[quote]dhickey wrote:
jsbrook wrote:
Inner city and podunk podunk school are typically pretty good.
public schools with no money What are you talking about no money? [/quote]
Poor public schools suffer from serious lack of funds. They can’t even provide each student with textbooks and school materials.
[quote]dhickey wrote:
and semi-literate teachers thank the teacher’s union for that, this has nothing to do with vouchers
[/quote]
It has little to do with the teacher’s union either. There’s not some massive push by the teacher’s union for the poorest schools to hire these people. They are the only people who are willing to work in bad neighborhoods, work with no resources, and deal with parents who don’t care. For crap pay. Smart people won’t. A handful will, but even most of them only do it for a few years under the umbrella of some organization like Teach for America. Not many are willing to work in the ghetto. The point is that it’s very hard to compete with private schools and wealthy public schools who hire smart, motivated, innovative teachers when you’ve got a staff like that. It’s not just waste and mismanagement. Other flawed measures under the same rationale have failed. Like hitting standardized test benchmarks. Threats of witholding federal funding hasn’t produced results. It’s not lack of incentive or lack of competition. It’s an inability to meet those standards.
[quote]dhickey wrote:
can’t compete with private schools you idiot. poduck schools don’t have to compete, they are in podunk
What the fuck don’t you understand about that? what I don’t understand about that is not wanting to put pressure on them. If there is pressure put on them they will either change or fail. If they fail one will take their place. Or do you think all the kids will just go home? We have inefficient schools that close all time without catastrophy. I travel through small towns across IA, NE, MN, and KS for a living. I see plenty of old school houses that are now apartments. Bad schools need to fail.
[/quote]
They will fail. Or not fail but not change. Institutionally, the cards are stacked against them. They don’t want to be shitty schools. It’s just that far more than waste and mismanagement holds them back. But really, I think not failing but not changing is the most likely scenario. There’s not even really a pressure to change from a FEDERAL voucher system. I’ve shown, with real numbers, how very little federal vouchers provide. And how very expensive private school is. Haven’t looked up the average income of parents at these schools. But I could do that for you. It shouldn’t be necessary. Even using your number of $1500, which I still think is too high, it doesn’t close to covering a year in a private school. So, why then, do the worst of these public schools have any incentive to change even if they could when they WON’T lose any students because those students can’t afford to leave?
And if they did fail? That wouldn’t be a catastrophe? You’re talking about isolated school houses across the country that never probably educated many students anyway. Those students were probably better assimiliated into a larger better nearby school system. Here, we’re talking about massive failure of all the worst schools. A huge number of students. Where are these students going to go? Remember, the vouchers still don’t provide enough money to send them to private school.
[quote]dhickey wrote:
There’s waste and mismangement. what does this have to do with your opposition to vouchers?
[/quote]
Nothing, in and of iteself. I was conceding the point that there is waste and misamangement in public schools and that money would go futher without it.
[quote]dhickey wrote:
Duh. If they schools werre perefectly managed, they still couldn’t compete. why not? what if they had fewer students and more money per student?
[/quote]
No, because they’d still have lousy teachers, problematic students, and parents that don’t know and don’t particularly care what’s going on in their kids lives. A disproportionate amount of federal funding goes to these schools too. Under a voucher system it wouldn’t. It’s an empirical question what this would actually do to revenue flow. I’ve said along that money is only a very small part of the solution. If there can even be a solution at all. But these schools lack basic resources. They would be better off if kids had textbooks no matter what, whatever else is wrong.
If federal voucher’s gave enough money to really enable these kids to attend private school, then maybe the worst of these public schools would do better too because there’d be more money to go around. Maybe the kids transferred to private school would to if programs and a support system were set up. But now we’re talking about MORE money than the federal government already spends on education.
[quote]dhickey wrote:
And no, they won’t lose students because those students can’t afford to go to private schools even with a federal voucher. THEN NOTHING HAS CHANGED, ie they are no worse off.
[/quote]
No beter. And hasn’t your whole argue been that they would be? Maybe worse. Because, as I said, more revenue goes to these schools proportionally under the current system. If the same money went to a school per pupil across the board, this wouldn’t be the case. So, the same kids are there because federal vouchers dont’ provide enough to get them out. And these schools have no incentive to improve performance because their kids can’t afford to leave anything soon.
[quote]dhickey wrote:
The schools stay open with the same students they always had. The private schools remain with the same students they always had. this is just plain stupid. You’re saying that vouchers won’t help some partents send their kids to better schools? Every little bit helps. How often do we hear about parents working second jobs and skimping on luxury items to send their kids to college. Are you saying this won’t help those same type of partents chose what they believe to be a better primary education?
[/quote]
It will help a few. There will be a small number of parents who are in the right income bracket that this amount of federal aid helps send their kids to private school. But if the federal government can’t do it right, it shouldn’t do it at all. And the federal government doesn’t have the funds to do it right in a way that will help a large number of people and not potentially decrease revenue flows to the worst of the public schools which already have no money. State governments potentially can. I’ll forget for the moment that every state voucher program has been executed horribly and primarily only saved money for parents who were already sending their kids to public school. State governments do spend enough on education that if they structured things as a voucher program, many people who can’t now afford private school could. Maybe your competition idea might even work at the state level because a reasonable percentage of parents COULD move their kids to private school.
It should definitely be a state issue. Lots of people don’t support the privatization of education. A majority in fact. And the public school system of some states is vastly superior to others. People in those states shouldn’t be subjected to this privatization because a minority support it.
[quote]dhickey wrote:
Students who parents get them tutors and the resources they need and stress the imporance of education. The very small percentage of public school kids who go to private schools DON’T do better because they don’t have this, and the program you’ve outlined doesn’t work towards this. One that does would cost a lot more than the federal government can afford.
this is just plain wrong. not every kid in private school has a tutor. Not every kid in private school comes from a well to do family. Some make tremendous sacrifices to send their children to private school, but I guess you still think their child’s share should still go to a public school they don’t even attend.
[/quote]
Not every kid in private school has a tutor. But their parents are actively involved in thier education and do their damndest to identify strengths and weaknesses and get them need if they possibly can. Be it a tutor or otherwise. This is not seen among parents in low-income private schools. And failure to educate parents and provide low-income voucher kids who managed to make it to private school with a support system is touted as one of the reasons why they don’t outperform their public school counterparts. And one of the biggest failings of public voucher programs. Private voucher programs that have implemented such measures like the Pittsburgh progam have been much MUCH more successful. But it costs additional money that the federal government can’t invest. But the states can.
I feel bad for parents who struggle to pay for private school and then still have to support the public schools. But the answer is not a federal voucher program that is underfunded and ineffecutal. And the vast, vast, majority of taxes ALL parents pay to support public schools are state and local taxes. A state voucher program could ease a great burden as well as have the chance of being effective. A federal program does not. And a successful state voucher program makes a federal one superfluous.