Sandra Tsing-Loh is shocked and hurt that Obama sends his daughters to an expensive private school rather than the local public schools.
In Obama's defense, the public schools in Chicago are terrible. My parents struggled with the same decision--my father worked for a Democratic city administration at the time, and they had both ideological and political reasons to want me to go to public school. But the catastrophic condition of New York's public schools at the time was too much for them, and at considerable personal sacrifice they ended up putting me in private school.
What is intolerable to me is when parents who have exercised school choice for themselves then oppose it for everyone else. Of course, Obama has little choice; the teacher's unions have far too firm a grip on the Democratic party for any of their politicians to buck its wishes.
It is true, to be sure, that vouchers will not ensure that everyone gets to attend the kind of ridiculous private school that I attended, tuition $38,000 and counting. On the other hand, 22% of the kids in that school are on some form of financial aid; a $5,000 voucher for each of those students would let the school admit more financial aid students, which they ardently wish to do.
The worries about taking money away from the public schools are more valid: as I heard from many administrators whom I interviewed for my story about demography, shrinking school districts do not see their expenses decline as fast as their student numbers. Buildings still have to be heated, yards cleaned, and so forth. Because the student numbers decline across grades, they have to lose a lot of students before they can get rid of one teaching slot.
Still, if the voucher is for less than the current full funding of the children, I see no problem. And there's no question that public school budgets are bloated: top-heavy with administration, for starters. Too many city governments look at the schools first as a jobs program, second as a means for educating kids. Why shouldn't they? The mostly poor citizenry they serve aren't going to buy a house in the suburbs, and if they did, it would probably be a net fiscal plus for a city providing expensive services on a very thin tax base.
Vouchers, Democrats say, are no substitute for fixing the schools. This would be true if anyone had anything other than nice-sounding phrases with which to fix them. Giving money to failing urban school districts is like giving money to failing third-world economies; the entrenched interests siphon it off for their own uses. Teacher salaries go up, janitorial pensions get fatter, more administrators are hired. But the kids don't get any smarter.
Obama's plan to fix the schools: more money. More money for teachers, more teachers, more after school programs. Absent are any specifics about what the new teachers will do that is any different from what the current teachers are doing that isn't working. John McCain doesn't either, but at least he's planning to shake up the educational architecture that gets worse every year.
One of the central insights of economics is that exit matters. Markets don't do better, over the long run, because people in the private sector are smarter or well meaning. They do better because they can be fired. What's more, they frequently are: firms that don't satisfy their customers go away. Look at the businesses that people in America complain most about: cell phones, utilities, cable companies, health care. What they have in common is that the end consumers do not have meaningful right of exit--those companies have at least a temporary monopoly on their customers. Private sector firms can fail spectacularly, as many financial firms just did. But the important thing is that they fail. Schools that do to education what Bear Stearns did to mortgage bonds maybe get a stern talking to from the mayor, and in extraordinary circumstances, the principal may be fired. (Though this takes year). But the school itself keeps going no matter how bad a job it is doing.
Middle-class parents instinctively know this, because they move to places where the right of exit keeps school quality high. Scarsdale knows that if it doesn't keep the schools successful, middle class parents will leave, taking their lavish tax dollars with them. Riverdale, too, knows that it needs to keep parents happy and test scores high. The New York City public school system, on the other hand, mostly has to get butts in seats, because that's how they get their money. It's not that the teachers don't want to teach kids; it's that they don't have to. And as anyone who's ever tried to write a novel in their spare time knows, anything onerous that you don't have to do generally runs afoul of other priorities.
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My memory may be fuzzy, but I don't remember anyone being too upset the Chelsea went to Sidwell Friends......of course, DC schools are in a league all by themselves.....
Aren't the Obamas actually improving schools for everyone else by saving CPS the cost of educating them while remaining on the tax rolls?
I'm not american, but I consider myself closer to the democrats than to the republican ( the main reason is that I hate religious nutjobs that dominate the repub party nowadays) but I am very pro school vouchers.
My disagreement with your post is that I think that the voucher program should pay the full costs of (cheaper) private schools tuition. I don't think helping parents pay the tuition of a 38 grand tuition private school should be a priority, even if it's a great school.
The schools would obviously have to agree to certain standards, like "not teaching creationism", but they could be "religious" in some ways.
If schools collapsing is the driving force behind improving education, please name the last private school you know that went under due to poor performance.
You've been killed in this debate before, Megan, but simply asserting this doesn't make one of the lynchpin arguments against you go away: "Still, if the voucher is for less than the current full funding of the children, I see no problem."
This reminds me of the argument in which someone says something like, "Admittedly, this is an unscientific poll of no validity. But putting that aside...." You are trying to defeat an argument simply by noting it, and hoping nobody notices you haven't countered it.
Actually, if you look at the progression of legislative rules that apply to every aspect of what and how teachers teach in their own classrooms over the years, you'll be amazed at how limited and constrained they have become. The pattern has come about in the name of "accountability," but it's achieved by increasingly onerous bureaucratic rules, ultimately resulting in less accountability and drooping performance. NCLB added a new level of federal rules here, on top of all the rules of states, municipalities, and school districts.
I still say the Netherlands offer a good example of a system that was "privatized" and has performed well. The privatization was done in the 1910s (or so) in order to de-politicize schools. Getting elected officials out of the business of micromanaging schools would probably lead to real, "sustainable" positive change -- but someone would have to challenge and slay the public school employee unions.
It's a tad simplistic to say that Obama's plan for education only involves throwing money at schools.
Why is it hypocritical for liberals who send their kids to private schools--on their own dime--to oppose vouchers? How does that amount to "denying school choice" to others?
I plan to take my grandkids to Disney World next year. I will pay for the trip myself. I would oppose any plan to provide government funding for trips to Disney World. That does not make me "hypocritical," nor does it mean I want to "deny" other people the right to ride on Space Mountain.
Still, if the voucher is for less than the current full funding of the children, I see no problem.
Why not?
Along with a concern about funds being diverted from failing schools (more funding might not help, but less funding almost certainly won't), my biggest concern in voucherville is that it becomes a fairly small subsidy that doesn't serve the group hit hardest by the failing schools.
If the government decides to give, say, a 1k voucher for opting out of the school, to be used for a private institution that costs, say, 15k a year, that does nothing to help the poor, and a little help the middle-and-up (although since the value of the subsidy will largely get assumed into the tuition, it probably won't bring as much benefit as we'd think).
The bigger the subsidy, the more it will drive up tuition. The situation will improve, gradually, for those down the income ladder as the actual value of the subsidy gets larger in relation to the cost of tuition.
But this is a very top-down solution; that is, it helps families in a method inverse to need. The marginal middle will be the first to benefit, and the poorest will be the last helped.
This, then, is why it doesn't make much sense to talk about right of exit without discussing ability to exit.
If you want vouchers, I'm open to persuasion, but if without a mechanism to help those at the bottom, it's really easy to have a cynical view about the system helping those that are most able to help themselves, not least able to. That mechanism could be a sliding scale voucher (one that gives families a meaningful set of choices), or it could be a whole-cost voucher. It needs to be something, though.
But without that, it's all an empty promise.
Vouchers, Democrats say, are no substitute for fixing the schools. This would be true if anyone had anything other than nice-sounding phrases with which to fix them.
Doesn't this fall into the "something must be done; this is something; this must be done" line of thinking? If you want to persuade people like me, some level of demonstration of vouchers working, and working for people in need, would go a lot farther than "but your politicians aren't better" blamecasting.
[Incidentally, there is a difference between the failure of an idea (more funding), and the failure of execution. More funding could and should lead to things like better student/teacher ratios, which have a demonstrable effect. That they don't isn't a failure of the idea of funding, its a failure to use that funding properly.]
Justin, why would there be a problem.
If it costs $12k for the public system to teach my kid, and I pull him out with a $5k voucher, the system saves $7k. Good deal for public education.
Only way this fails is if you consider public education a right for the teachers, not the students.
Even if the CPS were outstanding, I would send my kids to the University of Chicago Lab Schools if I had the chance. Within CPS, 10% of the schools are among the very best in the state of Illinois. The other 90% are among the worst. No middle ground. Obama's kids would have gone to the good schools. Michelle Obama did - Whitney Young High School is a magnet school that is one of the best public schools anywhere in the country.
But the Lab School is something else. I would have loved to have gone there.
I could name several charter schools in Minnesota that went under due to poor performance.
Here in Minnesota, the state funds the bulk of education costs on a per-pupil basis. School districts with declining enrollment get less money.
In many respects, Minnesota has created a voucher system in which parents can select from public schools (and charter schools, which are also public schools).
For instance, a parent in Minneapolis can choose to send his or her child to a charter school or a school in another district, as long as that district has room. Most of the suburban districts around Minneapolis are able to accept students from outside their districts.
Here's an article about the approval of 11 new charters in Minnesota. "This year’s crop follows a current trend in charter schools: aggressively pursuing poor and low-income families who are dissatisfied and disillusioned with public school systems, particularly in Minneapolis."
Brad--you make a good point about helping the middle rather than the poor, and about the probable effect on tuition. I've never seen that particular anti-voucher argument before, and it's a pretty serious flaw in the scheme.
What I find interesting is that everything you said applies to racial affirmative action, too.
A few things on private schools: Most parents do not realize that they surrender their legal rights at the door. Kids in private schools get kicked out of those schools; sometimes for flimsy reasons to hide the fact that they don't fit in to the school environment or because their parents are unwilling to dope them with antidepressants or ritalin; sometimes because they have a learning style the school is unable or unwilling to meet. Public schools cannot do this, Megan. So it's important, if you're a parent, to understand that you do not have the same legal rights, your child doesn't have the same legal rights, as they would in public school. And those rights extend across the board from academic support to disciplinary action.
When it comes to fixing the public schools, my major concern is that we're trying to groom all of our students for four years of liberal-arts college; and this is an enormous waste. We need plumbers, cooks, snow-plow drivers, fishermen, and farmers, too.
If you want better schools with better students, then teach those kids from their strengths. A good example is my son, who's mechanically gifted but language-arts challenged. There's a huge national shortage of mechanically-skilled laborers, and it's getting worse. But there's so little mechanical education in school now (and a kids likely to find even less mechanical education in private schools) that many kids don't realize the potential jobs. They're labeled as stupid, weak, troublemakers, etc. My kid suffered in school, both private and public, from the expectation that he ought be able to read books such as "Wuthering Heights," and from a system that rarely challenged his mathmatical/physics mentality. He ended up at a community college, where he studied Machine Tool, learning how to take a piece of raw steel and turn it into parts for space shuttles, MRI machines, antique tractors, and machine guns. He loved it, earned himself a spot on the Dean's List. Now, he's in engineering school, giving it his all. He plans to go on to graduate school.
We need kids like him to get the idea they can succeed a whole lot earlier, but they're consistently left behind because they don't always remember to use capital letters, spell well, or read fiction easily.
My hope would be a mixture of both private and public schools, and a whole lot more effort (as China and Europe do) helping kids identify and develop their strengths earlier in their lives. I'd throw apprenticeship programs and on-the-job training into the mix, and do it much earlier then a kid's junior year of high school. A high-school principal I interviewed a few years ago put it best when he told me the day that all kids have an individual learning plan is not far off, and it will be a good day.
wait, I went to NYC public schools, as did all of my immediate and extended family. They weren't bad, and certainly not all "catastrophic." And my mom didn't have any ideological attachment to public education, either. We were just working class. I do very much support school choice, though.
What, in the name of the gods, is so utterly sacred about "public schools?" Anything that's proposed as an alternative gets the same response as a friendly little proposal for a Black Mass on the High Altar at St. Peter's would in Vatican City.
Due to the culture it has embraced, the "underclass" is, for the most part, ineducable. (See Theodore Dalrymple's Life At The Bottom; for the record, he's talking about British slum-dwellers, who are almost all-white, so it's not a racial thing.) Why must the rest of us endlessly subsidize them in their asocial habits?
A big part of what's wrong with the public schools is that it's almost impossible to fire teachers, once hired, thanks largely to the powerful teachers' unions. By what right do public employees unionize in the first place? The deal used to be that they traded some possible income for much-greater job security. When did that change, and why?
Given absolute power, I'd abolish the public schools in general, and replace them with a system of objectively-administered exams; you pass such-and-such an exam, and you're good-to-go for a job, no matter how you acquired the knowledge. Forcing everybody into this Stepford-wives lockstep does most of them no good at all.
What is intolerable to me is when parents who have exercised school choice for themselves then oppose it for everyone else.
Who opposes school choice in that sense of the word? Maybe there is a bizarre fringe that wants to ban private schools, but they're irrelevant. What most Democrats oppose is taking money away from public schools to subsidize a private school education. Your conflation of these two separate meanings of "school choice" is intellectually dishonest.
When it comes to fixing the public schools, my major concern is that we're trying to groom all of our students for four years of liberal-arts college; and this is an enormous waste. We need plumbers, cooks, snow-plow drivers, fishermen, and farmers, too.
This is probably the first and last time I agree 100% with zic. We had mandatory woodshop at my (private) school and it was a good and healthy experience even for those who would go on to become, say, lawyers.
helping kids identify and develop their strengths earlier in their lives
...and the disagreement begins. The super-early "tracking" of German schoolchildren is harmful, not helpful. Identifying strengths, good. Denying options, very, very bad.
So you're for a sliding scale voucher system based on family income up to some percent (say 70) of the per pupil cost of public education. Sounds sensible enough, but has no chance of passing a Democratic congress. It places increased burden on teachers, teachers unions and Dept Of Ed and local bureaucrats.
No, or at least very few, voucher proponents would quibble with the sliding scale.
But no one talks about fixing the behemoth that is education administration as part of the funding increases. They just talk about funding increases as a prerequisite for change, since the main problem is funding.
I'm a Democrat who favors vouchers.
I basically agree with your post and I'm generally of the belief that it's easier to make real changes in education at the local and state level rather than the federal level.
On the education issue in general, I think the most important thing the government (federal, in particular) can do is to increase funding for pre-K education. Generally, money spent on education is more effective the earlier you spend it. So many kids are already in a big hole by the time they even reach kindergarten. Making public pre-K programs available to those who need it is probably the most cost effective way to improve our educational system in the long run.
Good one, Megan.
blogged with my thoughts on the matter.
Extra money doesn't fix the public schools because lack of money isn't the problem. The problems of the schools are a symptom of the breakdown of families. As a result of this cultural degredation, too many of the children in public schools (who are required to be there, and who cannot be expelled for any but the most atrocious breaches of decorum) simply are not there to learn, and, being immature, they make the learning experience more difficult for those that are there to learn. There is a line you cross when the fraction of non-learners grows enough (and I am pretty sure it doesn't even need to be a majority or close to it) that teaching the other children becomes impossible.
If you really want to reform the worst public schools, start expelling the disruptive non-learners early in the process, by the 2nd or 3rd grade, or, at the very least, segregate them together with a different type of curriculum designed to address their specific social problems. If you are unwilling to do this, then you are simply condemning all the children in that school to educational failure and a life spent in poverty.
This is why private schools are really more successful- they can discriminate against non-learning, disruptive students. Indeed, if you go to a voucher system that prevents such triaging, you will simply recreate the problems in the private system.
Obama is for performance pay. If that means differentiated pay for teachers based on academic productivity of their students, that will shake up the educaiton system faaaar more than vouchers. Death to the single salary schedule!
I don't think that vouchers are enough to solve the problem of education. I think there will always be the problem of prices rising due to the subsidy. We see this in higher education and there is no reason to think elementary and secondary education would be immune.
I think the only real long-term solution to the education problem is to shut down public schools entirely. As long as they exist they will be able to crowd-out private schools, and continue to harm children, especially those without the means to afford more tuition than the voucher pays.
Aside from the benefits of a truly competitive market for education for children, property taxes would be able to drop by more than half, since greater than 50% of municipal governments' spending is on their public school systems. This would be a boon to all residents, renters and homeowners alike.
A lesser alternative would be to emulate the Japanese model and only offer public education beyond 8th grade to kids who pass entrance exams. Everyone else has to pay for private school, or just quit.
In the alternative universe where every parent is forced to pay for the kids admission to the local carnival where the scary-smelling guy with the disturbing facial scars load you into the dilapidated, creaking mobile roller coaster with the bolts hanging loose even if you elect to take the kids to Disney on your own dime(or even, God forbid keep them home)this comparison has some value -- until then, not so much. So unless you are actually trying to argue that there should be 1. No school taxes at all and 2. Therefore, no government funded schools (i.e. all school should be pay as you go)this is a silly comparison.
If you are indeed trying to make that point -- rock on! I'll send money to your campaign.
HI Megan,
RE: Riverdale public schools. The elementary schools are great but the Stern Academy (middle and HS) is only good at best. It used to be PS 141 and a middle school only and for the wider community (working class and kids from projects) who were bussed in. A lot of kids where sent to private school when they got to that age. Now it is better, but the administration there is still hampered by NY PS bureaucracy.
Karl Weber - The differences between amusement parks and schools
1 = Government already pays for the public schools. Paying with a voucher isn't giving anyone something new, just paying for education a different way.
2 - Children are legally required to go to school.
A question for you Megan,
Wouldn't school vouchers just lead to a lot more tuition inflation? If everyone can pay more, won't schools start charging more? I guess the financial aid programs probably would improve, and you'd have a situation with private schools similar to the elite colleges, where the well off pay a ridiculous amount and the poor pay very little.
What this reads like is a give up on public schools. This coming election has really opened my eyes to what it seems conservative attitudes towards much of the lower and working class is like. Now I am not saying your a conservative but that is the attitude you take here. Giving anyone vouchers or making the cost of private schools lower is beside the point when its obvious that not all students can go to a private school. Its unfair to the students that are still in the public schools. Yes Obama does want to give schools more money, but it matters where you put the money. Merit pay for teachers is by far the best way to improve public schools because as we all know the teacher is the most importent part of any school. This is where Obamas plan focuses.
Secondly you simply brush off teacher salaries going up as umimportent. Why dont we use another central insight of economics to make the point that if you increase salaries more people will want the job and in turn attract better teachers. Your analysis of how giving money to bad public schools seems questionable because you could say this about every public program. Why not hire a private corporation to run our national parks or police our cities? You make the comment that "Too many city governments look at the schools first as a jobs program, second as a means for educating kids." Well whats the first priority of any private entity? To make money. I would also question the validity of that statement. My mother has been a public school teacher for over 30 years and this allowed me to see the ins and outs of the system. To be sure there is bureaucracy and waste in many public schools but on the level that matters, the teachers, its all about the kids.
Public schools are what most of American children will attend. This debate in it self is almost pointless because we are missing the bigger picture. We need to focus all of our energy on raising the standards of PUBLIC schools. The amount of students that will be affected even if we started a huge voucher program would be nothing compared to the students that are affected everyday but underpreforming public schools.
This is my first ever reply to any blog, so thanks for getting me involved.
If schools collapsing is the driving force behind improving education, please name the last private school you know that went under due to poor performance.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=975794
Yancey Ward, how many of those kids are not there to learn because they're not being taught they way they learn? We basically teach two learning styles -- language-arts and math. What about kids who's primary learning method is music? Shape and color? Mechanics? Sports?
Attitudes like yours are, in my opinion, what got our education into the mess it's now in; like the Christian-right's pro-life stance that only seems to value life up until a child is born. Then, it's the family's problem.
I prefer an entrepreneurial view toward education: help a child find their strengths and then get out of the kids way a bit, let them take more responsibility for their own education.
Okay, Tim and BladeDoc, what about this analogy. I buy bottled water. Most people use water from the city tap, which all of us (including me) pay taxes to provide. Does this mean government should give me a voucher to pay for the bottled water I personally prefer to drink?
I don't think so. And again, I don't see how that makes me hypocritical--which was the major point I was addressing (look at the title of Megan's post).
By the way, BladeDoc--that was quite a lurid fantasy you painted about the difference between public and private schools. (I assume that's what you were trying to say.) It so happens my wife and I went to public schools right through college, and all 3 of our kids went to public schools--and got excellent educations, thank you.
The virtue of vouchers is the potential for changing how the system
works; it has precious little to do with sending children to elite
private schools.
Look, we have a certain number of kids, we have a certain number of
physical schools, and we have a certain number of teachers. The starting
point of any change is what we already have. And what we already
have is almost entirely public schools and public school teachers.
Therefore, to be meaningful, vouchers have to be about changing
the behavior of public schools.
How?
We give the parents as much choice as practical about which public
schools their children attend. We increase the number of choices
by increasing the number of physical schools and decreasing the
size of their student bodies. When there's no money available
to build new facilities we take large existing schools and divide
them in place, so there might be say three schools sharing the
same buildings.
We slightly expand capacity so that within a given district there
will always be a certain number of schools that are significantly
less than full. At periodic, set intervals we shut down the least
popular school, firing it's principle and teachers, and, within the
same physical facility, open a new school, with new people running it.
Every student within a state within the public system should have
a certain amount of money attached to him or her and when that student
moves that money should go to the new school. No school within
the voucher system should be allowed to be charge anything beyond
that amount. No school receiving public money should be allowed to
select which students they accept. Naturally some schools will be
popular and have far more students seeking entry than they can
possibly accept. Beyond a preference for students who are already
in the school, who actually gets in should be determined by lottery.
Beyond a small set of fundamental rules, such as how much money
goes with a child and the prohibition on selecting students, the
schools should be allowed and even encouraged to be different,
including differences in what they teach (beyond a core set of
subjects) and in how they are internally organized, and in how
they handle student misbehavior.
Students within a state should have the option of choosing any
school in the state. But if they're outside the school busing
routes then it's the parent's responsibility to get the child
the child to that school.
At the end of the day, after such a reorganization, we end up
with the same set of students, basically the same set of teachers,
and pretty much the same set of buildings. Despite this, the
number of well-educated children and the degree to which they
are well-educated, should slowly, and then later dramatically,
increase.
They virtues of such a reorganization are several, and some
of them seem to be hard for some people to understand,
but one at least is pretty simple.
It puts far more power in the hands of parents.
And this is a good thing because parents, on average, care
far more about their children than teachers and principles
do.
People are selfish. That's reality. Saints are few and
far between. Take ten people and you know, beyond any doubt,
that the self-interested are running the show.
Teachers want high relative income and high relative status
and they don't want to work hard. So does almost everyone
else.
Children cannot represent their interests because they are
immature and short-sighted. Parents, although imperfect,
are by far the closest thing we have to a proxy for the
interests of children.
Vouchers allow parents, albeit indirectly, to hire and fire
teachers and to vote on and define who are the good teachers
and who are the bad and perhaps just as importantly to
define what systems work and what systems don't.
Vouchers can put good education back on the table. They
have the potential, if done right, to give voice to the
needs of the children.
Karl - I don't know about you but I pay a water bill regularly, it isn't something given free by the government.
Also - You usually would not be forced to have a water connection, and bottled water is MASSIVELY more expensive per gallon than tap water. Private education isn't always more expensive than public education, and even when it is the vouchers would usually be equal to or less than the cost of public education.
Karl,
Your analogy about water misses one important point - the water is tainted. It won't kill you, but it does stunt growth and intellectual development.
The affluent can buy bottled water - and do - but then announce that public water is a right everyone has and that any attempt to let more people buy bottled water is an offense to decency. Because, if less people use public water it will get less money.
Sounds sensible enough, but has no chance of passing a Democratic congress.
????
First, education is primarily funded at the local level, not the national level, isn't it? Voucher measures don't "get past Congress."
Second, let's imagine that this did become a federal matter. Take as a thought experiment: Congress decides to pass a massive education package that provides for funding full vouchers for the very poor through partial vouchers to those earning less than, say, 150,000, on some sliding scale.
(For now, let's leave aside the scale of this, and decisions about how we can decide what percentages are equitable.)
To apply, one goes through a centralized apparatus (Educaid?), and gets a voucher that can be applied only to education. Really, its not a whole lot different in principle than food stamps -- it would be nationalized "education stamps," (although vouchers does sound like a more polite term).
Which party do you think is going to make more noise about the costs of this additional spending; more likely to call this an entitlement; more likely to fight against this program for reasons of "fiscal restraint"? If you think the answer is Democrats, I think you are off base. Not that this would go without partisan combat: the fight that Democrats would likelier bring is more of the "how do we know it's a school?" variety - a desire to regulate and a certain fear of passing off religion as learning.
But saying that this is infeasible because those darn Democrats is silly.
The bigger the change, the bigger the fight. From all sides.
Where I now live, I pay a water bill. In my previous home, water was covered by city taxes. It varies from place to place.
You could come up with almost any comparison you want. Almost any public service (paid for by taxes) can be supplemented with a private version (paid for by individuals). My point is that individuals who choose the private version should pay for it themselves rather than expect public support.
The public pays for roads; if you want to use a private toll road, you don't get a voucher for that.
The public pays for parks; if you want to visit a private park, you don't get a voucher for it.
The public pays for police officers; if you want private security, you don't get a voucher to pay for it.
I don't see why education should be any different. AND THIS DOESN'T MAKE ME A HYPOCRITE.
But no one talks about fixing the behemoth that is education administration as part of the funding increases.
Oh, and...
Of course people talk about this. They talk about it all the time. NCLB was one approach to this. Anyone that is interested in administrative reforms can easily find loads of discussion about how to measure teaching performance, and methods for improving achievement. It's not a problem that lends itself to an easy answer, but there's been no lack of attention in this direction.
Of course, Obama has little choice; the teacher's unions have far too firm a grip on the Democratic party for any of their politicians to buck its wishes.
Megan, for an Obama supporter, you give some very good arguments against him. What are the argument for him again?
Skullberg,
I think it's overstated to say that "the water [of public education] is tainted." As I mentioned, my whole family was educated in public schools, and we are doing fine. (My kids graduated from a public high school and went on to Ivy League colleges.)
But I agree that our public schools need a lot of improvement. Where I differ from you is in my preferred solution.
To go back to our water analogy: Someone discovers that the public water supply is tainted. (The filtering system is broken, maybe, or somehow pollution has gotten into the reservoirs.)
My solution would be to fix the public system. Hire some good engineers, clean up the pollution, and make it work.
Your solution would be, more or less, to give tax rebates to people, to urge them to use the money to buy bottled water, and then hope that the "competition" between bottled water and the public water system will somehow improve the latter. Or if it doesn't, then I guess we can just shut down the public system and let everyone fend for themselves.
This seems to me a lot more roundabout and less effective than my solution.
The thing about school choice is we already have choice for the middle class and rich. The only ones trapped by bad schools are the children of parents who live in a bad district and can't afford to pay out of pocket for a private school or move to a different district for a good public school.
There is hypocrisy among politicians defending failing schools but refusing to send their own kids there and not giving poor parents and students the means to choose a different school like they have done.
You all do realize your arguments only apply to a small portion (geographically) of the country (i.e., cities and the denser suburbs). Vast areas of the country do well to support one school. Of course, that's mostly the red areas, which the readership of this blog never visits. :-)
If you really want to reform the worst public schools, start expelling the disruptive non-learners early in the process, by the 2nd or 3rd grade, or, at the very least, segregate them together with a different type of curriculum designed to address their specific social problems. If you are unwilling to do this, then you are simply condemning all the children in that school to educational failure and a life spent in poverty.
I suggest you watch The Wire. Specifically, the 4th season, which focuses on the inner-city public schools. It deals directly with the concept you mention.
Actually, what you're saying about cities isn't entirely true; I recall reading a great study a few years back of school performance in cities versus how thick on the ground school districts were. In those cases parents can exert a kind of school choice by moving a couple blocks into a new school district -- and, wouldn't ya know, the effects citywide on educational quality are robust and salubrious.
Karl,
2 things:
1) Saying some municipalities water is fine, does not say all is fine. The opposite it true as well, saying some municipality has tainted water, doesn't imply public water can't be clean. Schools are failing all over this country, not all, but some, and those need to be fixed.
2) I'd be open to fixing the water supply, if it could be done. What I'd like to do is work towards fixing it while also giving the least advantaged families the same or similar exit strategy the affluent have.
Christina,
You would be hard-pressed to find a more devoted fan of The Wire than me. However, I have held this opinion on what to do long before I saw season 4.
I had hoped the hostess of the blog would eventually get to season 4 and open a discussion.
Bill said,
You all do realize your arguments only apply to a small portion
(geographically) of the country (i.e., cities and the denser suburbs).
Vast areas of the country do well to support one school.
That's more or less true. Of course, as I think you'd acknowledge,
most of the population of the country is in the cities and the
suburbs. Even in the rural areas though there's some room for
choice (see my post earlier for what specifically I'm advocating).
In many more rural areas children are being bused such long distances
already, that going another ten miles isn't that big a deal.
The real question is how small one can make a school and still
have it really work. It may be that the answer is smaller than
these schools actually are. Certainly historically they were
much smaller. There were ten or so students in my father's public
high school. Somehow he got a very good education.
And if the answer to that is no, we can't make the schools smaller.
Well then there we are. We can't make everything the same. It may
be that for lightly populated areas there never will be, short of
the internet, much school choice.
But the catastrophic condition of New York's public schools at the time was too much for them, and at considerable personal sacrifice they ended up putting me in private school.
Does this mean MM didn't get into Stuyvesant or Bronx Science? (I ask because I doubt many people would call those schools "catastrophic.")
Also, there isn't an analog to this. You can't replace people, jobs or structures like you can a leaky pipe section.
I've never really taken a side on school voucher schemes, mainly because I've never seen a school voucher proposal that adequately dealt with the issue of what to do with kids with special needs.
The majority of private schools aren't equipped to handle kids who require individual learning experiences, whether through physical, behavioral, developmental, or emotional challenges (or a combination thereof).
A pure libertarian response would be that schools that are equipped to handle educating children with said challenges would develop once a level of equilibrium is reached where the amount of the voucher equals the cost of education (or cost plus targetted profit, if a profit-seeking entity).
But if the vouchers provided can't reach the level of equilibrium, then what? A continuation of the current system where special needs kids are either segregated into public schools targetted towards them and/or mainsreamed into a failing school that isn't equipped to handle them?
If a voucher proponent could answer that in a way that made sense economically and on a humanitarian basis, then I'll consider the arguements for vouchers. Until then, I can't, because education (no matter what one might want in a idealized world) can't be a market with free entry and exit by participants in a society which states that an educated electorate in a vital underpinning to its proper functioning.
BTW: Rob L, I'm not ignoring you. It's a very provocative point, one that deserves a more considered response than I can give right now.
I will make a couple of quick points about it:
1. You are right that it helps the least needy first. No argument, and this is unfortunate. This is the valid part of the comparison.
2. With vouchers, there is an underlying fear that money sent to families is being taken from the common pool of school funding. It's likely to be a direct loss to the students who remain public. I'm not sure what the equivalent would be when a student gets admitted in an AA situation. What is it that other minority students are left without? This is part of the comparison that I am not seeing.
Beyond that, it gets even more complicated.
Public schools, or vouchers, are solutions for a fairly uncontroversial problem -- most people think that kids deserve a chance at a good education. AA, on the other hand, is a solution to a soup of problems (institutional racism, unequal previous schooling, an inherent value to diversity, a redress of previous wrongs) that are all controversial to some extent. These discussions tend to generate more heat than light, and controversy over AA tends not to be about whether it works but whether it should exist at all.
==
A question for you Megan,
Wouldn't school vouchers just lead to a lot more tuition inflation? If everyone can pay more, won't schools start charging more?
==
I second this question. If tuition at your private school is $38K/year, and (presumably) they are turning away people who could pay it (demand > supply) and supply is fixed (no empty desks), if every consumer was given a $5K voucher wouldn't increase tuition to near $43K? It's like the gas tax argument, isn't it, simple supply and demand? Please clarify if there is another argument to be had...
What I find insane is the focus on government PROVISION of schooling (by those other than public school teachers). There is a decent externality argument for some public FUNDING of schooling. In fact, I think the externality is bigger the more "at risk" (likely to rob me in 10 years)the student is and support a progressive voucher system which quickly goes to zero.
We accept the government must provide all manner of services, yet nobody suggests that FEMA build the trailers or that Medicare/Medicaid operate the hospitals. Why in this particular case is everyone so insistent the government do something it has proved so bad at.
Skullberg,
well, we are certainly getting somewhere. We actually agree on a lot, based on your last comment.
But as for this idea of giving school vouchers so as to give "the least advantaged families" a good "exit strategy"--it sounds reasonable. But it takes away money from the public schools, which will make it harder, not easier, to fix those schools.
And when you look at the conservative Republicans who promote the voucher idea, you see that many of them philosophically oppose the whole concept of public schools. Their ultimate agenda is to weaken the public schools until they collapse.
If you think I am being paranoid, consider the fact that they NEVER extend the same logic to any other area in which public services are less than adequate.
Do conservative Republicans ever say, "Since our inner city neighborhoods aren't safe, we should provide vouchers to residents to pay for private security?" Do they advocate vouchers to help poor people in neighborhoods without public transportation buy cars? Or vouchers to help people who live in blighted neighborhoods move to nice ones?
No--because their real motive isn't to help the disadvantages, but to weaken public schools and teachers' unions, which tend to support the Democrats.
I think the big issue is accountability, and while vouchers may be one way to get there, there are others.
We could, for example, go with a very hierarchical structure, similar to the military. I don't have military service so if anyone does, feel free to correct me, but my impression is that the military does a pretty good job of ensuring reasonably consistent performance, whether from a service member currently in a battlefield in Iraq, down to someone stationed in a base in a rural community in the middle of America.
Funding is centralized, control is centralized, standards are set from the top and there are mechanisms in place to ensure that there are consequences when standards are not met.
I think if we reorganized public schools on this model it would be an improvement - well, at least for those students trapped in the poorest inner city schools. It's possible that some of the kids in wealthy suburbs might see a reduction in school quality, but I'm less worried about them -- many of those kids have the option to exit and go private. Certainly the huge disparities would be reduced. And my understanding is that this is pretty much the way the rest of the developed world does their schooling, and as we are continually reminded in those international test standings, they seem to get better results than we do.
The Atlantic recently had an article that discussed the huge inefficiencies that result from having every school district design their own curricula, not to mention the increased costs of having so many different textbooks etc. So a more centralized model would help out in this regard as well.
While my preferred solution would be some kind of voucher model, I could be convinced to support this "military model" because both would provide accountability, albeit in very different ways. But if these two options are deemed unacceptable, I'm having a tough time seeing what else might work. Those who argue for more resources need to explain why DC, which has some of the highest per-pupil expenditures in the country, has some of the lousiest schools, and how simply adding money will prevent other systems from moving in that direction.
One other point, which I've also seen very little discussion of:
The school voucher arguments seem to stem from the concept that the student are the consumers, and that the education received is the product. In actuality, the student is the product, the parents are the providers of raw materials, and the education received is the production process.
The consumers in the school choice arguments are not the parents/students, the consumers are employers and universities (another production process that further refines the student/product).
In what other production process are the suppliers of raw materials expected to compensate the manufacturer for producing a finished good to the consumer?
The flip side of your hypothetical conservative republican is a democrat who believes were our current system to collapse because privatization of public school physical capital and a voucher system provided better outcomes for all, it would still be a bad thing. I believe they are called public school teachers.
Nelson said,
The thing about school choice is we already have choice for the
middle class and rich. The only ones trapped by bad schools are the
children of parents who live in a bad district and can't afford
to pay out of pocket for a private school or move to a different
district for a good public school.
I understand what you're saying, but I think you're missing part
of it. The middle class have a choice in the sense that they can
choose to buy a house in a relatively nice school district.
Buying a nice house though in a good school district is extremely
expensive. You might say though that such a person can then sell
that house and then buy another. But I think if you look at the
details people on average take a financial hit in a real dollars
(inflation-adjusted) that's pretty significant every time they move.
So most middle-class people don't move that much. Therefore their
actual decisions points with respect to school districts are
few. And since vouchers get their constructive power from the choices
parents make, there's basically no real opportunity for middle class
parents to improve the schools by this mechanism.
There's also the assumption that the good schools in these middle
class areas are ok. Many are ok in a relative sense that is in
comparison to the inner city schools.
But I don't think this is true. They are not really ok. They
are in fact very bad. We just don't realize this because there
are so few examples around of what they could be and should be.
It seems to me what has gotten lost in this discussion is the ultimate responsibility of parents in the education of their children. If my taxes pay for the infrastructure of the educational system, that makes it mine, at least in part. And that, as a parent and a user of that system, means I need to take an active role in being an advocate for my child's education. Removing children from the system with vouchers seems an abdication of responsibility to that system.
The public school infrastructure, from the school building to computers to, the most important part, the teachers, are then my responsibility. My experience is that many of the problems arise from children whose parents have abdicated their responsibility for their children, thus making school, especially the later grades, a baby sitting system instead of an education system. It is up to me to make sure the system is working for my child, which in turn will help other children by making the system better on the whole.
Vouchers seem to me a "get out of jail free card" for responsibility to public education. To say, as some have suggested in this thread, that teachers just want high salary and do less, seems to me a highly cynical and self-defeating outlook. Most of the teachers my children have had were dedicated, hard working and fully engaged with us as partners in our children's education. Most want to be paid well, but I assume most don't want to be baby sitters. And without the belief that teachers are in it for more than just a paycheck, makes it much easier to speak out in favor of vouchers. It seems ironic to me that, as "personal responsibility" is one of the central themes to the republican worldview, that so many feel that turning away from their responsibility to public education with vouchers is a viable solution to the many problems facing the system. Accountability, you are a fickle lover.
Education, like democracy, is hard. As Michael Douglas says in THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT, you have to want it bad. And that means bringing your children up wanting to learn, hungry to learn, to take responsibility for their education. That means having respect for yourself, respect for your teachers, respect for your school. Those are the three R's that make public education great - and the idea of vouchers anathema to that ideal.
And when you look at the conservative Republicans who promote the voucher idea, you see that many of them philosophically oppose the whole concept of public schools. Their ultimate agenda is to weaken the public schools until they collapse.
As opposed to the liberal Democrats' "trap the poor in failing schools" philosophy?
There's nothing sacred about public schools, but I'm not against them. What I'm against is limiting the ability to choose better public (or private) schools only to the middle class and rich who can afford to move school districts or pay tuition.
I was reading the comments from Tsing-Loh's column and everyone defending Obama totally missed the point. They were all along the lines of "I'd do the same thing he did". Of course they would. We all would given the chance. But the poor don't have that chance and the anti-voucher crowd doesn't want to give that chance to them.
So, Christian and Nelson, what about the rest of my comment? Do you advocate housing vouchers for the poor? Car-purchase vouchers? Private security vouchers? If not, why not? Don't the poor deserve the same choices as the rich over where to live, how to get around, how to keep their families safe?
Jay C-
Here is some discussion of that point:
Try not to think of human beings with free will as commodities. I agree that parents incentives aren't perfectly aligned, but an investment in their childrens' human capital is as much of an investment good as is a college fund, trust fund, etc. While future employers are beneficiaries of the education, they are in the same way the employer of an independent contractor benefits when that contractor upgrades his or her capital (i.e. only to the extent the owner of the capital is unable to demand the increased productivity). With respect to parents, they are not merely providers of raw materials. A parent gives their children the means to provide for themselves because it is the right thing to do (from an evolutionary standpoint), and because in the future it may be the child providing for the parent.
I may have failed to discuss some elements, but to make a long story short, I think because education is productive, like other capital, economists' practice of labeling it human capital and treating it as a non-transferable investment good is probably the best way to model such a thing.
Karl,
So, Christian and Nelson, what about the rest of my comment? Do you advocate housing vouchers for the poor? Car-purchase vouchers? Private security vouchers? If not, why not? Don't the poor deserve the same choices as the rich over where to live, how to get around, how to keep their families safe?
Those may be very good ideas but I believe the most "bang per buck" is in the education front because with a good education you can afford all of those other things.
The flip side of your hypothetical conservative republican is a democrat who believes were our current system to collapse because privatization of public school physical capital and a voucher system provided better outcomes for all...
I think this misunderstands the point. I think the fear is that, with vouchers, the situation would actually deteriorate for the lowest 20% (those with poor or special needs students).
So, here is what happens in the fevered swamp of my imagination when partial-vouchers are applied.
A. Localities argue that this funding should come out of the education pool of funding, and not be an additional cost. Thus, schools that actually exist now have to do more with less (and probably do so while supporting an infrastructure that was meant to handle more students, but no longer does. Heating the buildings and so forth).
B. The population that moves out, which were actually the families on the economic margin of private schooling anyway, now becomes (relatively) unconcerned with outcomes for students in public schools. Political will to fix failing schools falls further, and the bandaid becomes the fix.
So, the government has given a gift to the already-succeeding private schools, and to the families on margin. The kids on the bottom are left worse off than ever before.
In principle, having the government operate schools because education is important makes no more sense than having the government run grocery stores (with "free" food paid for by tax money) because eating is important.
In practice, though, one good thing about the present system is that government at least leaves the private schools pretty much alone. Adopt vouchers, and control will follow, just as surely as Federal interference with "local" public schools followed Federal aid. As somebody who sent his kid to private schools, I have mixed feelings about vouchers. On the one hand, it's seriously unfair that poorer kids don't get the same shot middle-class kids get. On the other, vouchers would really be an expansion of government control, which is seldom if ever a good thing.
I do not disagree with that.
At the same time, I think that most of the discussions of education policies and funding (at all levels) neglect to treat employers as participants in the market of human capital (very specifically as consumers of human capital).
"Do you advocate housing vouchers for the poor? Car-purchase vouchers? Private security vouchers? If not, why not?"
Karl, I don't really understand the question. There are things that government does better than private individuals (army, hurricane relief...) and things that it is not successful at doing. Since education is one of the latter, we should consider whether privatizing it would be better. Since we don't want poor people to lose out, we're thinking about vouchers.
Instead of honing our ability to create analogies, let's try to think of the best way to do things.
Brad,
A. can be solved with a federal voucher program for the poorest students
B. isn't an issue for those schools where political will is already non-existent (and it could be argued that the flight of student will bring political attention to the problem)
A. can be solved with a federal voucher program for the poorest students
Yes. It can be solved. Just not with a "here's $5,000, go spend it and create some competition!" approach. If the effort is there to solve the problem with an approach that addresses the neediest first (or at least equally), it take a very different form that this one.
B. isn't an issue for those schools where political will is already non-existent (and it could be argued that the flight of student will bring political attention to the problem)
I think that most of the political will to "fix the schools" actually comes from the middle class. But many people that are willing to fight for this do see it worthwhile to fight not just for themselves, but for everybody.
If you appease a chunk of this group, some of that political will (along with the clout that comes with being in a better financial situation) will go away from the public schools, along with whatever dollars got redirected. Why? People care more when they have some skin in the game. That's just human nature. I mean, they'd probably still care, but the problems won't seem quite so salient.
Here's an argument against vouchers that would end the debate:
"Over in River City, they did X. X fixed all the problems with their public schools. So we don't need vouchers; all we need is to do X."
Strangely, no one seems able to make this argument.
Might I suggest that anti-voucher people get on the horn and find X, rather than tell us all about the things we shouldn't try because we know they won't work ahead of time?
I had great teachers in my public school as well, I can't understand why they believe poor teachers with equally long careers deserve the same pay. In a competitive system, good teachers would be fine, and likely better off. However, as long as they support the current system, the good they do for the students they affect will be outweighed by the harm done by their counterparts who they defend.
Karl-
In an earlier post I said the good argument for public FUNDING is based on the external benefit of schooling and the accompanying under provision. No, I don't support the vouchers you mention and would like a world where we don't need vouchers for school either. However, they are far superior to public provision of housing, public provision of cars, (possibly) public provision of security, etc.
No, of course the poor don't DESERVE the same choices as the rich, that's one of the reasons its bad to be poor and good to be rich (as an aside, the rich don't deserve those choices, they have them because they earned them, etc). However, to the extent the majority decides it must take our money to provide these things to the poor, the first question should be "who can we pay to provide it for them?"
That publicly operated schools are abysmal, and that their failings burden the under privileged most heavily is a progressive argument in favor of vouchers. It's telling that Obama always talks about investing in teachers and never discusses investing in students.
I see what you are saying but I still think the analogy of employers as consumers isn't apt. I posses my human capital, and benefit when employers effectively lease it (assuming 100% effort on my part, etc). It's my ability to lease my capital for many multiples of what it cost me that encourages me to accumulate it.
By way of analogy, I am not a consumer of tires (I don't own a car). Yes, I expect taxi drivers to have tires, but my preference for hiring taxis with tires is sufficient to encourage the driver or company (the consumer) to invest in them.
Its not that employers consume the human capital, but that employers like to employee people who have invested in human capital.
That being said, education is part investment, part consumption. I have no doubt my private liberal arts school education won't return on every marginal dollar over a cheaper university. However, it sure was nice to have all of those old red brick buildings and country club amenities.
Brad,
I think that most of the political will to "fix the schools" actually comes from the middle class. But many people that are willing to fight for this do see it worthwhile to fight not just for themselves, but for everybody.
I don't disagree with this sentiment. One way to fix failing inner city schools is to force middle and upper class families to send their children to them and watch the parents fight for a better system. Another way is to give the inner city children the opportunity to attend the good schools that the middle and upper class children attend. Only one of these ways is possible in a free country.
Another way is to give the inner city children the opportunity to attend the good schools that the middle and upper class children attend. Only one of these ways is possible in a free country.
I think we've gotten to the part where we agree more than we disagree. I'm all for vouchers, as long as they meaningfully give poor students a way into different schools. My criticism isn't philosophical, it's pragmatic: I think vouchers could make things better (or at least, see the possibility. Actual outcomes TBD.) I also think that, administered poorly, they could make things dramatically worse.
The problem is that, for the sake of cheapness, I fear that the "worse" option is a lot more likely than the better one. And when I hear things like...
"if the voucher is for less than the current full funding of the children, I see no problem."
...then I'm here to say: I see a problem there. A big one. The devil, as always, is in the details.
1) If the voucher can't be used by the poor, but can be used by the wealthy (relative within a specfic school district), the school district will lose its most well-equipped kids. This will harm the education of the poorer kids, furthering inequality. And because the voucher doesn't fully fund a good education, they can't use the voucher.
1. School vouchers will turn out exactly as housing vouchers have.
Take a look at this article. If you take people who are not well behaved and move them into neighborhoods with a better class of people, they don't suddenly start behaving properly. They just continue behaving badly in their new nice neighborhood, which isn't very nice for their neighbors and which makes the nice neighborhood less nice.
Here's another anecdote from Megan Non-McArdle, though obviously being a good liberal, she's not in the least bit against housing vouchers.
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2. Vouchers = busing. It's the exact same thing.
I have never seen you address the following argument against vouchers: It's not the schools, it the kids!
Parents who are well behaved and reasonably bright tend to associate with other people people who are well behaved and reasonably bright. They congregate and buy houses in the same sort of neighborhood. They send their children who also happen to be well behaved and reasonably bright to schools which just happen to turn out "good."
Then there are people who are not very smart and perhaps as a result not well behaved. These people tend to send their children to schools which somehow turn out to be "bad" and "fail" to a great extent.
You are saying that parents of kids in "bad" schools should be able to attend "good" schools.
But not great schools, like your prep school! No, those schools should continue to be filled only with children like you. It's the schools, probably filled with kids with "big sprayed permed hair" and "lavish eye make up," "Catholic schools" filled with the children of "plumbers and bodega owners" who should get the kids from "bad" schools.
All you'll be doing is transferring kids who aren't bright or well behaved to schools with a better (but not stupendous!) class of students.
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4. I am not white, and I attended a "failing" school in suburb of Atlanta. Between my 9th and 12th grade years, half the kids dropped out. We had an armed policeman on guard at all times and there was an annual check for drugs with dogs and police.
The reason the school was bad was because most of the students in the school were stupid and many were badly behaved. There were non-stupid, well behaved kids at the school, but we were a definite minority. Fortunately, our school had a tracking system, but in the classes in which everyone was mixed together, ugh! Class proceeded at a glacial pace.
If you had transferred the dumb kids or the badly behaved kids to different schools, I'm not sure what it good it would do. They wouldn't suddenly become smarter or better behaved. The "good" school would just have more problems to deal with.
It would have been a different matter if you had transferred the good students. But do you really think a public school would be allowed to distinguish between dumb kids and smart kids?
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In sum, why don't you ever ever take the quality of the kids involved into account when making arguments for vouchers?
Also, you've admitted that the prep school you attended will never accept voucher kids. So why don't you show a bit of sympathy for the parents who want to keep their kids away from the voucher kids? It's not just your parents who made sacrifices and paid through the nose. All you do is scream that they're contemptible.
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Jeff Licquia (@ 5:09 PM) says that all we need to do is identify what "River City" did to fix all its educational problems, and do likewise. Unfortunaltely, that's not possible.
What River City did, through taking advantage of its location and shrewd use of zoning laws, is ensure that few dysfunctional families live in River City (at least, as compared to any nearby poor urban area). Essentially, they have kept out the problem students. Thus, their schools have little difficulty educating the already good students they have.
Vouchers may have some effect on this problem, because parents who care about their children's education will be able to create communities of motivated parents and students in private or charter schools. What vouchers do not help is the problem of unconcerned parents. My wife teaches in an urban school system. Many of her students come to school with no knowledge of colors, shapes, numbers, the alphabet, or personal hygene. They can, however, tell her who was on the Letterman show the night before.
The point I am trying to make is that bad schools are far more a symptom of dysfunction in a community than a cause of that dysfunction. In large urban areas, it has long been the decision of most upper and middle class families to deal with the the poor and uneducated by avoiding them. The result has been that we have entire school systems made up of students for whom lack of education and job skills is the norm. Having little contact with any middle class people, why should they ever expect to enter the middle class? Meanwhile, in other, nearby, schools systems jobs and education are the norm. And this reinforces expectations that every student will (or at least should) graduate and develop some marketable skills.
I can see only one solution to this, and nobody (whether liberal or conservative) is going to like it very much. Poor urban neighborhoods (and school districts) will have to be broken up. Bulldozed, if necessary. And the former residents would then have to be provided with housing in suburban and exurban communities. Only when each public school district has a similar, but manageable, number of problem students to educate will we find out who really has a good education plan and good teachers, and who does not.
But this would mean that the poor would cease to be a voting bloc, so liberal politicians will hate it. It would also mean that upper and middle class communities would have to accept the challenge of educating (not to mention living close to) challenging students, which is not exactly a conservative's dream come true. So I don't expect to see it happen anytime soon.
"I think that most of the political will to 'fix the schools' actually comes from the middle class."
Whose schools are, by and large, OK. So I'd need a little evidence for that.
Here's a counterexample:
http://reason.tv/video/show/60.html
The Lab Schools' tuition is certainly expensive, but the Obama's haven't been paying nearly so much. Children of a University employee are eligible to attend at a half tuition rate; children of parents who both work for the University attend essentially for free. I imagine most parents would think it crazy to turn down an opportunity to send their children to one of the best schools in the country at so large a discount.
I decline to speculate on where the Obamas might have sent their children had they not been eligible for the University employee discount.
"What River City did..."
...none of which was actually in my (much shorter) comment.
And your "solution" has been done before: integration and busing. What happened? Once the schools gets below a certain quality level, the middle class stops fighting and goes somewhere else. So now, instead of a burnt-out district and a decent district, you have two burnt-out districts.
You could, I suppose, forbid people from moving. But I doubt that will fly.
Jeff:
No, we couldn't stop people from moving. What we might be able to do would be to require that no public housing project have more than 4 units, and that none be closer than a mile from any other such housing project. That would put some poor people in every neighborhood in the state, but never enough to hit the saturation point. Since I believe that hitting a "saturation point" is what causes a school district to burn out, this is one way to avoid it. The other thing it would do is require the upper and middle class to face facts and toughen up. It's easy to lament problems of crime and education, but do nothing to solve them them, when those problems are concentrated in some remote place. When they are in your neighborhood, however, you sort of have to face them.
I have to admit that a lot of people would try very hard to avoid this, and commenter "as" (right before my first post) links to an atricle describing the difficulties involved in trying someting like what I suggest. So, I don't think that it would be easy. On the other hand, I don't have any other ideas. Do you?
How's about we stop pretending we live in the nineteenth century and move on from publicly funding education and make that the parents responsibility? Which is where it properly belongs now that the means to efficiently educate any child, anywhere exists. Remove the local pols, the local education unions and the situation corrects itself in the marketplace, as it should.
Brad L - If you take students out of the public schools your also reducing the schools cost, not perhaps on a one for one basis (because their our economies of scale, and also because a lot of the schools costs come in bigger chunks than one student (you don't fire a teacher with each kid that leaves, or close a school down with each dozen or hundred). More importantly you provide competitive pressure for the public school to improve. If it was just a matter of resources our schools should be fine. Even the poorest school districts spend more per student in real terms than any school system did a generation or two or two (at most three) ago. Real per student spending has been roughly doubling per generation. But the we don't seem to have gotten a return on the additional investment. Why keep moving along the same path, why not try something new?
My hope would be a mixture of both private and public schools, and a whole lot more effort (as China and Europe do) helping kids identify and develop their strengths earlier in their lives.
posted by zic
I agree with what you said about helping students develop their skills, however I wanted to take about an assumption many Americans make that is completely incorrect. I wanted to tell everyone that the Chinese education systems is horrible. I know because of personal experience. I live and work at a University in China as an English teacher and I also work at several private schools part time.
The public schools in this country revolve around students passing a test, not around their actually ability. High School students go to school from 7 am to 9 pm 6 days a week 10 months a year.. On Sunday, they have a half day. Most of the high school students look exhausted all the time, and don't get enough sleep, or eat well. The best students are just good at memorizing the answers and know how to effectively answer test questions, but their actual knowledge and ability is somewhat limited. The average Chinese high school student knows calculus, and a lot about the sciences, but he has little sometimes no real creative ability. They also study English for 6 years but most can't speak any by the time they graduate.
If the high school is bad, in many ways, the Universities are worse. Students in Universities only study subjects in their given field instead of a broad array of knowledge. Even at the best Universities, most of the teachers only have master's degrees. There is absolutely no administrative oversight into the teachers curriculum or classes either. The Chinese government knows about its educational weaknesses and encourages students to study at Universities overseas. That's why every year a growing number of Chinese students apply to US universities, our education is better as a whole.
Cheating is another serious problem in China, both in high schools and colleges alike. Chinese students cheat in ways American students wouldn't even dare to try or even think about. The first time I asked my English major college students to write a paper in English, I was shocked by how much plagiarism there was not only off of the internet but also of their fellow classmates. When I've given tests, students tried to keep their notes, their books, made cheat-sheets, messaged the answers to their friends, hidden answers on their phones. They openly looked at other students answer sheets and even asked each other questions during the test!
The only real advantage I think the Chinese education system has over the American system is that (other than when they are taking tests) the students behavior is much better than that of their American counterparts. They are taught to respect their teachers and show that respect in every lesson. But this advantage has a serious flaw as well, often the students never question what they learn in school, they don't learn how to do research and discover things for themselves, and they lack the independent spirit that I think every American is proud of whatever his political views are.
Yes Yancey Ward I do agree with you!
Money is not the problem but politics! Unable or unwilling to enforce discipline is the problem among teachers and students. Sort of like a virus spreading the disease of bloody mindedness, careless-ness, bullying and low self esteem through out the system!
"You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow ear"
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If you really want to reform the worst public schools, start expelling the disruptive non-learners early in the process, by the 2nd or 3rd grade, or, at the very least, segregate them together with a different type of curriculum designed to address their specific social problems. If you are unwilling to do this, then you are simply condemning all the children in that school to educational failure and a life spent in poverty.
This is why private schools are really more successful- they can discriminate against non-learning, disruptive students. Indeed, if you go to a voucher system that prevents such triaging, you will simply recreate the problems in the private system.
Posted by Yancey Ward | September 11, 2008 2:30 PM
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The responsibility of the local/county/state government is to provide an education to children, not to provide an entitlement to the teacher's union. If the public schools are failing (and in many cases they are), then competition should be encouraged via vouchers, charter schools, and/or other mechanisms. The bottom line is that the Democrats are in bed with the teachers' unions and have been for as long as I can remember.
Obama is dead wrong that more money will solve the problem (when has it ever?). Without the right to choose alternative schools (ie., competition), there will be no solution to this problem. Without dismantling the entrenched bureaucracies controlled by people who cannot be fired, the problem will not be solved. Unfortunately, to many or most Democrats, the interests of the unions and entrenched bureaucracies are more important than those of the children and their parents.
It's not really that complicated. But solving the problem does require political risk, and Dems are averse to risking the loss of support of unions.
Mark Amerman @ 3:04 PM described a program that is in essence what we already have in Minnesota.
Who cares about what happens to the kids in the bottom 10 percent; they quite often wind up in prison. The strength of a society is in how well it's middle and elites do.
One thing that vouchers might do is put low IQ kids in middle class schools, which just ruins those schools and does nothing for those low IQ'ers (I mean that's how they were born).
Vouchers would only be desirable if they help the middle-class or to help that small percentage of the underclass born with the talents to escape the underclass.
suburban schools = good = unionized
urban schools = not so good = unionized
suburbs = whiter, more cash
city schools = darker, less cash
What gives, libertarian elf? Can't see how knocking out organized labor saves the world.
My memory may be fuzzy, but I don't remember anyone being too upset the Chelsea went to Sidwell Friends......of course, DC schools are in a league all by themselves..... - jwh
I was upset she went to Sidwell. They always used to beat us at soccer.
Bruno says that "religious nutjobs" bother him. Exactly what it is that those nutjobs propose that he finds more coersive than the authoritarian state that the religion of liberalism currently imposes? Currently I can not opt out of social security, can not sell my house to whomever I want for whatever reason I want, hire whomever I want for whatever reason I want. In a few years I won't be able to buy the kind of light bulbs I want. Current proposals from adherents of the religion of global warming would regulate what kind of flowers I give my wife on mother's day. Seems like a pretty totalitarian reach. Religious conservatives propose no such pervasive intrusion into people's lives.
I have two highschool aged children who go to two different schools-private and public. We have chosen the schools more on the basis of social environment than any other thing. Reason? Knowing my kids feel safe, are generally happy, and treated with respect does alot more for their education than scrutinizing teaching methods and curriculum.
Also, has anyone addressed the issue of transportation? We take advantage of the "school of choice", but there is no bussing for kids out of the district. How many parents would be willing to drive 30 mi daily back and forth like we do? This is very common in the rural area we live in. How would a voucher help a family in this case? Do most private schools provide bussing? Ours doesn't. I'm not complaining....I feel lucky we have the choices available, private and public. But I know that not all families have the driving time/gas money for this to be a real option.
What is intolerable to me is when people agree that the public schools are no good, yet rather than try to fix them they decide the best option is to bail on them and support private schools with gov't money--which often are not much better (Dayton, Ohio for example).
Asher: Shouldn't you at least use good grammar when talking about how the bottom 10% of kids do in school?
The school districts have already become modern-day segregation. Unless there is an education revolution where every American child receives the same care irrespective of race and societal status, neither vouchers nor more public funding will help.
I came from a school district where my childhood school was based on the district that I belonged to, However, when I got to highschool, my hometown and other surrounding towns had a pact where students from any of those towns could choose any highschool in either their hometown or any other participating town.
It is rather hypocritial of Obama to talk about the virtues of public education and the need to fix what needs to be fixed, and that parents and towns should send their kids to public schools, but when it comes to his family, his kids go to a private school.
True leadership is leading by example. Obama clearly fails this test and emphasizes how beholden to the teachers unions he is.
The biggest problem is as the author stated: bloated bureaucracies. School Districts are like our Federal Government, they spend too much. One problem is unfunded mandates. For example, I noticed that a local school here had a new asphalt parking lot put in, yet the old one didn't look that bad to me. How many books could have been purchased instead of waiting maybe one or two more years before resurfacing the parking lot. However, it is my opinion that the reason kids are failing in school is the curriculum. We need to get back to the basic 3, reading, writing and arithmetic. Forget about the politically correct socialized nonsense currently being taught, starting with English immersion classes for those who do not speak English. Unfortunately, schools have become propaganda centers for the liberal elite, such as 'The Global Warming Myth' and mandated sex education to kids too young to know the difference, particularly the 'tolerance' movement towards homosexuality. Let's let kids be the innocent lives that they should be and not bombard them with information that they are not ready to understand at too early an age. My last pet peeve about public schools is teacher's unions. The schools curriculum should be determined by the local school districts and the teacher's unions should have NO say whatsoever. It is fine for the unions to protect workers, but that is as far as it should go. Moreover, mega-schools like the Los Angeles Unified School District are the epitome of 'big government'. The district has become so large that it is incapable of serving the people. The primary reason is simple greed and corruption. There is too much money at stake for the school power brokers to give up and allow the school district to be broken down into smaller, more efficient systems. More money is NOT the answer, it only prolongs the inevitable waste and mis-management.
What is intolerable to me is when parents who have exercised school choice for themselves then oppose it for everyone else. Of course, Obama has little choice; the teacher's unions have far too firm a grip on the Democratic party for any of their politicians to buck its wishes.
Let's get real here, you have complete freedom to choose to spend your own money on a private school for your kids. Obama supports that as does almost every other mainstream politician. By 'school choice' you mean something that would be called socialism anywhere else. Take cars. Obama may have a nice car that costs over $30K. Does that mean he opposes 'car choice' for people who can't afford such a new car unless he demands the gov't provide everyone with 'car vouchers'? Get down to it, even if you support vouchers it really isn't 'school choice'. Unless the voucher is a blank check there will always be private schools that the poor or even middle class cannot afford. It's only 'intolerable' unless you happen to believe that it's wrong that people with more money have access to things that people with less money don't....in which case you've basically ditched the system of the world for the entire course of human history.
Megan, try to get this right because you get it wrong over and over.... It would only be hyprocisy if Obama was getting taxpayer money to send his kid to a private school while opposing it for everyone else. Using his own money to send his own kids to a private school is no different than a parent who uses his own money to send his kid to an exclusive camp instead of the public park/playground accross the street.
One more point, not a thing is lost due to Obama's or anyone else's call to use private school. Obama pays not a penny less in school taxes due to his decision to pay for a private school but by doing so he gives the Chicago system one less kid to worry about...(and assuming he is paying the market price for private school might also be providing some profit that the private school can use for scholarships for kids that normally couldn't afford them).
The quality of the Chicago Public Schools is really besides the point. The University of Chicago Lab School where Obama sends his kids is among the finest schools in the country. Plenty of people from "normal" suburbs with fine schools fight like crazy to get their kids there. The kids and parents both must take a battery of tests designed to weed out all but the most promising students. Like the University itself, low income students get substantial financial aid, and the Lab school probably has a substantial affirmative action program, but I'm sure that the majority of students come from educated backgrounds for the reasons that Megan described. I bet that the Obamas would still send their kids to the Lab school even if the Chicago schools were above average.
ps: as University of Chicago employees, the Obamas pay discounted tuition, not market price. I don't see that as being unfair though; this discount is a benefit like subsidized health insurance that allows the University to pay its employees less than they otherwise would. I have a friend who works for the University primarily for the discounted tuition her three kids receive from the Lab school.
Now if this were an article about Sarah Palin, perhaps linking her own family's circumstances to her policies related to sex education, everybody on the right would be absolutely livid at the rampant sexism that causes the mainstream media to attack this poor woman for her own personal family circumstances.
So, Megan... what gives?
Argh. This is such a complicated and charged issue.
Okay first. The issue isn't the money. Schools can get by with less money. Make less copies, skimp on janitors, etc.
The issue is actually the community.
When schools are 'ours', then everyone is a stakeholder in improving or maintaining them. I work in Florida and one of our problems is that the retirees feel they have no incentive to maintain our schools. They have no kids in them. Once public education becomes 'those people', you can kiss it goodbye. A perfect example is the New Orleans schools system. Everyone who can afford to is in private school. The public schools have NO support because... the people who make the most difference in politics have their kids in private school.
And even if bags of money were dumped on the schools, the students are in a community of students where home pathologies are the norm. They have no other strong students to make friends with, and so they can either hide their light under a bushel, or be ostracized.
The point that the consumers of education arent the parents, they are the employers, and the society at large is only half right. Most parents want the best for their kids. They may pursue it in a bass-ackwards fashion, but they love their kids.
That said, society has a real stake in good public schools. Not just putting resources into them, but having your kids cheek to jowl with other kids of different backgrounds so they don't become 'those people'.
Not lastly, how many of your parents could have afforded to send their children to private schools WITH vouchers? Mine couldn't. My mom raised 3 sons on a day care workers salary. We were bright but not stellar students.
Lastly, certainly clearing out the deadwood among the teachers, or at least setting benchmarks they had to work towards, is an excellent idea. (I say as a HS Teacher)
But so is making sure the parents and students understand that if they are not committed to graduation and educational success, THEY can be disciplined. I've taught in the burbs and the inner city and one of the biggest differences was that administrators were AFRAID to give students consequences in the inner city. The school board didn't support them.
And so students grew up not knowing what consequences were, until they were in the world where the price was HIGH. This did no favors to anybody.
To spell it out more clearly:
If the Obamas' decision to send their daughters to private school is evidence of the faults with Democratic party education policy, then Bristol Palin's pregnancy is evidence of the failure of Republican party abstinence-only eduction and lack of working toward more widespread use of contraceptives.
I'm fine either way, but fair is fair - either both are in bounds, or neither.
It is rather hypocritial of Obama to talk about the virtues of public education and the need to fix what needs to be fixed, and that parents and towns should send their kids to public schools, but when it comes to his family, his kids go to a private school.
How is this any different than the "chickenhawk" argument that asserts that any columnist or politician who supports a war should be enlisting either themselves or their family to join the cause?
(Hint: I don't buy the chickenhawk argument, either.)
Boonton -
The difference is if we want a nice car we aren't forced to also pay for the cheap car. We just pay for the nicer car. If we had a program (or a proposal for a program) where we had to pay taxes for a car, and many people couldn't afford to pay them and also buy a nicer car, then a reasonable argument could be made that supporters of this program or proposal where against "car choice".
TH
If the Obamas' decision to send their daughters to private school is evidence of the faults with Democratic party education policy, then Bristol Palin's pregnancy is evidence of the failure of Republican party abstinence-only eduction and lack of working toward more widespread use of contraceptives.
I'd say the problem here is your comparing apples and oranges. If Obama was advocating a law prohibiting people from using private schools...mandating public schools for everyone then I'd say his use of a private school would be an issue. But he isn't. He is advocating making public schools better (who isn't?) but he is for the individual's freedom to spend their own money on education from private sources. If you are for that freedom there will ALWAYS be people taking advantage of education that poorer people cannot afford even with the most generous voucher program in the world.
To see the problem what would Megan say about a politican who supported a $5000 voucher but sent their kids to a $38,000 a year school? The poor person is still denied the 'school choice' compared to the politician advocatng a $40,000 voucher.
Abstinence advocates, on the other hand, tell us they have an educational program that works so yea it's notable failure here would be a legit. gripe (a gripe they could counter with by saying othing works 100%).
Tim Fowler:
The difference is if we want a nice car we aren't forced to also pay for the cheap car. We just pay for the nicer car. If we had a program (or a proposal for a program) where we had to pay taxes for a car, and many people couldn't afford to pay them and also buy a nicer car, then a reasonable argument could be made that supporters of this program or proposal where against "car choice".
This doesn't make any sense at all. Obama pays taxes for public schools just like the person who uses the public schools pays taxes. He doesn't pay anything less because he is using a private school, he pays more since he must not only pay taxes for the public school but must pay the private school's bill too. As I pointed out, he is, in a small way, helping the public schools by giving them a few less kids to have to teach.
"What is intolerable to me is when parents who have exercised school choice for themselves then oppose it for everyone else."
I agree with Aaron Bergman above. This is intellectually dishonest.
This is like saying that if Obama purchases a car to drive to work rather than taking public transportation that he's a hypocrite if he doesn't support the government taking money away from public transportation in order to subsidize the private auto industry and people buying cars from Ford or BMW.
Someone might choose to use a slippery euphemism like "transportation choice" to refer to either of these two very different things, but pretending these are at all the same or that someone is a hypocrite for doing the first and opposing the latter is indeed dishonest.
...pretending these are at all the same or that someone is a hypocrite for doing the first and opposing the latter is indeed dishonest.
It certainly isn't dishonest. Those of us who wish to see a greater application of market forces in the provision of public education indeed see a large measure of hypocrisy when people whose own affluence allows them a choice of schools oppose an educational structure that would allow others the same privilege. Now, such people may hold good faith views as to why they oppose giving others the choice of schools that they themselves enjoy, but that still doesn't mean the word "hypocrisy" can't be applied, and it certainly doesn't mean educational pro-choicers are dishonest.
Jasper (and Megan)
Once again hypocrisy means advocating something for others that you don't hold for yourself. If Obama or anyone opposed vouchers yet accepted gov't funds to send their own kids to private schools that would be hypocrisy.
That's it. You are free to argue that vouchers are a great policy but that doesn't make those who disagree (or it seems in this case even those who fail to agree enough) hypocrites anymore than a whole language nut can call phonics advocates hypocrites because he feels they are depriving kids of the best possible education.
Boonton - Sure Obaba pays taxes that go to public schools. That's irrelevant in this context. He can afford to do so, while also paying for private schools. Not everyone can. The point is that the policies he supports force other parents (who can't afford to pay for both public and private schools) to pay for public schools, and many of them don't have the additional funds left over to also pay for private schools.
Him sending his own kids to private school doesn't hurt anyone else, it might even have positive externalities, but it shows hypocrisy when he also supports policies that effectively take away that choice from others. Its not "opposing vouchers" in isolation that amounts to preventing others from doing this, but supporting the current system of public schools and public school funding, combined with opposing vouchers. Its supporting taking the money away and in return giving one choice of how education will be handled, while Obama himself (who has enough that he can "double pay"), chooses another choice.