I do not wish for taxpayer dollars to fund private school (religious or otherwise) or homeschooling. One of the things I love most about this country is that America is a civic nation. This country is built on shared civic ideals, values, and vision. This country is not built on a specific racial, ethnic, or religious identity like many, many old-world Eurasian nations.
"This country is not built on a specific racial, ethnic, or religious identity like many, many old-world Eurasian nations."
I know there's an ideal of what America should be, but don't muddle the reality. America was built on whiteness (whose definition shifted over time) and class identity.
Really? I think taxpayer dollars should be focused on an outcome (creating a cohesive society of high performance critical thinkers able to solve problems independently and in groups would be my outcome measure). With that being said, I see quite a lot of problems with the public system (suboptimal teacher provision partially driven by union pushing for things that help their union members at the expense of students, weird administrator to infrastructure spending ratios, weird far left ideologies being pushed on kids that I think are far outside school responsibility into parent responsibility, etc) and vouchers seem like a reasonable way to address this by taking funding out of the system to places that can perform better.
To me, it seems more like a failure of voucher design than anything. The solution is probably to make the voucher worth up to 80 or 90% of what it costs to teach the kid in the public system (because if it doesn't cost less why are we doing it?) and force any school receiving a voucher to not charge more than a small amount more than the voucher, make the same restrictions on religion present in public enforced in private, etc.
Declining public enrollment is a problem for crappy teachers and their union more than anything, it's not something to be concerned about. Fire the unneeded teachers and administrators to save costs and it should sort itself out medium term.
> One of the things I love most about this country is that America is a civic nation
What are you a communist? /s
Jokes aside, with the recent election, the country has been sold to capitalists and oligarchs.
I genuinely wouldn't be surprised if the school system in some states is fed to vultures to suck money from.
You may think it is impossible in America but remember anything has been possible in America, including enslavement and redlining. Selling schools to vultures is not at all outside the realm of possibilities here.
> Jokes aside, with the recent election, the country has been sold to capitalists and oligarchs.
My question is how long will it take for it to be reversed.
I have a deep respect for the ideals upon which the US was founded, but it's getting increasingly hard to respect the ground truth of what the country has become.
I toned down the title to prevent rage engagement on purpose. Didn't work that well - the post got flagged anyway, as it always happens when people forget how to disagree in civil ways.
That we on HN can't have a civil discussion on a divisive topic is deeply saddening to me. Se should be better than that.
On a more serious note, you have to wonder why religions are more overt about having the taxpayer foot their bills these days? I mean really, if you want Christian, Muslim or whatever religion schools, fine. No issue from me. But if the government compels me to fund the Madrasas, that's another thing entirely.
I think there is a lot to be said for public schools to be eliminated, for all schools to be private schools with the government providing vouchers. So you would have some students going to a strong STEM school, others to schools with strong vocational education, etc--instead of students going to an average generic local public school. There is a lot to be said for freedom of choice.
I think thats likely the worst outcome possible. The public school system needs reform not privatization.
Privatization of any vital public infrastructure has to my knowledge never led to a better result. Whether is public transport, medical care, or education. You can have a specialized public school system that allows for different life paths, but putting the education in the hands of private entities is going to degrade the education for most students.
Maybe.... MAYBE if the private schools were forced to teach the government curriculum.
There should not be freedom of choice when it comes to tracking fundamentals of arts and sciences and history.
Tell me, what happens when the education privateers decides it isn't profitable to operate in majority black neighborhoods? Rural towns with sparse population?
You have rights with a public school system you don’t have with private school system. And not just “it’s a government run school so they have to follow the constitution.” You have explicit political rights. For example, you have the right to vote in school board elections and bonds. You don’t get to vote for the board of EduCorp LLC.
What actually happens is children from impoverished/troubled families and bad neighborhoods get completely screwed over, exacerbating existing problems and creating new ones by burdening already vulnerable children with more difficult logistics and higher transport and general schooling costs across town. This isn’t even about “better educational outcomes”. That’s all very weak smoke and mirrors for the actual intent: for better off families to pull the ladder up behind them and kick struggling communities clinging to the edge into the abyss while funneling cash to ideological strongholds that desperately need new ways to regrow their dwindling congregations. That’s at best. At worst it’s reinventing classic racist policies.
This is the whole problem. That money (and more!) should be going to public schools to fix them. We should all want great public schools everywhere. An educated populace is the only way we as a country can grow and improve.
While I agree, the rot in the metro area schools runs so deep its going to take decades to get the progressive ideology out of them. My kids have gone to public schools their whole lives, but we live in the suburbs where the focus has always been on preparing kids for higher education and being prepare to find a successful career after college.
Public schools? When the cost per student is double that of my kids school and their graduation rate is hovering in the 60% range with less than 50% attending college? THAT is a huge problem. And what happens every year? Those same schools cry and whine they need MORE money to fix the problem. And every year the state allocates MORE money to them and every year NOTHING improves. And yet, its a constant cycle while the suburban schools continue to thrive while those metro area schools and their residents? They're trapped, like my sister and her three kids were.
What's the solution for them? They yank their kids out and send them instead to a private school whose focus is education, not indoctrinating them into some progressive ideology. The other problem is families won't wait around for ten years and wait for the problem to be fixed. They have a very narrow window in which to change things for their kids. Like my sister did, they're going to find somewhere else to send their kids and do that.
I 100% agree with your comment, but I feel the metro area schools are so entrenched and so far beyond being repaired, the best course is to make private schools more affordable, as opposed to spending decades trying to undo what these schools have done.
is there actually any evidence more money would fix public schools? Urban school districts as far as I know have more money than the suburbs and worse outcomes as reflected in standardized test scores.
Students who commit or are accepted into 2 sand 4 year colleges: 90%+
- Compare that with just one school in the urban school system:
Cost per student: $37K/year
Graduation rate: 57%
Students who commit or are accepted into 2 sand 4 year colleges: less than 50%
Just to throw some more fire on this, the teachers in the last two years in those urban districts? They've gotten substantial raises and large increases in spending from the state legislature. The last standardized test results post C19? The kids in those schools were forced into lengthy closures during C19 and were the last schools to re-open (months after all the suburban schools had already been open with in person attendance) amounted to their students REGRESSING by multiple percentage points.
So no, after watching this first hand with myself and my sisters kids who were yanked out of an urban public school as freshman; urban students and schools receive considerably more than their suburban counterparts and are still lagging significantly behind them.
That's an anecdote, no? No idea where you live (guessing New Jersey?). But do you think there might be other differences beyond just the $/student that might explain some of those differences? What're the poverty levels of those urban children vs their suburban counterparts?
Its Minnesota. The numbers were off to from the last time I checked them.
Its now 13K for my kids school and 26K for the Minneapolis schools.
>> But do you think there might be other differences beyond just the $/student that might explain some of those differences?
Well yeah.
- Poor families can't afford to send their kids to private schools.
- Poor families don't have any vouchers or charter schools as alternatives
- Poor families cannot be bused to other, better school districts like mine or other suburban schools
- Most poor families are single parent homes which means driving kids to far off suburban schools is not an option
- Many suburban schools are closing their enrollment unless you live in the district now.
The educational SYSTEM is what keeps poor families without any options to give their kids a better shot at being educated and going on to a 2 year or 4 year college. When you have no options, then you're stuck. This makes no sense to me why this is a political issue. Don't you want kids to have the best opportunity to be successful? Why not open up to vouchers and charter schools? Why does the Minneapolis school system refuse to allow this? The answer is too obvious to require elaboration. Its because their enrollment (which has already dropped precipitously over the last decade) would drop off even more. This would then mean lose a ton of funding from the state.
At the end of the day, the MPS does not want competition because it means less money then from the state, even with the abysmal graduation rate, falling enrollment and tens of thousands of people moving out of the Hennepin County, they continue to refuse to change anything - which is pretty depressing when you think about it.
In my region the city's one massive school district has more money than any single suburban one, obviously. But funding per student is generally higher in the suburbs, and outcomes are better there as well. So I'm sure there are other factors but there is at least some evidence that more money would help.
The problem is Eumenes wants his school to be funded by everyone else's property tax.
When did this entitlement mindset grip this country so much that people openly ask for handouts like that? I know I will sound old now, but back in the 70's and 80's welfare was a bad thing. Now, everyone from corporations to private schools openly demand it.
> The problem is Eumenes wants his school to be funded by everyone else's property tax.
Where did I say that? I said it'd be nice if one could route their state/property taxes to school of their choice. That seems pretty dang fair. Taxation without representation doesn't.
That sounds cool. I bet people without kids wouldn’t direct their taxes to any schools. Or maybe they don’t support the police. Can you imagine the craziness of trying to create a budget for your community where everyone gets to direct their tax dollars? Then if you rent I guess you’re just stuck with what your landlord decides too.
I don't know how things are funded in your neck of the woods, but if I were to take the county property tax that's allocated to my local school district and use it to pay for private schooling for a child, it probably wouldn't cover a quarter of classes, much less everything else involved in sending a child to a private school.
You can't reform a system that is broken by design. The teachers' unions have WAY too much power. More power than parents, which is wrong and corrupts the system. You can see this by comparing money and test scores over the past few decades. More money today and worse results.
Kids/parents should have a choice. Just like we have choices on android or iphone and Purdue or Ohio State. Why should it be different with the k-12 education? If some are religious, so what? Parents can send their kids to a non-religious or trade school or a STEM school.
It's not as simple. Schools in my county are extremely selective even though they don't appear on outside. With arduous processes for application and applications only open for one day that only insiders know, or they extend application links to certain people with plausible denial that it's an open application through their arduous links.
Public schools on the other hand are straight forward. Once we move towards schools deciding who they want, it separates rich from poor students, white from colored students.
I already see it in chartered vs public schools in my county.
"That same year, a coalition of school districts, now numbering more than 200, filed suit against the voucher expansion."
In other word, a bunch of government employees used taxpayers' money to find legal action, with the aim of maintaining their local monopolies on the provision of taxpayer-funded education.
Government entities use taxpayer money to fund legal action (and pretty much everything else they do) all the time. I am not a lawyer but I believe it is called “administrative law” and is completely normal. To think so otherwise is completely ahistorical and incorrect.
Individual people - government employees - decided to do this.
They decided to use taxpayer funds (that were specifically allocated for educating students) to finance legal action aimed at preventing parents from choosing which schools would receive taxpayer funding to educate their children.
In other words, government employees spent public education money on litigation designed to keep money flowing into their own pockets, rather than allowing those funds to follow students to whatever educational environment their families determined would best serve them.
Of course it’s individual people. The political entity they work for obviously has no will of its own. It is terribly unsurprising to me that people tasked with a job by the government would do what they can to best carry out that job.
Are you scandalized when a city and the county it is in sue each other and the transportation department over who has responsibilities for what sections of road and how much money who should get rather than letting the citizens who drive on those roads decide? Where do you draw the line for what money the government decides how to spend and what money individuals should decide how to spend?
"It is terribly unsurprising to me that people tasked with a job by the government would do what they can to best carry out that job."
Right, but the government tasked school district employees with educating kids who enroll in government-run schools. The legislature explicitly created a voucher scheme, and it's unclear why school district employees would think it was their job to prevent this from happening.
Declining enrollment and pulled funding can destroy the ability of a district to carry out the mission tasked to it by the government. This is not just hypothetical. The rural, conservative school district I used to work for (and may, many like them as pointed out in the article) and the families that rely on them do not like school vouchers, even if they otherwise support everything else that politician does. If too many students unenroll and utilize school vouchers, the whole district could collapse due to lack of funding and screw over all the remaining students.
This is compounded by the fact that vouchers often pull out more funding that the government otherwise would provide to the district for that student. This is mentioned in the article as well. e.g. the state pays the district $5k a year per student, but pulls $8k a year for a student that uses a voucher.
Also, in a lot of these rural areas there are no other good options anyway besides the school district. It’s either the district, a scammy online charter school, a scammy fly-by-night charter school, or homeschooling.
"This is compounded by the fact that vouchers often pull out more funding that the government otherwise would provide to the district for that student."
Can you please help me understand the "This is compounded" part here?
In other words, a private school gets more money from a student’s voucher than a district gets from having that same student enrolled. The voucher doesn’t just move the same amount of money around. A voucher pulls more money from education funding than then enrolling a student in a public school does.
Parents probably care more about the education of their children, than government employees do. I think those parents can be trusted to know what is "serving the education of the students".
It's supposed to be a monopoly. I don't pay property taxes to make some head of OmniCorp Education LLC a multimillionaire. I do it so that the kids in my neighborhood aren't dumber than rocks.
Your local school district is the default. If you want to do something else, you're free to. You can educate your child yourself, or pay another educational institution to do it for you. Is that too expensive? Maybe you should talk about that with the person who pays your salary.
Private schools do not play by the same rules. Special education and transportation are a significant cost of public schools that private schools can just ignore.
> In my city, school district administrators are multimillionaires.
In many more cities, they aren't.
Furthermore, I don't necessarily see what the problem is. Are public employees necessarily supposed to live as paupers? Government agencies can't just tell the people they want to work for them that they have to do so. They have to offer a competitive salary and benefits package. Many school administrators are operating organizations with hundreds, if not thousands, of employees and hundreds of millions of dollars in assets, with heavy regulatory requirements. Many have masters or doctoral degrees.
The same would be demanded by other schooling providers, because that stuff doesn't magically go away when you let people compete for tax dollars.
Is it a bad thing? There are plenty of good public schools in the United States. They typically tend to geographically coincide with places with high average household income and thus lots of funding through property taxes, though that's not the only advantage money gives them.
> Why ought that to be the case?
Because society benefits when all children have at least some education from the age of five to sixteen, if not longer. There were times throughout history (up until relatively recently, actually - think prior to WWII) where there was lots of competition for your educational dollars. The problem was, if you didn't have educational dollars to spend, your kid got no education. And now that there's more urban than rural population in the US, you can't even just tell junior to help you with farm chores. You'll just have youths doing... well, it's hard to tell, but when kids don't have anywhere they have to be or anything they have to do, it usually turns out poorly for them and their communities.
> That's what I do, and the sticker price is less per year than the annual per-student opex of my local school district.
I bet it is. The average child who attends a private school typically comes from a household that has more financial resources, and thus, requires less of the social safety net that is often provided through school districts. These schools are also free to tell more "expensive" students (read: neurodivergent and disabled children) to pound sand when it comes to their needs.
Same deal with other industries with hybrid public/private, like the postal service or insurance. Arithmetic is based on serving some people at a loss but amortizing those losses against the wider public. Private entities come in and eat the winners while leaving the losers. Public option is left with only the clients that were never profitable, and private businesses have no obligation to serve them.
"There are plenty of good public schools in the United States."
I live in one of the wealthiest cities in the US. Government-run schools are funded to the tune of $27k per student per year. I had hoped to send my son to one of those schools, until I discovered that none of them would have provided him an appropriate education.
"Because society benefits when all children have at least some education from the age of five to sixteen, if not longer."
This is an argument for taxpayer-funded education. I have not said anything against taxpayer-funding of K-12 education.
This doesn't mean it has to be government-run.
"These schools are also free to tell more "expensive" students (read: neurodivergent and disabled children) to pound sand when it comes to their needs."
This is a reasonable argument with respect to private schools, but doesn't explain why the nearby charter schools, who admit students purely by lottery, are so much more efficient than the government-run schools.
> I live in one of the wealthiest cities in the US. Government-run schools are funded to the tune of $27k per student per year. I had hoped to send my son to one of those schools, until I discovered that none of them would have provided him an appropriate education.
Sounds like it's time to raise hell at a district meeting.
> This is an argument for taxpayer-funded education. I have not said anything against taxpayer-funding of K-12 education. This doesn't mean it has to be government-run.
Most non-public education options in the US are run by religious institutions. The First Amendment to the US Constitution is supposed to build a wall between church and state.
I also want at least some say in how my tax dollars are spent. There are absolutely people in my county and state where people would take my tax dollars and spend them at the K-12 version of a bible college.
> This is a reasonable argument with respect to private schools, but doesn't explain why the nearby charter schools, who admit students purely by lottery, are so much more efficient than the government-run schools.
If your parents have the time and energy to study out which charter school to send you to and put you into a lottery, there's a pretty good chance you have the resources at home to have a quality education regardless of who operates the school.
That last point brings up an ugly thing about privatization that many proponents of vouchers don't want to talk about: optimizing family structures for shareholder returns over the last 50 years (meaning both parents working outside of the home for stagnant wages) has had a negative impact on the children of this country, and you can't just fix that by telling the local school district to split their funding with another educational system.
