While we’re hot and bothered about education policy, I thought I would add another log to the fire. From Megan McArdle,
I very rarely get angry about politics. But every time I see some
middle class parent prattling about vouchers "destroying" the public
schools by "cherry picking" the best students, when they’ve made damn
sure that their own precious little cherries have been plucked out of
the failing school systems, I seethe with barely controllable inward
rage. It is the vilest hypocrisy on display in American politics today.
Apt. 11d 
Hypocrisy is overhyped as a sin these days (and righteous indignation is overhyped as a virtue), but I loved this phrase of MM’s:
“the lesser sin of viewing real estate purchases as the natural vehicle through which one should excercise educational choice.”
That’s a very striking way to put the question: why should the purchase of a half million dollar piece of real estate (or equivalent rent) be your passport to a quality education? I could think all day about that without coming up with anything that holds water besides “they paid for that school, so they deserve it” or (as a number of people said on MM’s thread) “if there were more minority children, it wouldn’t be a good school anymore.”
As I’ve said before, in a world where you can buy one song at a time, mix any paint color you want, and order things like a half-caf iced soy latte, there’s no way that the live-in-neighborhood-send-child-to-neighborhood-public-school paradigm is going to hold up. Choice is the order of the day, and eventually parents are going to get it. They may want before care, after care, SAT prep, wall-to-wall AP courses, vocational courses, soccer, lots of time for music practice and instruction, homework help, math-science emphasis, foreign language immersion, community apprenticeships, scripture (whoops! public school! must remain ignorant of foundational texts of Western civilization!), arts emphasis, public service emphasis, International Baccalaureate, whatever.
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“the vilest hypocrisy on display in American politics today”
McArdle brings teh funny. Question for the observers: wittingly or unwittingly?
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Well, there is a long list of major American political figures who sing the glories of public education while make good and sure that their kids don’t get any (especially that offered by the District of Columbia). The issue comes up now and again, but I don’t think they get nearly enough heat for it.
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I’m a reluctant supporter of vouchers for that reason — while I don’t think that they’re a substitute for systematic school improvement, I don’t believe that we’ve got a right to hold kids hostage in failing schools while we wait for the systematic improvements.
That said, I think most voucher supporters are also hypocrites — while there are some who are truly concerned about poor kids, most of them are primarily interested in promoting the free market as the solution to all of the problems in the world and beating up on the teacher’s unions.
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That’s a long, long way from “the vilest hypocrisy on display in American politics today.”
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Does anyone who opposes vouchers care to defend the hypocrisy to which McCardle refers? I’ve generally attributed it to a belief that the government knows what’s best for everyone, especially poor people. Therefore, the government will only spend tax money (your money) on what it thinks is best for you. Very condescending.
Or, in the case of politicians, pure unadulterated politics since they would hate to lose control of another government bureaucracy and because support from the NEA is crucial.
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Elizabeth,
I don’t see the hypocrisy there. Isn’t it possible to both think that the free market can generate a lot of neat solutions (in education and elsewhere), while also caring about poor kids? It’s not necessarily an either or situation. The free market would be the means, and helping poor children would be the end. Plus, might one not honestly believe that teachers’ unions have done for American education what the automotive unions did for GM?
I think that the situation with US education is very similar to US health care. If you are mostly happy with what the current system provides you, you don’t want to rock the boat, especially if you suspect that any new, more equitable solution won’t be quite so nice for you as the old system. In the case of education, there is a huge and very literal investment in the status quo. The fact that some schools are seen as better makes homes in those neighborhoods immensely valuable, and breaking the connection between neighborhood and school could lead to the loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars in value. (Of course, this would be most noticeable in high-cost areas.) In the face of that financial risk, it’s not surprising that vouchers haven’t gotten off the ground.
How to break out of this stalemate? I think at least part of the solution is pointing out that a lot of suburban schools aren’t actually all that great, compared with what they could be, given the resources that they consume, as well as continuing to create more diverse school models.
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Well, there are a variety of voucher plans out there. If we’re referring to the ones that would give parents a fixed credit to spend on private school, well, what a disaster that would be: the price of private school would be driven up, and the poor families who couldn’t afford to pay anything beyond the credit would be left in the resource-drained public schools.
Live by the free-market-solution-to-everything, die by it.
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Doug,
Well, imagine a captain reassuring his passengers that his sinking ship is doing fine, meanwhile lowering a lifeboat and escaping to safety while they all drown. That’s a really harsh analogy, but it’s in some ways well deserved.
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Actually, I prefer to imagine a former mayor of New York saying that whether or not waterboarding is torture depends on who is doing it. When I think of really vile things on display in American politics today, that’s one of the directions my mind runs.
Private schools are small beer by comparison.
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Private schools are small beer by comparison.
It’s hard to rank hypocrisy or political evils, but in my book the abuse that many public schools are imposing upon American children is pretty high up. The potential negative effects upon our democracy loom large in my mind.
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Tex:
No arguments as to the pure politics involved, but I don’t think even the “vilest hypocrites” would (consciously) agree with your first proposition. More likely is cognitive dissonance, born of an inability to face the ramifications of their own (accurate) calculations of what is best for their own children.
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Dr. Manhattan,
Don’t forget their (accurate) calculations that their political careers will go down the drain if they cross the teachers’ unions on vouchers.
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Riddle me this, conservatives over here: One of the things I think I often hear conservative people lamenting is the loss of community, the loss of common institutions, loss of common experiences that shape a local or national culture. Fragmentation of the public sphere is put about as a bad thing, part and parcel of general decay that must be fought.
And yet it is a point of conservative faith that public schools — often called “the common school” earlier in history — are irretrievably bad and must be replaced by some private-sector non-community approach to schooling. What gives?
(Ever so slightly more specifically, what gives outside of the South? Integration is what turned many conservatives in the South away from public schools, but did all the other conservatives just follow their lead?)
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Although my perspective on this goes beyond just the voucher argument, I believe it is possible to support public schools while sending your own children to private schools. If the public schools are totally awful, and you are activist in support of them, and vote in favor of appropriate taxes to give them the budgets they require, and make sure that needed ancillary services are provided, etc., you are helping those schools along to the point where eventually your own kids would go even if you could afford private school. I personally believe fixing the educational system is in the interest of everyone, parent or no.
One thing that makes it hard is that it’s pretty easy to take that stance publicly, but then in reality never actually provide much support to the public schools. My sense is that many people have good intentions, but they find the problem to be so exhausting and intractable that they end up never doing anything.
That said, I think it’s a bit much to characterize the state of the general American school system as “abuse”. Is it a mess? For sure. Is it not achieving up to its potential? Absolutely. Abuse? Only in a few situations.
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I agree with jen– you don’t have to have kids at all to support public schools, much less have your kids in a public school. And I do agree that supporting public education is in all of our best interests. Of course, I’m a mom who sends her kids to public schools, so I have a vested interest. But I also teach at a private school, so I straddle a strange line.
The problem for me with vouchers is the old “good of the many, good of the few” conundrum. When kids leave a “failing” school so they won’t be “held hostage,” what happens to the kids, faculty, staff and community that got left? How does it work towards long-term school improvement at all?
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I’m struck by the fact that opposition to vouchers is framed as “supporting public schools”. I support public schools, but not to the tune of forcing kids to stay in awful ones because they owe it to the teachers. Those kids don’t owe the other kids, or the teachers, or the community, one damn thing. The community owes them a good education.
And if you think that the kids who might leave do have some obligation, then your kids have even more obligation, because they already hit the pick-six in the genetic lottery.
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Good point, Dr. M. Cognitive dissonance probably explains it better.
A decent education trumps support for community schools when the over arching objective is to produce a properly educated populace (3 R’s & some history) needed to maintain the best components of our national culture.
It is strong language, but I would characterize the way many big-city schools treat our children as abuse. Especially when the wasted resources are considered. Even in supposedly good schools, there is an abysmal failure to teach according to world class standards. Washington State is experiencing a particularly difficult problem with this now.
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Correction — I should have written “even in some supposedly good schools”
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There are several different reasons to support vouchers. For some people, they want support of religious schools. For others, it’s a free market thing. And for some, it’s a matter of equity. There are many lefties who support school vouchers for that reason, including myself and Harry Brighouse at Crooked Timber.
It is absolutely not fair for some kid in the Harlem to have to attend some crappy school, waiting around for some magic school reform that never appears. If he can attend a slightly better Catholic school down the block, then he absolutely should. Vouchers are not going to lead to wide scale improvement of public schools, nor are they going to trash the system. But it will help some kids, not all, have a much better future.
Keeping these failing schools going, because of some unquestioning support of public schools is just wrong. If the private schools in these neighborhoods are doing even a slightly better job, then get those kids in there right now. It’s unfair to the kids to waste their youth in failing schools.
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Doug,
That’s quite a good question, and this is going to be a long, multipart answer. First of all, I’d point out that liberals talk about issues of community all the time, for instance around here. Secondly, (as we discussed a while back), like it or not, there seems to be a relationship between homogeneity and community. You can see this (as I have) comparing Catholic parishes in the DC area. There are immensely diverse mega-parishes where you could attend for years and no one would ever learn your name, and just about everyone rushes out to the parking lot as soon as they decently can. Meanwhile, across town at Our Lady Queen of Poland and Our Lady of Lebanon, the whole parish hangs out outside after the liturgy, buzzing. (St. Nicholas’s Russian Orthodox Church has a similar vibe down in the parish hall.)
And now for a partial tour of the conservative psyche. The question being, what do those “common schools” of old mean to conservatives? Let’s look! (The following is not meant to be history.) Here we go:
1. To begin with, the common school does not really feature in the psyche of American Catholic conservatives (the following is a reconstruction, as I’m neither a cradle Catholic nor a member of the relevant generation). You lived in your ethnic neighborhood, you went to St. Whatsits’s if you were Italian, and to St. Whosit’s one block away if you were Irish. God forbid your parents send you to the public school, which was pretty much a sin (featuring as it did, a large unwanted dose of Protestantism Lite), plus it demonstrated rather clearly that your parents didn’t love you. If you did go to public school, let’s not talk about it! Hopefully you went to the parish school and studied with the sisters in a class of 40 or so kids, grew up, became middle class, and eventually joined the exodus to the suburbs.
2. What about the conservative Protestant psyche? (Here I’m a better authority, because it’s where I grew up.) If this is you, the common school means reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic, ideally administered via the McGuffey reader in a small red one-room school house (I’m not joking about the importance of the McGuffey reader–you can still easily buy them online). Reading will be learned through the King James Bible, of course. All the classes are in a single room, and children progress through each subject at their own individual speed, and you don’t move on until you know the material. You might be at one grade level in reading, and at another level in math. You finish school with eighth grade. If you are really exceptional, you might go to high school, but there may not be a high school available near you.
While the common school is a worthy ideal, it seems to me to require common values and common goals. Where those are absent (as in much of our society), the public schools will be an arena of conflict, with each interest group intent on reshaping the school in their image.
I think the parish schools of old were “common schols” in a very real sense, despite being private. Similarly, I’ve been surprised to discover that my daughter’s new private school is in some sense our neighborhood school. We just moved to a small faculty neighborhood with 13 kids, and were surprised to discover that 9 of those kids are in families that send their children to this school. The larger neighborhood (graduate students, faculty, etc.) has a lot of kids that go to this school, and we’re always bumping into new families wearing the school t-shirts at one of the cafeterias or just walking around.
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Doug, I can’t speak for the other right-wingers on this thread or elsewhere, but I reject your premise. Supporting vouchers or similar substantial reform is perfectly consistent with trying to improve public education, not destroy it.
And insofar as public education systems are dominated, too often, by internal bureaucratic interests rather than what’s best for the kids- not exactly a controversial claim – then that cuts against your equation of public schools with “common institutions,” or at least desirable ones. Telling families that dealing with failing school bureaucracies is a mandatory communal experience is not something that either conservatives or liberals should support.
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Hey folks, you’re committing the same sin that you accuse us liberals of (about conservatives): assuming that because we disagree, that we must be motivated by evil.
Doug actually brings up the reasons I oppose vouchers (the community of public schools). Right now, anyone who chooses to attend a private school still has to be a part of the public school system (because we still have to pay taxes). Vouchers give you a choice of opting out of the system. Sending your kid to a private school doesn’t mean your opting out, because you have to pay for both, kind of like paying for Social security & saving for retirement.
So vouchers, in any wide-spread way, (to me) is the road to ending public education, which I feel has been a strong and substantial force for giving individuals opportunity (I myself am an example).
Elizabeth says she supports vouchers because she can’t see telling people who can’t afford to pay for both private & public education, and for whom the only available public education is substandard and inadequate that they must just let their children suffer. I might consider supporting such a program, but it would have to come with significant constraints: 1) means testing — I have no interest in subsidizing private education for people who could afford to pay for it and 2) significant limits on which schools it could be used for.
And,, ultimately, I don’t think vouchers really work for those cases that Elizabeth is talking about (the poor, who really don’t have access to better education in the public school system won’t really have it, on any significant scale, with vouchers). As Doug states, the money gets sucked up in many substandard schools,, sucked away from public education. Maybe random individual children would benefit, but I’d rather see that come as scholarship programs for poor children, funded separately from public education. In fact, that sounds like a plan I would consider — a federal tax increase that goes to fund scholarships for poor children who are attending “failing” public schools.
This really is the same debate about privatizing social security, privatizing education, privatizing health care. On each, we have different levels of public and private involvement, and we have a fundamental disagreement about which system provides better services. For all three I (an unabashed liberal) want a minimum level of service provided by a public institution. Then, people can opt to buy more, if they choose.
bj
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I think this is a pretty low level hypocrisy, but it is worth seeing the institutional background to it. The fact that choice operates through the housing market obscures from people the fact that it is school choice. AFter all, school quality is rarely the only consideration in play — we know we could get better schools by moving, but we like where we live for other reasons and the schools are good enough. And, to be fiar, its not our fault that zoning boards ensure that neighbourhoods (and therefore neighbourhood schools) are socio-economically segregated, so that our only realistic choices are very high poverty or very low poverty schools. And you might well think that vouchers don’t do much, anyway, to help poor kids (they don’t, its true). I actually think that most of the people Megan is so angry with are victims of the kind of opaqueness of social choices that protects a lot of people from seeing the vicious nature of their own inclinations. (Think of the people in the top 10-20% of the income distribution who whine about welfare and taxes).
Here’s a suggestion to Megan. What I do, is I simply say that as someone who is very advantaged and who has bought a house partly on school-quality considerations, I personally find it impossible to oppose measures that allow people whose prospects are much worse than those of my children and whose schools are much worse, from having a bit more choice about where they go, even though I know that vouchers don’t do much good, and aren’t a long-run solution. That tends to give people pause, and helps them to think a bit harder.
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I just am never going to support using public funds for any school that teaches religion. I know it happens (in the school district my father taught in, public school teachers were sent to the local religious schools to teach some courses, on the taxpayers’ dime), but I am not going to ever support it.
So here’s a suggestion: if a crappy school in Harlem is failing, close it and let the kids’ families choose nearby public schools that aren’t failing. All this “Catholic school down the block” stuff seems patently unrealistic. Not only that, it’s potentially discriminatory to atheists. Maybe I don’t want my kid to move to the Catholic school down the block, but what if the nearest non-religious school is miles away? How is that fair? It takes a lot of money to fund a school, Amy pointed out. Why should Catholic schools have an edge on getting students (and their funds) when they themselves are funded by a diocese with access to millions of dollars plus cheap labor? What if I want no part of that? It’s a system ripe for abuse.
Let the non-failing public schools get the student funding.
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Megan wrote: “I’m struck by the fact that opposition to vouchers is framed as “supporting public schools”. I support public schools, but not to the tune of forcing kids to stay in awful ones because they owe it to the teachers. Those kids don’t owe the other kids, or the teachers, or the community, one damn thing. The community owes them a good education.”
OK, you support public schools. But not apparently because public schools are a public good. You seem to support them because public schools are good for the individual student.
Because you see, you can’t have it both ways. Your statement that “the community owes [kids] a good education,” while true to a degree, is not the whole story. If public schools are a public good, then it’s not just about the kids.
I know you don’t really have a communitarian mindset, but do you see what I mean? There are benefits of public schools that extend beyond the benefits obtained by the kids. So Jackie has a point.
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Thanks, Wendy! Also, I have to agree that I will never feel comfortable using tax dollars to support religious schools. Freedom of religion does not entail government funding for religious schools, and too many government dollars have already been funneled to religious orgs under the current administration, and to bogus items like abstinence-only sexual education.
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In New York City and in a lot of older cities, the only alternative to public schools are the Catholic schools. The other private schools are too pricey to bother with vouchers. The city Catholic schools aren’t great by our suburban standards, but they are better than many of the failing public schools. If I was a needy parent, I wouldn’t care if the school was teaching scientology, as long as my kid was also getting the basics of math and literature. There are a lot of non-Catholics in Catholic schools in the city, just for that reason.
In some neighborhoods, there is no alternative. If there happens to be one successful school, they don’t have the desks or space to take in any kids from the failing school. Where do they have space? In the Catholic schools. Not enough Catholics anymore.
Of course, it’s best to not get involved with mixed church and state, but we’re left with very imperfect options in front of us. I’ll take a little church/state overlap in order to get a few kids a better education. Believe me, every parent in those communities would happily choose the church school over nothing.
Again, if we have that option, so should they.
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Laura, I live in Baltimore, one of the oldest Catholic cities in the country, so I’m very familiar with the argument of which you speak. The Catholic church is still a huge presence all over MD. I also attended Catholic school as a student and considered them for my kids. I still don’t think giving taxpayer money to religious schools helps anyone but a handful of students. And yes, that handful could see an improvement, but again, at what cost? Also, the jury is still out on whether voucher programs do result in academic gains for those students who take advantage of them.
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If it’s been proven that vouchers don’t work, then aren’t voucher arguments just so many red herrings? i.e. “pay no attention to the elephant in the corner” — that elephant being underfunded education across the board.
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Wendy,
I feel pretty queasy, too, at the prospect of public funding for the Abu Nidal Memorial School for the Greater and Lesser Jihad. There’s already a certain amount of public funding for religious schools, including school buses and textbooks, as well as funding for disabled children attending religious schools. School busing isn’t a problem, but I think state provision of state-approved textbooks has been, since textbooks are so closely related to content. I’ve heard a lot of complaints from Catholics about those textbooks, and how much damage they did to the Catholic textbook market. That’s a warning sign, I think.
My suggestion would be to create an individualized education plan for each child, charting out expected yearly goals. Schools (public AND private) would then get funding based on how much progress the child made in a year (or a semester, whatever). That way you avoid the issue of religion–you’re paying for a year’s worth of algebra, or a year’s worth of reading instruction, and you don’t pay unless the child gets it and it sticks. History would be a sticky area (a lot of stuff happened over the last 10,000 years–how do you figure out which events or people are important?), but I think it would work pretty well otherwise. The state would move away from the position of providing instruction and regulating itself (never a good idea), towards producing curriculum, directing testing and distributing funding. I’m not sure which levels of government would do the job best, what income levels would be involved, or how this would work exactly, but I think it has potential. I think it would be very practical to contract with a private tutoring company to teach a bunch of 5-year-olds to read, and pay only if they learn to read. It’s not a big deal, but it’s got to be done right as soon as possible, or a child’s entire educational future is in jeopardy.
With regard to church state entanglement, I lean towards paying for results rather than focusing on process. If a drug treatment program gets results with a combination of 12-stepping and glossolalia, or fasting and sweat lodges, why not?
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As to vouchers saving only a handful, I wonder if that is really such a good argument, and whether it isn’t true that any broader societal change will have to start with a handful of individuals. W.E.B. Dubois talked about a “talented tenth,” and said that “The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men.” I think there’s something to that.
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I won’t take a little church state overlap in order to get a few kids a better education, and I have to wonder whether that’s another case where people are insulated from the effect because of their own personal status. Laura you are catholic, aren’t you? Of course, for a Catholic person, sending using tax-payer dollars to send a kid to a Catholic school doesn’t seem like a very large overlap of religion and state. Instead, it’s a pretty useful subsidy.
I freely admit that I’m insulated from a lot because I belong to an economically privileged minority. But those of you who belong to a socially privileged majority (Christians, white people, whatever) underestimate the impact of blurring lines that protect minorities.
As a member of so many different minorities (and my children are even more impacted, ’cause they get to combine the individual minority groups that each of their parents belong to), as Wendy says, I will use every single power I have to do every single thing I can to prevent withdrawing money from our inclusive and non-discriminatory public schools and sending it to schools that discriminate and whose purpose is (and should be) furthering their own religious based values.
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Amy:
I feel just as queasy about public funding for the local parish school (though I’ll choose not to insult it by giving it an offensive name) as you do about giving money to the “Abu Nidal Memorial School for the Greater and Lesser Jihad”
That’s why we have separation of church and state in this country, so that we don’t have to have discussions comparing the worth and value of people’s personal religious choices.
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Religion, politics, and education. Is it blog sweeps week or something?
I think it’s all well and good to talk about “paying for results” and not worrying about the methods (“praying to the giant spaghetti monster”). But,, I think people only say that because they’re pretty certain that the environment won’t force them into a situation where the only option is praying to the GSM in order to get an education.
In a related matter, I participate in an nation-wide mailing list on education. One periodic lament that comes up is figuring out opportunities for your children if you live in Utah, where almost all activities for children seem to be religiously based (i.e. playing sports or any other type of enrichment activity), and you do not subscribe to the dominant religion.
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bj,
As I posted over at MM’s place, a lot of people overestimate how religion-neutral public schools are (especially those people who are happy with the current recipe). In a lot of places, the modus vivendi is a sort of syncretism that isn’t universally appreciated. In the early grades, we’ve got St. Patrick’s, Valentine’s Day, Hannukah latkes, and that winter-holiday-that-must-not-be-named. Sometimes, it feels like those holidays are the whole curriculum. (My daughter and her best friend were both whining last year to their respective mommies about how they wanted to celebrate Hannukah and get all those presents. It wasn’t a big deal for us, but think how some Muslim parents might feel about it.) A year earlier (as I posted here a while back) her city public preschool program spent a month or so celebrating Santapalooza. There was also the time in pre-K when my daughter came home talking about how Grandma Buzzard had put the sun in the sky. Then there’s those lengthy Ramadan simulations that some schools like to do. Very educational, I’m sure, but calculated to make a lot of parents mad. Plus, you know a lot of parents aren’t crazy about Halloween. So, how do you run a public school system that’s fair to the people who think this is no big deal and a cherished part of childhood, as well as the people for whom it’s like fingernails on a dozen blackboards? Quick answer–you can’t.
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Jen, I think it is a massive overstatement to say that “it’s been proven that vouchers don’t work.” At best the evidence is inconclusive.
And given the massive increases in education funding over the past few decades wiht a lack of corresponding improvement in outcomes (this was one of the points that inspired the Economist piece that touched off the last post), it’s hard to identify underfunding as the main problem.
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I don’t think you can consider public schools teaching about Ramadan to the kind of pervasive religious intstruction that heppens in religious schools. Again remember, I’m speaking as a former student in Catholic schools and someone who’s checked out curent Catholic schools as a parent. Explaining how Hanukkah works is very different than teaching kids that the Pope is the infallible representative of God on earth.
I’d also like to second pretty much every point bj made in his/her comments!
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“Explaining how Hanukkah works is very different than teaching kids that the Pope is the infallible representative of God on earth.”
Just as teaching about the bible’s influence on literature and history is not the same as teaching that it is the word of god.
Public schools celebrate the culture we live in, which includes religion. Teaching children about celebrations and traditions does not blur the line between church and state, but teaching religion does. Some individual practitioners might blur the division (and individual children might misinterpret the lesson being taught). But, that’s not an argument in further blurring the lines.
I’ll admit to the possibility that public schools in some less diverse places than the one I live in are less religion neutral than they should be. But, that’s only going to want me to re-double my efforts in favor of religious neutrality.
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bj,
As I was posting over at MM’s place and here, history is a another difficult issue. There’s so much material, so many places, people, and events, that to make any sense of it, you’ve got to (especially for the kiddies) fit it all on a narrative framework that the details can stick on to. This is unavoidably an ideological process. So do you teach kids about Helen Keller or about Elizabeth Anne Seton? It’s not at all obvious why it should be Helen Keller, as it was when I was a kid in public school, but Elizabeth Anne Seton doesn’t belong to a narrative that is taught in the public system (although she should show up in the Maryland curriculum). And so with a lot of people, places, and events. This is an insoluble difficulty of public schools–how do you truthfully deal with everyone’s history?
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The Ramadan news story (which you may have missed) was about an extensive Ramadan simulation at a public school. Given schools’ current emphasis on projects and experiential learning, it’s going to be very difficult to draw the line between learning religion and learning about religion.
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“One periodic lament that comes up is figuring out opportunities for your children if you live in Utah, where almost all activities for children seem to be religiously based (i.e. playing sports or any other type of enrichment activity), and you do not subscribe to the dominant religion.”
bj, I’m mystified by this complaint. I’m a practicing Mormon, and I’ll tell you for a fact that the church doesn’t involved itself in any community sports leagues, music programs, or other children’s enrichment activities, with the exception of Boy Scouts. (There are monthly church activities for children, and weekly youth group meetings for teenagers.)
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Cates:
I’m repeating second hand, poorly sourced information, so I can’t personally vouch for the lack of opportunities for non-Morman children in Utah. But, you should ask non-Morman acquaintances in Utah how they feel about their access to activities, perhaps?
I think members of “in-groups” often have no idea of the ways in which others might feel excluded. (Mind you, I’ve come to the recognition that this is true about being in an economic in-group, too).
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Fine, bj, I have no interest in instructing non-Mormons in how they should feel around other Mormons. (Incidentally, the Salt Lake metropolitan area is less than 50% LDS; the proportion is higher in rural areas.) But I did want to refute the dark implication that the LDS church is infiltrating civic organizations and structurally excluding non-Mormons, which is patently untrue. Please don’t repeat poorly-sourced hearsay that is likely to create unnecessary fear and resentment.
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I never attended a Catholic school and never considered using one for my kids, even though we’re Catholic. We have a perfectly adequate public school in town. (We’re lucky that way.) So, I can’t personally attest to how much forced indoctrination happens in Catholic school. But I have talked to a number of non-Catholics who attended parochial school, and they said it was no big deal. I don’t think that electrodes are being attached to the kids’ heads where they are brainwashed about popery. Nobody is forced to receive communion or get baptized.
Vouchers won’t prop up the catholic schools. In fact, the Catholic Church only very recently has supported vouchers. When Reagan tried to get a voucher bill passed in the 80s, the Catholic Church actually wrote a memo to Congress saying that were against them. They didn’t want to have to deal with the gov’t strings that went along with the money.
I strongly am against the notion that public schools should be about anything else than education. (sorry, Wendy) If they aren’t do their job, then I don’t want them. I think that for the most part, they are doing their job. But in areas that they aren’t. Where kids are being warehoused until they age out of the system. Then lose them. It is completely unfair to the kids in the schools to waste anymore time on magical reforms that never happen.
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Cates:
My statement did not say that the Mormon church is infiltrating private organizations, and I certainly didn’t mean to allege some kind of dark conspiracy. The source of the comment was actually stating the lack of opportunities, not because the Mormon church was “infiltrating” secular activities, but because there were no secular activities available, because most of the children were participating in church based activities. The person was not in Salt Lake City, and in fact, the lament might have been true about any less-metropolitan community dominated by a particular group, of which one is not a member.
For example, in my own neck of the woods (a large metropolitan area) there is a Catholic youth league that runs soccer, and there is a private organization that runs soccer. So, one can play soccer if you’re Catholic, or if you’re not. If the private league disappeared (and that would not require any “infiltration” by the Catholic organization, just a perfectly reasonable choice of Catholics to play in their own league, and a large enough percent of Catholics in the area as to make the other league un-viable), and the Catholic league required (for example, prayer), the opportunity to play soccer would be gone for those who were unwilling to engage in Catholic prayer.
Not a big deal when we’re talking about soccer, but indeed a big deal when we’re talking about schools. The Catholic league is completely within their rights, and not doing anything wrong, but if there were no other league, it would exclude me and my children This is actually a true story, and in fact, the Catholic league in our area is inclusive enough to include non-Catholics, without requiring them to pray (though that deal was negotiated). But, that’s generosity, not something that should be required of religious organizations. That’s why I believe separation of church and state in the provision of essential services is absolutely vital, and a reason why I believe vouchers are a terrible terrible idea, if they are used for religious education. I am not willing to outsource the public good of education to religious organizations.
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bj,
I don’t think you realize how controversial school curriculum is. Not even reading, writing, and arithmetic are safe–there are Phonics Wars, and Math Wars, and I expect Writing Wars any day now. The choice of books for assigned reading is famously controversial, and everybody’s guilty, from the conservative parents who can’t stand racy or depressing young adult stories to the parents who freak out over a Flannery O’Connor story with an un-PC title or Huckleberry Finn. Holidays are controversial. Character education is controversial. Drug education is controversial. Sex Ed is controversial. History is controversial, too.
There’s no way to create a neutral public educational environment that’s going to keep everybody happy, and neutrality itself is a fantasy.
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God bless my soul. More unexamined assumptions and dubious assertions masquerading as an argument, with a dash of pandering thrown in for salt. I’d recognize Jane Galt’s style anywhere.
“seldom angry about politics” – Iraq, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo don’t make you angry, but school vouchers do ?
“prattling about cherry-picking” – this is one of the least persuasive arguments against vouchers, there are many better: but those aren’t as easily ridiculed. Either Jane doesn’t know there are better arguments, or this is a choice for purposes of propaganda.
“vilest hypocrisy” – I agree with the earlier Doug, either Jane doesn’t get out much, or this is mere pandering.
This discussion is taking place in the context of NCLB, which mandates high-stakes testing for public schools, but nothing at all for private schools. Vouchers will give private schools public money without public accountability. Before Jane drags out the raddled old Free Market Faery to assert that the market will provide accountability, it needs to be said that there is no reasonable way to characterize primary education as a free market. Complete information ? perfect competition ? it would make a cat laugh.
Add to this the detail that wherever and whenever vouchers have been tried, they haven’t worked – see for example
http://tinyurl.com/2sdfql
and it appears to me there is a lot more work to be done by the proponents of vouchers before they can start hurling accusations.
To Harry’s point – yes, that does give pause. However in the current US context as noted, I really don’t think a case can be made for more voucher experiments, until the NCLB environment has been moderated.
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“seldom angry about politics” -Iraq, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo don’t make you angry, but school vouchers do?
—————————-
Doug,
I don’t think you’re being fair here to MM, but surely there is a case to be made that the preventable educational failure of millions of children, combined with generations of preventable poverty and ignorance is worth getting heated up about?
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Except of course that’s not what MM is heated about. What she describes as the “vilest hypocrisy on display in American politics today” is people making a choice about where to send their kids for school that she thinks is at odds with what these same people are saying. Is she seething about shortcomings in the systems of education? Is she seething about generations of preventable poverty? Is she seething about generations of preventable ignorance? No, she is not.
Everybody has their pet peeves, but I’m sticking with my first reaction, that particular posting is such rhetorical overkill that it’s funny.
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Look, if you believe that children should be denied exit in order to help the community, that’s fine . . . provided you deny your own children the same exit. In practice, almost no liberal I have ever met who opposes vouchers, is willing to leave their children suffering in poor schools. If you live in a school district with a high functioning school, I just don’t think you have any moral right to deny that to other children on the grounds that their parents couldn’t afford the right sort of real estate.
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Nor do I think that your apparently aesthetic objection to the notion of paying the Catholic Church to provide education should be a barrier to giving a kid the opportunity to make something out of the only life he’s going to get, again unless you’re willing to put your own kids in that kind of school. FYI, Catholic Schools teach religion in Religion class, which non-catholics get to skip. Most of the teaching is by regular teachers, and the Catholic Church is fully on board with evolution, etc. No one breaks into English class to proseletyze the faith.
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I know that many urban public schools are in bad shape (and I teach many students who graduate from them), but I’m not sure that education has declined in the U.S. in general. I know my daughter is getting an education that is far superior to the one I received (both educations entirely public). My husband says that his students learn far more math before they enter college than he did (both educations elite private). Here’s an interesting and related article at Business Week challenging the idea that our students are doing worse than those abroad.
http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/
content/oct2007/sb20071025_827398.htm
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I know that many urban public schools are in bad shape (and I teach many students who graduate from them), but I’m not sure that education has declined in the U.S. in general. I know my daughter is getting an education that is far superior to the one I received (both educations entirely public). My husband says that his students learn far more math before they enter college than he did (both educations elite private). Here’s an interesting and related article at Business Week challenging the idea that our students are doing worse than those abroad.
http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/
content/oct2007/sb20071025_827398.htm
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Lisa,
I can’t quite put my finger on it, but there’s something wrong with that Business Week article. At one point, the author says that the US is overproducing science and engineering graduates, compared to the available jobs. I really wonder how they’re defining science and engineering, since there’ve been huge nursing shortages as long as I can remember. With the current aging population, there’s going to be tremendous demand for quality medical care, nurses, technicians, etc. Other than that, there’s the mention of rising SAT scores over the past 20 years. That, of course, covers the period when SAT prep programs first started to boom. When I was a high school student in the late 80s/early 90s, my dad was one of the first people in our community to figure out the need to train for the SAT and take it early and often. At the time, a lot of kids we knew (even from upper-middle class families) took it only once in their senior year. There’s also the fact that the makers of the SAT have been fiddling with it for quite a while, so it may be difficult to compare old and new scores. Right after I took it, it was renormed to reflect the fact that scores had dropped.
Unless your daughter is going to the same school you did, I don’t think you can draw many conclusions from the fact that her school is better than yours. If we were to send our daughter to public school, she’d certainly get a better education than I got at my public school, but that would be because we’re better off and more mobile than my parents were, and we would make school quality our top priority.
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“…I thought I would add another log to the fire…” Laura, let me guess. When you were a kid, you were the one who poked hornets’ nests with sticks, right???
I’d like to associate myself with harry b in supporting vouchers as a social justice measure, that folks who live in neighborhoods not as good as mine, and where the schools keep producing very bad outcomes for the kids, should have a chance to get their kids out of those schools.
Doug, I think Megan’s response to your screeds “Look, if you believe that children should be denied exit in order to help the community, that’s fine . . . provided you deny your own children the same exit. In practice, almost no liberal I have ever met who opposes vouchers, is willing to leave their children suffering in poor schools…” is absolutely devastating, and that you are doing very poorly at refuting it.
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Megan wrote: “Look, if you believe that children should be denied exit in order to help the community, that’s fine . . . provided you deny your own children the same exit. In practice, almost no liberal I have ever met who opposes vouchers, is willing to leave their children suffering in poor schools.”
If I were “willing to leave [my] children suffering in poor schools,” you’d bitch at me for being a bad parent and probably tell me my kids deserve the bad education because they have such a neglectful parent. Nice little lose-lose scenario you’ve set up for me. Now let’s try reality.
Reality is that I’m never going to be in a situation where my kids are going to be in failing schools. I am white. I have a household income level of 6 figures. When I moved to my area of SE Mass, I made decisions about where to live. I surveyed the market. I ruled out the really low-cost rentals and I ruled out the really high-cost rentals and found a group of places I could afford. Guess what? None of those places were in SouthInnerCity or Impoverished ImmigrantSuburb.
SHOCKER.
Are you saying that our choice of where to live is somehow the same thing as “denying” or not denying the same exit that I would deny others? Do you really condemn liberals as hypocrites for making the choice not to live in the inner city where the failing schools are?
Now, I get that you live in DC, home of the Hypocrites and LINOs and Kool Kidz, as Atrios calls them. But the rest of us live in the real world where the choices of avoiding failing school districts are pretty much already made for us by the demographics of suburbia. If I decide I want more of a backyard, the choice is already made that I will be living in a school district that is not failing.
In fact, I don’t know why it enrages you that I might have the choice to live in a place without a failing school district, but it doesn’t enrage you that I simply have the choice not to live in an inner city apartment building run by a slumlord, with drug dealers on the corners. In fact, maybe my decision not to live in that neighborhood is what’s really motivating me not to live in the city, as opposed to “keeping my little darlings out of failing public schools.”
And one last thing: it’s kind of creepy how you’re so emotional and enraged over the issue of whether poor kids learn calculus or Latin like the rich kids, but you don’t seem to have that same kind of rage/emotion about whether or not middle class kids who are brain damaged from serious car accidents will get the health care they need.
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I was just thinking now that the grit in the gears of school choice is the fact that we choose with so little information. Things are gradually improving with schools putting more information on the internet, but school websites tend to look the same–all those shining faces and and primary colors. Usually, the only hard information available is test scores, percentage of free lunch users, teacher-student ratio, and racial percentages. Beyond that, there’s the look and feel of the school, but there are only so many schools you can make time to visit. There are starting to be school reviews online at places like greatschools.net, but a lot of schools don’t have any reviews. In view of the current shortage of information, I have two suggestions:
1. Schools and school districts should be much more forthcoming with instructional information. There needs to be a lot more transparency, and better two-way communication between school and parents. Schools should communicate in detail what is happening in class every week (my child’s school has a blog for each classroom), and they should twist the arms of textbook manufacturers, allowing them to post the full text of all textbooks and workbooks online.
2. On a more utopian note, how about a match.com for schools and students? Parents could (with help if needed) answer a questionnaire about their families, and receive a list of possible matches in their districts. (Private schools could be encouraged to participate, too.) A crucial part of this would be a section showing the child’s chance of graduating from this school or going to college, given their demographic information. To make it easier to understand, this could be color coded, maybe with the red-orange-yellow-green code that is already so familiar.
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Wendy,
The question is why there should be an iron bond joining real estate and school assignment. We’ve got to question that, and keep questioning it.
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Amy, I agree with what you’re saying, but I don’t think you do.
For example, my suggestion was that if a parent didn’t like a school, s/he could switch to a different public school that isn’t failing.
However, the “allure” of the private schools you all want vouchers for is that they are “right down the block.”
What’s wrong with my solution? It seems to go along with what you’re saying (geography shouldn’t determine school assignment) and it doesn’t involve using taxpaper money to fund private schools.
Also, one other thing: I don’t think you guys are agreeing on what “failing” schools are. By talking about being able to compare “instructional methods” etc, Amy, you’re suggesting that parents should have a right to get out of a public school whose methods they don’t like.
That seems very different from the outrage people like Megan, Laura and Harry are showing about the kids trapped in “failing” schools where they aren’t learning anything.
So before we can talk about this issue of vouchers and school choice, shouldn’t we agree on what constitutes a “failing” school?
In other words, I already see you trying to take advantage of the outrage over poor kids condemned to failing schools by trying to maneuver a way for parents to get the taxpayers to fund their individual preferences regarding curriculum.
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Wendy,
I didn’t have either calculus or Latin, but I don’t think that either is the mark of a “rich kid” education, just a good education. Beyond that, those upper level courses aren’t the issue. To be a fluent reader and writer, to know math facts effortlessly, to have a handle on fractions, and to easily manipulate numbers would be an excellent start (that’s mostly a sixth grade education, although good writing does take a while to develop).
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Amy, what is a “failing” school and how do you know?
I’m not talking about the differences among a satisfactory education, a good education, and a superior education. I’m talking about what the characteristics are of a *failing* school.
Is the local elementary school in your district a failing school? If so, what makes it failing? Is it failing because it doesn’t offer Latin? Is it a *bad* school because it doesn’t offer Latin?
Is there a difference?
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I also see no hypocrisy in making choices that allow my children to attend certain schools. The same free market folks who tout vouchers believe that it is money that should make the world go around. Because of money I have I have many many choices that the poor inner city kid doesn’t have, and one of those is to both pay my taxes to support public schools and pay for something else that I want, if I want it.
I think you guys are delusional to see the fact that some people can buy things that other people can’t as some kind of devastating criticism. We who oppose vouchers don’t deny anyone an exit, we just refuse to subsidize that exit with tax-payer dollars because of a myriad of other social consequences we believe result (the destruction of public education, the unacceptable blurring of lines between state and religion, the lack of any confidence that vouchers will actually benefit even the children who are subsidized). And, yes, we have choices that are unavailable to some who we refuse to subsidize, because we don’t need the subsidy to make decisions for our own children.
If voucher proponents really cared about the poor children in failing schools, you’d come up with other solutions to address the issue. But, in fact, we believe that voucher proponents actually want to destroy public education, blur the lines between church and state, and don’t really care about helping the kids with vouchers. Hence, the strong feelings. Mind you, this is one of the hills I’ll defend (not vouchers, per se, but the principle of universal secular public education).
bj
(And, really, would the Catholic church sign on to the idea that Catholic parish schools are not set up to advance the Catholic faith? No way, and they shouldn’t, because that is their purpose in developing an extensive school system, to bring and nurture their children in Catholic values and beliefs. But, that value shouldn’t be mixed with our diverse state.
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But Amy, then you are saying that vouchers are a means to dismantle public education as a common service to all the children in America. This is indeed what liberals believe about voucher proponents, and why I oppose vouchers. We think voucher advocates aren’t really concerned with providing an escape hatch for poor, under-served children trying to survive substandard public schools. We think that vouchers are a means to ending public education and replacing it with a private (including religious) system to provide an essential service to children.
I think that’s where we hit an unsurmountable ideological conflict. You believe public schools are potentially controversial. I believe they are where every child has an opportunity to become members of our common community.
We all bring our personal stories to this discussion. Public schools, average public schools, in an ordinary American city were where I became American. American public schools (not ones in Singapore, or India, or Japan) educated me, taught me to love learning, and science, and math, and reading. My life now, is in absolute terms, a real version of the American dream, where immigrants come from dirt poor backgrounds, and with access to the schools, and a recognition of ability, get success beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.
I credit American public schools, and as others have said in this thread, I see no evidence that the system is broken, except in isolated situations, which should be addressed without a wholesale change in the principle of universal education.
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bj, let me send you back to the article which lit Megan McArdle’s fuse: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/19/AR2007101901546_pf.html
The writer sets the scene for his choice to leave his house in DC for the ‘burbs with an account of what is wrong with the DC schools which he has seen, and which has driven him away. Is this in your ‘isolated situations’ exception? How about Camden? Isolated? East St. Louis? Baltimore?
The system works just swell for me. I bought a house in a district where houses sell for about $250000 more than a comparable house in the District would cost. My kids are in first, fourth and fifth grades, and they have been and are extremely well served by the public schools they attend. Your clarion call for requiring the children of people poorer than me to go to bad schools because their parents don’t have money to get them out – you note that people who have money generally have better choices than those who don’t. That’s true, but we usually try to make a distinction between different kinds of goods. You’d get laughed out of the room if you were suggesting that poorer people get subsidized for a nice new Lexus. But we do issue food stamps to ensure that there’s enough food in poor households (and give them in the form of food vouchers, so that parents can’t spend them for vodka). I think schooling is more like food than a Lexus, it’s in the area where we do want to take care of the kids whether their parents are fortunate or not.
Now, do I want to break the American public school system? Breaking the system in DC and East St Louis would be swell, I’ll cop to that. In my town? Not so much, nor do I think it would break – the existing public schools are extremely attractive, one of the things which is best for my kids is that their fellow students are their neighbors. So I at least hope that the schools which deserve to live would, and those which don’t would either have to reform or go under.
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Dave:
If I really believed that voucher proponents were trying to get my support on improving the lot of the children in failing schools in DC, we could discuss that issue, not vouchers, and we would leave the table open to all the different possible solutions.
And, there are many other potential solutions, from raising the salaries of teachers, to affordable housing in the suburbs, to different forms of escape hatches (as Wendy also suggested, my favorite would be allowing the students in DC to enroll in your public school district).
But, instead we are discussing the red herring of vouchers used to privatize education, that I believe will actually be used to break public education, not just in DC, but all over the country. That’s a solution that I believe conflicts with my fundamental beliefs, and more importantly one that I don’t think is going to work. Certainly nothing in the literature suggests that it will, or that it’s even marginally better than any other solution we could try; the proponents are trying to get us to buy into an ideological principle that privatization will necessarily produce improvements without showing us how. I believe the last eight years have shown me clearly not to fall into that trap.
So, as with many other debates, we get nothing and the children continue to suffer.
bj
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Gosh, I’m snowed under. Apologies in advance if I can’t adequately address every point.
Here are my answers:
1. Not in my wildest dreams do I expect that the state will pick up the tab for our excellent private school. To begin with, while we’re not as well-off as a lot of the double-income folk around 11D, we still belong to the class of people who is the “them” that is supposed to pay for everything. In fact, we make over three times the average household income in our economically depressed Texas town (which does have a lot of college students). Plus, I like the school so much that it would be very foolish to do anything to endanger it. At the moment, we’re paying $400 a month tuition (including school books, materials, and field trips), which is OK. When our second child goes to school, that will double. That will hurt, but hopefully we can make it happen by bidding farewell to cell phones, Starbucks, babysitters, and a lot of other things I like. It would be well worth it. If we had one, two, or three more kids, we’d be in a pickle, but I’d probably try to get a job at the kids’ school (which is essentially a co-op) and we’d go public for high school–by that point, there’s AP and you can usually put together a reasonable schedule of classes, maybe adding in a community college or distance learning course or two. For further savings, while the kids are too young for high school, we could stick to renting and avoid the 2-3% property tax that Texas has, at least while renting is significantly cheaper than owning (there’s no income tax). (Real estate in Texas doesn’t appreciate, so there’s probably no loss in waiting to buy. I do want a house eventually.)
2. bj, with reference to #1, not everybody is as fortunate as ourselves. A lot of medium-income people could pay either private school or taxes for public school, but they can’t pay both. So it’s not just a question of rich people being more fortunate than poor people–we’re actually taking away the money that middle-income would be able to use on a different, more congenial school. Hence the popularity of homeschooling in some circles.
3. (this is also for bj) There’s nothing “potentially controversial” about it–the items that I have listed up thread are controversial, and lead to alienation, distrust of and disengagement from the public system. A lot of people already feel exactly the same way about public schools that you feel about religious schools. (There’s a popular Catholic blogger who runs a regular feature “Reason #459209 to Homeschool Your Kids” whenever something heinous or ridiculous goes down at a school (although I think he includes private schools, too.)
4. Wendy, public choice would be a start (I hear they have it in San Francisco), but it doesn’t cover #3–the sense that a public school doesn’t share your family’s values or academic priorities.
5. (also to Wendy) I’m going to be utopian again, and say that a school is failing unless every child reaches their full academic potential. I suppose every school is failing according to that definition, but some more than others. If my child can learn to read at 4, she should. If she can start Spanish or recite the states of the Eastern Seaboard or describe the geography of the Grand Canyon or the Mississippi River in kindergarten, that’s when she should. Every year, there should be at least a year’s progress. (Add in all caveats about not force-feeding kids information. My daughter seems to quite enjoy it.)
6. (Wendy?) Pedagogy is intimately connected with the question of school success or failure. The schools (like KIPP) that are most successful with remediating disadvantaged children tend to follow a certain recognizable, very structured model.
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Wendy,
About failing schools–it’s become clear that in some schools, middle class children do fine, while non-middle class children crash and burn. I would deem those schools “failing”, also.
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bj,
How is raising teacher salaries supposed to fix anything, except as part of a broader reform? Paying a bad teacher more won’t improve things for anyone but the bad teacher. I share many of the concerns about vouchers posed above, but none of the alternative reforms appear even half plausible. So long as the vouchers are set-up so that the money follows the student (instead of just adding more to local taxes), I think vouchers are the best hope for reform in troubled districts.
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Why is allowing people to use vouchers for religion affiliated schools such a problem? I haven’t heard anyone complain that people use Pell grants or Stafford loans at places like Notre Dame or Loyola. How is this different?
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There’s all this talk about ways to solve the education crisis that is hurting children all over our country. Does anyone really believe that the right combination of reforms is going to take place any time soon? The politicians and bureaucrats with special interests are dominating this dialog. Meanwhile, children and their parents are waiting, waiting, waiting. That’s what burns me up.
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MH — raising teachers salaries would almost certainly have a small effect over the quite long term, even without other reforms, but, I agree, not much. If vouchers are the best hope for urban schools that is very depressing, because they probably have about as much benefit as raising teachers salaries (not much), from what we can tell of the actual experiements. I’d like to think bolder; Federal money should be sent directly to schools, and should be tied to deregulation of those schools, allowing principals much more power than they currently have over how the school is run and whom to hire, and how to pay them. This would almost certainly create a lot of inequality within urban districts, but there’s already a lot of inequality there, and it might really improve things for a good number of kids. To be honest I think vouchers (which I releuctantly support in some cases) are a bit of a red herring from the main issues, which are about the quality of management (more than of teachers) and the quality of management systems.
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harry b,
Yay for school deregulation! But do you seriously think that handing urban schools directly over to the feds will be a good thing? It sounds like a political nightmare to me.
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Amy — well…. you got me there! I guess I’d like to see the feds putting lots more money directly into schools with high levels of poverty, and demanding that States free them from regulation (in particular giving principles much more power relative to districts) as a condition. It would work better if it happened after some serious attention had been given to enhancing the talent pool for management. Then let the chips fall where they may.
So, of course, your point is that this might be utopian — the feds are addicted to regulation. If so, I withdraw the proposal, but I’d still want to persuade Governors and state-level legislators to do something similar, if they had the power and the will…
The key idea is to put extra money together with specific kinds of de-regulation, both to make the money more valuable, and to mute some of the opposition from unions etc (I’m very sympathetic to the unions, and specifically I am symapathetic to their reasons for resisting de-regulation, funnily enough — they fear that given the quality of the existing management and management structures de-regulation would have lots of arbitrary bad effects on their members. I think that fear is exaggerated, but then I don’t have responsibility for protecting their members!)
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Principals, not principles!
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harry b,
It just sounds like you’re describing charters, but exchanging local money and local oversight for federal money and federal oversight.
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Amy, let’s forget utopian and be realistic:
What are failing schools, and how can we measure whether or not schools are failing in as objective a way as possible?
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Amy — except that in most states charters have to be approved by districts, and I’m proposing to spread the de-regulation throughout the system. I’m actually less keen on charters as a small part of the system than I would be on having a system of charters.
WendyW — we can identify, by using a combination of value-added test scores and inspections, outlying poor performers. Its just not that hard to identify the worst failing schools. What’s hard is to design a system whereby policymakers are forced to identify them, and to figure out what to do about them.
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Wendy,
I’d say that any school where children don’t make a year’s worth of progress in a year’s time is failing.
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There’s a thorough discussion of the constitutional consequences (and the right or wrong) of voucher use for religious schools at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public life:
http://pewforum.org/events/?EventID=30
In the discussion, panelists consider the 5/4 decision by the Rehnquist court supporting the voucher program in Cleveland, Ohio. The program there was indeed modeled on grants like the Pell grants, and a divided court found that it did not violate the Establishment clause of the Federal Constitution.
The dissenters relied on the the difference between the neutrality of the grants in theory versus their use in practice. In theory, students were allowed to take them anywhere. In practice, only religious schools accepted the vouchers, because of the amounts involved and structure of the program, so over 90% of vouchers were used in religious education. The dissenters believed that the practical consequences trumped the neutrality of the law. The majority decided that the neutrality of the law itself was sufficient. I am a dissenter (for vouchers) and not for Pell grants, because the practical consequences of the two are different. Pell grants are (and should be) permitted for use at Universities like Notre Dame; but, in practice Pell grants are used at secular and religious institutions, and do not, practically funnel taxpayer dollars to religious education.
The case and decision involved the Federal constitution, and some states have laws requiring more specific restrictions on the separation between church and state than that required by the Federal constitution, so this decision doesn’t settle the constitutionality in individual states.
The discussion is a good one, including participants from many sides of the issue, including representatives of the Catholic church (who supported the specifics of the voucher program in Cleveland, but also state the limits to the kind of program the church would support) and a religious freedom group associated with the Seventh Day Adventists (who opposed the voucher program).
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So, what’s a year’s worth of progress?
Does the year’s worth of progress depend on the student, or only the school?
I do agree that there are outliers schools that would be seen as systematically bad, and that politicians need to be forced into thinking about what to do about them. But, the reason why they need to be forced is that there are often no positive alternatives to students in those schools. Closing those schools wouldn’t make good spots for the students you kick out. So, it’s easier to pretend you’re offering them a school. The most egregious examples of these kinds of schools have actually been charters, with large amounts of autonomy and independence.
But, I do think these schools are outliers, the ones that are actively bad. Most of our country’s failing schools are schools that serve populations that are difficult to educate. labellings them as failing tells us little about how to fix the problem.
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bj
my guess is that most public discussions of failing schools simply elide the distinction you are making. We do know that some schools do really badly, given their populations, and we can identify them (and they don’t all just have poor kids in them — there are plenty of schools that nobody objects to which are pretty awful but can coast because of their populations). The much harder question is: what to put in their place. The UK government has now had about 10-15 years experience of identifying and closing failing schools (my own high school was closed last summer, in fact), and replacing them with “New Start” schools with high levels -of investment, but more or less the smae populations. The results are mixed, but not awful.
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What bj said. 🙂
I’m supposed to be grading now, not looking up real-world examples of failing schools and why they are failing. But two things:
1. I poked around data on the failing schools in the city where I work. We (our university) have had a relationship with an elementary school that was on the Failing list (acc. to NCLB) for the past several years, so I looked up that one. The school is now Moderately Performing. A lot of people credit the principal, who started about 3-4 years ago, for that change; I met her and she did seem very capable. The children in the school are very poor and many are from immigrant families and do not even own books. Anyway, big, positive changes at that school thanks to top-notch leadership.
So I looked up info on the worst performing school (5 years failing). And lo and behold, that same principal above has been transferred there! (I’d heard she had been transferred, but I didn’t know where.)
It may take 3-4 years for her to insititute changes, and some might argue that the kids there shouldn’t have to “suffer” for 3-4 years while she makes the changes, but if everyone leaves, then how is she supposed to make effective changes?
2. I looked up another failing school, according to last year’s figures. It ends up that this school was closed last May for violating the fire code. What was interesting is that the community fought back hard. The schools chief had planned to transfer most of the students to a moderately performing school; the community did not want that. They wanted to keep their school, failing as it was. And they won, in a way; the school was rehoused in a different building, with the same principal and same staff.
I guess I use these examples as evidence of 1. community support for allegedly “failing” schools (was the school in #2 really failing if the parents and community wanted to keep it open?) and 2. the benefits of patience. Are the kids in the first school really that bad off for having spent 3-4 years in a school as reform was happening?
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bj,
As I said up thread, vouchers aside, each child should have an IEP (an individualized educational program), just as disabled children do already. There should be a thorough assessment of where each individual child is today, along with an (enforceable) plan with clear goals. This plan should be regularly updated and progress monitored, with lots of input from parents. (I realize that in our society, this is an invitation to legal hell.)
A lot of parents may disagree, but Catherine Johnson (of kitchentablemath.blogspot.com) has said many times that her two autistic sons get a better education than her typical son. Under a voucher system, children would be able to exit the public system if it were failing them, just as today schools that aren’t satisfactorily educating disabled children often have to pay for private education for them.
Just one example of today’s unacceptably low standards is the fact that one frequently sees third grade given as the proper deadline for getting children to read. That is really pathetic. Just knowing how to read accelerates incidental learning, so children who don’t know how to read until 8 are losing out on 2 or 3 years of incidental learning. Also, 4th grade is a famously perilous time for children (academically speaking), and allowing them to go until 3rd grade without being able to read fluently puts them into terrible jeopardy. It’s things like this that lead to a steadily broadening achievement gap throughout school.
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My buddy, Suze, has been student teaching in public schools in Brooklyn and has been relating her experiences. She told me of a high school English teacher who tried to get her students to copy 10 definitions from a dictionary. She struggled to have them finish this assignment in a week.
Most students have no interest in being at school. Their parents, if they have them, never attend parent nights. No adult in their lives cares whether they succeed or fail. In fact, the pressure from their peers is to fail. They don’t even come prepared with the basics of a pencil and paper to school. Every class period, time is wasted just getting the students a pencil. They are years behind their suburban peers with no hope of ever catching up.
It’s not just the schools are failing. Everything is failing.
I am coming closer and closer to the position that these schools should not only be closed, but the entire public school curriculum and model should be radically altered for these communities. The kids don’t want to be there. And no reforms are going to make this 14 year old learn. So, give him the option to take life-skills English and to get some sort of job training. Teach him how to balance a checkbook. Provide many class trips to have him exposed to new things.
Within that school of chaos, there are a handful of kids who have a shot. Let them have an exit. Vouchers are certainly not going to improve the whole community, but they do help the handful.
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“I am coming closer and closer to the position that these schools should not only be closed, but the entire public school curriculum and model should be radically altered for these communities.”
Laura, “these” communities sounds a little dicey.
Are you suggesting this solution as a short-term fix or as longterm policy?
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Laura, to clarify (I pre-emptively deleted something and posted the edited version): Leon Botstein has recommended that high school (grades 11 and 12) be abolished. Do you agree? Have you read his essay, by any chance? (It was in our comp text once upon a time, but I still use it with my classes. It makes a great critical thinking exercise.)
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I know it sounds dicey. But there are some really, really bad public schools out there. Some schools in Philadelphia have a 90% dropout rate. No learning is happening. Failing schools are a real thing. No little reforms are going make any difference. Radical change has to happen. I’m not really sure what it should look like. Perhaps students should be given the option to move into less academic challenging tracks with an emphasis on real life skills. Not everybody has to go to college.
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Bummer, I just lost my post while googling something. Anyway, Laura, I think your heart’s in the right place, but I bristle every time I hear “Not everybody has to go to college” because the lazy and incompetent high school guidance counselor at my old school used to say something like that. Also, I wonder about that less academically challenging track with an emphasis on real life skills. Isn’t that where those kids probably are already? When I was in high school, the school seemed to have an amazing talent for coming up with a multiplicity of those courses. The desire to wiggle out of the problem of bored and unmotivated teenagers with “life skills” classes is very old. I watched Sidney Poitier’s To Sir With Love (1967–that’s what I was googling for) a while back, and the approach shown was depressingly familiar. The English slum kids don’t like school–let’s show them how to make a salad, talk about sex, and take them to a museum exhibit on costume! I read the book years earlier, and while I could be wrong, I don’t think that was the approach taken in the book at all–my feeling is that the English teacher was actually teaching English. However, the idea of “relevant” “life skills” is so powerful and pervasive that the filmmakers may have stuck it in to the movie even if it wasn’t in the book. (Although as I said, I may be misremembering the book, which I read in high school.) On the other hand, I think a real consumer math course would be a beautiful thing, with sections on tax law, your chances of winning the lottery, how much nicer it is to get interest rather than pay it, pay day loans, and the toxic mortgage. It sounds quite thrilling.
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This is a bit off-topic, but illuminating. It’s an imagined cake-baking class taught according to the workshop method.
http://thejosevilson.com/blog/2007/10/22/having-your-cake-and-eating-it-too-workshop-model-style/
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I know. What I’m saying is really un-PC and I’m not sure if I’m even all together behind what I just wrote. I could easily argue the opposite point of view. But one of the fun thing about having a little blog like this is trying out new ideas, even bad ones. That’s one of the missions of this blog.
What if this non-college track thing was optional? Student could select this route for themselves rather than having some idiot guidance counselor make a decision for them.
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Laura, ftr, I’m behind the discussion of this idea. I wonder myself sometimes. There are people who are just not happy in traditional educational environments. My youngest sister is one. I often talk about how she got a GED; she was in a bad car accident the August before her senior year of HS and dropped out officially while on whatever medical absence thing that fulfilled the school district paperwork. She tried some community college courses; she went to medical assistant training. But she really doesn’t want to do college and probably never will, and besides, she’s 31 now. Then you have the twins I had in my class 3 years ago. I found out after the course was over that they were the children of a colleague. One twin failed; the other got maybe a B. Neither went on for their 4-year degree; one failed out, one got an associates. I ran into my colleague in the elevator the other day, and she told me how her son is doing. He tried education school (!) after leaving here, but now he’s in electrician school and happy as can be to be working with his hands.
But why didn’t he just do that in the first place? Is it because a nearly free college education was available to him (benefit of a parent who is a staff member)? Is it because of parental pressure? Societal pressure? Would he have known at age 17 that he should have gone to electrician school?
But how do we accommodate the growing up kids need to do? I didn’t know till I was 22 and put in front of a room of students as a condition of my graduate training that I wanted to be a teacher. Literally, in that first hour, I realized.
Another question I have is the interest in learning. As Amy has pointed out, the youngest kids, ages 5 and at least till 8 (my daughter) are sponges when it comes to learning. But something happens, as Tim has pointed out in a post about his course on the History of Reading (which I’ve read several times, thanks, Tim) at some point when kids stop being interested in reading (and thus become uninterested in learning?). Is learning too closely attached to reading in the upper grades? Should experiential education be more a part of post-elementary education?
I’m just spitballing here. It would be nice to stop being pissed off 🙂 and start talking about some of my favorite things, like reimagining education.
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I think that while a full-on four-year liberal arts education isn’t for everybody (and nobody should be racking up crippling student loans to get one), a whole bunch of non-academic types wind up doing further education, whether at community colleges or elsewhere. Every dab of education that they can get for free while they don’t have family responsibilities is a good thing, whether they know it or not. I think a high school “major” in nursing/medical tech would be excellent because it would open the door to a wide variety of professions, at any number of intellectual levels. You’d want lots of the relevant math (I’ve heard fractions can be fatal to prospective nurses), biology, anatomy, computers, etc. The nice thing about it would be how clearly the coursework would be leading towards a future high-demand profession. Just think how much studying Wendy’s electrician guy had to do to qualify to do wiring. My dad qualified as a blaster late in life, and even with his master’s degree in math, he spent days on the living room sofa learning the blasting handbook by heart for the exam. (Just for the record, being able to memorize stuff is an important life skill, for any number of vocations. It’s not just a school thing. Plus, in my dad’s case, he obviously wanted to avoid getting blown up.)
While I’m posting, I’d like to put in a plug for extrinsic motivation. If schooling for a child is costing $10,000 a year and the child is not motivated, maybe it would be worthwhile kicking back something to the kid, perhaps prizes for younger kids and cash gifts for big kids. It sounds sordid, it goes against every American ideal of education, but I think it’s worth trying as a last ditch effort for kids who don’t see the value of education for their futures. Let them get the education, one way or another, and then realize later how valuable it is. I never did this much as a teacher, but it’s served me well as a mom. One of my kids (smart, but a very tough customer) resisted potty training for years. Finally, she was almost 4, pre-K was just a few months away, and she wasn’t potty trained. Quelle horreur! (sp?) I experimented with M and Ms before bringing out the big guns–a tempting selection of My Little Ponies, Scratch and Sketch books, magic ink books, coloring books, paint with water books, and other enticing and rather expensive goodies. She potty-trained in record time and I phased out the prizes. After a while, she started demanding more potty prizes, so I decided that I’d teach her to read and give reading prizes. As I posted over at halfchangedworld a while back, I let her choose a prize each time she completed a whole set of phonics books (usually between 8 and 12 thin booklets). She eventually read about 15 of those sets, finishing a bit after 4 and a half. Once the sets were all read, I stopped giving prizes. She doesn’t read chapter books, but she likes non-fiction picture books, and can tackle just about any word. I don’t have any current projects with her (I’m sure even B.F. Skinner occasionally gave it a rest), but it’s probably about time to get her to pick up after herself. But as I said, she’s a tough kid.
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I’m convinced that not everyone should be encouraged to go to college. In fact, when you think about the tuition and years of income lost, I think I’d be financially ahead if I become a plumber instead of getting a graduate degree. Assuming that I was capable of becoming a good plumber. Of course, you still have to get everyone to a basic level of literacy and numeracy, but that shouldn’t take until someone is 18.
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I wonder, are any of the ardent supporters of the voucher systems voluntarily setting aside the amount of money they think we should all be taxed to provide for vouchers, and donating this money to scholarships for poor children in failing public schools? Wouldn’t that be the free market solution to this problem? (And if they’re not, isn’t *that* hypocritical?)
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af,
Think about it–we are already paying taxes for each and every child to attend school. (Although now that you mention it, there are tax savings from all of the drop-outs who aren’t in school! That’s probably more than balanced by the expense of paying for many of them to be incarcerated down the road.) By the logic you’re using (or not using), everybody who wants higher education funding should be putting some money aside every month and sending a check. For heaven’s sake, be consistent.
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As it happens, I have a circular in front of me from my daughter’s private school, inviting us to donate for (among other things) need-based scholarships. It looks like this particular organization funds the equivalent of three full tuitions, out of about 190 kids total in the school. That in itself is not mind-blowingly generous, but I know a lot of graduate students get free tuition for their children by teaching a class at the school. There are lots of teacher and staff kids too (although I don’t know exactly on what terms)–the school started off a few years ago as a free co-op and only later started charging tuition.
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Tuition is about $5,000 a year, and my child’s class has 13 kids in it, so $65,000 (plus extra donations) has to cover the rent, materials, textbooks, field trips, the classroom teacher, the art teacher, the music teacher, and the PE and Spanish teacher. That’s one of the larger classes at the school–I think 8 or 10 kids is more common. Although now that I think of it, it wouldn’t be $65,000 a year if we subtract out scholarship kids and faculty and staff kids. How on earth does the school do it, even in Texas?
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af,
I’m paying thousands per year for failing public schools and you want me to pay more because I expect to see some result from the $16k per pupil per year that my district already spends. I only support vouchers because, of all the reform proposals, they seem the most likely to work of anything that is politically possible. My preferred solution would be to break the local branch of the teachers union using a strike (and scabs) and fire at least 3/4ths of the current school administrators. Why pay someone to do a job that is is apparent they can’t do when you can try somebody else?
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As MH points out, af expects him to pay twice for school: once when he pays his taxes, and a second time when he contributes to private school scholarships (which he may do, for all I know). It gets even better if you have kids in private school–then af wants you to pay once for taxes, a a second time for private school scholarships for needy children (a very worthy cause), and then lastly you write the checks for your own children’s private education.
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There are plenty of people who oppose a voucher system without being the sort of hypocrite described in the OP. I don’t have any children, but I am happy to support public education because I attended 12 years of public education (and one year of private) and I think we need an educated society.
But I am utterly and completely unwilling to pay tax money to be given to private entities, some of which I completely disapprove of. My own one year experience with a private school was so terrible that if I had children, I’d rather slow-roast them and feed them to wolves than risk putting them through the garbage I had to put up. And in my state (Texas), most private schools are basically intended as havens for people to hide their children from science and rationality.
Our public education in Texas has plenty of problems, but I’m willing to support it. I’d rather be strangled in my own vomit than have my money go to the pockets of private schools. So I oppose vouchers.
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Meanwhile, only about 70% of US kids graduate from high school, and in many big cities, kids have only a 50/50 chance of graduating.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2006-06-20-dropout-rates_x.htm
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John, don’t hold back. Tell us how you really feel. 😉
I grew up on Long Island (NY), where Catholic schools weren’t about Catholic education. They were about making sure your kids didn’t have to go to school with black kids or Jewish kids (two words: Bill O’Reilly). I know not everyone who chooses Catholic school feels that way, but it is a major problem, and I don’t think it’s one we should be subsidizing.
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Amy, I did research about creating a bridge program for GEDs transitioning to college, and one of the things that struck me is that the reasons kids drop out of college do not often involve academics and failing out. Of course, the population I was looking at were people who had obtained GEDs already, but I heard/read a lot of stories about personal problems, family troubles, economic issues, etc.
Do we know how many people in a given population lack a high school diploma/GED? Is it 70%? Don’t forget–my sister was a high school dropout, and though she wasn’t a huge fan of high school, she would have finished had it not been for her car accident. And she did get her GED, quite easily. She has all the basic skills; she just didn’t like high school.
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John, Wendy,
Catholic schools in already provide a subsidized education for a great many non-Catholics who have fled the public schools. In urban areas, most of these students are African-American (though I doubt many are Jewish). For one example, see http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_2_catholic_schools.html. Only a very few Catholic schools charge tuition sufficient to the whole cost of running the school and I’ve never heard of one that didn’t give a need based scholarship. And, they can’t take your house if you don’t pay tuition.
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Wendy,
Aren’t GED earners on average quite distinct from regular diploma earners? You’d know better than me, but I remember hearing something about it recently. (I lean towards front-loading education, rather than easing into it, partly because outside issues become more and more of a problem the older a learner is. If you start early, you don’t have to worry so much about outside influence from sex, drugs, and rock and roll, not to mention the need to get a babysitter so they can go to night classes. Let’s teach kids as much as we can while they’re still cute and eager to please.)
I don’t know much about poor kids dropping out of college, because I don’t know any poor kids (other than my anomalous self) who went to college, period. On the other hand, I’m starting to have a huge mental collection of stories of middle class and upper middle kids who go to college and crash and burn freshman year or who spend over half a decade flipping between different majors, meanwhile giving their parents a million plausible excuses and running up amazing student loans, so I’m not that surprised that your GED students are having trouble making the transition. A middle class kid might eventually pull that off and graduate with a BA, but no one’s going to give a poor kid all those third, fourth, and fifth chances. Around here at 11D we do a lot of contrasting between the life of the fortunate middle class and the not-so-fortunate non-middle class, but it really isn’t all that easy to launch a middle class kid successfully. It isn’t just the US either–I hear the same story from just about every country where I have relatives or friends. Just about every family has a fledgling who’s having a tough time making it out of the nest.
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Here’s a movie quote that I’ve always loved, even though I haven’t seen the movie. I think Tommy’s got a point.
Tommy: “Hey, a lot of people go to college for seven years.”
Richard: “Yeah, they’re called doctors.”
-“Tommy Boy”
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I misspoke. I do know of a poor urban minority kid who did very well at an elite Catholic college, despite coming in with very little. When I first met him as a freshman, he couldn’t keep straight Hungary and Bulgaria, but he had incredible drive and work ethic. He also had a very touching story about how he got his unusual name–his dad wanted to name him after a president, but couldn’t get the spelling right. I’m not totally sure, though, that he went to public school.
The thing is that nobody on a college campus goes around wearing a sandwich board that says “I’m a poor kid” and the kids do look a lot alike to grownups.
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Amy, I’m trying to follow your point. Could you restate? Are you trying to say that poor kids can achieve success in elite schools? Or that they don’t achieve in elite schools? Or that they can or cannot achieve success at any level of higher ed?
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Sorry! Earlier I’d said I didn’t know any poor kids who managed to graduate besides myself, but then I remembered this one exceptional kid. I didn’t want to leave my earlier misstatement uncorrected.
My main point was about middle class kids and the very difficult transition between high school and college. A lot of kids from college-educated upper-middle class households overdo the college extracurriculars, hop from major to major and campus to campus and take seven years to do a four year degree, if they finish at all. I’ve seen it many times in other people’s families, and I still have no idea how you keep a college freshman on track. My point was that it’s really tough even for the solidly middle class to keep their kids moving forward, so it’s absolutely amazing anytime a non-middle class student gets a BA anywhere. One cultural and economic difference is that middle class families can and do put up with extended dependence a lot longer. At least when I was a kid, the understanding was that a lot of non-middle class families were going to change the locks once their kids turned 18 (I don’t know how literal this was, but I remember hearing a lot about older teens getting kicked out by their parents). I recall hearing my dad’s opinion of this when I was a teenager. He thought it was a very short-sighted move for parents not to support young adults through college, since otherwise they could expect to get their 25-year-old divorced daughter with three kids back to live with them. He wasn’t talking about poor poor people, but blue collar folk who had gotten by fine without college themselves. That was my milieu when I was in school.
Apologies to Laura for thread-hogging!
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Are we thread-hogging? Should I be posting again in my blog? (Got knocked out of the routine by going back to work after Labor Day–and I have another tv fandom blog that has an audience already, so it’s hard to transfer/double up.)
I posted about it here.
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Hopefully Laura will open up a new thread. There are a lot of fluffy, rather fun education stories right now. (I like the one about the proposal for issuing parent report cards, but I’m not sure you can say many intelligent things about it.)
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Threadhogging? Nah. Picture the 9-year-old red-headed Laura Not-Yet-Mckenna walking with other kids and hitting a hornet’s nest with a stick, and scampering away laughing. You’re doing exactly what she wants.
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Dave, you know me too well. Highly amused by the commotion. You guys got Megan McArdle steamed up. She wrote another post on vouchers this afternoon and linked to the commentary here.
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**Think about it–we are already paying taxes for each and every child to attend school. (Although now that you mention it, there are tax savings from all of the drop-outs who aren’t in school! That’s probably more than balanced by the expense of paying for many of them to be incarcerated down the road.) By the logic you’re using (or not using), everybody who wants higher education funding should be putting some money aside every month and sending a check. For heaven’s sake, be consistent. ***
I’m childless and probably will never have kids, and I’m delighted to pour as much money as any school district is willing to tax me on public education – I vote for that every time. And I bet most of these evil liberals you criticize are too – they’re paying for their kids to go to private school but willing to spend as much money as possible on the public school system because we think that has the best chance of working and serving the entire population (so that, for example, all of those kids whose parents aren’t knowledgeable or energetic enough to get them in “the Catholic school down the street” don’t wind up incarcerated after 12 years in astoundingly crappy schools). What annoys me is the cry of hypocrisy. You (or the OP)seem to be saying, “How can you spend money on sending your kids to private schools when you should be spending (tax) money to send other kids to private schools, instead of spending (tax) money to send them to public schools?”
Well, here’s how, I say: I think that’s the best way to ensure a good school system for everyone. I think vouchers are extremely unlikely to ever accomplish that. (Like, not at all, ever.) But if you think otherwise, then vote (as many conservatives do) against high taxes that support public schools, strip them to the bone, and donate to private schools. My annoyance with the rabid OP comment about hypocrisy prompted the comment about giving her extra money to scholarships, personally, which, yes, was unfair. But it seems to me the conservative way to go is to try to get less tax support for public schools and give their money to the private school of their choice.
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Talk has probably moved to the other thread, but for the benefit of Dave S (who is still with us at the end of the thread, I see): Among the many arguments here, the one that I am mainly having with MM is about her claim that what she calls hypocrisy on vouchers is the “vilest hypocrisy on display in American politics today.” This is still a laughable claim. Given Blackwater, Abu Ghraib, politicization of law enforcement, Guantanamo, civil forfeiture, billions simply lost in Iraq, conservative defense of torture, disappearing people into CIA black sites, voter disenfranchisement, warrantless spying on Americans and so much more in the rich menu of vileness that Bush-era American politics offers us, what MM thinks is vilest of them all is … wait for it … private citizens insufficiently commited to vouchers for schools.
In answer to my own question about MM bringing teh funny, I’m now going with unwittingly.
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I was lucky enough to be in a successful public school system that did a decent job of preparing me for higher education (except for math) but this debate on the hypocrisy of vouchers is an interesting one. But I do not think that public schools get the support they deserve.
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