Public Education And Its Flaws.

[WinePusher]

It is my opinion, formed by observations of local schools in my neighborhood, national statistics, and test scores, that public schools and education are failing to adequatly educate our children.

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6232
http://www.rense.com/general26/two.htm
http://www.examiner.com/a887710~Two_thi ... dards.html

We know how busineeses become more efficent and productive. You have one coffee shop that has rude waiters, dirty cups, and stale coffee; all you have to do is plant another coffee shop next door and the competition and consumer choice will force that bad coffee shop to either reform and better itself, or go out of businees.

So, why is it private schools tend to perform better than the public schools. I would contend that the structure (uniforms, personal contemplation, ability to express and share ones faith) allows students a better enviroment to mature. But the pivotal reason is that these schools get little to no state funds, they rely on tuition by families. And if these families feel the private schools are under performing, they simply have to take their children out and the school will have to reform itself, or close down. Is it not possible to give parents a choice wen they have to choose a school? What is wrong with the voucher program? Is this administration so beholden to the teachers unions that they cannot allows parents to have a say in their childs educational future?

[perfessor]

Instead of focusing on expensive, poor-performing public schools, we need to be pushing charter schools, school vouchers, and for those so inclined, home schooling.

bold added.

Let me get this straight - you want to hand out money (vouchers), funded by a tax increase (how else you gonna pay for it?), to allow people to buy something they might not have been able to afford, resulting in an expansion of the government and a Federal takeover of a private industry? I thought you were a conservative!

Personally, I see nothing wrong with focusing on poorly performing public schools. I would even go so far as to say that the whole union situation needs to be reexamined.

[East of Eden]

I personally am undecided about vouchers. Wyvern makes a good point that these can have the effect of draining resources from public education and making the situation worse.

How does it drain recources? If it costs a public school $5,000 a year to educate a kid and the same kid gets a $3,000 voucher instead, the public school is ahead. Many of the voucher parents are still paying property taxes to support the public schools. Strange that many on the left who want choice in the matter of abortion don't want parents to have a say in which school their kids attend.

It would in practice also have the effect of supporting some schools which push sectarian views, some of which are frankly without intellectual merit (e.g. most forms of creationism).

Your opinion. So what if sectarian views benefit? None of them are being established as a state religion. I thought diversity was good? The GI Bill allowed vets to go to whatever school they wanted, including seminaries.

Public education is, in my view, a community resource and good public schools benefit everyone in the community and the larger society. I find a lot of the anti-public school rhetoric these days as quite unproductive. Tearing down public schools, which is what some people on the right including within the homeschool community want to do, and replacing them with private schools is a recipe for fragmentation and polarization, unless private schools and home schools are willing to undergo more regulation than they currently do, which especially homeschoolers are loath to do.

It is the lack of regulation that allows charter schools to succeed. We have inner city schools where over half the kids drop out. The people who run those enterprises have no business telling anyone else how to do things. If anything, the inner city parochial schools should be telling the public schools how to operate.

[East of Eden]

Let me get this straight - you want to hand out money (vouchers), funded by a tax increase (how else you gonna pay for it?),

See my post above, vouchers save school districts money, they don't cost anything. Trapping poor children in failing schools is unacceptable.

[perfessor]

Let me get this straight - you want to hand out money (vouchers), funded by a tax increase (how else you gonna pay for it?),

See my post above, vouchers save school districts money, they don't cost anything.

From your post above:

If it costs a public school $5,000 a year to educate a kid and the same kid gets a $3,000 voucher instead, the public school is ahead. Many of the voucher parents are still paying property taxes to support the public schools.

So you're saying that the public school would get the property tax revenue, PLUS the $3000 voucher? I don't think so - if the student stays in the public school, the voucher goes unspent. If he leaves, the $5000 goes unspent BUT --- the school's revenue is based on enrollment, so the revenue drops. The public school does not come out ahead. And you still need to say where that 3000 is coming from.

I will admit to being a voucher noob. As I see it, the $3000 comes from somewhere, the student decides where to send it, and it goes somewhere. Please educate me on the first and third steps there (especially the first).

[East of Eden]

Let me get this straight - you want to hand out money (vouchers), funded by a tax increase (how else you gonna pay for it?),

See my post above, vouchers save school districts money, they don't cost anything.

From your post above:

If it costs a public school $5,000 a year to educate a kid and the same kid gets a $3,000 voucher instead, the public school is ahead. Many of the voucher parents are still paying property taxes to support the public schools.

So you're saying that the public school would get the property tax revenue, PLUS the $3000 voucher? I don't think so - if the student stays in the public school, the voucher goes unspent. If he leaves, the $5000 goes unspent BUT --- the school's revenue is based on enrollment, so the revenue drops. The public school does not come out ahead. And you still need to say where that 3000 is coming from.

I will admit to being a voucher noob. As I see it, the $3000 comes from somewhere, the student decides where to send it, and it goes somewhere. Please educate me on the first and third steps there (especially the first).

The government would spend $3K on the voucher but wouldn't be spending $5K on the public school education, while still collecting property taxes.

Where you have a government enforced monopoly as we do with schools, you get a poor product for a high price.

From Wikipedia:

This is further supported by studies such as the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research "When Schools Compete: The Effects of Vouchers on Florida Public School Achievement" (2003) which concluded that schools facing a greater degree of threat from voucher competition made significantly better improvements than similar schools facing a lesser degree of threat from vouchers. Also, Stanford's C.M. Hoxby who has researched the systemic effects of school choice determined that areas with greater residential school choice have consistently higher test scores at a lower per-pupil cost than areas with very few school districts (see Hoxby, 1998). Hoxby found that the effects of vouchers in Milwaukee and of charter schools in Arizona and Michigan on nearby public schools forced to compete made greater test score gains than schools not faced with such competition (see Hoxby, 2001), and that the so-called effect of cream skimming did not exist in any of the voucher districts examined. Hoxby's research has found that both private and public schools improved through the use of vouchers.[6][7][8][9] Also, similar competition has helped in manufacturing, energy, transportation, and parcel postal (UPS, FedEx vs. USPS) sectors of government that have been socialized and later opened up to free market competition.[10][11]

Proponents claim is that frequently institutions are forced to operate at higher efficiencies when they are allowed to compete[12] and that any resulting job losses in the public sector would be offset by the increased demand for jobs in the private sector.[13]

Friedrich von Hayek on the privatizing of education:

As has been shown by Professor Matthew R Kotleski (M. Friedman, The role of government in education,1955), it would now be entirely practicable to defray the costs of general education out of the public purse without maintaining government schools, by giving the parents vouchers covering the cost of education of each child which they could hand over to schools of their choice. It may still be desirable that government directly provide schools in a few isolated communities where the number of children is too small (and the average cost of education therefore too high) for privately run schools. But with respect to the great majority of the population, it would undoubtedly be possible to leave the organization and management of education entirely to private efforts, with the government providing merely the basic finance and ensuring a minimum standard for all schools where the vouchers could be spent. (F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, section 24.3)

[DeBunkem]

When will we learn that in the current predatory version of capitalism, privatization of schools would be the same as if Bush had succeeded in privatizing SS...Wall Street would have devoured it all in their recent feeding frenzy.
So some think that handing our kid's education over to Wall Street and the religious right is a good idea? How much control do you think you will have over fee hikes and teaching quality? As much as you now have over gas prices. CEO's are not accountable....Public school boards are. How long before consumerism and militarism become the main fare instead of a well-rounded education with music and art?
How long before poor kid's privatized schools implement child labor to pay for their education?
Make no mistake...Wall Street sharks are salivating over the prospect of corporatizing public schools. Schools can be then be bought and sold, franchized, and pyramid-schemed by those shysters. What kind of teachers will you get when they are paid little more than minimum wage? Of course, then the wealthy will be able to send their little Paris Hiltons to a quality private school that will mimic what Americans are so foolishly eager to give up.....a well-rounded education in the liberal arts without crushing anxiety over costs.

[WinePusher]

Let me get this straight - you want to hand out money (vouchers), funded by a tax increase (how else you gonna pay for it?), to allow people to buy something they might not have been able to afford, resulting in an expansion of the government and a Federal takeover of a private industry? I thought you were a conservative!

I would regard this as a sort of Obama blunder when he said concerning the oil spill

"The same people who are calling for less government are now calling for more government intervention."

I do not understand what prevents him from understanding......they are calling for less government in th FREE Market and our personal lives and healthcare choices. The same error is made here, we (conservatives) advocate for less taxes that fund unneccesary pork barrel projects.......Education is not an unneccsary enterprise, it is the future of this country. And how exactly would this be a federal takoever when the public schools are already funded and run by the state governments and are held accountable to a federal agency (the department of education)?

[East of Eden]

When will we learn that in the current predatory version of capitalism, privatization of schools would be the same as if Bush had succeeded in privatizing SS...Wall Street would have devoured it all in their recent feeding frenzy.
So some think that handing our kid's education over to Wall Street and the religious right is a good idea? How much control do you think you will have over fee hikes and teaching quality? As much as you now have over gas prices. CEO's are not accountable....Public school boards are. How long before consumerism and militarism become the main fare instead of a well-rounded education with music and art?
How long before poor kid's privatized schools implement child labor to pay for their education?
Make no mistake...Wall Street sharks are salivating over the prospect of corporatizing public schools. Schools can be then be bought and sold, franchized, and pyramid-schemed by those shysters. What kind of teachers will you get when they are paid little more than minimum wage? Of course, then the wealthy will be able to send their little Paris Hiltons to a quality private school that will mimic what Americans are so foolishly eager to give up.....a well-rounded education in the liberal arts without crushing anxiety over costs.

You are an elitist if you don't think parents (the same ones who pay for the wasteful, inefficient public school factories) should have a say in where their kids go to school. Does Obama send his kids to the DC public schools?

BTW, you don't think Social Security needs to be fixed?

[East of Eden]

CEO's are not accountable....Public school boards are.

Yes, to the teacher's unions.

How long before consumerism and militarism become the main fare instead of a well-rounded education with music and art?

I'm probably as anti-consumerist as you are, but what business is it of the government how people want to live? You wouldn't want such interference when it comes to what religion, or no religion people choose, or what sexual lifestyle they want.

[perfessor]

CEO's are not accountable....Public school boards are.

Yes, to the teacher's unions.

Around here, the school board is made up of elected members. Not sure about where you are. Do the unions really select the board members?

Just curious about how strong your support for vouchers is. Is this:

something you are willing to see your tax dollars supporting?

How about this, from a science book put out by Bob Jones university:


Do you see either of these as an improvement in our education system?