Interesting,.. you'd think with all that money public schools get, it would be ten times better....lol. Let's look at the trends of public schools. Figure 1 Top-Scoring Students on the Verbal Portion of the SAT, 1972 and 1994 Figure 2 Inflation-Adjusted Spending on American Schools Figure 3 Number of Public School Districts, 1945-94 District levels are lowering and centralizing; expenses are rising and out of control; and the students are degrading in standards. According to this article what is the problem: http://www.cato.org/pubs/briefs/bp-025.html I myself am not sure vouchers will work, but the way we're going is not productive. Although since the average (according to information they publish) demonstrates a cheaper cost per year, perhaps the arguement has some level of validity. Vouchers are essentially making a long-term loan from a less-centralized 'private' school. Thoughts?
Private schools can offer so much more because they don't have to rely on the govt.'s broken system...They can charge tuition, and then do with the money what they want, instead of spending millions on useless things such as a bridge to nowhere and not giving education anything. If the govt. was or had ever really been interested in schools, there wouldn't be a need for private...IMO.
Just think if the gov't schools ran off the limited $$ that many private schools run on. (I am not talking about the Ivy leaque type schools for people who lock up their kids there for months at a time. LOL)
But I don't think private v. public is a true zero-sum game, where private necessarily leads to better education than public. What is done with that public money is more important that who administers it, in my opinion. We in the U.S. are known to have among the lousiest pre-college educational systems - it is widely known that many statist primary and secondary educational systems in other countries very much beat the pants off our system, across many objective criteria - yet among the finest universities in the world; and even here, there is no correlation between public v. private funding and administration (think Berkeley, UNC-Chapel Hill, as a couple of public examples. Oh, I'm biased. Go Bears!).
Are you sure about those numbers? You haven't quoted your source and I really don't know the exact numbers but it sounds too low for me. My daughter lives with her mother in Europe and I pay $18,000 /year for school tuition, I asked about a school in Vancouver and it costs $15,000 /year. On top of the tuition you have all the costs of books, uniforms, school activities, lunch fees,....
You have to go back in time a bit. Although the numbers relate to the given time. http://www.cato.org/pubs/briefs/bp-025.html ^^^^^^^ The link has the source(s). But here's a simple one to view. Table 2 U.S. Private Schools, by Tuition, 1993-94 ...Number of Tuition ($).......................Schools Less than ...1,000..............................5,133 1,000 - 2,499...................................12,259 2,500 - 4,999....................................5,541 5,000 or more....................................2,904 Source: Based on National Center for Education Statistics, "Schools and Staffing Survey, 1990-91," Exhibit 8. ------------------------- Notice they even review the average within the major cities. You must read to understand. Not every private school is of that sort caliber.
I looked at the data but I think it is a little bit unclear how it works. For example do you know if the private schools get any help from the state? In Sweden the tuition that you pay to private schools is on the top of what they receive from government as what they calculate as a cost for having a child in school while in Spain they don't. Many of the examples in that article are Christian schools and I will be interested to know how much money they receive from the Church. I totally agree with you that administration in public schools can be much much better (the same as any other government run organization) but I just have a hard time to believe these numbers on it's face value.
All the Christian schools I am aware of run independent of the church it is usually located at. All funds are directly paid by the enroller unless someone else is helping that family personally. I am sure some are supported by churches - possibly catholic schools are supported by catholic churches?
Not surprising to me - private schools charge huge amounts of money for tuition every year, so its no wonder they can offer more. They also don't have any gov't restrictions.
Not in our area. The private schools don't get that much, they don't pay the teachers as much (don't get all the benefits public schools teachers get) and yes they still have some gov't restrictions, but are allowed to teach Bible or other classes that are banned from public schools. Maybe some snobby rich-kid schools get a lot in tuition, but we don't have those here.
Throw in Michigan, Illinois, Texas - Austin, eight other University of Califorinia campuses (go Anteaters!) and a number of other public universities. If the system of pseudo-vouchers (grants, scholarships, student loans, and mom and dad) works at the university level, let's push the same system down to high school.
You make a good point, Tbarr. How would you see these "pseudo-vouchers" coming down to high schools (maybe, even lower - primary education)? How would it work?
I was in private school until 8th grade and IMO unless you get a really good deal your much better off saving your money for something else. The only real advantage I saw was that students who needed 1 on 1 attention were able to recieve much more often in private school than in public school. Something else you would want to consider is how much socializing your children would be able to do. I notice a big difference between my friends who only went to private school and my friends who only went to public school in the way they communicate with other people and their perception and participation on group activities/tasks.
Vouchers would work well but wouldn't fly well with the dumbed down voters and the teachers union. I am already paying for one child's high school athletics, drivers ed, and other extracurricular activites, I suppose they could start taking away non-core classes (classes that as a college major only lead to a career in teaching that class) and giving grants for them and allow the grants to be used elsewhere say Phys. Ed grants could be used to pay for club soccer or traveling baseball or grants for history could be used for world history at the local Jewish Day school or Japanese school. Of course this is just a part of my giant conspiracy. Hey how about just shifting 12 th grade classes under the administration of the junior college system?
Vouchers in my perception are just long-term loans (paid via taxes), which go out to a private school that are regulated a bit less. Granted the private schools aren't entirely bogus, and have a minimal amount of regulation, then I find it to be of interest...and worth of experimentation. I'd like to see this done on a small and realistic scale. I'm thinking it would turn out well, if the law is written correctly.
Yeah shame on our college system...lol. Before you know it, people will want that fully centralized. After all, everyone has a 'right' to higher education. I'm sure that opinion will grow within time.
No over time the minimum wage will be raised enough so American kids don't have to go to college and colleges like the University of California, Irvine will formalize it's informal name: University of Chinese Immigrants* (* I got this name from a Korean immigrant and I did notice 7 years before that I was able to walk for 5 minutes around the central path of the campus without seeing a white or black student. I doubt that they will have room for my half Asian kids in the next 3 to 9 years thanks to all the spots they avail to non-residents).
A voucher isn't like a loan, it's money taken by force and given back like a check that says for deposit by a school only. It's only a tool to help competition. Private schools are more heavily regulated...by parents. We will walk with our tuition if the school doesn't measure up.
Chinese people tend to love education. My friends back-in-the-days didn't do a day of work, and went through college...all chinese. While most my white friend's worked full-time and went through college. Nearly killed themselves. I think my Chinese friends were a bit smarter. Labor only goes so far. The mind's immeasurable. Our colleges are good, that's for sure. Ironically, I wouldn't mind keeping some of these asian cats in America....although I could understand the idea that we might be pushing-out some Americans in policy...not really informed to see either way, personally. I know when I go to flight school, there's a bunch of foreigners. Japanese and Chinese primarily, and they're all forced to speak English in training (as our federal aviation system is not really meant to be multilingual).