[hrothgar]

Last thursday, Andrew Sullivan's blog linked included the following piece on school vouchers

http://andrewsulliva...hine-state.html

Is is oft the case, I didn't think that the voucher advocate made a particularly compelling case...

In particular, almost all of the "pro-voucher" discussions that I see seem to share a common flaw.

Voucher’s are intended to give parents the option to exercise “choice” regarding their children’s education. There is an assumption that said choice will be based on the quality of the educational options. I think that it’s far more likely that this will be based on cultural or religious grounds.

Public school are one of the few places where children are forced to mingle with people who are different than themselves.
Is it really worthwhile sacrificing this in order to fund our own homegrown madrassas?

[kenberg]

Vouchers, imo, totally owe their support to the really dismal situation in some schools.

The other day, well actually sixty years ago, my mother's friend May was telling my mother that Kenny should really be going to Holy Spirit where her daughter Shirley went. "We aren't Catholic". "He could go anyway, Shirley is learning algebra and Kenny isn't". "We aren't Catholic". End of discussion. The public school I was attending was really quite good. While Shirley was perhaps learning algebra from Sister Someone I was learning a good deal of stuff from Mrs. Kinney.

I think a lot of people, parents and others who have a stake in our schools, so practically everyone, are frustrated beyond tolerance and just don't know what to do. Neither do I, actually, but I doubt that vouchers are the answer. A stop gap maybe for parents who otherwise find only dismal options, but not a solution.

[awm]

The case for vouchers seems to involve the benefits of distributing money from the state level so that the funding (and hence quality) of public schools won't be so highly dependent on the wealth of the local community. That's certainly a good point, but it's not clear to me how/why that has much of anything to do with vouchers.

While there are certainly very good private schools, my impression is that these schools are extremely expensive. My wife and my mother both work for private schools, and talking to them it certainly seems like these schools cost quite a bit. I have some doubts as to whether "85% of the cost of public school" would really enable poor families to afford one of the better private schools (yes, religious schools are sometimes a different story because they get a lot of funding from charitable donations). So the net effect would be to help upper middle class (and wealthier) families who send their kids to private school anyway to have more money, and to help ultra-religious families (who send their kids to private religious school anyway) to have more money. This doesn't really seem like helping education in general -- more like giving away money to Republican party supporters. In fact the vouchers will be really expensive for the state government (blowing a huge hole in the budget) unless it results in an unlikely-seeming very substantial migration of students away from public schools.

[hrothgar]

awm, on 2011-January-17, 14:02, said:

The case for vouchers seems to involve the benefits of distributing money from the state level so that the funding (and hence quality) of public schools won't be so highly dependent on the wealth of the local community. That's certainly a good point, but it's not clear to me how/why that has much of anything to do with vouchers.

I made the same point in a reply to Sullivan

[the_dude]

I'm a staunch fiscal conservative, so I have an inherent bias towards vouchers. However, my wife has been a schoolteacher in a low socio-economic area for 15 years, so I have gotten to see that side of it too.

From what I've seen, the quality of the teachers/administration has much less impact on student performance than does the quality of the student population and their parents. In other words, if a bunch of uninvolved/unwilling parents send unmotivated and uncontrolled kids to a school, most of those kids are going to underperform. Furthermore, in such an environment where the teachers are chasing around wild kids all day, and drugs are rampant, even the good kids will underperform.

Let's face it .. outside of a few dramatically good and dramatically bad teacheers, most of them are decent, in it for the right reason and doing an average job. Trying to blame bad kids or bad test scores on the teachers is ludicrous .. you should see what gets sent to my wife's classroom.

That being said, I think that vouchers are a good thing .. if for no other reason they give involved parents/kids a way to escape a bad situation. Yeah, it probably doesn't help things at the "bad" school, but I would rather punish the parents who aren't doing their job in the first place than make the ones who are trying hard to suffer.

[kenberg]

I have some appreciation of Dude's views. Dude says most teachers are decent and doing an average job. I agree. Moreover, the world has to keep turning with decent average people doing most of the work. I get so tired of hearing about Jaime Escalante.

We have a number of grandchildren, eight and a half I think at last count. One of the twins is having some trouble in first grade. I, or his father, can pick him up, carry him off, sit him down and talk to him. The teacher can't do that. Too bad, really. He's a good kid (honest) but like a lot of six year olds, especially boys, he needs someone to firmly clarify for him what is acceptable. I am positive the teachers deal every day with far worse problems with kids and with far less cooperative parents. Our next door neighbor teaches second grade and I am sure that she would confirm this.

But there are areas where things completely go to hell. In my own school days, fifty plus years ago, I was rarely in class by the end of the day during my senior year. This was ok, since my last period teacher had an alcohol problem and by the end of the school day he was not too sure of where he was, let alone where I was.

There is room for improvement all around.

[luke warm]

awm, on 2011-January-17, 14:02, said:

In fact the vouchers will be really expensive for the state government (blowing a huge hole in the budget) unless it results in an unlikely-seeming very substantial migration of students away from public schools.

i understand this is just one school, and it is after all california, but there are parents who probably wish their kids could migrate

[TimG]

hrothgar, on 2011-January-17, 11:23, said:

Public school are one of the few places where children are forced to mingle with people who are different than themselves.

If my daughter attended a Catholic school, that would be mingling with people who are different, more so than attending the public school that she does.

[phil_20686]

I have a couple of comments, obviously based on the similar (if not quite so bad) situation in the UK.

Firstly, its generally a myth that private schools have more funding than government schools. Generally both systems pay about the same amount per pupil. What is true is that private schools normally own their own land and buildings and this can lead to significant savings in running costs compared to state schools, which often have to rent their buildings from the local government. This, of course, translates into a significant saving for public schools. (Note, the average spend is normally skewed heavily by a small number of elite boarding schools, which puts the average in the uk about £1500 higher, but a boarding school offers a totally different service and is not a like for like comparison, remove these and the average drops to a similar amount per pupil as the state sector).

Secondly, I think we generally do not spend enough on education in the West. Given the massive benefits of a reasonably well educated population, it seems like spending 5% of Gdp on your school system is not a big ask, and I would prefer a higher number. Closer to ten % of GDP. (Surprisingly, the US spends the largest % of its gdp on school education of any developed country, although the difference is mostly in a higher percentage of spending on independent schools).

Finally, I think people underrate how important surroundings and buildings are in shaping ones perspective. Being educated in a nice building with well designed spaces and desks tells you that someone is taking your education seriously. Most state school buildings in this country are incredibly depressing. Rectangular boxes with bare concrete floors in the hallway. No playing fields of any description. Also, I found it hard not to treat education as a privilege when every assembly day I had to walk past the names of the 219 former pupils who gave their lives in two world wars. This concept of "ethos" or "History" of a place is something that the independent sector seems to really get. I was flabbergasted to discover that in the state sector teachers don't normally have their own classrooms, but teach in many different classrooms. This makes it incredibly difficult to personalise your "space". Even the additions of a number of undergraduate textbooks gives a classroom a certain flavour, and makes it much easier to encourage the better kids. I think most children are sensitive to the fact that a personalised class room is some sense your teachers' "space", and will get a different level of behaviour than you would in a "public" space.

PS: Something I didn't mention before, teachers must be able to effectively discipline their children. In the UK teachers just dont get the back up they need, you are not even allowed to give a child detention without prior notification and approval from the parents. This is madness. There is a significant subset of children who will push every boundary till they get punished severely enough. They enjoy pushing at the boundary of what is deemed acceptable and daring a teacher to punish them. Every teacher must have recourse to some form of punishment sufficiently severe that there are some rules that pupils are afraid to cross. Four hour detentions on a Friday night, or at the weekend. Manual Labour. The cane. I don't really care. But at the moment children seem prepared to, as it were, call the teachers bluff regarding behaviour. That is an untenable situation that demeans teachers and prevents proper discipline in the class room.

[PassedOut]

I agree with Phil, not only about the inherent value of funding for education, but also about the importance of the physical and behavioral environment. In the US many folks object to using the word "investment" for government spending, but spending on education is exactly that. (So is well-planned infrastructure spending.)