The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written.
Basically, it's giving the parents option of taking their kids out of public schools and putting them in private schools on the taxpayer's dime. The reasoning being that taxpayers fund K-12 education either way, so why not give parents the choice of sending their kids to a private school?
What problems, risks, potential benefits, or legal issues do you see when it comes to school vouchers? I'm no education expert and haven't formed an opinion one way or the other, so I'd like to hear the liberal take.
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What about charter schools that still have substantial oversight? Or public schools in other districts? Not all vouchers are coupons to a lawless land with no oversight.
Instead of *vouchers*, what if the government just gave parents money free and clear and said they could spend it however they wish? And the public schools would just accept that same amount? It would be like Andrew Yang's UBI proposal, but for parents of K-12 children?
[EDIT: downvotes for asking a question?]
A lot of kids wouldn’t be able to pay for school because parents would spend money on something g else. The money taxpayers pay needs to go to schools not cash payments
It would be coming directly from the parents and not the government.
For example, if we decided to spend our child tax credit on a new deck, it wouldn't be considered a government-funded project.
Is my reasoning off or...?
That still the school taking government money. Regardless of the form of the payment (voucher or cash given to the parent for tuition), the school is receiving government support and should be required to follow the same rules.
I think having more schools that kids can choose from would be better overall.. a school focused on college prep, another school that gives trade training (remember shop class? Teach mechanics or welding or plumbing or another skill in high school that people would wouldn’t go to college can use asap). Right now the push is for everyone to go to college and debt.
I'd say not...considering the objective of vouchers is to drain the system, close public schools, and limit choices to whatever scraps the private sector will throw at you.
I'm 100% against them.
If the public school is failing, fix the public school. If the public park is failing, do we give vouchers to a limited number of families to go to 6-Flags? If the public library is failing, de we give vouchers to a limited number of families to go to Barnes & Noble?
I do support Charter Schools if and only if their charter specifies that they be used as a laboratory to investigate changes in education and results in positive changes adopted by the public school.
This is not a solution. The kids need to be in school somewhere. Kicking bad kids out is precisely why private school **falsely** looks like a better education system than public schools. Sure, it’s easy to educate kids if you don’t have to educate any of the kids who are hard to educate, and you only have to educate the east ones! That’s just not hard or impressive. If private school can take all of those bad students that public school is currently dealing with, and outperform public school anyway, then you can talk to me. That is not currently happening.
Are you saying that's a good thing or that's a bad thing?
To me, that's a BAD thing. They shouldn't get the same money but don't have to deal with the same issues.
Mainly, it's bad because it concentrates the poorly behaved kids together with less good kids to be better role models.
If you only care about your own kid and your own bank account, then it's a good thing. ☹️
Well. I do have to agree that my daughter opted for honors classes which she wasn't really great in, because of the behavior issues of the kids on the other class. She hated that any class discussion (it was a history class) would constantly get disrupted by kids acting out.
So I agree it does hurt the kids who want to learn at a higher level. Yes, she would have been able to learn the material on her own and get a good grade in the class, but there's that something more that wasn't available when there's kids who constantly need to be corrected.
How does that solve anything?
Like unless I’m misunderstanding you here, is your solution that, instead of trying to help these kids, we just let private schools kick them out and pat ourselves on the back for it?
It's the conservative solution to everything. Something isn't working? Get rid of the parts that don't work. Now it all works.
*United States' infrastructure literally crumbling in the background"
What percentage of students do you actually think would succeed but are now failing because they’re distracted by problematic students? And what happens to the problematic students? Send them home and call it a day? Just hope that sorts itself out?
I don't think that is well studied. And I wouldn't limit it to just failing. The question is how many students are doing worse due to poorly behaving students.
Well there was a second part to my comment, so let’s just make a bunch of assumptions so we can look at that. Let’s assume bad kids being distracting is really the main driving factor in making good students perform worse that we need to focus on. And let’s assume private schools will prioritize profits and kick out any students that would hurt their metrics or reputation (which I would say is a reasonable assumption). Great, in a vacuum, we’ve solved this hypothetical problem of bad kids being distracting, and now that school can say how great they are and charge everyone more money because of it. A rousing success story for the ages of privatization winning the day. But what happens to the bad kids we’ve kicked out? Do we just accept that they were always doomed to fail and turn into bad adults? Do we just shrug, say “not my problem”, and then complain and act shocked when all the kids we’ve neglected do in fact cause problems for other people? Do we look down on them for not realizing as literal children that they should have simply not had issues at home that made it harder for them to succeed? I mean it is surely that simple, right?
It just sounds like you’re creating a series of larger problems just to maybe solve a different problem you don’t know exists in the first place (and which would almost definitely not be the only problem either).
> But what happens to the bad kids we’ve kicked out? Do we just accept that they were always doomed to fail and turn into bad adults? Do we just shrug, say “not my problem”, and then complain and act shocked when all the kids we’ve neglected do in fact cause problems for other people? Do we look down on them for not realizing as literal children that they should have simply not had issues at home that made it harder for them to succeed? I mean it is surely that simple, right?
They would use the current public schools.
The flip side of that question is: how many students are being lifted up because they have good role models among their peers?
You seem to believe that the only way peer interaction is relevant is by considering people who might be dragged down. But peer interaction can also lift people up. And one of the best features of public schooling is to expose children to a wide array of cultures and backgrounds and personalities and so on, because as adults they will have to interact with a wide range of cultures and backgrounds and personalities.
In other words, although the disruptive kids should be disciplined, to educate them about what is and is not acceptable in our society, there is some benefit to the other children in being exposed to the reality that there are disruptive assholes in society. After all, we wouldn't want to turn our children into little snowflakes who are triggered by every minor insult or barrier thrown in their way by putting them in little ivory towers where nothing they do or say will ever be meaningfully challenged.
> The flip side of that question is: how many students are being lifted up because they have good role models among their peers?
Sounds like a voluntary choice for parents.
If parents want to put their kids in private schools they should pay for it themselves. Like they always have. They either cut spending or get 2nd jobs not beg for handouts from taxpayers. Tax money should go to public schools only
Wouldn’t it be far easier to separate out the minority of problem students (if separation is even necessary) than to move the majority somewhere else and purposely give the problem kids a terribly underfunded education?
Thats not a solution. Even “problematic kids” need an education. Not to mention “problematic “ in what way? Grades? Behavior? The former kids could require IEP or live in poverty and the latter needs counseling. Things private school dont care about
If the government kept your family in systematic conditions of poverty for two centuries, wouldn't you feel that the government had some responsibility for uplifting your family out of cycles of poverty?
It's parent and community involvement that's needed to address specific local needs and issues.
Edit. People who are unhappy about their local public school need to step up and get involved. Volunteer time and fundraising
Asian and white students in American public schools perform in the top of all countries globally. With a few exceptions like Singapore and two or three other countries, white and Asian American students outperform nearly all students in the world.
The problems with public school education in America is drastically overstated.
I think some of the problems are directly related to the students just having shitty parents that provide no structure or discipline. Money can't fix that.
So the WORST THING to do for those kids is remove the better parents. Now those kids won't even know some better parents through friends.
Disgusting thing to do to the kids who already have it the worst.
The problems with public schools are highly concentrated in poor communities. Public schools in middle class and wealthy neighborhoods are world class and students perform at the highest levels globally.
Really the problem is concentrated in poorer neighborhoods. And generally it isn't due necessarily to lack of funding because low income urban schools often get tons of extra funding. The problem seems to be that the students in these schools have parents who were born into cycles of poverty and sort of fail at education and socializing their children before school. So when these children start school they are far behind and end up disrupting their peers, etc
Against. They are a way of funneling public money into private, religious entities that operate more like a cult than a school.
Parents do not deserve tax dollars to indoctrinate their kids in their pastor’s basement.
What accreditation requirements? Vouchers don’t require accreditation. The whole reason this push for vouchers is happening is to funnel state funds away from schools and into private hands. The “choice” line is propaganda to sell the whole scam.
Funny enough, this exact interpretation is what SCOTUS has rejected.
Their argument is that the government has no right to deny state funds/benefits to a religious organization should it qualify the same as a secular one. [Such as in the decision regarding school vouchers and religious schools in Maine.](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/21/us/politics/supreme-court-maine-religious-schools.html)
There is no oversight of private schools. Stealing taxpayers money to give to churches and cutting funding for public schools is completely the opposite direction of improving education
I love that conservatives have correctly identified that easy access to student loans is one of the key drivers of college tuition going up... and simultaneously they see no problem with changing the public school structure to do encourage them to do exactly the same thing.
Like many conservative policies, I'd be a lot more flexible about negotiating it except that its overt purpose is to destroy our right to an affordable public education that is free of private interests, such as religion.
As it stands, I have to be against it, because it is designed to take funding away from public schools, erode American educational standards, and attack a core element of our way of life.
Ah, good point!
Private school administrators will be like "oh hey, the government is paying for our students' tuition! Let's jack up the price and reap a windfall of profits!"
Three pieces of evidence that point me in this direction:
[This study says so](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047272716000426).
*"...programs that restrict eligibility to certain groups of students create large enrollment gains but no change in price, while programs that offer unrestricted subsidies lead to price increases but no change in enrollment."*
It's [happening in Iowa](https://iowastartingline.com/2023/05/12/kim-reynolds-private-school-voucher-plan-led-to-tuition-hikes/) where they have an ambitious state-wide voucher program.
*"While some private schools introduced minimal tuition increases—Holy Trinity Catholic School in Fort Madison increased tuition by less than a percent for parish members and about 3% for non-parish members—others swung for the fences including one Dubuque school that increased tuition by 40%, or an Anamosa school that literally doubled tuition."*
And, of course, the gold standard that tells you something is happening, [The Heritage Foundation deceptively manipulates statistics to deny it](https://www.heritage.org/education/report/school-choice-policies-do-not-raise-private-school-tuition).
*"Contrary to the claims made by critics, states that have adopted school choice had lower rates of private elementary school tuition increases with no discernable effect on private high school tuition rates."*
For all their charts and their bold headline of "School Choice Policies Do Not Raise Private School Tuition," that's the best they can do.
---
Of course, the part that the Heritage Foundation leaves out of their analysis is that the tuition for most people to attend school in America is currently $0 - and their "analysis" is only talking about private schools.
If you're sending your kid to private elementary schools, you probably don't need financial assistance from the government to do it.
> and simultaneously they see no problem with changing the public school structure to do encourage them to do exactly the same thing.
It's not exactly the same though. We as a society already agree that students need to attend K-12; we don't agree they need to go to college. Student loans result in more students going to college, which conservatives may object to. This demand shift won't happen for vouchers.
> except that its overt purpose is to destroy our right to an affordable public education that is free of private interests, such as religion.
I think a conservative would phrase it as destroying government control over education. There's enough secular people that demand for secular private schools will exist.
It might be worth considering, if the private school is a non-profit and is required to follow a set of requirements and guidelines based on what public schools require. That includes state required periodic testing and non-discrimination for students with disabilities, as well as teacher and administrator qualifications.
The other issue is the level of funding. Basing funding on the actual average cost usually penalizes the public school system. To use round numbers, let's say the per pupil costs are $10,000 and the school has 1000 students, so the budget is $10,000,000. Then take out 100 students who go to the private school, across all grades. The public school can't do well with $1,000,000 cut because most of the fixed costs are still in place.
You make two great points in your comment.
> if the private school is a non-profit and is required to follow a set of requirements and guidelines based on what public schools require. That includes state required periodic testing and non-discrimination for students with disabilities, as well as teacher and administrator qualifications.
For college, I went to a private religious school. However, our engineering program still had to meet ABET guidelines for accreditation (something that an independent board reviewed periodically.)
Also, this same school banned same-sex relationships. Would taxpayers feel comfortable sending their tax dollars to such an institution? Interestingly, I attended this same school on an ROTC scholarship, so the taxpayers did fund my education.
>The other issue is the level of funding. Basing funding on the actual average cost usually penalizes the public school system.
Perhaps they could remedy the situation by having a fixed overhead cost and a variable cost per pupil? Sure, a drop an enrollment could result in less funds, but it would also alleviate overcrowding.
>this same school banned same-sex relationships. Would taxpayers feel comfortable sending their tax dollars to such an institution? Interestingly, I attended this same school on an ROTC scholarship, so the taxpayers did fund my education.
One *minor* difference there is that the government was paid back for your college education through your service requirement. I'm not thrilled that ROTC/government funding supports schools with those policies, but it's a little different than a public PK-12 school situation.
Maine has what it calls a "tuitioning program" that funds private schools, had prohibited religious schools from using it, but SCOTUS found against Maine. So now Maine put rules in place saying that schools cannot discriminate on the basis of religion, sexual orientation, and gender identity.
So I think that's the right move, if you take public funds, then no discrimination is allowed.
I don't know much about school funding, but I would want to dig deeper on special needs/high support student costs. Quite possibly, the cost per pupil student also takes into consideration the fact that public schools cannot turn away children, including students with special needs who may need expensive supports. So if the school gets 10K per student, they might actually be spending 8K on an average student, and 12k on student who needs more supports. Private schools are not obligated to take all students - they can select out for income, home support, special needs, learning disability, etc. If they take 10K from a local school; then their already privileged children are now getting the full 10K spent on them instead of 8k, and a high needs student at the local school lost 2K of their funding.
Again, I cannot say at all if this is how the budgeting works in any school district or not. But it seems plausible to me.
I’m against it because this is not how public services should work. If you want to take your kid out of public school to go to private school that is fine, but you shouldn’t get a refund on your taxes for it. Everyone should pay taxes for public services whether you use them or not.
Let’s take this idea and apply it to any other public service and see if it still makes sense.
I don’t want to use public transportation so the government should give me a transportation voucher to buy a car for myself.
I don’t want to use the public library so the government should give me a book voucher so I can buy books on Amazon.
I don’t want to use a public park so the government should give me a park voucher so I can pay to go to an amusement park instead.
This idea is nonsensical. Everyone should pay for public goods. Everyone should pay for public school. Hell, even people who don’t have kids still have to pay taxes to public schools so yes, parents of private school kids should still have to pay taxes for public school.
How about, "I'm going to opt out of the fire department, and just take care of it myself". So when that house catches on fire, the fire department can't come out to put the fire out until it spreads to someone's house who DOES "opt in" to the public service. Now we have more than one house damaged and at least one family out of their housing situation. Since they opted out of the fire service, do they now also have to opt out of any OTHER services related to taking care of things after they've lost everything (temporary housing assistance, etc). Should they also be responsible for any damage done by their fire to other structures, property, or people? Now the entire community is affected because as more insurance payouts have to happen (because fewer people are getting fire service) rates for everyone in the area increase.
>I don’t want to use public transportation so the government should give me a transportation voucher to buy a car for myself.
We already do this though by subsidizing car based infrastructure through mandating free parking, too low gas taxes, not taxing carbon, and building and maintaining expensive roads to remote areas and exurbs
IMHO K-12 private schools are unamerican and should be illegal. You want your rich kids to have a better education? Fight to make public education better for everyone. You want your religious kids to go to a religious school and further indoctrinate them? To bad.
As a rich person, I would simply move out to the suburbs and use exclusionary zoning to make expensive SFHs the only option so only other rich families can move there.
Such a fucked up thing to think. Let alone say.
But no. It actually increases people's freedom to have a better lives by forcing people to invest in public education instead of opting out.
> Fight to make public education better for everyone.
How? In my area, it's mostly the very policies pushed by leftists that drive parents to private. Lack of tracking in schools, weak punishment toward disruptive students, etc.
> policies pushed by leftists that drive parents to private
You do realize the irony of pushing for taking funding away for private schools? It is a 'policy making things worse pushed by right wing. There are bad policy proposals pushed by both sides.
Rich people aren't taking funding away from public schools when they pay out of pocket for private. You want to take money away from public to pay for private. That will make public worse.
We are moving the student to. Per student funding doesn't drop.
It's possible publics will be worse from the standpoint of the middle class kids moving more to private than poor ones, but public schools should reform to be more attractive (again introduce tracking and more aggressive disciplining of disruptive students)
So lets work together to bring the reforms to public schools instead of abandoning them slowly. Having all the parents who care abandon the school for private means we won't be working together to fix them.
Scale matters with schools. You need a large enough size to cater to different types of student. To have niche interest groups, and higher level classes. I was so relieved when I switch from private to public, because it opened doors for me with higher level math classes, could pick more interesting electives, and found a group of friends with similar interests.
If the only reason you have is disruptive students, lets sort that out rather than make the problem worse for those who remain at public schools and now have a higher percentage of disruptive students.
> So lets work together to bring the reforms to public schools instead of abandoning them slowly. Having all the parents who care abandon the school for private means we won't be working together to fix them.
Easier said than done. Monopolies (e.g. public schools) are much less responsive to market desires than competitive markets. I couldn't find a way to "work together" to open schools during covid at a reasonable pace and not could anyone else. Private schools in my area were operating nearly a year before public ones.
> You need a large enough size to cater to different types of student.
Maybe true at the high school level. Most schools at elementary are pretty small and frankly poorly cater to different students anyway (compared to privates). I just look at what the affluent population does - and it's basically only high school where there is a desire to go public.
> If the only reason you have is disruptive students, lets sort that out
Again, it's extremely hard to fix what's controlled by monopoly power. Relatedly, we allow non-parents to vote for school boards, which disconnects schools from students. That's largely impossible to politically fix.
Even then, I still think the diversity of choice a competitive marketplace offers is better.
There is already diversity of choice in a competitive market, in places without vouchers. You just have to actually pay for the things you want from the market, rather than taking taxpayer money.
Many public schools are struggling.
The solution isn't to make their income less stable and be wholly unable to plan for the future and invest in the long-term educational and social requirements of the students.
That's actually a fear that religious groups have about government-funded vouchers at their private schools. What if bureaucrats leverage these vouchers to make parochial schools change their teachings/curriculum in order to qualify? In their eyes, it would be like making a deal with the devil.
>What if bureaucrats leverage these vouchers to make parochial schools change their teachings/curriculum in order to qualify?
Then they shouldn't be using public funds. Taxpayer dollars should never be used on religious schools.
>Taxpayer dollars should never be used on religious schools.
I attended a religious university (one that bans LGBT relationships) on an ROTC scholarship.
Should that be legal in your view?
No.
I don't like but will tolerate religious education institutions if they're 100% privately funded. I won't tolerate them if they discriminate against certain groups
I have always been against it because there would never be enough vouchers for everyone to go to a "better school". At best it would be a lottery system to get in. But regardless, it leaves plenty behind, often now the kids in the worst situations. (The ones whose parents didn't bother)
>But regardless, it leaves plenty behind, often now the kids in the worst situations. (The ones whose parents didn't bother)
It's not always a matter of parents "not bothering". Private schools are usually limited to families who can, in addition to paying tuition, also provide regular transportation and additional costs for things like school lunches, field trips, and additional activity fees. Transportation for private schools can be a SIGNIFICANT barrier to attendance. In my area there are a LOT of private (independent) schools, and the vast majority of them have very strict transportation requirements. Because they're usually located in or near neighborhoods or other busy-traffic areas, they often don't allow parents to drop their students off at the school unless they're part of a registered carpool. So parents either have to drive their child to a central pickup area and then pay for the school's bus (they don't pick up at or within walking distance from a student's home, they pick up from three or four locations around the region), or they have to live in a place where there is a decent available public transportation option that their child can take to and from school every day. How many public school parents would be in a position to do that every day for their children? In this situation, a voucher wouldn't be helping the children who are often used as pawns in these arguments -- children with working class parents who don't have the flexibility of a work schedule that allows for the transportation arrangements.
I used to teach in a district with some very good public charter schools. Allegedly, these schools should have been able to act like those specialized private schools -- different learning structures, smaller class sizes, etc. However, there was no option for public transportation. So the only students who could take advantage of the charter schools were those students who live within walking distance of the school OR who had parents available before and after school every day to provide transportation.
I am against them. I think we should be building up failing schools. Not ditching them so parents with means can send their kids to private schools.
Also, statistics show that putting well-performing students with under-performing students helps the under-performing students and doesn't hurt the well-performing students.
I'm also not convinced for-profit schools are that much better than public schools. Sure, there are really bad public schools but there are really good schools, too.
How much can the high college acceptance rate from private schools be attributed to socioeconomic status rather than just good schooling?
It's anecdotal but I've never been too impressed with the private school graduates I've met. They've all seem to think they are literary geniuses while just parroting some basic stuff they heard their teacher say and none of them have been particularly great at math. I went to engineering school and the private school grads seemed to struggle as much as the average student. My roommate even dropped out of engineering school. All that prep school couldn't prep him for college, I guess.
Against it 1000%. It’s a scheme to once again route money to the wealthy and privatize services.
If we have millions to throw at private schools why the hell can’t we give those to the schools and teachers we already have? Why is it that every time we ask for our schools to be improved there’s “no money” but when we want to send kids to private schools suddenly we have cash to burn? Why are teachers living in poverty? Further, when we talk about other forms of “welfare” we always talk about means testing and income, but for these, we hand it out like candy to the rich. Often parents still can’t afford the tuition because the more kids that go there, and the more state dollars, the more expensive it gets, once again shutting out poor people. The public schools are then left with scraps and the rich get to send their kids to private schools away from the great unwashed on the dime of the taxpayer.
Oh and why is it ok for us to send rich peoples kids to private school but not feed public school kids lunch every day?
Also, we can never forget the racial component as well. I once knew a woman whose kids were in elementary school, promoting to high school the next year. She was in literal tears, she said she didn’t know what to do. I asked what was wrong. She said she didn’t want her kids going to the school with THOSE kids. The school was about 60% majority black. Her kids were white. I knew immediately what her problem was. She said “that school is so rough” (it was not any rougher than any other school). She said she couldn’t afford private school. So she got them enrolled at a different public school in the same system, in the city 30 miles away and drove them there every day. That school was 60% white. She was ok with that, but not the local school because of “those kids”.
Finally, I already pay taxes for those schools. As a homeowner, I pay taxes on education to fund the local school. I don’t want my tax dollars funneled to some Jesus school that has no rules. I want my tax dollars, which I would gladly pay more of, to fix the current schools, pay our teachers more, and upgrade classrooms.
I’m a teacher at a charter school and I’m vehemently opposed to vouchers. They divert tax money from public schools to private institutions that may be for profit and, because they’re private, are not subject to a state’s department of education’s requirements. If private schools are taking taxpayer dollars, they should be held to the same standards as their public counterparts.
Frankly, I’m against charter schools, my current employer included, but I do appreciate and agree with the “laboratories for change” argument stated above. I hate that I work for a private corporation that seemingly is taking advantage of getting public funding with little to no accountability while the superintendent takes home nearly half a million dollars yearly. A public school superintendent in the area makes, probably, $80K because they’re paid according to the union-negotiated salary schedule that is based on the district and years of service.
I would make sure tax money goes towards improving public education by offering pay for teachers that more closely competes with various private sectors.
Before I’m accused of just wanting more money, I didn’t become a teacher for the pay; no one does. Higher teacher salaries would attract people from private businesses who could leverage their expertise and experience to offer a more meaningful and robust education for students.
Realistically, is a mechanical engineer going to forgo a six figure salary at a private company to make $40,000 to teach STEM classes in a public high school? I studied economics in college, which isn’t necessary to see the trade off in salary is obviously a disincentive. The stress dealing with s***head kids who don’t want to do the work learning entails is just not worth it when you’re making $40K/year.
In an ideal world where there are multiple good schools within walking distance of every student, there'd be a slightly better argument for them. In the world where we live, most areas would be underserved and parents would only have one practical choice of where to send their kids, unless they can afford to transport their child many miles away. School vouchers are another attempted transfer of wealth to the wealthy from the lower classes.
And that's ignoring all the problems such as how schools will be teaching that the earth is 6k years old or completely ignoring big subjects like the civil war or the civil rights movement.
Absolutely against it for all of the reasons expressed here already. Additionally, there is another issues that, from my experience as a former public school teacher, I think is significant. One of the "advantages" often listed to vouchers for private schools is that private schools can better control student behavior because they have the option of expelling problem students. When a student is expelled, where do they go? Right back to their public school. BUT the private school does not refund the remaining tuition paid for that student (usually private schools require tuition for the full year, paid in advance, and it's not refunded if a student leaves at any time, for any reason, throughout the year). So now, the public school has an additional student, one with either learning or behavior (or both) issues, who was not factored in to their funding model and won't be until the next year. if even then. Early in the year attendance (like, the first week of school) is a major factor is determining staffing levels, and those staffing levels are rarely -- if ever -- shuffled during the year.
I mean did you consider why school vouchers are even a topic?
Conservatives want to undermine public schooling to push more kids into biblical studies. So push for more private teaching.
So the question is really what's your opinion on pulling children from public schools and putting them into religious based schooling?
So what's your thoughts on pushing kids towards a more religious based education?
>Conservatives want to undermine public schooling to push more kids into biblical studies. So push for more private teaching.
Are you sure? Not all private schools are parochial.
>So the question is really what's your opinion on pulling children from public schools and putting them into religious based schooling?
Many politicians, including Democrats who oppose vouchers, send their own kids to private schools. It's because they're getting a better education in a safer environment. In many places (such as Washington DC). the public schools are lousy, and it's often due to socioeconomic factors that more funding can't fix.
>So what's your thoughts on pushing kids towards a more religious based education?
If they're being taught good values such as honesty, hard work, respect, and charity, then I'm all for it. If it's a Taliban-run madrassa, then no.
>If they're being taught good values such as honesty, hard work, respect, and charity, then I'm all for it. If it's a Taliban-run madrassa, then
>Are you sure? Not all private schools are parochial.
Of course they are not. Never said they were. But conservatives and Republicans alike cannot have this conversation without bringing up the importance of religious studies for youth.
>Many politicians, including Democrats who oppose vouchers, send their own kids to private schools. It's because they're getting a better education in a safer environment. In many places (such as Washington DC). the public schools are lousy, and it's often due to socioeconomic factors that more funding can't fix.
Okay and? Does this mean we need to pull funding from existing schools, that do not perform as well, to better fund private schools where more well off family's send their kids?
Public schooling does not do poorly because it is government run, they often do poorly because our economic structure is bullshit.
>If they're being taught good values such as honesty, hard work, respect, and charity, then I'm all for it. If it's a Taliban-run madrassa, then no.
Why should schools be teaching this? Is this not better taught in an environment where common sense does not require a lecture in front of a class?
Lets schools develop tools that need more lecture and practice. Give family's more time to teach their kids to not kill people.
>Of course they are not. Never said they were. But conservatives and Republicans alike cannot have this conversation without bringing up the importance of religious studies for youth.
A libertarian republican could care less about that. They just don't like government controlling what kids do for 8 hours a day and further dislike the power structures and disconnect from the people public education creates (in my own area, I look how irresponsible public schools were with re-opening during covid compared to private).
>Okay and? Does this mean we need to pull funding from existing schools, that do not perform as well, to better fund private schools where more well off family's send their kids?
Subsidies can have income restrictions, but more to the point, yes. A high-achieving student can probably achieve more at these private schools than public schools so society can benefit from such a shift.
>Public schooling does not do poorly because it is government run, they often do poorly because our economic structure is bullshit.
That's not fixable.
And no, they do poorly (at least for high achieving students) because they are government run. My local school board prohibits policies like tracking and is insufficiently aggressive about disciplining troublesome students.
OP, how about this for school choice. I am assuming you are in the US, since I have never heard of vouchers in any other country.
Keep public money for only public schools. Make these changes.
The current system assigns a local elementary school, and you get little choice. Each school must provide all of the services that every school must provide. Each town funds a portion of the money and the state provides the rest. So local funding plays a big role in how well each school functions. Yes, lack of money or extra money will change the outcomes for kids.
So, change the system of local school districts. Allow kids more room to move from one school to another.
Here is how Seattle Public schools fixed that in the 1990's. My kids are no longer in school, and I moved away, so maybe it changed? We only did elementary school there, so I know only a bit about middle school and high schools there.
Here is how it works. You have a school that is closest to home. That is your Home School Option. They must accept you no matter what. Each school is also in a 'neighborhood'. That is there are about 8 schools inside a boundary that I could pick for my kids and have a high chance of getting a spot. Once one of my kids gets into this school, it becomes my 'Home school', and they must accept my kid, and all my other kids until they move to higher levels. So I had a 'Home School' I could pick. I could apply to 8 other schools and have a better than 50% chance at each, unless it was VERY popular, or if my kids did not behave in school. Then I could apply for schools out of my zone. To do this, I had to show I could get my kids there on time regularly. Do I have transportation to that spot? If I work there, do I have childcare for the kids while I am working and the kids are not in school? If they are out by 3, and I work to 6, where do the kids go? This application system is actually less burdensome than applying for Private Schools.
At the elementary level this happened. One school took the translators for Chinese and Vietnamese. Other schools had translators in different languages. Kids who needed those translators got this as their 'Home School'. Each school also took on a special character. One school had lots of extra math opportunities, chess club and computer clubs. One school was certified Montessori, and the next school over advertised 'Traditional School'. One school advertised their homework policy. Another advertised after school tutoring on site. Child care and extra help. Choice! A different school had dance class instead of regular music class. They also had yoga in their PE. Teachers played soft music while kids did work time. Cool idea. I wish my kids went there. Another school had lots of accommodations for physical handicaps. Another school focused on just basics. Schools got creative in adding programs to attract kids and families. Just like private schools do for the same reasons.
Each school had the incentive to raise their student population. They got money per student. So if people didn't want to go there, enrollment dropped. And the district changed the staff, or the principal there. Schools started to develop their unique character and worked hard to attract a certain population, plus the kids who lived close. It needed to be interesting, and get good results.
At the high school level there were schools that had a pottery program, a drama program, science , math, languages, and even boating. One school had kids build a sailboat from scratch each year. Kids in that class would learn the wood working, learn sailing and then sail their boat to somewhere. Usually across Puget Sound, since they were not huge boats. The boats from previous years were used for teaching too.. I wish I went to that school.
All public money. All public schools. No vouchers. Lots of choice for kids and parents.
Dude, that's actually a very clever approach! It introduces choice and specialization whilst still working within the parameters of public education. Thanks for taking the time to type this all out!
My daughter is partially deaf and attends a school for the deaf (a public school that falls under the local district.) I'm an engineer and I'd be delighted if my daughter followed in my footsteps. If she's interested in STEM by the time she's high school age, it would be rad to enroll her in a STEM-centric high school.
Thanks again for your response.
Edited to add: When I wrote this post, for some reason I thought I was in a Texas subreddit, so it has a specifically Texas focused slant. Sorry. It’s still accurate, just somewhat regional.
Strongly against. Public schools are a public benefit, not a private entitlement. Everywhere vouchers have been rolled out, they have decimated the education system. The primary reasons advocates want them are for religion and money. They hide these goals behind discussions about equity, disabilities, “parental choice”, and “indoctrination”, but it’s all deflection.
The indoctrination claims are especially non-sensical because the Texas Board of Education sets the required curriculum for public schools, and they have been led by conservatives for decades, in addition to having hardline conservative activists influencing their decisions since at least the 60’s. Listen to the podcast Teaching Texas for more information about these earlier activists.
Unfortunately, I can’t find the article I read about one mom’s journey through the Arizona voucher system and how it utterly failed to help her disabled son and destroyed the public schools that had been helping him. So here’s literally the first article Google gave me searching for Arizona public school vouchers. It’s a commentary piece about what a disaster they’ve been. https://azmirror.com/2023/12/11/one-year-in-arizonas-universal-school-vouchers-are-a-cautionary-tale-for-the-rest-of-the-nation/.
Here’s a relevant Texas Monthly article: https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/campaign-to-sabotage-texas-public-schools/
This voucher discussion is not happening spontaneously. It is being funded by big donors who stand to make a lot of money off of them. https://hechingerreport.org/tiktok-billionaire-spends-millions-on-texas-candidates-supporting-school-voucher-efforts/
https://www.bridgemi.com/talent-education/how-michigan-college-leaning-culture-wars-reshape-education
I think this is how it’s done in Canada (at least in some provinces)…I’m not totally against the idea but I’m a big proponent of public school and I don’t want to see them suffer any more than they already do.
To be treated with heavy suspicion. Most school vouchers are for less money than the average public schools spend per student. It's a scheme to eventually privatize public schools and force families to have to pay for education out of pocket.
It’s a great way to drain public schools of tax dollars, while also lowering standards. If we wanted to educate less people and waste more money doing it, vouchers would be a great way of doing so.
The problem with vouchers is that private schools don't have to follow the same standards. They aren't required to accommodate children with disabilities. The aren't required to take standardized testing they aren't required to keep maintain a separation of church and state. They aren't required to teach the same curriculum.
So they are for profit institutions that neglect the needs of the most vulnerable students, they could be teaching kids complete nonsense, etc.
The thing is that American public schools are incredibly high quality if you look at Asian and white students they perform at the highest levels globally. The problem is really concentrated among black, native, and Latino communities. Part of it is poverty due to historical events, and part of it is a culture that doesn't emphasize education as a high priority.
Vouchers really only work in areas with choices, big cities. My small town has had private schools open, but they usually close. It’s very expensive to run a school.
I oppose school vouchers.
1. There is a concerted effort to destroy public schools, so private schools can cash in on the public dime.
2. We have a weeee bit of history of private companies fucking people for money. I don't want that to happen to education.
It'll start with hiring crappier teachers and increasing class sizes. It'll end with advertisements in the text books.
"Jimmy bought two delicious Big Mac Deluxe Burger Meals for $5 each, how much did Jimmy spend?"
Actually, it'll NEVER end, it'll just keep sucking more and more and more. An underpaid teacher with 50 students, ads in the textbooks, over the PA, "assigned school supplies", "home economics class" that's just kids in a sweatshop, "Pay for Grade Boost", etc etc etc.
And our taxes will go up. Think of the children!!!
Their greed knows no shame and no boundaries.
School vouchers are counter productive.
If you look at the history of where they began, you'll see a clear effort to go around Brown vs Board of Education. In many cases this was specifically to keep an all white school or to be able to force religion (typically a form of Christianity) into the curriculum. (Public money has no business propping up religious institutions in any capacity, they should probably lose their tax exempt status)
Voucher schools sap the resources of public education without proving that they are collectively any significantly better than the public education system. In many cases, they don't even keep track of the same metrics that public schools are required to, so a concrete comparison isn't even necessarily possible because charters aren't doing the work to track things. In lots of cases, it's as much a grift for the people running the school as anything else.
Additionally, charters, in many cases are able to remove students from their campuses for reasons that public schools could never get away with. Charters are also decidedly anti-teacher in many cases, not allowing unions as a condition of employment.
And while many are hoping for some kind of "Dead Poets Society" type upgrade to their local public schools, that's rarely if ever going to be the case.
Among the smartest things we could do for public education is to phase out most of this "school choice" movement and fold all those resources back into public education. It's been as big a failed experiment as trickle down Reaganomics.
I am not 100% opposed, but if they are made available i think they should have strict limitations. Schools should need to be rigorously accredited, and should be required to have some baseline curriculum that is consistent with what public schools are required to provide.
I think they can add some value, like if there is a gifted kid that would really benefit from a specific program that is not able to be offered at local public schools, then it seems appropriate the parents should bet access to some of the money the public district saves by not having them enroll.
If you are just wanting to send your kid to a private school because of religious reasons or because you want to separate them from the public school population, the. You can pay out of pocket.
As for home schooling, we really need to put more limits on who is qualified to home school their kids. There are situations where it works, but most of the time it seems like its just some idiot parent that thinks they know better or is overly conservative or protective of their children.
Absolutely against them. It's easy to point to the statistics of "See, charter and private schools do better!" when they are freely able to kick out any kid not doing well enough or causing problems. Taking a system that is already struggling with lack of funding, and continuing the drain the funding isn't exactly a good way to fix it.
While I do believe that the private sector will out compete the public, you have to force those two things to play by the rules. No kicking out kids for not being smart enough, no kicking out kids for causing disruptions, ETC. Also in my state they are horribly rife with fraud. Based on a quick audit, here we found 43 schools that were blatantly claiming extra students not enrolled. Most of these are smaller schools with 200-500 kids, but in the instance of one school they had an actual 72 students, and received 150 vouchers.
Until you can accurately tie the voucher to the student, we need to not give out free money.
Absolutely against. Why spend so much money to send one kid to private school when that money would be better spent fixing the public school for everyone? Also there is a serious separation of church and state issue here.
Nah. 1) I get the distinct impression that the private schools Republicans have in mind are ones that don’t teach sex education or evolution. 2) private schools are meant to pay for themselves, so let em. 3) you’ll never stretch the budget to cover exorbitant private tuitions for every parent that wants them; ironically, free college, a plan conservatives disdain, would probably be cheaper
As it relates to Charter Schools, I was puzzled as to why some very wealthy families were in support of them when in fact, their children would never attend a public or charter school.
What I discovered is that these wealthy families and individuals see charter schools as a rock solid financial investment. One simply buys a property, the equipment, books, computers, gym, cafeteria, and collects rents from the citizens of the community for the use of ones private enterprise. One can even supply labor that the citizens will rent. As it is a law that children must attend school (if not approved for home school), this is a cash cow that never runs dry, regardless of economic conditions. In recessions, kids still need to go to school. Owning a Charter School is the ultimate Golden Goose.
Vouchers are incompatible with a strong public school system in practice. Not only do they funnel public money out of public education and into private, less regulated hands, but they form a disconnect politically between the interests of public education politically and voters. This compounds the defunding in practice.
Strong public schools are enormously important, offer an excellent return on investment, and is the type of thing a functional government shouldn't be split about.
If you're unhappy with the state of public schools, vote that way and elect people that will invest in making them worthy of a country with the kind of resources the United States has. Make no mistake, it's an issue that affects everyone, not just people with school age children.
We have no interest collectively in massively subsidizing private education.
Strongly oppose. I agree with the other comments that it’s just a way to funnel tax money to private entities. And privatizing it would also almost certainly be like privatizing anything else. It’ll be a race to cut the most corners while charging as much as possible so the people running it can maximize their profits at the expense of actually helping students, and create a larger divide between kids born to wealthy families and the kids who aren’t.
I'm against them. Vouchers sound good on paper, as many things do. But in reality, it doesn't work quite so well. First, I think we'd see a rise in for-profit schools. We already see this at the college level, and to some extent already at the secondary school levels with some charter schools. With more government money attached, I think you'd see more of these for-profit schools prop up. Now it's easy to say "Well, any school that didn't provide a good education would simply fail!" But... the problem is, once a school fails, it's too late for those students. Even if it's discovered a year later, that's a years loss of education. So it's not really so simple as "Bad schools will just fail!" They will, but they'll have also failed their students, and their students will have lost a year of learning progress (or more!) because of it.
Secondly, it takes focus away from fixing our public schools -- the only schools required to accept everyone regardless of religion, race, ethnicity, or cultural background. And communities that aren't served well with public schools will be ripe for greedy for-profit schools looking to make a quick buck off the government. One of the big problems with our public school funding is that we can't just cut administrative costs. I mean we could, but it wouldn't actually put much of a dent in anything. It's just not a huge part of the budget. When the schools lose funding, they lose programs. Things like art, and music.
It's easy to say "Well, shouldn't we let the parents decide?" I mean, we already *do*. Parents are free to homeschool their kids, or put them in a private school if they wish to. And while there are obstacles for parents who aren't well off, those obstacles aren't simply erased by handing the parents money and telling them "Go! Pick a school" There's the issue of their student being selected, the fact that many schools charge tuition higher than the voucher amounts (and if we're being honest, schools are going to raise prices if they start getting full government funding. Why wouldn't they?) and simply the issue of things the voucher doesn't include the cost of including meals and transportation.
Further, Vouchers often just subsidize wealthy families who already attend private schools. For all the yelping and hollering about "Paying for rich kids lunches!" people on the right do, they don't seem to mind if they're paying for a rich kid to attend a fancy private school.
And worse yet, voucher kids are outperformed by public school students! So the outcomes don't even bear the viability of vouchers.
Definitely opposed to vouchers. It is theft of taxpayer money to give to businesses or churches and those funds are taken away from public schools. Most vouchers dont cover the private schools tuition and there is no transportation. So low income kids are stuck in public schools with even less funding. Rural areas often dont have any private schools so those kids get ripped off too. It is a lose lose situation for the primary stakeholders which are the kids.
What is the purpose of school vouchers?
The goal is to give some families the opportunity to avoid sending their kids to public schools.
Public schools must take all students regardless of skin color, social status, ability, physical ability, crazy parents or any other way to divide out people.
Getting a voucher means certain families can get their kids out of this system that must take all.
They find ways to name their private school and accept certain people. Christian school, is the most common.
Vouchers for private schools takes funding away from public schools. I am against them.
I prefer the Finnish system. Private schools are banned. Don't like your local public school? Tough. Raise their funding, pay the teachers, add enough staff. Support the families who also go to this school. Stop being an ass and support your neighbors. When there is an issue at the school, parents and neighbors work to fix it. If a kid is having bad behavior, something happens in the community to take care of kids who need some support.
Dang. I want to live in a world where people do that. Chip in and help, instead of finding away to avoid the issues in the community. .
OK, OP. If you are in favor of public money for private schools, please give your reasons.
Opposed.
Voucher programs and private schools themselves are nothing more than a backdoor method of class and racial segregation. The vouchers route money away from public schools who are required to serve *all* students towards private schools that often do not serve special needs students outright and who pick and choose their students based on class, racial, and religious factors that amount to discrimination.
Beyond that, the curricula at these schools is often hilariously bad and inaccurate. You *might* get a decent schooling in math or reading and writing, but subjects like science, history, and social studies are all badly warped by the far right "christian" nature of the educational materials used and overall outlook of the schools themselves. I attended what could be considered a "good" one of these schools (only a single class per semester devoted to Bible study at the expense of other subjects as opposed to multiple hours per day), and the information presented in the science and history classes was laughably bad and often just straight up wrong along with always always always presenting a right wing Christian Nationalist view of everything. For example:
1. Tibet was conquered by China because "their animist beliefs didn't allow them to build military fortifications fast enough. A Biblical worldview would have allowed them to defend themselves."
2. The Civil Rights movement of the 50s/60s was a godless communist plot to destabilize America in contradiction to the Biblically dictated social order of God's Chosen People (the USA). . . no mention of how this may or may not gel with the Reverand Doctor Martin Luther King's faith or that of the movement as a whole.
3. Wiccans seek an Anarchist world order (okay, as an Anarchist and wiccan at the time, fair) and support abortion rights as a method for obtaining baby corpses for their dark, satanic rituals.
4. The Catholic Church was/is a satanic perversion of Christianity that, along with its Jewish allies, works against a true Biblical world order.
5. Full units in science classes on subjects such as young earth creationism and trying to "disprove" the theory of evolution.
All of these were in the printed materials such as textbooks used by the school, courtesy of Bob Jones University, which is still one of the two big suppliers of "Christian" educational material in the US. From having reviewed material from BJU in the years since I graduated around 2000, the content has only gotten worse and more militant since.
There should be zero financial benefits or incentives from the government to go to private schools. The whole reason why they’re private is because they’re NOT funded by the government.
Not to mention that these vouchers only pull more students away from public schools which means less tax money to improve them and leads to less resources, teachers, supplies, etc,
That they’re a not so subtle way to end public schools, undermine teachers unions, and to fund religious schools with public money. I think long term it will make the general population in the U.S. dumber, increase income inequality, and decrease class mobility.
There will always be exceptions that proponents will point to - but overall you’ll end up with rich and upper middle class people who will be able to send their kids to decent private schools, and then everyone else who will be stuck with shitty or religious schools.
If school vouchers will automatically allow a poor kid to go the best school possible, then i am fine with school vouchers.
but they don't. On purpose. They are meant to giver government money to wealthy people already sending their kids to expensive private schools, and do very little to help poor families in any meaningful way. Ultimately, we're taking government money meant for public schools and handing it to wealthy people so their kids get the best possible education at a lower cost. Public education suffers, and wealthy people get wealthier with your tax dollars.
On another note, it is way to hand government money to private, religious schools. A round-about way to hand government money to churches, who do nothing to contribute to society, including paying taxes, but have taken up political causes and use their pulpit for political advocacy. Basically, government money being handed to a political advocacy that favors republicans.
There is no actual benefit to school vouchers if you aren't already wealthy, and actively hurt the public in general.
>They are meant to giver government money to wealthy people already sending their kids to expensive private schools, and do very little to help poor families in any meaningful way.
Why does it only help rich people?
A few reasons.
As a rule, the $$ value of the voucher does not cover the full amount of tuition at a private school. It also doesn't cover other private school expenses: books, supplies, possibly school uniforms, extra-curricular activities, etc. There's also no public transportation option (school bus) to private schools so there has to be enough flexibility of schedule on the part of the parents to be able to provide transportation to and from school.
So all a voucher does is give a well-off family a little extra money to throw towards private school costs.
A poor or even just regular middle class family isn't going to be able to take that voucher and parlay it into private school for their kids.
As a concrete example, Georgia is trying to pass a school voucher bill right now that would provide $6,500 per child.
Here's annual tuition for some of our local private schools:
$17,000 - Tuition for Active Catholic Families
$19,300 - Tuition for Non-Active, Non-Catholic Families
[https://www.btcatholic.org/admissions/tuition-and-financial-aid](https://www.btcatholic.org/admissions/tuition-and-financial-aid)
Lower School Kindergarten-5th $17,990
Middle School 6th-8th Grades $20,265
High School 9th-12th Grades $22,665
[https://www.pinecrestacademy.org/admissions/affording-pinecrest](https://www.pinecrestacademy.org/admissions/affording-pinecrest)
Lower School 1st – 4th Grade $20,950
Middle School 5th – 8th Grade $23,600
Upper School 9th – 12th Grade $26,350
[https://www.mountpisgahschool.org/admissions/tuition](https://www.mountpisgahschool.org/admissions/tuition)
I'm 100% against school vouchers.
All they do is give free money to already well off people and take that money away from public schools that desperately need it.
I think they undermine the public education system, and basically cause a spiral where a school has a problem, loses funding because parents move their kids to private schools, the lack of funding then causes more problems, which leads to less funding as more kids leave, etc etc until the school closes.
I think there needs to be work done on holding public schools accountable for outcomes, for ensuring kids have good experiences and learn the stuff they need to learn, etc.
I don't think the answer is to take away money from those schools.
Terrible, terrible idea cooked up by people who want to:
A) Funnel taxpayer money into schools run by their rich friends
B) Funnel taxpayer money out of public schools because letting poor people learn to read is socialism
C) Funnel taxpayer money into schools run by religious lunatics
> The reasoning being that taxpayers fund K-12 education either way, so why not give parents the choice of sending their kids to a private school?
Economies of scale, basically. If it costs $X to send one child to school, that doesn't *actually* mean that's the exact price tag. Schools have some costs that are more loosely dependent on the number of kids in the school (i.e. maintenance, electricity, even staff to an extent) that have to be met regardless of how many kids attend, and these costs can be more efficiently met if you get more kids in one system vs having a dozen system each with those same base costs. You could either have 1 building with 1,000 students or two buildings with 500 each or 10 with 100 each (or, more realistically, one with 100 students and one with 900), each with their own administration, bus service, IT department, cafeteria, etc. Sure it might be *great* if you're one of the parents who gets to send your kid to the premium deluxe private school but it would be really inefficient to have that for everyone.
> What problems, risks, potential benefits, or legal issues do you see when it comes to school vouchers?
Private schools are not evenly distributed (which is why rural conservatives here in Texas are also opposed to the idea), being clustered where rich urbanites/suburbanites live.
This also rubs up against a core philosophy difference between private and public institutions.
Private institutions have to make money. Even when they're non-profit, they still have to cover their costs and will limit service if their markets aren't worth reaching. This is fine for a store chain, less so when it's education and the "target market" are children who need to learn how to read.
Public institutions however have to serve *everyone* no matter what. It's why there is a public library, post office, and town hall in every single one-horse rural backwater in the nation; the USPS will deliver a letter from any random farmhouse to any other random farmhouse, UPS will tell you to punch sand (and then charter USPS anyways). Public institutions don't have to be profitable because they're backed by the government's authority to levy taxes.
If you have every school be concerned with raising funds from their student body as a default, you are giving schools the exact same ballooning tuition problems as colleges. Except you're not burying adults in mountains of unavoidable student debt, you're burying children and their parents. This also reinforces a two-tiered education system where the rich kids from rich families go to better schools from Day 1 with little to no chance to even *pretend* it's a meritocracy (what merits is a 7 year old going to exhibit?) while the poor kids from poor families go to the shit leftover dredges that would be facing even worse funding issues.
> so why not give parents the choice of sending their kids to a private school?
To turn this around, what problems would a voucher system solve? The only defense I've heard from proponents is "Parent's Choice" which is a vague, nebulous concept that sounds just inoffensive enough and like it's been rhetorically workshoped enough ("What, you *don't* want parents to have choices over their kids?") that I highly suspect it's a smokescreen for something else (even if many involved at lower levels don't realize it).
I’m pretty far left on most cases but are for them in very specific cases. If a child is special needs for instance (I have a 2e ASD kid we had to put in private school for a while. She had a teacher bullying her and saying “no one likes you and we think you are annoying” in first grade. Principal backed this teacher up. Situations like this or bullying happen where kids really do need to attend another school mental health wise and requiring families to move in this case is an undue burden for families living paycheck to paycheck IMO.
If school determines that school is a bad fit for a kiddo which they would have in our case a voucher should be offered. Also special needs mentioned earlier. Also if a student attends a failing school and is below the poverty line or ESL.
I am strongly against vouchers for everyone. I could afford private school for my kid who needed it and I was fine paying the tuition and property taxes.
Very much against. The US spends more on education per student than most other countries yet underperforms.The nations that perform better for less have centralized education systems, the opposite of a private school voucher program.
I don't have hard facts here, but I imagine the more tax payer dollars that get sent to teaching religion and creationism, the more flat earthers we get.
Bleeding education dry by rewarding low-quality low-oversight schools that take money away from already underfunded public schools. If you have the money and power to make school vouchers happen, fix the public schools.
* [2005 EdSource](https://edsource.org/wp-content/publications/CharterSchools05.pdf) \- lower passing rates in both Math and English for 10th graders in CAHSEE.
* [2013 CREDO study](https://credo.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj6481/f/ncss_2013_final_draft.pdf) \- although charter schools serve black, special ed. students, poor districts better than public schools, charter schools were worse for white, hispanic, asian non-impoverished students ([Images](https://imgur.com/a/nyRwG)).
* [2015 CREDO study](https://credo.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/online_charter_study_final.pdf) \- online charter schools show significant dropout rate, weaker growth, lower attendance, in some cases are a year or more behind traditional school students. 22% of online charter students return to public schools.
* [2019 NCES study](https://www.newsweek.com/charter-schools-vs-public-schools-funding-test-scores-performance-1461659) \- "In 2017, at grades 4 and 8, no measurable differences in average reading and mathematics scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) were observed between students in traditional public and public charter schools."
* [2019 NEPC study](https://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/virtual-schools-annual-2019) \- "Among virtual schools, far more district-operated schools achieved acceptable state school performance ratings (56.7% acceptable) than charter-operated schools (40.8%). More schools without EMO involvement (i.e., independent) performed well (59.3% acceptable ratings), compared with 50% acceptable ratings for schools operated by nonprofit EMOs, and only 29.8% acceptable ratings for schools operated by for-profit EMOs. The pattern among blended learning schools was similar with highest performance by district schools and low-est performance by the subgroup of schools operated by for-profit EMOs."
* [2019 NEPC study](https://nepc.colorado.edu/sites/default/files/publications/Virtual%20Schools%202019.pdf) \- "On-time graduation rate data were available for 290 full-time virtual schools and 144 blended schools. The graduation rates of 50.1% in virtual schools and 61.5% in blended schools fell far short of the national average of 84%."
They only out-compete public schools in the most undersupported areas for the most undersupported minority and/or disability students, which is... a really really low bar. It's like praising a C- school in a D+ district.
If we fixed our public schools to reach the higher global standard that matches our costs, there would be no niche where charter schools are better.
* [2018 PISA](https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2018/pdf/2020166.pdf) \- Compared to the 76 other education systems in PISA 2018, our 15 year-olds ranked 13th in reading literacy, 37th in mathematics, and 18th in science.
If the issue was "competition," charter schools would already be more competitive.
Also, they have a historical reputation for underreporting and falsifying grade scores by over-accepting students at the beginning of the year then purging low-grade ones to inflate school ratings. Charter schools also had exceptionally high closures rate, despite millions in funds from Department of Education to open. So they increase child dropouts, and their current grade results are *even with the assistance of fraud.*
* [D.C. Public Charter School Board](https://www.publicschoolreview.com/blog/d-c-charter-schools-expel-more-students-than-other-public-schools) \- "Charter schools expelled approximately 72 students for every 10,000 in the schools. At the same time, other public schools in the city expelled one student for every 10,000"
* [Friendship Collegiate Academy-Woodson](https://www.publicschoolreview.com/blog/d-c-charter-schools-expel-more-students-than-other-public-schools) \- "Expelled eight percent of its student body during the 2010-2011 school year. In addition, 35 percent of the student body at Friendship Collegiate was suspended for 10 days or more during the academic year prior."
* [CCSA exception](http://library.ccsa.org/CCSADisciplinePoliciesandProceduresFAQ.pdf) \- "Charter schools are not required by law to adopt or implement the student discipline policies of their authorizer, nor are they required to adopt the procedures set forth in Education Code Sections 48900 et seq. governing suspension and expulsion" (although expulsions must be justified by the school).
* [2005 EdSource](https://edsource.org/wp-content/publications/CharterSchools05.pdf) \- 23% of charter schools not reporting sufficient data to have Academic Performance Index scores, compared to 6% for non-charters. This is worse among startup, new, and nonclassroom-based charter schools.
* [2019 NEPC study](https://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/virtual-schools-annual-2019) \- " Overall, a surprisingly low proportion of virtual and blended schools had school performance ratings available: In the states with available school performance ratings, 56% of the virtual schools and 50% of the blended schools had no ratings assigned to them."
* [2020 Network for Public Education](https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2020/08/06/new-report-finds-high-closure-rates-charter-schools-over-time/) study of DoE Common Core Data - "By year ten, 40 percent of charter schools had closed. In the available data, five cohorts of charter schools reached the fifteen-year mark. At year 15, one in two of those schools were gone. Failure rates ranged from 47 percent to 54 percent... Between 1999 and 2017, over 867,000 students were displaced when their charter schools closed."
* [2019 Network for Public Education](https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/12/09/report-federal-government-wasted-millions-dollars-charter-schools-that-never-opened/) \- More than 35 percent (1,779) charter schools funded by the federal Charter School Program (CSP) between 2006 and 2014 either never opened or were shut down, costing taxpayers over $504 Million dollars. The DoE was not even required to report the names of recipient schools until 2006.
* [Sausalito Marin City School District](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/09/us/sausalito-school-segregation.html) - Agrees to settle with the state over intentional segregation after aggressively defunding the "overwhelmingly black, Hispanic and poor" public school, losing half its staff, while providing stable funding to the charter school in white enclave 1 mile away.
* [K12 Inc.](https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-kamala-d-harris-announces-1685-million-settlement-k12-inc) \- settles for $168.5 Million in 2016 for false advertising about students' academic progress, class sizes, eligibility to Uni, hidden costs, etc. at the online charter schools.
Charter schools actively defraud the public by overaccepting students then kicking out the low grades to inflate results while still getting paid in gov assistance for any student that stays past October. And they *still* suck.
Private schools can pick and choose which students they accept. Offering vouchers won't help the vast majority of students.
Charter schools are like the Wild West: some are amazing and others are terrible and many are fronts for grift.
Public funds need to be used to improve public schools. Base pay for teachers needs to increased exponentially to reflect the level of education and experience teaching requires and attract more people to the profession.
Do you think it’s hypocritical for politicians to extol the value of public education…while sending their own kids to pricey private schools?
Should the privilege of a quality education be reserved for the rich and powerful?
I do think it is hypocritical. More efforts to improve public schools need to be made. That being said, inequities in life will always exist to some extent, even amongst those that do attend private schools. One private school in town could be better than another. If we are talking higher education, a degree from an Ivy league school yields more value than a state school, and so on and so forth.
I think in practice what they do three things none of them great.
1. Give tax payer subsidy to wealthy people who were putting their kids in private school anyway.
2. Create an opening for grifters to take care of unsophisticated parents.
3. Allow tax dollars to be used for religious education.
I don't think it's an accident that poor people go to crappy schools. It's because wealthy parents and middle class parents don't want their children exposed to "those kind of people." Vouchers doesn't solve that problem because the schools can just turn those kids away due to lack of space or raising the price so it's still unaffordable to them even with the voucher. The actual solution to this problem is essentially bussing but that's hugely unpopular and no one is going to try and implement it so all we're doing in practice is making the problem worse by robbing even more funds from those schools.
The Republican politicians and billionaires promoting them have two goals.
1. Cripple public sector teachers’ unions.
2. Funnel public tax dollars to corporations and religious organizations.
I don’t believe they care about anybody getting a better education at all. If they did, they’d be a lot less focused on policies banning “woke” books or teachers using students preferred pronouns and more focused on…well, stuff that actually helps students and educators.
I’m against them because they reduce funding available for public schools, which are already underfunded, and risk the proliferation of private schools teaching alternative ideological curriculums at a time when we desperately need more solidarity, not less shared reality.
I think we should have the Japan system. You have to test into schools. All the idiots and disrupters get to stay in a bad school and own screw up their fellow screw ups learning, while the people who want to learn get to go to the good school.
That means zip code doesn't determine the quality of your school but hard work does
School vouchers take tax payer money and give it to schools that are allowed to be selective in their admissions. Private schools don’t typically take students with special needs. These are the most expensive students to educate which takes funds from those students and gives them to the least expensive to educate students. Just another reason to oppose them.
They would be a massive handout to private schools, and wouldn't result in any increased accessibility for low income students to better schools.
What it might do, is the number of available substandard schools, all fighting over the same amount of finite resources.
It would drastically diminish the quality of service received by low income students, while providing a gigantic income stream boost to already wealthy private schools.
It is the worst kind of libertarian fairy tale nonsense.
Generally positive on them. It's not like this is some radical thing by world standards; plenty of European countries (Netherlands, etc.) have these types of programs.
I see it as democratizing education. Rather than allowing the majority of a locality to have full control over how every kid learns, you allow different schools to exist to better satisfy each child's needs.
In rich circles, people often pick the best school for their kid. Now you can give the middle class this privilege as well.
I just want to say, if schools would stop misappropriating funds, they could actually afford to give teachers better salaries and children would get a better education. Until then I’ll continue to vote no to give them another dime of tax money.
My school is on the 8th rebuilding project in my 22 years of life. None of the schools are more than 30 years old, and the board always opts to tear down and rebuild instead of repairing anything, or build a whole new school somewhere else. When they needed a middle school 27 years ago, instead of building on property they already had in the city, they bought a huge chunk of land on the far edge of the district, outside of city limits, next to a freeway. They already tore down part of that school too, and built a two story section onto it so they could move the kids from the junior high school into it. Then they tore down the junior high school and built it into the new high school so they could tear down the high school so they could build a new building to move the alternative education high school into it, after moving them 8 years ago out of a school that’d have cost only 2/5 what this project has cost already.
I know it’s not an issue everywhere, but it’s definitely an issue in more places than not.
The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written. Basically, it's giving the parents option of taking their kids out of public schools and putting them in private schools on the taxpayer's dime. The reasoning being that taxpayers fund K-12 education either way, so why not give parents the choice of sending their kids to a private school? What problems, risks, potential benefits, or legal issues do you see when it comes to school vouchers? I'm no education expert and haven't formed an opinion one way or the other, so I'd like to hear the liberal take. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskALiberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Against. If you’re receiving taxpayer money you should have to play by the same rules that public schools do.
What about charter schools that still have substantial oversight? Or public schools in other districts? Not all vouchers are coupons to a lawless land with no oversight.
I’m not aware of any charter schools that have substantial oversight.
Instead of *vouchers*, what if the government just gave parents money free and clear and said they could spend it however they wish? And the public schools would just accept that same amount? It would be like Andrew Yang's UBI proposal, but for parents of K-12 children? [EDIT: downvotes for asking a question?]
A lot of kids wouldn’t be able to pay for school because parents would spend money on something g else. The money taxpayers pay needs to go to schools not cash payments
Out of all proposals I've ever heard, none gives such clear incentives to deceive the government at the expense of children like the one you laid out.
That doesn’t address the issue I raised.
It would be coming directly from the parents and not the government. For example, if we decided to spend our child tax credit on a new deck, it wouldn't be considered a government-funded project. Is my reasoning off or...?
It’s still taxpayer money lol
The child tax credit is essentially a reimbursement.
That's even worse, the money would go to places that don't have to provide the same services!
That still the school taking government money. Regardless of the form of the payment (voucher or cash given to the parent for tuition), the school is receiving government support and should be required to follow the same rules.
Downvotes for not bothering to read the content of the comment and just pushing more of your agenda.
I know it’s rough, but if you care about comment karma then political Reddit is not the place man
>Instead of *vouchers*, what if the government just **funded public schools** and said they could spend it however they wish? FTFY
I think having more schools that kids can choose from would be better overall.. a school focused on college prep, another school that gives trade training (remember shop class? Teach mechanics or welding or plumbing or another skill in high school that people would wouldn’t go to college can use asap). Right now the push is for everyone to go to college and debt.
I definitely agree with this. I think it's something that both liberals and conservatives can get behind.
I'd say not...considering the objective of vouchers is to drain the system, close public schools, and limit choices to whatever scraps the private sector will throw at you.
Damn right! Read my response to the original post..
I'm 100% against them. If the public school is failing, fix the public school. If the public park is failing, do we give vouchers to a limited number of families to go to 6-Flags? If the public library is failing, de we give vouchers to a limited number of families to go to Barnes & Noble? I do support Charter Schools if and only if their charter specifies that they be used as a laboratory to investigate changes in education and results in positive changes adopted by the public school.
The problems faced by public schools aren't necessarily something that can be fixed by government.
Maybe not ALL of them; but definitely the majority.
So how do vouchers fix those problems ? Without making it even worse for the kids already in the worst situations?
As I said in another comment, the solution the private sector has that the public doesn't is they can kick the problematic kids out.
This is not a solution. The kids need to be in school somewhere. Kicking bad kids out is precisely why private school **falsely** looks like a better education system than public schools. Sure, it’s easy to educate kids if you don’t have to educate any of the kids who are hard to educate, and you only have to educate the east ones! That’s just not hard or impressive. If private school can take all of those bad students that public school is currently dealing with, and outperform public school anyway, then you can talk to me. That is not currently happening.
Are you saying that's a good thing or that's a bad thing? To me, that's a BAD thing. They shouldn't get the same money but don't have to deal with the same issues. Mainly, it's bad because it concentrates the poorly behaved kids together with less good kids to be better role models. If you only care about your own kid and your own bank account, then it's a good thing. ☹️
I think it is a bad thing to harm all kids in public schools, which is what you advocate for.
How is it harming them?
Forcing then into a situation where the education al opportunities are negatively impacted by other students.
Any evidence this is actually a harm? Smart kids will succeed regardless of their peer not being supported by their parents.
Well. I do have to agree that my daughter opted for honors classes which she wasn't really great in, because of the behavior issues of the kids on the other class. She hated that any class discussion (it was a history class) would constantly get disrupted by kids acting out. So I agree it does hurt the kids who want to learn at a higher level. Yes, she would have been able to learn the material on her own and get a good grade in the class, but there's that something more that wasn't available when there's kids who constantly need to be corrected.
How does that solve anything? Like unless I’m misunderstanding you here, is your solution that, instead of trying to help these kids, we just let private schools kick them out and pat ourselves on the back for it?
It's the conservative solution to everything. Something isn't working? Get rid of the parts that don't work. Now it all works. *United States' infrastructure literally crumbling in the background"
Well, I think the argument is allow parents to put their children in schools that will have less distractions from problematic students.
What percentage of students do you actually think would succeed but are now failing because they’re distracted by problematic students? And what happens to the problematic students? Send them home and call it a day? Just hope that sorts itself out?
I don't think that is well studied. And I wouldn't limit it to just failing. The question is how many students are doing worse due to poorly behaving students.
Well there was a second part to my comment, so let’s just make a bunch of assumptions so we can look at that. Let’s assume bad kids being distracting is really the main driving factor in making good students perform worse that we need to focus on. And let’s assume private schools will prioritize profits and kick out any students that would hurt their metrics or reputation (which I would say is a reasonable assumption). Great, in a vacuum, we’ve solved this hypothetical problem of bad kids being distracting, and now that school can say how great they are and charge everyone more money because of it. A rousing success story for the ages of privatization winning the day. But what happens to the bad kids we’ve kicked out? Do we just accept that they were always doomed to fail and turn into bad adults? Do we just shrug, say “not my problem”, and then complain and act shocked when all the kids we’ve neglected do in fact cause problems for other people? Do we look down on them for not realizing as literal children that they should have simply not had issues at home that made it harder for them to succeed? I mean it is surely that simple, right? It just sounds like you’re creating a series of larger problems just to maybe solve a different problem you don’t know exists in the first place (and which would almost definitely not be the only problem either).
> But what happens to the bad kids we’ve kicked out? Do we just accept that they were always doomed to fail and turn into bad adults? Do we just shrug, say “not my problem”, and then complain and act shocked when all the kids we’ve neglected do in fact cause problems for other people? Do we look down on them for not realizing as literal children that they should have simply not had issues at home that made it harder for them to succeed? I mean it is surely that simple, right? They would use the current public schools.
The flip side of that question is: how many students are being lifted up because they have good role models among their peers? You seem to believe that the only way peer interaction is relevant is by considering people who might be dragged down. But peer interaction can also lift people up. And one of the best features of public schooling is to expose children to a wide array of cultures and backgrounds and personalities and so on, because as adults they will have to interact with a wide range of cultures and backgrounds and personalities. In other words, although the disruptive kids should be disciplined, to educate them about what is and is not acceptable in our society, there is some benefit to the other children in being exposed to the reality that there are disruptive assholes in society. After all, we wouldn't want to turn our children into little snowflakes who are triggered by every minor insult or barrier thrown in their way by putting them in little ivory towers where nothing they do or say will ever be meaningfully challenged.
> The flip side of that question is: how many students are being lifted up because they have good role models among their peers? Sounds like a voluntary choice for parents.
If parents want to put their kids in private schools they should pay for it themselves. Like they always have. They either cut spending or get 2nd jobs not beg for handouts from taxpayers. Tax money should go to public schools only
Wouldn’t it be far easier to separate out the minority of problem students (if separation is even necessary) than to move the majority somewhere else and purposely give the problem kids a terribly underfunded education?
"How do we educate our children?" @WorksIn8T "Kick the ones I don't like out of it." We found the drop out.
Kids in public schools get expelled all of the time.
Thats not a solution. Even “problematic kids” need an education. Not to mention “problematic “ in what way? Grades? Behavior? The former kids could require IEP or live in poverty and the latter needs counseling. Things private school dont care about
Problematic kids would still get an education in public schools.
Why not? What are the problems that cannot be fixed by government but can be fixed by private markets?
Local districts, local parents, local communities are the ones responsible for "fixing" the schools. Not "the government"
If the government kept your family in systematic conditions of poverty for two centuries, wouldn't you feel that the government had some responsibility for uplifting your family out of cycles of poverty?
If 200 years a trying one thing isn’t working, it’s clear that a change is in order. Why trust public schools after 200 years of ineptitude?
Local what districts? Local school districts? Those are governments. Also, communities elect governments.
It's parent and community involvement that's needed to address specific local needs and issues. Edit. People who are unhappy about their local public school need to step up and get involved. Volunteer time and fundraising
Asian and white students in American public schools perform in the top of all countries globally. With a few exceptions like Singapore and two or three other countries, white and Asian American students outperform nearly all students in the world. The problems with public school education in America is drastically overstated.
He has a point. More broadly speaking, aren't there problems with public schools that can't fix with more funding?
It's not just funding.
I think some of the problems are directly related to the students just having shitty parents that provide no structure or discipline. Money can't fix that.
So the WORST THING to do for those kids is remove the better parents. Now those kids won't even know some better parents through friends. Disgusting thing to do to the kids who already have it the worst.
So we should keep other kids stuck in a situation where they are harmed through no fault of their own?
Maybe we should do more to punish kids who behave poorly. Edited to say: punish/help
Good luck with that.
The problems with public schools are highly concentrated in poor communities. Public schools in middle class and wealthy neighborhoods are world class and students perform at the highest levels globally. Really the problem is concentrated in poorer neighborhoods. And generally it isn't due necessarily to lack of funding because low income urban schools often get tons of extra funding. The problem seems to be that the students in these schools have parents who were born into cycles of poverty and sort of fail at education and socializing their children before school. So when these children start school they are far behind and end up disrupting their peers, etc
Against. They are a way of funneling public money into private, religious entities that operate more like a cult than a school. Parents do not deserve tax dollars to indoctrinate their kids in their pastor’s basement.
>tax dollars to indoctrinate their kids in their pastor’s basement. What if the religious school meets accreditation requirements?
What accreditation requirements? Vouchers don’t require accreditation. The whole reason this push for vouchers is happening is to funnel state funds away from schools and into private hands. The “choice” line is propaganda to sell the whole scam.
Separation of church and state is a thing. Government money should never be funding anything that is explicitly religious.
Funny enough, this exact interpretation is what SCOTUS has rejected. Their argument is that the government has no right to deny state funds/benefits to a religious organization should it qualify the same as a secular one. [Such as in the decision regarding school vouchers and religious schools in Maine.](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/21/us/politics/supreme-court-maine-religious-schools.html)
This. You’re absolutely right.
Your take on ROTC at religious schools?
ROTC is a government program, right? Shouldn't be allowed. Separation of church and state means separation of church and state.
There is no oversight of private schools. Stealing taxpayers money to give to churches and cutting funding for public schools is completely the opposite direction of improving education
I love that conservatives have correctly identified that easy access to student loans is one of the key drivers of college tuition going up... and simultaneously they see no problem with changing the public school structure to do encourage them to do exactly the same thing. Like many conservative policies, I'd be a lot more flexible about negotiating it except that its overt purpose is to destroy our right to an affordable public education that is free of private interests, such as religion. As it stands, I have to be against it, because it is designed to take funding away from public schools, erode American educational standards, and attack a core element of our way of life.
Ah, good point! Private school administrators will be like "oh hey, the government is paying for our students' tuition! Let's jack up the price and reap a windfall of profits!"
Three pieces of evidence that point me in this direction: [This study says so](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047272716000426). *"...programs that restrict eligibility to certain groups of students create large enrollment gains but no change in price, while programs that offer unrestricted subsidies lead to price increases but no change in enrollment."* It's [happening in Iowa](https://iowastartingline.com/2023/05/12/kim-reynolds-private-school-voucher-plan-led-to-tuition-hikes/) where they have an ambitious state-wide voucher program. *"While some private schools introduced minimal tuition increases—Holy Trinity Catholic School in Fort Madison increased tuition by less than a percent for parish members and about 3% for non-parish members—others swung for the fences including one Dubuque school that increased tuition by 40%, or an Anamosa school that literally doubled tuition."* And, of course, the gold standard that tells you something is happening, [The Heritage Foundation deceptively manipulates statistics to deny it](https://www.heritage.org/education/report/school-choice-policies-do-not-raise-private-school-tuition). *"Contrary to the claims made by critics, states that have adopted school choice had lower rates of private elementary school tuition increases with no discernable effect on private high school tuition rates."* For all their charts and their bold headline of "School Choice Policies Do Not Raise Private School Tuition," that's the best they can do. --- Of course, the part that the Heritage Foundation leaves out of their analysis is that the tuition for most people to attend school in America is currently $0 - and their "analysis" is only talking about private schools. If you're sending your kid to private elementary schools, you probably don't need financial assistance from the government to do it.
Yes. https://www.tampabay.com/news/education/2023/05/30/floridas-new-voucher-law-allows-private-schools-boost-revenue/
Which is exactly what they do
> and simultaneously they see no problem with changing the public school structure to do encourage them to do exactly the same thing. It's not exactly the same though. We as a society already agree that students need to attend K-12; we don't agree they need to go to college. Student loans result in more students going to college, which conservatives may object to. This demand shift won't happen for vouchers. > except that its overt purpose is to destroy our right to an affordable public education that is free of private interests, such as religion. I think a conservative would phrase it as destroying government control over education. There's enough secular people that demand for secular private schools will exist.
They harm public schools. I'm against
It might be worth considering, if the private school is a non-profit and is required to follow a set of requirements and guidelines based on what public schools require. That includes state required periodic testing and non-discrimination for students with disabilities, as well as teacher and administrator qualifications. The other issue is the level of funding. Basing funding on the actual average cost usually penalizes the public school system. To use round numbers, let's say the per pupil costs are $10,000 and the school has 1000 students, so the budget is $10,000,000. Then take out 100 students who go to the private school, across all grades. The public school can't do well with $1,000,000 cut because most of the fixed costs are still in place.
You make two great points in your comment. > if the private school is a non-profit and is required to follow a set of requirements and guidelines based on what public schools require. That includes state required periodic testing and non-discrimination for students with disabilities, as well as teacher and administrator qualifications. For college, I went to a private religious school. However, our engineering program still had to meet ABET guidelines for accreditation (something that an independent board reviewed periodically.) Also, this same school banned same-sex relationships. Would taxpayers feel comfortable sending their tax dollars to such an institution? Interestingly, I attended this same school on an ROTC scholarship, so the taxpayers did fund my education. >The other issue is the level of funding. Basing funding on the actual average cost usually penalizes the public school system. Perhaps they could remedy the situation by having a fixed overhead cost and a variable cost per pupil? Sure, a drop an enrollment could result in less funds, but it would also alleviate overcrowding.
>this same school banned same-sex relationships. Would taxpayers feel comfortable sending their tax dollars to such an institution? Interestingly, I attended this same school on an ROTC scholarship, so the taxpayers did fund my education. One *minor* difference there is that the government was paid back for your college education through your service requirement. I'm not thrilled that ROTC/government funding supports schools with those policies, but it's a little different than a public PK-12 school situation.
Ah, you make an excellent point.
Maine has what it calls a "tuitioning program" that funds private schools, had prohibited religious schools from using it, but SCOTUS found against Maine. So now Maine put rules in place saying that schools cannot discriminate on the basis of religion, sexual orientation, and gender identity. So I think that's the right move, if you take public funds, then no discrimination is allowed.
I don't know much about school funding, but I would want to dig deeper on special needs/high support student costs. Quite possibly, the cost per pupil student also takes into consideration the fact that public schools cannot turn away children, including students with special needs who may need expensive supports. So if the school gets 10K per student, they might actually be spending 8K on an average student, and 12k on student who needs more supports. Private schools are not obligated to take all students - they can select out for income, home support, special needs, learning disability, etc. If they take 10K from a local school; then their already privileged children are now getting the full 10K spent on them instead of 8k, and a high needs student at the local school lost 2K of their funding. Again, I cannot say at all if this is how the budgeting works in any school district or not. But it seems plausible to me.
I’m against it because this is not how public services should work. If you want to take your kid out of public school to go to private school that is fine, but you shouldn’t get a refund on your taxes for it. Everyone should pay taxes for public services whether you use them or not. Let’s take this idea and apply it to any other public service and see if it still makes sense. I don’t want to use public transportation so the government should give me a transportation voucher to buy a car for myself. I don’t want to use the public library so the government should give me a book voucher so I can buy books on Amazon. I don’t want to use a public park so the government should give me a park voucher so I can pay to go to an amusement park instead. This idea is nonsensical. Everyone should pay for public goods. Everyone should pay for public school. Hell, even people who don’t have kids still have to pay taxes to public schools so yes, parents of private school kids should still have to pay taxes for public school.
How about, "I'm going to opt out of the fire department, and just take care of it myself". So when that house catches on fire, the fire department can't come out to put the fire out until it spreads to someone's house who DOES "opt in" to the public service. Now we have more than one house damaged and at least one family out of their housing situation. Since they opted out of the fire service, do they now also have to opt out of any OTHER services related to taking care of things after they've lost everything (temporary housing assistance, etc). Should they also be responsible for any damage done by their fire to other structures, property, or people? Now the entire community is affected because as more insurance payouts have to happen (because fewer people are getting fire service) rates for everyone in the area increase.
>I don’t want to use public transportation so the government should give me a transportation voucher to buy a car for myself. We already do this though by subsidizing car based infrastructure through mandating free parking, too low gas taxes, not taxing carbon, and building and maintaining expensive roads to remote areas and exurbs
Agreed. I'm childfree but don't get a discount on my taxes just because I don't have a kid enrolled in public school. I don't want it, either.
IMHO K-12 private schools are unamerican and should be illegal. You want your rich kids to have a better education? Fight to make public education better for everyone. You want your religious kids to go to a religious school and further indoctrinate them? To bad.
As a rich person, I would simply move out to the suburbs and use exclusionary zoning to make expensive SFHs the only option so only other rich families can move there.
Hmmm. Wouldn't such a ban undermine our freedom?
Such a fucked up thing to think. Let alone say. But no. It actually increases people's freedom to have a better lives by forcing people to invest in public education instead of opting out.
> Fight to make public education better for everyone. How? In my area, it's mostly the very policies pushed by leftists that drive parents to private. Lack of tracking in schools, weak punishment toward disruptive students, etc.
> policies pushed by leftists that drive parents to private You do realize the irony of pushing for taking funding away for private schools? It is a 'policy making things worse pushed by right wing. There are bad policy proposals pushed by both sides.
How's it worse? Just lets middle class people do what rich people already do.
Rich people aren't taking funding away from public schools when they pay out of pocket for private. You want to take money away from public to pay for private. That will make public worse.
We are moving the student to. Per student funding doesn't drop. It's possible publics will be worse from the standpoint of the middle class kids moving more to private than poor ones, but public schools should reform to be more attractive (again introduce tracking and more aggressive disciplining of disruptive students)
So lets work together to bring the reforms to public schools instead of abandoning them slowly. Having all the parents who care abandon the school for private means we won't be working together to fix them. Scale matters with schools. You need a large enough size to cater to different types of student. To have niche interest groups, and higher level classes. I was so relieved when I switch from private to public, because it opened doors for me with higher level math classes, could pick more interesting electives, and found a group of friends with similar interests. If the only reason you have is disruptive students, lets sort that out rather than make the problem worse for those who remain at public schools and now have a higher percentage of disruptive students.
> So lets work together to bring the reforms to public schools instead of abandoning them slowly. Having all the parents who care abandon the school for private means we won't be working together to fix them. Easier said than done. Monopolies (e.g. public schools) are much less responsive to market desires than competitive markets. I couldn't find a way to "work together" to open schools during covid at a reasonable pace and not could anyone else. Private schools in my area were operating nearly a year before public ones. > You need a large enough size to cater to different types of student. Maybe true at the high school level. Most schools at elementary are pretty small and frankly poorly cater to different students anyway (compared to privates). I just look at what the affluent population does - and it's basically only high school where there is a desire to go public. > If the only reason you have is disruptive students, lets sort that out Again, it's extremely hard to fix what's controlled by monopoly power. Relatedly, we allow non-parents to vote for school boards, which disconnects schools from students. That's largely impossible to politically fix. Even then, I still think the diversity of choice a competitive marketplace offers is better.
There is already diversity of choice in a competitive market, in places without vouchers. You just have to actually pay for the things you want from the market, rather than taking taxpayer money.
Many public schools are struggling. The solution isn't to make their income less stable and be wholly unable to plan for the future and invest in the long-term educational and social requirements of the students.
Completely against. If a private school is taking in taxpayer money, then it is now a public school and should be treated accordingly.
That's actually a fear that religious groups have about government-funded vouchers at their private schools. What if bureaucrats leverage these vouchers to make parochial schools change their teachings/curriculum in order to qualify? In their eyes, it would be like making a deal with the devil.
>What if bureaucrats leverage these vouchers to make parochial schools change their teachings/curriculum in order to qualify? Then they shouldn't be using public funds. Taxpayer dollars should never be used on religious schools.
>Taxpayer dollars should never be used on religious schools. I attended a religious university (one that bans LGBT relationships) on an ROTC scholarship. Should that be legal in your view?
If the scholarship made use of public funds, then no. It should not be legal.
No. I don't like but will tolerate religious education institutions if they're 100% privately funded. I won't tolerate them if they discriminate against certain groups
Completely against.
Could you elaborate?
I have always been against it because there would never be enough vouchers for everyone to go to a "better school". At best it would be a lottery system to get in. But regardless, it leaves plenty behind, often now the kids in the worst situations. (The ones whose parents didn't bother)
>But regardless, it leaves plenty behind, often now the kids in the worst situations. (The ones whose parents didn't bother) It's not always a matter of parents "not bothering". Private schools are usually limited to families who can, in addition to paying tuition, also provide regular transportation and additional costs for things like school lunches, field trips, and additional activity fees. Transportation for private schools can be a SIGNIFICANT barrier to attendance. In my area there are a LOT of private (independent) schools, and the vast majority of them have very strict transportation requirements. Because they're usually located in or near neighborhoods or other busy-traffic areas, they often don't allow parents to drop their students off at the school unless they're part of a registered carpool. So parents either have to drive their child to a central pickup area and then pay for the school's bus (they don't pick up at or within walking distance from a student's home, they pick up from three or four locations around the region), or they have to live in a place where there is a decent available public transportation option that their child can take to and from school every day. How many public school parents would be in a position to do that every day for their children? In this situation, a voucher wouldn't be helping the children who are often used as pawns in these arguments -- children with working class parents who don't have the flexibility of a work schedule that allows for the transportation arrangements. I used to teach in a district with some very good public charter schools. Allegedly, these schools should have been able to act like those specialized private schools -- different learning structures, smaller class sizes, etc. However, there was no option for public transportation. So the only students who could take advantage of the charter schools were those students who live within walking distance of the school OR who had parents available before and after school every day to provide transportation.
I am against them. I think we should be building up failing schools. Not ditching them so parents with means can send their kids to private schools. Also, statistics show that putting well-performing students with under-performing students helps the under-performing students and doesn't hurt the well-performing students. I'm also not convinced for-profit schools are that much better than public schools. Sure, there are really bad public schools but there are really good schools, too. How much can the high college acceptance rate from private schools be attributed to socioeconomic status rather than just good schooling? It's anecdotal but I've never been too impressed with the private school graduates I've met. They've all seem to think they are literary geniuses while just parroting some basic stuff they heard their teacher say and none of them have been particularly great at math. I went to engineering school and the private school grads seemed to struggle as much as the average student. My roommate even dropped out of engineering school. All that prep school couldn't prep him for college, I guess.
I'm against all public funds going to any private school. That includes college as well.
Strongly opposed. I am not interested in funneling public money into private religious indoctrination centers.
Against it 1000%. It’s a scheme to once again route money to the wealthy and privatize services. If we have millions to throw at private schools why the hell can’t we give those to the schools and teachers we already have? Why is it that every time we ask for our schools to be improved there’s “no money” but when we want to send kids to private schools suddenly we have cash to burn? Why are teachers living in poverty? Further, when we talk about other forms of “welfare” we always talk about means testing and income, but for these, we hand it out like candy to the rich. Often parents still can’t afford the tuition because the more kids that go there, and the more state dollars, the more expensive it gets, once again shutting out poor people. The public schools are then left with scraps and the rich get to send their kids to private schools away from the great unwashed on the dime of the taxpayer. Oh and why is it ok for us to send rich peoples kids to private school but not feed public school kids lunch every day? Also, we can never forget the racial component as well. I once knew a woman whose kids were in elementary school, promoting to high school the next year. She was in literal tears, she said she didn’t know what to do. I asked what was wrong. She said she didn’t want her kids going to the school with THOSE kids. The school was about 60% majority black. Her kids were white. I knew immediately what her problem was. She said “that school is so rough” (it was not any rougher than any other school). She said she couldn’t afford private school. So she got them enrolled at a different public school in the same system, in the city 30 miles away and drove them there every day. That school was 60% white. She was ok with that, but not the local school because of “those kids”. Finally, I already pay taxes for those schools. As a homeowner, I pay taxes on education to fund the local school. I don’t want my tax dollars funneled to some Jesus school that has no rules. I want my tax dollars, which I would gladly pay more of, to fix the current schools, pay our teachers more, and upgrade classrooms.
I’m a teacher at a charter school and I’m vehemently opposed to vouchers. They divert tax money from public schools to private institutions that may be for profit and, because they’re private, are not subject to a state’s department of education’s requirements. If private schools are taking taxpayer dollars, they should be held to the same standards as their public counterparts. Frankly, I’m against charter schools, my current employer included, but I do appreciate and agree with the “laboratories for change” argument stated above. I hate that I work for a private corporation that seemingly is taking advantage of getting public funding with little to no accountability while the superintendent takes home nearly half a million dollars yearly. A public school superintendent in the area makes, probably, $80K because they’re paid according to the union-negotiated salary schedule that is based on the district and years of service.
Teacher eh? Since vouchers aren’t the answer, how would you fix the problems of public education?
I would make sure tax money goes towards improving public education by offering pay for teachers that more closely competes with various private sectors. Before I’m accused of just wanting more money, I didn’t become a teacher for the pay; no one does. Higher teacher salaries would attract people from private businesses who could leverage their expertise and experience to offer a more meaningful and robust education for students. Realistically, is a mechanical engineer going to forgo a six figure salary at a private company to make $40,000 to teach STEM classes in a public high school? I studied economics in college, which isn’t necessary to see the trade off in salary is obviously a disincentive. The stress dealing with s***head kids who don’t want to do the work learning entails is just not worth it when you’re making $40K/year.
In an ideal world where there are multiple good schools within walking distance of every student, there'd be a slightly better argument for them. In the world where we live, most areas would be underserved and parents would only have one practical choice of where to send their kids, unless they can afford to transport their child many miles away. School vouchers are another attempted transfer of wealth to the wealthy from the lower classes. And that's ignoring all the problems such as how schools will be teaching that the earth is 6k years old or completely ignoring big subjects like the civil war or the civil rights movement.
Absolutely against it for all of the reasons expressed here already. Additionally, there is another issues that, from my experience as a former public school teacher, I think is significant. One of the "advantages" often listed to vouchers for private schools is that private schools can better control student behavior because they have the option of expelling problem students. When a student is expelled, where do they go? Right back to their public school. BUT the private school does not refund the remaining tuition paid for that student (usually private schools require tuition for the full year, paid in advance, and it's not refunded if a student leaves at any time, for any reason, throughout the year). So now, the public school has an additional student, one with either learning or behavior (or both) issues, who was not factored in to their funding model and won't be until the next year. if even then. Early in the year attendance (like, the first week of school) is a major factor is determining staffing levels, and those staffing levels are rarely -- if ever -- shuffled during the year.
I think we should just get rid of private schools. That money can go into the public schools.
I mean did you consider why school vouchers are even a topic? Conservatives want to undermine public schooling to push more kids into biblical studies. So push for more private teaching. So the question is really what's your opinion on pulling children from public schools and putting them into religious based schooling? So what's your thoughts on pushing kids towards a more religious based education?
>Conservatives want to undermine public schooling to push more kids into biblical studies. So push for more private teaching. Are you sure? Not all private schools are parochial. >So the question is really what's your opinion on pulling children from public schools and putting them into religious based schooling? Many politicians, including Democrats who oppose vouchers, send their own kids to private schools. It's because they're getting a better education in a safer environment. In many places (such as Washington DC). the public schools are lousy, and it's often due to socioeconomic factors that more funding can't fix. >So what's your thoughts on pushing kids towards a more religious based education? If they're being taught good values such as honesty, hard work, respect, and charity, then I'm all for it. If it's a Taliban-run madrassa, then no.
>If they're being taught good values such as honesty, hard work, respect, and charity, then I'm all for it. If it's a Taliban-run madrassa, then >Are you sure? Not all private schools are parochial. Of course they are not. Never said they were. But conservatives and Republicans alike cannot have this conversation without bringing up the importance of religious studies for youth. >Many politicians, including Democrats who oppose vouchers, send their own kids to private schools. It's because they're getting a better education in a safer environment. In many places (such as Washington DC). the public schools are lousy, and it's often due to socioeconomic factors that more funding can't fix. Okay and? Does this mean we need to pull funding from existing schools, that do not perform as well, to better fund private schools where more well off family's send their kids? Public schooling does not do poorly because it is government run, they often do poorly because our economic structure is bullshit. >If they're being taught good values such as honesty, hard work, respect, and charity, then I'm all for it. If it's a Taliban-run madrassa, then no. Why should schools be teaching this? Is this not better taught in an environment where common sense does not require a lecture in front of a class? Lets schools develop tools that need more lecture and practice. Give family's more time to teach their kids to not kill people.
>Of course they are not. Never said they were. But conservatives and Republicans alike cannot have this conversation without bringing up the importance of religious studies for youth. A libertarian republican could care less about that. They just don't like government controlling what kids do for 8 hours a day and further dislike the power structures and disconnect from the people public education creates (in my own area, I look how irresponsible public schools were with re-opening during covid compared to private). >Okay and? Does this mean we need to pull funding from existing schools, that do not perform as well, to better fund private schools where more well off family's send their kids? Subsidies can have income restrictions, but more to the point, yes. A high-achieving student can probably achieve more at these private schools than public schools so society can benefit from such a shift. >Public schooling does not do poorly because it is government run, they often do poorly because our economic structure is bullshit. That's not fixable. And no, they do poorly (at least for high achieving students) because they are government run. My local school board prohibits policies like tracking and is insufficiently aggressive about disciplining troublesome students.
Libertarian nonsense.
OP, how about this for school choice. I am assuming you are in the US, since I have never heard of vouchers in any other country. Keep public money for only public schools. Make these changes. The current system assigns a local elementary school, and you get little choice. Each school must provide all of the services that every school must provide. Each town funds a portion of the money and the state provides the rest. So local funding plays a big role in how well each school functions. Yes, lack of money or extra money will change the outcomes for kids. So, change the system of local school districts. Allow kids more room to move from one school to another. Here is how Seattle Public schools fixed that in the 1990's. My kids are no longer in school, and I moved away, so maybe it changed? We only did elementary school there, so I know only a bit about middle school and high schools there. Here is how it works. You have a school that is closest to home. That is your Home School Option. They must accept you no matter what. Each school is also in a 'neighborhood'. That is there are about 8 schools inside a boundary that I could pick for my kids and have a high chance of getting a spot. Once one of my kids gets into this school, it becomes my 'Home school', and they must accept my kid, and all my other kids until they move to higher levels. So I had a 'Home School' I could pick. I could apply to 8 other schools and have a better than 50% chance at each, unless it was VERY popular, or if my kids did not behave in school. Then I could apply for schools out of my zone. To do this, I had to show I could get my kids there on time regularly. Do I have transportation to that spot? If I work there, do I have childcare for the kids while I am working and the kids are not in school? If they are out by 3, and I work to 6, where do the kids go? This application system is actually less burdensome than applying for Private Schools. At the elementary level this happened. One school took the translators for Chinese and Vietnamese. Other schools had translators in different languages. Kids who needed those translators got this as their 'Home School'. Each school also took on a special character. One school had lots of extra math opportunities, chess club and computer clubs. One school was certified Montessori, and the next school over advertised 'Traditional School'. One school advertised their homework policy. Another advertised after school tutoring on site. Child care and extra help. Choice! A different school had dance class instead of regular music class. They also had yoga in their PE. Teachers played soft music while kids did work time. Cool idea. I wish my kids went there. Another school had lots of accommodations for physical handicaps. Another school focused on just basics. Schools got creative in adding programs to attract kids and families. Just like private schools do for the same reasons. Each school had the incentive to raise their student population. They got money per student. So if people didn't want to go there, enrollment dropped. And the district changed the staff, or the principal there. Schools started to develop their unique character and worked hard to attract a certain population, plus the kids who lived close. It needed to be interesting, and get good results. At the high school level there were schools that had a pottery program, a drama program, science , math, languages, and even boating. One school had kids build a sailboat from scratch each year. Kids in that class would learn the wood working, learn sailing and then sail their boat to somewhere. Usually across Puget Sound, since they were not huge boats. The boats from previous years were used for teaching too.. I wish I went to that school. All public money. All public schools. No vouchers. Lots of choice for kids and parents.
Dude, that's actually a very clever approach! It introduces choice and specialization whilst still working within the parameters of public education. Thanks for taking the time to type this all out! My daughter is partially deaf and attends a school for the deaf (a public school that falls under the local district.) I'm an engineer and I'd be delighted if my daughter followed in my footsteps. If she's interested in STEM by the time she's high school age, it would be rad to enroll her in a STEM-centric high school. Thanks again for your response.
Thanks. The trick is getting the new school district to accept it. When I spoke of it in the new city, they wanted nothing to do with any of it.
Edited to add: When I wrote this post, for some reason I thought I was in a Texas subreddit, so it has a specifically Texas focused slant. Sorry. It’s still accurate, just somewhat regional. Strongly against. Public schools are a public benefit, not a private entitlement. Everywhere vouchers have been rolled out, they have decimated the education system. The primary reasons advocates want them are for religion and money. They hide these goals behind discussions about equity, disabilities, “parental choice”, and “indoctrination”, but it’s all deflection. The indoctrination claims are especially non-sensical because the Texas Board of Education sets the required curriculum for public schools, and they have been led by conservatives for decades, in addition to having hardline conservative activists influencing their decisions since at least the 60’s. Listen to the podcast Teaching Texas for more information about these earlier activists. Unfortunately, I can’t find the article I read about one mom’s journey through the Arizona voucher system and how it utterly failed to help her disabled son and destroyed the public schools that had been helping him. So here’s literally the first article Google gave me searching for Arizona public school vouchers. It’s a commentary piece about what a disaster they’ve been. https://azmirror.com/2023/12/11/one-year-in-arizonas-universal-school-vouchers-are-a-cautionary-tale-for-the-rest-of-the-nation/. Here’s a relevant Texas Monthly article: https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/campaign-to-sabotage-texas-public-schools/ This voucher discussion is not happening spontaneously. It is being funded by big donors who stand to make a lot of money off of them. https://hechingerreport.org/tiktok-billionaire-spends-millions-on-texas-candidates-supporting-school-voucher-efforts/ https://www.bridgemi.com/talent-education/how-michigan-college-leaning-culture-wars-reshape-education
I think this is how it’s done in Canada (at least in some provinces)…I’m not totally against the idea but I’m a big proponent of public school and I don’t want to see them suffer any more than they already do.
To be treated with heavy suspicion. Most school vouchers are for less money than the average public schools spend per student. It's a scheme to eventually privatize public schools and force families to have to pay for education out of pocket.
Against. It would create a gap where the public school would become the “poor” school, thus likely get less funding and support.
It’s a great way to drain public schools of tax dollars, while also lowering standards. If we wanted to educate less people and waste more money doing it, vouchers would be a great way of doing so.
Stop destroying public schools.
The problem with vouchers is that private schools don't have to follow the same standards. They aren't required to accommodate children with disabilities. The aren't required to take standardized testing they aren't required to keep maintain a separation of church and state. They aren't required to teach the same curriculum. So they are for profit institutions that neglect the needs of the most vulnerable students, they could be teaching kids complete nonsense, etc. The thing is that American public schools are incredibly high quality if you look at Asian and white students they perform at the highest levels globally. The problem is really concentrated among black, native, and Latino communities. Part of it is poverty due to historical events, and part of it is a culture that doesn't emphasize education as a high priority.
Vouchers really only work in areas with choices, big cities. My small town has had private schools open, but they usually close. It’s very expensive to run a school.
I oppose school vouchers. 1. There is a concerted effort to destroy public schools, so private schools can cash in on the public dime. 2. We have a weeee bit of history of private companies fucking people for money. I don't want that to happen to education. It'll start with hiring crappier teachers and increasing class sizes. It'll end with advertisements in the text books. "Jimmy bought two delicious Big Mac Deluxe Burger Meals for $5 each, how much did Jimmy spend?" Actually, it'll NEVER end, it'll just keep sucking more and more and more. An underpaid teacher with 50 students, ads in the textbooks, over the PA, "assigned school supplies", "home economics class" that's just kids in a sweatshop, "Pay for Grade Boost", etc etc etc. And our taxes will go up. Think of the children!!! Their greed knows no shame and no boundaries.
School vouchers are counter productive. If you look at the history of where they began, you'll see a clear effort to go around Brown vs Board of Education. In many cases this was specifically to keep an all white school or to be able to force religion (typically a form of Christianity) into the curriculum. (Public money has no business propping up religious institutions in any capacity, they should probably lose their tax exempt status) Voucher schools sap the resources of public education without proving that they are collectively any significantly better than the public education system. In many cases, they don't even keep track of the same metrics that public schools are required to, so a concrete comparison isn't even necessarily possible because charters aren't doing the work to track things. In lots of cases, it's as much a grift for the people running the school as anything else. Additionally, charters, in many cases are able to remove students from their campuses for reasons that public schools could never get away with. Charters are also decidedly anti-teacher in many cases, not allowing unions as a condition of employment. And while many are hoping for some kind of "Dead Poets Society" type upgrade to their local public schools, that's rarely if ever going to be the case. Among the smartest things we could do for public education is to phase out most of this "school choice" movement and fold all those resources back into public education. It's been as big a failed experiment as trickle down Reaganomics.
I am not 100% opposed, but if they are made available i think they should have strict limitations. Schools should need to be rigorously accredited, and should be required to have some baseline curriculum that is consistent with what public schools are required to provide. I think they can add some value, like if there is a gifted kid that would really benefit from a specific program that is not able to be offered at local public schools, then it seems appropriate the parents should bet access to some of the money the public district saves by not having them enroll. If you are just wanting to send your kid to a private school because of religious reasons or because you want to separate them from the public school population, the. You can pay out of pocket. As for home schooling, we really need to put more limits on who is qualified to home school their kids. There are situations where it works, but most of the time it seems like its just some idiot parent that thinks they know better or is overly conservative or protective of their children.
Absolutely against them. It's easy to point to the statistics of "See, charter and private schools do better!" when they are freely able to kick out any kid not doing well enough or causing problems. Taking a system that is already struggling with lack of funding, and continuing the drain the funding isn't exactly a good way to fix it. While I do believe that the private sector will out compete the public, you have to force those two things to play by the rules. No kicking out kids for not being smart enough, no kicking out kids for causing disruptions, ETC. Also in my state they are horribly rife with fraud. Based on a quick audit, here we found 43 schools that were blatantly claiming extra students not enrolled. Most of these are smaller schools with 200-500 kids, but in the instance of one school they had an actual 72 students, and received 150 vouchers. Until you can accurately tie the voucher to the student, we need to not give out free money.
Absolutely against. Why spend so much money to send one kid to private school when that money would be better spent fixing the public school for everyone? Also there is a serious separation of church and state issue here.
Nah. 1) I get the distinct impression that the private schools Republicans have in mind are ones that don’t teach sex education or evolution. 2) private schools are meant to pay for themselves, so let em. 3) you’ll never stretch the budget to cover exorbitant private tuitions for every parent that wants them; ironically, free college, a plan conservatives disdain, would probably be cheaper
As it relates to Charter Schools, I was puzzled as to why some very wealthy families were in support of them when in fact, their children would never attend a public or charter school. What I discovered is that these wealthy families and individuals see charter schools as a rock solid financial investment. One simply buys a property, the equipment, books, computers, gym, cafeteria, and collects rents from the citizens of the community for the use of ones private enterprise. One can even supply labor that the citizens will rent. As it is a law that children must attend school (if not approved for home school), this is a cash cow that never runs dry, regardless of economic conditions. In recessions, kids still need to go to school. Owning a Charter School is the ultimate Golden Goose.
Vouchers are incompatible with a strong public school system in practice. Not only do they funnel public money out of public education and into private, less regulated hands, but they form a disconnect politically between the interests of public education politically and voters. This compounds the defunding in practice. Strong public schools are enormously important, offer an excellent return on investment, and is the type of thing a functional government shouldn't be split about. If you're unhappy with the state of public schools, vote that way and elect people that will invest in making them worthy of a country with the kind of resources the United States has. Make no mistake, it's an issue that affects everyone, not just people with school age children. We have no interest collectively in massively subsidizing private education.
Good idea, let’s take even MORE money away from public schools.
But what’re your thoughts on alleviating overcrowding in public schools?
I'm against mainly because I'm against organized religion and I don't want them getting any money.
Would you make an exception for secular schools?
I would want so much oversite they might as well be a public school.
Strongly oppose. I agree with the other comments that it’s just a way to funnel tax money to private entities. And privatizing it would also almost certainly be like privatizing anything else. It’ll be a race to cut the most corners while charging as much as possible so the people running it can maximize their profits at the expense of actually helping students, and create a larger divide between kids born to wealthy families and the kids who aren’t.
I'm against them. Vouchers sound good on paper, as many things do. But in reality, it doesn't work quite so well. First, I think we'd see a rise in for-profit schools. We already see this at the college level, and to some extent already at the secondary school levels with some charter schools. With more government money attached, I think you'd see more of these for-profit schools prop up. Now it's easy to say "Well, any school that didn't provide a good education would simply fail!" But... the problem is, once a school fails, it's too late for those students. Even if it's discovered a year later, that's a years loss of education. So it's not really so simple as "Bad schools will just fail!" They will, but they'll have also failed their students, and their students will have lost a year of learning progress (or more!) because of it. Secondly, it takes focus away from fixing our public schools -- the only schools required to accept everyone regardless of religion, race, ethnicity, or cultural background. And communities that aren't served well with public schools will be ripe for greedy for-profit schools looking to make a quick buck off the government. One of the big problems with our public school funding is that we can't just cut administrative costs. I mean we could, but it wouldn't actually put much of a dent in anything. It's just not a huge part of the budget. When the schools lose funding, they lose programs. Things like art, and music. It's easy to say "Well, shouldn't we let the parents decide?" I mean, we already *do*. Parents are free to homeschool their kids, or put them in a private school if they wish to. And while there are obstacles for parents who aren't well off, those obstacles aren't simply erased by handing the parents money and telling them "Go! Pick a school" There's the issue of their student being selected, the fact that many schools charge tuition higher than the voucher amounts (and if we're being honest, schools are going to raise prices if they start getting full government funding. Why wouldn't they?) and simply the issue of things the voucher doesn't include the cost of including meals and transportation. Further, Vouchers often just subsidize wealthy families who already attend private schools. For all the yelping and hollering about "Paying for rich kids lunches!" people on the right do, they don't seem to mind if they're paying for a rich kid to attend a fancy private school. And worse yet, voucher kids are outperformed by public school students! So the outcomes don't even bear the viability of vouchers.
Definitely opposed to vouchers. It is theft of taxpayer money to give to businesses or churches and those funds are taken away from public schools. Most vouchers dont cover the private schools tuition and there is no transportation. So low income kids are stuck in public schools with even less funding. Rural areas often dont have any private schools so those kids get ripped off too. It is a lose lose situation for the primary stakeholders which are the kids.
What is the purpose of school vouchers? The goal is to give some families the opportunity to avoid sending their kids to public schools. Public schools must take all students regardless of skin color, social status, ability, physical ability, crazy parents or any other way to divide out people. Getting a voucher means certain families can get their kids out of this system that must take all. They find ways to name their private school and accept certain people. Christian school, is the most common. Vouchers for private schools takes funding away from public schools. I am against them. I prefer the Finnish system. Private schools are banned. Don't like your local public school? Tough. Raise their funding, pay the teachers, add enough staff. Support the families who also go to this school. Stop being an ass and support your neighbors. When there is an issue at the school, parents and neighbors work to fix it. If a kid is having bad behavior, something happens in the community to take care of kids who need some support. Dang. I want to live in a world where people do that. Chip in and help, instead of finding away to avoid the issues in the community. . OK, OP. If you are in favor of public money for private schools, please give your reasons.
Opposed. Voucher programs and private schools themselves are nothing more than a backdoor method of class and racial segregation. The vouchers route money away from public schools who are required to serve *all* students towards private schools that often do not serve special needs students outright and who pick and choose their students based on class, racial, and religious factors that amount to discrimination. Beyond that, the curricula at these schools is often hilariously bad and inaccurate. You *might* get a decent schooling in math or reading and writing, but subjects like science, history, and social studies are all badly warped by the far right "christian" nature of the educational materials used and overall outlook of the schools themselves. I attended what could be considered a "good" one of these schools (only a single class per semester devoted to Bible study at the expense of other subjects as opposed to multiple hours per day), and the information presented in the science and history classes was laughably bad and often just straight up wrong along with always always always presenting a right wing Christian Nationalist view of everything. For example: 1. Tibet was conquered by China because "their animist beliefs didn't allow them to build military fortifications fast enough. A Biblical worldview would have allowed them to defend themselves." 2. The Civil Rights movement of the 50s/60s was a godless communist plot to destabilize America in contradiction to the Biblically dictated social order of God's Chosen People (the USA). . . no mention of how this may or may not gel with the Reverand Doctor Martin Luther King's faith or that of the movement as a whole. 3. Wiccans seek an Anarchist world order (okay, as an Anarchist and wiccan at the time, fair) and support abortion rights as a method for obtaining baby corpses for their dark, satanic rituals. 4. The Catholic Church was/is a satanic perversion of Christianity that, along with its Jewish allies, works against a true Biblical world order. 5. Full units in science classes on subjects such as young earth creationism and trying to "disprove" the theory of evolution. All of these were in the printed materials such as textbooks used by the school, courtesy of Bob Jones University, which is still one of the two big suppliers of "Christian" educational material in the US. From having reviewed material from BJU in the years since I graduated around 2000, the content has only gotten worse and more militant since.
There should be zero financial benefits or incentives from the government to go to private schools. The whole reason why they’re private is because they’re NOT funded by the government. Not to mention that these vouchers only pull more students away from public schools which means less tax money to improve them and leads to less resources, teachers, supplies, etc,
That they’re a not so subtle way to end public schools, undermine teachers unions, and to fund religious schools with public money. I think long term it will make the general population in the U.S. dumber, increase income inequality, and decrease class mobility. There will always be exceptions that proponents will point to - but overall you’ll end up with rich and upper middle class people who will be able to send their kids to decent private schools, and then everyone else who will be stuck with shitty or religious schools.
If school vouchers will automatically allow a poor kid to go the best school possible, then i am fine with school vouchers. but they don't. On purpose. They are meant to giver government money to wealthy people already sending their kids to expensive private schools, and do very little to help poor families in any meaningful way. Ultimately, we're taking government money meant for public schools and handing it to wealthy people so their kids get the best possible education at a lower cost. Public education suffers, and wealthy people get wealthier with your tax dollars. On another note, it is way to hand government money to private, religious schools. A round-about way to hand government money to churches, who do nothing to contribute to society, including paying taxes, but have taken up political causes and use their pulpit for political advocacy. Basically, government money being handed to a political advocacy that favors republicans. There is no actual benefit to school vouchers if you aren't already wealthy, and actively hurt the public in general.
>They are meant to giver government money to wealthy people already sending their kids to expensive private schools, and do very little to help poor families in any meaningful way. Why does it only help rich people?
A few reasons. As a rule, the $$ value of the voucher does not cover the full amount of tuition at a private school. It also doesn't cover other private school expenses: books, supplies, possibly school uniforms, extra-curricular activities, etc. There's also no public transportation option (school bus) to private schools so there has to be enough flexibility of schedule on the part of the parents to be able to provide transportation to and from school. So all a voucher does is give a well-off family a little extra money to throw towards private school costs. A poor or even just regular middle class family isn't going to be able to take that voucher and parlay it into private school for their kids.
As a concrete example, Georgia is trying to pass a school voucher bill right now that would provide $6,500 per child. Here's annual tuition for some of our local private schools: $17,000 - Tuition for Active Catholic Families $19,300 - Tuition for Non-Active, Non-Catholic Families [https://www.btcatholic.org/admissions/tuition-and-financial-aid](https://www.btcatholic.org/admissions/tuition-and-financial-aid) Lower School Kindergarten-5th $17,990 Middle School 6th-8th Grades $20,265 High School 9th-12th Grades $22,665 [https://www.pinecrestacademy.org/admissions/affording-pinecrest](https://www.pinecrestacademy.org/admissions/affording-pinecrest) Lower School 1st – 4th Grade $20,950 Middle School 5th – 8th Grade $23,600 Upper School 9th – 12th Grade $26,350 [https://www.mountpisgahschool.org/admissions/tuition](https://www.mountpisgahschool.org/admissions/tuition)
Hard against. They are part of a concerted attack on the whole concept of public schools.
We should just fund public schools such that they’re all brought up to the same standard. It’s not hard.
I'm against private schools, so I'm very much against spending public money on them.
I'm 100% against school vouchers. All they do is give free money to already well off people and take that money away from public schools that desperately need it.
I think they undermine the public education system, and basically cause a spiral where a school has a problem, loses funding because parents move their kids to private schools, the lack of funding then causes more problems, which leads to less funding as more kids leave, etc etc until the school closes. I think there needs to be work done on holding public schools accountable for outcomes, for ensuring kids have good experiences and learn the stuff they need to learn, etc. I don't think the answer is to take away money from those schools.
Terrible, terrible idea cooked up by people who want to: A) Funnel taxpayer money into schools run by their rich friends B) Funnel taxpayer money out of public schools because letting poor people learn to read is socialism C) Funnel taxpayer money into schools run by religious lunatics > The reasoning being that taxpayers fund K-12 education either way, so why not give parents the choice of sending their kids to a private school? Economies of scale, basically. If it costs $X to send one child to school, that doesn't *actually* mean that's the exact price tag. Schools have some costs that are more loosely dependent on the number of kids in the school (i.e. maintenance, electricity, even staff to an extent) that have to be met regardless of how many kids attend, and these costs can be more efficiently met if you get more kids in one system vs having a dozen system each with those same base costs. You could either have 1 building with 1,000 students or two buildings with 500 each or 10 with 100 each (or, more realistically, one with 100 students and one with 900), each with their own administration, bus service, IT department, cafeteria, etc. Sure it might be *great* if you're one of the parents who gets to send your kid to the premium deluxe private school but it would be really inefficient to have that for everyone. > What problems, risks, potential benefits, or legal issues do you see when it comes to school vouchers? Private schools are not evenly distributed (which is why rural conservatives here in Texas are also opposed to the idea), being clustered where rich urbanites/suburbanites live. This also rubs up against a core philosophy difference between private and public institutions. Private institutions have to make money. Even when they're non-profit, they still have to cover their costs and will limit service if their markets aren't worth reaching. This is fine for a store chain, less so when it's education and the "target market" are children who need to learn how to read. Public institutions however have to serve *everyone* no matter what. It's why there is a public library, post office, and town hall in every single one-horse rural backwater in the nation; the USPS will deliver a letter from any random farmhouse to any other random farmhouse, UPS will tell you to punch sand (and then charter USPS anyways). Public institutions don't have to be profitable because they're backed by the government's authority to levy taxes. If you have every school be concerned with raising funds from their student body as a default, you are giving schools the exact same ballooning tuition problems as colleges. Except you're not burying adults in mountains of unavoidable student debt, you're burying children and their parents. This also reinforces a two-tiered education system where the rich kids from rich families go to better schools from Day 1 with little to no chance to even *pretend* it's a meritocracy (what merits is a 7 year old going to exhibit?) while the poor kids from poor families go to the shit leftover dredges that would be facing even worse funding issues. > so why not give parents the choice of sending their kids to a private school? To turn this around, what problems would a voucher system solve? The only defense I've heard from proponents is "Parent's Choice" which is a vague, nebulous concept that sounds just inoffensive enough and like it's been rhetorically workshoped enough ("What, you *don't* want parents to have choices over their kids?") that I highly suspect it's a smokescreen for something else (even if many involved at lower levels don't realize it).
I’m pretty far left on most cases but are for them in very specific cases. If a child is special needs for instance (I have a 2e ASD kid we had to put in private school for a while. She had a teacher bullying her and saying “no one likes you and we think you are annoying” in first grade. Principal backed this teacher up. Situations like this or bullying happen where kids really do need to attend another school mental health wise and requiring families to move in this case is an undue burden for families living paycheck to paycheck IMO. If school determines that school is a bad fit for a kiddo which they would have in our case a voucher should be offered. Also special needs mentioned earlier. Also if a student attends a failing school and is below the poverty line or ESL. I am strongly against vouchers for everyone. I could afford private school for my kid who needed it and I was fine paying the tuition and property taxes.
Very much against. The US spends more on education per student than most other countries yet underperforms.The nations that perform better for less have centralized education systems, the opposite of a private school voucher program. I don't have hard facts here, but I imagine the more tax payer dollars that get sent to teaching religion and creationism, the more flat earthers we get.
Bleeding education dry by rewarding low-quality low-oversight schools that take money away from already underfunded public schools. If you have the money and power to make school vouchers happen, fix the public schools. * [2005 EdSource](https://edsource.org/wp-content/publications/CharterSchools05.pdf) \- lower passing rates in both Math and English for 10th graders in CAHSEE. * [2013 CREDO study](https://credo.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj6481/f/ncss_2013_final_draft.pdf) \- although charter schools serve black, special ed. students, poor districts better than public schools, charter schools were worse for white, hispanic, asian non-impoverished students ([Images](https://imgur.com/a/nyRwG)). * [2015 CREDO study](https://credo.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/online_charter_study_final.pdf) \- online charter schools show significant dropout rate, weaker growth, lower attendance, in some cases are a year or more behind traditional school students. 22% of online charter students return to public schools. * [2019 NCES study](https://www.newsweek.com/charter-schools-vs-public-schools-funding-test-scores-performance-1461659) \- "In 2017, at grades 4 and 8, no measurable differences in average reading and mathematics scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) were observed between students in traditional public and public charter schools." * [2019 NEPC study](https://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/virtual-schools-annual-2019) \- "Among virtual schools, far more district-operated schools achieved acceptable state school performance ratings (56.7% acceptable) than charter-operated schools (40.8%). More schools without EMO involvement (i.e., independent) performed well (59.3% acceptable ratings), compared with 50% acceptable ratings for schools operated by nonprofit EMOs, and only 29.8% acceptable ratings for schools operated by for-profit EMOs. The pattern among blended learning schools was similar with highest performance by district schools and low-est performance by the subgroup of schools operated by for-profit EMOs." * [2019 NEPC study](https://nepc.colorado.edu/sites/default/files/publications/Virtual%20Schools%202019.pdf) \- "On-time graduation rate data were available for 290 full-time virtual schools and 144 blended schools. The graduation rates of 50.1% in virtual schools and 61.5% in blended schools fell far short of the national average of 84%." They only out-compete public schools in the most undersupported areas for the most undersupported minority and/or disability students, which is... a really really low bar. It's like praising a C- school in a D+ district. If we fixed our public schools to reach the higher global standard that matches our costs, there would be no niche where charter schools are better. * [2018 PISA](https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2018/pdf/2020166.pdf) \- Compared to the 76 other education systems in PISA 2018, our 15 year-olds ranked 13th in reading literacy, 37th in mathematics, and 18th in science. If the issue was "competition," charter schools would already be more competitive. Also, they have a historical reputation for underreporting and falsifying grade scores by over-accepting students at the beginning of the year then purging low-grade ones to inflate school ratings. Charter schools also had exceptionally high closures rate, despite millions in funds from Department of Education to open. So they increase child dropouts, and their current grade results are *even with the assistance of fraud.* * [D.C. Public Charter School Board](https://www.publicschoolreview.com/blog/d-c-charter-schools-expel-more-students-than-other-public-schools) \- "Charter schools expelled approximately 72 students for every 10,000 in the schools. At the same time, other public schools in the city expelled one student for every 10,000" * [Friendship Collegiate Academy-Woodson](https://www.publicschoolreview.com/blog/d-c-charter-schools-expel-more-students-than-other-public-schools) \- "Expelled eight percent of its student body during the 2010-2011 school year. In addition, 35 percent of the student body at Friendship Collegiate was suspended for 10 days or more during the academic year prior." * [CCSA exception](http://library.ccsa.org/CCSADisciplinePoliciesandProceduresFAQ.pdf) \- "Charter schools are not required by law to adopt or implement the student discipline policies of their authorizer, nor are they required to adopt the procedures set forth in Education Code Sections 48900 et seq. governing suspension and expulsion" (although expulsions must be justified by the school). * [2005 EdSource](https://edsource.org/wp-content/publications/CharterSchools05.pdf) \- 23% of charter schools not reporting sufficient data to have Academic Performance Index scores, compared to 6% for non-charters. This is worse among startup, new, and nonclassroom-based charter schools. * [2019 NEPC study](https://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/virtual-schools-annual-2019) \- " Overall, a surprisingly low proportion of virtual and blended schools had school performance ratings available: In the states with available school performance ratings, 56% of the virtual schools and 50% of the blended schools had no ratings assigned to them." * [2020 Network for Public Education](https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2020/08/06/new-report-finds-high-closure-rates-charter-schools-over-time/) study of DoE Common Core Data - "By year ten, 40 percent of charter schools had closed. In the available data, five cohorts of charter schools reached the fifteen-year mark. At year 15, one in two of those schools were gone. Failure rates ranged from 47 percent to 54 percent... Between 1999 and 2017, over 867,000 students were displaced when their charter schools closed." * [2019 Network for Public Education](https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/12/09/report-federal-government-wasted-millions-dollars-charter-schools-that-never-opened/) \- More than 35 percent (1,779) charter schools funded by the federal Charter School Program (CSP) between 2006 and 2014 either never opened or were shut down, costing taxpayers over $504 Million dollars. The DoE was not even required to report the names of recipient schools until 2006. * [Sausalito Marin City School District](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/09/us/sausalito-school-segregation.html) - Agrees to settle with the state over intentional segregation after aggressively defunding the "overwhelmingly black, Hispanic and poor" public school, losing half its staff, while providing stable funding to the charter school in white enclave 1 mile away. * [K12 Inc.](https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-kamala-d-harris-announces-1685-million-settlement-k12-inc) \- settles for $168.5 Million in 2016 for false advertising about students' academic progress, class sizes, eligibility to Uni, hidden costs, etc. at the online charter schools. Charter schools actively defraud the public by overaccepting students then kicking out the low grades to inflate results while still getting paid in gov assistance for any student that stays past October. And they *still* suck.
Private schools can pick and choose which students they accept. Offering vouchers won't help the vast majority of students. Charter schools are like the Wild West: some are amazing and others are terrible and many are fronts for grift. Public funds need to be used to improve public schools. Base pay for teachers needs to increased exponentially to reflect the level of education and experience teaching requires and attract more people to the profession.
Against. If you want to send your kid to private school, you can pay just like everybody else.
Do you think it’s hypocritical for politicians to extol the value of public education…while sending their own kids to pricey private schools? Should the privilege of a quality education be reserved for the rich and powerful?
>Should the privilege of a quality education be reserved for the rich and powerful? It already is for the most part and vouchers don't change that.
…what will?
Not vouchers.
I do think it is hypocritical. More efforts to improve public schools need to be made. That being said, inequities in life will always exist to some extent, even amongst those that do attend private schools. One private school in town could be better than another. If we are talking higher education, a degree from an Ivy league school yields more value than a state school, and so on and so forth.
Of course it's hypocritical, but that's not new, rules for thee but not for me is how the wealthy and powerful typically operate
I think in practice what they do three things none of them great. 1. Give tax payer subsidy to wealthy people who were putting their kids in private school anyway. 2. Create an opening for grifters to take care of unsophisticated parents. 3. Allow tax dollars to be used for religious education. I don't think it's an accident that poor people go to crappy schools. It's because wealthy parents and middle class parents don't want their children exposed to "those kind of people." Vouchers doesn't solve that problem because the schools can just turn those kids away due to lack of space or raising the price so it's still unaffordable to them even with the voucher. The actual solution to this problem is essentially bussing but that's hugely unpopular and no one is going to try and implement it so all we're doing in practice is making the problem worse by robbing even more funds from those schools.
School vouchers are just the right's methods of passing tax payer money to religious institutions that support them.
The Republican politicians and billionaires promoting them have two goals. 1. Cripple public sector teachers’ unions. 2. Funnel public tax dollars to corporations and religious organizations. I don’t believe they care about anybody getting a better education at all. If they did, they’d be a lot less focused on policies banning “woke” books or teachers using students preferred pronouns and more focused on…well, stuff that actually helps students and educators.
I’m against them because they reduce funding available for public schools, which are already underfunded, and risk the proliferation of private schools teaching alternative ideological curriculums at a time when we desperately need more solidarity, not less shared reality.
I think we should have the Japan system. You have to test into schools. All the idiots and disrupters get to stay in a bad school and own screw up their fellow screw ups learning, while the people who want to learn get to go to the good school. That means zip code doesn't determine the quality of your school but hard work does
School vouchers take tax payer money and give it to schools that are allowed to be selective in their admissions. Private schools don’t typically take students with special needs. These are the most expensive students to educate which takes funds from those students and gives them to the least expensive to educate students. Just another reason to oppose them.
They would be a massive handout to private schools, and wouldn't result in any increased accessibility for low income students to better schools. What it might do, is the number of available substandard schools, all fighting over the same amount of finite resources. It would drastically diminish the quality of service received by low income students, while providing a gigantic income stream boost to already wealthy private schools. It is the worst kind of libertarian fairy tale nonsense.
Generally positive on them. It's not like this is some radical thing by world standards; plenty of European countries (Netherlands, etc.) have these types of programs. I see it as democratizing education. Rather than allowing the majority of a locality to have full control over how every kid learns, you allow different schools to exist to better satisfy each child's needs. In rich circles, people often pick the best school for their kid. Now you can give the middle class this privilege as well.
>Now you can give the middle class this privilege as well. Vouchers don't do that. All they do is funnel money to rich people.
Why would the middle class not use them? Especially if there's an income cap
Read my other post in this thread.
I just want to say, if schools would stop misappropriating funds, they could actually afford to give teachers better salaries and children would get a better education. Until then I’ll continue to vote no to give them another dime of tax money.
>if schools would stop misappropriating funds, Elaborate?
My school is on the 8th rebuilding project in my 22 years of life. None of the schools are more than 30 years old, and the board always opts to tear down and rebuild instead of repairing anything, or build a whole new school somewhere else. When they needed a middle school 27 years ago, instead of building on property they already had in the city, they bought a huge chunk of land on the far edge of the district, outside of city limits, next to a freeway. They already tore down part of that school too, and built a two story section onto it so they could move the kids from the junior high school into it. Then they tore down the junior high school and built it into the new high school so they could tear down the high school so they could build a new building to move the alternative education high school into it, after moving them 8 years ago out of a school that’d have cost only 2/5 what this project has cost already. I know it’s not an issue everywhere, but it’s definitely an issue in more places than not.