Best piece on vouchers I have ever read

[proud2BlibKansan]

McPrince and the Pauper go to School
17 July 2008

So let’s see if I got this right. John McCain, married to a billionaire, advocates taking poor children from the schools in their neighborhoods and sending them to private schools using a voucher system that privatizes our public education. He used vouchers as his gimmick in his speech to a sparsely attended meeting with the NAACP on July 16th.. This would be instead of providing the infrastructure, security and faculty improvements that are needed in order to make the proper level of education available to all children in that “failing school.” So let’s take a kid who has to depend on the school for breakfast and lunch and send him to a private school where his parents might be employed to trim the rose bushes if they’re lucky. In most private schools, even middle class families would be hard pressed to pay the tuition. So we dump this kid into a school where what his parents make in a year is pocket money for their class mates?

That is an unpleasant situation for everyone involved, including the “fortunate” kid who ends up in the rich school his parents could never afford to send him to. Are they going to legislate equal treatment from classmates? Who will this kid hang out with after school? It’s certain his classmates won’t be coming home to his house after school.

It promotes a twisted worldview where the ‘lucky’ get to be princes for a while. The world where suddenly you win the clearing house sweepstakes and all your problems are solved forever. The world where you win on American Idol and suddenly become America’s version of royalty. The world of bread and circuses where social problems are not solved, they are shoved under the carpet while we play the prince and the pauper with our children’s futures.

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The answer to “failing schools” is not shipping the kids to a school somewhere else that has more money. The answer to “failing schools” is to fix what’s broken and turn those schools into successful schools that provide the education to which every child in this country in entitled.

John McCain wants to convince the NAACP and the rest of the American voters that he will make their child into a prince or princess by providing vouchers that will lift them from poverty and deposit them in Beverly Hills. John McCain thinks we’re stupid. He thinks that if he sells the American Idol myth hard enough we will buy into it and sell our country down the drain with a vote for another republican administration. He wants us to believe that he has the winning ticket for the clearing house sweepstakes and when we hand him the presidency he will hand us that check that will transform our lives suddenly to one of prosperity.

more . . . http://www.mytown.ca/nutshell/

[stray cat]

1. McCain wants me to pay private school tuition for everyones kids?

[proud2BlibKansan]

2. Yep

I have posted about this before - I was a faculty brat at the most expensive private school in my city. My dad taught there so my sisters and I got to attend tuition free. So I know what it is like to spend your days with kids you have nothing in common with. They never came over to my house after school and we rarely spent any time on weekends together. I did make a few friends and they weren't all bad people. But my family did not fit in. And our dad was a popular teacher. I really felt sorry for the kids whose dad was the coach everyone hated.

Now I teach in an urban school in the same city so I have really seen how both ends of the economic spectrum live in this community. And frankly, I think it would do the private school kids more good to mingle with the urban kids than the other way around. But I wouldn't subject the urban kids to what I went through socially.

The other piece left out of this voucher idea is that tuition is only part of the expense at a private school. How will the urban families get their kids to school? How will they afford all the extras, like books? Everything a public school provides is an expense at a private school. We had to buy our own books. Need a tutor for a class? The private school can find you one but you have to pay for it. Want to play on the football team? You have to pay for that plus buy your uniform.

The voucher proponents are going to find that it is more expensive to send kids to private school. There is no way most low income families could begin to afford it, even if they do get tuition scholarships.

[antigop]

3. Thanks for posting that. I think the wealthy want vouchers simply so they get a tax break

for sending their kids to private schools.

[proud2BlibKansan]

4. My theory about vouchers

Back in the 70s when schools were ordered desegregated, many white families (mainly in the south but in other areas as well) responded by opening private academies for their kids. They did not want their children attending school with black kids. After a few years, they realized education was expensive and they needed public money to help their schools be successful. So they came up with tuition tax credits which eventually warped into vouchers.

So I think you can connect vouchers to racism.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

7. Exactly right...a lot of parents send their kids to private schools precisely because

they want to avoid exposing their children to dark-skinned children. (To be fair, I also know parents who send their kids to private school because their child does not fit in at the public school.)

They're not going to be eager to accept lots of inner city children.

[fatback006]

11. Another theory.....

Maybe, but a more plausible reason is caring parents did not want their children attending inferior schools. Face it, today as was the case in the 70's inner city schools or urban schools offered up inferior educations when compared to their private or public suburban school peers. This is not a white or black issue. This is an issue about caring parents. Why is it when vouchers are offered in minority communities you have more applications than vouchers? This happens because the parents of these kids recognize they are being offered a chance to get their kids in to a school where they will get a better education than what is offered at the local urban public school.

Another point to consider: parents. Where I live there are incredibly high truancy rates in the urban schools. What is the point of having a top notch public school if the parents don't care enough to send their kids to school? The parents of these kids simply don't give a crap about their kids. Go to a school board meeting where the parents are invited to speak with the board. Hardly anyone shows up.

To me private schools or vouchers equate to caring parents. After all, Barack cares enough to send his kids to an elite private school where the annual tuition is right around $20K. Not a Chicago city school. He and his wife care so they send their kids to the best school possible - a private school. Why shouldn't some of Chicago's inner city kids be given the chance to attend this same school through a voucher system?

With regards to the article - I'd rather have a well educated child with fewer friends than a poorly educated child with a large group of friends.

My .02.

[LWolf]

5. This IS a great piece on vouchers.

There are so many reasons that vouchers will not achieve what the public is told they would, I hardly know where to start.

This article is a good place.

[ulysses]

6. excellent!

Unfortunately, McCain may be right to a degree about American stupidity.

K&R.

[LuckyLib]

8. The quick end to the voucher discussion is this: Most proposals put forth an amount of $1500 - 3000

This is a drop in the bucket to most private schools. Catholic schools are cheaper, but most private schools now, particularly at the secondary level, are $18,000 per year and up. And $1500 will get how many folks in the door? Given that everything is a la carte, will vouchers pay for fees, fees, and more fees? I didn't think so. Unless vouchers are paying for the full ride, they are whistling in the wind. End of discussion.

[MountainLaurel]

9. Great point

It's just a subsidy of people who could come up with the whole tuition anyway.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

10. The right wing likes vouchers because they smell free-markety, and teachers tend to oppose them.

Most right-wingers believe that

1) any solution involving a FreeMarketTM is better than any solution not; introducing more market forces is always in and of itself a good thing.

2) Teachers are members of unions; unions are wicked. Teachers want to get paid as much as possible, while providing as little as possible benefit to pupils. Therefore, if teachers oppose something it must be good for education.

Put those together, and it's clear that vouchers are a good idea.

I suspect that most right wingers a) genuinely believe that vouchers will improve education for the poor, and b) haven't really thought about why they believe this, beyond point 1) above.

[donco6]

12. And another thing . . .

In general, RWers don't give a fig about solving a societal problem. They want a solution for THEIR KID. "Vouchers work for me, therefore I am for them." Not a spare synapse goes toward thinking how it would impact the situation as a whole.

Here in Colorado, there simply aren't enough private schools to even send kids to. We already have open enrollment across district lines. We charge NO FEES of any kind in our district, and still have parents that can't pay for even basic school supplies. How would they pay for a private school uniform? Transportation? Athletics fees? Supply fees? Field trip fees? In a private school, you are fee'd to DEATH. The voucher certainly isn't going to cover it.

And what happens when the kids are kicked out? . . . or, what happens if a kid can't meet the entrance requirements? Does the voucher guarantee admission? Does the public school just become a "default" school?

It's my belief that ANY school can display the test scores of a private school - all you have to do is set up the same entrance requirements, eliminate transportation, and remove all prohibitions on expulsion that exist in public schools. Presto! Instant private school full of high performing kids, whose parents care enough about their education that they've arranged to get them there every day, and who have to perform or else. It's all bogus BS.

Finally, if vouchers were fully implemented, what then happens to the "leftovers", of which there will be millions? Is anyone going to care?

[classiclib4life]

13. I think Vouchers are great ideas...

Particularly for allowing people to choose where they want their tax money going.

Lets get this straight; these vouchers could be just as good for Democrats and Liberals as they are for Conservatives.

There will be bad school districts; with political influence mended into them; always. In Kansas you'll see no evolution on the books. In New York the conservatives will see their own problems.


Allow vouchers on a school opt-out basis. The Vouchers aren't for unlimited amounts of cash. And most private schools are not- "Rich Schools" as you so lovingly put it.

Even if you wanted to go to one of those "Rich Schools" the voucher would provide for maybe a quarter of the cost of enrollment at best.

I simply can't see how providing more choice to parents can hurt anyone. One-Size does not fit all; and it would take 4 times the amount to provide some of the choices in public systems that can be fixed with a couple hundred vouchers.