The debate on school vouchers went into a third day at Pajamas Media. Check it out and give me comments, please.
18 thoughts on “More on Magic Vouchers”
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Apt. 11d 
Oh man. This has been the last week of our term, and I’ve been swamped. It’s on my list of things to read/comment on this weekend, I promise–after I take my husband to the airport, go grocery shopping, prepare next term’s syllabi, write an article for the department newsletter, and take my daughter to dance class.
And it’s true, I spend what little free time I do have reading about the writers strike. I’m kind of bummed, though, that they’re not striking on behalf of good writing. All they seem to care about is MONEY MONEY MONEY. Do they even care about the fans???? Damned unions!
😉
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Your joke would work only if television cost $600 to $1,000 a month, which you had to pay or lose your house, and you had to pay another $1,000+ a month to avoid your children being legally required to watch seven hours of “Becker” re-runs each day.
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Laura,
1. Again with the nuns. Where are they, anyway? Does NJ have a secret supply that you aren’t sharing with the rest of the country? As I’ve said before, these days isn’t one much more likely to encounter a nun running a hospital, heading a school, or being a professor, rather than teaching grade school? So it’s incorrect to talk about Catholic schools having free labor.
2. I don’t want to go too far in defending parental disengagement, but parents who do not go to parent-teacher conferences may just be voting with their feet to the best of their ability. They may have registered the fact that their input is not valued, and that nothing they say or do at school is going to change their child’s educational experience, and have resolved not to waste their time (plus parent-teacher conference days tend to be days off from school and kids usually can’t be present, so they trigger logistical problems). My daughter’s very fine pre-K teacher spent nearly all of our first parent-teacher meetings telling me several pages worth of general class policy, which I could much more efficiently have read at home if she had sent the material home in my daughter’s back-pack. No doubt she did the same for the other 20 or so kids in the class. What a terrible waste of everybody’s time!
As I wrote on an earlier thread, if we, who are educated, confident, well-off, and (some of us) lawyered up get the brush off at school when we raise issues, just think how much more this is true for parents who lack our advantages?
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Don’t get caught up in the nun argument, Amy. It’s a tangent. The point was that Catholic schools, for WHATEVER reasons, are able to offer a low cost, private education that no other private schools have been able to manage. The voucher advocates maintain that if vouchers are available, all sorts of private schools will rise up to take advantage of the money. There is ZERO evidence that that will happen. There are no schools, other than the parochial schools, that fit that description now. Other programs that have attempted to take advantage of pilot voucher programs have failed. There is no political pressure from private schools to take the money. In fact, the private school lobby has been opposed to vouchers. The bountiful private school belief is the real problem with the voucher argument.
Urban parents aren’t bad guys. I’m sure that urban schools are extremely rude to parents. And this might explain why they don’t show up for parent-teacher conferences. Other causes might be overwhelming economic pressures and recurring family crises. Also, these parents haven’t been marching in the streets for school vouchers. I’m not sure if simply changing school systems would have a huge impact on parental apathy.
I will support limited, targeted voucher programs. But this fantasy voucher stuff is based on air.
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I thought DanS had the best reply in that thread, including this: “The fantasy of competition, however, is another matter entirely – it’s part of the myth that failing urban schools are in trouble ultimately because they’re not trying hard enough – lazy teachers, badbad unions, etc. – and need market discipline to whip them into shape (or drive them out.”
I think the problem is bigger: it’s major poverty and lack of “capital” of all kinds in the communities served.
(Sigh–younger child wants to play with Webkinz on my laptop. Why can’t I get my husband to agree to replace our ancient iMac that the kids had been using contentedly until they realized our computers are faster?)
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Laura,
I just respect your work so much that it bothers me to see using incorrect information, even if it isn’t crucial to your argument. I’d like to see you using the best possible information at your disposal.
As far as marching in the street, no one does much of that nowadays, but we do know that when alternatives to the DC public schools are offered, families flood in. The last I heard, 28% of DC public school children were in charters. Plus, those 1900 or so participants in the Washington Scholarship Fund, which is nothing to sneeze at when you consider that the total public enrollment in DC is only 50,000 kids. Plus there’s participation in the public school choice program (although I realize that that option is probably much more exploited by middle class parents in gentrifying neighborhoods)–DC has quite a number of decent public elementary schools. I don’t know what the demographics are of the charter schools versus the standard public schools, but to me the raw numbers on participation don’t suggest apathy.
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Wendy,
Bad schools and incompetence do come into it. At one point, my dad was teaching a community college math class in our rural community. One of his students was an old high school friend of mine who was quite sweet and of at least average intelligence. However, as my father discovered, the reason she was struggling in his class was that she didn’t know the multiplication table. The public schools had 13 years to get her to learn her multiplication table, but somehow it didn’t happen.
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Amy, I see just as many private school students who graduate without knowing multiplication tables or basic writing skills.
Why do you think your friend didn’t learn the multiplication tables? You were in the same school. You learned them, presumably. Why didn’t *she* learn them?
If you’re an experienced teacher, you know that there are many answers to that question.
Laura, you wrote: “Urban parents aren’t bad guys. I’m sure that urban schools are extremely rude to parents. And this might explain why they don’t show up for parent-teacher conferences.” How so? Racism? Classism? Only badmeanpeople are hired as teachers in urban areas?
Seriously, I’m kind of offended by this statement, and I don’t even work in an urban school. Maybe you mean “can be rude” in which case I withdraw my objection. 🙂
And urban parents CAN be bad guys. I posted about my student’s friend whose mom told him he couldn’t go to college–he should just go out and deal drugs instead.
Let’s not make this either-or–these problems are complex. There are bad guys on all sides of the issue. But there are good guys, too. What are they doing right? There’s a school we (our university) work with in our city and it has made great improvement. As I mentioned, the principal has been transferred to the lowest performing elementary school so she can use her skills/experience to make positive changes in that school. I read the state report on this lowest performing school (written a few years ago), and the observers reported that discipline was a major problem, that it was hard to learn and teach in a situation where so many children had such severe discipline issues.
Is that a school problem or a parent problem? Both contribute, but I think we all know that it’s mainly a problem of weak parenting skills (which can be caused by all sorts of issues–not necessarily a condemnation of the parents personally).
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“Amy, I see just as many private school students who graduate without knowing multiplication tables or basic writing skills.”
I’m sure you do. About a year ago, I was looking into the schools of the Archdiocese of Arlington (that’s Northern Virginia). I liked their religious education curriculum, but was horrified by the year-by-year summaries of the K-8 math curriculum. There were huge amounts of math topics, with more and more added every year–the classic mile wide inch deep American math curriculum. Then at the very end (7th or 8th grade), there was a whiplash inducing turn into the brutally cumulative world of traditional algebra. I bet a lot of kids don’t manage that transition very well, and I wonder how well the basics sink in in the early grades when there are just so many other topics to cover.
I don’t think private schools are perfect (it seemed like every school in the DC area was on the same lousy math bandwagon), but the more diversity there is in school offerings, the better chance a family has of finding a school that is the right fit, or of escaping obvious curriculum train wrecks. (As I’ve mentioned earlier, our move to Texas was occasioned largely by the chance to get our daughter into a private school that uses Singapore Math. The Singapore Math kindergarten workbooks are fantastic and inexpensive, and I recommend them to anybody with a 4 or 5 year old.)
“Why do you think your friend didn’t learn the multiplication tables? You were in the same school. You learned them, presumably. Why didn’t *she* learn them?”
I’ve posted some of this before, so please forgive my repetitions. I’m not sure if this answers your question, but here we go:
We didn’t have more than a couple of classes together in high school, but were part of the same artsy-musical-dramatic-literary lunch group, which fit neatly at a single small table at our rural school. I wasn’t mathy, but my parents were graduate educated and my dad did math tutoring as a 3rd or 4th paying job. He prepped me for the SAT as a 7th grader, made sure I skipped 8th grade (which was a super idea), and later on not infrequently put in two hours a night getting me through my math homework. The school’s college prep track was tiny, and my friend wasn’t in it. My last year in high school (my junior year) there were eight kids in college algebra/trig, six kids in AP English, and four in the waste-of-time physics course. (A few years later, an administrator decried the fact that the high school was too much of a “prep school”. It is impossible to convey the anti-intellectualism and anti-achievement ethos of that school system–despite the fact that our pep buses went all over the state to cheer our sports teams, it wasn’t possible to persuade the administration to send a single bus to the big college fair in Seattle. But the facility was clean and tidy, so Kozol’s not going to write a book about it.) We were in different tracks and our paths didn’t cross much in the classroom, but my friend adored Anne Rice and Depeche Mode and was a very well assimilated first-generation Mexican-American. Her family was solidly upper-lower-middle class and lived in a trailer park, but so did a lot of people. Her parents were divorced and the family was biggish, but the mom seemed to have things under control, and the dad was in the picture. (She and her sisters once kindly opened their closets to me and fairy-godmothered me to the homecoming dance, for which I will be eternally grateful.)
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That’s about all the relevant facts I can confidently muster, but I think it’s safe to say that while my parents didn’t impede my education and did a lot to advance it, my friend’s parents didn’t impede her education, but didn’t have the sort of social capital or material resources to advance it. Her education was 100% dependent on the school (whereas mine was about 50% dependent on the school), but the school let her down.
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“He prepped me for the SAT as a 7th grader, made sure I skipped 8th grade (which was a super idea), and later on not infrequently put in two hours a night getting me through my math homework.”
Amy, this sounds contradictory. If you were prepared for the SAT in 7th grade, why would you need help–particularly two hours of help–with math in 9th grade?
I honestly cannot imagine moving to a different state so that my daughter would get a certain kind of math curriculum. You and I have such different perspectives on this.
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Wendy,
There’s no contradiction at all. As I said, I wasn’t mathy, I got 510 as a tutored 7th grader, and I never got better than 690 on a real SAT math test (this was before all the funny business with “recentering” the test). Fortunately, my verbal scores were better. Anyway, at least back in the late 80s/beginning of 90s, SAT math was not very challenging. You needed a bit of algebra and a bit of geometry, plus speed and accuracy, not to mention lots and lots of practice. SAT math wasn’t the sort of stuff that you’d sit and tear your hair out over, as you might over a really hairy patch of Algebra II–SAT math questions were supposed to be two, three minute problems. Plus, as my dad says, there are only so many good problems, so the same ones keep coming up. You just have to figure out which one you’re dealing with and turn the crank, so to speak.
It’s not like we were surrounded by family or childhood friends in DC. I made some good friends, but found it really hard to put down roots there. Everybody’s busy, there wasn’t a real campus community, distances are huge, and at least where we lived, it was almost all nannies at the parks on weekdays. Oh, and we were going to be broke as soon as we left our wonderful free campus housing. Under the circumstances, cheap housing, a congenial school, and a good parish were irresistable. In addition, my relatives from grey and rainy western Washington relatives love the idea of coming south to visit us in the winter, plus there’s the appeal of exploring and mastering the folkways of an exotic foreign culture. Washington DC would be better for my hypothetical career, but I may have an interesting prospect here, too.
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I skipped both 8th grade and Algebra I, going straight from 7th grade pre-algebra to 9th grade Algebra II, so the landing was bumpy. And being non-mathy, I needed a lot of hand-holding. As I said, there’s no contradiction.
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Amy, I don’t know–it all seems a little weird to me. But I had parents who were very hands-off in education. They were also pretty busy with 4 kids by the time I was 10, and back then teachers made little money. I always remember that Septembers were a killer until the third Thursday in September, which is when my dad would get paid for the first time since June.
I just posted in my blog about my elementary school experiences. It’s also making me want to seek out and maybe try to have a reunion of all the kids in our class. It also makes me wonder about that particular pedagogy and whether it’s being used today, and why or why not. And would it work in inner-city schools, or like the success of KIPP schools would suggest, is more structure required?
Or, what I think, is there no “one size fits all” and that success will come to the public schools when they realize this and incorporate as much diversity of instruction as possible? When I worked at a public education preschool for special needs kids, one of the teachers would have the most “unusual” class. She would take the 6 lowest functioning kids, a teacher’s aide, and she would teach them. There’d be kids banging their heads on the floor because of their inability to communicate effectively, and she worked patiently with them.
I never remember the bad teachers. I always remember the good ones, the ones whose devotion to their jobs and their students I admire so much.
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Wendy,
My family was atypical in many ways. I was the oldest of three, and my dad didn’t have a regular paycheck job until I was in 7th grade (no health insurance ever, but that goes without saying). Early on, whenever my parents hit a rough spot, we’d move in with my grandparents for a spell. Fortunately, things improved financially for my parents towards the end of my high school career, so this is all a distant memory. By the time my younger siblings were in high school, my dad was preoccupied with a new business and much less hands-on, and my younger brother got some genuinely stinky grades for lack of oversight, but we all three went to college (although my brother is in Iraq for his second tour of duty with the Marine reserves but will hopefully finish up school fairly soon). My parents were sort of conservative hippies up into the late 80s, and were a transitional generation in our family, half-blue collar, half-business people, spending a long time as economically lower middle class before transitioning into middle class or (in good years) upper middle class. (To give you an idea of our social and economic stratum, literal ditch-digging was one of the most lucrative jobs my dad had when I was a kid.) Nowadays, they’re empty nesters and my dad researches, writes, and publishes his books on local women’s history during the off-season.
I expect that being conservatives and thinking that the public schools were going to hell in a handbasket helped motivate my dad, his brother and sister-in-law, and his sister to closely supervise academics, whether afterschooling math and science, supervising homework, or taking kids to the local Kumon center. If you think that the school is just swell, you just aren’t as motivated. Two of the bunch did time on the school board, but found it very frustrating. As my dad said, in the end, you just have to do the best you can for your own kids.
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Correction:
I think a more exact quote would be “you just have to save your own kid.”
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Wendy’s post on her blog about her elementary school is very good, and makes me feel really jealous of her elementary experience. I did pretty well in school up until 4th grade, when it was time to move beyond reading for fun, and start reading for information and actively memorizing stuff. It was a rough transition (not helped by my teacher who had us all diligently copying massive outlines on volcanos and earthquakes off an overhead projector), and I coped with it by tuning out and doing a lot of reading of unauthorized fiction behind textbooks, which only put me further behind. Plus, I was offended by multiplication–why not just add it up? (My dad only started working with me on math when I was older, and that was the only subject where I got significant help.) I did like historical fiction and those children’s biographies of famous Americans, so I can see how Wendy’s school’s independent studies for literature and history would have worked well for me. I’m a little less sure about math and science. Or maybe, I’m not sure that the same kids who would joyfully study literature and history independently would do the same for batteries and geology, or the other way around. A child might benefit from independence in one area, but a more guided approach in another.
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The wonderful thing about the Learning Center approach is that the teacher could assess each student’s needs individually and see where he or she needed more guidance/structure. It was challenging, I’m sure, for the teachers, but also cool.
I’ve become really motivated to go back and explore what was going on with this class. In the past, I started the process of retrieving my records from the school district I attended; I think I will go further and continue that process. I think I’d also like to try to track down some of the teachers.
Sheesh. Like I need another obsession right now. 🙂
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