A more intense topic today - school vouchers.
I was listening to my Cato daily podcasts this morning and one of my backlog from August was one on Race and School Choice. This brought up several things in my mind:
1) Race and Income level - correlated? - the speaker was saying that you could study race where you didn't actually have the race info by looking at income level or at geographic area. This brought up something from when I was in grad school. I took a class on epidemiology, and the instructor (an idiot in my opinion, by the way) said that the National Health Survey where we get 90% of our health knowledge of the country at large did not collect income level. It did collect race. How will we know the effects of income on health without that information? She said that they do it based on race. What? so all blacks and hispanics are poor and all whites are at least middle class? Despite suspecting that this is an inaccurate way of doing this, I was also insulted. I actually said this in class and asked her: Wouldn't you feel insulted if you were black or hispanic? She didn't really have a comeback.
2) School choice -I am against this. but I am actually for distributing the property tax over a larger area - for instance the entire state and then each school getting a designated amount for each student. Having grown up in a suburb of Chicago I have seen the disparity between schools in different districts first hand.
3) The harm in school choice - If Illinois had school vouchers when I was in high school I suspect my mother would have used them as our high school was not good at all (of the 300 seniors entering senior year, only 190 graduated). We only had 1 AP class. My ACT score of 31 (not that high people) was the highest the school had seen since they changed the scoring system. But, if she and all the other AP Calculus parents did use it they would have left the public high school in a worse spot. The school would have lost the need to offer those more challenging classes which, while primarily populated with the same 20 kids, did offer an opportunity to other kids to take advanced classes in a subject they were good at. Also, the teachers didn't stick around long anyhow at our school, but imagine that they didn't even have an honors class to teach each day. I figure we would have lost more good teachers earlier.
4) Also, where would I have gone? You have to pick a private school, right? You can't choose to go to the Winnetka high school up in the well to do suburb. The private options were all 30 minutes away and Catholic. There wasn't a secular option. So, I would have needed a ride every day to and from.
5) I don't know what the percent is, but it seems that a very high percentage of the private school options are religion based. Could that be the source of the pressure for vouchers? They try to say it is the lack of quality in our schools, but sending kids somewhere else isn't the way to increase that quality, it will just eventually leave the public schools crappier.
6) the anger over out of district kids. Tven as crappy as my high school was, it was still better than the Chicago public schools on the southside. Therefore, there were many kids who "stayed with" relatives in our district so they could attend our school. This puts a burden on the school because they aren't collecting more property taxes for these students. My school had a staff member who actively investigated kids and booted out the out of district ones. My uncle who works as a teacher in a nearby high school gets very worked up about keeping the out of district kids out of his school. It has never occured to him to work to make the schools where those kids live better so they don't want/need to leave.
In conclusion - let's spend our money in a wider community model, accepting that the quality of the schools everywhere affects our community as well.
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In general, I say "Amen, sistah." I feel like people who are extremely anti-public schools should just bite the bullet and homeschool instead of continuing to mess with the public school system with vouchers, etc. However, in my ever-contradictory merit-based liberalism, I will say that there is something to the argument that one of our (ever-dwindling) freedoms in this country is to choose where we live based on things we like and dislike about the community, with one valid criteria being the relative strengths and weaknesses of the local school system. This is partially why I'm against No Child Left Behind - more in practice than theory, but that's another conversation. If one community values a certain sport over another, or drama over sports, or dance over music, or certain culture- or place-based academic strengths over others (e.g. a focus on marine biology topics in science classes in California vs. foresty topics here), then I'm all for the school having the power to do that. Schools are one of the few places modern Americans actually engage in public institutions, so some measure of autonomy/differentation in local school districts is essential to maintaining this engagement. However, as with everything else in society, I believe that we have a fundamental moral responsibility to give everyone an even starting line - decent food and housing, basic healthcare, and, yes, an education that can make people capable of functioning in society and seeking further education and job skills if desired. After that, what you do with yourself is based on your smarts and merit (there's the 'go-go capitalism' part of my politics). Unfortunately, we're failing miserably at providing that level playing field in education, as your experience clearly demonstrates. Until we can get to that basic acceptable level of education for all students, I agree that we need to share the wealth for the common good, including the end of school choice and vouchers for the time being. (I can hear my father muttering "freaking communist" right now. And everyone else muttering "control your comment length, please". Fair enough on both counts :)
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