8 ms·

The voucher scam: Are we too mathematically illiterate to notice

81 points by TimPC 5y ago

sokoloff 5y ago
> such smaller vouchers would not be an equitable program as they would need to be topped up with additional funds in order to offer the full cost of admission to a number of lower cost private schools. If a smaller, constant-amount voucher is “not equitable”, is a $0 voucher more equitable somehow?
- TimPC 5y ago
  I think the trade off being evaluated is the damage to the public system against the benefit of choice that a voucher provides. $0 vouchers minimize damage to the system which is fairer to low-income individuals compared to vouchers that are too small for them to afford using.
  - _aavaa_ 5y ago
    What about the middle income students for who the vouchers would be enough the make the difference?
    - TimPC 5y ago
      There is a potential benefit to them for having smaller vouchers. But such a program would need to be framed as such and the merits of that program would need to be debated. Current voucher programs use the artificially inflated size of the voucher to argue that low-income students are the prime beneficiaries. My sneaking suspicion is that a program designed predominantly for middle income individuals at the expense of low income ones wouldn’t have the broad base of support necessary to become policy.
      - sokoloff 5y ago
        If you put together a program that credibly promised to save local taxpayers money by providing small vouchers, I think you might be surprised at the pretty broad support it would garner.
        TimPC 5y ago
        You’d have to have evidence that the small vouchers changed behaviour enough that the uptick in private school enrolment gave enough reduced costs to the system to pay for the small vouchers for all the people who are already in private schools without any vouchers. I’m skeptical that small amounts of money will change behaviour enough to do this.
        sokoloff 5y ago
        You'd have to convince voters this would save them money. Having evidence that small vouchers changed behavior enough is only one way to do that (and is probably the least likely path).
        TimPC 5y ago
        I think the coalition of private school voters is incredibly small relative to public school ones. There is a much larger block of voters to oppose measures that cost the system money than there is to support measures that save private school users money. I think you do have to convince public school users they will save money to have the votes. Public school users only save money by the behaviour change I posited.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    If the typical private school admitted student costs a district $6000 while the average student costs $9000, it seems like a $3000 voucher helps the public school funding situation rather than harming it, while simultaneously allowing some middle-class families to elect private school who couldn’t pay the full amount.
    - TimPC 5y ago
      This is an interesting point of debate. The question is whether the $3000 saved on the new students electing for private schools is larger or smaller than the cost of providing the $3000 benefit to all individuals already in private schools. My suspicion is $3000 is a small enough benefit that it doesn’t more than double private school enrolment.
TimPC 5y ago
I wanted to post this essay to HN because I think the specific mechanism of how averages hide highs and lows is of interest to a technology community. Vouchers are one instance of this problem but I am confident there are many others hiding in plain sight.
- fundad 5y ago
  Thanks. Math illiteracy aside, the effort to privatize public schools is as old as integration. They’re not tricking people aside from decades of attacks against all social services except policing.
- sharemywin 5y ago
  I'm sure the medical system works the same way. In general, it's using averages and then being able to filter out people. Investors work that way too. Let the entrepreneur take the largest risk upfront and then pluck the highest things likely to succeed.
  - TimPC 5y ago
    I’d love to hear which aspects of the medical system you think work this way. I’m looking for other examples to write the broader essay on understanding averages but I’m not completely sure which particular issue you mean here.
    - _aavaa_ 5y ago
      Medical insurance is the obvious example that comes to mind. If everyone is forced the pay for medical insurance (e.g. everyone is taxed for it), then the net results is the same, the healthy people subsidise those the sick. Which is why in countries where medical care is not guaranteed through taxes (e.g. USA) insurance companies try to find out about any pre-existing conditions before they give you a rate; they try to figure out if you're in the healthy group which would otherwise be subsidizing the sick people, or you are one of those sick people. I say that without any value judgements one way or the other. The same is true with other forms of insurance. See broadly Adverse Selection, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_selection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_selection.
throwmyway99 5y ago
I think it would be interesting to make the ammount the school receives for the student inversely proportional to their placement in the admission.
- tangjurine 5y ago
  Yeah, have the school calculate the average cost for a student in x grade with y test scores and z conditions, and send them off with a voucher of that cost.
mrguyorama 5y ago
The real scam with private school vouchers is making tax-payers foot the bill to send your child to a "private school" that isn't, like what often happens in Florida, or worse, to a "school" that is really just a religious indoctrination tool. You shouldn't be allowed to take money from the public coffers because you want your child to only think things like evolution are not settled science or "just a theory".
- TimPC 5y ago
  I have sympathy for kids whose parents are awful but we will have to disagree on what the real scam is. I think the inherent cost disease and misleading nature of current voucher programs is far more pernicious than the fact that some users of vouchers end up in awful schools due to a poorly made choice. Many kids don’t even get a choice to leave while it’s pretty clear the current cost structure subsidizes the kids who do leave in rather unfair ways.
- _aavaa_ 5y ago
  Putting aside discussion of where the child is sent. The "money from the public coffers" didn't appear there out of thin air. The argument with school vouchers is that the money there belongs to the parents because it came from the parents as part of taxation.
  - TimPC 5y ago
    If we take that argument to the extreme then people without kids shouldn’t pay school taxes at all. Fundamentally I don’t think that is how the system should work. There is something unfair about parents paying once through taxation and again through tuition but I think there is a reasonable case to be made that that is a lesser evil than programs that damage public education.
    - vba616 5y ago
      >If we take that argument to the extreme then people without kids shouldn’t pay school taxes at all I don't see that as an argument or related. That is, it's obviously wrong, but doesn't reflect on the other thing, I don't think. People already got the benefit of schooling, whether or not they have kids, so it's just a matter of paying it back through taxes.
opwieurposiu 5y ago
The USA has the highest spending per student in OCED but we do not have the highest test scores. When increasing funding does not improve results, funding is not the issue. At a more basic level, school has a big issue with consent. We force kids to attend at the barrel of gun, we force adults to pay for it at the barrel of a gun. How bout we chill with all this non-consensual educational activity. If you have to force someone to use/pay for your product you are not adding value.
- TimPC 5y ago
  Education is a fundamental human right. It needs to be provided to all, including those who can’t afford to pay for it. I view providing it as more important than maintaining some abstract right to non-taxation. Plenty of systems that are suboptimal can still nonetheless add value and I think public education is one of those. On the funding point, for elementary and high school education the US has a rather poor funding record. It’s only when you include the costs of providing university education that the US is the most expensive. Many US states spend half of what Ontario does on K-12 education and Ontario has a much higher educational attainment.
  - opwieurposiu 5y ago
    Compulsory schooling is just involuntary servitude for kids. "Go to this place and preform this labor or else agents of the state will hurt you until you comply." Sorry not ok. There is merit in the idea of cost sharing for the kids who are in school by their own volition, but as long a coercion is involved any benefits are outweighed by the moral injuries.
    - toivo 5y ago
      Children cannot be expected to make responsible decisions. Kids might not understand properly why they are being taught basic math, but it'll most certainly be helpful to them in the future, anyway. It's the same as a parent, you're not going to allow children to drink alcohol or smoke either.
    - 5y ago
nkurz 5y ago
1) The town where I live in Vermont does not have a high school, and instead offers a voucher that pays for high school students to attend elsewhere. This can be at another public school, either in Vermont or in nearby Massachusetts. Or it can be used (possibly as partial payment) to a private school. It's expensive, at about $16,000 per student, but overall seems like a better use of funds than trying to run a full high school for a handful of students, and probably provides a better education as well. I don't know how they deal with special needs students who would have costs higher than this. More details about the program here: https://www.edchoice.org/school-choice/programs/vermont-town-tuitioning-program/ https://www.edchoice.org/school-choice/programs/vermont-town... 2) When you are calculating the costs per student for the purpose of valuing vouchers, I'd guess you need to include the students who are are being homeschooled or are currently attending private schools without vouchers as part of the denominator. Presumably the vouchers wouldn't be restricted to only the students who are switching, but instead would be given to all? Since about 10% of students are currently private schooled (I presume homeschooling is much lower?), this would reduce the "fair" value of the voucher by another 10% or so if you were trying to keep it cost neutral.
- TimPC 5y ago
  I agree vouchers may make sense in small towns where it’s not cost effective to have an education system at all. I think the town is relying on it’s smallness to avoid costs relating to special needs though and will run into substantial challenges the moment it tries to give a $16,000 voucher to a student that costs far more to educate. On 2) I agree that my calculations are simplified in the article and further reductions are necessary for cost neutrality.
  - jonnydubowsky 5y ago
    Thanks for writing this. You motivated me to go digging for any studies that have evaluated the outcomes of these voucher programs. Looks like there are dozens of studies that showcase just how bad these programs can be. This study by American Progress supports your thesis. American Progress is a left-of-center alternative to the right-leaning Heritage Foundation. I haven't finished looking for the right wing think tank's studies, but I'll share anything of particular interest when I do. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/highly-negative-impacts-vouchers/ https://www.americanprogress.org/article/highly-negative-imp... "This analysis builds on a large body of voucher program evaluations in Louisiana, Indiana, Ohio, and Washington, D.C., all of which show that students attending participating private schools perform significantly worse than their peers in public schools—especially in math"
wave_function 5y ago
This seems to be the same concept as “the market for lemons” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons Parents of low-cost students can send their kids to the “high information market” (the schools that can reject high-cost students). Parents of high-cost students have to send their kids to the “low-information market” (the public school that can’t reject high-cost students). Any school that can reject high-cost students can make themselves more attractive to low-cost students, which then feeds on itself, as the “low-information” school ends up with more and more high-cost students. In this case, both schools have the same information, it’s just that one school isn’t allowed to act on it.
- TimPC 5y ago
  There are similarities undoubtedly. I think the major difference is the source of the distorted subsidy. In the market for lemons bad cars are subsidized by people thinking they might be good ones. In the voucher system low cost students are handed a massive subsidy by government pretending they have average cost. I think the voucher market is more dangerous since government ends up on the hook for all the increased costs of education because of the artificial subsidy.
kjellsbells 5y ago
Im not qualified to judge the voucher program, but if the value of the voucher was cakculated as the median and not the arithmetic mean, would that reduce the scam that the article claims?
- TimPC 5y ago
  This would certainly help as the majority of low cost kids would have cost similar to the 50th percentile. I think this isn’t a general fix though and only works in this case because of the nature of the data distribution.
tdba 5y ago
You're arguing against a straw man: most existing voucher programs are means-tested already (ie. only available to your "high cost" students) which negates your argument that the low cost students will use vouchers leave the system. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_voucher https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_voucher
- TimPC 5y ago
  Means tested doesn’t mean only available to high cost students. Means tested means available only to certain income demographics. A high cost student in the essay is someone who costs more to educate for instance a special needs student who requires a full time assistant.
  - hnburnsy 5y ago
    Most vouchers are variable based on what the school would get, not a flat amount. Example in Arizona most (>50%) of vouchers are used by disabled children and can top $40000. Did you know that many schools out source highly disabled kids to specialized school, in essence running their own voucher system?
    - TimPC 5y ago
      While some vouchers are based on this data shared elsewhere in this thread indicated that most are not. Outsourcing disabled kids to a specialized school has a number of disadvantages and is not a program I would broadly support. I think the most notable is that it reduces the interaction of the typical student populace with disabled students causing them to be less aware of the challenges and issues they may face. A lot of education is exposure to different peoples and perspectives. I had a disabled child in one of my classes at a young age and think that experience helped develop my empathy for people who had a different experience of life than my own. If the benefits to disabled students are sufficiently large they may outweigh the gains to the broader student body but designing systems to be insular rather than reflective is something that should be done with an abundance of caution.
hnburnsy 5y ago
Many states have variable funding for students based on SES, grade level, and disability and in many states with vouchers, the voucher is some percentage of what the local school would get, not a flat amount... https://www.ncsl.org/research/education/voucher-law-comparison.aspx https://www.ncsl.org/research/education/voucher-law-comparis...
- TimPC 5y ago
  Thanks for sharing this it’s helpful. A quick look shows that in most states the % of what the local school would get is high. It’s still fundamentally a program that makes a lot of assumptions that low cost students cost more than they actually do. I’m glad to see additional funds for special needs kids but the distribution seems flatter than reality. The kids with a special needs assistant aren’t getting the full cost of that assistant more on the voucher and the kids without a special needs assistant are getting some portion of the cost of providing for special needs kids in theirs.
  - hnburnsy 5y ago
    So your argument and basis for calling vouchers a Scam is because the dollar amount for the voucher is not granular enough? Maybe the dollar allocation could be better, but it doesn't make vouchers a scam. If you'd like more confirmation in your beliefs may I direct you here... https://dianeravitch.net/ https://dianeravitch.net/ IMO, vouchers have a place in school choice and I would prefer that they are used to give disabled, disadvantaged, and hard to educate children more options. I am a bigger fan of open enrollment and charter schools as zip code\housing affordability should not dictate a child's educational destiny.
    - TimPC 5y ago
      Yes. Vouchers are a scam if the dollar amount is insufficiently granular in ways that benefit those taking them at the expense of those who don’t. Most voucher programs aren’t targeting or benefiting any of the groups you highlight as the granularity of the funds is biased against them. I’m personally against open enrolment as I think it creates a prisoner’s dilemma race to the bottom where districts worsen their education system to provide tax relief knowing their students can enrol in neighbouring systems. Of course if the neighbouring systems follow their incentives to do the same the net result is a gutting of the education system. I emphasize with the idea of providing more broader access to good systems I just think the mechanism to do so has to protect the incentives to make the systems good.
pridkett 5y ago
This is a good observation that I wish that more people understood around schooling and funding for the public good. I live in a small town with about 1000 children total in grades Pre-K through 12. Schools are funded through local property taxes, which almost entirely fall on home owners and renters. Every year we need to vote on the town budget which inevitably tweaks our taxes a little bit up or down. A few years ago our town approved a budget and then held another budget referendum about two months later. That’s not completely unheard of - we’ve needed it after natural disasters or other unexpected costs in the past - but what was weird is that taxes were going down in the proposed new budget. The cause was a single student who had moved out of the town that was costing the town more than $225,000/yr for special needs education. In the end, my taxes went down by a little over $100/yr as a result of the change which was strictly for a single student. All this goes to show that not only are vouchers a racket, because for the most part the private schools are getting more than it takes to educate an average student, they’re also a racket because students with additional needs don’t get enough funding for the private schools to take them. Further starving the system.
- zamadatix 5y ago
  I'm not pro-voucher but I think it's a bit unfair to compare case based public funding to flat value voucher funding and declare all voucher funding is a racket based on that comparison. There is no reason vouchers couldn't also have value based on how much the student costs, in fact some voucher systems work exactly this way. All that is to say: this is an example of why _flat rate_ vouchers don't make sense.
  - TimPC 5y ago
    I agree this is a case for why what you call flat rate vouchers don't make sense. But what you call flat rate vouchers is also the predominant program of vouchers being advocated for in most policy. When the mainstream discussion moves on to better programs of vouchers I'm happy to discuss the separate merits of those programs. As long as people are advocating for stealing money from vulnerable groups I think that is the most important issue with these programs that needs to be highlighted.
  - 5y ago
julienfr112 5y ago
We have the same thing in France with competition between public funded hospitals and private one ( called clinique). Just replace student with surgery...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
spacemanmatt 5y ago
Short version: We should be tar and feathering politicians who perpetrate these scams on our uncomplicated population.
- fundad 5y ago
  Exactly. No privatization policy happens by accident, it’s the country people want.
helpfulclippy 5y ago
As a parent of a public school kid, I am deeply frustrated by the overburdened mission scope of the school system. Schools must be a social welfare program, a babysitting service, and an educational system -- my impression from my own kids' journey through the system is that the priorities go in that order. When the essay talked about "high cost" students, my first thought was special ed. In my district, the 2021-22 budget allocates about $71M and 513 FTEs to serve 10,475 special ed students. Or, about $6778/yr and 2 hours per week per student. I've aggregated that across several categories -- in the most expensive of those, the per-student cost is $21,351/yr and 7.9 hours/week., which is over triple the average cost of an average student. This may sound shocking, but these kids have special needs, and those needs require resources to be met. Now let's look at a "low cost" special need: kids whose academic performance is very strong. In my district, the principal way that these kids are served are through the "Talented and Gifted" program (TAG). This program is nearly unfunded. The district has an annual budget of roughly $1b/yr., and serves nearly 40,000 students across over 50 schools. About 6,333 of those students are in TAG. The program has a total budget of roughly $387k/yr., or about $61/student/yr. It has 0.8 FTEs allocated -- that is to say, the budget allocates 32 hours a week of labor to serve the entire district's TAG K-12 needs, or about 18 seconds per week per TAG student. "TAG" kids are successful but they still have needs. They need extra attention from teachers and mentors. They need the opportunity to work on challenging coursework, focused on their areas of talent and interest. They need to be able to work with peers who can keep a similar pace. All of that costs a lot more than $61/yr. and needs more than 18 seconds/week of someone's time, but that's presently what they get. And I think that's because these kids look like they're doing great -- they get good grades, they're less likely to be on drugs or involved in gangs, and their attendance is usually solid. But that viewpoint only considers these kids in terms of the needs of the school and society at large, rather than their own need to be stimulated and cultivated and to have so much of their childhood spent wisely. Because nothing immediately blows up when those needs are unmet, nothing is spent to meet them, and the money goes towards the squeaky wheels. So when the linked essay talks about "low cost" students, I think it fails to address that they actually have high cost needs that are going unpaid. As a result, their parents have to shoulder the extra cost themselves by either paying out of pocket for a private school, or taking the time (and career sacrifice) to home school. That's exactly the kind of burden social programs like public education are supposed to avoid! Many families simply can't afford this or are unable to do this due to other barriers, and so their kids' needs simply go unserved. To be clear, there are many possible solutions here, of which the status quo and vouchers are just two. I don't think they're even the best options. But I also don't think advocates of either are dishonest. I don't think parents are running a scam when they advocate for their kids to receive just as much support as anyone else's. I don't think it's dishonest for them to want access to schools that specialize in their kids' needs, and I don't think it's unfair for those schools to reject students whose needs are very different.
draw_down 5y ago
ALittleLight 5y ago
Why not issue additional vouchers for students with special needs?

81 points by TimPC 5y ago

> such smaller vouchers would not be an equitable program as they would need to be topped up with additional funds in order to offer the full cost of admission to a number of lower cost private schools. If a smaller, constant-amount voucher is “not equitable”, is a $0 voucher more equitable somehow?

TimPC 5y ago
I think the trade off being evaluated is the damage to the public system against the benefit of choice that a voucher provides. $0 vouchers minimize damage to the system which is fairer to low-income individuals compared to vouchers that are too small for them to afford using.
- _aavaa_ 5y ago
  What about the middle income students for who the vouchers would be enough the make the difference?
  - TimPC 5y ago
    There is a potential benefit to them for having smaller vouchers. But such a program would need to be framed as such and the merits of that program would need to be debated. Current voucher programs use the artificially inflated size of the voucher to argue that low-income students are the prime beneficiaries. My sneaking suspicion is that a program designed predominantly for middle income individuals at the expense of low income ones wouldn’t have the broad base of support necessary to become policy.
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      If you put together a program that credibly promised to save local taxpayers money by providing small vouchers, I think you might be surprised at the pretty broad support it would garner.
      - TimPC 5y ago
        You’d have to have evidence that the small vouchers changed behaviour enough that the uptick in private school enrolment gave enough reduced costs to the system to pay for the small vouchers for all the people who are already in private schools without any vouchers. I’m skeptical that small amounts of money will change behaviour enough to do this.
        sokoloff 5y ago
        You'd have to convince voters this would save them money. Having evidence that small vouchers changed behavior enough is only one way to do that (and is probably the least likely path).
        TimPC 5y ago
        I think the coalition of private school voters is incredibly small relative to public school ones. There is a much larger block of voters to oppose measures that cost the system money than there is to support measures that save private school users money. I think you do have to convince public school users they will save money to have the votes. Public school users only save money by the behaviour change I posited.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  If the typical private school admitted student costs a district $6000 while the average student costs $9000, it seems like a $3000 voucher helps the public school funding situation rather than harming it, while simultaneously allowing some middle-class families to elect private school who couldn’t pay the full amount.
  - TimPC 5y ago
    This is an interesting point of debate. The question is whether the $3000 saved on the new students electing for private schools is larger or smaller than the cost of providing the $3000 benefit to all individuals already in private schools. My suspicion is $3000 is a small enough benefit that it doesn’t more than double private school enrolment.

TimPC 5y ago

I wanted to post this essay to HN because I think the specific mechanism of how averages hide highs and lows is of interest to a technology community. Vouchers are one instance of this problem but I am confident there are many others hiding in plain sight.

fundad 5y ago
Thanks. Math illiteracy aside, the effort to privatize public schools is as old as integration. They’re not tricking people aside from decades of attacks against all social services except policing.
sharemywin 5y ago
I'm sure the medical system works the same way. In general, it's using averages and then being able to filter out people. Investors work that way too. Let the entrepreneur take the largest risk upfront and then pluck the highest things likely to succeed.
- TimPC 5y ago
  I’d love to hear which aspects of the medical system you think work this way. I’m looking for other examples to write the broader essay on understanding averages but I’m not completely sure which particular issue you mean here.
  - _aavaa_ 5y ago
    Medical insurance is the obvious example that comes to mind. If everyone is forced the pay for medical insurance (e.g. everyone is taxed for it), then the net results is the same, the healthy people subsidise those the sick. Which is why in countries where medical care is not guaranteed through taxes (e.g. USA) insurance companies try to find out about any pre-existing conditions before they give you a rate; they try to figure out if you're in the healthy group which would otherwise be subsidizing the sick people, or you are one of those sick people. I say that without any value judgements one way or the other. The same is true with other forms of insurance. See broadly Adverse Selection, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_selection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_selection.

throwmyway99 5y ago

I think it would be interesting to make the ammount the school receives for the student inversely proportional to their placement in the admission.

tangjurine 5y ago
Yeah, have the school calculate the average cost for a student in x grade with y test scores and z conditions, and send them off with a voucher of that cost.

mrguyorama 5y ago

The real scam with private school vouchers is making tax-payers foot the bill to send your child to a "private school" that isn't, like what often happens in Florida, or worse, to a "school" that is really just a religious indoctrination tool. You shouldn't be allowed to take money from the public coffers because you want your child to only think things like evolution are not settled science or "just a theory".

TimPC 5y ago
I have sympathy for kids whose parents are awful but we will have to disagree on what the real scam is. I think the inherent cost disease and misleading nature of current voucher programs is far more pernicious than the fact that some users of vouchers end up in awful schools due to a poorly made choice. Many kids don’t even get a choice to leave while it’s pretty clear the current cost structure subsidizes the kids who do leave in rather unfair ways.
_aavaa_ 5y ago
Putting aside discussion of where the child is sent. The "money from the public coffers" didn't appear there out of thin air. The argument with school vouchers is that the money there belongs to the parents because it came from the parents as part of taxation.
- TimPC 5y ago
  If we take that argument to the extreme then people without kids shouldn’t pay school taxes at all. Fundamentally I don’t think that is how the system should work. There is something unfair about parents paying once through taxation and again through tuition but I think there is a reasonable case to be made that that is a lesser evil than programs that damage public education.
  - vba616 5y ago
    >If we take that argument to the extreme then people without kids shouldn’t pay school taxes at all I don't see that as an argument or related. That is, it's obviously wrong, but doesn't reflect on the other thing, I don't think. People already got the benefit of schooling, whether or not they have kids, so it's just a matter of paying it back through taxes.

opwieurposiu 5y ago

The USA has the highest spending per student in OCED but we do not have the highest test scores. When increasing funding does not improve results, funding is not the issue. At a more basic level, school has a big issue with consent. We force kids to attend at the barrel of gun, we force adults to pay for it at the barrel of a gun. How bout we chill with all this non-consensual educational activity. If you have to force someone to use/pay for your product you are not adding value.

TimPC 5y ago
Education is a fundamental human right. It needs to be provided to all, including those who can’t afford to pay for it. I view providing it as more important than maintaining some abstract right to non-taxation. Plenty of systems that are suboptimal can still nonetheless add value and I think public education is one of those. On the funding point, for elementary and high school education the US has a rather poor funding record. It’s only when you include the costs of providing university education that the US is the most expensive. Many US states spend half of what Ontario does on K-12 education and Ontario has a much higher educational attainment.
- opwieurposiu 5y ago
  Compulsory schooling is just involuntary servitude for kids. "Go to this place and preform this labor or else agents of the state will hurt you until you comply." Sorry not ok. There is merit in the idea of cost sharing for the kids who are in school by their own volition, but as long a coercion is involved any benefits are outweighed by the moral injuries.
  - toivo 5y ago
    Children cannot be expected to make responsible decisions. Kids might not understand properly why they are being taught basic math, but it'll most certainly be helpful to them in the future, anyway. It's the same as a parent, you're not going to allow children to drink alcohol or smoke either.
  - 5y ago

nkurz 5y ago

1) The town where I live in Vermont does not have a high school, and instead offers a voucher that pays for high school students to attend elsewhere. This can be at another public school, either in Vermont or in nearby Massachusetts. Or it can be used (possibly as partial payment) to a private school. It's expensive, at about $16,000 per student, but overall seems like a better use of funds than trying to run a full high school for a handful of students, and probably provides a better education as well. I don't know how they deal with special needs students who would have costs higher than this. More details about the program here: https://www.edchoice.org/school-choice/programs/vermont-town-tuitioning-program/ https://www.edchoice.org/school-choice/programs/vermont-town... 2) When you are calculating the costs per student for the purpose of valuing vouchers, I'd guess you need to include the students who are are being homeschooled or are currently attending private schools without vouchers as part of the denominator. Presumably the vouchers wouldn't be restricted to only the students who are switching, but instead would be given to all? Since about 10% of students are currently private schooled (I presume homeschooling is much lower?), this would reduce the "fair" value of the voucher by another 10% or so if you were trying to keep it cost neutral.

TimPC 5y ago
I agree vouchers may make sense in small towns where it’s not cost effective to have an education system at all. I think the town is relying on it’s smallness to avoid costs relating to special needs though and will run into substantial challenges the moment it tries to give a $16,000 voucher to a student that costs far more to educate. On 2) I agree that my calculations are simplified in the article and further reductions are necessary for cost neutrality.
- jonnydubowsky 5y ago
  Thanks for writing this. You motivated me to go digging for any studies that have evaluated the outcomes of these voucher programs. Looks like there are dozens of studies that showcase just how bad these programs can be. This study by American Progress supports your thesis. American Progress is a left-of-center alternative to the right-leaning Heritage Foundation. I haven't finished looking for the right wing think tank's studies, but I'll share anything of particular interest when I do. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/highly-negative-impacts-vouchers/ https://www.americanprogress.org/article/highly-negative-imp... "This analysis builds on a large body of voucher program evaluations in Louisiana, Indiana, Ohio, and Washington, D.C., all of which show that students attending participating private schools perform significantly worse than their peers in public schools—especially in math"

wave_function 5y ago

This seems to be the same concept as “the market for lemons” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons Parents of low-cost students can send their kids to the “high information market” (the schools that can reject high-cost students). Parents of high-cost students have to send their kids to the “low-information market” (the public school that can’t reject high-cost students). Any school that can reject high-cost students can make themselves more attractive to low-cost students, which then feeds on itself, as the “low-information” school ends up with more and more high-cost students. In this case, both schools have the same information, it’s just that one school isn’t allowed to act on it.

TimPC 5y ago
There are similarities undoubtedly. I think the major difference is the source of the distorted subsidy. In the market for lemons bad cars are subsidized by people thinking they might be good ones. In the voucher system low cost students are handed a massive subsidy by government pretending they have average cost. I think the voucher market is more dangerous since government ends up on the hook for all the increased costs of education because of the artificial subsidy.

kjellsbells 5y ago

Im not qualified to judge the voucher program, but if the value of the voucher was cakculated as the median and not the arithmetic mean, would that reduce the scam that the article claims?

TimPC 5y ago
This would certainly help as the majority of low cost kids would have cost similar to the 50th percentile. I think this isn’t a general fix though and only works in this case because of the nature of the data distribution.

tdba 5y ago

You're arguing against a straw man: most existing voucher programs are means-tested already (ie. only available to your "high cost" students) which negates your argument that the low cost students will use vouchers leave the system. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_voucher https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_voucher

TimPC 5y ago
Means tested doesn’t mean only available to high cost students. Means tested means available only to certain income demographics. A high cost student in the essay is someone who costs more to educate for instance a special needs student who requires a full time assistant.
- hnburnsy 5y ago
  Most vouchers are variable based on what the school would get, not a flat amount. Example in Arizona most (>50%) of vouchers are used by disabled children and can top $40000. Did you know that many schools out source highly disabled kids to specialized school, in essence running their own voucher system?
  - TimPC 5y ago
    While some vouchers are based on this data shared elsewhere in this thread indicated that most are not. Outsourcing disabled kids to a specialized school has a number of disadvantages and is not a program I would broadly support. I think the most notable is that it reduces the interaction of the typical student populace with disabled students causing them to be less aware of the challenges and issues they may face. A lot of education is exposure to different peoples and perspectives. I had a disabled child in one of my classes at a young age and think that experience helped develop my empathy for people who had a different experience of life than my own. If the benefits to disabled students are sufficiently large they may outweigh the gains to the broader student body but designing systems to be insular rather than reflective is something that should be done with an abundance of caution.

hnburnsy 5y ago

Many states have variable funding for students based on SES, grade level, and disability and in many states with vouchers, the voucher is some percentage of what the local school would get, not a flat amount... https://www.ncsl.org/research/education/voucher-law-comparison.aspx https://www.ncsl.org/research/education/voucher-law-comparis...

TimPC 5y ago
Thanks for sharing this it’s helpful. A quick look shows that in most states the % of what the local school would get is high. It’s still fundamentally a program that makes a lot of assumptions that low cost students cost more than they actually do. I’m glad to see additional funds for special needs kids but the distribution seems flatter than reality. The kids with a special needs assistant aren’t getting the full cost of that assistant more on the voucher and the kids without a special needs assistant are getting some portion of the cost of providing for special needs kids in theirs.
- hnburnsy 5y ago
  So your argument and basis for calling vouchers a Scam is because the dollar amount for the voucher is not granular enough? Maybe the dollar allocation could be better, but it doesn't make vouchers a scam. If you'd like more confirmation in your beliefs may I direct you here... https://dianeravitch.net/ https://dianeravitch.net/ IMO, vouchers have a place in school choice and I would prefer that they are used to give disabled, disadvantaged, and hard to educate children more options. I am a bigger fan of open enrollment and charter schools as zip code\housing affordability should not dictate a child's educational destiny.
  - TimPC 5y ago
    Yes. Vouchers are a scam if the dollar amount is insufficiently granular in ways that benefit those taking them at the expense of those who don’t. Most voucher programs aren’t targeting or benefiting any of the groups you highlight as the granularity of the funds is biased against them. I’m personally against open enrolment as I think it creates a prisoner’s dilemma race to the bottom where districts worsen their education system to provide tax relief knowing their students can enrol in neighbouring systems. Of course if the neighbouring systems follow their incentives to do the same the net result is a gutting of the education system. I emphasize with the idea of providing more broader access to good systems I just think the mechanism to do so has to protect the incentives to make the systems good.

pridkett 5y ago

This is a good observation that I wish that more people understood around schooling and funding for the public good. I live in a small town with about 1000 children total in grades Pre-K through 12. Schools are funded through local property taxes, which almost entirely fall on home owners and renters. Every year we need to vote on the town budget which inevitably tweaks our taxes a little bit up or down. A few years ago our town approved a budget and then held another budget referendum about two months later. That’s not completely unheard of - we’ve needed it after natural disasters or other unexpected costs in the past - but what was weird is that taxes were going down in the proposed new budget. The cause was a single student who had moved out of the town that was costing the town more than $225,000/yr for special needs education. In the end, my taxes went down by a little over $100/yr as a result of the change which was strictly for a single student. All this goes to show that not only are vouchers a racket, because for the most part the private schools are getting more than it takes to educate an average student, they’re also a racket because students with additional needs don’t get enough funding for the private schools to take them. Further starving the system.

zamadatix 5y ago
I'm not pro-voucher but I think it's a bit unfair to compare case based public funding to flat value voucher funding and declare all voucher funding is a racket based on that comparison. There is no reason vouchers couldn't also have value based on how much the student costs, in fact some voucher systems work exactly this way. All that is to say: this is an example of why _flat rate_ vouchers don't make sense.
- TimPC 5y ago
  I agree this is a case for why what you call flat rate vouchers don't make sense. But what you call flat rate vouchers is also the predominant program of vouchers being advocated for in most policy. When the mainstream discussion moves on to better programs of vouchers I'm happy to discuss the separate merits of those programs. As long as people are advocating for stealing money from vulnerable groups I think that is the most important issue with these programs that needs to be highlighted.
- 5y ago

julienfr112 5y ago

We have the same thing in France with competition between public funded hospitals and private one ( called clinique). Just replace student with surgery...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

spacemanmatt 5y ago

Short version: We should be tar and feathering politicians who perpetrate these scams on our uncomplicated population.

fundad 5y ago
Exactly. No privatization policy happens by accident, it’s the country people want.

helpfulclippy 5y ago

As a parent of a public school kid, I am deeply frustrated by the overburdened mission scope of the school system. Schools must be a social welfare program, a babysitting service, and an educational system -- my impression from my own kids' journey through the system is that the priorities go in that order. When the essay talked about "high cost" students, my first thought was special ed. In my district, the 2021-22 budget allocates about $71M and 513 FTEs to serve 10,475 special ed students. Or, about $6778/yr and 2 hours per week per student. I've aggregated that across several categories -- in the most expensive of those, the per-student cost is $21,351/yr and 7.9 hours/week., which is over triple the average cost of an average student. This may sound shocking, but these kids have special needs, and those needs require resources to be met. Now let's look at a "low cost" special need: kids whose academic performance is very strong. In my district, the principal way that these kids are served are through the "Talented and Gifted" program (TAG). This program is nearly unfunded. The district has an annual budget of roughly $1b/yr., and serves nearly 40,000 students across over 50 schools. About 6,333 of those students are in TAG. The program has a total budget of roughly $387k/yr., or about $61/student/yr. It has 0.8 FTEs allocated -- that is to say, the budget allocates 32 hours a week of labor to serve the entire district's TAG K-12 needs, or about 18 seconds per week per TAG student. "TAG" kids are successful but they still have needs. They need extra attention from teachers and mentors. They need the opportunity to work on challenging coursework, focused on their areas of talent and interest. They need to be able to work with peers who can keep a similar pace. All of that costs a lot more than $61/yr. and needs more than 18 seconds/week of someone's time, but that's presently what they get. And I think that's because these kids look like they're doing great -- they get good grades, they're less likely to be on drugs or involved in gangs, and their attendance is usually solid. But that viewpoint only considers these kids in terms of the needs of the school and society at large, rather than their own need to be stimulated and cultivated and to have so much of their childhood spent wisely. Because nothing immediately blows up when those needs are unmet, nothing is spent to meet them, and the money goes towards the squeaky wheels. So when the linked essay talks about "low cost" students, I think it fails to address that they actually have high cost needs that are going unpaid. As a result, their parents have to shoulder the extra cost themselves by either paying out of pocket for a private school, or taking the time (and career sacrifice) to home school. That's exactly the kind of burden social programs like public education are supposed to avoid! Many families simply can't afford this or are unable to do this due to other barriers, and so their kids' needs simply go unserved. To be clear, there are many possible solutions here, of which the status quo and vouchers are just two. I don't think they're even the best options. But I also don't think advocates of either are dishonest. I don't think parents are running a scam when they advocate for their kids to receive just as much support as anyone else's. I don't think it's dishonest for them to want access to schools that specialize in their kids' needs, and I don't think it's unfair for those schools to reject students whose needs are very different.

draw_down 5y ago

ALittleLight 5y ago

Why not issue additional vouchers for students with special needs?