School voucher support and demographics

[Tricky]

Did you read this somewhere, or are you just sure that it must be costing something somewhere?

In one of the articles cited, one of the points the voucher opponents had was that it was a taxpayer burden. So yes, I did read it, but I can't say whether it was true or just partisan complaining. However, I find it highly unlikely that they could emplace a parallel school system without incurring some significant costs. As I mentioned earlier, education is not a fungible commodity.

And what about those parents who leave town rather than send their kids to public schools in large cities?

I cannot see that the voucher program would be any more effective in preventing suburban flight than simply improving the public schools. However, neither is free either in monetary value or effort spent. In my experiencing, outsourcing reduces accountability and often, quality. The free market is not a solution to all woes.

 

[Darth Rotor]

The people who support vouchers are upper-class a-holes who want to privatize everything. They don't give a damn about education.

See, I can make blanket statements too .

Enforced bussing was hardly a solution, yet it received considerable support from altruists who thought something was gained by giving some people a leg up while at the same time screwing others with a leg down. I think you'll find that a lot of people who are supporters of vouchers are rabid opponents of bleeding heart "enforced bussing" policies. I agree with Tricky, in that treating education as some market product or good is a profound conceptual error. Education is a core societal asset, but I digress.

Both the bussing approach and the voucher approach attempts to deal with dissatisfaction with some public schools on the cheap. Neither is particularly effective in that aim. The correct, if resource intensive, solution is to invest the resources, and if need be arm the teachers and administrators with the authority and security guards, to raise the low performing schools up. Public schools should not be considered "operations on a minimum bid basis" as a rule, which far too often they seem to be. Tying the funding to property taxes is, IMO, a part of the problem.

DR

 

[Segnosaur]

If education were a fungible commodity, that might make some sense, but it is not as if the school board saves a ton of money for every student it doesn't have to educate. Unless you are going to close a lot of schools (which can lead to other problems) you still have to rent buildings, pay teachers for each subject, provide heat and electricity etc.

Some schools may have to be closed (and perhaps some teachers layed off), but it would not have to be anything wide spread (and lets face it, with the changes in population demographics now you already have schools being closed and reopened.) And, there are other places that savings would exist: fewer textbooks needed, fewer computers, etc. Some balance would have to be reached... making the value of the voucher high enough to give people more flexibility to choose their school, yet low enough so that we don't have a mass exodus out of various schools.

Also I'm very unclear on the economics of what you propose. If you take a student out of public school and put him in private school, you are still removing (in your example) $7,500 from the public school system.

Yes, you'd be removing $7,500 from the public school system, but you'd also be removing a student. That means fewer textbooks needed, fewer computers, and perhaps fewer teachers (assuming you were going to keep the same student/teacher ratio).

Removing funding from a school isn't necessarily a bad thing, as long as the per-captita funding is kept stable or even increased.

I'm also unclear as to who receives these vouchers. Is it need based? If you make it universal, you are simply reimbursing rich people part of the cost of sending their kids to private school, which I strongly oppose.

Well, those 'rich' people were paying taxes that were going to something they didn't particularly have an interest in using.

But the thing is, the 'rich' people have always been able to send their kids to private schools. I see vouchers as being aimed more at middle class families more than the rich.

The advantage of the voucher system is that it gives more flexibility to middle-income families who may have wanted to send their kids to a better school, but did not have the financial resources to do so. Giving them a voucher for part of the education costs (costs that they've already paid into) means that they have more options as to where they send their kids.

I also see no solution in any of the voucher programs that deals with problem kids. Public schools have to take them. Unless you force private schools to take them as well, then you wind up with a concentration of almost nothing but problem kids in private schools. If you're going to do that, you might as well just save a step, put up razor wire and turn them into prisons because you're just making an underculture of undesirables in our public schools.

Yeah, that last bit is somewhat over the top, I admit, but it is an extreme extrapolation of a genuine problem with vouchers.

Problem kids are always going to be 'problem kids', regardless of the number of non-problem kids around them. There are a couple of ways that a voucher system would benefit even those kids:
- As I've suggested before, if only part of the money is used for the voucher (with the rest remaing with the school board), there will be more money per capita to deal with these students. (That's assuming that money is an issue in providing their education)
- If a parent had a 'problem child' (and they actually cared about their education), then they could, in theory, try to find a school specifically geared towards handling such cases (as opposed to dumping them into a generic public school where everyone is treated the same)

 

[Billdave2]

This link is to a report by John Stossel about school vouchers.

http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Stossel/story?id=1500338

I live in South Carolina and this has been a major issue in the state, not just because of the issue with the govenor's kids in the article, but also the fact that we consistently rank at the bottom of all the states in education. I know that for my child to get a good education I will have to move to another part of town, or send him to private school. Both are very cost prohibitive. Don't get me wrong, I live in one of the better school districts in the state, but there are definate differences in the schools within the district and we just happen to live in a neighbor hood where one of the schools (middle school) that my son would have to attend is far below the standards of the rest of the district. The other two middle schools are much better, even though they have smaller budgets and higher teacher/student ratio's. One of the other middle schools is even closer to my house than the "bad" one, but I can't send my sone there. The fact is having an education monoply is bad for the consumer. So how do we fix it? If voucher's aren't the answer, and more money doesn't work, what else can we do?

 

[Magyar]

If you live in the City of Detroit and your kid attends public school, your child will be attending a school where drugs and violence are rampant. His classmates will, with few exceptions, be low achievers. Therefore, when your child turns four years old, you will go house shopping in the suburbs unless you can afford private school. I've seen it again and again, and I've done it myself. Thios leaves people who either can't solve their own problems, or don't care to. That won't result in a decent neighborhood. To improve the neighborhood, you have to keep families in it.

It wouldn't matter if you hired a private tutor for every child, gave them all spiffy laptops, and had desks made of gold. The schools would still be awful, because everyone who could afford to leave, did.

I have three main contentions.

1. The public school system in America contributes to the economic and racial segregation that is a feature of American cities.

2. School vouchers would help reduce that segregation.

3. There is no more effective way to address the problem.

Meadmaker,

I agree with pretty much everything you say, but what I don't see is how exactly you think vouchers will prevent or remedy the situation.

OK, I live in the City of Detroit, or Wats LA (or pick the inner city of your choice) I get my $7500 to send my kids to private school. The last time I looked these schools are NOT located in these neighborhoods (Ok, you can pick a few - very few exceptions but realistically they do not exist)

So,
1) how do I get my kids to these schools?
public transportation from the hood to the burbs doesn't exist. and the private school isn't going to send a limo.
2) What am I going to do with my kid after school?
Those bad elements you talk about don't vanish like a fart in the wind when school closes. They live in the neighborhood. Hang out on the corner etc. and unless you put your kid in total social isolation he's looking at social hell if not worse. Besides, if you don't want to send the kid to the school because of these kids you'll probably not want your child hanging out with them after school, right!?

So the way I see it, giving vouchers to inner city parents will only entice them even more to get the heck out of the city. Problem made worse.

 

[Beerina]

I'm opposed to school vouchers because I fail to see how taking money away from public schools helps the common good in any way.

Do you view public schools like they're a utility like water, that's always there?

But what it supplies may not be used by all the people -- some send their kids to private schools. Hence the public school needs less money since it doesn't have that student. Why provide for that student if that student isn't there?

So what do you do with that money? Spending it needlessly on an empty space is an unethical thing for government to do.

So do you refund it as taxes to everybody, reducing their tax burden a little bit? That would be OK.

Alternatively, you could just refund that family's school tax portion up to the maximum they paid for that year (given the amount of public schooling, dollar wise per student, a family "gets" sending the kid to public school is far greater than the amount that family pays in school tax per year.)

That would be OK.

Or you can do vouchers, where the money follows the pupil to other accredited schools. This would normally be an amount in excess of what the family pays. As a libertarian type, I would not be in favor of this. However, given the massive taxes that make it hard to go to a private school, it's probably better than forcing taxes into only a single public school.

We should also acknowledge that the whole sordid mess is oriented about reducing the teacher's unions. What's the hidden force politically? That bit right there.

That's hardly something new, though. Consider also the Flexible Spending Accounts, where you can, before the start of the year, have some amount of your salary set aside, pre-tax, to be used to pay for medical expenses. So far so good, but it has its downside -- any unspent money you have to just forfeit to the government at the end of the year. So ya better not set too much aside.

You also can't add or subtract amounts in the middle of the year, making it even more dangerous to use.

So why don't do this? It seems logical to let you add more to it from future pay checks, if you suddenly need it, or to stop contributing near the end of the year if it looks like you're gonna overshoot. Or better yet, just let it roll over into the next year.

But that logical step is opposed by Democrats. Why? Because that would make a FSA more useable, and thus take more pressure off the health care reform movement, and the Democrats want a massive dependency on government. FSAs thwart this. Therefore they must be hard to use and scary to use. What's the hidden agenda? That is.

 

[Meadmaker]

There are a LOT of things that "are in line" with our pocketbooks.

Amount of education, for example. Similarly, there is a correlation between amount of education and lack of religiousness, right? Hence, there will be a correlation between wealth and lack of religousness. Now, who is more likely to object to vouchers on grounds of not supporting religion: poor, religious people or wealthy, non-religious people?

And when it is the latter, why attribute it to the wealth as opposed to the obvious reason?

Did the California initiative, on which the analysis was based, include religious schools? I don't know.

Certainly some people are quite bent out of shape about the possibility of religious schools being subsidized via vouchers, and there probably is an income correlation involved. However, when economic interests happen to align with voting patterns, I think most people would say that there is an "obvious reason" that is not religious in nature.

I'm not saying that there is one, single, reason why people support vouchers or oppose them. Reasons vary from person to person. However, people who are well served by the status quo tend to want to keep it, and people not well served by the status quo tend to want to change it. That pattern shows up on this issue as well.

 

[pgwenthold]

I'm not saying that there is one, single, reason why people support vouchers or oppose them. Reasons vary from person to person. However, people who are well served by the status quo tend to want to keep it, and people not well served by the status quo tend to want to change it. That pattern shows up on this issue as well.

Perhaps you should actually read what I have written in this thread. In fact, I am all in favor of changing the status quo. For example, I have suggested funnelling money from my local school district to schools in poorer areas. The opposite of "no school vouchers" is not necessarily "status quo." You disservice yourself by assuming that is what people want.

In the more general sense, you have not shown anything that suggests that school vouchers will hurt my situation at all. Your assertions have been met with equally legitimate assertions that the main people to benefit from vouchers will be my wealthy neighbors, which ultimately would serve me well. Hence, I it seems to me that you are arguing from false premises in the first place.

You apparently don't have religiousocity data, but you can't ignore it. You see the pattern based on wealth. But there are so many other possibilities. My argument on religion still stands. There is another: perhaps wealthier people are more likely to expect to have to pay for things, whereas poor people would love to get government support to pay for things they cannot currently afford?

How's this for an analogy: the government subsidizes public transportation, so it should give vouchers that can be used to buy an SUV, provided they never use public transportation again.

 

[Meadmaker]

Yes, you'd be removing $7,500 from the public school system, but you'd also be removing a student. That means fewer textbooks needed, fewer computers, and perhaps fewer teachers (assuming you were going to keep the same student/teacher ratio).

And to see this, all we have to do is look at places where they've been implemented. I've read a lot about Milwaukee schools, and all the anti-voucher web sites talk about money leaving the public school, but I have yet to see any numbers that have anything other than, "If it weren't for vouchers, we would have more money."

- If a parent had a 'problem child' (and they actually cared about their education), then they could, in theory, try to find a school specifically geared towards handling such cases (as opposed to dumping them into a generic public school where everyone is treated the same)

Exactly. It helps deal with the "one size fits all" model of centralized education. Of course, it isn't the only way to deal with it, but it is one way.

 

[Billdave2]

How's this for an analogy: the government subsidizes public transportation, so it should give vouchers that can be used to buy an SUV, provided they never use public transportation again.

The last time I checked I was not required by law to use public transportation (or any transportation for that matter).

 

[Meadmaker]

So,
1) how do I get my kids to these schools?
public transportation from the hood to the burbs doesn't exist. and the private school isn't going to send a limo.

That's a legitimate issue. I do see that as the one down side to the idea. On the other hand, schools will spring up to meet demand to some extent. However, on average, kids will travel farther, and no matter how you distribute the cost, it still means extra expense.

2) What am I going to do with my kid after school?
Those bad elements you talk about don't vanish like a fart in the wind when school closes. They live in the neighborhood. Hang out on the corner etc.

Certainly there's some truth to that. If you live in a bad neighborhood, it won't become good just because your kid isn't in it during the school day. However, it might be the difference between staying and going. For example, there will be some parents that like their street, but not their school. There will be others that don't like either, but they know that the kid's primary social contacts will be through school, not neighborhoods, and they figure it's worth staying for whatever reason, as long as their kid is in a place they find safe. Some will still leave, but some that would have left will stay.

Vouchers aren't some sort of panacea for problems. Milwaukee didn't become a paradise, and the schools didn't become perfect. On the other hand, nothing bad happened, either, unless you cound spending money on religious schools as "bad", and that wasn't even part of the original plan.

I think it is telling that, once implemented, no voucher plan has ever been repealed through initiatives or legislative actions. Judges have shut them down, but voters have not.

So the way I see it, giving vouchers to inner city parents will only entice them even more to get the heck out of the city. Problem made worse.

I'm not following your reasoning. I can see how it doesn't solve the problem, but I can't see how it makes it worse.

 

[Admiral]

No.

Of course, that has nothing to do with public schools. If you think they don't care if they have good quality, you are maligining some of the most dedicated people in the world.

Could you please provide evidence that public school teachers care more than private school teachers? After all, you seem to think they'll be more dedicated than teachers would under a voucher system.

 

[Tricky]

Could you please provide evidence that public school teachers care more than private school teachers? After all, you seem to think they'll be more dedicated than teachers would under a voucher system.

I said no such thing. I merely responded to when you said:

...do you believe we would have a better restaurant system if areas were sliced up into districts, and each one had a state-run food court that got the same amount of money whether or not people ate there, and therefore didn't care whether they had good quality at all?

Your inference (intentional or otherwise) is that public schools are like this and teachers don't care about quality. I'm not maligning anyone. I know a lot of teachers both public and private school (and some who are both) and, for the most part, they are all dedicated.

 

[Tricky]

I'm not following your reasoning. I can see how it doesn't solve the problem, but I can't see how it makes it worse.

I think the implication is that by making vouchers available, it adds incintive to those who would like to flee the inner city. Actually, that's fairly logical.

 

[GodMark2]

Honest question to opponents of vouchers- do you believe we would have a better restaurant system if areas were sliced up into districts, and each one had a state-run food court that got the same amount of money whether or not people ate there, and therefore didn't care whether they had good quality at all?

No.

Of course, that has nothing to do with public schools. If you think they don't care if they have good quality, you are maligining some of the most dedicated people in the world.

I have to disagree with you, Tricky. But only if we include a few more requirement for these 'State Run Food Dispensaries", to make them operate more like public schools:

1) They give the food away for free.
2) They can't turn anyone away, unless they're a danger to the other customers.

Then we call them "Local Soup Kitchens" or "Food Banks".

Admiral, do you think food banks should be required to give money to patrons so they can go eat at the local McDonalds?

 

[Tailgater]

I have to disagree with you, Tricky. But only if we include a few more requirement for these 'State Run Food Dispensaries", to make them operate more like public schools:

1) They give the food away for free.
2) They can't turn anyone away, unless they're a danger to the other customers.

Then we call them "Local Soup Kitchens" or "Food Banks".

Admiral, do you think food banks should be required to give money to patrons so they can go eat at the local McDonalds?

Well, the food bank is receiving the patrons tax dollars based on the fact that the patron in question will be eating at that particular food bank. If the patron no longer eats there, why should the food bank keep the money? Also, the food cannot be free. The patrons would have to spend money, but highly discounted. I still spend alot of money throughout the school year on my kids. No where near dollar for dollar value of an education, but parents still spend money having their kids in school on top of tax dollars.

 

[Admiral]

Your inference (intentional or otherwise) is that public schools are like this and teachers don't care about quality. I'm not maligning anyone. I know a lot of teachers both public and private school (and some who are both) and, for the most part, they are all dedicated.

"Don't care" probably was too nasty a thing to say, and I don't mean to malign public school teachers in general (and certainly don't want to malign all of them- my experience at public school was almost entirely positive).

What I meant is that it seems incredibly naive to trust a system on the fact that people have good hearts. No matter how well-intentioned teachers and school administrators are (and they certainly aren't all well-intentioned), the fact is that the system doesn't hold them accountable, meaning that the education of students is at the mercy of how generous the school board and teachers are.

When public schools are held accountable, they're held accountable to attendance (which leads to perverse incentives, like failing students after only a few absences) or test scores (and I hardly need to say how badly that fails, considering NCLB). Why can't they be held accountable the way that any private service provider- a restaurant, a supermarket, a gardening service- is held accountable: through the choice of the people using their services? (In this case, the parents).

I think the implication is that by making vouchers available, it adds incentive to those who would like to flee the inner city. Actually, that's fairly logical.

For starters, I don't understand why that would be a bad thing. Why do you see a problem with parents moving their children to better areas? That makes the children better off.

The only problem you could claim is that this makes the kids that stayed worse off. There are many things wrong with this claim- for starters, why does it make them worse off? The school gets less money and has fewer students- they'd start firing the bad teachers.

Secondly, anywhere where there is an enormous amount of demand for private schools (in the form of parents in a lousy school district, each with a $10,000 voucher in their hand), people will start them. Private schools don't have to be elite academies, the only reason they are that way is that the current system ensures that only the rich can send their kids to private school (since if poor or middle-class people send their kids there, they have to pay double- both in taxes for the public school and with their money for the private school). A private school could be nothing more than a small building with a couple of dozen students. However, demand for these schools is currently suppressed by the fact that the money instead flows to the lousy unaccountable school in that district.

Thirdly, doesn't it show you that something is wrong with the system that you claim the only way it survives is by trapping people that would otherwise want to go to other schools? It's as though someone argued that East Berlin might be bad, but that if we took down the Berlin Wall people would leave to West Berlin and make the problem worse.

 

[Tricky]

Well, the food bank is receiving the patrons tax dollars based on the fact that the patron in question will be eating at that particular food bank. If the patron no longer eats there, why should the food bank keep the money? Also, the food cannot be free. The patrons would have to spend money, but highly discounted.

This is going to get really convoluted. Can we agree that the restaurant/food bank thing is an unnecessary and wretched analogy and stick with talking about schools? Really, it doesn't need an analogy. If you're talking about apples, you need not make an analogy to oranges, in spite of the fact that they share some characteristics.

I still spend alot of money throughout the school year on my kids. No where near dollar for dollar value of an education, but parents still spend money having their kids in school on top of tax dollars.

Indeed you do, especially if your child dares to do anything extracurricular. This at least should help quiet those who complain that they shouldn't have to pay school taxes since they don't have kids.

 

[WildCat]

In analyzing voter patterns, something became clear. People without children, who own their own homes, and who live in poor neighborhoods, support vouchers. People without children, who own their own homes, and who live in wealthy neighborhoods, oppose vouchers.

It isn’t hard to figure out the difference here. People with no children have no specific self interest related to the education of their own children. However, they have a great interest in property values, and also in quality of life in general.

People who have children and aren't poor have already moved to a neighborhood with a good school district and so support the status quo. People without kids hope that they'll have vouchers available so they don't have to move to some god-forsaken suburb in order for their children to get a decent education.

 

[Admiral]

I have to disagree with you, Tricky. But only if we include a few more requirement for these 'State Run Food Dispensaries", to make them operate more like public schools:

1) They give the food away for free.

Hold on, that doesn't make any sense. Public schools aren't "free," they're paid for with tax dollars. The whole point of vouchers is to let the parents choose how that money is spent. I'm not sure what you mean here.

2) They can't turn anyone away, unless they're a danger to the other customers.

I'm not sure about something here- what about scarcity? In your analogy, should the private schools be required to expand their class to fit everyone that wants to come in until they're forced to shut down? Or am I misinterpreting your analogy?

Then we call them "Local Soup Kitchens" or "Food Banks".

Admiral, do you think food banks should be required to give money to patrons so they can go eat at the local McDonalds?

You mean government-funded food banks? (Private soup kitchens, shelters, churches etc would be free to do what they want. Claiming that private charities give vouchers to patrons would be the equivalent of claiming that private schools should give vouchers to students instead of teaching them). I do think that giving "vouchers" that could be spent on food in other places would be much more effective than having a government-run food providing service.

If this idea sounds radical and silly to you, then you do realize we're talking about food stamps?