Vouchers Poll: Whatddya think?

I'm wondering what the education hawks think about changing the K-12 system from the inside-out.

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Although I see the logic on both sides of the debate, I would (and did) vote no. I do not like the idea of segregating american education at the lower levels. There are better ways to improve the system, although I doubt throwing money at it is the answer. We could employ technology to supplement live teaching. An algorithim could decide when a student is ready to move on to the next stage. In short, intelligent competency based education. This would save money (long term) in two ways. First, those who are bored and already have (or will gain) the requisite knowledge would be moved to the next level, immediately. This would benefit those who learn faster by letting them move on, while also cutting down on seat time. Second, there would be a motive to educate, rather than to keep students in class (hopefully.) In addition, this system would also benefit those who learn a little slower. Instead of getting pushed through they system (seat time) with a 'C', educators would be forced to explain until something was understood.

Utah is in the beginning of changing their K-12 system to this model (kindof), and I can't help to think that this is a better solution than vouchers; Where concerned citizens run away from problem schools rather than fixing them.

Tony
A complicated subject

 

I believe that vouchers would hurt students because the proposals I've seen haven't provided any standards for schools where the vouchers may be spent. I believe that in that case below standard schools could be started up that compete on lowest price. It might take a year for the parents to find this out but in the mean time their child's academic career would be placed in a tailspin.

The proposals that I've seen would also hurt the public schools by taking money away from them.

 

Duh! Isn't that the point?

 

Bill et. al.

it seems to me that most of the objections to vouchers, besides the church/state issues perhaps, are objections to the process it would take to transition to a voucher based system.... not objections to the idea of a voucher based system in itself. People are clearly worried about what would happen to public schools, but I suppose public schools could be supplied with a "fly or die" grant to catch up to speed with the competing private and religious schools.

Chris

 

Frankly, I don't care what happens to public schools. Is the goal here to save the schools, or to save our kids?

Of course, there will be some problems with the transition, and some children will be affected, but are they not affected now by a system that doesn't work?

The point is that increased competition increases the overall quality. Under the President Bush's proposal, only those parents of kids in failing schools would qualify for vouchers. How could we deny them the opportunity to escape the current situation?
I pay $10,000/year for 2 kids. My daughter is 8 and does highschool level Spanish.....my son is 4 and has been reading for 6 months. Is this isolated success? YEP! Isolated to all the kids who go to their school. Fortunately, I can afford it (barely), but some of the parents are on the line. Vouchers would help them.
Also, it sould force schools to compete, which it to say to raise their level of quality. They, for the most part, are stuck in a failing paradigm. They have no incentive for continuous improvement. It is sad because schools are the place where we cannot afford to have poor quality.

Don't get me wrong, I think that there are many schools that do well, but what about thse that don't? Our Kids, thus our future suffers. I just cannot fathom a good argument against vouchers.

 

I'm undecided about vouchers.

Basically, they would introduce competition and choice into a monolithic state education system.

Standards would be a problem, as Bill Huffman suggests. One option would be to institute state exams administered periodically through a student's education career, and make passage of those exams a prerequisite for advancement to higher grades. (They could be retaken, so kids wouldn't be abandoned if they fail.) Exam pass rates could be posted for each school, allowing parents to identify strong and weak schools. Many states already have similar exams, so this wouldn't be a dramatic departure.

Another common concern is that vouchers would drain funds from the public school system. This could be addressed in various ways. Today we fund schools according to enrollment, at x dollars per head. Suppose that a parent opting out got a voucher for y dollars, a slightly smaller amount than x. That would mean that for every kid whose parents opt to exercise the voucher, the school could receive x - y dollars to spend on the remaining kids.

This troubles me, since it would be a clear disincentive to quality, since it would reward public schools for the number of kids that leave. But it would raise the per-student spending in the weakest schools that need it most.

Another objection is that public school systems have high fixed costs in the form of existing plant. But all these new private schools arising to serve the voucher kids would would need to find facilities, and how better to get them than to buy or lease redundant schools from public school systems. So a voucher system would definitely force public school systems to downsize, but this could be a money making opportunity for them.

Concerns about segregating primary and secondary education have been raised. I'm not sure what kind of segregation is being referred to here: race, class, religious or what. I agree that this is probably the most serious objection.

Class segregation already exists. Wealthy parents in weak school districts already send their kids to private schools. A voucher system would just widen the educational choices for the less favored.

To the extent that race is correlated with class, race discrimination already exists. The wealthy already opt out, and that includes wealthy Asians (especially), blacks and Hispanics right along with the whites. Vouchers would just give those left behind some options of their own.

The biggest problem I have with vouchers is that I see it as a Trojan horse for the religious right. If there is a danger of segregation here, it's cultural segregation.

Perhaps the strongest argument for public schools has been that they give all Americans a similar cultural foundation. Schools are second only to parents in socializing children into society. Over the last 200 years, they have done tremendous work transforming a crowd of squabbling immigrants into a coherent nation. I think that the public schools have done more than any other single institution in creating the American people.

What I fear is groups segregating themselves on cultural grounds. The motive thrust behind the voucher proposals are the fundamentalist Christians. They want to put their kids in Christian-only Bible-believing schools at taxpayer expense. They want separate education for those called apart by God from this evil fallen world.

All of this is opposed by the left, but the left will inevitably come around soon. They will realize that vouchers will allow their own "diversity" fantasies full reign: We will have state-funded schools for the left's own separatist communities: la raza schools, Afro-centric schools, Farrakhan schools, womyn's-only sisterhood schools, Islamic sharia schools, postmodern gibberish schools, socialist labor schools, gay and lesbian schools and countless more. The left can follow the religious right in in its own secularized version of separating themselves from this fallen world of racism, sexism and class-exploitation.

Anybody that wants to indoctrinate their community's youth in their own peculiar system, no matter how weird, will now have the public funds to do it. Obviously one could argue that state-run public schools have been indoctrinating youth all along. I agree with that.

But at least they have been indoctrinating them in roughly the same thing.

 

I still don't see that any of the things you bring up are problematic. Challenging? Maybe, but not problematic. The academic standards will be easiest to implement, as they will be set and expected by the consumer. Because of the exisitance of choice, schools will have to do something to create an advantage. It will be difficult to attempt to gain a price advantage, because of the exisitence of the public school system that puts a quasi price floor on the product. This will leave quality as the differentiator.

As far as draining from the public schools is concerned, I say again.......who cares? I care about the education of youth, not that the system is saved. Sure there will be fixed costs. This will mean that the schools will have seek to reduce variables costs, and be more cretive about the uses of its infrastructure. One things is for sure....when given the choice between my childrens' education and the public school in my district, the choice is clear.

Religious Right- Adam Smith that when organizations meet the needs of society, they will prosper. If there is such a demand for religious schools, so be it. I don't have to send my kids there because I too have a choice.

Cultural Foundation- This is where public schools fail miserably. Generally, there is one perspective in our school systems....one than leans to the Left. I take issue with this. Moral and Cultural issues should be left to parents. Let the schools deal with education. Sure, there is much to be gained socially from our academic settings, but don't force me to integrate. I am offended at that . Create the environment and let us choose. Any time there is a demand ....there will be a supply. If schools can't compete, they are out. Sorry to be so abrubt, but it's time we start caring more about our kids, and less about the system.


There will be some school doing things so right, that they will make up for those that are slacking.

 

It seems to me that vouchers are taking dollars that will mostly be going to the religious schools. Have the courts ruled on the legality of vouchers?

 

Fascinating thread!

Having had dealings with the California education system from the local to the state level, I can state unequivocally that the system is broken because the focus of the system is not upon the children, but the proliferation of the system itself.

The argument that educational innovations would pull money from the public schools is, at best, a hollow one. In the few instances across the U.S. where vouchers have been allowed to be tried, there is no evidence that the pulbic schools in the area have been crippled.

(By the way, Bill, the courts have ruled that vouchers are legal).

In California, charter schools (non-sectarian free public schools with somewhat less regulation) were put forth as a "compromise" to vouchers. Since charters are non-religious and cannot practice selective enrollment, they appear to address the problems that vouchers face. One of the stated goals for charter schools was to introduce competition in public education.

Unfortunately, something that should have been obvious seems to have been overlooked by those who drafted the Charter law: Monopolies do not like competition and will do whatever they can to eliminate it. Professional educrats and teachers unions (via their purchased legislators) have neutralized charters by having them placed directly under the jurisdiction of the very schools with which they are supposed to compete and have given their competitors the right to authorize, fund and revoke their schools charters.

(Let's put Wal-Mart in charge of approving and funding K-Marts and see how long K-Mart stays in business! Absurd, isn't it?)

Our county superintendent of schools has a higher salary than the Governor. While teachers and students meet in substandard classrooms (or portables) with outdated (or non-existent) resources, our district and county offices of education are opulent, overstaffed and filled with state-of-the-art everything.

The California Education Code is more bloated than a Microsoft operating system (thousands of pages) and is designed to create a huge bureaucracy of middle and upper management to interpret and enforce an often contradictory set of regulations. Meanwhile, students and teachers have to settle for whatever few dollars are left over after administration takes its chunk.

The idea behind reforms such as vouchers and charters is quite simple: The money should follow the child. If a school does not meet the needs of parents and children, they should be allowed to take their business (and money) elsewhere. This simple principle has been applied to almost every aspect of U.S. life except the public schools. Regardless of where my house is located, I am free to choose where I eat and shop. The same should be true about where, how and by whom my children are educated.

Tony Pina
Faculty, School of Education
California State University San Bernardino

 

wow Tony...

Wow, Tony...

you have some strong points indeed.

I didn't say this at the beginning, but you are all helping me do a presentation on vouchers this friday. Thanks for helping with my opinion research!

 

One more thought, an angle that hasn't been brought into this...

While vouchers may not provably improve academic performance (arguable), they would almost definitely improve neighborhoods.

I mean to say that white flight, black flight, upper class hispanic and asian flight happens when schools in their urban and suburban areas degenerate. They move away, trash the local neighborhood, and choose a better one for one simple reason: we choose our child's school by choosing a neighborhood.

If vouchers were introduced, rich folks would be encouraged to stay in the same neighborhood more since they could "choose" a school that would require a commute, and still keep the same home. People wouldn't HAVE to move away and flock around the same school because they wouldn't necessarily choose their school by choosing a neighborhood.

Interestingly enough, this "conservative position" would integrate society more with respect to neighborhoods, and perhaps curb violent crime in the inner cities that festers because of the conglomeration of lower classes in the same spot.

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Christopher,

I was reading some research on the effects of vouchers on student achievement. I'll try to retrieve that publication for you. As I recall, voucher programs had a positive effect on achievement.

Tony Pina
CSU San Bernardino

 

presentation went well....

Thanks guys.

My presentation went well.

Overall, after researching and reading your posts I am in favor of vouchers.

However, I would watch and see what happens. For the most part, state funding comes with strings attached. This project would not only socialize the public schools but it would aim to do so with the private schools as well. After vouchers are relied upon, some "Bible believing" Christian schoolsm for instance, may have to allow a certain quota of gay teachers, etc. etc.

I think the privatized nature of private schools is what makes them capable of competition and cleaning our their infrastructure so efficiently. If that freedom is violated by strings attached to vouchers because of the need for homogeneity then there would be a serious objection I would raise to vouchers. I don't think that principle is different for religious or non-religious schools.

However, at this point, its hard to tell if things would go in that direction or not.

Chris

 

I think one of strengths of private education is that the schools have choices. They can choose to admit certain students or employ certain teachers. The goal is to educate. That said, I think religious schools will be challenged significantly. I am am not interested in making sure more kids have a literal understanding of the Bible, or that they become predisposed to have a certain view of homosexuality. Rather, I would like to seem them gain criticalk thinking skills that will help them be productive members of society. The point where education is imposed upon by ideology is where there will be the biggest problem.

Also, schools must retain the right to be selective. From a social perspective, it may be hypothesized that admitting any student who applies to a school will have the effect of degrading the educational experience of those who are not from underpriveleged situations. This does not solve our problem either. Perhaps we could benefit from tax credits. It is a tough one I admit. bu allowing some type of choice will undoubtedly improve he overall state of education in this country.

 

The problem with private schools is that most people cannot afford them. Vouchers are an attempt to provide lower income students with the opportunity to attend some of these schools. Where they have been allowed to operate, vouchers seem to enjoy a level of success.

The religion issue, in many people's eyes, is a huge one. Charter schools (again, where they are allowed to operate) can provide some of the choice that vouchers do. Since they must be non-sectarian, the religion issue is side-stepped completely.

In California, charters are being crushed by both administration and teachers unions (about the only thing upon which they agree) via select legislators who owe their elections to union monies. Because California's education system is so bad and because school choice is being systematically eliminated in California, the voucher proponents are being given a significant amount of "ammunition". Look for a strong voucher initiative in California within the next few years.

Tony Piña
Faculty, CSU San Bernardino

 

As a product of the New York Public schools (and the son of two public school teachers), I also live in CA and agree the system is broken.

The difference in putting my daughter in a private Catholic high school was nothing short of amazing. She went to a much more challenging curriculum and went from C's to straight A's. When I asked her why, she said alot of her friends parents had to scrape the money together to go, so they tried really hard. When she saw how hard they worked, she decided to try too. She currently is a sophmore in the UC system and on the dean's list.

I also have a little 4 year old who will never ever see the inside of a public school, despite the cost. Like most parents, I just want the best for my kids, so they don't have to do what I have had to do to get ahead. I will now leave the soapbox.

 

I would love to have vouchers. It gets old when the public school system does not work. My son has ADHD which is fairly controlled with medication and he is also what is called GT (Gifted & Talented). The school does not address the ADHD part at all well in terms of understanding the behavior and interaction needed to get the most out of the student (everyone must fit in the mold). We add to that problem the fact that bullying is not well controlled and ADHD kids tend to over react to injustices and we have a problem. On top of that the classrooms are too large for an ADHD child and there is no moral structure. The process of attempting to get the school to work with us and dealing with all the other issues involved with ADHD has left us exhausted and frustrated. It has also left our son sad and frustrated.

I do not really blame teachers. They are over worked and over loaded, expected to do so much with so little. They have classes where they must try and deal with large numbers of children that range from those that need extra help because they are slow learners to those on the other end who need more challenges because they are bright. They have behavioral problems and are expected to know the different reactions and learning needs of those with ADHD.

Unfortunately, even if the school system is not fully doing what it should you cannot simply take your tax dollars and go elsewhere. Without vouchers, that luxury is saved for the wealthy (like Bill Clinton did). All parents should have that option.

North

 

To add more oxygen to the flames: It is not inconsequential that many of the students in my area that are enrolled in private schools, charter schools or are homeschooled are children of local public school teachers.

This is akin to the person who works at Ford or GM but decides to own a Toyota or Honda instead. Many teachers are perfectly aware of the lousy state of the sytem in which they are employed and do the best that they can, but want something better for their own children.

I train teachers for a living and know that many who go into teaching do so because they love children and want to make a difference. Then they run headlong into a system in which education decisions are made by accountants and attorneys, where school board members are trained to follow blindly whatever the superintendent and education bureaucrats recommend, where teachers are (mis) represented by union bosses and where the question, "what is the best thing for the kids" is seldom asked.

No wonder that teaching has one of the highest attrition rates of any profession. Innovations such as vouchers and charters can provide opportunities for choice, growth and improvement for teachers, as well as parents and students.

Tony Pina
Faculty, CSU San Bernardino

 

In order not to get too far off track, my answer (as an education hawk--education is my career). The ONLY way to salvage the education system is to change it from the outside-in. Reforms seldom (if ever) occur from the inside-out. This is especially true of monopolies.

What incentive does the education system have to reform itself? None. Student attendance is compulsory and the system is paid for by tax monies, which are entitlements, rather than earned. There is no market pressure to reform, nor is there any significant competition (private schools are not seen as competiton by public schools because they do not compete for the same pot of money).

The kind of reforms that are commonplace in the business world (such as elimination of layers of management when companies are forced by compeition to run "leaner and meaner") are non-existent in education, where there is a partnership between union officials, education administrators and legislators. New laws are passed which require more administration to manage, which requires more administrators, which requires more monies to be alloted toward education (little or none of which makes it down to teachers and students).

Why in the world would our county superintendent, who makes $9,000 a year more than the Governor of California and who has a $1,000,000 insurance policy (valid for life), be interested in reforming a system that provides such a comfortable living for him?

Education reform will NEVER occur at the hands of the California Teachers Association, National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers, National School Boards Association, American Association of School Administrators, the California Department of Education or the Grey Davis administration (which is beholden to the groups listed prior). These all have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.

Only when those who are (under) served by the current system begin to demand reform will reform occur. Only when there is another choice (be it vouchers, charters or some other method) to the current system will we see any notable change or improvement.

Thus endeth my tirade (for now).

Tony