In DC, the government K-12 school system ("public" schools) get $15,000 per student per year. The average class size is just 15, much lower than the national average. Result: awful. DC govt school students perform horribly (even as these same students produce world-class results on the various sports fields). Is is possible that for $15,000 parents could get a better deal from private schools? Yes, we're talking "vouchers." Why not? Could private schools do any worse? Could the hypothetical negative affect on the govt schools cause *them* to do any worse?
Prediction: In order to hold onto black votes, the democrats will eventually have to support vouchers. Even some govt school teachers themselves are going to start supporting vouchers... for themselves! So that their own kids can attend decent schools.
2006-07-07
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2 comments:
I think in this case giving up and going to a voucher system is throwing out the baby with the bath water.
I wonder how much of that budget goes to administration salaries. How much goes to security? How much goes to those sports teams Paul is talking about? How much goes to books? How much goes to recruiting top teachers?
It isn't just how much money is spent, but how it is spent. If DC schools advocated a system that is similar to the Ben Carson Lifetime Scholars method, schooling could improve, even in a public school setting.
I'd need more info before deciding that I was going to destroy the system instead fo fixing it.
Nadir: I agree that if DC's govt schools adopted the BCLS approach (including the transfer of interscholastic sports to city rec. depts.), they would produce steller, internationally renowned results. But this would involve at least one component that the govt school lords seem incapable of adopting (except for their excellent sports teams): non-compulsory attendance (ejection of students who refuse to cooperation).
But how long shall we permit "the baby" to wallow in the bathwater? The current model -- restricting all govt K-12 education funds to govt-run schools, but permitting "vouchers" (Pell grants, GSLs, etc.) for govt higher education funds -- has failed now for about 40 years. I declare "the baby" dead, and thus ready for burial. As that one baby wallows in the bathwater, waves upon waves of new babies come alive and wilter, all on behalf of recessitating this long-dead dream of govt-only schools providing excellent educations.
How many more generations of beurocrats are you going to permit another crack at solving problems (ie, impliment BCLS practices)? Meanwhile, in DC we have many thousands of families of very limitted means, with the govt spending $15,000/year on their behalf. How do you tell one of these mothers, with three kids: "Yes, we are spending $45,000 a year educating your children. I'm sad to admit that we waste much of it on unneccessary administrative costs, and other inefficiencies. But we can't just hand this over to you to purchase education services from a competing private concern! That's only for college students. If you kids make it to college, they can spend their govt funding at any school that they like, even Notre Dame or Jerry Falwell's Liberty University. In the meantime, the govt funding for you kids can only go to govt-run schools. We need another few decades to improve these schools. Just because we've failed for 40 years doesn't means we'll keep failing! Simply handing the money to you would constitute 'throwing the baby away with the bathwater,' and we wouldn't want to do that, no would we?"
Prediction: large and increasing numbers of black voters will lose their devotion to Nadir's 40-years-dead K-12 govt school baby, and selfishly focus entirely on their own flesh-and-blood children living in their homes, for whom they bear all responsibility, and whose future represents their own, and they will vote to get that $15,000/yr sack of cash to spend at their own discretion. And when they do, they will experiance something that I have yet to experiance as a govt school parent, but which BCLS parents experiance all the time: school officials asking for input, and responding to input. Why? Because if the school officials displease voucher-bearing parents, those parents can LEAVE, and take their vouchers with them. And if the officials please such parents, they will spread the word, drawing in more vouchers.
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