So, Megan continues to brim with righteous anger about voucher opponents. She writes a long post derailing the good commenters here at 11D. Well, if she mocks my commenters, I get to mock hers.
Amongst the die-hard, free market voucher types, there is the misguided belief that if you offer vouchers, new independent, but inexpensive schools will rise up to fill the void. There will be more choices than the run of the mill Catholic schools. The voucher money will lead to more schools, more competition, more options.
Yeah, not.
Let’s look at Cleveland. (My Minneapolis friends should chime in here, too). Cleveland has a limited voucher program. You must demonstrate some need. The vouchers can’t be redeemed at suburban public schools. The voucher amount is for around $2,000.
One of the biggest proponents for vouchers was a lawyer-industrialist, David Brennan. Brennan got into vouchers after watching a presentation at the Friedman Foundation. Education was his pet policy, so he decided to advocate for vouchers with the goal of setting up his own private schools in Cleveland, which would accept the money. He planned to keep the costs low by educating the kids with some lame DOS-based computer programs. He got the voucher plan through, because of his connections with key Republican leaders and a few Democratic leaders in Cleveland. But he wasn’t able to get the schools going. He couldn’t break even. He ended up starting some charter schools instead.
Then there the whole Whipple education disaster.
Low cost, private schools haven’t taken off in this country. Maybe if the voucher amount was significantly higher, then something would happen. But that’s such a political long shot that the discussion quickly goes into the realm of fantasy.
Apt. 11d 
If we’re mocking MM’s commenters, can we start with the ones who argue against vouchers by saying that voucher recipients will wreck the schools they transfer to? There’ve been at least a couple of those.
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I’ve come to the conclusion that you either believe that:
1) education is something that every kid should have and the government is the best (relatively speaking) provider – in order to make sure that we don’t leave behind the poor, disabled, etc.
or
2) we need to have the best schools/students in the world and we should stop at nothing to provide top-quality education to our best students.
Now, if I could just find someone who could combine the two in one program.
Most of our neighbors/friends go to private schools. We have stuck it out in the public schools. (beliving strongly in option 1) So far, we are having a great experience.
My fear is that vouchers would serve the kids with the involved parents…and leave the rest behind. But I’m still reading everything I can about vouchers. On a theoretical level, it makes sense to me.
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Do I get mocked? DoIdoIdoIdoI????
Heh. For the record, I’m kinda impervious to mockery. I have a long and storied background in the murky depths of tv fandom. Try being a Spike-Buffy fan in early Season 5. Just try! I DARE YOU!
I have 9 more essays to grade. Tonight. I am a bit punchy right now.
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There is a case to be made, of course, but it’s not a liberal case.
Wendy posted on her blog that her stand is that she doesn’t want public funding of religion, and she hates it when teachers are trashed. I’d respond to that: What about when parents and kids are being trashed? Because it seems to me that when the blame is being dished out for education failure, if we aren’t blaming teachers the default is going to be to blame kids and parents. (Sure we can talk about society, but that isn’t very satisfying. Plus, society is us.) I’ve noticed that in popular discourse on education, there is a tendency to talk about parents as either meth addict types who can’t take care of their kids, or helicopter moms, who care way too much. There isn’t a middle ground for sensible, well-informed parents who do their research and facilitate their kids’ education. If you are that parent, no one’s going to write a NYT style article about you.
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Laura,
It’s true that for-profit schools have been a bust. However, the tutoring companies (Kumon, Huntington, Sylvan, and all those test prep places) seem to be doing OK. (I was just looking at Kumon locations in the DC area, and they seem to have a franchise in just about every hamlet in suburban Maryland.) I don’t know much about any of these companies (except that Kumon produces beautiful workbooks), but they seem to be meeting a need. Maybe schools should feel freer to contract out different parts of their curriculum to commercial tutoring companies? That would be one way to introduce some market-based vitality into a resistant sector.
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Okay, yes, if vouchers are too small, they won’t work. But no one’s claiming that you can give the kids $1.50 and get adequate results. Obviously, the vouchers have to be enough to educate the kids, and obviously, the price of educating kids has to be high enough to support a school on; and obviously, $2000 is not enough. Can I say that public schooling doesn’t work because it costs more than $2000 apiece?
Voucher advocates think that schools will rise up to fill a void if vouchers create new demand. You can’t refute that by saying that very tiny programs in places where there were adequate school slots didn’t create demand. To create a robust school market, vouchers would have to cover a substantial number of geographically concentrated children; otherwise the market’s too small to serve.
Moreover, I’m fine with more run-of-the-mill Catholic schools. But the notion that, if you created vouchers that were sufficient to educate an average student, no one would start a school to serve those students, seems to me more risible than the reverse proposition. Every good or service that people are willing to pay at least cost for, seems to generate a supply to fill that demand.
Politically, it will be hard to get adequate vouchers, perhaps impossible. But everything I’m in favor of is political poison; if I let that stop me, I’d have to stop blogging.
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Here’s a quote from the web page for Huntington Learning Centers (I like what they say about the failure chain):
“Right from the start, our staff works individually with your child to discover what is holding him or her back in school.
“By individually diagnosing what is keeping your child from doing his or her best, and creating a program of instruction tailor made to fit your child’s needs, we are able to help students improve their academic performance, skills, confidence, and motivation.
“Our experience is that many students are locked into what we call the failure chain–a continuing cycle of frustration and failure. These students look at the learning experience as a threat rather than a challenge. Often they deal with this threat by daydreaming, acting out, or even tuning out. This behavior goes on in school and at home, affecting the whole family.”
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Until Megan posted, I hadn’t noticed that the Cleveland vouchers were only $2,000 a year. Good heavens!
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OK, a little poking around found that the Cleveland voucher is now worth up to $5,000 per student, which is much closer to what the average per student funding is for public school students. And no schools have popped up.
It’s actually really expensive to run a school. The only way to break even with $5 – 7,000 is if you have packed class rooms. The church schools are able to function with low tuition levels and small classes, because they are subsidized by the church and they pay the nuns nothing.
To fill all those seats in the classroom, all the kids in a community would have to be eligible for vouchers and also use them. A education venture capitalist couldn’t make it in a community that had a competing public school system that drew away 50% of the population.
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How many nuns are there working in schools these days? Isn’t one much more likely to see an elderly nun as principal of the school, rather than a youngish nun teaching? Unless the Cleveland Catholic schools are very unusual, most of the teachers are going to be low-paid seculars (i.e. not a member of a religious order), rather than religious. (Or, as Laura, said, it can be made to work work by packing the kids in. I once visited a very fine K-8 parish school in Montgomery County, MD with a one child tuition rate of about $5,000 a year. The upper classes were probably about right size-wise, but I was dismayed to discover that there were 26 kids in the crowded kindergarten class. The better of the two nearby public elementary schools had only 13 kids max per class in kindergarten and the lower grades, although it’s true that they had to use a lot of portables.)
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These economic problems with making a voucher utopia is what has driven the original voucher proponents onto other ideas, as much as the political obstacles. The strong voucher proponent of the 80s and 90s have all moved onto technology reform. ex. Bill Bennett
They want to get around the problem of creating competing private schools by setting up computer programs that enable students to learn at home. No difficult battles with that hot button “voucher” word. These kids are homeschooled.
Advantages — No teachers to pay. Complete consistency in instruction. No building to build or maintain. They make money if there is low enrollment. No pressures to fill a classroom.
Disadvantageds — Sounds boring as hell.
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I generally think vouchers are a good public policy idea, well worth experimenting with on a significant scale. I do think some of their advocates are way, way too overconfident about the results they’re going to produce if they’re implemented on a massively systemic scale, though–at that scale, there seem to me to be lots of possibilities for unintended consequences. It’s idolatry of the market to think that a market mechanism alone will inevitably produce a better result, and education remains something that I think there is a legitimate public interest in insuring universal access to (which doesn’t inevitably mean that education requires a large centralized system run directly by government).
But the rhetoric about massive hypocrisy, etcetera, is considerably over the top for my tastes, and bugs me more in some ways than the voucher-no voucher arguments themselves. Come on, don’t we have enough issues out there where the political gulf is wide and unbridgeable? Why make more of them? Vouchers seem to me to be an issue where there’s plenty of potential for a heterogenous public policy approach and some degree of political consensus about what we’re hoping for in our education system. I feel the same way when folks start preaching on behalf of rigorous testing or any other pedagogical nostrum as if it is a demonstrated fact that their preferred approach is the sole true way to educate a child.
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Kevin Drum weighs in.
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Timothy,
I dislike the hypocrisy talk a lot too, but it’s interesting what kind of things anti-voucher people start saying when called hypocrites. You start hearing “I got mine” and racist/classist talk from the oddest sources. At some point, you can either blame the schools (sorry, Wendy!) or you can blame the kids. A lot of people go with blaming the kids. Hence the argument that vouchers won’t work for poor children because poor children are defective. We can blame society for screwing up the kids, but even if we do, we’re still saying that they’re defective.
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Speaking of “defective” poor children, there’s a meme out there that I can’t stand. This is the meme that says that poor children are ill clad, underfed, sick, and have bad teeth, and that’s why the public schools get the results they do. I’m pretty sure that poor American children are often rather nicely turned out, unless their mothers are quite far gone. A normal low-income mom takes huge pride in her kids’ appearance. There are also school breakfast programs all over the country, not to mention free lunch. I don’t know about the rest of the items on the list, but I feel like an awful lot of energy seems to go into endless excuses for non-learning and non-teaching.
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Amy, I don’t blame. I see a problem, I see the factors leading into the problem, and I try to think of solutions that don’t violate fundamental principles and/or increase existing sociol/economic inequities.
I don’t blame the schools, the kids, the teachers, the parents.
I blame an inequitable system. I blame a system of school funding that has stacked the deck in favor of the wealthy. I blame local corruption that devalues schools and thinks that nepotistic/cronyist hiring will do the job (of course, Bush has brought that concept to a whole new level). I blame, yes, a society that is still stacked in favor of white, middle-to-upper class people and has very clever ways of perpetuating itself as such.
I have no problem blaming society. Why? Because I think it’s the right answer. I am not about finding something to blame simply because it’s “satisfying.” You should be ashamed of yourself for saying that, even if you were joking. We don’t need some sort of public policy voodoo doll to stick pins into. We should be focusing on the solution, not blame.
Maybe I am too big-picture of a thinker, but anything that you or any voucher proponent is suggesting is a band-aid on a bigger problem, and it’s not going to be fixed by pointing to the stupid teachers or the stupid principals or the stupid parents or the stupid unions.
We have to think about what education is and should be. That’s why I’m intrigued by discussion over Laura’s point about rethinking education to focus on life skills. That’s where we are going to get into some useful problem-solving. Because we have to know what public education could/should be before we can figure out how to make it happen. All the rest of it is like trying to write an essay without figuring out your thesis statement. That is why I keep asking you to explain what you mean by failing schools–and you *still* haven’t explained it in any satisfying way to me.
I have to get back to work (a few stragglers to finish grading before class at 11:30), which is why this is weirdly constructed, but one digressive point:
It’s been cracking me up that your kid is in a school that teaches Latin. As an aside, I should point out that my husband took Latin in his public high school–which happens to have been the infamous Island Trees of Island Trees v. Pico (i.e., book banning Supreme Court case) fame. In fact, he was attending Island Trees when that decision happened.
More reason for me to associate censorship and restrictive ideas with “classical” education.
Gd, I can’t shut up, can I? I am now officially on hiatus until tonight.
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Whether it’s $2000 or $5000, Cleveland’s voucher is still small. For comparison, Richmond VA spends about $10,000 per student.
For a voucher program to work long-term, it can’t be some minimal proportion of the resources in the public schools (which, critically, already own their buildings.)
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I am skeptical of vouchers because the proponents imply that you can somehow *profitably* (because it’s the profit incentive that is supposed to pull new schools onto the market right? I mean, that’s how economics works–if it’s a good that the market can’t provide profitably, then it’s a public good best offered by the gubermint) educate a kid on $2000 or even $5000, as compared to those wasteful public schools that spend $10-12K per kid. And when we are talking about failing schools, we are usually talking about communities where the parents can’t afford to make up the difference between the $5000 voucher and the actual cost of the education.
While I don’t doubt that there is ample waste in the public system (DC public schools being the poster child for this), the truth of the matter is that providing quality education isn’t cheap. The “run-of-the-mill” Catholic schools are perfectly adequate, but their expenses have been traditionally kept low by the availability of instructors in religious orders. As the number of young women interested in religious orders has dropped, schools have increasing turned to lay teachers, and the cost of Catholic education has risen–many schools are kept afloat by their parishes and the local diocese, but you also see many schools, particularly in urban areas, being shut down because they are just too expensive to run.
The heart of the matter, which many conservative education reformers like to ignore, is that you get what you pay for. We are currently dithering between our perfectly fine local public school and a subset of the extraordinary private schools that DC is well known for. Our local public has a high population of free-lunchers (there are a lot of striving immigrants in our boundaries), so it gets a lot of extra resources, but there are challenges associated with serving that community as well. The cost of the private schools ($25,000, approximately, for elementary age, nearly $30,000 for high school) is nearly double the per pupil spending in our school district. So what do you get for the big bucks? You get very small classes, clean, modern facilities with lots of amenities, including well-groomed sports fields, well-stocked art and music programs, and plenty of new textbooks. Plus they don’t provide transportation for students or deal with special ed. They do offer financial aid and grants, so not everyone pays full tuition, but they also fund-raise like a university (large, alumni/parent development campaigns, not bake sales). Money may not be the only answer, but it sure as hell helps.
And I think there is something to the “cherry picking” argument. It’s a bit like insurance pools. If you take the kids who are least at risk out of the system, you’re left with the hardest cases, who need the most resources. If you are going to provide the public schools with extra resources needed to deal with the kids who are at highest risk, then that isn’t necessarily a losing proposition. But that’s not generally how the proposed voucher systems are structured. The public schools, who are left with the kids who are toughest to reach, lose resources.
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Wendy,
Here are a few responses to your points:
1. As you can tell, I’m a very pleased private school parent. Purely on grounds of self-interest, my impulse is to keep the school basically as it is, fill the moat, and pull up the drawbridge. So there’s not a whiff of self-interest here–quite the contrary.
2. I seem to be the victim of mistaken identity. I’m not the big voucher proponent here–that would be Megan McArdle. I’m 10% pro-voucher, 90% pro-quality instruction, and 100% anti-mediocrity, so I’m mainly interested in vouchers as a vehicle for shaking up American pedagogy.
3. As to what is a failing school, I feel like I’ve already answered that question at least 4 different ways at different points the past few days. Here we go again: I’m pretty sure that a school system that graduates only half of its students is failing. Likewise (and more controversially), a school that takes longer than 1st grade to teach non-SPED children to read is failing. Also, non-SPED children should have manipulation of fractions mastered perfectly by the end of sixth grade.
4. You seem really hung up on that Latin. That wasn’t actually a big selling point with me. I was most enchanted by the school’s use of Singapore Math (which I used extensively with my daughter after school in pre-K) and the fact that it starts Spanish in kindergarten. The school phases out Spanish later in elementary school for Latin, and I’m actually petitioning the school to keep up the Spanish, either in class or as an organized extracurricular. One nice thing about the Latin, though, is that the music program includes lot of traditional Latin chants, so there’s some nice synergy between the Latin, the music, and the religious education programs. (The school is multi-denominational Protestant, so as Catholics we’re a small minority.) They study a different artist every quarter, too. It’s all really high-brow, but somehow they manage to create a high-powered intellectual, literate environment for kids that’s also warm, humane, and nurturing. (My daughter’s teacher is the Platonic ideal of kindergarten teacher.)
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As I mentioned earlier, my daughter went to a really good NW DC school last year for pre-K. I used to push her in a stroller to school, which she was a bit too big for but that made it easier to get her to school on the many mornings when she did a non-stop shouted monologue about how school was bad and learning was bad, etc. She doesn’t do that anymore. I get barely any whining in the morning, and certainly nothing so sustained and operatic. She is older now and her class is a lot smaller than in DC (they had 20-22 kids with a great teacher and a bored aide who seemed to come in late a lot versus 13 kids with one teacher), but in any case it’s nice that she likes school, and she’s liked it since day 1.
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I think I do get mocked, but don’t feel very bad about it, because, frankly, that blog entry was not very well argued. It mocks and dismisses the serious ideological issues involved with privatizing public education: outsourcing the education of the children to religious entities (which are just one example of a society that divides itself along ethnic/religious/racial lines).
And, honestly, though the ideological issues are hugely important to me, I would consider vouchers (my version, which would involve disbanding public education, and decreasing taxes by the amount that pays for it, which avoids the ideological issues of taxpayer subsidies)if I believed it had a rats chance of substantially improving the education of all children.
But, I really do believe that even when we ignore the privatizers who really don’t care about the education of all the children (but, as K says above, care about educating those who can help themselves — or whose parents can), I think vouchers are being sold to those who drank the free market economics kool aid, and think that the economics of the free market will provide the best goods in every case, without question.
And, yes, as every private school parent knows, “money may not be the only answer, but it sure as hell helps” Private schools in our area cost 20K + to run, compared to the 12K or so spent in the public schools.
I really would like to know more about the economics of parish schools, which are certainly less expensive, because it would tell us something about what education can cost. The parish school in our area says it has an operating budget of about 3 million, to serve approximately 500 students, 6K per student. One solution they employ is large class sizes (30 in the kindergarten class). Another is to pay the teachers less (but I don’t know how much less). I don’t know if the facilities costs are part of the operating budget, or are budgeted separately (this can be extremely difficult to account for, as I know from school facilities at the university). I suspect, but don’t know, that they avoid educating any special needs children who need significant resources (category 2 or 3 in our public school’s parlance).
Parish schools with “a unique responsibility to proclaim the Good News of Jesus through the education of children . . . ” (from the parish school’s mission statement) would still be unacceptable to me as voucher recipients. But, knowing how they manage to provide an adequate education for the tuition costs they report would be relevant to the economics. All the secular private schools I’m aware of cost at least 2X as much.
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PS: Our parish school (our in the sense that it’s in our neighborhood) serves a relatively affluent population, and, presuably, except for the special needs population, the same one as our relatively affluent public school. It serves a somewhat less affluent, but equivalently socially privileged population as our private schools.
bj
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Depending on what specific issue or specific episode we’re talking about (beyond “the schools are bad”) I’m perfectly content to blame teachers, administrators, the government, the students, their parents, their communities, or myself. In some cases, I think it’s fine to blame all of the above. Or give credit.
See, part of the problem is a misattribution problem. We have a model of the relation of schooling producing society that is fine for some things and lousy for others, and rarely do people involved in these debates bother to constrain what they’re talking about.
Take this whole idea that a good education is about delivering to every child the realization of their fullest individual potential. That’s great as an ethos of interpersonal relationships, or as a philosophy that guides a teacher’s everyday practice. It’s dubious if that’s assumed to assure good economic outcomes for every such fulfilled individual, because there’s a lot more involved that goes well beyond schools.
If we’re going to stay focused on vouchers, I think the advocates of vouchers would be well served by tightly constraining the question to which vouchers are thought to be a good answer. If that question is, “What do we do about ossified administrative structures in some public school districts that make reform nearly impossible?” or “How might we produce a wider diversity of instructional and organizational models in education so as to get a richer sense of what works for different kinds of students?”, vouchers seem like a pretty interesting solution. If that question is, “How do we fix our failing schools?”, no single public policy idea is a magic bullet because it’s not even clear when someone says that what they think “failing” is. When you get past that generalized kind of complaint, you find that one person’s failure is that schools aren’t reinforcing patriotism, family values and traditional community and another person’s failure is structural urban poverty.
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Amy:
Regarding the evaluation of “failing schools” I think we’re not understanding you because you are basically answering what would be a failing school for your child, not for children in general.
A school that had inhibited my first grader from reading would indeed be a failing school, ’cause she’s reading at the fifth grade level right now. But, different children are different. With regard to reading, specifically, there are children who probably can’t be taught to read by age 4, but can be taught at 5, and others who can’t be taught at 5, but at, and others who can be taught at 7. There really is a developmental time course involved with acquiring developmental skills, and it has a distribution. My understanding is that seven is the cutoff for believing that one is dealing with a disability, rather than developmental differences. But, it really isn’t a clear cut line.
I had no desire to work with my daughter the way you’ve described working with yours (I just didn’t see it as useful for her or our family). At four, she didn’t learn how to read, without such instruction (could she have? I don’t know). But, a year later, she became a thoroughly fluent reader. It’s lovely, and it required no effort on my part, and, I suspect little on the part of the school, or on hers (she doesn’t remember learning how to read, and thinks it just happened automatically, but since she was at a pretty good school, I’m going to give them some credit).
That’s a long story, but the point is that we cannot extrapolate on what would fail our children to all children. We are also extremely involved in the educational development of our children. The children I’m worrying about don’t have that benefit from their parents.
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bj,
Don’t forget the steep sibling discounts that a lot of Catholic schools give. The parochial school in suburban Maryland that I mentioned earlier has in-parish rates of $5K for one child, but only $10K for four children in K-8. Wow! I’ve seen the same tuition rates for a lot of other (but certainly not all) Archdiocese of Washington schools.
I think part of the passion coming from Catholic voucher supporters comes from an intuition that the parochial schools were an essential help in moving their grandparents and great-grandparents from poverty and the ethnic ghetto to the middle class and the suburbs. Ethnic Catholics left their schools in the cities, which went on teaching without having enough Catholic laymen to support them and fund them, and a lot of those schools and parishes are being closed right now. (Plus, we’re just about fresh out of nuns. No one knew how important they were until they were just about gone.) A colleague years ago used to have a t-shirt with a zebra-shaped bar code, saying “You Can’t Restock Wildlife” and I think it’s reasonable to have a similar attitude about those Catholic city schools. What if their institutional memories still contains the formula for raising children, families, and communities out of poverty? How horrible if we were to lose that, stupidly, carelessly, and then only realize our mistake later? That isn’t an argument for government funding, but it is an argument to fight hard for city parishes.
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bj said:
“That’s a long story, but the point is that we cannot extrapolate on what would fail our children to all children. We are also extremely involved in the educational development of our children. The children I’m worrying about don’t have that benefit from their parents.”
The thing is, we’re interested in equity. So, we should look at a good level of performance for a middle class child, and then try to work backwards and reverse engineer that for a poor child. If a middle class child starts kindergarten with a much larger vocabulary than a poor child, let’s figure out how to increase the vocabulary and narrow the gap before that poor child starts kindergarten. Otherwise, there is a practically irresistable snowball effect where the middle class child learns more and more, while the poor child is further and further behind. The disadvantages that poor children face are an argument for teaching them more, not an argument for teaching them less.
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i’m late to the discussion, but there is one question/comment i would like to throw in.
this pertains partly to the notion put forth by voucher proponents that “if you build it, they will come”, i.e. if vouchers are available, low-cost private schools will pop up to serve them, and partly to how private schools are funded in general.
i don’t have a huge amount of experience with private schools, and none on the east coast, but what i’ve seen where i live is that private schools rely heavily on fund-raisers for their operating budgets. and yes, there’s the argument that public schools do fundraising as well, but i’m sorry they are not in the same ballpark.
selling candy bars or magazine subscriptions door-to-door in order to buy band uniforms is what i’e seen the public schools do for fundraising.
$X00/plate or $X000/plate dinners with silent auctions is what the private schools i know of do for fundraising. this is true for both the catholic high school i graduated from and the fancy-pants international school that my BIL and his wife sent their kids to up in portland.
basically, the wealthier members of the private school community subsidize the schools for the students whose parents are not in a position to pay as much. they pay the steep tuition for their kids, but then they go on to donate, in some cases, tens of thousands of dollars on top of that. for the catholics, i believe the motivation stems partly from a sense of religious obligation, and otherwise it’s about status.
endowments and donations have always been part of the private school funding system, and, i don’t know, i just don’t see how vouchers fit into that.
(n.b. and as for catholic school operating budgets being lower and achieving higher outcomes, well, there is the cherry-picking issue. but there’s also the issue that for example, the catholic high school i graduated from had no vocational training at all, it was strictly college prep. so there was no auto shop or wood shop or home ec or anything like that – all of which costs more money to run than a latin classroom. and the sports uniforms? donated. so it depends on what you mean by “outcome”. there’s a place in our society for vocational education, and private schools aren’t stepping up to the plate to provide it, because it’s more expensive and because it’s not what the wealthy people who pay for the schools want for their kids educations)
i have no problem with the wealthier members of society paying more than their share to educate the children of others, but in the private system it’s all voluntary. using the voucher system to expand the private school population isn’t going to expand the donor pool proportionately, is it?
it just doesn’t look sustainable to me. that’s all.
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Trishka,
You have some good points. It’s important to remember that K-8 parochial school is quite distinct from the Catholic high schools. There are more K-8 schools, they’re parish-based based, and they often have low tuition. Catholic high schools, as you rightly point out, are different.
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bj,
I’ve eased off the after school program now, since I know what’s going on at school, and my daughter seems to be doing fine. Just doing her weekly religious education homework from church keeps us pretty busy. She still occasionally asks to do the Singapore Math at home, but I beg off and post on 11D instead. My son is 2.5 and we watch “Letter Factory” and the occasional Sesame Street video. I’ll probably crank things up a bit in a year or two, but in the meantime, Big Bird and Ernie do the heavy lifting.
There is a lot of truth to the idea of an individual pace of development, but how do we distinguish between a slower developmental pace and deprivation (lack of prerequisite knowledge, ineffective teaching, etc.)? The Direct Instruction people say that reading instruction should only take a year for children of average intelligence as well as mildly retarded children. Are they right? I don’t know, but I do know that end of third grade is awfully late, unless there’s a learning disability.
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Against my better judgment, I went to read the new post. But it’s the same as the old post – unexamined assumptions, straw men, and blather.
Let’s pick on point 10 by way of example. Jane can muster only a contemptuous laugh for the argument that in the NCLB era, private schools have no accountability. How about, oh I don’t know, an actual rebuttal ? maybe a counterexample, or even a shadow of a hint of a rational account of how it might be possible to compare private to public ?
Assuming that all private schools will be like the $30k/annum paradigm that Mrs Coulter references, isn’t an argument. This is the assumption that hides behind the mocking laughter which substitutes for rational discussion in Jane’s worldview. As SamChevre and the missus point out, expecting private schools with $5k per student and no significant fund-raising capability, to compete with public schools, is asinine.
Agree with Timothy B too – it might be possible to have a reasonable discussion about vouchers, but not when it is poisoned by this kind of rhetoric. This I suspect is because ‘vouchers’ are merely a Trojan horse for the wealthy Randians and their fellow-travelers who are Jane’s target audience, and whose children will assuredly be private-schooled anyway.
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My kids attend a small Lutheran school in Chicago. We are very happy there, but it’s not a model that could work for everyone. The school is quite open about saying that they just don’t provide services for special needs kids of any kind. ADHD, mild autism, downs, even worse-than-usual discipline problems are all referred to CPS.
Also interestingly, Lutherans of course being without nuns and priests, the school is staffed with teachers and a principal who knowingly take low salaries because they consider religious education to be central to their ministry to the world. A great gift to my children, yes. A model upon which to base the future of American education, no.
What slayed me most about McArdle’s spewing was the fact that she unabashedly calls for the end of public education in America. (“A dumb goal”, I believe was the phrase.) And yet it’s the anti-voucher camp that is anti-child, that is hypocritical? Has Ms. McArdle ever benefited from public education in this country? How about the police who protect her family, or the firefighters who would douse her home, or the pediatrician she visits? Or how about just about every resident of the U.S. who is literate and can read her web site, thus giving her a job???? Any of those people ever gone to a public school? Hypocrisy, indeed.
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Doug,
Since high school students are working age, there are some options available for fundraising for private high schools that aren’t open to elementary schools. There is a very promising new Jesuit model called Cristo Rey, which helps students pay for private high school with corporate internships.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cristo_Rey_Network
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Here’s some material taken from cristoreynetwork.org:
“The Cristo Rey Network® is a national association of high schools that provide quality, Catholic, college preparatory education to urban young people who live in communities with limited educational options. Most of our students qualify for the federal free or reduced lunch program. Member schools utilize a longer school day and year, academic assistance, and counseling to prepare students with a broad range of academic abilities for college. All students at Cristo Rey Network schools participate in a work study program through which they finance the majority of the cost of their education, gain real world job experience, grow in self-confidence, and realize the relevance of their education.
“During the 2007-08 school year, 4,234 students are enrolled in 19 Cristo Rey schools, which are located in Baltimore, Birmingham, Cambridge (MA), Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, Indianapolis, Kansas City (MO), Lawrence (MA), Los Angeles , Minneapolis, Newark (NJ), New York City, Omaha, Portland (OR), Sacramento, Tucson, Washington, DC and Waukegan (IL). Ninety-two percent of the students are racial minorities, and the average family income of this year’s 9th grade class is $33,766. Ninety-eight percent of last year’s graduates enrolled in college in the fall of 2007. Three more schools are scheduled to open in 2008, and feasibility studies for potential new schools are underway in four more cities.”
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Amy: I agree whole-heartedly that because it’s easier to teach a prepared child doesn’t excuse teaching the unprepared child less. My point was not that we should accept lower standards, but that the failure of the teacher to teach the two different children can’t be judged in the same way.
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bj,
Certainly. I’ve heard one or two cases of celebrated middle-class school principals who got jobs at high-poverty schools and bombed. They just didn’t have the skills they needed in their new setting, probably because they’d been unknowingly coasting on the demographics of their old schools.
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Tapped checks in, too. Can network TV be far behind?
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Ok, don’t know who everybody is.
One simple question.
Why can’t I use my money to train my kids in the manner that they best learn?
Don’t give me that crap about ssssocialization. Both of my kids get along with everyone from a newborn to senior citizens, even volunteering at a retirement home, and have more friends from further afield than if they would be cooped up with the same 40 kids everyday.
I have money taken from me every year at legal gunpoint to incarcerate some ingrate punk who doesn’t want to be there so that the unions can forcibly take my money from the teachers so they can buy political causes that I strongly disagree with.
Both of my kids score three to four grade levels above their age and in the 99th percentile.
All I want is to be able to educate my kids in the way that they learn best.
And in 15 years from now they will be the ones that employ your kids. Unless Hillary gets elected and runs private business out of business.
Dadofhomeschoolers
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If a public school hasn’t the resources to educate a child with special needs, they are legally required to pay tuition to an appropriate private school. Our state has a list of approved schools for special needs, and a fair number of those schools are run by religious orders, or the Catholic church.
What is the difference between funding private schooling for special ed students, and private schooling for kids in failing schools? If one could argue that some schools are not equipped to adequately educate anyone, why should the state not give the inner city children of single mothers the same freedom alloted to the special needs children of engaged suburbanites? Especially when the cost of the vouchers can be set at a level which is less than the per-pupil cost for public school?
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Whoops, lost another post!
Doug,
That Tapped post was pretty bad. MM talked about middle class families leaving for suburban PUBLIC schools, and Sam Boyd misread her as talking about private schools. Then MM says that SOME kids would be better off spending the day at Chuck E. Cheese and SB misreads her as saying that all kids would be better off there, rather than at school.
I dislike the tone MM has taken the past couple days as righteous libertarian scourge of affluent white liberals, but her core arguments have been crushing. Given the inconclusive studies, it may be true that poor children are not better off with vouchers. It may be that socio-economic status rules the day, and they will turn out just the same if left in their neighborhood schools. But if this is really the case, is there a good reason for middle class parents to leave DC’s Capitol Hill for Montgomery County or Fairfax County or to pay exorbitant private school tuition in DC? Wouldn’t their child turn out basically the same, no matter where they went to school? If Capitol Hill schools are bad for middle class kids, they are almost certainly worse for poor children who lack a middle class home environment and financial advantages. That’s the core argument, and it’s really hard to wiggle out of without saying something really un-PC.
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But Amy, no-one is proposing vouchers that pay $15-20,000 per year. What those parents want is not the kind of education we want for low-income kids, but a premium education.
We should get clear about what vouchers, of the kind that can actually get through the political process, are good for. What they do is provide some parents with a slightly better alternative to really awful schools. They won’t do anything about ossified bureaucracies (charters are much better for that) or increase the diversity of instructional approaches; they simply serve to save some of the least disadvantaged children (the more advantaged among the least advantaged — those with better educated and more motivated mothers) from the very worst schools. That’s it.
And that’s good enough for me, frankly, in the absence of a better alternative that would really turn around the schools. I don;t think that voucher opponents have a better alternative, frankly, but they do, and they are sincere about that. I disagree that in our circumstances improved funding and smaller classes will do the job (though more funding is certainly part of the package); but those beliefs are no more unreasonable than some of the absurd claims that some public proponents of vouchers make for vouchers. So, although as I said in the previous thread I, too, am sometimes exercised by the inconsistency of some voucher opponents, MM’s invective is quite OTT.
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Work is busy, and I’m posting more reactively than responsively. I had a tl;dr reply to an MM post (don’t feel like replying there), so I moved it to my blog.
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I think many of you are missing the bigger point. Public education, as it currently exists in many areas (including mine), is killing cities by driving out the middle class and locking the poor into a cycle of continuing poverty by failing their children. I agree with many of the criticisms of vouchers that were given in the comments on 11D. But, I have also come to the conclusion and public schools, at least in Pittsburgh, are not capable of reform through any currently existing political process. Why have I come to that conclusion? School spending is currently $16k/per pupil, teacher pay is high by local standards (more than I make by quite a bit), the drop-out rate is through the roof (5 of the 10 high schools were recently labeled ‘drop-out factories’), and enrollment is dropping even faster than population. And the teachers union has just voted (by a large margin) to authorize a strike for higher pay and a shorter work day(!). They also want to continue to pay virtually nothing for health care and retirement benefits better than those that cost me 15% of my salary. The school board elections are not competitive due to the local political machine (and the teachers union is a key component of that machine. I’ll support any solution that doesn’t involve cannibalism or giving more money to the people who have demonstrably failed in the past. Vouchers, Charter Schools, whatever. It all seems more likely to work that what we have now. I mean, I have my own personal solution that I can take whenever I want (it involves a realtor and a moving van), but that will only work for so long because the suburbs won’t continue to be nice places if there is nothing in the center.
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harry b,
The District of Columbia spends about $10,000 a year per child. About half of that goes to administrative costs. But who knows? DC has lousy financial record keeping and it’s actually unclear where the money goes. Meanwhile, in the most recent year that I was able to locate (2003-4), Montgomery County was spending $11K per student. Mo Co has a reputation for being wealthy, but it has a lot of poorer immigrants in places like Gaithersburg and Wheaton, and it also offers a lot more transportation to school than DC does. In addition, as I mentioned earlier, Mo Co has 13 child classes in a number of elementary schools (I believe that’s targeted at schools with especially needy populations). So, I’m really not seeing where the $15K-20K number is coming from. I’m not saying that Montgomery County is perfect, but they are making their money go much further than DC is. DC has a lot of school choice, but that doesn’t mean a lot without transportation (our NW public school had a lot of very happy Capitol Hill and SE families, but they were all, with one exception, middle class). It is possible that Mo Co is spending a lot more these days. If so, I await correction.
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Wendy wrote over at her blog:
“Third, were my kids, in this wildly improbably situation, in a failing inner city school, you can bet damned sure that I would do everything in my power to MAKE SURE THE SCHOOL IMPROVED.”
I respond:
How much leverage do you think that you the parent have over curriculum and instruction and personnel at your child’s public school, even as an educated, middle class parent? Isn’t it true that you are mostly wanted in order to provide snack, bake cupcakes, attend the silent auction, and buy books at the book fair? And that’s at a “good” middle class school. Do you really think that the principal of a “drop out factory” would be interested in your constructive criticism or your help? A fortiori, how much weight do you think that principal would assign to your opinion if you were a struggling high school dropout single mom with problem kids? The reason that vouchers and school choice comes up at all is that parents don’t count in the eyes of a great many school administrators.
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I think any really good school administration, public or private, needs to be receptive to parent expertise. If Liz’s a history professor and she thinks the history textbook is shallow and misleading, give her a hearing. If Meg is an engineer or a meteorologist and she thinks that the elementary math curriculum doesn’t build up properly to algebra, hear her out. If Suzanne’s a doctor or a medical researcher, she may have some thoughts on the biology curriculum. There needs to be a sense of permeability, that ideas from parents can wind up affecting the direction of the school. (I chose middle class and upper-middle class professions here for simplicity, but I bet plenty of blue collar types will give you an earful, too.)
Even little gestures can be very meaningful to parents. Sometime this summer, I was raving to a teacher at my child’s school about a book in which five children meet a sand fairy and get a series of wishes, leading to various page-turning, fantastic adventures. Later, I looked at her class blog and saw that the teacher had picked it as their read-aloud book, and then a month or so later the class performed a scene from the book for the whole school. As Andrew Sullivan would say, I was gobsmacked. She listened to me! And she valued my opinion! Amazing! Needless to say, this teacher made a big deposit in our future relationship. She demonstrated trust in my judgement, and I am going to be more than ready to extend the same to her down the road.
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Amy P — well, that’s a good lesson in fact checking. The pattern in the US is that the subsurbs spend much more than the cities they surround, even when you include Federal money, so I assumed that pattern held in DC. In fact, although you seem to understate what MC spends (I’d include capital investment per pupil), from what I can gather you understate DC’s spending by considerably more!
Laura, can you bear to adevrtise Rick Hess’s book Common Sense School Reform here?
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harry b,
I wouldn’t stake my life on those numbers, but it gives you an idea. It is hard to compare the two districts–DC faces declining enrollment, has a lot of older buildings, and is periodically closing many of its numerous small schools, whereas Mo Co has to provide more busing and is more spread out. I believe DC gives some sort of subsidy for kids to ride public transit, but that’s not super helpful. It’s not like you’re going to stick your kindergartener on the city bus alone. I got the impression that ferrying their kids to and from school car dictated life for my non-NW mom colleagues at school, and I think they needed to very carefully calculate the ebb and flow of traffic in order not to spend much of the day in the car with a younger child. (We lived a 30 minute walk from the nearest metro station but the elementary school was only 15-20 minutes away.) The non-NW parents were so happy to have gotten in! Fortunately for them, our NW neighborhood wasn’t using all of its slots, partly because of private school enrollment.
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Yglesias, too.
http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/10/vouchers.php
Laura, will your kids be able to phone home with all the cable-show schedulers trying to get through to you?
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hmmm. I commented last night, but it never showed up.
Crooked Timber is talking about vouchers now, too.
Sorry, I’ve been silent for the past couple of days. I’ve been reading and smiling at all the controversy, but some family drama sucked up time this week.
If you want more, Megan and I will be debating vouchers on Pajama Media tomorrow. Should be excellent fun.
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Debate vouchers? But you’re both on the same side–you both support vouchers.
Our liberal media again? (Sorry, I read too much Atrios. 😉
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Now that Laura’s back, I’d like to reminisce a bit and put a human face on the two DC parents I knew who would be the most likely candidates for school choice or vouchers.
Mom A was my daughter’s preschool teacher in DC, who also worked at public school before-care and after-care. She was really energetic and the co-op parents were obviously thrilled to have her. She wasn’t “intellectual” and was less likely to tell you about what she heard on NPR than about her family’s big shindig to welcome her cousin who had just been released from prison. Nonetheless, through her work she had lots of opportunities to observe the school system, and she had well-worked out plans to put one child in a charter and the other in a parochial school. (She lived in Maryland, but I strongly suspect in Prince George’s County rather than in Montgomery County. Was she using a DC program fraudulently, or planning to? Maybe, but I’m not feeling judgy this evening.)
Mom B was the parent of the only non-middle class child in my daughter’s pre-K class in NW. Her gestures, speech, and dress contrasted sharply with the rest of the ethnically diverse (but uniformally middle class) group of parents. I regret to say that whenever I picked my daughter up at the end of the day, her son was usually getting yelled at by the teacher for not sitting quietly in line. Nonetheless, there he was in one of DC’s top public elementary schools! His older siblings were at an academically ambitious NW charter school (which I’m sorry to say has been having administrative problems).
I found the existence of both women very cheering. Neither had much academic knowledge themselves, but they were energetic, were paying attention, and were trying to do their best to find good schools for their children under very challenging circumstances. Oh, and they had cars, which made the existing choice structure accessible to them. There must be a lot of similar parents who are equally motivated but don’t have the car, or don’t have such good access to school information.
I know a lot of people are going to say, but what about the families that aren’t so motivated? To that, I’d answer that there are such things as social networks, and the information that these parents are choosing particular schools and are happy with them percolates through their social network–since they’ve done the preliminary research, it’s easier for slightly less savvy friends, neighbors, or relatives to follow them. (I’ve read that whole villages used to relocate to particular locations in the US, based on this sort of information sharing.) Moreover, if these children do well, they will eventually be much more capable of helping less-fortunate relatives, both materially, through sharing information, and through social capital.
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Washingtonscholarshipfund.org is worth a look. Among other things, they are the conduit for $7,500 federal vouchers, and serve about 1800 poor students. There’s a long list of participating private schools, including Sidwell Friends, St. Alban’s, the National Cathedral, Georgetown Day, Georgetown’s Holy Trinity, Gonzaga, Washington International School,and Visitation. Very importantly, transportation is covered!
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