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WashPo covering for Barry Obama - again.
But did the customer service levels of the schools improve?
I wonder if those voucher students had lower rates of discipline problems, drug abuse, etc.
And even if it does nothing for urban students (which I doubt is the truth anyway) I think they should still be open to everyone in the US. I see no reason why parents who want to privately educate their children should have to pay for it twice.
Bad sign, but still far too early to can the program. Let vouchers run their course properly (five years should be the minimum), then make a decision about retaining it, refining it or abandoning it.
Whatever happened to a little patience and foresight?
You're telling me that private schools, when given $13,500 per student can't perform better??
The US Dept of Ed is lying.
I wonder how these lottery winners were REALLY picked. Rotten cherry picking?
Try getting the government out of public education. As in, we don’t need public education... the market will provide all the good, private schools we need.
The key here is that it is D.C. schools. In any other city you would see a difference.
The point, of course, is not how the children fare on tests etc, but should the parents have a choice. If we decided programs based on the scores of the kids on the tests many public schools would be closed and we would be looking for an alternative.
Which “public schools”? DC or US public schools IN GENERAL? Seems like a flawed report.
If they did better than DC schools, then they are a success! The DC Public School system is a basket case. I doubt that the DC charters did no better than DC Public Schools.
The entire concept of vouchers is to allow the free market to weed out the bad schools and encourage excellence.
If a student performs well in a school, then the school attracts more students. A poorly performing student would then use the freedom to choose a better school.
Two years????
This amount of time is entirely inadequate to assess the success of vouchers. Its not even enough time for a single student to assess whether or not a single school is good or not.
This is blatent propoganda by the WaPo. And people are smart enough to recognize that two years is not enough time to make any kind of judgement.
I’m not surprised by this. I have never understood the logic behind solving a problem by moving the problem from one location to the other. The success or non-success of a school is mostly determined by the students, not the teachers or the school. Good students will do well even in bad schools. Bad students will do poorly in good schools.
It’s interesting to note that the noticeable improvements came from students who did relatively well before entering the voucher program. This is understandable since these students showed motivation before and are more likely to take advantage of a better environment than the kids who did poorly before entering the program. A voucher program will most likely help the kids who needed the least help in the first place.
When you look at the black community, you see a steady increase in blacks achieving high professional status while at the same time, you see an increase social failure of many. What you are seeing is one group gradually receiving more benefits from taking advantage of the opportunities today while another group is becoming less and less motivated and getting worse and worse. This is what is being shown in the voucher schools. The motivated inner city students, who did fairly well before, will improve while the ones who didn’t do well (typically the unmotivated ones) will do no better.
Good grief, give it another year, at least!
Inner city kids nowadays are the product of generational welfare, thanks liberals! How's that ADC working out for us?
Parents of students with scholarships were more satisfied with their children's new schools and were less likely to worry that schools could be dangerous, the report found. Students showed no difference in their level of satisfaction.
So the kids are doing NO better, and sometimes worse, but the parents FEEL better about being in a private school - and the kids couldn't either way!
Yeah, let's throw more money at the problem, that'll work.
If vouchers do nothing else but lessen or eliminate the socialist agenda from being implemented then it is a worthwhile endeavor.
Sometimes you need to break the mold and start over again. The best thing that could ever happen would be for public schools to be sold off to private enterprise and let the marketplace work in allocating educational opportunities.
Vouchers stink, but not for the reasons detailed in this article.
Vouchers are a political red herring. And I’m failing to see how one wealth redistribution measure (vouchers) are all that more palatable than government schools.
I guess the idea of allowing taxpayers to keep their money and educate their children as they see fit is just too radical a concept.