Posted on 04/05/2008 9:13:50 AM PDT by indcons
This week's revelation that 17 of the nation's 50 largest cities have high school graduation rates below 50% surely saddened many. But it surprised few people attuned to the state of U.S. public education. Proponents of education choice have long believed that dropout rates fall when families can pick the schools best suited for their children.
So news that Sol Stern, a veteran advocate of school choice, is having second thoughts about the ability of market forces to improve education outcomes is noteworthy. Mr. Stern explains his change of heart in the current issue of the indispensable City Journal, a quarterly magazine published by the Manhattan Institute. And his revised views on the school choice movement warrant a response.
Inside of two decades, charter school enrollment in the U.S. has climbed to 1.1 million from zero. Two tiny voucher programs in Maine and Vermont blossomed into 21 programs in 13 states and the District of Columbia. Tuition tax credits, once puny and rare, are now sizeable and commonplace. The idea that teacher pay should be based on performance, not just seniority, is gaining ground. Not bad for a small band of education reformers facing skepticism from the liberal media and outright hostility from well-funded, politically connected heavies like the National Education Association.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
They want it in about the same amount of the level of care they have for the poor children in their charge.
I wish there had been school choice where I was. I ended up going to an IB school and ended up playing catchup in college despite the fact that they said my senior year was equivalent to my freshman year of college.
For god sake we spent three months reading Beloved and two weeks on Hamlet.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
Sadly you are correct. The same can be said about fighting illegal immigration it seems. :(
Full vouchers are the only thing that would work to improve anything.
The main concern I have with vouchers is that the government can use the to control the schools that are chosen by the parents. I'm not entirely opposed to the idea, but it just seems like something that can be abused if not done right (which it won't).
I prefer the idea of being able to deduct private school tuition from state and/or local taxes paid instead. This way, the parents are still doing the choosing, but since the money goes straight from the parent to the school, there is less control involved.
BTTT
I agree with you.
Sadly, I've given up trying to tell her otherwise. I'll just have to wait until she's bit older and not quite as accepting of her Weekly Reader!
You should hear what our second grader is being taught about the Endangered Species Act. (I’m sure you can guess)
Well, there's the problem. The nation's largest cities. It's all in where the parent chooses to live and if that parent instills values into the child. I don't know where all these 50 cities are with such low graduation rates, but even the closest big city from us is Austin, TX and it has less than a 5% drop out rate. I know ours is out in Podunkville is even less than that.
The solution would be giving parents a partial refund on property / school taxes if the kids are in private school. No vouchers, which can be used to mandate the heck out of private schools. No money to those who aren’t footing the tax bills. And there is more money per kid in the public schools.
So what's your solution? Give up?
The public schools are broken at a fundamental level. They are incapable of reforming themselves--frankly, they don't want to. They get to not educate the kids for 7 hours a day and send all the hard work home to parents (2-3 hours of homework a night). The administrators have money and power. They have 35 assistant principals and, they get to spend their time planning indoctrination rather than education.
The teachers have it better than the mythology would have you believe also. Their alternative in the private market is not, for the average school teacher, an 80,000 or even 60,000 a year job. Their alternative is something that pays about what they get as teachers and they don't get three months off a year. So they don't want to rock the boat either. They just want more money in the existing boat. This is demonstrably true. You don't see teachers moving out to better positions en masse in the private sector. Instead, you see them working to keep things exactly as they are except that they want taxpayers to pay them more.
The teacher's union has become so powerful that politicians and the public are incapable of reforming schools from the outside. Proponents of any change in the status quo (other than "send more money") are destroyed or marginalized.
The Ed school and certifications board make sure the same dysfunctional thinking about how to educate children is passed on to every new generation of teachers.
So what I'm saying is that the failure of the public schools has been institutionalized and is, imho, pretty much unfixable. It will not go away. It will not reform. And it will bitterly fight the emergence of alternatives that affect the miserable status quo.
Somehow, we have to let public schooling wither on the vine while building a completely different set of institutions that actually educate. That means figuring out how to build those completely new institutions in a way that serves all portions of the public--not just white middle class students. And we have to do it over the vigorous and very well funded opposition of the education establishment. So of course we will go thru times when we are losing and our solutions seem as much a "dead horse" as the public schools are (it's just that they're a dead horse with a lot of money).
Of course, one alternative is to give up, which would not be a weird reaction, given the huge array of reactionary forces and money that are lined up to prevent any improvement in the schools.
Or you work on alternatives.
Homeschooling is a great alternative for some folks who are willing to make the huge financial sacrifice it involves. But while it is still growing very rapidly, it's going to cap out at some point. So it's only a partial solution. Unfortunately, it doesn't much help those who need it the most--kids in minority school districts. Homeschooling is still a very middle class and white movement and has not penetrated the minority community to any significant degree. One thing we could do to help would be to work to expand awareness of and willingness in the minority community about homeschooling.
Some private schools are decent; but they suffer the problems of both homeschooling and public schools. On the one hand, their teachers went to the same Ed schools as the public school teachers and absorbed the same dysfunctional methodologies of how not to educate kids as do the public school teachers. So you don't always get a better education in private schools. On the other hand, like homeschooling, private schools are pretty good at reaching white, middle-class kids. But not so good, because of financial reality, at reaching poorer kids.
I'm much more an incrementalist on this issue. The alternative institutions have to grow a little bit and in a lot of different ways. The big barrier is, of course, money. Virtually all the money in education goes to the current, dysfunctional public school system. Every method that gets some of that money out of the public schools (which cannot succeed) and into alternatives that might succeed is a little success. Every method that moves private money into alternatives is a little success. And these are successes for two reasons: (1) Some kids end up with an education they would not have gotten in public schools; and (2) Each one is a bit of infrastructure that provides jobs for folks who would like to teach without becoming part of the education establishment. People will follow jobs. Currently the only game in town is to saddle up and become a public school teacher. Alternative job markets will create alternative institutions to provide teachers for those new markets.
This is a long winded way of saying that it is not time to give up on educating our children. Leaving the public school mess as-is amounts to giving up. The system demonstrably does not work. Vouchers tend to be an all-or-nothing victory the educrats cannot allow to poor childern. So we lose that one. But I'm happy with each quarter or eighth victory.
Creating a new set of education instutions will be the work of decades and will have a lot of setbacks. But what's the alternative? A new set of brainwashed kids graduating every year who are incapable of thinking about environmental issues, who cannot spell or write a decent paragraph, and who are demonstrably deficient in math skills. And, a new set of poor kids who are even further behind.
“No one wants school choice. Both the public and the teacher unions’ recoil at private schools being paid for with taxpayer funds. Its time to stop beating that dead horse.”
Really? Isn’t it funny how the Clintons and Obamas seem to want it, as do most politicians and, in fact, most public school teachers put their kids in private schools if possible!
Here is an interesting tidbit:
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
South Carolina NAACP: “No” to School Choice
http://sccgca.blogspot.com/2006/09/south-carolina-naacp-no-to-school.html
“During the past decade, the NAACP has worked with groups like the National Education Association (NEA), People for the American Way (PFAW) and the American Civil Liberties to oppose school choice. In l997, the NAACP joined forces with the PFAW to create a new coalition, Partners for Public Education (PPE), headed by Mfume (former president) and PFAW president Ralph Neas. It had a single purpose—fighting school choice.
But despite the opposition for school choice by the national, state, and local NAACP, there is a battle within Black America. NAACP officials, liberal politicians, and the education establishment are trying to stonewall the “good news” about school choice. But school choice works, and more and more Black leaders are saying so. For example in l999, the national NAACP ousted Mr. Wille Breazell as the organization’s Colorado head, after he announced his support for school choice and complained that the “status quo leaves the poorest kids who need the most help......trapped in our very worst schools. “
Black community support for school choice is putting the NAACP at odds with prominent Democratic politicians, particularly big city mayors. For example: John Norquist, former mayor of Milwaukee, Kurt Schmoke, former mayor of Baltimore, Andrew Young, fomer mayor of Atlanta, and most recently Washington D.C. mayor Anthony Williams——all of them Democrats want to give low-income parents the right to choose where their child attends school. Plain and simple, that is the definition of “school choice” allowing parents to make the decision where their child will attend school, not some governmental entity making the decision.”
And yet another:
From 2000 census data:
“While just 12.2 percent of U.S. families send their children to private schools, that figure rises to 17.5 percent among urban families in general and to 21.5 percent among urban public school teachers, almost twice the national average.
The difference in the choices made by public school teachers and the general public were especially striking in America’s largest cities, where public schools are often the most troubled. For example, in the New York City area, 32.5 percent of public school teachers send their children to private schools, compared to 22.7 percent of the general public. In Chicago, 38.7 percent of public school teachers, versus 22.6 percent of the general public, send their children to private schools. In Los Angeles, private schools are chosen by 24.5 percent of public school teachers and 15.7 percent of the public.
Also noteworthy are the differences in cities where school choice programs have seen their greatest successes. In Milwaukee, for instance, home of the nation’s oldest publicly funded voucher program, 29.4 percent of public school teachers send their children to private schools, versus 23.4 percent of the general public.
In Washington, DC, home of the nation’s newest publicly funded voucher program, 26.8 percent of public school teachers send their children to private schools, versus 19.8 percent of the public. One of the revelations that helped pass the DC voucher legislation was the disclosure in the news media that the politicians opposing school choice in that city did not enroll their own children in District of Columbia public schools.”
Yeah, “nobody” wants it, if they can get it or afford it, they sure don’t choose to pass it up, do they?
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