"Bleeding-Heart Liberal" is a Misnomer

[Ned]

Just to make it clear, a lot of "conservatives" are also racist in their actions even if not in their words. Both liberal and conservatives share this latent racism in the US.

[Kuciwalker]

Vouchers would be redundant where I live - the public school I went to was better than any of the dozen or so private schools in the area

[Adam Smith]

There are two fallacies with Chegitz' argument.

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
For example, if it cost $10,000 to attend Le Snooty School for Rich Boys and Girls, and every family gets a $10,000 voucher, then Le Snooty will raise its rates to $20,000. The parents are still paying the same $10,000 out of pocket they were before, and the school has doubled its revenue.

First, if schools are charging $20K and the education only costs $10K, then it will pay some school to charge something under $20K and capture additional students, so on and so forth, (the famous "race to the bottom" that so many people are fond of appealing to in trade cases), until schools are offering a $10K education for $10k.

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
Meanwhile, the public school has lost all of the money that is now going to the private school in the form of vouchers.

Second, except for very small school systems, the public schools have also lost the expenses that go with those students, so they haven't lost any resources on a per-student basis.

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
How this helps anyone but the owners of the private school is beyond me.

Perhaps Carolyn Hoxby, Professor of Economics at that bastion of reactionary conservatism, Harvard University, can shed some light:

The most frequently asked questions about school choice are: Do public schools respond constructively to competition induced by school choice, by raising their own productivity? Does students’ achievement rise when they attend voucher or charter schools? Do voucher and charter schools end up with a selection of the better students (“cream-skim”)? I review the evidence on these questions from the United States, relying primarily on recent policy experiments. Public schools do respond constructively to competition, by raising their achievement and productivity. The best studies on this question examine the introduction of choice programs that have been sufficiently large and long-lived to produce competition. Students’ achievement generally does rise when they attend voucher or charter schools. The best studies on this question use, as a control group, students who are randomized out of choice programs. Not only do currently enacted voucher and charter school programs not cream-skim; they disproportionately attract students who were performing badly in their regular public schools. This confirms what theory predicts: there are no general results on the sorting consequences of school choice. The sorting consequences of a school choice plan depend strongly on its design.

http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/hoxby/papers/hoxby_2.pdf

edit: formatting

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Adam Smith
First, if schools are charging $20K and the education only costs $10K, then it will pay some school to charge something under $20K and capture additional students, so on and so forth, (the famous "race to the bottom" that so many people are fond of appealing to in trade cases), until schools are offering a $10K education for $10k.

That assumes that the only thing the private school is selling is an education, as opposed to an exclusive reputation, and access. Parents who were sending their kids to the most expensive schools beforehand were likely not doing it because of the quality of the education, though some may have.

Second, except for very small school systems, the public schools have also lost the expenses that go with those students, so they haven't lost any resources on a per-student basis.

Generally speaking, vouchers don't provide a lot of access for students in public schools. The private schools generally aren't begging for students, and more often are turning people away, so the number of students at the public schools isn't likely to decline by much. However, all of the voucher money now going to private schools is being taken away from public schools. In addition, things like physical plant costs aren't going to decline unless the drop in students is so severe that they can close a school or two.

[Jaguar]

Spoiler:

chegitz is still a moron

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Jaguar

Spoiler:

jaguar is a stinky head

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Originally posted by Ned
This certainly would put the upperclass liberals like Clinton in a quandary if they want to send their daughter to an all-white school. They would have to explain why they chose the all-white private school rather than the snooty school down the block with 20% minorities. Simply explaining that they were seeking quality education would not be enough.

You know, this particular obsession with Hillary and "all-white schools" is sad and kind of pathological. I suspect it's more revealing of your psyche than your politics, though revealing of what I'm not sure.

When the Clintons came to Washington, they toyed with the idea of enrolling Chelsea in public school, but rejected it. Quality was certainly one reason. But security was the overriding concern: you're old enough to remember the farce that ensued when Jimmy Carter enrolled Amy in the DC public schools, and I think we can all be thankful we were spared a replay of that.

Instead they enrolled her in a private school, Sidwell Friends -- a school where 38% of the student body is non-white, where 20% of the students attending are on some form of financial aid, and where, this week, a prominent link to its Black Student Union is on the front page of its website.

Go ahead, support vouchers. Go ahead, hate Hillary. But is it really too much to ask that you know what the f*ck you're talking about before you start spouting off?

[Ned]

Herr Rufus, I actually support what you say you support but in fact oppose, integration.

Well bully for Hillary and Sidwell Friends having a large minority student body.

Also, as pointed out above by Adam Smith, competition in education raises its quality and lowers its costs. Public Schools that face no real competition, even if vouchers existed, will always offer inferior education regardless of how much money we throw at them.

As to your socialization argument, this works only if all students attend public schools and race distributions are normalized across a large school district. But since we do not live in a police state (yet), socialization can only work if there are, in fact, no public schools at all and schools that accept public funds are required to balance their student body according to the local demographics.

[Jon Miller]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker
Vouchers would be redundant where I live - the public school I went to was better than any of the dozen or so private schools in the area

Your public school sounds good. And most the ones I heard of in the northern midwest sounded good (Minnesota/North Dakota/etc).

But such was not the case in rural Oregon.

JM
(Oregon is also the place where numerous times in the last decade they have cancelled school due to lack of funds)

[Jon Miller]

In my family:
We were all private schooled when it was relatively easy.. This was in grades 1-3 (we lived near an SDA school). Before 5th grade I was private schooled or homeschooled.

One of my brothers was again sent to a private school at the end of 7th. This was because of trouble he was having (alcohol and drugs), I and the rest of my siblings were not.

Later, the baby of the family was sent to a private boarding academy for the last 3 years of highschool. This really should have been done for my other siblings as well as my highschool was attrocious.

For example:
Less than half my class graduated highschool after 4 years.
Of those that graduated, less than 25% went on to college.
Of those that went to college, only 2? (maybe 1 or 2 more who I hadn't heard of) graduated 4 years later.

And it was getting worse during my time there.

JM

[Ned]

Jon, I think America must have the worst and costliest public schools (on average) in the civilized world. Kids who have to attend these public schools are doomed. If it were not for private education, this country would be doomed.

And yet, the Dems rigidly oppose any reform and offer only idealistic gibberish as to why public schools are necessary and completely hysterical nonsence on the evils of freedom of choice.

[GePap]

The problem with out public school system is that it chaotic, uncentralized, locally funded, and that too mcuh attention is given to "parential" concerns.

Schools nationawide should be centrally (Federally) funded (not from property taxes) and there should be standard curriculums nationwide which would help measure achievement.

Both of these steps would cut huge amounts of superflous and unnecessary management costs.

Curiculums need to be taken out of the hands of untrained locals and put in the hands of trained professionals - at the same time, it should be emphasized that the point of education if imparting knowledge and civic values to future citizens. Children are not "consumers" of education, and the schools should worry about what the kids learn, NOT what parents want them to learn. If parents want to teach kids something, that is what spending time with their kids is for.

[GePap]

As for the difference between private and public charity. Private charity would NEVER be able to minimize poverty to the extent that public endebours do. At the end of the day, you need public action to achieve anything massive and substantial because private interests are too diverse and would hardly be able to do anything on that scale effectively.

[Jaguar]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara

Spoiler:

jaguar is a stinky head

Well played, sir, well played.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Ned
Public Schools that face no real competition, even if vouchers existed, will always offer inferior education regardless of how much money we throw at them.

BS, the school districts with the worst schools are also those with most most "competition," big city schools. School districts with substantially less competition, suburban schools, are often the best.