Asymmetrical Information

regression to the mean, it's not a bug but a feature

Kids First in Minneapolis is a charity that gives privately funded school vouchers to low income elementary school students. The vouchers enable the students to attend private schools

A lottery is used to select students for the vouchers-no grades are looked at. Here are last year's results for both types of students.

Voucher Kids.
90% passed their grade level reading test.
80% passed their grade level knowledge test.

Public school kids
50% passed their grade level reading test.
40% passed their grade level knowledge test.

Minneapolis spends $15,780 per student. Schools that the Voucher Kids attend spends $5000 per student.

But once again we come to the idea of self-selection. Are the kids who avail themselves of voucher programs the ones who do have actively involved parents and therefore have less of a need for the vouchers themselves? I don't see how the vouchers give any kind of benefit in excess of just allowing a choice of public schools based on prior grades and test scores. I understand that this might not work well in rural areas but in urban areas I suspect it will work better.

The biggest things private schools can do (and government schools used to be able to do) is to separate those who can learn from those who have difficulty doing so; and, to separate those who want to learn from those who don't want to learn, or don't care.

A good teacher, placed in a classroom full of eager, bright students, can accomplish far more than in a classroom containing the same number of students with widely divergent (or non-existent) motivations and abilities. Students who are not as bright or motivated can still learn more in a classroom with others of roughly the same educational potential.

In a private school, the student who is unruly and creates disturbances in class can be removed. When I was growing up (too long ago, apparently), there were "reform schools" for such troublemakers, to separate them from those who wanted to learn so that learning could happen.

In the private high school I attended, the 212 students in my grade were selected by competitive examination from a group of more than 2,000 potential students who chose to take the entrance exam. After our first year, we were separated further into three groups based on our abilities and interests. We were then "stretched" for the next three years. It was a truly amazing experience.

When my sons were in high school, in very good government schools, they both had the opportunity for independent study and enrichment programs offered in association with Northwestern University, because the high school curriculum and classroom pace could not keep them challenged. They both benefited greatly from the experience.

I don't believe we will be able to resolve the issues with our schools until: they have the flexibility to challenge the brightest and most motivated of their students; and, to provide the best education the remaining students can absorb and utilize. We cannot afford either to ignore our future Einsteins, or to toss the slowest overboard; but, we can't educate all of them optimally in the same classroom.

Einstein is said to have defined insanity as: "continuing to do the same things and expecting different results". In my judgement, continuing to throw money into our failing school systems is "insane".

I think Jake is on to the even more glaring difference between private and public schools. Most private schools have far less resources than public schools!

My sister-in-law, for example, has been the Principal of a small (~150 student) private Christian school. It charges about 3K/pupil (although it does receive some other funding from the Churches who are involved with it.) That's a far cry from the average pupil expenditure at the local public schools. Does anybody have pointers to studies comparing the expenditures per pupil between public and private schools? CATO says the NCES found tuition was about %50 of public school per pupil expenditures, but I couldn't find that in the pdf...

"In my judgement, continuing to throw money into our failing school systems is "insane"."

Quite so. And, worse is that we are continually beaten, upside our once-thinking heads, by the gross canard that "public" schools are funded by "Government "Money"".

Anyone care to ask: Why is the "Government" in the "School" business, in the first place?

Or, better: proffer an answer?

Kate,

"I don't see how the vouchers give any kind of benefit in excess of just allowing a choice of public schools based on prior grades and test scores."

I know this works in NYC, with schools like Bronx High School of Science, Brooklyn Tech, Stuyvestant, etc. Very few cities combine the population density of NYC with its public transportation systems and long history of special schools for outstanding students.

Northern VA has Thomas Jefferson High School, which is outstanding, but the public transportation system is far more limited; and, the population density requires that TJ be open to attendance by students from a number of school districts.

In many other cities, as well as in the suburbs, the opportunity is not as great. Washington, DC is an example of a school district in which vouchers have worked to the great advantage of a number of students who would otherwise have been condemned to staying in DC district schools, which are both the most expensive and least effective in the nation.

However, since vouchers provide the opportunity for a better education at a lower cost, I have a very hard time understanding the resistance. I guess I'm just obtuse or slow.

The special magnet school I went to, the North Carolina School of Science and Math, has to draw from the entire =state=, and, of course, is a boarding school. Perhaps because the population it's drawing from is roughly the magnitude of what Stuyvesant gets to draw from.

Speaking of the Minneapolis voucher program: compare the lottery-winning students (thus getting vouchers) to the lottery-losing students (whereever they end up). That way it's a fair comparison - you will have self-selection if you just look at voucher vs all public school kids.

It may be tougher to get that data, but I think it worthwhile.

Monopolies tend to operate inefficiently, offering poor servie at high cost. The government public education monopoly is no different. Vouchers would force the public schools to compete, driving down costs and improving quality. They would have to be more responsive to the needs and concerns of their customers--the students and their parents--or lose funding and be shut down.

The teachers unions and the education bureaucracy have abused their power and done tremendous damage to poor kids. This has, in turn, hurt the whole country and contributed more than anything else to the growing income disparity. So, three cheers for Jane's Post and a Bronx cheer for the unions and administrators.

P. S.: I just want to note that the people who work at the Dept. of Education don't have much interest in producing a study implying that they are doing a lousy job and showing that private schools are vastly better than public ones.

Isocrates,

I don't think that the public school system does have a monopoly on education. The definition of a monopoly is that there is no competition, that there are no other options and when it comes to education, and that's just not true. Yes, I know, but it's not free. That's the way a free market works. You sometimes get what you pay for. If you pay nothing (or your tax dollars pay very little) you'll get crap. I've often known very bright kids who were poor who were allowed into very nice private and parochial schools despite not being able to pay for them. Those kids get scholarships based on merit.

Now, I'm not going to put up a fight with you that the teacher's union is a scum sucking bottom feeding organization but I would limit the amount of blame I place on them for our failing school systems. If the kid you're trying to teach has a terrible homelife and doesn't eat regularly there is very little you can do about getting the brain to work.

meep said

Speaking of the Minneapolis voucher program: compare the lottery-winning students (thus getting vouchers) to the lottery-losing students (whereever they end up). That way it's a fair comparison - you will have self-selection if you just look at voucher vs all public school kids.

I don't get it. What's the difference between the populations? I guess there could be some low income students who didn't win the lottery but switched to private education through other means, and they might tend to do well (selection bias: their parents are motivated or the children are gifted or part of community able to help them, etc etc), but so what? If they did score well, all that would show would be that low income kids who leave public education tend to do better, which was the point in the first place I suspect...

While I'm in favor of vouchers, there's one thing to consider; public schools have to handle everyone. That includes kids with behavior problems or who are in special education or handicaped. Special education programs in particular tend to cost more per student.

I'm not familiar with the private school entry process but I would guess that special ed kids might have trouble getting into private schools. Anyone care to offer insight here. How much do public schools spend on mainstreamed students in specific, compared to a schoolwide average.

"I don't think that the public school system does have a monopoly on education. The definition of a monopoly is that there is no competition, that there are no other options and when it comes to education, and that's just not true."

Kate,

Over the children of affluent families the public education cartel has little monopoly power, but over the children of the poor it has tremendous monopoly power. Those who cannot afford to send their kids to a private school are stuck with the local public school. They have no choice at all. No matter how bad the teachers are, no matter how unruly the other students, parents of scant resources must send their kids to the local public shool.

That seems to me to be significant monopoly power, and I think it explains why vouchers are so popular in poor areas. Poor parents want their kids to do well and they resent the squalid monopoly that holds their kids down. As Milton Friedman has argued, the monopoly "makes it impossible to reform the public school system from within. Reform has to come through competition from the outside and the only way you can get competition is by making it possible for parents to have the ability to choose."

The study is dubious - it basically overfits a bunch of variables, not stating their correlation with school types or regression matrix. it controls for:
Gender, Teacher experience, Race/ethnicity, Teacher certification, Students with disabilities, Student absenteeism, English language learners, Percentage of students excluded, Computer in the home, Percentage of students by race/ethnicity, Eligibility for free/reduced-price school lunch, Student mobility, Participation in Title I, School location, Number of books in the home, Region of the country, Number of absences, Percentage of students eligible for free/reduced-price lunch, Percentage of students with a disability, Percentage of English language learners, Percentage of students in the Title I program, School size

Thus, if private schools have smaller school sizes or better qualified teachers, they are penalised.

Now, the regression matrix for all those parameters would be an interesting one, and one that would make a valuable contribution to the debate, so why is it suppressed?

"How much do public schools spend on mainstreamed students in specific, compared to a schoolwide average."

In New Jersey, where I live, a school business administrator told me last month that the statewide average cost to educate a "regular" (non-special needs) elementary school pupil is about $8,000 per year. A regular high school student costs about $12,000. Special education students cost $20,000 - $100,000 each plus transportation depending on their needs and the severity of their handicap or learning disabilities.

With respect to vouchers for inner city students, I strongly support them. Even if, in the worst case, the voucher students performed no better than if they had stayed in the public school, just giving the student and the family a choice has value in that they feel they exercised some control over their destiny instead of just being assigned to and stuck in a miserable non-performing inner city school that is poorly managed, expensive to operate and dysfunctional. In short, vouchers have an easy act to follow; it would be hard to do much worse. Of course, the unions will fight vouchers with everything they have, because they see them as a threat to their power and their livelihood. While vouchers are quite popular among inner city blacks, if they continue to routinely give 90% or more of their votes to Democrats, blacks will lose this issue to the teachers unions every time, in my opinion.

Kate,

Out of curiousity, if there is no effective difference between the quality of education in a private versus a public school (the essence of the self-selection argument), that must mean that student/parent motivation has no salient effect on the educational experience. If we accept this, why should there be a problem with allowing vouchers for those who want them. The argument I've usually heard is that it "skims the cream of the crop" off of the public school system. But, if this matters at all, then denying these students the opportunity to gain the advantage of self-selecting into an environment with motivated peers seems unfair, to say the least.

Ryan,

One of the most evil canards of the anti-voucher folks is that vouchers would harm special ed students. In reality, vouchers would allow special ed students to go to schools that specialize in their disability, and they would have the opportunity for more individualized education. When you have only one student in a school with a particular disability, costs are going to be higher.

"Mainstreaming" is a response to the former practice of warehousing and discriminating against disabled students - shoving them in a back room, making them go in the back door so that the regular students and parents wouldn't be disgusted.

Mainstreaming has been good for countering the prejudice, but it's not really the optimal learning situation for absolutely every kind of disability. Some kids would benefit from the specialization available if they were (by choice) in a school that was organized to be optimal for their disability.

Vouchers would allow us to take out our son from a situation where a one-size-fits-all school contorts itself to offer something fitting, and place him in a situation with specialists and experts and allow us to join with other families facing the same issues.

In any reasonable voucher system, the special ed allocation ought to follow the kid, so a private school would have access to the funds needed for specialists.

"I don't see how the vouchers give any kind of benefit in excess of just allowing a choice of public schools based on prior grades and test scores"...by opening up the monopoly. There may be multiple public schools in an area, but they are subject to the same policies (for example: refusing to hire excellent teachers who lack "education" degrees) and the same general mindset.

Rough analogy: What if all Americans in the 1950s and 1960s had been required to buy automobiles from domestic manufacturers, on the grounds that foreign cars had not demonstrated clear superiority? (More precisely: they can still buy foreign cars, but if they do they must also pay for a domestic one.)

kids attending public school are just as shortchanged by having ignorant or uninvolved parents as kids attending private school

Jane's statement above is accurate as far as it goes, but it doesn't go very far. I taught in urban Catholic schools for two years. They were better than the nearby public schools for one reason only: the parents cared. Here in Pittsburgh, there is something called the Extra Mile foundation that provides private vouchers to kids in failing schools so that they can attend one of four Catholic grade schools with majority African-American (and non-Catholic) populations. If you ask, the heads of the program will admit that the only reason these schools are better than their nearby competition is because the parents (the ones who can scrape up the money for the $3K tuition, and the ones who can't but are active enough to seek out this program) care.

In short, at the sort of private school that is likely to accept vouchers and to be available to kids who receive them, far more parents care than do parents at the nearby public schools. That, and only that, is the secret to the private schools' success.

"Bad" kids with "lazy" parents who go to a school where most of the kids are "good" and parents are not "lazy" will probably live up to the school's expectations, provided that the number of such kids is kept low enough so that expectations do not change. If vouchers work, this is why.

Bill Dalasio, you say:

"Out of curiousity, if there is no effective difference between the quality of education in a private versus a public school (the essence of the self-selection argument), that must mean that student/parent motivation has no salient effect on the educational experience."

I'm sorry, I think it says the opposite thing. I don't understand? What do you mean?

"If we accept this, why should there be a problem with allowing vouchers for those who want them. The argument I've usually heard is that it "skims the cream of the crop" off of the public school system. But, if this matters at all, then denying these students the opportunity to gain the advantage of self-selecting into an environment with motivated peers seems unfair, to say the least."

I completely agree with this statement, I'm just saying that, at least in urban areas with good transportation systems (like New York, for example) allowing a choice of public schools as opposed to vouchers would have the same effect, the good students would gravitate to the good schools and the poor students who didn't care would stay at the lousy school they were assigned to. The cream does tend to rise to the top.

I don't have anything particularly against school vouchers except for the fact that I don't have any interest in paying for someone else's religious education. I don't understand why my tax dollars should go to finiance someone else's Catholic (or some other religion I don't like) education. I have no issue financing the public schools and letting the free market sort out the good schools from the bad.

By the way, at least here in New York City they make every effort to get people into the school system to teach, they require some education courses, but not education majors. Thus far I have three friends who have taught in the NYC Public school system, one had been a computer programmer, one worked in music PR, and the last was a funraiser for non-profit organizations. All three quit within the first year because the job was too difficult. One went on to become a stay-at-home mom, one went back to her PR job and the last one became a private tutor.

From what I've read, the three factors most highly correlated with student achievement are: (1) the student's own ability, (2) the socio-economic background of the family, and (3) how the school is organized and managed. The latter includes an ability to fire non-performing and incompetent teachers and administrators as well as to remove disruptive students from the classroom and either expel them or transfer them to an alternative school.

As for parents who care, this sounds like what the Manhattan Institute refers to as signing onto "The Mission" which means doing everything possible to prepare your child to eventually go to college and to succeed in the adult economic world. Signing onto "The Mission" is, of course, much more prevalent throughout the middle and upper middle class than among the poor.

I completely agree with this statement, I'm just saying that, at least in urban areas with good transportation systems (like New York, for example) allowing a choice of public schools as opposed to vouchers would have the same effect...

Kate: most advocates of school choice want there to be a "choice of public schools". The Netherlands employs such a system, for example. Education funding is portable there, in other words -- the money follows the student. In the Netherlands, though, the money can follow the student into either a "public" or a "private" school. I use scare quotes because with the Dutch system, as with any system that approaches true voucherzization (ie., true portability) the bright shining line between government-owned and operated schools and privately owned and operated schools becomes increasingly meaningless. And this is because the state largely confines itself to finance and quality control (licensing) and leaves management to the schools themselves.

You're essentially arguing for is a voucherization or portability system -- but one that doesn't permit schools to participate unless they're owned and operated by the government.

I don't have anything particularly against school vouchers except for the fact that I don't have any interest in paying for someone else's religious education.

I guess I understand your sentiment, but I think it's shortsighted, and based on emotion. If we could dramatically improve the international competiveness of our schools, and produce well-educated students with bright futures, it really wouldn't bother me in the least if some of them also happened to pick up the finer points of Buddhism or Seventh Day Adventism in the bargain. Americans have foolishly allowed their fixation with the concept of church/state separation to emasculate the traditional role of religion in teaching. As long as the government isn't telling me I'm required to use my portable purblic funds to send Jr. to a religious school, I have no objection if that's the option my neighbor chooses.

BC,

I suspect that many of the poor "parents" really do not understand what "The Mission" is; and/or, would not care if they did. In many cases, the schools are dealing with the "children of children" who did not finish their own educations because they got pregnant in their mid-teens and dropped out of school. In some cases, those "parents" may be the "children of children", so there is a history of minimal education, immature "parenting", low expectations, etc.

In many cases, they are also dealing with peer groups which look down upon intelligence, enthusiasm, education and diligence. I'd love to be able to tell you how to break that cycle, but I admit to being "clueless". However, it must be broken, soon.

I think some of the posters above make important points, but perhaps reach the wrong conclusions.

Big advantages that private schools have over public schools are:

- Private schools select who they want, via entrance exams or merely expelling troublemakers. The bottom 10% who don't want to learn and whose parents don't want to be involved probably use 1/2 the time of teachers. By eliminating this, private schools are much more efficient.

- Private schools, in general, are populated by students who have:
a) parents who are concerned enough about their childrens' education to make the financial sacrifice to put them in a more expensive school. One would believe that those willing to make the financial sacrifice would also be involved heavily in the students education.
b) or parents whose income is so great that tuition is trivial. One must admit that on average, intelligent people tend to make more money, and they also tend to have more intelligent offspring. Therefore, a portion of the private school population who lack the 'heavily involved parent' advantage, might have at least some genetic advantage over the general population.

Without these advantages, private schools would not be superior to public schools. If private schools are not inherently superior to private schools, then why support for vouchers?

There is no legitimate concern about the separation of church and state here. As long as people are free to choose what school they want, whether sectarian or not, then it would not be reasonable say the government is somehow pushing a certain religion by offering school vouchers.

The government already subsidizes college education at religiously affiliated colleges like Notre Dame and Georgetown--how is high school or primary school any different? One senses that there are some dogmatic atheists out there whose prejudices against religion blind them to the manifest benefits of allowing competition to thrive in education.

John Stossel has done good work on this, showing how Belgium has essentially a voucher system that has served its young people well. They are doing far better than American kids at less expense. Does anyone really believe that Belgium is in danger of becoming a theocracy, just becuase th kids can choose to go to sectarian schools if they wish?

The comment above by "wallster" states my thoughts perfectly!

Of course there might be a benefit to having free market competition to improve school quality, but the private schools for people with vouchers will never be as good as the private schools for rich people.

wallster,

The other difference is DISCIPLINE. Discipline can help prevent students who might become troublemakers from acting up in the first place. Discipline takes many forms, including: dress codes; silence during moves between classrooms; speaking in class only when spoken to; and, it requires parental acceptance/support.

To this first grader (58 years ago), a "four foot nothing" nun (Catholic female religious, for the really young among us)with a quarter inch thick yardstick resembled a marine drill instructor in all but uniform. The last thing I would ever do is go hame after school and admit to getting in trouble with "sister", because I would get a double dose at home.

Today, discipline is almost impossible in the government schools; as a result, order is also almost impossible in some circumstances. Learning amidst chaos is virtually impossible. Discipline is still possible in private schools, because of the risk of ultimate expulsion.

"Without these advantages, private schools would not be superior to public schools. If private schools are not inherently superior to private schools, then why support for vouchers?"

If only your lengthy compare and contrast were complete.

Can anyone explain why it is routine to find more bureaucrats than Teachers in most, if not all, "Public School" districts?

Excuse me for being sentimental, but How, exactly, did people obtain "education" before the State made itself the provider of first recourse?

Anyone want to remember that State control of "education" comes straight from the Communist Manifesto? Or, does that provide too much cognitive dissonance?

Also, no one wants to mention the difference in results obtained by our competition-laden market for "higher education" and the results of the, competition bare, field of K-12 indoctrination/day care centers?

Ed--

You are assuming that parents--even private school parents--want their children to be disciplined, which I'm afraid is often not the case. My experience with elite private schools is that there is pressure not to be tough with the children, because the parents don't want it for their kids (though maybe for other people's kids), and the school is extremely dependent on the parents for survival and has to please them. You can only expel a certain number of students per year when you're building fancy buildings all the time. Check out Erin O'Connor's discussion at critical mass of her year at a boarding school for her experience. We are all assuming that the majority of parents want what they should want for their children. That is not always true, and if schools are entirely competitive in the future, parent- and kid-pleasing will become a priority. I think anybody who has worked in an extremely elite private school knows this. Of course the students at such schools are also much more capable, for a variety of reasons, but learning can be definitely hampered by the lack of effective will to discipline. This is despite the fact there is incredible pressure on the students to do well; or, to put it more clearly, the students are expected to get good grades and the faculty are expected to provide them with those grades; presumably this grade inflation catches up on the kids in college, but that may be one more reason why the colleges are complaining about all the students that enter their doors, not just the public school educated kids.

I'm not against vouchers, but I think education will only work when children have the will and discipline to seek it, which will only work insofar as being truly educated--not just outwardly successful, i.e., getting good grades--is a priority of parents. It is the priority of many first and second generation immigration parents, and boy can you tell the difference in the classroom. There's no comparison.

Per Lisa's comment above, the mother of one of my colleagues retired a few years ago from teaching high school English in a wealthy Northern NJ district. She says that many of those upper middle and high income parents want their children to do well and to get into good colleges but they don't want the kids to have to work very hard. Another driver of the both grade inflation and the lack of discipline.

"...but I think education will only work when children have the will and discipline to seek it..."

I agree, but the missing element in your list is "opportunity", which for the poor and much of the middle class means vouchers.

I have no experience with "extremely elite" private high schools, in the sense of very fancy and very expensive. My experience is with highly selective, educationally exceptional private schools in which the maintenance of (and, yes, the administration of) discipline was a given. There were no fancy buildings, just real courses with real exams administered by Jesuit priests and scholastics and lay teachers who really cared that we learned, understood and mastered what we were taught. The private high school I attended is located in the "undulating flats of eastern Jersey City, NJ. Not exactly the rolling hills of some idyllic setting. I wish I'd had the opportunity to send my sons to St. Peter's as well.

When I was a freshman, we had a priest in the freshman building who was responsible for discipline. The first of certain infractions resulted in a paddling with a "generic" paddle, combined with the "opportunity" to create your own personal paddle to the priest's specifications, which was then hung on the wall of his office to keep it handy in the case of a second infraction. There were not a lot of second infractions; and, many fewer third infractions. It was my understanding that there was no opportunity to commit a fourth infraction. Father's collection of paddles was sufficiently impressive to this 18 year old freshman that I never had to make my own personal version.

Let me stipulate that my daughter is a student who can get a subject together. She went to an upper class public school system where the students are respectful. She taught honors eighth grade science last year in a different system. A few days ago, she said, 'I am so glad not to be going back to where I will be called "racist." I don't think I could have enjoyed my summer if I planned to go back.' One time she was in the midst of explaining a concept, and a student behind her was talking as loud as she was. On being corrected, the student corrected her with the epithet. Of course the schools are not racist. To achieve that they may subtly encourage all students to be insolent and, of course, disruptive. To put it in terms of miltary strategy, that is the center of gravity of our public schools.

Oops. Make that "14" year old freshman. I shouldn't start typing until my brain is in gear!

"In many cases, they are also dealing with peer groups which look down upon intelligence, enthusiasm, education and diligence."

I absolutely agree. If you look at different groups of people such as Asians, Jews, Cajuns, low income blacks and hispanics, etc., there are tremendous cultural differences in attitudes toward education and the value placed upon it by parents, students, and peers.

I find it particularly frustrating in New Jersey that the State Supreme Court in the Abbott vs Burke decision, requires taxpayers to fund 31 low income districts at the same per student level as wealthy districts with the intention of closing the acheivement gap between rich and poor. I sorry, but it will never happen no matter how much we spend because of the combination of these cultural differences and the disadvantages (chatoic or dysfunctional family life, etc.) the students face once they leave the school environment.

I think we need more people like Bill Cosby to tell low income audiences that, to a large extent, you've met the enemy and it's you! Change your behavior. Two useful pieces of advice might be: finish high school and don't get pregnant until you can afford to support your child(ren).

Of course there might be a benefit to having free market competition to improve school quality, but the private schools for people with vouchers will never be as good as the private schools for rich people.

Why must there be a difference? Why not allow Johnny's family to use their $10,000 voucher toward the tuition at a $16,000 private school? True, coming up with six grand may not be easy, but coming up with sixteen grand might be impossible. And I trust nobody thinks a $10,000 voucher is an unrealistically large amount. Lots of public schools spend considerably in excess of this amount per student. If education monies were truly portable, voucher amounts in our metropolitan areas would often be in the five figures. A number of school districts in my neck of the woods spend close to $20,000 per pupil annually.

I find it particularly frustrating in New Jersey that the State Supreme Court in the Abbott vs Burke decision, requires taxpayers to fund 31 low income districts at the same per student level as wealthy districts with the intention of closing the acheivement gap between rich and poor. I sorry, but it will never happen no matter how much we spend because of the combination of these cultural differences and the disadvantages...

Of course it "will never happen". But that still doesn't mean it's not the right thing to do. Education is a public good; the house values in your neighborhood shouldn't determine how new your text books are whether or not your science labs are up to date.

All proponents of school choice should do as I do and press for equalized funding. Indeed, better yet, fund education at the state level, without regard to property values. If I could waive my magic wand I'd disolve my state's several hundred school districts and make the whole state one big school district. There'd be no need for the balkanization of education that accompanies the existence of myriad school districts if we centralized funding at the state level, allowed the money to follow the students (that is, if we funded students rather than schools), and allowed the management issues currently handled at the school district level to be handled at the most local level of all: that of the individual school.

"I'd disolve my state's several hundred school districts and make the whole state one big school district."

As I understand it, Maryland funds schools at the county level. There are 24 counties and 25 school districts (including one for the city of Baltimore). Perhaps someone could provide some insight as to how their students perform both in comparison to other states that fund at the district level and how much variance in achievement there is within each county, presumably despite roughly equal funding.

I think no matter whether schools are funded at the district, county or state level, vouchers could serve to increase competition which could both lower costs and improve results across the system.

As an aside, the Newark, NJ district, for example, is funded 90% by state funds whereas wealthy districts receive, at most, 10% of their budget from the state with most of the rest coming from local property taxes. Even if we tried to move to complete state funding, there would be nothing to stop wealthy districts from raising additional money privately so they could provide extras beyond what the state paid for.

The bottom line is that throwing ever more money at the same failed system is not the answer. While many people who live in upper income districts are quite satisfied with their schools, education in the inner cities has not produced improved results anywhere near in proportion to the massive funding increases provided in the last 10-20 years. We should make vouchers more widely available in these districts.

Wallster,

Even assuming that you are correct (which I don't)when you say private schools are not better than public, vouchers would still make sense. Most private schools educate their students for far less cost.

As a taxpayer, I'd much rather spend 6 grand on a voucher than spend 15,000 to educate the same kid in the public school. I realize that these numbers are average and not marginal, but on a large scale, the savings are real.

And, the direct savings would ultimately be a trivial portion of the total benefits.

"but the private schools for people with vouchers will never be as good as the private schools for rich people."

That really isn't the question. The question is: can private schools for people with vouchers educate them better than the schools they left?

If I could waive my magic wand I'd disolve my state's several hundred school districts and make the whole state one big school district.

Uhh, can you spell Los Angeles Unified School District? No thanks!

A statewide school district - no way. Eliminate local district taxation and finance education through a statewide school fund, with each school getting paid for the number of children they actually educated. (With exceptions for the kids that truly need special education, of course.) Break up the big city school districts into smaller competing districts. Then, leave it up to local choice whether to maintain local "districts" or to just spin off each school to survive or die on it's own.

The two key points here, though:
1) Bad schools have to die, just like businesses that fail to serve their customers die. That's the biggest problem with the current system - when parents take their kids out of a public school, the incompetent administrators still get most of their funding, without so many kids to make their jobs difficult.
2) Getting funding from above without getting micromanaged from above is always a difficult trick. I'd suggest a state constitutional amendment that limits the role of the state DOE to not much more than counting kids and writing checks, and that allows legislators only to determine how much money is appropriated and requires them to keep their noses entirely out of school management.

I was wondering if anyone would call Mark Hoffer on this one: "Can anyone explain why it is routine to find more bureaucrats than Teachers in most, if not all, "Public School" districts?". No one did. What a complete and utter line of B.S. But of course in a place where so many have a simple black and white belief system of government bad, business good no one would consider thinking critically about such a broad statement.

Public school teachers fear vouchers because the cream of the crop would leave?

That means they are not offering a sufficient education for our best and brightest, whose talent is languishing.

Unacceptable! Crazy! In this fiercely globally competitive world? Our economy lives or dies on the talent of our brightest, the ideas they generate, the businesses that form from them, etc.

Ability sorting! Let's quit pretending everyone is the same. Bring on vouchers and choice and a variety of educational options so each kid can get what is the best education for him/her.

I belong to a faculty union for bargaining purposes, and it's AFT/AFL-CIO, and I retch at the newspapers/magazines they send us that fear vouchers like they're the Black Plague. I fiercely disagree with their position on this and many other issues.

Who says private schools for rich kids would be forced to accept voucher kids? They could elect not to accept vouchers if they wanted. They're private schools.

Kentuckyliz,

Congratulations for your sensible view on vouchers and for independent thinking in the face of your union's propaganda.

I've said before that the main reason, in my view, that teachers unions oppose vouchers is that they consider them a threat to the monopoly power of the union and the livelihood of their members. If they really thought they were offering a solid, cost-effective product that could stand on its own in a competitive world, their reaction to vouchers would probably be more like bring them on instead of nip them in the bud.

Jim S,

Have you seen a copy of your local School District's Budget?

Funny it's not available online, yes?

And, worse yet, if you want a copy, tell me they won't charge you, 25 cents a page, for the priviledge(!).

Btw, simple declaratory rejoinders are hardly sufficient vehicles to carry your "call out".

And, with this: "But of course in a place where so many have a simple black and white belief system of government bad, business good no one would consider thinking critically about such a broad statement." If you are referring to this site, AI, I assure you, you're quite mistaken. These threads are thoroughly populated by many who don't even question the basic premise of: The "Government"'s perturbation of the Marketplace.

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