Until you fix urban education, you’re pissing into the wind.

We disagree on the method. You want vouchers for a separate system. I want to solve the root causals of the current system. I don’t see vouchers playing a role in that.

Details are very important to me especially with vouchers.

I’ll go back to my original question about RenSquare - and ask why isn’t it an option? No vision or leadership.

No, I think that most suburbanites are pretty comfy in their neighborhoods. I was suggesting that alternatives to the RCSD might allow families to not leave the city in the first place. People move when their kids become school-age; given an alternative, many would stay. That’s one way to build up the city’s tax base: to increase retention times.

I’m not assuming anything about details or implementation, I’m just insisting that you - and other progressives - not rule out vouchers completely for precisely that same reason. There are no details. It’s all hypothetical, and what I saw on the original post and comments was a lot of knee jerk liberal reactionarism that painted vouchers with a pretty broad anti-corporate brush.

My point is that not all school-choice programs are schemes to privatize or dismantle public goods. Properly implemented, they could be an important part of package of policies that benefit both the city tax base and individual students.

BTW, failing schools have gone from being a result to being a cause. They are the cause of much of the city’s decline. They are, as I said before, a deal-breaker for almost all middle class families with school-age kids.

Trade Ren Square for a “fixed” school district? Well, sure. If that was an option, I’d take it. It’s not.

We are simply going to disagree here Itchy. You seem to beleive the current system can’t be fixed. Which is why you support vouchers. I maintain the current system can be fixed but fixed means solving the problems contributing to the schools - not necessarily tossing money into the schools

I seen vouchers as replacing an existing system so I understand your support of them.

With the right leadership we might actually fix the problem - redraw all those lines you mentioned. Oh, for the want of leadership.

Also as I said earlier the devil is in the details. voucher details are not something to simply be assumed away. Details are freakin huge. And currently UNKNOWN

The failing schools are a result not a cause in and of itself. I want to address the causuals. Poverty concentration, health, and I’m sure a bunch of other things that my brain can’t think of at the moment. I want those problems solved which solve the RCSD school problem.

That vouchers are going to encourage people to move back into the city from suburbia? I don’t think so.

Finally - I asked earlier would someone trade RenSquare for Good Schools in the city? Seems fair to me. There is 230 million dollars to build a bunch of buildings, a project without a plan. Imagine what 230 million dollars could do solving issues that cause failing schools.

If only there was leadership….

One more thing….

There were a lot of implications in your comments about not living in the city or pushing the ladder over but this stuck out

Maybe a little cognitive dissonance going on? Good enough for them, but not for us?

I’ll chalk it up to excited and flaming hands on a keyboard. If it is something else then we take it off line.

Look, we have an intense concentration of poverty in our city schools, and reducing the number of administrators at Broad St. isn’t going to change that. Nothing is going to change that except redrawing the districts (ain’t gonna happen - State Law & third rail) or providing another way for city students to GTFO. Another way… if only there was another way…. cough cough.

I mean really, people, I’m hearing all of this faith that the system can be fixed - yet to my knowledge not one of the well-meaning liberals on this blog has children in the RCSD. But you support it in theory? Maybe a little cognitive dissonance going on? Good enough for them, but not for us?

I’m sorry if that’s harsh, and I’m not trying to PUO, but I get very frustrated when I hear suburbanites insist that we maintain the current system. We’ve all reached the top of the ladder, and now, by insisting that the existing systems be ‘fixed’ we are (as Dennis O’Brien said in a previous thread) “kicking the ladder over and saying, ‘i did it on my own, so can everyone else.’”

Re: living wage, health care:
I don’t see this as an either/or between vouchers and living wages or NHC. Ideally we’d have all three. Heck, ideally we’d be able to control sprawl and provide good transportation alternatives, too. But this was originally a post about how vouchers are a nefarious scheme to divert public funds to for-profit corporations or private companies. I don’t think that’s the case, here - I think that there are some extremely compelling arguments for school vouchers, and I resent the simplification of the issue as a corporate profit motive scare tactic.

Question for you re school choice: What about Charter Schools? Magnet schools? Neighborhood schools? The Elementary School lottery? Do you oppose those forms of school choice? If not, then think about how your opposition to “school choice” is a matter of degree, and at what point you start to oppose “school choice”. Hopefully you do not oppose it before it’s dramatic enough to be effective…
What if the vouchers were only valid for tuition at other public school districts? And what if those districts were mandated to take a certain number of vouchers (maybe 20% of their student body.) Would you oppose that?

Finally I’d like to re-iterate the connection between schools and the overall health of the region. It’s a question of how you break that link between the city’s municipal boundary and unacceptable schools. If we want to see our city prosper, we have to break that link. The schools are killing Rochester. It is imperative that we find a solution soon, or Rochester will continue to decline.

I personally know a number of families who would not have moved out of the city if they had had a realistic option for the education of their children. Multiply that by thousands and you have the potential to partially reverse five decades of “white flight”.

So this isn’t just a question of how best to educate poor children, but a question of what’s most likely to effect the vitality and competitiveness of all of our region. I think a limited voucher system is a very progressive solution to a historically intractable problem.

I’m not willing to sacrifice another generation of young minds. We’re out of time. This is urgent.

Re RCSD. Brizzard seems to be reducing the bureacracy. (100 staff folks at last count). My earlier points were about actuallly fixing the problems that contribute to students not ready/able to learn.

Living wage, health care sound like a start.

The suggestion that we should spend the money that would be spent on vouchers on fixing the system might be a good one — if we had a functional entity that would utilize that money to change itself. What we’ve seen with the RCSD is that more money often goes to enlarge an already oversized bureaucracy (cf., the Cala report), not to students.

WRT Ron Paul: Paul opposed the war in Iraq from the beginning. He consistently voted against the Patriot act. Libertarians might have ends we disagree with, but there are issues where we can find agreement. That’s how politics works.

I believe that regardless of the use of vouchers.

We need to fix the problems that cause kids not be to at their best in school.

I don’t see vouchers as a silver bullet solution.

Put yourselves in the shoes of a working single mother of a bright, enthusiastic third grader. Your child has so much intelligence, and so much potential. You are working full time, making $10/hr - about $10K/yr.

Um, sounds like living wage, sounds like health care, sounds like a confluence of activities and progressive ideas that need to be implemented as opposed to the silver bullet of vouchers those “just details” haven’t been worked out.

Sorry the devil is in the details and the details are important

Other ideas are fix the existing schools implement the targeted programs that can help people like your example. Give these programs a chance to actually work instead of oh, I don’t know the Fast Ferry or paying rent on Frontier field.

Heck would you trade RenSquare for prospering schools because the root causals that cause teachers to deal with winter coats and cavities- are being dealt with.

In a heartbeat

stlo7: “fixing failing schools takes time” - I’m not willing to sacrifice another generation of young minds. We’re out of time. This is urgent. It’s not a social experiment. Every year that goes by effects the futures of another cohort of students.

In general, I agree that implementation is a huge concern. There are some details that I’m not 100% clear on - but they’re just details. We can work out the details.

ladkiddo: OW! - stab me with a hot guilt-by-association knife with the Libertarian thing. I take exception to being compared to Ron Paul…

This is what I’m hearing:
Government is good.
Libertarians hate government, therefore Libertarians are bad.
Libertarians love vouchers, therefore vouchers are bad.

What?? You don’t have to oppose something just because your opponents support it. What if it’s an even better idea because they support it - what if bipartisan support means it has a chance of actually happening?

Finally, re Catholic schools: Have you considered that a strong Catholic school system was something that made city living feasible for hundreds of families that otherwise would have fled to the ‘burbs? Most of the kids in those schools weren’t Catholic. They were there because it was the only alternative to the RCSD. The collapse of that system is a HUGE blow to the city.

What if we could provide a secular alternative to the RCSD - and to religious schools - that would tip the balance in favor of city living?

Let me start by saying that I respect both of you immensely, you have written many many pieces which I gobbled up, and I almost always read your posts and say attaboy.

I ask that you think about this issue in depth before ruling it out completely.

Here’s how I see things:

Our education system is broken. Monroe County’s suburban schools are very, very white, and very affluent. The RCSD is very, very black, and very poor. We have a rigidly segregated school system. We have seperate and unequal systems. This cannot be denied.
Education is the elephant in the room of politics, here. You can plant as many trees as you want, you can bump out the curbs, you can create an artwalk, you can have a festival every weekend, you can fill the Inner Loop, you can lobby for state aid, you can run a ferry, you can build a stadium, you can open new corporate headquarters downtown…

Until you fix urban education, you’re pissing into the wind.

The vast majority of middle class people will not - WILL NOT - ever send their children to our current city schools. It’s a deal-breaker. Without a middle class tax base, our city will continue to wither.

We have to do something.

Look at it this way: Put yourselves in the shoes of a working single mother of a bright, enthusiastic third grader. Your child has so much intelligence, and so much potential. You are working full time, making $10/hr - about $10K/yr. There is NO way you are paying for private school - even after a scholarship. There is NO way you are moving to a better school district, either (you’re lucky if you’ve got a second-hand car.) Your child has been assigned to school #6: 99% minority and 93% free/reduced lunch school. The test scores for this school are as bad as they get, and the teachers spend time dealing with things like winter coats and cavities.

Well, too bad for her? She should “Pay for it or get a scholarship from that school.” That’s cold-blooded, man.

Look, I’m not a Cato Institute kind of guy, but this seems to me to be the most politically feasible answer. It IS thinking outside the box - the “box” is the current arrangement of school district boundaries and funding. The “box” is killing our city and ruining lives.

In my mind vouchers have enormous potential to do two extremely important things:

1) Provide an escape route for poor children.

2) Reverse the cycle of urban decline by providing a way for middle class families to live in the city - possibly also reducing residential segregation.

If you have another idea with as much promise for providing equal educational opportunities for ALL of our children, let’s hear it.

You raise some real implementation issues, but I don’t see that any of them are insurmountable. Certainly there’d need to be oversight of the program. The cost of oversight would depend on the number of participants, and pilot programs could be used to find and address issues before the program was more broadly implemented.

ladkiddo: It’s a gov’t program, of course there would be implementation costs and abuse. But the status quo in inner cities is loaded with waste, too.

As for who gets them — I’d say the worst parts of the worst districts should be targeted for vouchers and other pilot programs.

As for the libertarian questions you both raise — Libertarians see limited government as a necessity for personal freedom, but a “real” libertarian (in my opinion) is someone who looks at freedom first. And the most important freedom at stake here is that of a student who wants to learn and can’t in the current environment. So I think it’s possible to make common cause with libertarians on certain issues where their views of personal freedom coincide with that of progressives.