I don't. Care. About. The. Teachers.
I don't dislike them. Nor do I like them. I don't care whether they are, or are not, represented by a union. I think they should be paid more, not because they're lovely, special people, but because I hope that would let us attract and retain a higher caliber of teacher.
I care about educating the kids. Once we have done that, we can turn to arguments about the teachers. Until then, paeans to what great people public school teachers are are just completely irrelevant. The janitors are probably great guys too, but the school is not there for their benefit. If it made the kids better off to fire them all tomorow, I'd happily sign the order to do so. I mean, I'd feel bad for them. But not enough to keep them employed at the expense of educating the kids.
Nor am I interested in vouchers because I'm trying to prove a point. If the public schools in inner cities were managing to educate more than a handful of the students, this would be somewhere on my list of priorities around "privatizing the post office". The existence of public schools qua public schools simply doesn't interest me. The only goal I am interested in discussing is educating the kids. Any other goals, people, or ideology attached to the school system are stunningly uninteresting until that primary purpose has been met.
Suburban parents exit the system for three very good reasons: one, the system is completely broken. Two, they don't have the faintest clue how to fix it--by which I mean, actually make any significant part of the system function normally. Three, it is not the job of the child to fix the system. It is our job to provide him an education. He should be expected to remain in the system only if the system can do that; otherwise, he has a right to get educated elsewhere while we try to fix it. And if we can't help everyone, then at least as many as possible should be so aided.
Now I'm done talking about vouchers. Either you agree that poor kids should be allowed to exit until the system works for them, or they don't. My model of voucher beliefs predicts that people will get angry at me when I challenge their beliefs without changing their minds, and indeed, they are right. And myself, I'm too angry on the subject to do much good. The people saying that they want details before they'll commit: look, obviously design matters. If you concede the right of exit, I'm happy to debate details. But until you do, it's a waste of time.
...except that I never would have brought it up, until you made the morality and ethics of the people you are arguing against not just the centerpiece of your argument, but the entirety of your argument. You have been attacking the motives of people who disagree with you. You have been calling us all hypocrites. You started talking morality! So now that you set the table, I'm sitting at it. And since you've attacked the sincerity, morality and commitment of voucher opponents, I'm providing a counterpoint, in the form of a large contingency in the anti-voucher camp, teachers. Once again, you can't have it both ways. Sorry. You can't attack the moral value of people and then reject similar discussion for the other side. Even if you get really whiny and plug your ears and scream.
Reap what you sow.
My point is that suburban parents where never in the 'system' to begin with they chose their won system. What we need to fix is the schools these kids go to, because there arent any others
having a voucher if there isn't a school to take it is like trying to buy water in the desert. If there isn't any water, you go thirsty, and no amount of money changes it.
You need to put this group of blogposts under a single heading so I can distribute them to the legislators I work with. You've made what has to be among the best arguments I've heard for the issue.
In my high school there was a policy against wearing Halloween costumes to school on Halloween. But I was going as Fred from Scooby Doo so my costume was just blue bell bottoms, a white sweater, a blue collared shirt and an orange ascot. (Plus I was blonde back then.) So I figured I could just wear my costume as an outfit and get away with it. But someone NARCed on my and they told me I had to change and I refused and got suspended for the day.
I feel this is related to this discussion somehow.
D wrote: having a voucher if there isn't a school to take it is like trying to buy water in the desert. If there isn't any water, you go thirsty, and no amount of money changes it.
Ever hear of this place called Phoenix, Arizona? Or for that matter, most of the Middle East?
I know, you were trying to use a general analogy to make a different point, but water can be had in the desert for a price. The price increases exponentially the farther you go from a source, but I'm not aware that (m)any broken US school systems match your figurative here. The worst districts are usually right in the middle of dense urban areas, where means are available but nobody knows how to implement them under the current system's web of entanglements. You can't fairly claim, in effect, that it's a chicken and egg problem while tacitly opposing any measure that might allow poultry products to be introduced.
It's one thing to oppose resource-consuming change in a system that has problems, but produces some certain results versus the uncertain outcome of the alternatives. But when the system has such massive problems that the worst possible outcome of trying something different is that the same resources will be wasted in different ways, and better outcomes are at least possible, what is the source of the opposition?
If you concede the right of exit, I'm happy to debate details.
This is the silliest thing you've said in this whole group of posts. Of course I concede the right of exit -- anyone can exit, and I'll support giving them a $10 voucher. That's the current system we have now, with all the 'rights' you're talking about, and enough of a voucher to buy a sandwich. There isn't anything to concede or not concede until you talk details.
Assume a little good faith on my part. Conceding the right of exit means that we're obligated to give every kid the means to exit -- or to stay, if the parents would rather. And exit to a school of minimum decent standards, not the local lunch counter. If we agree on the goal, I think you'll find we're surprisingly close to agreement on many of the details like cash and quality assurance.
That night was the biggest party of the year, at my friend Ben's house. I went with a group of other friends, each dressed as a different character from the gang. Sky was Shaggy (yes, his name was Sky), Suzanne was Velma, Asol was Scooby... and Daphne was Cara. I was in love with Cara, a fact that was obvious to everyone but her. The party was great, for the most part; it was sort of the most prototypical high school rager I ever went to. There was a Wesleyan party next door and some of the people came over and the parties sort of mingled, which is ultra-rare, given the whole "townie" thing, the town/gown divide. I drank a 40 for I think the first time, it was Steel Reserve and I got really drunk.
Cara ended up leaving with Nick, who I usually describe as a football star, because that sounds more cinematic. But really he wasn't a star. He just played football. Anyway they left together and my group sort of split up, so my costume didn't make much sense any longer, and I got hella drunk and felt sorry for myself. I've heard Nick moved to San Diego and got arrested for selling Ecstacy, but this is scuttlebutt. I can't believe that was 8 years ago.
Beating a dead horse, here, but Megan, I don't think liberals would mind if you could guarantee everyone to exit to a school with the (post-voucher) standards and achievements of Riverdale, Dalton, Dwight, or Collegiate. But there's no "details" that allow it, and if at the end of the day the right to exit to a "private" Thomas Jefferson High School, it looks to most liberals as atrocious from a variety of viewpoints - inequality, accountability, etc. That's why liberals are so cautious to defund the education system in favor of a voucher.
Just like health care, the overriding questions are ones of efficiency and empirics, but efficiency and empirics require you to actually study something and know a thing or two about applied economics. But you want to win the debate APTA-style, without resorting to such silly things such as facts and details.
Oops, that should be APDA.
Conceding the right of exit means that we're obligated to give every kid the means to exit -- or to stay, if the parents would rather.
Right. If you hand out vouchers, but only to a few, you're only increasing the relative inequality of those left behind. I don't see how a non-universal voucher policy can be supported if we believe in basic ideals of egalitarianism.
I just disagree about the value of exit. I don't believe that it will improve education for all-- I don't think you can scale up whatever benefits of private education exist to such an enormous extent, among other objections-- so I can't support it as public policy.
And exit to a school of minimum decent standards, not the local lunch counter. If we agree on the goal, I think you'll find we're surprisingly close to agreement on many of the details like cash and quality assurance.
I really don't think we are. Quality assurance seems to me to be a huge problem to me. There's absolutely no way to measure it without a track record, and we're talking about starting up private schools in huge numbers -- if the vouchers took off, the vast majority of schools where they're used would be brand new.
I'm generally opposed to 'vouchers' in relation to any actual program I've heard suggested, because of that problem. If you could sell me on on how quality assurance was going to work better for private schools than for the public schools that are the problem you're talking about now, I don't have any objection to them in principle.
As a product of the public school system in a mixed suburban-urban-rural area (you read that right), I feel confident saying that the schools are not the problem, nor are the teachers, or the students. It's the parents, who expect the school system to somehow instill in children the values that parents are meant to teach them.
If vouchers took off, new schools would not be "the vast majority" because many existing private schools could easily handle more students than they already have. Some already have excess capacity and are only held back by the fact that many parents can't afford the tuition they are forced to charge, while some would need to hire more staff and add classrooms, but could handle a lot more than they are currently handling.
New schools probably would be the (non-vast) majority in a post-voucher world, but most of those would be founded by people with a track-record in public or private education. In North Carolina, there are already bunches of educators ready, willing, and able to found new charter schools who cannot do so because of an arbitrary 100-school limit on the number of charters in the state. They sit around twiddling their thumbs waiting for the legislature to raise the limit, or for one of the existing 100 charters to fail -- I don't think the latter happens often.
Only for suburban parents who've lived in the 'burbs their whole lives. I think Megan is talking about the sort of people that are thrilled to live in the city when they're single, or married but childless, but move out to the suburbs once they spawn.
You know, like the person who wrote the article that kicked off this series of posts.
Megan, I think you may have misdiagnosed the root cause of opposition by suburban parents. It's really just a matter of economics, rather than a delusion of solidarity with inner city parents. The quality of the neighborhood public school is capitalized into land prices; this is why even childless households will sometimes vote for an increase in the school tax.
There is a wide range in the quality of public schoos, which correlates pretty closely to the wide range in property values. People pay a premium to live near good schools.
If you make geography irrelevant through vouchers, that premium might very well evaporate. It's not just that the doors to the country club will be thrown open to all. The control over the school will pass from the neighbors who pay the property taxes to the "customers." This competition introduces a lot of risk -- the neighborhood school might improve, but it might also decline.
I'm not advocating a particular policy here, but I think this largely explains the ingrained opposition to vouchers.
anony-mouse... so er, yeah, I know from Phoenix, since my Mother is a public school teacher in the Murphy district near downtown Phoenix...
but if you head out of Phoenix west, without a water bottle... eventually you are going to be in the desert. Don't take enough water? you are outta luck...
But the point I was making was in those very dense urban inner cities... You say the means are there, so what is preventing this from being fixed now? The means I was speaking of was really about the use of vouchers. I'm saying there isn't a place to use such vouchers that is close to where the children who really need them are. In southside Chicago for example, there are a number of run down schools. So, give them young'ins the vouchers. OK, done.
Where are they going to go? This is not a trivial question. Having been a school photgrapehr when I was in Chicago, I know a lot of schools and the areas they are in. It's not like 2 streets over is a better school. The closest suburban district isn't much better off, and it's 10 miles away. So we need to bus them out to the burbs?
How does that actually fix anything? Aren't we talking about inequality of district funding? If a kid in a state was treated like any other kind in a state, wouldn't that go a ways towards fixing the actual problem?
Oddly this is similar to what Megan is proposing, except different. Giving every kid the same school voucher to buy their own schooling, isn't really different from taking all the school funds, and dividing by the child. Except where in one you are sending individuals off to do something, in the other you are asking individuals to come to you.
This goes back to critical mass... we keep talking about standards, and doing the most education for the least money. This doesn't lend itself well to lots of small schools that are experimental, where the funding is uncertain. The funding is uncertain, when you can go from school to school as you like it. I agree that the current system is broked, but fixing it rather than launching the newest experiment seems more reasonable to me... I don't think it will be any less difficult to fix exisitng schools, than it will be to do vouchers and get that whole thing to work.
In southside Chicago for example, there are a number of run down schools. So, give them young'ins the vouchers. OK, done. Where are they going to go?
To the private schools that will start up, run by people with an eye on that voucher money.
The absolute worst-case scenario is that no new schools start up, and kids have nowhere to go. In other words, the worst-case scenario is that nothing changes and the public schools get the same amount of money and the same students that they did before.
If the worst-case scenario for a policy is that nothing changes and the best-case scenario is that kids get to escape failing schools... what, exactly, is the rational basis for people who care about the education of those children to oppose school vouchers?
we keep talking about standards, and doing the most education for the least money. This doesn't lend itself well to lots of small schools that are experimental, where the funding is uncertain. The funding is uncertain, when you can go from school to school as you like it.
That objection would, perhaps, have some value if private schools were a new and untested idea. But small private schools where "the funding is uncertain" -- which is another way of saying "schools that actually have to care if parents are happy with them" -- have been successfully teaching kids for, oh, the last couple of thousand years. Virtually ALL private schools fall into that category.
Besides, in reality parents aren't going to go school-hopping on a year to year basis; it is a pain in the ass for both parents and children, and kids need stability anyway. What parents will do is get their kids into the best school they can manage and then leave them there until something significant changes and prompts them to switch.
You're right, it is a huge pain in the ass to change schools. Even if the school is a "private school[] that will start up, run by people with an eye on that voucher money". With no baseline to establish quality, and no way to tell if it will still be there in two years, or if it will go out of business midway through the year.
This isn't a recipe for market forces enforcing school quality. There are a lot of things wrong with some public schools, but it's pure fantasy to say that any private school is going to be an improvement.
One person who agrees with Megan on the "hypocrisy" issue is Jonathan Kozol, the author of "Savage Inequalities" and one of the biggest liberal names on this issue around. He thinks white liberals are culpable for abandoning public schools.
I have an unfair advantage since I don't live in the US and can't be accused of hypocrisy. But I'm pretty sure that if I were in the US, I would be either living in a nice suburb (or gaming the NYC public school system full-time) to get my kids into a good school, or I'd be taking a job I didn't like so much to earn enough money to send the kids private. So I'm gradually starting to think I support vouchers.
But they have to be really, really big. $10,000 a head. Something like that.
An argument that's been appearing a lot on here is that allowing kids to leave public schools will decrease quality for those folks left behind. Only, I don't understand the mechanism by which this will happen-- while it's true that kids leaving necessarily decreases funding, it also decreases the number of kids the school has to educate. And I'd imagine that most school costs are variable-- teachers, transportation, supplies, lunches, etc., which means that it shouldn't impose undue hardship on the young'uns left over, unless I'm missing something.
I'll grant you, there would no doubt be a decrease in electives-- teachers couldn't specialize as much-- but this doesn't seem terribly crippling. After all, electives are electives for a reason: they're fun and, perhaps, useful, but not vital for a child's education to have. And if this is the price we pay for giving students an exit, then I'm all for it.
Lizardbreath's point is a good one-- that new private schools represent a risk to parents. Thing is, though, I don't see this as an insurmountable issue, because parents are in a good place to weigh the risks themselves. That is, if parents see a new school opening down the road, they *know* that it has no track record, and they know that they're taking a risk in letting their children go to that school. Which means that to entice these parents away, schools will have to provide a lot of information regarding their methods and policies. And if, after hearing this, the parents think that the school represents a justifiable risk, I see no reason why they shouldn't be allowed to act on their judgement. Also, as Dan noted, new private schools face that same difficulty now and seem to handle it fine.
In short, accountability will come from the same place as it does in most private companies-- from the customers themselves, rather from the government. So as long as we've got a few regulations to enforce transparency, I don't see a problem.
Megan,
What is the evidence that the problem with the worst schools is the school administration? My impression is that the really horrible schools have something close to 100% poor, minority students, largely from seriously messed-up families, often without a father or a book anywhere in the house, often with nobody in the family speaking much English, etc. Without fixing the underlying problems for those kids, I wonder how much good we can do fixing the schools' administration.
Has there been any research in this area? I would expect a lot of natural experiments whenever school district boundaries were shifted a bit, so that a few kids who previously would have gone to a low-performing school instead go to a high-performing school. We could also look at bussing, to see how much better the bussed kids did than the ones who stayed behind, though that gets tangled up with other stuff.
The point of all this is that we need to know we're solving the right problem. If improving school administration, teachers, etc., by 50% only improves performance 5%, we may want to look elsewhere for fixes.
In short, accountability will come from the same place as it does in most private companies-- from the customers themselves, rather from the government.
One of the main problems with American education is that too many American parents are poorly educated, and lack the skills and knowledge to assess and demand good education for their kids. To some extent, the US needs a massive program to shove quality education down people's throats, with little regard paid to pro-ignorance lobbies like the ebonics and creationism folks. But that certainly isn't happening under the current system, so I'm not sure what the solution is.
brooksfoe,
Yes,if we were to allow poorly educated people choices on such things as education or possibly such things as automobiles or houses without government dictates the poor uneducated masses would surely suffer. Thank God for you intellectual elites. BTW, what type of coffee maker do you suggest for us uneducated types?
Seriously, I have always considered it a folly to assume some type of superior knowledge relating to a defined stratified population (intellectually, or otherwise). Especially in deference to the outcomes of a spontaneous order (Hayek) of that selfsame population when allowed to freely interact.
"One of the main problems with American education is that too many American parents are poorly educated, and lack the skills and knowledge to assess and demand good education for their kids."
Maybe, but any time we give people freedom of choice, some folks will choose wrongly. I don't think this means the choice should be taken away entirely, because we restrict the informed parents just as much as the uninformed ones.
I guess one way we could deal with this is by a sort of soft paternalism-- just give the parents a "default" school in each region, but give an option to switch by filling out some form or another. It'd impose little cost on the parents who are informed enough to switch, and acts as a safety net for the ones who simply don't care. Not that this necessarily the best scheme; I'm just illustrating that the problem you describe isn't insurmountable without a government monopoly.
But the point I was making was in those very dense urban inner cities... You say the means are there, so what is preventing this from being fixed now? The means I was speaking of was really about the use of vouchers. I'm saying there isn't a place to use such vouchers that is close to where the children who really need them are. In southside Chicago for example, there are a number of run down schools. So, give them young'ins the vouchers. OK, done.
The tax base is there, therefore the money is there. That IS the means. What prevents the means from being implemented now is the fact that the moneys are locked into entrenched interests -- i.e., it gets dumped into the one-way funnel of public school systems that are generally guaranteed to get it for a wide range of outcomes. Unfortunately, for several reasons, public schools often lack the tools needed to enforce standards and discipline, against either the staff or the students.
Consquently, wealthier suburban districts tend to get more of the better students and teachers on average, and poorer urban districts get the reverse on average. And unless motivated parents have a way of responding to that OTHER than suburban flight or private school tuition (which presently, only the middle class and above can afford), or an extraordinarily motivated administrator decides to drastically but constructively shake up the system, it can indefinitely continue as-is.
B,
I take it you're for teaching creationism in schools? And you'd be fine with parents using their vouchers to send their kids to madrassas where they learn to repeat the Koran by heart, rather than math, and to believe the US is an agent of Satan?
brooksfoe writes: "I take it you're for teaching creationism in schools? And you'd be fine with parents using their vouchers to send their kids to madrassas where they learn to repeat the Koran by heart, rather than math, and to believe the US is an agent of Satan?"
But brooksfoe, you're forgetting that SuperChristian homeschoolers do really, really well in spelling bees.
I renew my call for brooksfoe to be given an Atlantic blogsite of his (or her) own. Just a premier and patient contributor. The comment about voucher amounts being pegged at $10K or so for them to really make a difference is correct - and there's just no way that will happen at the state level.
A couple of points here:
1) According to Reuters, the Census pegs 2005 average US spending per pupil at $8701, so the $10,000 figure mentioned really isn't much of a stretch from there.
2) Many voucher opponents seem to be making the implicit assumption that the public schools in question will make no response to the introduction of vouchers (aside from lobbying against them). I find this implausible and particularly so if the voucher system is drawn up so that the money follows the student. I think that school systems in poor inner city neighborhoods are in much the same situation as the Big 3 auto makers were in during the time that they had a lock on the US market, with much the same results- lousy products. Once the Japanese and German car makers came into the market, the domestic producers were forced to up their game or have their lunch eaten by the new competitors. Hence, even if there isn't enough private school capacity for every student at the outset of a voucher system, perhaps there does not have to be, the mere threat of exit will be sufficient to improve the quality of instruction in many locales. If private schools only have to handle those fleeing those public schools which remain recalcitrant, that is likely to be much less of a tall order.
If most public schools respond the way I anticipate then, rather than destroying government supplied education, vouchers will be a sort of "tough-love", bringing the discipline of the market place to bear where before there was a monopoly. This last point is one that I regard as non-essential because, like Megan, I see educating the children as the ends. How we do this, be it vouchers, charter schools, or public schools is just a question of means to that end. I don't especially care which means are used to achieve these ends, so long as they are achieved and my problem with the status quo is that, in all too many cases right now, these ends are not being achieved.
Greg: I agree about average spending per pupil and the needed voucher amount, but most voucher programs I've seen seem to involve amounts of money well below that. I get the sense that it's really hard to generate the political will to make the vouchers generous enough, and there's a big risk that the shift will be used to screw poor students.
Incidentally, looking around at private-school tuitions, I see $10,000 is really lowballing it. Private school tuition in Washington DC is in the $20,000 range. This is true even though private school teachers are paid significantly less than public school teachers. I don't know why private schools are so much more expensive -- small class sizes is probably a big factor -- but this is a risky shift to make and it had better come with political will to significantly increase overall school funding.
Anyone should of course be free to exit any school, but that doesn't mean they're entitled to have other people pay for their education.
How about acknowledging a right of exit for taxpayers? That would make schools compete in a hurry.
Suburban parents don't always move for the high-minded reasons they give. In Dane County, Wisconsin, the two schools that consistently have the most National Merit semifinalists and send the most students to the most competitive colleges in the country are in the city -- fed by elementary and middle schools that set up that successful performance, yet I still hear of parents who have decided to move from the attendance areas of those schools to the suburbs 'for the schools'.
Incidentally, looking around at private-school tuitions, I see $10,000 is really lowballing it. Private school tuition in Washington DC is in the $20,000 range.
Depends on if you cherrypick the private schools where the tuition is in the $20,000 range. In fact, there are several schools (mostly Catholic) where tuition is in the $4,000 to $6,000 range. See http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/coffeehouse/2007/jul/03/riffing_on_education_policy#comment-266704
I have an unfair advantage since I don't live in the US and can't be accused of hypocrisy. But I'm pretty sure that if I were in the US, I would be either living in a nice suburb (or gaming the NYC public school system full-time) to get my kids into a good school, or I'd be taking a job I didn't like so much to earn enough money to send the kids private.
Brooksfoe --
The choices you have aren't that bad. I live in a high-poverty neighborhood and send my kids to public school, which is in our case excellent. There are plenty of good public schools out there that aren't economically or racially segregated. I wouldn't send my kids to the worst of the worst schools out there, but you don't have to have them in a lily-white rich-kid enclave to avoid that.
This has come up before (http://www.janegalt.net/archives/009706.html). I appreciate that we all tend to generalize from our own personal anecdotes, but you're still not giving any reason to think that your kid's school is at all representative of a city in which only 44% of kids (and 37% of boys) graduate from high school on time. See http://www.nysun.com/article/27509/
The not so secret cause of bad school is . . . bad students. Ever notice how the bad schools in the U.S. are exactly where you would think they would be: where large numbers of minorities with many other social problems are. Moving around these students is not necessarily going to do that much good.
Vouchers are probably a good idea, but they are not a panacea. Education is different than other consumer products. It happens during the day when the parent cannot see whats going on and even if the parent wants to change its tough to yank your kid away from all his or her friends. (Furthermore, vouchers are unpopular because middle class white voters don't want minorities coming to their schools.)
Once again a little insight from The Bell Curve, one of the books on the modern Index, is applicable. The U.S. actually seems to do a pretty good job of education those in the broad middle. All those dumbed down textbooks have a reason behind them. The problem comes with people at the high and low ends. Those at the top are not being given the challenging material they deserve and those at the bottom should be learning a trade. The problem is that those at the very bottom are disproportionately black, so there is a lot of politically correct pressure not to put them in such practical programs.
I appreciate that we all tend to generalize from our own personal anecdotes, but you're still not giving any reason to think that your kid's school is at all representative of a city in which only 44% of kids (and 37% of boys) graduate from high school on time.
There's a bunch of different stuff going on there. One is that the fact that a school may not be doing a good enough job to successfully make certain that poor kids graduate on time, but still be a perfectly functional place for a middle-class kid to get a decent education. (That doesn't mean they don't need to be fixed -- they do. But for a lot of schools there's a good shot that there's no pressing need to keep your precious children out of them during the process of fixing.)
There's also the fact that the school my kids go to is an unusually good one. But it's not unusually good because the students are uniformly white, or affluent -- they're mostly neither. Which means that there are, even in the big city public school systems that are being viewed with horror, reasonable options that don't require either sacrificing your children or keeping them segregated from everyone who doesn't have the money to move to the suburbs.
LizardBreath:
I am genuinely curious as to how much work on your part went into either making sure you lived in a neighborhood where your kid could attend that school, or working out how the system would allow your kid to attend that school. My friends in NYC whose kids are in good public schools are either a. in expensive neighborhoods or b. heading towards age barriers where the schools will get suddenly worse and they'll have to start figuring out how to work the system. There's one exception, but it's on the UWS where the neighborhood is a sharp borderline between wealth and poverty.
I admire the commitment to staying in public school in NYC. It seems to me like it just about almost works. I wonder what your experience is like.
I am genuinely curious as to how much work on your part went into either making sure you lived in a neighborhood where your kid could attend that school, or working out how the system would allow your kid to attend that school.
Got lucky, mostly. I'm in an upper Manhattan neighborhood that's largely, maybe mostly depending on how you draw borders, immigrant Dominican, and the rest is largely broke professionals: teachers, opera singers, public interest lawyers, people in city jobs. Lots of degrees, not a whole lot of money. We've got a good principal, and the 'broke professionals' are good with the time and skills for harassing the city when, e.g., they tried to reassign her. The program we're in is lottery admission, but local. (And I'm calling it excellent. The test scores are only fair, but they include half the school's population having come in with little or no English language skills. When you look at the native English speaker kids broken out, their test scores are quite good, and everyone's scores get better the longer they've been in the school.)
I'm certainly not saying all city schools are good, but there are good schools that aren't segregated.
Lizardbreath:
Did you just imply that private schools are all "segregated"? You need to defend, explain, or withdraw your last sentence.
An argument that's been appearing a lot on here is that allowing kids to leave public schools will decrease quality for those folks left behind. Only, I don't understand the mechanism by which this will happen
It's actually pretty simple.
While you can average the dollars spent per child in a system, that number doesn't actually reflect the costs of educating each individual. Some kids are (relatively) cheap: they're average to bright, lack learning disabilities, and don't need special facilities. Some kids are expensive: they have physical, mental, or emotional issues and require additional assistance (special equipment, teacher's aides etc). There are also fixed infrastructure costs (fixing leaky roofs, heating the place, etc) that don't go down just because some of the potential students stop showing up.
Many voucher proponents want to use the average cost to educate one child as the voucher amount. But private schools by and large take the cream of the crop. They don't want and won't touch the ones who are expensive to educate. So in most voucher proposals I've seen, each child who exits takes more out of the public system than it actually costs to educate them. So now the school district has to do more with less, which after a certain point means inevitable quality decay.
There's a saying "In theory theory and practice are the same. In practive ..." That seems very apt to me when describing vouchers: they're nice theoretically, but I've seen very few proposals that dig into the details, and this is one of those things where the devil is in the details.
Did you just imply that private schools are all "segregated"?
Nope.
So how about explaing just what you meant? Because maybe I'm missing something, but that does seem the most natural interpretation of your sentence. Please clarify.
Megan, you do realize that the overwhelming majority of American students are in public schools, right?
Suburban parents aren't "exiting the system" and our public schools in America aren't broken as you insist they are.
Vouchers don't guarantee poor students the "right to exit the system", because private schools aren't obligated to accept them.
Those schools can accept or reject anyone for any reason and they do it all the time.
>>Greg: I agree about average spending per pupil and the needed voucher amount, but most voucher programs I've seen seem to involve amounts of money well below that. I get the sense that it's really hard to generate the political will to make the vouchers generous enough, and there's a big risk that the shift will be used to screw poor students.
Incidentally, looking around at private-school tuitions, I see $10,000 is really lowballing it. Private school tuition in Washington DC is in the $20,000 range.
Both sides of this issue make an unquestioned assumption about the "good" of educating children. The benefit of having well educated children is questioned by neither side. What they should ask themselves is, what is the goal of the public school system? To produce adults with both problem solving skills and critical thinking skills that are necessary to be a good citizen, I think most people(esp. those above) would answer.
Where is the evidence for this? At what point in American history has education been anything but a way for the elite to continue their dominance. You could make the argument that post-WWII until 1973(the year I was born, of course) the education system provided more than adequate education for all economic classes. If they were white, at least. But almost everything got better for people during this time, so it was less a function of desire than economics.
I think that the public education system in this country works almost exactly as it is supposed to in a capitalist economy. It produces a consumer. That is, someone who can read price tags and name brands on the back of there clothes. This requires very little above a fourth grade education, which happens to be the par set by marketers, the entertainment industry and journalists for their audience. In short, the disagreements about how to fix the education system are meaningless because it is not broken, it achieves the exact results that are required in the United States.
So, what do you think we should have instead of mandatory public education, Chance?
There seems to be one point being glossed over in this "right to exit" demand. Even if all students do get vouchers there will still be no "right to exit" for children that fail to meet the criteria of a private institution. Lets even put the question of religion out of the equation. Learning disability? A history of poor grades? Behavior issues? None of these children will have much of any shot at getting into a private school. So now you have a kid who could probably use a different environment more than the student with decent grades who cannot escape no matter how many vouchers they get.
I do not see any legal impediment to vouchers, but if we want to see how well a program might work the private schools must be required to work with the same level playing field. So are you willing to add to your crusade for vouchers a "first come, first entry" requirement for any institution that accepts them?
"None of these children will have much of any shot at getting into a private school." Really? The private school I taught at last year and the year before had 3-4 Asperger's kids (out of 40-50 students total), one deaf kid, two who had been kicked out of public school for drug use and were banned from all public schools in the county, and a couple more with psychological problem of various sorts (severe ADD, introversion so extreme it prevented reading aloud in class, and serious anger issues from being beaten up at public school). One of the druggies lasted less than two days before being kicked out, but the other one finished the school year successfully and only went back to public school the next year so he could play football. One of the Aspies didn't make it to the end of his second year for behavioral reasons, but the others are all doing just fine.
It is simply untrue that private schools only skim off the academically 'normal' kids and reject all the dummies and oddballs. By the way, the school was not aimed at the 'troubled child' market, and had a more rigorous academic problem than the fancy local prep schools, despite charging one-third as much. I actually taught fourth-year Greek two years ago, something I never managed to do in nine years of college teaching, where the tenured professors hog all the good classes. That was one of the things that made me willing to work for (relative) peanuts.
Sorry, I meant to say "the academically gifted 'normal' kids".
>>I think that the public education system in this country works almost exactly as it is supposed to in a capitalist economy. It produces a consumer. That is, someone who can read price tags and name brands on the back of there clothes. This requires very little above a fourth grade education, which happens to be the par set by marketers, the entertainment industry and journalists for their audience. In short, the disagreements about how to fix the education system are meaningless because it is not broken, it achieves the exact results that are required in the United States.
Dr. Weevil, your example may seem to change the equation but it neglects 2 points:
1- how much did the parents have to pony up to get these special needs children into the school? It can be amazing what a school will accept for the right amount of cash, er, donation.
2- Was the school REQUIRED to take these students? Are any of these private schools?
If part of the argument is "competition is good" then all parties need to work under the same rules or its just a rigged game.
What is the evidence that the problem with the worst schools is the school administration? My impression is that the really horrible schools have something close to 100% poor, minority students, largely from seriously messed-up families, often without a father or a book anywhere in the house, often with nobody in the family speaking much English, etc. Without fixing the underlying problems for those kids, I wonder how much good we can do fixing the schools' administration.
Has there been any research in this area?
Yes. Project Followthrough. Big research study starting in 1967 into which school models could teach poor kids. Found that one programme could raise schools from performing at about the 20th percentile to performing at about the 50th percentile in reading and maths. It also improved children's higher cognitive thinking skills and their self-esteem far more than the other trialed programmes. All this without changing the children's parents or external environment, just the school district.
Reference: http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~adiep/ft/becker.htm .
The system was Direct Instruction, a sophisticated curriculum that depended on careful, explicit presentation of information so that nothing was left to chance. The detail the developer had to go to was immense. For example, initially his first reading lesson called for kids to follow the teacher by touching each word as the teacher read it. It turned out that some poor kids were so vocabulary-deprived that they didn't know the meaning of the word "touch", so a lesson had to be developed to teach them how to do this.
Direct Instruction is probably not the perfect, optimal system. I would not be surprised if it could not be improved. But it sets the benchmark for what should be happening, and it shows that schools can improve the education of their students even when those students are from direly poor backgrounds.
The not so secret cause of bad school is . . . bad students. Ever notice how the bad schools in the U.S. are exactly where you would think they would be: where large numbers of minorities with many other social problems are. Moving around these students is not necessarily going to do that much good.
This is because schools don't know how to teach properly. Well-prepared kids with smart parents learn anyway. Poor kids don't. The model for education for the last few thousand years, and in all countries, not just the US has been:
- present the material.
- if the kid learns they're smart. If the kid fails to learn, they're stupid. Kids' failure is very seldom considered the fault of the teaching methods or the curriculum.
However, the developers of the Direct Instruction curriculum have showed that it is possible to effectively teach "bad students". It's hard work, it needs careful explicit teaching of all the material middle-class kids normally come to school with. But it can be done.
clyde:
The 'special needs' kids paid exactly the same as the other kids: around $7,000 per year. Some of them were better than average students, despite their various problems.
And no, the school didn't have to take any of them, but note what I said about the two with drug problems: the public schools didn't have to take them either. The one who got kicked out of my school had to move to another state to live with relatives in a small town where his parents hoped he might straighten out and stay off the drugs.
I'm amazed at the number of people who assume private school teachers only care about the 'normal' kids who never cause trouble, and aren't eager to teach anyone who's willing to try to learn. If I didn't give a damn about the students and just wanted the paycheck, I'd take the stupid education courses, get a job in a public school with a strong union, and just go through the motions of teaching them until retirement.
"While you can average the dollars spent per child in a system, that number doesn't actually reflect the costs of educating each individual. Some kids are (relatively) cheap: they're average to bright, lack learning disabilities, and don't need special facilities. Some kids are expensive: they have physical, mental, or emotional issues and require additional assistance (special equipment, teacher's aides etc)."
Fair enough. However, it seems like this should have a simple fix-- allocate more funding to those kids that require special assistance. This may sound like a kludgy, ad-hoc solution, but it's probably workable; we just have to get a study done of public school districts to find out the relative amounts of money spent on the more difficult pupils, and adjust the vouchers to handle it. This'd also have the advantage of encouraging some schools to specialize in handicapped students, which I'll grant probably wouldn't happen under a fixed-voucher system.
As for infrastructure costs, that's not a terribly large expense, at least in Seattle public school districts. All contractual services together in a district (pupil transportation, utilities, etc.) are only about 11% of the total budget, the vast majority being taken up by teachers and other staff:
http://www.seattleschools.org/area/finance/budget/recommendedbudget08.pdf
And while this isn't insignificant, it seems like it's so much dwarfed by the other expenses that we don't really need to worry about it. Once a school gets so small that even that'd be an issue, it'd probably be a good idea to put it under new management anyway; after all, a mass exodus of students likely indicates something about the school's quality.
(Jannia): "While you can average the dollars spent per child in a system, that number doesn't actually reflect the costs of educating each individual. Some kids are (relatively) cheap: they're average to bright, lack learning disabilities, and don't need special facilities. Some kids are expensive: they have physical, mental, or emotional issues and require additional assistance (special equipment, teacher's aides etc)."
(25hour): "...this should have a simple fix-- allocate more funding to those kids that require special assistance. This may sound like a kludgy, ad-hoc solution, but it's probably workable; we just have to get a study done of public school districts to find out the relative amounts of money spent on the more difficult pupils, and adjust the vouchers to handle it."
Either it's been done, where districts already contract-out the care of severe sp-ed kids, or it's a simple problem in high school algebra: School A has X percent sp-ed kids and a budget of $M. School B has Y percent sp-ed kids and budget of $N. What are the per pupil costs of regular ed and sp-ed? Basic equations in two variables, people. Remember?
Furthermore, many countries subsidize a parents' choice of school. If they manage to solve this problem (and do a better job, overall), why suppose that the problem is intractible for US policy makers? Oh, that's right: they went to public school.
(Jannia): "There are also fixed infrastructure costs (fixing leaky roofs, heating the place, etc) that don't go down just because some of the potential students stop showing up."
There are no fixed costs, just costs that change more slowly. From a school district's point of view, the result of a loss of students to a voucher program where the voucher is less than the regular-ed per pupil budget looks like a decline in enrolment (which they handle all the time) and an increase in their per pupil budget (which they request all the time).
Malcolm Kirkpatrick: it's true that many countries subsidize a parent's choice of school, but you had better be prepared for what comes along with it. The Netherlands (to tie in, again, the country with a public-private split we may be emulating for both health care and, here, education) pays out of the public budget to support religious schools, as well as non-religious ones. But that obviously entails a very significant level of social involvement in other people's business. The government is paying for the Muslim schools attended by Dutch kids of Moroccan and Turkish ancestry; that means constant public conflicts over what kind of Islam can be taught in the schools, with commentary by ultra-religious Dutch Reformed Christians who have no idea what they're talking about. The government is also paying for the Dutch Reformed kids' schools, which means the national-consensus tolerance agenda that there's nothing wrong with being gay has to be adhered to in those schools.
I have serious doubts that the US is ready for something like this. After public voucher money starts going to private religious schools, I think the onslaught of court cases by gays, women, and the ACLU regarding teachings in Catholic and Evangelical schools are about 4 months away.
Either religious prejudice is rampant, in which case a politically-controlled school system will experience endless conflict or one sect steamrolls others, or it is not, in which case only a few loons will send their kids to schools which instruct kids into the mysteries of the Golden Calf. Vouchers reduce conflict. The way to teach tolerance of diversity is to tolerate diversity, seems to me.
In any case, my point about sp-ed costs stands. Proof by counterexample: Other countries manage vouchers and sp-ed.
Although tuition vouchers would be a big step up from the current State-monopoly school system, I prefer a policy I call Parent Performance Contracting.