School vouchers- the privatization of our educational system
Over at the D&C Blog, Amishjudy has this up about school vouchers. She appears pretty accurate in her assessment. (As opposed, of course, to this article where Petrena speaks.)
I remember my Dad telling me that the way to understand any issue was to “follow the money”. Well this advice served me well when it came to understanding school vouchers because I now understand the real motivation behind vouchers: To systematically dismantle the public school system and turn schools over to FOR PROFIT management companies.Â
She then goes on to talk about Milton Friedman-the father of school vouchers. From the Cato Institue website:
The problem is how to get from here to there. Vouchers are not an end in themselves; they are a means to make a transition from a government to a market system. The deterioration of our school system and the stratification arising out of the new industrial revolution have made privatization of education far more urgent and important than it was 40 years ago.
 She ends with this:
During the seven years of President Bush’s reign, we have seen some disastrous affects of privatizing government services. Certain services should NOT be profit-making ventures and the education of our children is most certainly one of these vital services. There are for-profit companies which manage public schools. The best known of which is Edison Schools. Companies like these put profit for share holders ahead of service to students. This company has had ethical problems such as manipulating test data to make it look as though test scores are improving,
Should profit become the goal of our schools? Should our tax money go into the pockets of share holders? This is what is at stake when you hear people advocating for school choice and vouchers. It is a scam. It is not about schools, students, or choices. It is about money and profit. It is about looting the public coffers for private gain.
You go, Judy!
Good post.
Scare tactic.
Watch out for the big bad corporations!! While Edison is a for-profit company, most private schools aren’t. There’s no reason why you couldn’t offer vouchers, but restrict them to secular not-for-profits.
Sorry - non-profits don’t get an automatic pass.
The reason you don’t give vouchers is because ultimately it weakens the system. In various time lengths but I’m talking ultimately.
Want your kid to go to a private school? Pay for it or get a scholarship from that school.
Finally - speaking of non-profits - How much profit did excellus make last year? Yeah it isn’t a school but it is non-profit.
It’s still about taxpayer money paying for private schools. I’m with sto7 on this one. What he said.
It’s pretty easy to be on that side when your own kids are attending extremely good, very safe schools. With all due respect, you’ve both already decided to opt out of the city schools (me, too) - and now you suggest that we should deny that opportunity to people who cannot afford to vote with their feet. I don’t think that “school choice” should be reserved for the upper echelons.
Actually, I want to “fix” the schools so people don’t have to escape.
I’m suggesting that we find other solutions and work with what we have. there are more ways than one to solve any problem. I’m suggesting that vouchers is not the way to go. Thinking outside the box (I hate that expression, way over used!) is there no other solution, or a combination there of. I believe that organizations of concerned parents could find ways to work within the ssytem that we have now, to improve the city schools. I’m not saying we should leave them High and dry. But there are resources out there that we have not begun to tap.
Vouchers are not always about profit. In the US we have separation of church and state, resulting in private schools (largely religious) not sharing in the school taxes the way they do in Canada. In Canada, your school taxes follow where your children attend - and it doesn’t weaken the system there.
Vouchers are one way to get around that.
The Teacher unions are battling it tooth and nail (I’m a former member of the union.).
Canada also has an national Health Care system. Frankly lets start there before we start rewriting the separation clause in the Constitution.
I suspect there is more here than mets the eye,
What is the tax rate and how does it compare to the US?
Role of Health Care?
Anything else. I need to ask?
I agree with Lee — vouchers are not just about profit. People who want to send their students to church schools are often big supporters of vouchers.
And I agree with stlo7 — vouchers have the potential to weaken public schools.
However, I think vouchers have their place, and that place is in school systems in poor neighborhoods which have a long track record of incompetence and poor service. In that specific case, vouchers are the “escape route” for parents who are concerned about their children and want them to get the best education possible. As itchy points out, vouchers should be limited to not-for-profits, and schools receiving vouchers should have to live up to certain standards. But the presence of a voucher program would change the equation in a lot of inner cities, perhaps for the better. And it’s hard to see how they could make some inner city schools much worse.
Also, when you see Milton Friedman and the Cato Institute pushing something, their rationale is probably not the same as, say, AEI and the Bush Administration. Libertarians like Friedman and Cato are probably focusing on the freedom of choice that vouchers provide. Bush and AEI are focusing on the interests of donors who want to start for-profit schools. Progressives shouldn’t lump the two together. The former have an honest argument that needs to be addressed. They’re not in it just for money, or even principally for money.
I’m going to side with Rotten on this one.
So people can escape the poor public schools and go to a private school. Well, what about using vouchers to prop up say Catholic schools and their continuing enrollment short falls.
I also have concerns with implementation. Are these private schools going to take everyone - like our public schools do now? What do we do with the kids not accepted in private schools? Are we going to start leaving citizens behind? Are we going to start to be selective?
Implementation is a huge concern
Fixing failing schools is a longer term process and takes time. I’m not part of the city district but it seems RCSD is getting on the right path. The larger question is how much patience will people have to actually see it through.
Rotten - I understand your good point about the two different points of view but In terms of freedom choice. So the Libertarians like Friedman and CATO want choice. A government subsidized choice? I thought Libertarians didn’t like a lot of government involvement.
I think the liberatarians want to see the demise of Government and governmental programs,of which education is a biggie,
And Stlo is right, who decides who gets the vouchers? Would they only go to inner city youth? Would it be income based, like Medicaid? Would we need a new government authority to regulate this? Would we, then be increasing, again the size of Government and the cost of the program? Implementation would be huge! Would there be abuses of the system?
Stlo7 - I don’t really have a problem with the notion that a limited voucher program would give some short-term aid to Catholic schools, or any other school that did a demonstrably better job of educating students. The point of introducing vouchers is to prod public schools to do better by increasing competition.
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.
There’s the prodding - but there’s also the pressing, immediate concern of providing education for kids in the city.
stlo7, ladkiddo,
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.
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
Some specific responses:
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?
I’m not sure that I made that connection Itchy-Libertarians hate government, therefore Libertarians are bad. I AM saying that, just as the CATO link says, this is a way of privatizing education and the Libertarians love that idea. I remain steadfast in fix the schools we have. Let’s start with the cause of the disease, not the symptoms. Do I know how to fix them, no, but I’m sure there are brilliant minds out there who do. Let’s spend the money that we would spend on the vouchers to get things going.
The other point is, I’m not sure that the people who need them most would get them.
I am very sorry that the Catholic Schools closed. I know that is a huge blow. Apparently a new Cathedral was a priority here, but don’t get me started with this one.
My time horizon comment was meant to convey we didn’t get here (lousy city schools) over night and we are not going to get out of it over night.
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.
I don’t think that anyone said that vouchers were a silver bullet. I certainly don’t think that’s the case. I think they’re a technique to dislodge a deeply entrenched, dysfunctional school bureaucracy that has repeatedly shown an inability to reform itself.
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’m curious as to how we, all of a sudden are considered anti-Libertarian. There certainly are issues where we can find agreement. Privatizing government programs is just not one of them.
Re the silver bullet - Maybe it was this comment by Itchy.
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.
I feel that any “solution” that retains the current school district geographical boundaries and doesn’t provide any type of escape route is unacceptable. Too little. Too conservative. Keeps kids trapped in a failed system. We’ve had that type of “solution” year after year since I was a kid in the RCSD - and it gets worse every year.
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.
If only there were another way cough cough cough
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
I’ll chalk it up to excited and flaming hands on a keyboard. If it is something else then we take it off line.
“That vouchers are going to encourage people to move back into the city from suburbia?”
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.
So again let’s close on a positive note. I think we agree on this
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.