Thread: School Vouchers

Originally Posted by AgentM

But if what gopman says is true, and a middle school education in DC costs more than it would to go to a public college, that doesn't sound like good management to me.

That is true- we pay more per student in DC than anywhere else, and DC has the worst public schools of anywhere. But, that doesn't neccesarily link to poor management. DC schools also have to deal with enormous problems way beyond what probably any other school district faces. Basically 100% of the people who attend DC public schools are below the poverty line. Nowhere else has to deal with the problems caused by poverty in such a concentrated fashion. For example, inner city Detroit is probably one of the closest parallels to the poverty in DC, although it isn't as bad. In Detroit what they do is set the school districts up so that they include a slice of the worst areas and stretch out to less economically devestated areas and they try to split up schools so they serve some of the most impoverished kids and some not so impoverished kids. DC doesn't have that kind of option since they're not part of any state. So, where in Detroit you may have 50 high schools each of which is dealing with 20% of their student body being in poverty, in DC you might have 10 high schools each of which is dealing iwth nearly 100% of their student body being in poverty. It's a lot more difficult and expensive to cope with a situation like that. Almost impossible.

So, I'm sure there are improvements DC's school board and superintendant can and should make, but the problem they're trying to solve is 100 times harder than the problem a normal school district tries to solve. The right solution might even require more money. They may need to take an approach that would sound insane everywhere else like reducing class sizes to the single digits and setting up a whole network of social services around the schools way beyond what any other school district would require to succeed for example. I don't really know what the solution is, but just taking the ratio of results to budget and comparing it to other school districts as a measure of the quality of the management would be extremely misleading. All the cards in the deck are stacked against them.

Originally Posted by gopman

There is no way to compare them apples to apples, but it is a point of interest that it costs more to educate an 8th grader in DC than it does to pay for tuition, fees, meals and housing at a public college.

It's easy to compare apples to apples. What you need is the actual per student cost of that college education. In most states, tuition only covers about 1/3 of the bill. If you compare the per pupil spending at a public school to the total cost per student at a public college, you're comparing apples to apples. The tuition and fees are pretty much arbitrary and are based on the shortfall between state funding and actual cost. They could be zero or they could account for the whole cost--they are just the complement of state funding. So you're comparing an actual cost to an arbitrary cost--which isn't all that revealing.

It's actually not legislation, as it was created by a judge in the case of Abbott v Burke who said that the poor quality of education in poor communities was "unconstitutional."

The definition of which districts have special needs is very loose. It's determined by a government agency and based on socioeconomic factors. They are generally poor, but range from urban to suburban to rural. Pemberton Township actually has a median household income of over $47k, which is higher than the national average. The real criteria for creating these districts was probably something on the lines of "where can Democrats buy votes with taxpayer money".

From your own description, this doesn't sound like a very accurate way to discuss costs, since all the information coming from it is arbitrary--either the decision of the court or the decision of a bureaucracy you yourself don't trust. I'm not sure how to respond because you've basically told me its all BS anyway.

I disagree with the first premise. The purpose is to subsidize families' purchase of education. They still have to make an economic decision, and they still have skin in the game, so to speak, assuming they want their children to be successful, or at least that they want to stop supporting them eventually. And it doesn't preclude them from supplementing the voucher with additional money, as far as I know.

That's true, but if you go in this direction, you're only adding weight to the argument that vouchers are really just for middle-class and rich people to recover some of the money they pay in school taxes, and they generally pay for schools that are pretty good to begin with. The people who benefit most from vouchers (and who are the target population when the voucher idea is sold to the public) are the poor. The last thing we need is another middle-class entitlement.

Primary and secondary schools are all teaching institutions, and it is relatively easy to quantify their effectiveness, if not to qualitatively judge based on personal interaction with the teachers and administrators. Test scores and college and career placement statistics are easy to interpret and understand for anyone. Besides, children from poor neighborhoods who do go to college seem perfectly capable of selecting institutions at that level.

I'm sorry, but you're just wrong about this. Yes, you can quantify anything, but that doesn't mean the numbers you generate will mean anything. Standardized tests are very limited in their ability to evaluate higher-level thinking skills. Anyone who works with psychometrics (who isn't selling a product) will be very circumspect about the ability of tests to determine a school's quality. That's why educators are almost unanimously unhappy with NCLB--because it makes assumptions about the value of testing that simply don't stand up to scrutiny.

As for poor children being "perfectly capable of selecting institutions," that again is inaccurate. Most first-generation students don't know the first thing about selecting a college and they often do it rather badly. If you mean "poor students who go to college manage to go to college," then you're right. Choosing the right institution is a very different thing. I teach at a university in a relatively poor area with a high proportion of first-generation students, minorities, and children of immigrants. When I talk about different sorts of institutions, its generally the first they've heard of the distinctions. They have no idea. When they get to be juniors and seniors and are thinking about graduate school, they have no idea how to select one of those either. The Pew Charitable Trust has a major white paper about college readiness, and in addition to subject matter knowledge and academic skills, they identify organic knowledge like this--how to apply, who to choose a school, how to succeed within the bureaucracy and social setting of a university--as essential to success. If you don't have family or friends who've been through higher ed, chances are you don't know much about it. And the number one reason first-generation students drop out isn't that they can't do the work, but because they just don't feel like they belong.

For example, the typical under-privileged student will first attend a junior college. Nothing wrong with that--particularly because it's more affordable--but those who attend JC first are actually more likely to drop out than those who seek a 4 year school from the beginning. Basically, students fare better when they attend the most rigorous and advanced education they can get admitted to. Poor kids don't know that, and they assume all college paths are basically the same. Some public colleges actually sell themselves to people based on the idea that they are just as good as Harvard and that rich people who send their kids to Harvard are just wasting their money because they don't know the value of a dollar. And this method WORKS! All because most people aren't good consumers of education.

It's possible that absent the level of regulation we currently have, vocationally focused secondary or post-secondary schools will start to appear, and that would add another dimension to the decision. But overall it would be a positive development, as public schools severely lack this service.

the newest movement in secondary education is "college prep for everyone," identified as the "A-G" curriculum. The reason behind the movement is that even trades require the same sorts of foundational math, reading, writing, and reasoning skills that go into college prep. One other suggestion has been to shorten high school by dropping 12th grade. Seventeen-year-olds would then be able to pursue more specialized education as befits them. Since even high school exit exams generally cover material taught only up to the 9th or 10th grade, this probably makes sense.

Originally Posted by AgentM

But if what gopman says is true, and a middle school education in DC costs more than it would to go to a public college, that doesn't sound like good management to me.

Please see my reply to him above. The cost of a public college he sights is just arbitrary.

Originally Posted by AgentM

Wow, I didn't know DC was that poor (I had kind of assumed there was a lot of middle/upper middle class/wealthy people there due to the federal gov't presence). That explains a lot!

There are three kinds of people who live in DC. The very poor (who can't leave for the suburbs), the very rich (who mostly don't have children or send them to private schools), and gay people (who live there because it has had some of the strongest civil rights protections for homosexuals in the US--for decades). The wealthy areas of town are strongly divided. For example, Georgetown (one of the wealthiest enclaves in the US) doesn't have a subway stop--largely because it's residents didn't want to give people in Anacostia (one of the poorest urban areas in America) an easy way to get to their neighborhood.

Originally Posted by AgentM

Wow, I didn't know DC was that poor (I had kind of assumed there was a lot of middle/upper middle class/wealthy people there due to the federal gov't presence). That explains a lot!

DC is very divided. There are rich areas that are very rich, like Georgetown, and there are poor areas that are poorer than any place I've ever seen in the US. But only the poor send their kids to the public schools there. Most the middle class families with school age kids live in the suburbs, which are in Maryland or Virginia.

Originally Posted by Rassales

There are three kinds of people who live in DC. The very poor (who can't leave for the suburbs), the very rich (who mostly don't have children or send them to private schools), and gay people (who live there because it has had some of the strongest civil rights protections for homosexuals in the US--for decades). The wealthy areas of town are strongly divided. For example, Georgetown (one of the wealthiest enclaves in the US) doesn't have a subway stop--largely because it's residents didn't want to give people in Anacostia (one of the poorest urban areas in America) an easy way to get to their neighborhood.

Yep exactly. I actually lived in Georgetown for a while when I was a student and we kept campaigning to get a subway stop, but it was never even seriously considered... It sucks being on a student's budget with no real public transportation, but the Georgetown elites wouldn't even consider opening the gates to the rest of the city like that... It's a strange place indeed.