School Vouchers

Congressional Republicans try to fire me up by offering a national school voucher program.  Fine, I'm hyperventilating, are they happy?  Whether I can continue to hyperventilate until the legislation is taken up next year is a question that can only be answered in the fullness of time.

Since we are on the topic, here is a Times story from last Saturday on the performance gap between public and private schools.  The gist - after adjusting for student demographics the two types of schools are pretty similar.  But let's hear from the Eduwonk:

In any event, even though the report looks at different kinds of private schools to some extent, both the public and the private category are so broad and heterogeneous that just comparing them doesn't tell us much because within these categories there is so much variation.

And John Tierney, hiding behind TimesSelect, blasted the coverage of this study - let's steal from Pinch and re-print an excerpt here:

Thanks to a new federal report comparing public and private schools, there’s no doubt that public schools have one huge advantage: the leaders of their unions are unrivaled masters of spin.

They didn’t merely celebrate the report’s release on Friday, they complained that the Bush administration tried to bury it by releasing it for the weekend. They spun so well that the report was treated as a public-school triumph that “casts doubt on the value of voucher programs,” as The Wall Street Journal described it.

But if anything, the report from the Education Department did just the opposite. It concluded, after compensating for socioeconomic differences and other factors, that public-school students score slightly better on tests in fourth grade, while private-school students score slightly better in eighth grade. Given a choice, would you rather be ahead in the fourth inning or later in the game?

But even if you ignore that trend, even if you focus on the overall similarity of the scores in both types of school, that’s still bad news for public schools. Their students ought to be scoring higher if you believe in the unions’ favorite prescription for improving education: more money.

Most private schools are not places like Exeter or Dalton. They’re Catholic parochial schools and others on lean budgets. According to federal surveys, the typical private school’s tuition is only about half what a public school spends per pupil.

The public schools are spending more even if you exclude their expenses for special education, buses, lunch programs and central administration, as William Howell and Paul Peterson found in a study of New York elementary schools. The political scientists calculated that the public schools were still spending twice as much per pupil as were the Catholic schools in New York.

General Motors would not celebrate the news that its $40,000 Cadillac performed almost as well as a $20,000 Honda. It would not have its dealers put up signs reading: “Why Pay Less? Our Cars Are Nearly As Good.” But that’s the logic of the teachers’ union leaders who want to prevent students from getting vouchers and taxpayers from saving money.

The demographic-adjusted spending per pupil figure is a key to the analysis, but where is it mentioned in the Times?

MORE: The Times reminds us that Congress approved a vouchers program for folks displaced by Hurricane Katrina; the NY Sun has background.

Comments

[ajacksonian]

Yet another Federal Solution for us! Say, how come Johnny *still* can't read? I mean we have thrown so much at the problem at all levels... and Johnny is still reading at the exact same rate as in 1958.

Vouchers? No thanks.

I would prefer a system that pays for actual results and let parents choose the best way to get their child educated. Vouchers go through levels of bureaucracy, but apportioned block grants do *not*. Eliminate the overhead, which includes the Dept. of Education, and hand out the funds proportionately to those students that test well and then only as a fraction of how they do against the best in the world. That also includes home schooled children who have parents that would like to get paid some pittance for the hard work they put into teaching their child.

Somehow more overhead just overburdens the system, makes it *less* responsive and always winds up making the problem worse. Get the bureaucrats OUT of the system and remove the grandstanding platform. This rightly belongs with the States and the only part the Federal Government should look for is paying for results.

That is my taxpayer money, and I expect results for it. Not 'good wishes programs' and more paid bureaucrats. The system is broken, vouchers will burden the system *more*... remove the burden, put in a feedback loop that is harsh, but fair and let parents decide on the best schools that *want* Federal funds.

Perhaps taxpayers enjoy seeing their money thrown away like this. I am, however, not one of those.

I wonder just *how much* money the Dept of Education gets? Much more then they will hand out... so if we get rid of them and do a simple solution that is *not* simplistic, you will, actually, wind up with MORE money in the hands of educators. But then I do have strange ideas...

[clarice]

I approve vouchers wholeheartedly. I think any Congresscritter who votes against them should be forced to put his kids in public schools. Ditto any reported/editor/pundit.

With rare exception (Scoop Jackson for a while and Jimmy Carter for a while) every Senator and Congressman who lives in the District (and many who live in the tonier suburbs) send their kids to private schools. So do the editors (i.e. Pinch and the Grahams). Indeed, many "public advocates" who oppose vouchers (i.e. Marion Wright Edelman) have their kids in the best private schools in America.

In D.C. no amount of money seems to improve anything. We pay about $12 k a year per kid to send kids to poorly managed schools which only get worse.

[clarice]

Well Carter was President when he did it, not in Congress, of course, but his daughter went to a tiny school .

As for the private schools, they all set apart a fair amount for scholarship aid but it is not enough to meet the need.
BTW at the school on which I served on the Board for well over a decade many of the parents were connected to unions which set aside a significant amount of money to block vouchers to pay off their NEA affiliates.

[richard mcenroe]

So, Little Pinch Sulzberger's kids went to public school, did they?

[clarice]

His kids go to a school where the tuition is $30k per year. (Fieldston, I think.)

[ed]

Hmmmm.

"Vote for me today and I'll pass a bill you like next year."

Where have we heard this before?

And what was the result?

Yeah I'm not buying it either.

[maryrose]

As an educator for 30 years I can honestly say that each system has their strength. In special education the public system does a fine job. In order for all students to move ahead vouchers should be an option because some poor badly run schools are still in that category despite the passaage of No Child Left Behind. President Bush in his speech today at the NAACP reiterated his desire to provide ALL students an equal chance. My daughter is a product of the private school system, my son of the public. Parents should have a choice and the final say for their child's future.

[larwyn]

Saved this one yesterday. Feel it is relevant to the real problem i.e. control of the teaching degree programs by the same people that are bringing us the j-school grads. Teaching degrees are years of study of techniques and sensitivity and not a wit of making teachers masters of their subject/subjects.

I say close down all those "teacher Ed colleges" and make this major a minor, a certificate program. We would have, Heaven Help Us, math teachers with an actual mathmatics degree! How about English teachers who can actually diagram sentences.

Can one imagine the astounding benefit of people who know their subject actually teaching it. We
might also find that those "undoctrinated" students who will not submit to mindnumbing classes for a degree in "education"
might actually again consider teaching as a profession worth entering.

OK, now grade the written work by 3 members of the Duke 88
Dinocrat:Your college dollars at work

"Here is a profile of some of the Group of 88 at Duke, faculty members eager to jump to certain conclusions about members of the student body we have previously discussed:"

The 69 permanent faculty signatories included only two professors in math, just one in the hard sciences, and zero in law. (It would have been difficult indeed for a law professor to have signed a statement deeming irrelevant “the results of the police investigation.”) Of the permanent signatories, 58—an astonishing 84.1 percent—describe their research interests as related to race, class, or gender (or all three), in some cases to an extent bordering on caricature.

One Group of 88 member stated that his current project “argues that unless we
attempt to read racialized trauma according to a more Freudian, Lacanian understanding for subjectivity we will continue to misunderstand why racial stigma persists and, more generally, why the laws humans create to protect against forms of discrimination leave in place a notion of the racialized subject as emptied of interiority and the psychical.”

Another reasoned that “it was not merely military mobilization . . . that paved the
path to war [in Iraq] but a highly gendered war talk.” An example? Laura Bush’s late 2001 comments about the plight of Afghan women, which “furthered the [U.S.] imperial project in her highly gendered appeal to a world conscience.”

A third signatory, after beginning her career exploring “postmodernist theory about the individual and the body,” is now ” working on a new project critiquing animal rights from speciesist perspective.

"Apparently many University boards of trustees do not take their jobs very seriously. They certainly are not the watchdogs for parents and alumni who want their dollars well-spent as well as academic excellence in the university. (HT: Instapundit)"...Dinocrat

For almost 7 weeks, I was unable to read JOM - so if any Duke posts
were posted during that period, I did not see them.

I am hoping that by now TM is no longer aligned with such as the "Duke 88".

[clarice]

I agree with you on ed schools.
As for Duke, I hate the place. I went there for a graduation a few years ago and almost walked out on the speakers. PHEH what a silly, lefty dump.

[Neo]

In the report I read, they explictly mention compensating for "race." Say what ?!

[UofAZGrad]

One of the major reasons that private schools spend less per pupil than public is that private school teachers earn far less than public school teachers. Its dressed up in "per pupil" as if the number is just quantifying what gets spent on the students but that number comes from the entire budget of a school divided by the number of students attending and, as such, the ridiculously low salaries private school teachers get makes that number what it is.

Much of the other savings come from the lack of accountability private schools have to the local, state and federal governments. They don't have to fill out the same paperwork or adopt the costly procedures mandated on public schools. Some of it no doubt comes from the fact that public spending is less efficient than private spending (its a common tale that public procurement gets perverted by campaign donors and other connected bidders).

The point of this study is that the teaching and learning is not marginally better. All you are going to do with tax funded private school is depress teacher wages, remove levels of accountability and allow tax money to support religious education (including any madrasses that want to apply).

In return you cut down on some beauracratic overhead and reduce the possibility of this particular public money not being used as patronage.