In the previous essay, I considered some of the arguments in favor of school vouchers. I now continue the discussion. Another set of arguments focus on the choice aspect, that vouchers allow parents to select education that best fits their children and education that will cultivate values. For example, choice proponents claim that vouchers (and similar programs) will enable parents of children with special needs to pick a tailored program not available in public schools. An obvious reply to these arguments is that the main reason public schools lack tailored programs is that they are woefully underfunded. Schools could offer tailored programs if they had the funding—so diverting public money to vouchers makes less sense than funding such programs. To use an analogy, this would be like arguing that public money should be diverted from community rec centers to private gyms because the rec centers lack the variety of equipment possessed by private gyms. If the equipment is critical for the community, then the funding should be used to get that equipment for the rec centers.
A third set of arguments focus on economic efficiency and accountability—the gist of the arguments is that private schools will be more economically efficient and more accountable than public schools and hence they are better. While I will not deny that public schools can be inefficient and lack accountability, I will also not deny that the same is true of private schools. Look at the nightmare of for-profit colleges to see what can go wrong in the private education sector. There is obviously no public sector curse and private sector magic—one can have bad or good in either domain. If a school district is inefficient and not accountable, going private is not an automatic fix—it also leaves all the problems in place in what remains of the public sector. Rather, the solution is to increase efficiency and accountability in the public sector—as has been done with many very good public schools. In the case of for-profit schools, there is always the obvious question about how they can do all that a public school would do for less, yet still make a profit. At the college level, the answer was that they did not.
A final set of arguments focus on how voucher and similar programs improve schools by offering competition. While, as a runner and gamer, I do recognize that the right sorts of competition can result in improvements, this does not seem to apply in education. First, consider the disastrous for-profit colleges. If the competition hypothesis held true, they should have been better than public schools and helped improve them. However, they ended up being vacuums for public money and disasters for their students. Public schools mainly responded by doing what they could to help their victims—I attended various meetings about what to do with classes for students who attended for-profit schools that were not accredited. Second, public schools operate at an incredible disadvantage in the alleged competition. They are more accountable than private schools, they must meet far more requirements than private schools, they are subject to state assessment and grading, they must accept everyone, and their funding is limited. To use an analogy, this would be analogous to arguing that giving places like Disney and Six Flags public money from the state park system would improve the state parks because of the competition. This would obviously not improve the state parks—they are far more limited than the private operations and already have far less funding. If we want better state parks, taking away money would hardly be the way to make that happen. Likewise, taking money from public education is not going to make it better.
In sum, while vouchers are good for some people, they do not benefit public education. The arguments in their favor are problematic, while those against them are strong. As such, vouchers (and similar programs) are a bad idea.
America’s schools are in trouble – but it’s not all about money. In 2014, the US spent an average of $16,268 a year to educate a pupil from primary through tertiary education, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) annual report of education indicators, well above the global average of $10,759.
This was from the Guardian.
WASHINGTON The United States spends more than other developed nations on its students’ education each year, with parents and private foundations picking up more of the costs, an international survey released Tuesday found.
Despite the spending, U.S. students still trail their rivals on international tests.
This was from CBS news.
The problem is not lack of spending.
In some cases it is-spending varies greatly by state and within the state. Well-funded schools generally do well; badly funded schools tend to do worse.
And even if you did give the schools more money, all they would do is hire more administrators…
That is a reasonable worry; administrative bloat is a real problem at public universities and probably at the K-12 level. As a small example, in addition to the traditional role of dean, many schools have added associate and assistant deans. Despite (or perhaps because of) the administrative bloat, more admin tasks are being pushed onto faculty. So, I am managed by far more administrators than when I started and spend at least 25% of my time doing administrative work. I infer that the story is the same elsewhere.
So why are you against school choice? Why not let poor kids go to school in rich neighborhoods?
My main points of opposition against vouchers are:
1. Often takes funding from already struggling public schools, making them worse-thus putting more pressure on people to avoid them, thus resulting in less funding and on into a death spiral.
2. Often used to funnel public money into religious schools linked to churches, thus providing public funding to private religions.
3. Often used to funnel public money into for-profit schools, which is wealthfare.
4. Are often limited programs with high cost per student; so only a relative few students get “choice” and this can come at a high price.
5. Fails to address the basic problem you mention: poor kids want to go the school in rich neighborhoods because schools in poor neighborhoods are generally far worse. Why not improve the poorly funded schools? One would assume that parents want to chose to send their kids to good schools-so why not make public schools better? To use an analogy, if public roads in poor areas are bad because they are not properly funded, the solution is not to build private roads adjacent to the public roads using public money and then giving some poor people vouchers so they can drive the better private roads.
6. Public education is a bedrock of a democracy-as many past conservatives have eloquently argued.
These are all reasons for you to approach the question of whether school vouchers should be issued in any given case with a bias towards a “No” answer.
They are not reasons for opposing a specific scheme.
This, and the previous part, argues with adjectives. If I were defining the categories of fallacy, Argument by Adjective (and Adverb) would hold a lofty place in the hierarchy.
The question before us is: would that ~0.5% of the Florida Education budget earmarked for vouchers be better spent on some specific other part of the Florida budget? After reading these, and looking up some budgets, I have no idea which is the better use of that $130M
We could analyse this question from first principles. One way to ensure fairness, for example, would be to remove all public education, and give every family an education voucher for a defined amount based on the age/class of the child, redeemable only at a set of approved private schools. The DoE would then merely apply standards and examinations, and disburse the cash.
However, we are not currently looking at a radical review – just the question of whether this marginal half-percent would be better spent on public schools or on vouchers.
The points presented in the essay are stock arguments. They need to be given weight by writing values against each one before being used in a specific policy setting.
Addressing this question requires numbers, not adjectives. How many students are expected to receive a voucher? Will the value of these vouchers be equal to the nominal cost of public schooling for that child, or more, or less? What will be required to qualify for a voucher? How many available places are there in private schools in Florida? What standards must a private school meet to be eligible to redeem a voucher? measured how?
Without knowing basic numbers such as these, adjectives (and adverbs) mean nothing.
I’m curious what everybody thinks of this argument against free will:
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/05/how-to-live-without-free-will.html
Since you asked….Sigh…There’s no winning with these sorts of arguments because there’s no objective frame of reference. However you answer, your answer is proof that you lack free will or proof that you have it. Or maybe you have free will and don’t have free will at the same time in a fluid hyper-state range of genders and charms. Beyond casual discussion of it I’m rather suspicious of anyone who thinks that they are smart enough to come to any conclusion. Much like a belief in God. Which for all its faults is somewhat useful to most societies. The popularization of physics, especially quantum physics, has created way too many people with way too much confidence in knowing a subject that, ironically itself, argues for the unknowable. This is likely a result of the concept of God disappearing from the (supposedly) intellectual spheres. Gotta put those let-me-annoy-my-betters thoughts somewhere.
Well back atcha buddy. The lack of self-awareness (God, I hate that term) here is amusing in this context. Putting aside the unknowableness of the conclusion, people who take such a linear true/false approach seem a little out of their element to begin with. It’s almost a troll. Is it? It’s not so much that these are not interesting points, but haven’t we all contemplated this whilst staring at the ceiling watching the fan spin round and round? Of course I haven’t because I have free will and decided I would never waste my time with such foolishness. Or smoke dope. Never smoke dope. You’ll find yourself dragging the existence of Bohm’s interpretation and Bill Wimsatt’s cat into what amounts to little more than solipsistic navel gazing. Which is really all that this is on a God-like, what is the purpose of the universe level. I recommend naval gazing as a much better use of your time.
The most we can get out of this, and what soooo many credentialed “smart” people cannot accept, is that the domain of things that are simply unknowable by man is likely infinite. Which is why freedom succeeds where top-down control fails. Which is all that really matters in this world. Well that and what is six times nine in base 13?
Don’t Panic!
I actually got my head around John Conway’s Free WIll Theorem when it was first published … I think. That cranial distortion has subsided now, but, TJB. if you liked Sabine’s take, do please spend some time on the meatier Conway stuff. He also has lectures on it, which I see are on YouTube.
Thanks, guys. I am more from the “shut up and calculate” school of QM, as are most practicing scientists, and I haven’t given much thought to the philosophical implications of different interpretations of QM.
Sabine is quite amusing in that she is always outspoken and doesn’t do nuance.