Consistency

Local control of school systems is almost a necessity today because local property taxes provide much of the funding. Doing away with local control in favor of, for example, statewide or even nationwide control would require new sources of funding in order to be acceptable.

The greatest danger of large-scale private education is the problem with private school in general: greater stratification and segregation in an already stratified and segregated society. The idea that private schools are going to arrive at a system that ensures egalitarian access to equal education is absurd. Vouchers, at their worst, create even greater inequity between children from the same cities-- if private schools are really superior to public schools, as voucher proponents claim, then those lucky enough (or politically connected enough) to receive vouchers will receive a better education than those who don't. A proponent of vouchers would suggest that the thing to do would be to have an extensive voucher system replace public schools altogether. But what, exactly, would be the benefit of doing that over our current system? The idea that simply because they are motivated by profit, all schools would improve, and improve to a basically uniform level of educational quality, is absurd.

The fact is, private schools exist precisely to maintain inequality of opportunity in our society, and to segregate wealthy children from poor students. I can tell you from personal experience that there are many, many parents who send their children to private school (whatever they say their motivation is) because they don't want their children around poor, black kids. Exeter and the like are not going to open their doors to the underserved children of our country regardless of who is willing to foot the bill.

I support education vouchers (and charter schools for that matter so long as the institution is not overtly sectarian in nature.

If you could start over, you might eliminate the States entirely.

The typical American citizen is theoretically supposed to keep track of, and vote intelligently on:
Local council, city or county
State legislature, 1 or 2 houses
State governor
Federal Representatives and Senators
The President.

Guess, what. They don't. They get things confused. Famous Proposition 13 in California defunded local programs its supporters actually liked and kept funding for State programs it supporters didn't like. Likewise a President can claim to be the 'Education President' even though virtually all education decisions are made at the local and state level, except for research grants, which aren't touched by the new Federal legislation. And so on.

Starting over, in this era of electronic communications, would be radically different. And a pipe dream. And very, very, dangerous.

K-12 education in the US is a mess and needs reform. The structure of the school boards makes it terribly tough. It would need to be de-localized and made into State programs to be fixed. And restructuring can't guarantee improvement, just permit it.

-12 education in the US is a mess and needs reform.

But what is the evidence for saying that? Why are people so sure our schools are in such bad shape? It seems to me that knowledge about the quality of education at a given school is dominated by anecdote and conjecture. Testing data is a remarkably poor earmark for making a general impression of the overall quality of a school, and, by the way, news about testing data isn't always bad-- and is never as bad as people seem to think. I think part of the problem is that people begin with the assunption that public education=bad without a clear understanding of why. You can't improve something if you don't have a rational accounting of what's wrong with it in the first place.

Why does everyone dislike federalism so much? Especially for programs that really could vary with local needs, tastes, and desires? It's easy enough to come up with a grant program that redistributes funds across states, why not allow local management beyond that?

Bluntly, people who care about public education (or favor its existence at all) tend to shy away from education policy prescriptions beloved by right-libertarians for the same reason that chicken farmers would be naturally suspicious of animal-husbandry methods beloved of foxes and wolves, i.e. because we're not complete idiots. This is not, I think, that difficult a point to understand.

It would be very worthwhile in the healthcare debate to turn this question around and ask the Right why, since they favor school vouchers, they don't also favor single payor healthcare.

I'm a student teacher in a suburban district with a seven year old daughter in an urban district and I have thought a lot about our school system. I believe the most vital issue, the first thing to address-if you honestly care about education in this country--is the effect socio-economic status has on our kid's education.

Currently, our school "system," educates most middle-class white kids to the standard we have set for ourselves. Everyone else (as a socio-economic group) with the exception of some Asian kids, fails to meet the standards. What these basic facts tell us is that our "system" works for middle-class white kids.

I think, given this indisputable fact, that we are then required to ask ourselves these two questions: why does our system only work for MCW kids? And what will it take to make our system work for all the other kids?

I read a lot of people on this site talking about the state of our educational system, but if you are not honestly addressing the two questions above, I think you are wasting your time. All that talk about vouchers and charter schools is fine, but it is way premature until we come to a national consensus on the answers to the two questions above. And I think in many, many ways, vouchers and charter schools are attempts to avoid asking and answering those two questions.

Matt writes that in his dream world:

"schools would need to do admissions by lottery"

I look forward to your campaign to get your alma mater, Harvard, to switch over to admissions by lottery.

I look forward to your campaign to get your alma mater, Harvard, to switch over to admissions by lottery.

What would the point of that be? The only reason anybody wants to go to Harvard is that it's hard to get into (it's not fun, the weather's bad, there's no particular reason to think people learn a lot). If you made it admission-by-lottery, people would just want to go to Yale. And, obviously, if I spent my time campaigning for Harvard to adopt this policy I'd just fail.

Your system has its merits, though any sytem that sets standards or funding nationally is problematic. Do you think it costs the same to run a school in Boston or San Fran as it does in Nebraska?
But, even more the regulations you propose are exactly the kind of system most voucher supporters, private schools don't want, and most parents of private school children don't want. They just want the money, thank you.

Even though in the end, I think any voucher system, on whatever scale it is implemented, is likely to look more like your proposal than the one its current proponents would prefer.

even more the regulations you propose are exactly the kind of system most voucher supporters, private schools don't want, and most parents of private school children don't want.

Right. Exactly.

[I]f private schools are really superior to public schools, as voucher proponents claim, then those lucky enough (or politically connected enough) to receive vouchers will receive a better education than those who don't.

While I am not an expert, I don't think that is the claim made by voucher proponents. The idea is that money spent on education can be allocated more efficiently by parents than by top down administrators because parents have a vested interest in sending their child to the best possible school. The end result of this is that the schools that perform the best receive the most children and money. This does not necessarily leave the poor scoring schools without money, but rather gives them an incentive to improve their schools so that they can keep their students. It forces school administrators and teachers to find ways to improve their educational product or risk losing students and money.

No one is saying that all children will receive the same education with a system of vouchers, but all children don't receive the same education now. The quality of instruction at Exeter, Choate, or Andover is far superior to that of any typical inner city high school and will remain that way. The voucher system will improve the inner city high schools by giving the ones that perform well (as judged by parents) more money and shutting down those that don't.

I understand that many of us have an aversion to market mechanisms, but in this case, where the reward is so great without an exceptional increase in money spent, I don't see why we should not be open to the idea. Why do we care if libertarians proposed the idea, if it still improves our schools? I say we focus less on ideology and more on pragmatic solutions that solve -- or at least help alleviate -- the problems of our society.

"The voucher system will improve the inner city high schools by giving the ones that perform well (as judged by parents) more money and shutting down those that don't."

Just like competition among chinese restaurants in DC has produced a world class cuisine.

Just like competition among chinese restaurants in DC has produced a world class cuisine.

That situation is not quite analogous. If every Chinese restaurant in DC were owned by one company, then the quality of food would be worse than it is.

I'm not saying that vouchers will give people a "world class" education, but that they will be an improvement over the current system.

I agree that the best way to improve education is to spend more on education, but if that's not an option, then vouchers are the next best solution. What would be even better is agreeing to a system of vouchers only if conservatives would agree to increase the amount of money given by those vouchers by a lot. It seems like a compromise that both sides of the political spectrum can sign onto.

I have a question about one aspect of voucher/school choice proposals. I apologize if it's too basic, but I've wondered for awhile and never heard a voucher proponent address the point.

In a school district with some good schools and some really bad schools, presumably most parent would try to get their kids into the good schools, if not the single "best" school. Even in instances without dramatic differences in the quality of school, pretty soon the good schools fill up and you're left with some number of kids attending the bad schools. Which kids are they? Is some sort of lottery inherent in the set-up for school choice plans?

Maybe courtroom lawyers should be allocated by lottery, too. "Tough luck, old boy, looks like you'll be represented by Skeeter."

Again, let me reiterate that I'm not an expert, but I think the idea is that if a public school is performing poorly, then a private school will be built near it and try to take the public school's students' money through their vouchers. The overall number of schools is not static. This does not happen now because in areas where public schools are performing poorly, the families usually cannot afford private schools so there is no incentive for a private school to be built. The "good" public schools will remain while the "bad" schools will be replaced by private ones or get their act together and continue having children attend their schools.

It's important to remember that the private schools won't be as good as private schools as we use the term now, but will be better than the poorly performing public schools.

If that's confusing, I apologize. There's a nice, little wikipedia entry, from which I've stolen the paragraph below, that explains this better:

“[T]he importance of government funding for education does not imply that the government should run its own schools. In general, to subsidize a good, there are two broad choices: subsidize producers or subsidize consumers. Economic theory suggests subsidizing consumers is more efficient. For example, a producer food subsidy might have a government run store that distributes potatoes to every qualifying poor person. If the individual doesn't like potatoes, too bad. On the other hand, an example of a consumer food subsidy would be the federal food stamps program. Qualifying poor people get to choose what food they want and the government pays for it. With a consumer subsidy (food stamps), a poor person can buy more food and more of the food they want. Back in the arena of education, the government run school system is a producer subsidy while a school voucher would be a consumer subsidy. By subsidizing the consumer, proponents of school choice believe that vouchers will foster competition and allow the consumer to purchase higher quality education.”

I second the call to get rid of the states. They tend to be too big to really allow for local control (for example Virginia, a midsized, and not particularly unusual state, contains two quite different metropolitan areas, Hampton Roads and its portion of the DC area, plus some distinctive ruralish regions, each with its own center), too small to really influence the local government, plus the state lines often run in odd places, in many cases through the middle of large cities.

If we were starting over, we would either have about a dozen Texas sized states, or about 150 small states, several consisting of just one metropolitan area.

I realize this is a pipedream, but if you start thinking of the federal system as currently constituted as an obstacle, a lot of the reasons for our policy messes become clearer. And I'm not calling for federalizing everything, my argument is that the states as currently constituted makes real local self-government effectively impossible.

One argument against what I just wrote is the educational system in California, as that state is large enough to try to implement some meaningful and constructive reforms on its own. This doesn't seem to have happened.

Linus wonders why liberals look the other way while many thousands of children - an overwhelming percentage of them not white - never learn how to properly read or write or do basic math in American public schools, look the other way while even richly funded suburban public schools have come to resemble a cross between medium security prisons and Kruschev-era Soviet military barracks in the Urals, why getting a single sentence into health textbooks about gay people is important but chronic and pervasive bullying is barely worth mentioning, why as many as 20% of dropouts are gifted and have by definition IQs as high as the average Harvard undergrad, why the pensions of bureaucrats are more important than the aspirations of young people.

Linus wonders why conservatives want to turn over 40% of American primary and secondary education to certain people who believe the earth was created less than 6000 years ago and can't even tell you in many cases what a theory is. Linus wonders how he is supposed to trust certain people who have spent the past forty years practicing a politics of racial grievance while now claiming to speak for the needs of poor brown and black kids, how he is supposed to trust certain people who do not accept the basic dignity and humanity of gay people, who seem not to feel at some core level that women do not deserve equality under the law, whose intellectual ancestors never especially valued education at all.

Linus wonders why both conservatives and liberals will miss the point when choice is finally enacted into law ultimately bringing the kind of corrosive regulation that has been ruinous for public schools into private ones.

AJ wonders why the hell Linus refers to himself in the third person.

Has Linus been chasing that Viagra with too much Pepsi?

Doesn't Harvard already have admission by lottery?
Ooops, it is by legacy, my bad.

I beleive the mean at Harvard is now up to a 3.5.

Since,according to the OECD,the Finnish school system is the best in the world,let me give a bullet-point reference to what we do differently from the rest of the world:

- Lots of taxpayer money

- Control decentralized at local-, school- and teacher-level, central government doesn't micromanage

- no separation between fast-track "elite" and slower students

- very little formal testing; no admissions testing until higher ed

- not a terribly hard workload, really :-)

- not much specialisation, a pretty comprehensive curriculum for everyone

If I had to squeeze it down to a simple sentence, I'd say good education is about hiring competent teachers and making schools are adequately funded.

Standardized testing may help pick some "low-hanging fruit" in finding out where to seek improvements,but here as in elsewhere, it doesn't logically follow that "more is always better".Teachers are usually the best experts when it comes to teaching,pestering them with more bureaucracy doesn't necessarily lead to better schooling.

Charter schools, when measured using the same tests as required for public schools, provide no better and often worse results.
What charter schools do is provide for taxpayer funded religious indoctrination and various combinations of racial/ethnic/economic discrimination.
Do we really want an "educational" system that teaches that Noah put dinosaurs on the Ark and that gay's deserve death for their sexuality and that blacks are mud people?
Because that is exactly what the voucher systems produce.
Want better public schools? Try raising teacher salaries to a reasonable living standard combined with the dismissal of bad teachers and reinforced by required parental commitment.
That will show real results without forcing us all to subsidize a bunch of cultural Luddites.

Thank god for the Finns. Maybe that cold weather taught them to heat the knife before applying it to the butter.

If parents want to improve their child's education, the parents themselves should get more education. The education of the parents, and how much they read, are the two strongest predicters of the educational performance of children, and have been for decades.

The rightwing "solutions" for education? A "free" coupon worth 10% off! Shop 'til you drop! When it comes to classrooms, choose the Giant Economy Jumbo Size!

And, most important in any rightwing recipe for better schools, get rid of teachers who have actually gone to college and learned the profession.

The longer I live, the more I value our federalist system, which acts as a buffer against the universal American desire to get something for nothing, and to get it NOW!

"AJ wonders why the hell Linus refers to himself in the third person."

Linus's parents often referred to him in the third person while he was in the room. Linus notes that some people on this thread seem to have taken up the practice.

But obviously he raises no points of substance and is probably some kind of big, dumb jerk type anyhow. The truth is that Democrats care a great deal more about children than teacher and bureaucrat unions, public schools are not these weird authoritarian places that are failing to educate lots of poor black and brown kids and allowing some of our best and brightest to fall through the cracks. The truth is also that Republicans are all these fruity dominionist types who want to sell off American education to Haliburton. Or the other way around.

For the record, I think public schooling (especially public secondary schooling) in America is a hopeless project but worry about the takeover of a wide swath of eduation by fruity dominionist types in the event of some choice regime being enacted as well as the prospect that the government will start regulating pre-existing private and parochial that accept vouchers (wrecking them the way that it has wrecked public schools; so much of what is great about the culture of independent schools in the country depends on them not being subject to all sorts of government mandates).

As far as education goes, I'm more or less a humanist. I think private independent and moderate parochial schools are the least authoritarian and most effective primary and secondary educational institutions in this country and that we should seek to make this kind of experience available to as many kids as possible.

Ideally, I think there would be a four-tiered system of choice. You would continue to have public schools funded with taxpayer dollars, overseen by local school boards, and regulated by state governments. You would also have foundational schools like those in the Netherlands and Denmark (founded by groups of parents or maybe teachers or others) which could of any religious denomination or educational philsophy. These schools would be eligible for foundational, development, and per-student funding but would be subject to the oversight of independent school boards (as they are in Holland). The third tier would be a voucher system for pre-existing independent schools. They would have to be accredited by that organization which accredits independent schools but would not be subject to government regulation. They would also not be eligible for foundational or developmental funding. (There would be some formula based on income and locale to determine the size of the voucher.) Finally there would be an annual tax credit available for home school parents to cover the cost of materials, educational travel, training, etc.

Foundational as well as independent schools that receive state funding would not be allowed to teach creationism by any name but would be allowed (as they are in Holland) to reject students whose parents oppose the school's religious orientation or educational philosophy. Ideally, students would be given a meeting with an educational and career counselor (as they are at good private schools) at the end of the sixth grade (at state expense) to discuss options for the future, and would be allowed under the law to over-rule their parents wishes for the type of school they attended at the secondary level. Middle and high school aged students would be allowed to over-rule their liberal parents' wishes and attend a conservative religious school, as well as over-rule their conservative parents' wishes and attend a liberal, secular school.

I don't know about the comparison between single-payer health and school vouchers. I think Matt is on the money that it's a difference of what is possible from where things are now. After all, I think if you were starting from a clean slate "single-payer" might have less support than it does now.

The trouble with school vouchers is that they institute differential outcomes with the kids who are easy to educate getting good private education and the ones who are hard to educate left in sink schools.

The average cost of education will be the voucher value. If your child can easily be educated (c.f. parental socio-economic capital etc.) then you're the kind private schools want. The rest are simply not good economic bets. You can theoretically raise the voucher level, but really is that politically likely?

Imagine if the food stamp program were run like public education:

•You couldn't buy just any food with a food stamp, but only government food grown on government farms.

•You couldn't use them at any grocery store, such as the one closest to you, but rather you could only use them at the government grocery store to which you were assigned.

•Eventually, all of the good government food would wind up at the government stores where all of the rich people were assigned, while the stores assigned to the poor would go to shit in every way imaginable.

•After a certain amount of time shopping you would be kicked out the gov't store whether or not you had purchased any food.

Can anyone think of any others?

By the way Matthew, my fantasy is more masterful than your fantasy.

yours/
peter.

Sorry about the futzed link, it's here:

http://www.liberalcapitalist.com/docs/111

yours/
peter.

You have too much faith in testing.

Linus and Peter Jackson, why do you blame schools for failing to rectify socio-economic inequality? That is, by definition, impossible. As other people have mentioned on this board, there is an entire industry designed to facilitate the advantage wealthy students have when they enter the school system. As for your silly analogy, Peter, why have urban schools "gone to s***?" Where is your evidence that any of the problem in urban schools is the fault of teachers? After all, that what all of this is; an attempt by mindless neo-libs and capitalist marauders to pillage another public good, while simultaneously destroying a form of employment that doesn't allow managers to control their underlings' lives. Unless you can demonostrate a method of teaching that is effective that is being completely ignored or underutilized by public schools, you are simply union bashing.

Aside from that, imagine if the people who received food stamps could actually vote on the administrators of the program ("the local food stamp board") every few years, as they do with schools! Quite an improvement!!

mono:

Thanks for the Finnish perspective. I would certainly like to see our school system move in some of the directions you described.

My nominee for "key problem" with the schools is a ridiculous level of over-management. Too many cooks -- meaning bureaucrats, educational theorists, activist lobbies, national/state/local testing initiatives/mandates, and collective culture of constant scolding and handwringing -- result in for too little scope for teacher initiative and passion.

Our regimented, age cohort driven school system was invented by Prussians for martial and industrial efficiency, and adopted in the US to get children out of the labor force. Nowadays schools are gradually evolving into dawn-to-dusk day care for working parents. Helping children discover our cultural and technological heritage has always been an afterthought to keeping them penned up and marching in step.

I like the symmetry between single payer healthcare and single payer education. Both pose large challenges, but noticing the resemblance is a very constructive observation.

Assuming that there was a liberal media bias, we didn't believe the media, even though they were correct. The obvious solution, now that the media is vindicated and we were proven wrong, is to correct the liberal media bias which, as I just stated, only existed in our imaginations.

Good comment.Thanks admin.

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