Asymmetrical Information

There is a very human delight and need to see every child grow, to be happy, to develop to wondrous achievement.

And that is the parent's responsibility.

I feel public education, compulsory education, is not to nourish the child, but to preserve and grow democracy. And I think this goal is achievable. Every US citizen should be able to read ballots, news, and political statements, to understand budgets and the physics of war and planning for war, to understand laws and the damage crime does to the community and nation. To recognize manipulative speech, to identify the truth behind the stated message, and to make choices in the best interests of individual, community, and nation. To understand the general social culture of the United States, and how local preferences and lifestyles contribute or challenge that culture. To understand how history affects the today's choices, to evaluate threats to communities and nations, and to understand how others are motivated. To understand how an election works, how to effect changes locally and nationally. The roles of those in government, and how to contact them.

My greatest concern about vouchers is that the needy students are most likely to be exploited. And that the needs of the nation, an educated citizenry, will continue to erode in the weakest areas.

I don't agree that trying to target the most resources to the kids in neediest schools should be the objective of public education. Not as the Department of Education currently defines public education. Some of the best successes come at the lowest per-pupil costs, but usually show the most parent and community involvement. Probably the biggest need is to provide every child with a respected (by the child), educated and disciplined adult role model, to motivate and inspire an interest in education.

This claim stopped me in my tracks: "What we want is a system that funnels the most resources to the poorest and neediest kids."

What is the basis for this, what is the end goal? Surely funneling most resources to the poorest and neediest kids is not the end-goal in itself. Presumably this is intended to acheive some other result.

* if the end goal is to increase overall productivity at the maximum rate, which leads to a better lifestyle for everyone, then is this goal reached most effectively by funneling most resources to the poorest/neediest, or by first making sure that the kids who are going to make the biggest difference in increasing productivity are getting what they need to be maximally effective?

* if the end goal is to really help the poorest/neediest kids in terms of increasing their ability and productivity, then the long-term answer is going to come out of "transhumanist" technology. Most of these kids have been unlucky in the gene-pool lottery, and are not going to be particulary productive regardless of how good their education it. The best answers will come from in-vivo gene therapy or nano-technology treatments, human-computer interfacing to very smart computers, etc. These solutions will be available this century, barring a major catastropy. So perhaps the best use of resources is to move these technologies along as quickly as possible.

* if the goal is to help the poorest and neediest kids live more successful, better lives today, then education per se is not the answer, is it? Not that I know what it is, but education doesn't seem like it is going to do it :-)

The problem of the vouchers is that they raise the spending with education and they will make the private schools looks like the public ones.

Public schools in other developed countries are much better than in the US. The problem in the US is the goofy administrative scheme used to run the schools. Other countries administer schools from a national level. The US has 17,000 local school boards. It's an insane system that delivers very poor results.

Shamus,

Because our nationally-administered programs, like the VA, the Army Corps of Engineers, FEMA, the TSA, and others have been such a shining series of cost-effective successes in recent years.

Other countries have different demographics, different cultures, and different administrative systems. It's not sensible to attribute all of the difference to only one factor. Nor is it sensible to make local curricula the concern of Congress.

The problems with the education of children in the United States is largely not the fault of the school system. The problem is the disintegration of the family unit. This is especially obvious in the inner cities. Parents are responsible for ensuring that their children come to school and take the process of education seriously. Without this parental involvement, the schools and teachers are helpless to educate the children.

There is a critical mass of such parental involvement that is required to run a successful school. Once you fall below this level, the school will not even be able to educate those children with responsible parenting. Vouchers have one important advantage over the present system- they allow the responisible parents to concentrate their children into schools that have this required critical mass.

The only other approach I can think of is to expel any student that hasn't learned to read within three grade levels of his age. A harsh remedy, no doubt.

A huge problem with vouchers is that the current, supposedly superior supply of private education is not very elastic.

In a scenario where vouchers were passed out to all children, I believe the two exclusive and very expenseive private schools in my neighborhood would be very happy to raise tuition by the exact amount of the voucher, thereby increasing revenues without changing the student body, as each student would presumably still be willing to reach into their pockets for the same amount that they had pre-voucher to attend these exclusive schools.

Wallster,

Yes, but presumably two new schools will form to take in the same amount as the two private schools do now, except from vouchers. This would be a net gain.

"A huge problem with vouchers is that the current, supposedly superior supply of private education is not very elastic."

Wait, what's the evidence for this? It would be a moderately serious objection if it were true, but what reason is there to think that giving parents a few thousand dollars worth of demand for schooling wouldn't increase the number of schools? Especially if we're not assuming each school needs to be some big brick factory-model building accommodating thousands, or even hundreds, of kids.

How dare those people who paid the big bucks to live in an expensive school district want to protect their money. It's for the children.

Let's eliminate the middle man, and just go steal their money, because we have better uses for it.

Slavery, supposedly, was abolished in this country.

MarkD, no offense, but if your home value depends on inner city kids getting a shitty education and being trapped in poverty, so that your schools look good in comparison, then I could care less about preserving your home value. You need home equity a lot less than some disadvantaged kid needs a chance not to spend his life popping chicken tenders into the deep fry at Popeyes, or worse.

Is it really conceivable that kids in inner city schools could get a worse education even from some awful fly-by-night unit where the books are written in Swahili, than they are currently enjoying right there at PS 82?

Yes, it is conceivable. I'm a well paid lawyer, and I send my kids to an inner city public school in the sense that the word is generally used in, rather than some elite high income program: the student body is probably better than 70% Latino, and around 50% first generation immigrant and low income. And I'm not sending them there out of some sort of deranged martydom -- they and their classmates are getting an excellent education.

There are certainly problems in American public education, but approaching it with the idea that there's nothing for students to lose from change, because nothing could possibly be worse for poor kids than the current status quo is wrong. Things could be worse, and things certainly could be more stratified.

Other countries seem to have no problem managing education at a national level, but perhaps the US government would somehow do a worse than local school boards. Studies of 15 developed nations show the US last in education. The biggest difference between these countries and the US is our peculiar method of managing the educational system. I don't see why local officials need to make decisions about curriculum. It should be possible to come up with some sort of standardized plan that everyone could agree on. Maybe this is problematic because we have such low quality people in our Congress that they would prevent any effort to provide decent education, but 14 out of 15 coutries are able to do this. The gross inefficiency of duplicating management functions 17,000 times would indicate that a huge amount of resources are being wasted.

The remaining 40% is mostly an emotional reaction by homeowners who have managed to snag homes in decent school districts, and are horrified by the thought that their massive investment will suddenly be rendered near-worthless.

But that wouldn't happen, even with a 100% voucher system. In Michigan, many districts, even those in wealthier areas, are 'open enrollment' meaning kids from other districts can enroll (and the state funding -- the equivalent of a public school only voucher -- comes with them). But the impact, though real, hasn't been huge because transportation is a problem, and because many parents don't necessarily want to pull their kids out of their peer groups and send them to school with a bunch of rich-kid strangers whose families they don't know.

Also, I'm sorry to say this, but putting poor (and especially minority) kids into wealthy, high-performing districts doesn't necessarily do much for their achievement. Pick a wealthy community with an excellent school system and a substantial minority population, and you know what you'll find? A very large, persistent 'achievement gap'. Try googling, "Evanston achievement gap" or "Berkeley achievement gap" or Ann Arbor or Madison or Princeton. And these aren't just wealthy, high-achieving communities, they're politically liberal high-achieving communities who invest substantial sums and effort into minority achievement and yet minority performance continues to be poor.

Getting poor, minority kids into well-funded, high-performing schools and districts simply does not have the hoped-for effect.

"In what way could our educational system possibly become more stratified than it already is, short of just pulling poor kids out of school entirely and sending them to work in the coal mines at age six?"

If we did that, at least they'd learn to work. Limited education is something employers can work around if necessary. (Otherwise, we wouldn't have an illegal immigration issue...) Education doesn't mean a thing in the marketplace if you can't both meet the unspoken requirements of the workplace, and buckle down and get to work. Many, many young people trying to enter the work force have somehow grown up unwilling or unable to get out of bed and get to work on time every day, wear clothes that don't offend the customers, and do what they're told when they're told to do it. If they're from middle-class families where adults did get to work on time, etc., the kids eventually get over their shock and start performing, although they may get fired several times first, or flunk a couple of terms at college. (Colleges provide a second chance to develop these habits, for those whose families can pay for it, and also many college degrees provide employers with evidence that the kid actually got that, whether or not any of the courses are of any use on the job.) If they're from welfare families with no good role models among their relatives, there's a pretty good chance they never will be able to hold a job - not even the kind of job that an illiterate immigrant who speaks only a crude gutter version of his native language and knows no English can handle.

Not that all of this is the fault of the public schools. Before they can teach anything else, the kids must learn to arrive on time, shut up and sit down, and pile into the assigned work. Either the schools' attempts to teach these basic behavioral requirements are being lost in the contrary lessons kids learn at home and from their peers, or the kids somehow get the idea that what they do at school has nothing whatsoever to do with what they'll be doing the rest of their lives.

The second group shows one way schools fail middle-class kids; they also fail to challenge the kids with higher abilities (and often even the average kids), prefer political correctness to the truth and fad teaching methods to proven effective methods, and often leave most of the class doing makework while the teacher spends most of her time trying to reach someone that lacks the ability or the will to keep up.

I think the first group, the ones from bad neighborhoods and defective families, are beyond the reach of any school that is just a school. There are a few public schools that actually have succeeded with such kids, but only only were these schools led by principles with rare inspirational talents, but they kept the kids in school for long hours so they could do their homework in a better environment than the home, and imposed strict rules that would have Yuppie parents calling their lawyer. The point is, if the home environment is the problem, the school cannot succeed until it does something about the home environment, but that will probably involve going beyond what a school can or should be able to do to unwilling parents. Such a school needs parents who selected the school and agreed to conditions that you just can't mandate as part of compulsory education, and it probably needs a segregated student body, because white middle-class parents are unlikely to accept this sort of treatment just because some other kids in the school need it. In other words, such a school can succeed as a charter school, it might succeed as a private school if the families that needed it could get vouchers to pay for it, but in a regular public school district it's an anomaly that can't last.

And the kids of poor parents that don't seek out a school that actually works for them better hope that gardener and maid robots remain prohibitively expensive, but it's better to save those that can be saved than to let all the poor kids fail together.

There is an effective instructional system for teaching low-income kids to read and do basic maths - Direct Instruction. See http://www.jefflindsay.com/EducData.shtml, or do a Google search.

Direct Instruction is a carefully researched programme for teaching all sorts of kids. It consists of a scripted set of lessons in which kids are placed according to ability - so some kids start the reading course with instructions to follow with their finger as the teacher reads the words. Other kids start with lessons on how to point if their language comprehension isn't up to that much. Direct Instruction includes all sorts of details, like to teach kids what something means, starts off with examples of what it isn't, varying by characteristic. For example, if you want to teach "red", start off with a picture of, say, a blue ball, and say "Is this red? No." Then replace by a picture of an identical ball, except this one is green and say "Is this red? No." Then replace by a picture of a red ball, and say "Is this red? Yes." Then ask the kids a similar set of questions (maybe not with balls, or with different colours, leading to the red). Feedback is continual, and if the teacher spots kids not getting things right then correction is immediate. Lessons are designed so when a kid encounters say lesson twenty-two they already know everything they need to learn lesson 22 from lessons 1 to 21. Repetition to drive a topic into long-term memory is built in too. There's all sorts of details about presenting information so that kids who started off with very poor language skills can learn it. Teachers sbould be taught Direct Instruction so they don't have to reinvent the wheel individually, and school districts should be structured to support them.

Now kids from one-parent poor families, or kids with low-IQs, may never be able to achieve as much as kids whose parents have holiday homes at Hampton. But schools could be doing a far better job of teaching those kids.

shamus said:

"
Public schools in other developed countries are much better than in the US. The problem in the US is the goofy administrative scheme used to run the schools. Other countries administer schools from a national level.
"

Which other countries would that be? There is more to the world than "the US" and "the rest".

Did you mean the European countries which rate above the US in international comparisons?

Well, some of them do administer schools nationally (France), some don't (in Germany it's a state affair and in some countries, like the affore mentioned Denmark, it's a voucher system).

Because, believe it or not, what voucher advocates want is Denmark's public education system! Literally.

It kills me when people start talking about "other countries federal government does such and so, why can't ours do it as well." Here's the deal most of the countries that have this great central control are 1) a hell of a lot smaller, 2) have fairly homogenous populations. For example here's some comparison numbers.

Sweden pop 9 million, area 411K sqkm
UK pop 61 mill, area 242K sqkm
Switzerland 7.5 million, area 39k sqkm
France 60.8 million, 545k sqkm
Germany 82.4 million, 349k sq km

US pop 298 million, 9.1 MILLION sqkm
CA 33 million, 404k km sq
TX 23 million, 696k sqkm
NY 19 million, 122k sqkm

When you think of European governments think of big states (and sometimes not so big ones). When the entire EU does something (anything) as one unit THEN you can compare apples to apples. Untill then the comparison is either done out of ignorance or dissimulation.

How dare those people who paid the big bucks to live in an expensive school district want to protect their money. It's for the children.

MarkD, you're worried about nothing. The voucher-heads insist that there be no lotteries and schools be able to reject applicants as they wish. So your community can just set up a private school in which only people in your community are accepted.

That's the beauty of the voucher system. The status quo unfairly helps the middle class at the expense of the poor. A voucher system would make sure the middle class and lower class are equally screwed over.

It should be possible to come up with some sort of standardized plan that everyone could agree on.

Having picked my jaw up off the floor, I wonder how much attention you pay to educational politics. Evolution v. creation. Condoms v. abstinence. The "Western Canon" v. modern critical theory. Phonics v. fad-of-the-month in reading. Self esteem v. actual grades.

Little local school boards can't agree on this stuff, what in Heaven's name makes you think "everyone" could?

(I also highly recommend doing a little googling on the mess that is the textbook industry)

And, out of curiosity, what "management functions" are really being duplicated here? School districts will still need managers and oversight. Curricula will still need to be chosen--only now with high-cost Federal debate. You're talking about adding several extra layers of management and creating an brand-new industry of lobbyists. Not to mention further distracting national elections from issues that are actually national.

The first step to any recovery of the school system will require getting the best teachers to teach. It is not enough for people to simply baby-sit in a school 8 hours a day without the ability and effort to actually teaching someone something important (reading springs to mind).

The unions are the biggest effector of this: teachers are paid and retained based on years of experience, not ability, not results. Hence we still have graduates that can't read/write.

Yes there are plenty of other problems (such as students that actually don't want to learn, families that are disintegrating, funding issues and others) but the biggest overall problem from any school system is the teacher. They are the one person that makes (or not) a difference to the students day-in and day-out.

Get a teacher that teaches and sooner or later you'll get students that learn.

the biggest overall problem from any school system is the teacher...
Get a teacher that teaches and sooner or later you'll get students that learn.

Actually, no it isn't, judging by effective schools. The key difference is whether the principal is good or not.

Plus, it's not merely a matter of finding a teacher who teaches, it's a matter of teaching effectively. Read my comment on Direct Instruction above. There is a lot of complexity behind an effective instructional system. Expecting every teacher to get this without having been systematically taught and being systematically supported is setting teachers, and thereby kids, up to fail.

LizardBreath, I'm sure your school is lovely. And I'm sure that if your school wasn't lovely, your children would no longer be in it. Please tell me that you're not comparing a public school in a middle class neighbourhood, chockablock with latinos though it may be, to having your children in a failing school in East New York or the South Bronx? My school would have been inner city in the sense that you seem to be using it, except for not being in the inner city. I went to a predominantly minority school in a very middle class neighbourhood, which gave me a decent idea of just how many light years that kind of experience is from, say, that of the homeless children I used to volunteer with. Are you living in Mott Haven? Because there is no reasonable value of the word "inner city" for which anyone living in Manhattan or the gentrified bits of Brooklyn, can declare themselves to be living in it, or sending their children to school in it, or in any way experiencing life as a member of the underclass.

A large proportion of New York's school children not only don't have a good school near them, they lack what your children have; a right of exit. Those are the kids who leave school illiterate, or barely literate, and unprepared for anything except disaster. For them, it can't get worse, and comparing your childrens' lives to theirs is just silly. Frankly, you're exactly the parent I'm talking about (as were mine); the ones who are comfortable putting their kids in public school precisely because they can cream the best off the top of the school system, leaving the dregs for the kids who most need what your children are getting instead. And then fight vouchers because look! Public schooling can work!

As I said in my prior comment, the student body in the school my kids go to is better than half very low income -- I'm in Manhattan, north of 125 and not in that high income section of Washington Heights between the bridge and Fort Tryon Park. The point about my children's school is that it is available to a bunch of poor kids -- that's most of their classmates.

Because there is no reasonable value of the word "inner city" for which anyone living in Manhattan

You don't get north of 125th much, do you? Washington Heights is anyone's definition of inner-city.

The point is that while there are non-functional schools out there, there are good ones as well, and there are good ones serving poor children. Vouchers are fine, so long as the schools that receive them have to meet standards equivalent to those imposed on public schools -- where that doesn't happen, though, there's real potential for things to get worse than they are now, not better.

For whatever it may be worth, here are my observations after 23 years as a teacher. I have taught 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th grades, taught court ordered parenting classes for adults with children in the juvenile justice system (very angry customers!), vice principal and principal of an elementary school, adjunct faculty at a small college teaching teachers about literacy instruction, reading and math training consultant for schools and now back in a combined 8-9 year olds classroom at an international school in Italy.
The single most significant factor in student achievement is...the teacher. I would like to cite the research, but can't readily do that just now. Nonetheless, no amount of money in the world, canned programs, brand new buildings, textbooks, equipment, etc. etc., can replace the value of an effective teacher.
Effective teachers take responsibility for the outcome of their instruction. They don't blame poor parenting, poverty, language, lack of motivation, lack of funds and on and on. Effective teachers really like to teach. They really like kids. They constantly look for ways to improve their instruction. They stay current on what research says about effective methodology and adjust accordingly.
Ineffective teachers aren't incompetent. Nor do they lack knowledge of subject matter. For example, being a highly proficient mathematician does not automatically make one a highly effective math instructor.
Would more resources help effective teachers do an even better job? Absolutely! The same can't be said for ineffective teachers. Before pouring yet more money into a myriad of schemes, lets try these two things. First, improve the quality of teacher training and professional development. Next, get rid of tenure.

Further to my last: you know what causes those unsightly enclaves of middle-class kids in excellent public schools while the poor kids go to lousy schools a couple of blocks away (this doesn't describe the school my kids go to, but it certainly does exist)? School choice -- the amount of it that exists within the system we have now. Middle class parents with superior access to information and superior wheedling skills find out where the good schools are, and make sure their kids go there -- poor parents know less and are less successful in manipulating the system. This doesn't happen despite a lack of school choice, it happens because of school choice.

That's not a reason to lock everyone down to their neighborhood school, but thinking that increased choice is going to make education less stratified, considering the results of school choice now, seems naive.

LizardBreath, school choice didn't exist when I was in school, and somehow, the middle class parents ended up in the good schools anyway. They had friends in the district, the school board got tired of arguing with them, their lawyer presented reasons why junior could only go to PS 166 and not PS 87, etc.

I do get north of 125th quite a bit; in fact, Washington Heights was exactly the neighbourhood I was thinking about, in terms of white people who lightheartedly imagine that they've moved to the 'hood. Washington Heights is, in fact, pretty much exactly like the neighbourhood I grew up in: an emerging one split between affluent white people in their co-ops, and brown people in the housing projects and cheap tenements that hadn't yet been renovated. (Ten years before I was born, West Side Story was written about the area ten blocks south of the apartment I grew up in.) The affluent and connected middle class people put tremendous energy into the local public schools, getting money for programmes, making sure good teachers stay, fighting when a bad principle comes in, etc. Then they proclaim that public education is terrific . . . yes, more money should go to the schools, but real reform is just a right wing plot!

All the neighbourhoods in New York are better than they used to be, but I'm pretty sure that you wouldn't put your kids in school . . . or indeed, on the street unaccompanied by a security guard . . . in, say, East New York. The local high school there was, last time I looked, in the process of being shut down by the city for, among other things, having less than 5% of its students able to do math at grade level, and something like a 25% graduation rate. Or Mott Haven (not the yuppie bit; the part on the other side of the Bruckner where all the shootings are.) Or Morrisania. Or any of the other areas where everyone is poor, and the kids get whatever hte school system can't use elsewhere.

Here is a strictly anecdotal argument for vouchers based upon my wife's experience as a teacher in an inner city middle school.

Most of the kids want to learn. In fact, the kids in many ways more eager to learn. They are less jaded and cynical, and more sensitive. My wife is a music teacher and she can get students in the inner city to respond to singing and dancing games that would only result in groans and rolled eyes in the suburbs.

But the hard fact of reality is that the bad apples in the inner city are much more disruptive than the bad apples in the suburbs. They make the class atmosphere at best delicate and at worse toxic. There is literally nothing you can do to punish the bad apples. Their home lives are so bad that they don't mind detention - its where their friends are. Their parents don't care if they misbehave or get bad grades, so calling the parents doesn't work.

The single biggest thing you can do to help children in poor districts is to find a way to get the 80% that want to learn away from the 20% that do not. Vouchers would succeed admirably, since private schools can expel the bad apples.

I suppose the left would use these 20% as proof that vouchers will cause some children to be "left behind." But the hard fact is that they are not going anywhere. They have already failed their three grades and are being socially promoted back to age level even though they can't read or write. They are counting down until they can drop out.

There is nothing compassionate about dooming 80% of the children to a second rate education.

Lizardbreath: What happens if no parent wants their kids going to a school? In a public school district, district administration will pick out some kids to be forced to go to that school, so they can keep it open and keep it's funding coming in.

In a free market, a lousy school that fails to improve suffers the same fate as any other business that can't attract customers: it closes, the buildings, books, etc. go up for auction, the (probably incompetent) principal is out of a job, teachers look for jobs at a more competently run school, or look for other work if it appears they were part of the reason the school was so bad. That is, although the process is rather painful, it does get rid of bad management and employees, and re-distribute the resources to organizations that can better use them.

LizardBreath, school choice didn't exist when I was in school, and somehow, the middle class parents ended up in the good schools anyway.

If you can effectively choose which school your kid goes to, that's school choice, and it's existed to some degree in New York throughout my lifetime; and the result of it is, as you said, that better connected and more aware parents end up in better schools, and the system gets more stratified.

All the neighbourhoods in New York are better than they used to be, but I'm pretty sure that you wouldn't put your kids in school . . . or indeed, on the street unaccompanied by a security guard . . . in, say, East New York. The local high school there was, last time I looked, in the process of being shut down by the city for, among other things, having less than 5% of its students able to do math at grade level, and something like a 25% graduation rate. Or Mott Haven (not the yuppie bit; the part on the other side of the Bruckner where all the shootings are.) Or Morrisania. Or any of the other areas where everyone is poor, and the kids get whatever hte school system can't use elsewhere.

Megan, I grew up in New York right about the same time you did (I'm thirty-five, I think you're a little younger, but within a decade.) The Upper West Side was a lot less gentrified then than it is now -- it still wasn't like present-day Washington Heights.

But regardless of whether Washington Heights is the worst neighborhood in the city, which it isn't, it's a neighborhood with poor children, and at least some of them go to good public schools now. If Washington Heights isn't the 'inner city', and the problem you see is limited to the neighborhoods where you wouldn't let your kids on the street without a security guard, what on earth makes you think that private voucher-driven schools in those neighborhoods are going to be any better? The remarkable success of the free market in supplying high-quality grocery stores to those neighborhoods?

I grew up on the Upper Upper West side . . . the border between the safe bits and the not so safe bits. My corner had prostitutes on it until I went to college (though to be fair, I didn't know this); the guatamalan drug dealers frequently shot each other on my block. The SRO's produced scary homeless people and drug addicts to terrorise the neighbours. I was mugged in the girls' bathroom of my public school when I was in third grade. Etc. Etc. I've been to Washington Heights frequently (indeed, I almost moved there); it looks like my neighbourhood did. It has lower crime, of course, but that's not exactly an argument in your favour.

My point is, tough and hardbitten as you are and as the neighborhood you grew up in was, that you've just defined 'inner city' for most people -- if you're limiting 'inner city' to 'neighborhoods that are much scarier than Washington Heights is now or the north end of the Upper West Side just south of Columbia was in the 70s and 80s', you're speaking in code. (I'd still say that residents of Washington Heights are on average poorer and more foreign-born than the UWS was back then -- the gentrified bits are comparable, but there are large areas that aren't gentrified at all).

Further, those neighborhoods that do fit your standard of 'inner city' are not places that are likely to be well served by private schools regardless of the voucher regime -- again, there aren't decent grocery stores in those areas, and the teacher's unions aren't responsible for the lousy produce.

Odd -- my comment isn't showing up. Is this because I included links?

From what I can tell, McArdle thinks that we simply shouldn't have schools in the really bad, unsafe areas, any more than we have a Whole Foods there. Instead, kids in the really bad neighborhoods (the ones where you get mugged in kindergarten instead of 3rd grade, I guess) can travel to get to a safe private school where market-driven teachers would choose to teach. I will say that sectarian schools often will hang on in suboptimal conditions, because they are driven strongly by non-market considerations such as the necessity of charity and self-sacrifice, but I don't want to premise someone's education on willingness to submit to religious indoctrination.

> I don't want to premise someone's education on
> willingness to submit to religious
> indoctrination

Much as I am against indoctrination -- be it religious or ideological -- I can find a lot of much worse things to premise someone's education on (how about surviving in a teenage gang-dominated environment?). Besides, we seem to be perfectly willing to premise the present education of our upper middle class kids on ideological indoctrination unmistakably coming from a political margin.

"and a yearning on some peoples' part for the government to subsidize something that they are already doing."

Government is never "subsidizing" when it gives you your money back instead of taking your money for a service you are not using, but are in fact incurring additional expenses to avoid using the crummy service they offer.

Now, it's a good point that a lot of people in private schools will get money for something they are already paying for. But that is just one of the many problems associated with forcing someone to pay for a service they are not only not using, but spending even more money to they can avoid using your service you are requiring them to pay for at gun point.

I'm with LizBreath on this one - my kids go to an excellent school in the Boston Public School system - but here's the problem - they have to go across the city to go there, there are a very, very limited number of seats and right on the same block there's another BPS school that sux. I had to use all my magical powers to get my kids in that one and now my poor wife has to listen to her friends complain about how they didn't get their choices and now have to send their kids to private/parochial or move out of the city. That there are excellent schools in the big city districts doesn't help the kids that aren't in them and doesn't change the fact that a large percentage of the schools are hell holes, but it doesn't mean that there aren't any good public schools.

My comment isn't showing up, either. Here it is again, without the links. You'll have to Google for the two PDFs mentioned, and I don't recall now exactly what words I used to find them in the first place. (Megan, can you fix your filter? Two links in one comment is hardly excessive.)

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I'm amazed that so few people know that two states, Maine and Vermont, already have education vouchers for some of their citizens, and they apparently work just fine. When I was teaching in Maine four years ago, I was told that the rule was that anyone who lived more than 20 (or was it 25?) miles from the nearest public school could get roughly $5,000 a head from the state to send their children to any non-religious private school. Some of my students' parents had (I was told) intentionally built houses in places that made them eligible to send their kids to "the second-best school in Maine" (that's what they all said), where I taught. I was also told that some towns never got around to building public schools, because they found the private schools perfectly adequate and well worth the money. Fryeburg, Maine, for instance, has K-8 public schools, but sends all their high-schoolers to Fryeburg Academy, which is nearly 300 years old and also serves a few tuition-paying students from over the line in New Hampshire, plus lots of boarding students from the U.S. and abroad.

I may have been misinformed on some of the details, and I may remember them wrong after four years. If you want to know more, a quick Google search shows two PDFs that look useful: the Cato Institute's "Lessons from Maine" and some Maine educators' "An American Tradition in Education: New England Town Academies".

It's not a coincidence that the middle class end up at the good schools. The good schools are defined by where the middle class end up. The important variable isn't the schools, it's the attitudes of the parents. At the limits, the school can not exist at all, and parents who value academic achievement will homeschool.

We have subcultures in this country which don't value academic achievement, and suprise! Their children don't do well in school. The question is, what can we do about this root cause? Will multi-culturalists even permit us to try, or is this a problem we're simply not allowed to notice?

There are several instances of teachers unions' actually supporting more money for experienced teachers in low-income schools. Not every teacher union local is on board with this, but many of the bigger ones are.

Now most teachers unions are going to fight tooth and nail against merit pay based on individual performance, but many are even ok with school based performance results.

I know none of this is perfect, but teachers unions don't play such a negative role as all that.