I find the whole school choice idea to be elitist due to transportation issues,
Republicans in the Arizona legislature are pushing a major voucher expansion bill, claiming it will save money. But the state’s independent budget research office, the Joint Legislative Budget Committee, says it could cost taxpayers an additional $24 million annually and potentially many millions more. But of course the proponents are undeterred. http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/arizona-education/2017/02/17/arizona-school-voucher-expansion-costs/97965256/
That still has nothing to do with the voucher program. The point is that if the public schools are better, parents will send their schools there. If the private ones are better, then they will attract students. Sometimes comparisons on a standardized math or English test don’t even make sense. For example, kids in my son’s private middle school tended not to do as well on grade level math tests because they were 2-3 years ahead (meaning that the material was not fresh). They tended to do very well on tests meant for HS students.
Sometimes it is just that better behaved kids choose charter or private schools. Other times kids who have moderate learning difficulties go private. Studies that do not control for this are not representative of the population.
Another issue for many parents is the indoctrination that students receive in the public schools, and the lack of critical thinking skills and emphasis on ‘what’ and not ‘why’. Again, not measured by a test.
Finally, as @barrons mentions, costs are rarely comparable with voucher programs. Ideally, a voucher program would give identical grants to all kids, and not let public schools access bond money from a separate budget (which has the appearance of equality but in reality covers a 40-50% price difference). The net effect of anything but a fully funded voucher is actually a subsidy to the public schools.
Since math up to high school is sequential and builds on previously learned material, wouldn’t a student who does well in some level of math up to high school do well on the previously learned material as well?
To many math teachers I’ve known, including a HS classmate who is currently a math teacher* at a respectable public NYC HS almost as renowned as the STEM-centered public magnet HS we attended, this is a sign the student’s mathematical foundation in the lower levels of math weren’t solid enough.
Their perspective is that if a student has had a solid foundation in math up to/exceeding his/her grade level, s/he should have no issues tackling math from lower grade/educational stages.
- 12+ years
You would think that but it doesn’t work out in actual practice. I found this when I was helping D18 with her AP Calc AB. While I would remember the important stuff I would fail on the edge cases … and the edge cases are common problems on tests taken in class. You forget the fringe stuff over time.
Private day schools in our area cost upwards of ~$13k/year. Would vouchers pay for all of that or just cover partial tuition? Unless they cover full tuition, vouchers are just subsidies for middle and upper income families.
Since vouchers are used for approved alternatives to public education and homeschooling is an approved alternative, can I expect my state to send me yearly $13k checks per child? We seem to be saving them quite a bit of money by not burdening the public school system.
@austinmshauri that is exactly my opinion. It is not really school choice unless it is enough for everyone to actually choose.
“The point is that if the public schools are better, parents will send their schools there. If the private ones are better, then they will attract students.”
This is true of CC parents, but not true across the board. Lots of American parents choose crummy education for their kids. The parents are often poorly educated and they don’t know any better, or they value other things (like religious instruction) over academic achievement.
So if kids are already in a poorly under performing school, what choice do parents have to improve their children’s education. They see vouchers as a chance to help their children.
How many parents here moved to better school districts so their children could have the best education.
Re: #27 #28
Or perhaps parental convenience overrides everything else, including academic quality. When parents are looked at with suspicion if their kids go to school on their own, commuting logistics become worse, limiting school choice.
I wish someone could start a new thread to compare and contrast “the lack of critical thinking skills” between private and public schools. Son is in public middle school but I’m willing to borrow to pay extra for critical thinking skills.
A couple of methodological points:
- I would be interested in seeing what happens if you use students as their own control group. If a public school student is in the 50% in 3rd grade, and then switches to a private school for 4th grade, how much does his or her test score change on average.
- The LSP study numbers don’t make a lot of sense for math scores. They show a large decrease in performance during the first year, but show the performance gap narrowing significantly during the second year. If the achievement gap narrows during the second year, then the voucher schools have more value added during the second year compared to the control group. This points to either problems with their data or methodology yielding highly unstable results. Another explanation might be students take a 1 time hit when transitioning to a new school.
What makes you think that public school student are in any way at a disadvantage there? Anecdotally, I’d argue just the opposite - from what I’ve seen, it is the private school students who miss out, often because of comparative lack of diversity at their schools or because of ideological factors at some schools. But it’s hard to ascribe cause & effect – and certainly neither private nor public schools are are uniform in their approach.
There are private schools known for the strongest academics that cost much more than that. For example: https://www.harker.org/admission/tuition-financial-aid
The Catholic schools tend to have lower prices, but even they commonly cost more than $13,000 per year. For example: http://www.bcp.org/admissions/tuition-and-financial-aid/index.aspx
The schools above offer financial aid, but they do not have net price calculators to make estimates with like colleges do.
Also IME there’s plenty of private K-12 school graduates…including academically respectable/elite ones who lack critical thinking skills as demonstrated by several undergrad classmates, a relative, colleagues, and an idiot Ivy undergrad who mistook me for a TA in an American history survey course who ranted angrily about the “unjust C” his graded essay received and shoved it under my nose when in actuality, his TA IMO graded it far too leniently*.
- And I said as much to that Ivy undergrad considering my 9th grade public HS teachers would have given that miserable excuse of an essay an F and required him to redo it from scratch.
“How many parents here moved to better school districts so their children could have the best education.”
A lot. Hence my statement about CC parents vs. parents in general. “Parents here” bear no resemblance to a cross-section of American parents.
^This. I was chatting about this with another friend who grew up working class, like me. Our parents never really weighed the school district when they chose where to move. They couldn’t afford to. They moved to the neighborhood that had the best combination of safety and affordability and hoped for the best. I’d imagine it’s the same for many lower-income parents. I see it in my own area of suburban Seattle - the best schools are in astronomically expensive places. Upper and upper-middle income parents can move to the best school districts and plan carefully when they buy their houses to be in one of the really good ones. The low-income parents are just scrambling to find something, anything, that they can afford as they are steadily priced out of the close metro area.
Vouchers create disinvestment. If they are a fixed amount, as someone else mentioned, they simply become a subsidy for the wealthy/affluent parents who can pay the balance at a good private school. The lower-income parents don’t benefit from it at all. So the affluent parents take their dollars and their resource to another district or another school that’s probably already doing well and don’t need it. These are also the parents who are more likely to serve on the PTA, volunteer in the classroom or the library, donate, get their friends to speak at Career Day, etc. They leave the schools and leave behind the students who are least likely to have parents who do this work on their behalf.
Even if a voucher did cover all of tuition, you still have a situation in which the most involved and invested parents simply pick up and leave rather than working to improve a school. The same effect trickles to policymakers and school leaders - the conversation becomes about how to help parents and good students leave failing schools rather than how to improve the schools that are failing. The kids who can’t leave for whatever reason (transportation, especially) get forgotten as the conversation shifts.
Is this bad? Is it bad to stop a parent who really wants to move their kid from a failing school to a good school? After all, these are macro level trends. What about the micro? What does an individual student do in the meantime while people are trying to fix his failing school or find money? I don’t know the answers to these questions. Just bringing up a point.
The one piece I haven’t seen discussed here is the effect that vouchers will have on the prices of private schools. What’s to stop the most prestigious/best private schools from upping their cost by exactly the value of the voucher in order to 1) limit enrollment to a student body similar to what they already have and 2) get even more money? Historically, there is precedence for price increases when government money became available. The example that leaps into my mind is the adoption tax credit. When we adopted our youngest, we paid $XX for the adoption fees - it was an extremely reasonable amount that covered just the basics like lawyers fees. Fast forward several years and there became a $10,000 tax credit available for adoptions. Anyone want to take a guess what the new cost of adoption was through our agency? Yep, $XX + $10,000. So those $13,000/year private schools might just cost $13,000 + $voucher money in the future.
A couple of good illustrations of the above is the the rural Mississippi area where a branch of my family lives and the historical factors behind the fact Hawaii has the highest percentage of K-12 students enrolled in K-12 schools(20% of K-12 aged students).
In both cases, it’s due to a mix of a legacy of racism by the local wealthy White ruling elites who overwhelmingly sent their kids to private/boarding schools for K-12 and the consequent neglect of such local leaders in allocating funds/priorities to the building and maintenance of public K-12 schools. Especially considering the prevailing view among those local leaders for decades was that public schools were for non-White minorities* and the lower SES so there was no need to prioritize them in budget allocations or policy initiatives.
And this cumulative legacy of neglect over decades has been such that in those areas, it’s considered an unusual exception for an upper/upper-middle class family to voluntarily send their child(ren) to public schools.
- Especially after desegregation in the case of the rural area of Mississippi.