Thread: School Vouchers

Originally Posted by gopman

Most often, failing schools actually have much more funding than their more successful counterparts. Certainly that's the case everywhere I lived, including Washington DC and New Jersey. In fact, it costs more money to send a kid to high school in Newark or Camden than it does to send him to Rutgers.

It would be interesting to know how that's calculated, since higher education funding stats are often misleading. Is that the cost of TUITION to Rutgers (which is probably about 1/3 the cost) or is that the total bill, including state funding.

Washington DC schools cost a full 50% more per student than a year at my alma mater, Virginia Tech.

Same question. It's already stipulated that New York, New Jersey, and DC are the top three in per pupil spending. It's also logical that schools in urban areas will be more expensive because EVERYTHING in urban areas is more expensive. Just providing security for students in urban schools is a heavy burden. I went to a charter school in the West Fifties (NYC) a couple of years ago and head to wait ten minutes to file through the metal detectors--and that was at a good school in a nicer area.

And these schools have no incentive to change their ways, because improvement means loss of funding, which means less administrators with bloated salaries (studies in New Jersey show that's the only difference between schools that receive special state funding and others). Schools are actually the perfect example of how government does a poor job allocating resources. It almost seems too obvious to say, but throwing money at schools never has and never will be the solution.

Here we agree.

And it's even more moot, because there's been no evidence of deteriorating quality of public schools in places where vouchers exist.

Here we also agree, though its more about a lack of data than anything.

Poor students don't deserve to be punished while we experiment with ways to turn their schools into socialist utopias. Public schools have already done untold damage to poor communities in the last century and it's about time we let kids from those areas have a chance to improve.

If private schools don't mind being accountable like public schools are for the curriculum and other services, we'd agree even more. Unfortunately, mostly privates don't want to comply with those rules and opt out of programs that require compliance. I'd argue that giving public money without any accountability is unwise.

Originally Posted by gopman

I don't think it's a disingenuous comparison, particularly if you consider that my professors were paid to spend less than half their professional time actually teaching me and the rest doing research. The cost to administer and teach me is probably pretty accurately represented by tuition (plus various expenses and books, which I included), and, shockingly, room and board and meals, which public secondary and primary schools certainly don't provide.

I didn't call the comparison disingenuous. I wanted to make sure we were comparing apples to apples. So which is it that we are comparing--the total cost or the cost to the student?

To the point about urban schools, most of the "Abbott Districts", i.e. state subsidized underperforming school districts in New Jersey aren't urban, with the notable exceptions being Newark and Camden, which are the particularly bad examples I used in my last post. But anyway, teachers don't make more in urban areas and books and other materials don't cost more. The only real difference would be land cost, if it hasn't already been paid in full, and possibly security, although I don't think most schools have metal detectors, and that wouldn't alone account for such a massive difference. The vast majority of the difference according to a study done in New Jersey, which I can't source because I heard on the radio, is administrators. Large budgets mean more of them and no change in educational quality.

It's not just land cost; there are lots of attendant costs to running a school in a poorer or more crowded area. Security is a major one and includes employing quite a number of people who simply aren't needed in a suburban school. The same is true for any business--that's why groceries are more expensive in poor neighborhoods, because the cost of doing business is greater.

I'm not familiar with Abbot legislation. Where are most of those schools? Are there any distinguishing characteristics they have in common in terms of their communities?

Private schools are most accountable- if they do poorly, people will stop paying to attend. If their curriculum doesn't prepare students for college or work, they will be throwing their money down the drain, and private businesses don't like to do that under normal circumstances. Basic accreditation is fine with me, but even that is done privately at the university level I believe. If vouchers were present on a large scale, it probably wouldn't take long for an organization like that to spring up, if there isn't one already. But forcing them to submit to public regulation effectively takes many of the problems public schools have and forces it on private ones. Schools should be accountable to students, parents and competitors, not to a government that's proven it's not capable of administering even a most basic level of education in some of these districts.

First, the whole point of vouchers is to make sure parents DON'T have to pay for private schooling. The people who need vouchers are the ones who can't pay. Second, you're assuming that parents are good consumers of education. It's not like toothpaste--you need to know something about education to be a good consumer on behalf of your child. I find that people without much education don't know much about it at all, and that includes my own college students. Many of them don't understand how my university fits within the scheme of universities (we're a "tertiary" school, concentrating on teaching rather than research, the equivalent of a Montclair State. My students don't know the difference between a Research 1 institution like Rutgers and a tertiary institution. It's difficult for a parent who is not well-educated to tell the difference. Market economics assumes an enlightened as well as self-interested consumer, and that's simply not true in the case of most poor parents.

Originally Posted by Rassales

I like your means testing idea, but the problem is the school, not the income of the parents. It's doubtful that many--if any--well-off people are going to live in the areas where schools are doing quite poorly. I'd give vouchers based on the performance of the school. I'm afraid your scheme would not allow alternatives because people making twice the poverty line still have no money to contribute toward their kids education.

Yeah that might be a better approach, but with a few caveats. First, testing the performance of a school is complex, and the no child left behind tests are a terrible way to do it. Let me give a personal example. My mom taught at a public school that served almost exclusively extremely poor students, but it was an absolutely awesome school. They had an all star staff, some brilliant curriculum development people, it was featured in a national education magazine, a chunk of the curriculum they developed got adopted state wide and some of them were sent around to education conferences to present it, many of the teachers volunteered to come in nights and weekends to work with kids for extra time, etc. Really, it was one of the best run schools I've ever seen. But, since the kids were all living in poverty they had to deal with all kinds of disadvantages most schools don't, so they were on track to fail the no child left behind test. They had two choices. They could either abandon their awesome curriculum and teach to the test instead or they could say screw it, we'll lose our federal funding. Because their reputation was so stellar, the state offered to replace any funding the federal government pulled and they ignored the test. But most schools that are on the line of failing NCLB don't have that option. Many schools have now taken as much as 1/2 of their time with students to purely teach them to take that one test instead of educating them generally. So, anyways, all that is just to say that if we have a school performance based system, the measure of performance needs to be a whole lot better than the NCLB test is. I don't really know how, but it needs to be a lot more flexible and it needs to take the economic situation of the student body into account.

My second concern would be that it would just result in pulling the best students out of the worst schools leaving the students that remain even more screwed. I think to do it that way we'd need to make sure that the vouchers were sufficient to cover the entire cost of at least some of the private schools in that area, and we'd need to accompany it with a significant outreach program to make sure the parents fully understand the program and their options.

But, if all that was taken into account, I'd agree with your approach.

Originally Posted by AgentM

DC doesn't seem to be a particularly well managed place, from what I've heard, so maybe they're not the best comparison option?

I haven't lived there for 7 years so I'm not that up to date, but I actually have to say, when I left it was well managed. Marion Barry was a disaster for the city. Totally incompetant. But Anthony Williams took over after him and he was amazing. Completely turned the city around. I don't know the current mayor, but he's from Williams' team and from what I've heard, it's still going well.