<p>BCEagle: I agree about NCLB. The one thing that’s come out of NCLB is testing, testing, testing. It’s made the testing companies rich.</p>
<p>i don’t care which countries have vouchers because their educational system and its funding is too different from ours to be imported. If the US government is going to hand out vouchers to enable families to send their kids to $20k private schools (and that’s one of the cheapest in my area), that’s not how I want my tax money to be spent.</p>
<p>Public school costs went from $3,000 to $10,000 in our town over a period of 18 years. A decent private (non-religious) school runs about $20,000 and that doesn’t cover all of the costs (books, transportation, fees, parental participation). I would think that there is something in-between. Colleges, like private schools, charge what they can because they can. Some of the costs may be used for scholarships which further distorts the retail price/cost issue - same thing in colleges.</p>
<p>I think that the solution is to raise taxes or cut spending in other areas and then subsidize education.</p>
<p>“I think that the solution is to raise taxes or cut spending in other areas and then subsidize education.”</p>
<p>Educational funding experiments have basically shown that you can’t fix education without fixing the family. Unless you’re willing to spend enough to buy a sound family and the housing that goes along with it.</p>
<p>“Vouchers only work if there is a requirement that schools accept them as full payment.”</p>
<p>Absolutely. (Is that Day 7 or 8 on the calendar?)</p>
<p>But it’s more than that.
(1) Private schools are especially crowded (& have waiting lists) in locations which have the worst public school systems, which in turn under-prepare students & absolutely do not qualify them for any entrance requirements into private schools.
(2) As I just alluded to, there are extremely few openings. Those go to the more capable students who can do well on entrance tests, interviews or “shadow visit days,” make a good impression as to the seriousness of the student, etc. There are more such candidates among the group that need vouchers <em>less</em>. Those who need them <em>more</em> are far less likely to be admitted.</p>
<p>“Educational funding experiments have basically shown that you can’t fix education without fixing the family.”</p>
<p>Yep. And in particular, you can’t fix education without the parents having a basically good one. It’s not just the motivation, values, priorities that have to be family-wide (although that’s essential); it’s the education level as wide. This has been shown in experiments across the board: rural, urban, suburban. At least this is true for native-born students. OTOH, struggling immigrant families from Asia often produce exceptionally motivated children who manage to achieve to the max within their school systems, whatever those schools may be. In those cases there is a singular family drive which sustains the student & exceeds the drive even of many better-off, well-educated families.</p>
<p>More funding is not the solution. In NJ, some poor counties get about 4 times more funding per capita than the some of the wealthier counties, but the tests scores are still lower. </p>
<p>We need parents to be involved, my parents missed very few PTA meetings (My grandfather substituted if they couldn’t attend). We need to convince kids from poor households that education is a better path to move up the social ladder.</p>
<p>Implementing vouchers on a national scale is not feasible in this country because of the way education is funded. I think funding should be based more on sales tax (I know some states don’t have sales tax). States can then remove the restriction of attending the schools in your neighborhood. </p>
<p>If the state is spending $7000 per capita for public education, a kid from Irvington, NJ should be able to attend a school in Summit, NJ (you can basically walk from Irvington to Summit, but there is a big difference between the schools)</p>
<p>Competition for the voucher $$ among the public schools will improve the performance of the schools. This has been seen at the hospitals in our area. </p>
<p>When the $$ follows the student, it becomes more important for those students to be enrolled at the various schools. As a result, you will see greater outreach to parents, more concern from teachers & administrators, more interest in educationsal strategies which actually produce results (i.e. “learning”), and an overall increase in performance. With vouchers, schools will suddenly realize their very existence relies on the quality of the service they provide to the consumers - which is not the case nowadays.</p>
<p>There’s an old Communist Soviet Union expression: “As long as they pretend to pay us, we’ll pretend to work”. That applies to the “government school system” we currently have in place - “As long as they pretend to support us, we’ll pretend to teach” (and I’m not just talking about $$). Good teachers deserve to be paid more (at least on our state), and the poor teachers should be removed - it’s more difficult to determine who is a “good” teacher & who is a “bad” teacher if the system is not results oriented. The testing & evaluation aspect of NCLB is worthwhile, but we need to take it a step further & make school option available for all students - not just the ones who are attending a so-called “failing school”. Why wait until a school is already “failing” which means it hasn’t met ADP (Adequate Yearly Progress) for at least 2 yrs.? (And sometimes ADP doesn’t really measure what the parents want to know, such as which school has the best art, music, science or math programs).</p>
<p>Once real competition is introduced into the educational marketplace, those so-called “private schools” won’t necessarily be all that more appealing b/c the public, charter, & magnet schools will become highly competetive (they’ll HAVE to!).</p>
<p>“The testing & evaluation aspect of NCLB is worthwhile”</p>
<p>The distillation of a set of objective and subjective measurements distilled into a few numbers is fraught with problems in human endeavors.</p>
<p>BCE91 - Agreed. that’s one reason why Parents should be able to choose the school they wish their children to attend b/c there is much more involved in making that choice than just test results - and further shows that’s why the determination of a “failing school” based solely on ADP is erroneous.</p>
<p>(That’s not the most coherent post I’ve ever made - but I hope you get my drift - I’m agreeing w/ you for a variety of reasons anyway!).</p>
<p>tega said:
“Implementing vouchers on a national scale is not feasible in this country because of the way education is funded.”</p>
<p>Yes, but there are add’l reasons it is not feasible – having to do with the differences among how the educational systems operate in the various states. (Beyond funding, although this is of course essential as well.)</p>
<p>bz:
(1) So people in your area are getting vouchers to go to hospitals?</p>
<p>(2) The experiment to some extent is being done, has been done in my State. The entire system is so overwrought with bureaucracy & non-educational agendas that it began to break down long ago. The outcome has been a gigantic charter school movement – which, however, is funded by the state, while giving those schools a certain amount of freedom to set agendas and dismiss underperforming & misbehaving students. That is, the charters have the equivalent of a voucher – per student & per administrative entity. They can spend that as they want, to some extent. The site charter schools are much better funded than the home charter schools, but the numbers of both are huge. Nevertheless, the budgets for both site charter & home charter are fractional compared to site non-charter schools. This makes for unequal fund distribution to an extreme, and also requires enormous practical involvement of parents in charter schools – usually resulting in reduced employment for any given household. (Parents doing essentially much of the work that the schools would be doing; if the charter parents didn’t do it, the schools would not perform to State mandate, & their funding would be elminated.) Charter schools – the competition for the traditional site schools – are understaffed & extremely underbudgeted.</p>
<p>You may say, Hey, the solution is to increase charter funding so that they are able to operate on a par with site non-charter publics. The problem is that the number of new charters (site & homeschool – yes, there are huge number of publicly homeschooled students in my state) opening up in the last 10+ years (& projected to increase much more in the near future) is so great that the economics of it is inefficient, hence reducing any individual school’s budget. </p>
<p>Further, these charter publics remain in State control, with many of the associated problems such as meeting certain state mandates to qualify as “public.” It’s competition, all right, just without the level of control that any private would have.</p>
<p>Epiph -
- No, I was referring to competition, not vouchers.
- Appreciate the info you provided re: charter schools & the situation in your state. You said the charter schools in your area are understaffed & underbudgeted - how does their performance compare to the traditional schools? (Are they “doing more w/ less”?). You said the numbers of both site charters & home charters are huge - why is that?</p>
<p>If the $$ truly “followed the student”, then wouldn’t that provide for those schools, charter or other, to have the equitable amount of funds?</p>
<p>The whole educational funding stuation is tragically out-of-whack in our state. It is based on property values, so while my county is “rich” based on propery values, we have more kids on free & reduced lunch than most other counties (which proves that property values is not an appropriate measurement of “wealth” of the residents of a given county). Consequently, we give an exhorbitant amount of tax dollars to our state and get back a paltry sum to find education ($1.6 million. Meanwhile, some other counties, which have about the same # of students, are getting more that $150 million. It’s a terrible situation, and while our governor has attempted to introduce vouchers as a way to reform the system (the legislators from the counties which get all the $$ aren’t about to change the system!), he gets overridden every time. A federally-mandated voucher system would certainly go a long way toward fixing a very very broken system in our state.</p>
<p>I agree that using income from property tax to fund public education seriously distorts the educational experiences of students. It is not something that the federal government can do much about, however.</p>
<p>
In theory maybe. In practice, not so much. I’ve not seen any empirical study supporting that argument. If you know of one, I’d appreciate a link.</p>
<p>Here’s a link to a paper from Cato outlining some of the difficulties:
[‘Dismal</a> Science: The Shortcomings of U.S. School Choice Research and How to Address Them’ by John Merrifield - Page %CURPAGENUM% of %LASTPAGENUM%](<a href=“http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/html/pa-616/pa-616index.html]'Dismal”>http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/html/pa-616/pa-616index.html)</p>
<p>As for comparing public schools to hospitals, I don’t see how one can–other than through some indirect evidence perhaps. For one thing, the funding sources are different. Not-for-profit hospitals, to cite one small difference, enjoy a favorable tax advantage over for-profits. And hospitals are not good “competitive market” models for a number of reasons, one small example being surgical supply inventories on hand. Here’s a link to a good book that discusses many of the difficulties of applying a standard business model to healthcare:
[Amazon.com:</a> Critical Condition: How Health Care in America Became Big Business–and Bad Medicine: Donald L. Barlett, James B. Steele: Books](<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Critical-Condition-America-Business-Medicine/dp/0385504543/ref=wl_it_dp?ie=UTF8&coliid=I8ZIS3F4E4W8V&colid=LPS21F3MC7OY]Amazon.com:”>http://www.amazon.com/Critical-Condition-America-Business-Medicine/dp/0385504543/ref=wl_it_dp?ie=UTF8&coliid=I8ZIS3F4E4W8V&colid=LPS21F3MC7OY)</p>
<p>Or look at public school funding, which varies widely among the different states. In some, the capital budget and operating expenditures are voted on separately by taxpayers. Other states use district funding equalizing formulas (which wealthy districts can circumvent by exploiting loopholes). </p>
<p>There’s another big problem with NCLB’s testing and evaluation aspect that I don’t believe has been mentioned yet on this thread: the instructional black hole it can leave before the end of the school year. Once the mandatory testing is done, the instructional year is effectively over. In my state, that’s months before the “official” school year ends.</p>
<p>Property taxes are somewhat consumerist as you can pick how much you pay in property taxes based on what kind of dwelling you live in. On average, though, people with more tend to live in places that are worth more. We made the deliberate choice to live in an inexpensive place to get lower property taxes so that we could save for college.</p>
<p>Different areas assess differently. We once considered buying a house that straddled the boundary between two towns. The 2/3 that was situated in the cheaper community would have generated a property tax bill smaller than the 1/3 located in the more expensive one.</p>
<p>In CA, you can live next to a house exactly the same as your own, but pay hugely different property taxes based on when you bought your property. </p>
<p>In fact, I’m persuaded that educational spending drives much of the property tax bills in our district, not the other way around. Real estate assessments were increased significantly several years ago; then the real estate market decreased. Assessments remained the same. But the tax bills increased because the tax rates increased. We spend a huge amount per pupil. Much of it is taken up by a swollen bureaucracy which has been justified because our schools have different teaching philosophies, curricula, etc… on top of ethnic and income diversity.</p>
<p>Answering bz:
“how does their performance compare to the traditional schools? (Are they “doing more w/ less”?)”</p>
<p>To some extent, yes. The differences are marginal, the later the student begins that experience. (Not surprisingly.) That is not just because of the obvious time needed to make up for academic deficiencies, but also because the teaching is done by a mixture of professionals and amateurs. I’m not discounting parents as potentially excellent interventionists, understand. I’m merely being accurate about how unrealistic most parents are when they take on the task of greater involvement in their student’s education: it’s highly time-consuming, which, as I referred to above, means leaving/reducing your job commitments <em>or</em> resigning your student to less achievement than his or her potential. This is true even if the charter is a site-school, but naturally much more so if it’s homeschool.</p>
<p>So, again, we get into the round-robin: those who most need to depart from an underperforming school or system often have parents who are not optimally equipped to take on more educational responsibility. By contrast, parents who do understand & are in a position to take on much responsibility tend to have already done so by habit in a traditional public, and may also be able to do so without significant harm to their employment. </p>
<p>I’ll put it this way: the only students I’ve personally seen – since I was recently heavily involved in charters – who have done <em>worse</em> in a charter than a non-charter public, are the students who are Special Needs (significant LD). That is because there is extremely little funding for Special Ed in any charter school, whereas the traditional site schools usually are well funded in that area, or at least much better funded. </p>
<p>The specific charter schools I’ve been involved with & taught in have better state standardized test scores than non-charter schools with a similar demographic. I would have to look into a full statewide study to provide more data than that.</p>
<p>As to money following the student, it’s not just the student that determines the funds. It’s the administrative costs. The State considers a larger, more uniform organization (such as a district all applying the same rules, similar curriculum, calendar, etc.) as much more efficient, & thus the more generous dollars reflect that. With charters you essentially have mini-kingdoms meeting minimal compliance with baseline state requirements, and the state chasing after hundreds of these entities to verify compliance. </p>
<p>“You said the numbers of both site charters & home charters are huge - why is that?”
Where to begin?
(1) An out-of-control bureaucracy which has multiplied its tentacles over the last 30+ years, to include all varieties of social agendas not related to academics, & ill-equipped from a centralized position to address the nuances large & small of a vast population of highly diverse cultural & economic makeup.
(2) The political involvement of state legislators in public education, setting state agendas & obstructing local educational priorities.
(3) The enormous immigrant population of largely illiterate, ELL families whose presence outnumbers in many of the metropolitan & rural locations, the previous school population of English-speakers. These have become de-facto immigrant schools, populated mostly by children of the undocumented. Classes are often conducted in Spanish --against State mandate – so the english speakers learn little or nothing in some cases. Further, these schools dramatically drop in performance with such an influx, because of the illiteracy levels of the parents, which is crucial to student performance. So the exit from such schools consists of middle-class whites, middle-class Hispanics (less recent immigrants & ESL rather than ELL), and both middle & (some) low income blacks. Generally, the lowest income groups among these ‘immigrant’ schools cannot afford or are in a position to choose a charter alternative, & so are often stuck there & stalled in their learning. Those groups usually include southeast asians & very poor (non-immigrant!) blacks.
(4) Recently, a shortage of teachers (due partly to retirements) has resulted in lowering the bar for teacher employment, admitting more teachers with less experience & less professional training.
(5) Grade inflation, which can be enormous. This has resulted in the late discovery of under-preparation for high school & college.
(6) The misuse/abuse of teachers as psychiatrists, social workers, court arbitrators, and more. Often very little time is spent on academics in the classroom, relative to diversion of teacher time into administering meds, behavioral therapy, clinical therapy, holding arbitration sessions, discussing with & dealing with ‘youth crime,’ presiding over ‘anger management sessions’ & the like. You think I jest. I do not. Whether there is one nonproductive child who is a clinical case or 15 of them (I’ve seen both varieties of classrooms in the recent past), the teacher’s attention is thoroughly diverted (& prioritized so by the administration), while the children who are ready to learn wait with their books open, waiting for the teacher to perform the tasks for which she obtained professional training. There is a huge amount of practicing-without-a-license in our schools, due to the major confusion on the part of the State as to function of the public <em>classroom</em> as opposed to social service agencies, law enforcement, & the psychiatrist’s office.</p>
<p>I must say, though, ironically one school I taught in recently – one of the worst cases of practicing without a license – was itself a charter school. It was the parents (and board; charters do have boards) & school administration that were setting inappropriate priorities, similar to what is often true in non-charter schools.</p>
<p>This is why I do not see charters themselves as “the answer.” I see as the answer the State getting out of the business of education except as regards overall administration. They should leave the structure, local administration, discipline, curriculum, & teaching, to the individual schools. The State can issue learning standards (as they do now), & most especially fund the Special Eds needs & testing for that & for state-wide standardized measures. Funding has to be set up much differently than it is now. I could go on & on about solutions, but I’m hogging the thread.</p>
<p>EDIT (Sorry!): As to (6), one of the underlying reasons for the misappropriation of teacher roles from academic to clinician is the result of the “mainstreaming” movement. Initially, mainstreaming involved mostly the physically disabled but mentally & emotionally functioning. That has evolved over the years into schools as a gigantic social laboratory.</p>
<p>Why should individuals be given public funds to spend on private education in the first place? While I am not an expert, it would seem to me that using public funds to subsidize attendance at a parochial school would be a violation of separation of church and state. I certainly realize that not all private schools are parochial.</p>
<p>The other concern I would have is that if private schools accept public funds of any type (aside from transportation assistance) then they should be required to accept any and all students who wish to attend regardless of ability or disability. They should be required to comply with Special Ed law and 504 law. They should be required to meet all standards with regard to tests mandated by NCLB.</p>
<p>“Why should individuals be given public funds to spend on private education in the first place?”</p>
<p>To garner support for public funding.</p>
<p>If you put the burden for private schools (whether for academic, environment or religious reasons) fully on parents, they will generally work to defund the public schools. At the very least, they won’t support public funding of schools.</p>
<p>“it would seem to me that using public funds to subsidize attendance at a parochial school would be a violation of separation of church and state.”</p>
<p>Separate out the non-religious stuff and have the state pay for what is common. One could start with school busses and work up to textbooks, pencils, paper, heating, building maintenance, etc.</p>