Anyone who thinks vouchers are about improving American education and not a hellish coalition between the religious right and grover-norquist-drown-goverment-in-the-bathtub activists is lying or in denial.
another issue I see is how do we determine which private schools are “worthy” of public money? I live in Westchester County (NY), and across the river there are some Orthodox Jewish communities that run their own private schools, and it has been said that many students come out with little “practical” to use a loaded word, skills (math, even English literacy). Is “anything goes” going to be the bar for getting public money? And if not, do we really want to be in the business of grading private schools, as well as home school environments? (some states have rather loose oversight). I personally think that private schools (and home schools) should meet minimum standards, but I wonder whether those in favor of vouchers feel the same way.
http://www.lohud.com/story/news/investigations/2016/04/20/east-ramapo-education/82519112/
This isn’t true in the Louisiana case. The main Louisiana voucher program is only available to families earning under 250% of the federal poverty line, so it’s the wealthy/affluent parents who don’t benefit from it. The amount is fixed, although schools, which accept vouchers, must accept the voucher as payment in full.
vouchers disproportionately help people with money and almost invariably lead to increased segregation (or “decreased diversity” if you prefer).
There are lots of great private schools. However, in most cases, the vouchers are smaller than public per pupil spending, as @barrons points out. If the goal of the voucher program is to save the state money, then this works. If the goal of the voucher program is to improve participating student test scores, then it’s an experiment designed to fail, as it doesn’t provide vouchers large enough to access most of the better private schools.
Did you read my response to juillet?
Yes, @roethlisburger , but (A) I don’t have any particular expertise with Louisiana’s system (and it may not be representative), and (B) if you give a poor person a voucher for $2000 off a Mercedes, you’re giving her nothing.
As @Julliette says:
“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.”
However, those same parents are also paying a disproportionate share of property taxes and if they send their children to private schools without a voucher program, receive ZERO benefit. There is also an underlying assumption that that the education dollars somehow belong to the government (which has the effect of funneling funds to unionized teachers and their political cronies) and not the taxpayer. Many middle class taxpayers could afford to send their own children to private school if their property taxes were lowered, or with a voucher, but few can afford private school tuition and public school taxes.
Most private schools have some sort of financial aid ; the number of students and the amount may be limited but it does exist. Those high end private schools could subsidize some students, many catholic schools have base tuition far below the amount spent by the public system . The point is not necessarily to make every private school the equivalent to a public one, it is the ability to discriminate in admissions which often makes private schools (and public magnets) superior to regular public schools.
Private schools will adjust their tuition to govern a reasonably high voucher figure, it also gives them more incentive to become more efficient.
Ultimately in comes down to what delivers the best results, and a lot of that is dependent on the what fits the child and family. For some private schools are best, for others public or something else. Clearly the public school system in most urban areas is failing and the problem is not money. Zuckerberg gave nearly $100 million to Newark, NJ with no discernible improvement, Kansas City had a huge, judge ordered increase in funding over 20 years ago with no significant improvements either.
I know, right? When are we going to achieve justice against those fat-cat public school teachers?
Anyone care to address the 2015 CREDO/Stanford update of its urban charter-school study? (Charter schools being essentially a system with full-cost vouchers with limited options for where to use them. The charter system does promote competition and innovation in public education. It doesn’t provide taxpayer funds to Catholic schools or schools not willing to accept the “voucher” as full payment.) When it looked at urban school systems a decade ago, it found essentially no overall advantage for comparable students vs. district-run public schools. Some charters were great, but so were some district schools. Lots of both were terrible. When they looked at newer data, with systems that had aged more, there appeared to be an emerging advantage for charters, due in part to the fact that terrible charters were easier to close than terrible district schools.
This is a huge, nonideological study that tries to control for things like cream-skimming by the charters. It also makes clear that charters alone are not a panacea, and that there are a number of districts where charters systematically lag the district schools, many of them in Texas or Florida.
Caution: I have not read it carefully or studied critiques of it.
Isn’t that the same argument made about government financial aid causing college prices to go up?
Yes. And there’s a pretty good case that colleges have essentially farmed government aid while maintaining (and increasing) the prices they charge individuals.
I don’t know how voucher systems really work, in detail, but it must be hard to avoid that effect.
DeVos and her backers aren’t talking about that but about vouchers for full on religious education (Creationism, the whole nine).
Only when thinking narrowly. The reason that there is significant government involvement in education is that:
a. Someone being educated has positive external effects (both economic and non-economic) that benefit others.
b. Limiting kids’ opportunity to education by parental finances results in significant losses to economy and society when those with talent from poor families are unable to make use of their talents to benefit both themselves and others (or worse, use their talent toward criminal or otherwise harmful endeavors). The resulting inherited wealth aristocracy is unlikely to do as well economically or socially as a land of opportunity.
People who make good money pay taxes for all sorts of things they don’t use and often don’t even want. That’s how taxation works. Take the Iraq War, for example…
I don’t know what public education is like in most states, but in NY it’s funded by property taxes. We already have a situation where children from upper income families have better schools and greater opportunities for college than low income students. We don’t need vouchers to increase the divide. I don’t understand why funding schools is this way. It seems obvious that it would create two tiers of public school. “Free, appropriate education” is certainly not equal, but it should be.
I preferred the system where I went to school. I graduated from a high school in the Southeast. Their schools were funded by sales tax and each county had 4 or 5 high schools. They were larger than our NY schools, had more updated equipment, and a greater variety of classes. I think that all high school students in our county had similar opportunities. I wish NY would combine our resources and use them to make a concerted effort to improve our public schools. My kids are too old to benefit but I think educating all the children well helps mine too, so I’m willing to pay for it.
@ucbalumnus , the original purpose of American public education was to assure that the citizenry properly understood the blessings of liberty, the origins of American exceptionalism and the constitution, and would be able to intelligently elect their representatives in government. They could only do so if they were literate and especially historically literate. They were not designed for vocational training programs, employment security for unionized teachers and bloated administrations, sports camps, or many of the areas occupied by today’s public school system. The public school system, for the most part, fails at least one of its original directives as well.
Vouchers actually expand the availability of educational choices for low and middle income families ; more private schools will emerge when money is available to pay for them. That will lead to increased competition for the current group of top privates. So what if prices go up a bit at those schools (they already modestly increase yearly), to the parent, prices will drop. More entrants will also cap prices. You also do not have the high barriers to entry like at the university level, which is partly responsible for tuition increases. For now, we have ‘free’ public education vs. moderate to very expensive private education, and it is no surprise that ‘free’ wins out and competition is squelched.
I realize that most families are perfectly happy with their public schools ; for about 80% of students the public schools do a pretty good job. A lot if that has to do with the multi-track, ‘shopping mall’ format of most high schools. Most parents have not experienced the superior educational experience of the better private schools, and likewise have not suffered with horrible urban systems. That doesn’t mean that even in the best systems that all students are properly served (especially at the upper end). The problem remains that we are just not getting good value from the public systems for the most part. Our country can no longer afford to overpay to promote the interests of politically connected groups like the NEA and we need to improve our competitiveness.
I am all for taking a narrow view of value for services rendered rather than pontificating about some nebulous societal benefit. You can never improve anything without a narrow focus, and conversely you can justify almost everything without a direct tie.
Yes, these are some of the external positive effects of an educated population. If quality education becomes only or primarily available based on inherited family wealth, what will become of American society when there is an underclass that does not understand the blessings of liberty or the US constitution, and is unable to intelligently elect their representatives in government? We may be part way to that unfortunate state of affairs now, but if we are not careful, it could get a lot worse.
Would school voucher proponents propose anything to solve the commuting issues that many families face, even if they could enroll at many possible schools at no tuition costs? In practice, commuting issues can be very limiting on school choice, especially in the lower grades, so vouchers may not increase school choice as much as advertised.
@ucbalumnus , I have not doubt that we are already there, as far as an underclass is concerned. The choice is not between the current system and nihilism, but using free market principles to to deliver maximum value for the public education dollar. I also agree that the benefits of vouchers are oversold and that they are no panacea, but they are certainly better than the current state of near collapse in urban public education and high costs of other systems. I expect a large improvement in urban systems, a moderate improvement in suburban systems, and virtually no change in rural ones.
No one is suggesting that education paid for by the public should be dropped (except at the federal level due to those aforementioned constitutional issues). But the education system that has been in place for the past 100 years is obsolete and in need of serious reform.
Really? Are you sure?
Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said the following to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909:
John Taylor Gatto’s [“How Public Education Cripples Our Kids and Why”](Against School - John Taylor Gatto) is a good read on the subject: