That will just splinter society further into divisive religious and other ideological tribes who can’t understand each other or even get along. We have some of this now but vouchers make it worse and drain the budgets of public schools. The money has to come from somewhere and it ends up coming from taxpayers. So then less taxpayer money is available to do actual helpful things.
With your vouchers, is any school required to take a voucher required to take a student?
What if the student has a learning disability? In a smaller school, that will certainly take down the test scores - will three LD students ruin the school's reputation? How about people with down syndrome, for example?
What if the student requires major accommodations - for example, the student is quadriplegic? The big school systems currently take money from all students to help out with these expensive cases.
Will these private schools with vouchers be required to maintain the same standards as the public schools? For example, can a school discriminate via race or religion?
Most voucher advocates are really looking to take the easy students and dump the hard cases on a backstop underfunded public system. Then everyone will look at the public system and say, "see how much better the private system is!"
Because the private system does not take the hard cases.
You have a lot of questions. Denmark has money tied to the child and not the school district. Look into their system for more answers.
Everything is a process of improvement overtime. The reality is, we don't have all the answers ever. What matter's is how much things are improving overtime. I don't see that with public schools.
I could easily ask you a ton of questions on how to fix Detroit or LA schools.
There was an interesting issue with the voucher system- most specifically, in areas with the voucher system, private schools are not held to the same standards as public schools. Ie. They are not tested the same for quality and they are not expected to have the same programs for special needs children.
Cherry picking data can certainly show that private and home schooled kids do better on tests. It's easy to self select and paint a great picture.
US Public schools blow everyone else out of the water if you shave off the bottom 10%. The US problem with schooling is more and more a problem of equity. People need to understand that helping other kids isn't going to hurt their kids.
US taxpayers would rather throw money at prisons and police instead of education and social workers. I don't mean schools when I say education, I mean outreach to families and help getting them what they need.
Wow, just kind of threw the kitchen sink in there didn't you. Many if not most of those go to middle class and higher families. Pretty thanks for providing the details so we can all see how disingenuous this argument is.
Private and home schooled kids consistently outperform public schools by a GIANT margin. The quality of education, by say a Montessori school, compared to public is drastically different; from building self esteem, independence, critical thinking, creativity, socialization, etc.
Public schools, are derived from the Prussian system, its optimized to create obedient workers, its the lowest common denominator in education.
Arguements of equality in public schools are out the window too when you compare the funding and quality between poor counties and wealthy ones.
Its especially unjust that parents paying for private education pay twice, for public and private.
It's really too bad that the only way we can be sure rich folk pay their fair share is to charge them twice for private education. Otherwise, my mother may not have felt it necessary to work the overnight shift at the local factory for decades in order to provide us with the basic necessities and a private school education.
We live in western New York. My wife teaches in a private school and my daughter teaches in a charter school. The New York State Department of Education provides standards and direct support for high functioning special needs students and transportation to/from special classes for those with greater needs. The students in these two schools take the same standardized tests as those in the public schools. My wife teaches college level classes in Physics and Calculus to high school students with oversight from a local community college.
This is a great deal for the students because they enter the college of their choice with a better background than a typical student.
Yes, like I said, private schools are not held to the same standards. They get to use public services like support for high functioning special needs students while claiming more profit off those programs. Additionally they get to pick and choose people who attend these schools- I noticed you only specified "high functioning" for those schools. A public school doesn't get to choose between "high functioning" special needs students and "low functioning" ones.
Perhaps an increased voucher for special needs students is in order.
Society is disadvantaged when intelligent students aren't allowed to achieve their fullest potential. We need programs that allow students to independently work at their own pace. We'd have a ton more 15-16 year old's attending college.
This still doesn't allay the issue that private and charter schools have the ability to simply decline to take up students that are more difficult for them to teach.
That there is room for improvement does not prove that a particular method would cause the desired improvement.
There is considerable reason to believe almost all variability in school performance is due to factors unrelated to the actual school itself (predominantly, the socioeconomic background and environment of the students and degree of parental involvement), which explains why limited scale efforts which require active parental choice to engage always perform better than the baseline, but scaling those up to be the baseline usually fails to have the same results. Better schools are just the schools attended by the students that would do best whatever school they were in.
So, if you aren't directing the solution at the things outside of schools that drive school outcomes, I don't expect you are going to solve any problem with the schools.
The inflexibility of the current system is an issue, at least the ability to try different schools/home school options allows people to try everything until they find what works, more so they can find a school that works best for their child.
Just like remote learning, if I don't like K12, I can try another online school, same as I dump Netflix for Hulu. I'm not even geographically limited. If there is a teacher that specializes in teaching dyslexic students and I have a child that's dyslexic, I'm no longer limited that the teacher isn't in a school within 5-10 miles. The teacher can be in another state even technically as long as she's board certified in my state. There is also a geographic arbitrage advantage, if my school system doesn't pay teachers enough to live comfortably in my city, maybe the teachers can be hired where its cheaper to live. Or teach for NYC and live in rural NY state.
We can postulate how a top down approach might work but these students will still be suffering while we sort and continually monitor (we won't) the system.
Involving market forces and allowing parents to have say in where their children will be educated puts the power in the most effective hands for change.
Denmark proves that vouchers are not incompatible, when combined with the other conditions which exist in Denmark, with good outcomes, but the other places that don't do it and also have good outcomes show that it is not necessary for good outcomes.
Good points. We just don't have that vacuum to test as gov's differ.
Market forces improve conditions. Motivations are realigned to the incentive of the parent's satisfaction with their kid's education. Service improves when you have competition.
