School vouchers - bad idea?

[Philly]

[Homer]

[Philly]

[anarchy]

[Philly]

When I hire a private lawyer to get me out of a prison sentence, I save the state's prison system money. So they should give me some of that money to pay for the vacation I take after I get acquitted.

[Aaron]

The goal should never be to raise public schools to any particular level, because American culture does not value education above financial stability. We will not significantly cut other gov programs to pour money into education, so there is no reason for the average American citizen to sacrifice to make public institutions better. In addition, the people often in control of state and federal education budgets, are people who should be nowhere near a strategic discussion about how to maximize the value of American education. They are usually people who are owed political favors, or have the financial influence to put themselves in that position.

[Divinity11]

Yes, vouchers are a bad idea. For starters, private schools typically have an endowment fund to use for scholarships for socio-disadvantaged, high-achieving students, and that system works quite well. Right now, the average "voucher" number being thrown around is $4,200 per student. This is creating an artificial demand for a charter market attempting to cash in on this new market. The trick? Operate a school on $4,200 per student and turn a profit. A building costs one dollar to rent, you don't have transportation costs, and don't have to serve lunch. So where's the cut? Overhead costs. Employees are overhead. Do the math on this. Remember, some legislators don't believe class size matters.

We have an entire school district that has been completely privatized with charter schools in which we can perform studies, ad nauseum. Post Katrina, the RSD (Recovery School District) in New Orleans is now completely privatized, and has mostly been this way for almost a decade now. The results? Number manipulation, skimming better students to skew test scores, cheating allegations, etc...

My Proposal

So what's the fix? I believe we need to have a three-tiered system...college-prep (traditional public/private schools), workforce development (vocational schools), and a vast increase in alternative schools.

The current educational reform movement essentially is to “privatize” education, because like the business world, the market solves everything. Those of us in education that have the knowledge also have the foresight to understand that this will not FIX the problems in education, only SHIFT the problems into a for-profit model. In actuality, it will create more problems, but that’s a topic for another day and I digress.

To begin, we all have to understand the root of the problem in education. That is, boil it down to its lowest common denominator. Every argument in student achievement, literally all of them, eventually whittles down to the same common denominator…parents. We can make excuses for the ills of our society and its impact on children, but regardless, every single argument in education boils down to parenting. All of them.

So, with that said…what do wealthy, elite members of our society (say, in Connecticut, for example) do with their “unruly” fourteen year-old? They send them to boarding school where that child will get a healthy dose of military-style discipline. Why? Because the military model works. Obviously we can’t send poor children to boarding schools where they stay overnight, but why can’t we have publicly-funded military academies? I realize we already have some across the country, but in my opinion, are severely underutilized and not used properly. For example, a few years ago, the Charlotte Mecklenburg School system hired a new superintendent, and the first thing he did was increase the number of “alternative” schools. It was a step in the right direction, and he almost got it right. But he didn’t go far enough. Case in point…in the early 2000s, I worked in one of the biggest public schools in North Carolina. It was very common to have a few students every semester that would get into trouble, be sent to the “alternative” school for a month or two, only to return back to your class. But now, not only has he missed a great portion of your course content, the student’s behavior has not changed. Nothing got fixed. I could literally tell dozens of stories like this one.

While I am ignorant of the current curriculum in these schools, I do have some proposals for how we could actually fix public education. The corporate reformers want to “fix” our educational woes by creating charter schools? Fine. Let’s use charter schools to become publicly funded military academies. The student body would be made up of students who have been identified by their local schools (by a special committee made up of the student’s teachers, counselor(s), administrator(s), etc…) as benefiting most in a military-style setting. Said student attends the academy for minimum one semester, where he can “earn” his way back into his public school, based on recommendations from his commanding officers in the military academy.

Again, let’s boil this down to the lowest common denominator. In business, and education for that matter, there is what’s known as the “80/20” rule, where 80 percent do the right thing, and 20 percent do not. These numbers are not absolute, and depend on many things – socioeconomic status, demographics, etc…- but are commonly accepted as the average. Students who fall in the lower 20th percentile typically lack discipline and respect (mostly self-respect, unbeknownst to them), and in a military-style setting, they would get both. What ultimately would happen, in the average school setting, the ratio would become more like a 90/10 ratio, as those on the bubble would tend to straighten up if they knew they would be sent to a military academy. The remaining 10 percent now make up the student body of the local military academy.

The curriculum in these military academies would be a hybrid of the JROTC (discipline, respect) and AVID programs (organization, self-motivation), and since it’s a charter school, they would have the freedom to offer other modified curriculum, such as basic life skills, math and reading remediation, etc…things that would help turn them around into productive members of our society, rather than fill our prisons in a year or two. These students wouldn’t have to worry about standardized tests like the public school students. Teachers would have the flexibility to cater to their needs, via remediation software, projects, portfolio assessments, etc…

And now, due to the simple removal of the bottom 10 percent, suddenly a public school’s test scores improve, because now they are not being averaged with students who care more about disrupting the learning process than actually learning. Viola.

The reformers try to sell their movement as offering a “choice” by giving students an option to get out of their “bad” or “failing” public school. All this will do is take some of the better students out of their public school (where they currently have trained, certified educators) and put them in a charter school (where, at this time, only half the staff has to be certified – but bills are being proposed to remove that requirement as we speak). That seems counter-productive to me. Why not remove the “bottom feeders” instead? Who are the teachers that make up the staff at these academies? How about retired military personnel? How about Teach for America candidates? How about state certified teachers who serve as department chairs for the TFA candidates?

Again, my proposal is hard for me to articulate in writing. Solving our nation’s educational problems is of no financial interest to me. In other words, I have no hidden agenda in my solution proposal. I don’t stand to gain a thing out of it, other than saying my solution is the best one I have heard in the past fifteen years, and not because it’s MY idea, but because I believe it’s an idea that would actually WORK. Years of pent up frustration have led me to my solution of actually fixing a problem, not shifting a problem. I’m a big picture guy, and don’t have all the answers and details, but what I do know is the current for-profit charter school solution proposals are not the right answer.

[The Dharma Bum]

think of a solution that won't make things worse

all public military academies would do is take kids away from their parent even more than they already are, which is the basis of the actual problem, which you partially identified when you attempted to blame parents for bad education.

Blame the school, and the state. That's the real reason our system sucks. Both are incompetent due to social adherence to the many bad ideas that help form the intellectual basis of our society.

[Winchester]

[anarchy]

There will be no perfect School Solution. Yes, Private School Students can achieve higher ACT and SAT scores but they can also choose who they admit and who not to admit. A Public School can also elect to ignore their student`s wishes and really suffer no penalty they are assured funding through taxes. If a Private School does that the parent can elect to withdraw their student and the school suffers financially or has to find another student. However, Parents can and do play games in Private Schools if you don`t change my little brat`s grade to a higher grade then I withdraw my child and that actually happens. Parent`s will play games with the vouchers too.