good? bad? what say you? also, feel free to talk about other alternatives. Lode says terrible terrible idea. i think we can get a good discussion on this going
well, what we have here in fort collins, which seems to work INCREDIBLY WELL is the free enrollment program. you can enroll in ANY school in the district, and they get their money based on the number of students enrolled. basically, what that means is that the schools HAVE TO compete and offer something special to be a magnet for the money they want. what also happens is that the parents become INCREDIBLY involved in their children's school. it's valuable time spent, because you want your kids to get the best education possible, and one way to do that is to make sure they're not spending money on stuff that could and should be spent on supplies and good teachers.
Public schools around here offer a free program also. It works out well because they will offer a bus to pick the students up if there is a certain amount up to 20 miles, I believe? The only problem is...most of the people seem to be lazy and they still send their kids to the shitty highschool we have here in town that is now controlled by the government due to violence and drugs. But, the option is open for students. I almost did it when I moved briefly in high school
School vouchers sap money from the schools which need them most. You're giving tax money to affluent families to send their kids to somewhere where they would be sent anyway. The idea was proposed in the south right after Brown vs the Board of Education, to get white children out of mixed schools. Private shool are under no obligation to accept anyone who applies. That leaves kids with learning disabilities or difficulty in english shoved into a third rate school. Most private schools are religious, and this would also lead to government funding in the way of the seperation clause. So under this system we have public education money earmarked for people who would otherwise be in private schools. We have no accountability to teach children with learning abilities, and we have government funding religious schools. There are also the risks of private institutions raising there rates to the point where vouchers would come nowhere near the means where it's accesible to lower class families. Seeing the price of college educations increase over the last 20 years. Imagine that happening under the voucher program with private institutions.
i can agree with all that Lode - thanks for writing it all down i brought the wrong term up - school vouchers - or misunderstood at first when using it....i'm more or less trying to figure out how to make public schools better. they're pretty terrible around here, unless you get into one of the testing school (latin, latin academy, etc) - some of the high schools are decent...but fall way behind what you can get at a private school. also, i know of 1 program in Boston that takes kids from boston out to a suburb school - but shouldn't all public schools have some sort of competition to make sure they are better? instead of earmarking voucher for kids to private school - shouldn't that money better help accomodate more ways to increase public school ability to do more good than harm?
Often schools are funded mostly through property taxes. This gives most of the money to more affluent school anyway. It's ridiculous here in Texas. The best schools have brand new books every year, great programs, and kids in the black side of town go to schools which afford books which talk about one day harnessing fire, not just being scared back into the cave by it. Pooling the money to some extent, rather then crippling already underfunded school by depribing them of any sort of resources, makes a lot more sense to me.
i was being lured to go live with my friend in the suburb to play soccer for the high school team haha i stayed in boston...if i didn't switch to private school, i probably would have "moved" out there
As I said in the other thread. Privatize all schools and issue government vouchers to parents. That way the parents could choose which school to send their kids to. There will be competition among all schools, plus it would be wonderful to have schools with higher standards that only accept certain students. The dumber kids can learn at their own level, while the smarter kids can learn at their own level. It's a beautiful idea.
I don't understand this concept. Is this concept something like food stamps or the kind of work-for-welfare type vouchers you have in the US of A?
No its not a beautiful idea at all. "dumb kids" are usually not dumb at all. Often times they have not recieved the help at home that other kids have, and of course you have to consider where they are coming from socio-economically. Not to mention, that the "smart kids" (rich kids) have just as much to learn about life by being surrounded by people who are different from them. If we privatize school we are doing a number of negative things for our youth, for our teachers, for our society, and the main result will be widening the gap between the rich and poor in this country, which is the last thing we want to happen (unless of course you are one of the lucky rich ones, and on top of that you have no compassion for your fellow human beings) Did you know that on average, students who come from poverty do NO BETTER in schools that "excell" (upper middle class schools) then they do in these so called "failing schools." So WHY in hells name would we punish the school?? Private schools can deny anyone they want for any reason. IF we made it so they were rewarded for meeting high standards, can you imagine what would happen?? They would take only the brightest and wealthiest students, and of course by and large they would succeed, and then they would be rewarded. And as for your run of the mill public school, especially those in poor areas, they would be punished?? This makes no sense. I dont think public schools suck at all. They could be better no doubt. What sucks is that everything is standardized now. Teachers aren't allowed to find what works best for their students. They have to do everything according to the book, and of course, not everone learns the same way. I think its bullshit. We have a lot of great teachers who cannot help these students as much as they could because of this standardization. Even 10 years ago when I was a kid, it was much different. No child left behind is a horrible mess. Its not competition we need in education...we don't need to make public education is a huge business. We all know that where there is big business there is often big corruption. What we need is to stop funding a dead end war, stop giving tax breaks to the wealthy, and free up some money to help our public schools. They are very underfunded. Kids don't even get to do music anymore...thats a damn shame.
Hmmm... First and foremost, we must understand what makes a school "bad" in the first place. No matter the funding... if you don't have good teachers combined with good parenting, the kids aren't going to reach their true potential. The truth is that with enough effort, most anyone can get to the level of "intellectual"... some faster than others, but capability is simply a measure of will. The problem here is much deeper reaching than can be solved so simply, we need to rethink things from their base - not fix one problem in the face of many. A chain is only as good as its weakest link... right now its about time for a new chain And it starts @ home... gotta stop TV raising the next generation and get more forward thinking ourselves.
Exactly. It does start at home. And its not fair to punish students because they never recieved education from home. Like to be quite honest with you, I feel like I got a great education from my parents which was supplemented by public education. Sure I had some great teachers and learned a lot. But 90 some percent of what I learned, even with regards to purely scholastic material, I learned at home. Some kids don't have that at all, and they should not be punished by it. And if you punish the teachers, and the schools, then you punish the kids.
In retrospect... I can remember thinking... why do I even care about school, the world is so focked right now it doesn't matter - my opinion doesn't and will never matter, whats the point? Perhaps we need to give the next generation something worth working for? School vouchers sound extremely wasteful, they are a costly band-aid as far as I can see - not a solution.
i'm for every parent/child consensus being free to choose whatever school they want to attend, even if its half way arround the world. but i don't believe some mumbo jumbo involving the movement of little green pieces of paper is every going to give anyone that freedom. i don't believe education should even be manditory. but i do believe it ought to be free. and that it takes place between teachers and their students and isn't at that point, the bussiness of chambers of commerce, or even parents. unless the students choose to need and want their perents to defend them or move them to another school. =^^= .../\...
