some private schools may not take vouchers

[pstokely]

the rich snobish ones will probably not take anyone who uses vouchers to keep out the 'rifraff'

[oostevo]

1. Not Necessarrily ...

I happen to go to one of those "rich 'snobish' ones," and feel compelled to respond in its its defense (though I can't really speak for the public school community as a whole, just the one I attend).

My preparatory school costs over $12,000 per year to enroll, but only about half of the students there pay that amount. The rest receive some form of financial aid, and several hundred of the thousand or so students enrolled there don't have to pay anything at all. All of this financial aid is donated willingly and voluntarily by the school for the betterment of the community, even at its own cost.

Furthermore, all of the administrators at my school strongly support school vouchers so that they can get the chance to help _more_ disadvantaged children from the community, not turn them away.

I can't say that all private schools are like mine (I can actually say with quite a bit of confidence that most don't), but just be careful before you make sweeping generalizations.

[jiacinto]

5. Here is one problem that I see

How are these children going to be accepted there? I know of the private schools in DC. They are St. Albans, National Cathedral, Maret, Landon, Georgetown Prep, Georgetown Day, The Lab School, Washington International School, Edmund Burke, and Madeira to name a few. Their tuitions are extremely high. They are almost as expensive as a year at a liberal arts college.

So now I ask the next question. The voucher, from what I've been told, is going to be $7500 a year. How is that going to bridge the gap between the tuitution and what the family can pay?

Also how are these children going to feel when they are around kids from very wealthy backgrounds? It is obvious that many of the kids there will not accept them and will look down on them. These children are going to see their peers driving expensive cars, having nice clothes, and coming from a different world. They are going to see their peers go on vacations and have every advantage. How will these kids be able to handle that?

[fortyfeetunder]

8. Good point -it's not just tuition...

And It's not just Tuition, as you pointed out. There are activitie$ through the year that add co$ts, like weekend field trips, enrichment activities not part of the tuition.

Granted some of them aren't essential for the education but it does offer the chance for the student to expand their horizon outside the classroom.

The kid whose caregivers can barely afford to get them in the school with the voucher may not have additional resources to fulfill those activities.

[jiacinto]

16. Those too

Those kids will miss out on those events.

[oostevo]

9. Speaking From Experience ...

they handle it fairly well. I don't have an expensive car (I don't have one at all), I don't have an expensive wardrobe, and I generally don't have the advantages outside of school, but I still value my education above almost everything else. My oppertunities there are why I wish everyone had this opertunity, whether through private school vouchers or through enhanced public schools (though I don't see the latter happening very soon).

[jiacinto]

12. Well my experience was different

I did go to public school in a wealthy suburb of DC and the rich kids looked down on those who were poor. I then went to a private liberal arts college and that took place there.

[ulysses]

23. ...

My oppertunities there are why I wish everyone had this opertunity, whether through private school vouchers or through enhanced public schools (though I don't see the latter happening very soon).

Anyone else witnessing the glories of the private school education here?

[SoCalDem]

25. wicked

:)

[Dookus]

2. well....

this is one of the more powerful arguments against vouchers.

Many private schools do so well compared to public schools EXACTLY because they can pick their own students. They're not obligated to provide education for a lot of handicapped, developmentally disabled, economically disadvantaged, etc. etc. students.

The "problem" students can be thrown out of private schools, but not the public schools.

[DoYouEverWonder]

3. Most private schools don't want

'problem' students even if you are willing to pay the tuition yourself. So why should they want to take a voucher?

My son is a gifted dyslexic, try finding an appropriate program for him in either a public or private school. Good luck.

[LWolf]

11. Here's a tip.

Programs don't teach, or learn, or help kids. People do. There is no program that can meet the needs of every kid. So I don't endorse any program.

As a teacher, I put everything I've got into my toolbox, then I pull out the tool I need for the particular kid. It works.

The last 2 years (I moved up with the kids)I had a highly gifted dyslexic adHHHHHHHd kid. He "caught up," forged ahead, and left me confident and happy. And has come back daily to check in with me and give me progress reports this first week of school in his new classroom.

You are absolutely correct that there will not be a "program" for your boy. You need teachers who can function outside the boxes that programs put us into. We are few and far between.

Not easy to find, but more likely in public ed, since we have more training and resources to deal with special needs than private schools do.

[DoYouEverWonder]

17. Fortunately

There is a private school in my community that does a very good job of taking in the 'problem' kids and turning them into kids who love school.

My son has tried the public school system, twice and both experiences were very disappointing. One of the schools we tried was a charter school for children with reading disablities. They did a great job teaching kids to read but it was the expense of everything else. After a year, I got tired of my son coming home with bruises from the other kids and a school full of adults who prefered to ignore the problem or would throw up their hands and claim they didn't know what to do.

Lwolf, you sound like a good teacher, however teachers like you are becoming a rarity. I could no longer deal with a system, where whether or not my son found a teacher who cared and had the ability to deal with his needs, was a gamble from year to year.

[SoCalDem]

4. Do the math, people ...

My son went to a high school with 3,500 students.. It was NOT a "failing" school, but what if it were?? Imagine about 2,800 parents with a fistful of vouchers, ready to enroll their sophomore, junior and senior grade children... Where do they go?? How does a community absorb that many kids into a "private system"???

Vouchers come along with the fuzzy-wuzzy picture of cute little grade schoolers, who could probably be taught what they need to know, by lots of different people/schools.. But what does one do when we are talking about high school?? High school is where most of the "problems" actually are, and those kids would be served the most poorly to be uprooted.

and again, Where would they go?? Would they be jammed into another already-full school, only to create a new problem there?? What about the sports teams?? Does a kid who has football scholarship dreams , just give it up, because his new school has no room for him??

There are so many problems associated with the whole voucher issue.. It just seems to me that if one half of the energy and money that is being spent to float the voucher idea was spent on the improvement of the schools we already have, the whole issue would just "go away"..

No parent wants their kid to get a shitty education.. But it's only logical to note that if property taxes are the primary way to fund schools, the areas where the pricey real estate is, will always have the best schools... If all the money in the state that was dedicated for education was pooled and equally divided between all the schools in the state, there would be soome hollering going on, and things would change.. Until the rich districts start losing "their" money to the poorer districts, the heads will stay in the sand, and these wacky band-aid ideas will continue to waste money..

[oostevo]

6. Interesting points ...

I especially like the idea of allowing something other than property tax to fund schools (that should help the problem with some schools getting way more money than others. Let's hope that it's implemented).

Perhaps I should clarify. I don't support vouchers because I think there are some serious problems with the idea, but I still think that it would be a good idea to encourage private schools who want to help the community do so, don't you?

I like the frog, by the way.

[SoCalDem]

18. Private schools don't really need encouragement

The religious schools have their own congregation to draw from, the pricey preppy schools will always have an abundance of rich people to draw from..Most private schools around here have waiting lists, so vouchers will do little good if there is not even room for the kids..And if the voucher schools get greedy and start accepting moire kids than they can handle, where does the small class advantage go??

Here in my community, when they opened two magnet schools, there were parents literally camping out , in hopes of getting a prized spot for their kids.. Those schools have been in operation for years now, and their scores are no different from the rest.. It's just the age-old issue of "new" being better automatically..

There's not a kid alive who did not eagerly anticipate the first day of school.. Somewhere around 4th grade, we start to lose them.. THAT'S what needs the focus..

Schools are being asked to do so much more than teach, and vouchers will not cure what ails them..

What most schools really need is adequate funding, books, decent wages for the teachers, parental involvement, extracurricular activities (not only sports related), music, art, and the community backing that is always necessary for success.. Schools are not just kid warehouses to save Mom & Dad childcare expenses..

[Clete]

7. I went to richy rich private school, not because

my family was rich, but because my father worked overseas, and his company paid for my tuition. I think anyone who wants to send their kids to private school needs to get their funding from private sources.

Our public schools don't need the drain. What they need is good funding in poor neighborhoods so that the poor children have the same advantages as the suburban white children. Subsidizing private schools on the public dime is only a trick to fund religious schools.

[K-W]

10. Its not so much the riffraff

but a very good model of private education exists already in colleges. And that is not a model that we should want applied to elementary education. The big reason of course is that not everyone goes to college. The college system as it stands could not afford to accomidate all the college age people in our country, which is what we ask elementary education to do.

We need an educational system that promotes equality and equal opportunity. A privatized education system would do what our current college system does increase the stratifications in society.

The answer to our educational problems is a better funded and better designed public educational system. The myth of privitization cannot be allowed to destroy education.

[LWolf]

13. Excellent.

We've always known that if you look beyond the test 'em, drill, kill, and shove more tests at them model for school improvement that the biggest predictor of student performance is socio/economic level of parents. Spending the resources currently allocated to testing, (a massively frightening amount of money) on parent ed and more for those kids would be a good place to start if we really want them to succeed.

[K-W]

14. yep

We already know that the system is preforming below what we would want. There is absolutely no need for more testing. All more testing does is continue to reinforce the Republican myth that public education is beyond rescue.

The republicans pour money into testing, setup standards that are designed to fail schools so that when the schools fail they can say "look, the experiment of public education has failed" it wont even be bad schools who fail. Good schools will fail as well. The standards set in "no child left behind" are absolutely ludacris. They are going to cause an academic crisis the likes of which few can imagine.

The burn the village and salt the feilds approach to social programs seems to be the strategy of this administration on many fronts.

[LWolf]

21. "Burn the village and salt the fields approach"

That is a deadly accurate observation of the current republican agenda. At this point, we keep squeezing together at the end of the field, but the flames keep coming and leaving us less and less room to stand. I'm hoping we're still standing in 04, and can turn the election to good purpose for public education.

[dofus]

15. The vouchers

are only going to be worth their face value at the private school. And the figure I typically hear for most vouchers is in the three to four thousand dollar range, and as others have noted most private schools cost considerably more than that. Someone's going to have to come up with the difference between the voucher and the sticker price.

The real answer is to fund public schools appropriately, and have the programs in place to serve everyone who chooses to go there, including all the special needs kids.

And not all private schools are filled with snotty kids. There are plenty of snotty kids in public schools.

My kids attend a private school and there's much more diversity there than in the local public schools.

[JohnKleeb]

19. true snottyness in all

Ive encountered it with more private school kids though, but my dad went to the same kind of Catholic schools, and you know what he wears a DK sticker with great pride on his car. Also dofus thanks for your email.

[dofus]

20. You're welcome.

Hope it helped.

[AP]

22. The rich selective ones, however, will benefit from higher tuitions

which will be the inevitable reaction to vouchers in the market for private education.

[uptohere]

24. thats why they're private

The exclusive ones that have no trouble filling their seats will decline them, certainly. The ones that have to compete for enrollees will love to have them. And you can count on new ones opening where vouchers get approved.