously ordering us to totally disregard the government’s own rankings of its own schools, even if that ranking comes from the federal government.
In fact I agree that NCLB is a lousy piece of legislation, but evidence that public schools are doing badly for the poor children who would benefit from vouchers is readily available from countless other sources.
If I am reading between the lines correctly, your alternative would be corporations fleecing the public for bigger profits?
See, the “ignorant and dismissive towards financial realities” part, while inartfully stated, is built in. That is, to a certain degree, the purpose of public institutions - removing the profit motive in order to serve the public good. Whereas corporations etc. would not be motivated to serve the public good.
I don’t think it’s fair to say it’s all about prayer and creationism, it’s also about not having your kids go to school with black children.
I think the conservative argument goes further, to be fair, in that corporations will be more apt to serve their customers better than public schools where a lot of things are slow to change. A school run like a business will be keen to show results of students getting a good education. If they are not, then parents (via vouchers) can go ahead and enroll their kid in a different school that has better results. The idea of the vouchers is that it will give parents more choice, and schools that underperform will eventually go out of business, while good schools will grow and be successful. Not that I am in favor of this approach, it is just how I understand it.
In the current model the public school is a permanent edifice in the community and if you do not like the results, you can enroll your kid in a private school at your own expense, after paying school taxes.
Now, when you throw the prospect of parents enrolling kids in schools that better fit their personal beliefs on religion and vaccination, etc., that’s where I start having problems with the vouchers. This is where I agree with the OP. That, and the GOP distain for unions of any kind is why they hate public schools, IMHO.
If the vouchers could be illegal to use at religious schools, then I think they may get more traction with the secular set.
I don’t think it is nearly so simplistic. It is more about not wanting their kids exposed to other ideas. It is more about making schools like TV news, where you never have to hear a contrary viewpoint if you don’t want to. Don’t like birth control - force abstinence only education. Don’t like the view that the Civil War was mostly about slavery - change the way you teach history. Creationism is a special case of this. Just look at the Texas school board - their attempt to distort history was purely secular.
BTW I haven’t heard any calls for mandatory prayer. It kind of works out that way by ostracizing kids who don’t want to pray the way the majority does, but they are more subtle than that. And as parochial schools show, you can get both a religious and good secular education in one place.