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My kids go to a private religious school in South Carolina. They are taught about world religions, evolution, have chapel twice a week and allow prayer. It’s a

My kids go to a private religious school in South Carolina. They are taught about world religions, evolution, have chapel twice a week and allow prayer. It’s also the best school in the entire state. My kids go there because it's a great school. There are a lot of anti religious scare tactics used to push people off of vouchers. The reality is that the only people with true choice in school selection have to either be able to afford private school, afford to move to a house zoned for a better school or afford to have parent who can facilitate a home school group. Voucher proponents want everybody to have all choices available.

FrustratedMonky 3y ago
>"It’s also the best school in the entire state." That is the problem. Why not make public schools better? Why is everyone else at a disadvantage. If our focus was on putting funding into 'all' schools, not just 'rich geographic locations', then everyone could be educated. It isn't about 'Choice', it is about everyone getting a minimal education. If you want to 'choose' to indoctrinate your kids into your particular religion of 'choice', that can be done at home. But everyone should learn the old Reading/Writing/Arithmetic.
- brightball 3y ago
  > That is the problem. Why not make public schools better? People have tried. The problem is the governance structure that creates a race to the bottom. It's not a question of funding anymore. The reason that private school is so successful? It's run by teachers. People who have gone to school, received training and degrees as professional educators. Not only are they able to get together to talk about new techniques, figure out the best ways to teach and improve what they do, how they teach, what they think is important to teach...but they also have to convince parents that the school is the best place for their kids to be so there's a natural balance factor in play of "teacher collaboration", "parental buy in" and "is it actually working for my child"? What sold me was the tour we did when my son was getting ready to start K5. Everything looked great on the tour of course. I was happy with everything that I saw, but then I started asking questions. This was during the time that common core was being rolled out everywhere and I was seeing my friends with parents of older kids talking about how students who were previously getting straight A's or perfect scores in math were suddenly getting bad grades because they were getting the right answers the wrong ways. They were turning into stressed out, anxious basket cases who hated school. That system was being thrust on everybody so quickly by careless governance that it was causing chaos. The dean's answer? "We also use common core here, but we decided on that a few years prior after our teachers researched it and decided it would be best. It was gradually implemented over 4-5 years and parents were communicated to about the changes along the way. The entire process was very smooth." That sold me. We actually live where we live because it is zoned for a good public school. The option to have a school experience for my kids that wasn't going to be disrupted by dramatic changes after every election was more important to me. I wanted a stable elementary school experience and we planned to move them out to public in middle school. Then Covid hit and the school handled things much better than public schools did for those 2 years. Now we're on to high school and the political climate is just about the strangest it's been in my lifetime with so much politics aimed at school boards, so without ever planning to there's a good chance that they'll continue here for high school too. The educational factors are important, yes. It's a rigorous school. But the stability factor is more important. My kids love school. I didn't when I was a kid and I'm very thankful that they are in an environment that gives them that. The religious aspects for me are good, but they would get most of the same in church. But I do like knowing that the same values we teach our kids are being modeled in their daily environments. "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law." - Galations 5:22-23
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    Read it sometime. Most American Christians have never read the Bible and have no idea what they believe in. Is this what you want to teach your kids. Search Stoning, literally can't get through the day without being stoned. This is how we become Ameristan. ---- Did you work on Sunday? Dead Exodus 31:15 "Six days may work be done; but in the seventh is the sabbath of rest, holy to the LORD: whosoever doeth any work in the sabbath day, he shall surely be put to death." ---- Little Victim Blaming, Dead Deuteronomy 22:23-24 “If there is a girl who is a virgin engaged to a man, and another man finds her in the city and lies with her, then you shall bring them both out to the gate of that city and you shall stone them to death; the girl, because she did not cry out in the city, and the man, because he has violated his neighbor’s wife. Thus you shall purge the evil from among you. ------ Pretty Harsh - we'll be killing a lot of people to comply with this law. Dead. Leviticus 20:10 “If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death. ---- No Bad Words, or you are Dead. Leviticus 24:13-14 "Then the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, “Bring the one who has cursed outside the camp, and let all who heard him lay their hands on his head; then let all the congregation stone him." ----- Wave the bloody Sheet or, Dead. And father fined. Deuteronomy 22:20 "But here is the proof of my daughter’s virginity.” Then her parents shall display the cloth before the elders of the town, 18and the elders shall take the man and punish him. 19They shall fine him a hundred shekels b of silver and give them to the young woman’s father, because this man has given an Israelite virgin a bad name. She shall continue to be his wife; he must not divorce her as long as he lives. If, however, the charge is true and no proof of the young woman’s virginity can be found, 21 she shall be brought to the door of her father’s house and there the men of her town shall stone her to death. She has done an outrageous thing in Israel by being promiscuous while still in her father’s house. You must purge the evil from among you." ------- Women are property, and the Bible lists a price sheet. Rape is just fifty silver shekels. Not dead, but now married because you were raped. Deuteronomy 28 "If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, 29he shall pay her father fifty shekels c of silver. He must marry the young woman, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives." ----- Some Sexy Times Ironically, the least offensive thing here. Ezekiel 23:19-21 "There she had longed for her lovers. Their private parts seemed as big as those of donkeys. And their flow of semen appeared to be as much as that of horses. You longed for the time when you first became impure in Egypt. That was when you allowed your breasts to be kissed. And you permitted your young breasts to be touched.”
- davemp 3y ago
  > Why not make public schools better? Because you can’t feasibly make public schools better. There are too many entrenched players and layers of bureaucracy. > If you want to 'choose' to indoctrinate your kids into your particular religion of 'choice', that can be done at home. But everyone should learn the old Reading/Writing/Arithmetic. Afaik charter schools are already obligated to teach the minimal set required for standardized testing.
- latency-guy2 3y ago
  > Why not make public schools better? It'd be nice if you could explicitly define how that would work. I can understand some ideas not working 100% of the time, but throwing money into black holes where nothing comes out is an insult to taxpayers. Baltimore [City] has been the clearest example. I believe we're around $25k a head in a seat so far there. At what number specifically do you think all that gets turned around? $50k? $100k? If you can't answer that, why should anyone give a shit about what you think is good for society, demanding everyone pay into ponzi schemes like Baltimore? If you refuse to answer that, then you are out of your depth completely and you have no basis for making or influencing policy decisions. It's far too easy to use other people's money and then wring your hands about not getting the results you advertised. edit: [City] need to discriminate between Baltimore county and Baltimore city here since there may be eventual confusion on school system ratings
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    So, you need an explicit policy plan and how to implement it, but you can take one cherry picked example from Baltimore to justify turning the US into a Taliban style theocracy?
    - latency-guy2 3y ago
      > So, you need an explicit policy plan and how to implement it Yes? That's how things work everywhere in the world. I'd like $50 billion and the biggest yacht in the world, I don't plan on doing anything to get either of those things, so magically, they will appear to me as soon as I walk out the door in 20 minutes. > but you can take one cherry picked example from Baltimore to justify turning the US into a Taliban style theocracy? I don't think I addressed religion once until just now, so this is coming out of left field to say the least. But since you want to be hyperbolic about things I never said, I'll imagine your ideas are no more than theft and money laundering. I suppose that's the end of this discussion.
      - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
        Joke? This whole thread is about religion. People are arguing that they need Private Schools so they can have the 'choice' to indoctrinate their kids into their specific religion. And because public schools 'bad', religious schools 'good’, They feel justified in taking public funds, to support those religious schools. This breaks the separation of church and state. Think this is the old “I Require more proof from you, than I provide” argument. No, posting an entire policy and implementation plan to reform the education system, is not commonly done in internet arguments with trolls. Neither have you provided any detailed analysis of your point. I venture to say, the rest of the world does NOT make their policy decision based on something posted in an online argument.
hibikir 3y ago
Even among private schools, pricing differentiation happens. My local catholic parish has many schools: Some are very affordable, but those are not the good ones. The ones that are competitive with the secular private schools charge just as much, and it's not due to facilities suddenly costing five times as much: It's that, for the most part, only the kids with rich parents will afford them, plus a few rare scholarship targets that happen to make the school look a little diverse. The high price is a feature. So Vouchers do not have all choices available: Having a voucher doesn't guarantee acceptance to a school. And depending on your voucher legislation preference, you aren't going both force all schools to accept vouchers and make sure they don't raise prices. Ultimately, being selective is a feature, and therefore prices will go up, not unlike how easy student loans for colleges help raise prices. The top schools will eat the entire value of the voucher in cost increases, or just refuse the value of the voucher if they can't. You are right in the fact that really, most people in America have to pay for the good school district, either straight up in cash, or in significant increases in home costs. I've seen 30% drops in home values as, within the same district, the line of who got to go into the 'good' public school changed. Vouchers probably make the school choices far more explicit, and might lead to less housing segregation. But they sure aren't going to make all choices available to everyone, any more than I can choose to marry a supermodel, or own a private island.
cmurf 3y ago
I went to a Catholic one of these. World religion was a double edged sword. If you're born a Muslim and are a good Muslim you go to heaven. But it's better to "upgrade" by converting to Catholicism. That's what we were taught. Including the inferiority of evangelical Christianity. i.e. belief in Christ as a deity and your redeemer, isn't good enough to get you into heaven. You have to do good works. I have every confidence religious schools teach the superiority of their religion. With a white Jesus on a cross. It's not Jewish and Muslim schools pushing for public money without strings attached into private schools. It's Christian schools. Well maybe there will come a time once again when folks understand Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptists, from which we get the wall of separation between church and state phrase. It is in the letter from the Danbury Baptists we see what they were worried about. It wasn't Jews, Muslims, atheists, or anti-religionists. They were worried about the Danbury Congregationalists. Christians are not on the same page, is an understatement. They really aren't all on the same book either. It's impossible to promote them all the same. And they will not and should not permit dissimilar promotion. The only sane solution to preserving freedom of religion is to also preserve freedom from it. The government must only promote secularism. Everything else is playing with fire.
- brightball 3y ago
  > The only sane solution to preserving freedom of religion is to also preserve freedom from it. The government must only promote secularism. Everything else is playing with fire. There's nothing about vouchers that prevents the creation of secular private schools. Religious schools that you have no choice but to attend are very, very different than religious schools that your parents choose for you because they think it's the best place for your education.
  - cmurf 3y ago
    Government providing $1 to a religious private school is finding favor in that particular religion. Since Christian schools are more common than any other, public funding in any amount is the state promoting that religion above others. A possible work around is the state donates $x to each registered religious organization in that state. Every group gets an equal amount. John Rawls "veil of ignorance" thought experiment applies here.
JamesLeonis 3y ago
> My kids go to a private religious school in South Carolina. > They are taught about world religions, evolution, have chapel twice a week and allow prayer. It’s also the best school in the entire state. My kids go there because it's a great school. I also went to a private christian high school and it was all that you say here. However I also remember many very rich, ultra religious parents that ousted three principles over religious horseshit while I attended until my latin teacher became Principal and told them all to pound sand or go somewhere else. I also went to a private catholic elementry school. While it was good at the time, recently it's falling apart. The church has distanced itself from it, attendance YoY is falling, and it'll likely close in the next few years. However unlike a public school, these private schools can close and lean on the public system to catch all of the students they shake out. Unlike the private and charter schools, the buck stops at Public schools. > The reality is that the only people with true choice in school selection have to either be able to afford private school, afford to move to a house zoned for a better school or afford to have parent who can facilitate a home school group. Charter schools kick out kids as well, so all of these problems apply to them too. The only purpose of charter schools is to make their lobbyists (like Bill Gates and Betsy DeVos) rich by siphoning public money like defense contractors. All this talk about Charter Schools is about Options for students/parents, but nobody is talking about who is Obligated to those students, parents, and the tax payer. When a charter or private school closes, it dumps its students into the pubic system [0]. > Consider City High School in Los Angeles, California, which received a $575,000 grant from the federal government. The school had barely started its second year when it suddenly closed, leaving 116 students scrambling for a new school. Similarly, a charter school in Wilmington, Delaware, received a grant of $350,000 but closed just five months into its first school year, forcing 206 students to look for a new school. > The Acclaim Academy charter school chain in Florida received grants of $375,000, $175,000, $175,000, and $19,198 for its four schools. One never opened, another was taken over by the district due to financial concerns and mismanagement, and the two other closed suddenly with no notice, in the middle of the year, leaving students, some of them seniors preparing college applications, searching to find new schools. Then there is the low attendence and fraud. > The report locates much of the blame for this waste of taxpayer money on the Department of Education’s practice of awarding grants to states with few rules and virtually no accountability. Often, grants were “doled out to individuals who had no credentials or experience to open up a new school,” according to the researchers. > The report also identified a “pattern” of charter school operators—even before their school opened—funneling money from grants to their own personal accounts, to purchases of expensive equipment, and to “for-profit consulting and education management organizations” that do not publicly divulge how they spend money. The report concluded that, due to these practices, the charter school grant program “has become a magnet for grifters, consultants, and charter entrepreneurs who see an easy way to cash-in.” The kicker: > When members of Congress repeatedly referred to those findings when questioning Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, she dismissed the findings as “political.” History is littered with corpses and bailouts. At the end of the day, it's all about privatization of public institutions for private profit. It's also an open secret that private schools rose as a response to desegregation [1] [2]. Privatization is cancer. [0]: https://progressive.org/public-schools-advocate/new-report-waste-abuse-charter-bryants-191212/ https://progressive.org/public-schools-advocate/new-report-w... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segregation_academy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segregation_academy [2]: https://southerneducation.org/publications/history-of-private-schools-and-race-in-the-american-south/ https://southerneducation.org/publications/history-of-privat...
MisterBastahrd 3y ago
Voucher proponents want to get parents hooked on the idea of charter schools, and then the schools will invariably raise their prices past the cost of voucher when the undesirables start trickling onto their campuses.
- AlgorithmicTime 3y ago
  [dead]
- aidenn0 3y ago
  There is a world of difference between means-tested vouchers and non-means-tested vouchers. Non-means-tested vouchers will have the effect of making expensive private schools more affordable for the upper-middle-class, while means-tested vouchers can't do that.

FrustratedMonky 3y ago

>"It’s also the best school in the entire state." That is the problem. Why not make public schools better? Why is everyone else at a disadvantage. If our focus was on putting funding into 'all' schools, not just 'rich geographic locations', then everyone could be educated. It isn't about 'Choice', it is about everyone getting a minimal education. If you want to 'choose' to indoctrinate your kids into your particular religion of 'choice', that can be done at home. But everyone should learn the old Reading/Writing/Arithmetic.

brightball 3y ago
> That is the problem. Why not make public schools better? People have tried. The problem is the governance structure that creates a race to the bottom. It's not a question of funding anymore. The reason that private school is so successful? It's run by teachers. People who have gone to school, received training and degrees as professional educators. Not only are they able to get together to talk about new techniques, figure out the best ways to teach and improve what they do, how they teach, what they think is important to teach...but they also have to convince parents that the school is the best place for their kids to be so there's a natural balance factor in play of "teacher collaboration", "parental buy in" and "is it actually working for my child"? What sold me was the tour we did when my son was getting ready to start K5. Everything looked great on the tour of course. I was happy with everything that I saw, but then I started asking questions. This was during the time that common core was being rolled out everywhere and I was seeing my friends with parents of older kids talking about how students who were previously getting straight A's or perfect scores in math were suddenly getting bad grades because they were getting the right answers the wrong ways. They were turning into stressed out, anxious basket cases who hated school. That system was being thrust on everybody so quickly by careless governance that it was causing chaos. The dean's answer? "We also use common core here, but we decided on that a few years prior after our teachers researched it and decided it would be best. It was gradually implemented over 4-5 years and parents were communicated to about the changes along the way. The entire process was very smooth." That sold me. We actually live where we live because it is zoned for a good public school. The option to have a school experience for my kids that wasn't going to be disrupted by dramatic changes after every election was more important to me. I wanted a stable elementary school experience and we planned to move them out to public in middle school. Then Covid hit and the school handled things much better than public schools did for those 2 years. Now we're on to high school and the political climate is just about the strangest it's been in my lifetime with so much politics aimed at school boards, so without ever planning to there's a good chance that they'll continue here for high school too. The educational factors are important, yes. It's a rigorous school. But the stability factor is more important. My kids love school. I didn't when I was a kid and I'm very thankful that they are in an environment that gives them that. The religious aspects for me are good, but they would get most of the same in church. But I do like knowing that the same values we teach our kids are being modeled in their daily environments. "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law." - Galations 5:22-23
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  Read it sometime. Most American Christians have never read the Bible and have no idea what they believe in. Is this what you want to teach your kids. Search Stoning, literally can't get through the day without being stoned. This is how we become Ameristan. ---- Did you work on Sunday? Dead Exodus 31:15 "Six days may work be done; but in the seventh is the sabbath of rest, holy to the LORD: whosoever doeth any work in the sabbath day, he shall surely be put to death." ---- Little Victim Blaming, Dead Deuteronomy 22:23-24 “If there is a girl who is a virgin engaged to a man, and another man finds her in the city and lies with her, then you shall bring them both out to the gate of that city and you shall stone them to death; the girl, because she did not cry out in the city, and the man, because he has violated his neighbor’s wife. Thus you shall purge the evil from among you. ------ Pretty Harsh - we'll be killing a lot of people to comply with this law. Dead. Leviticus 20:10 “If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death. ---- No Bad Words, or you are Dead. Leviticus 24:13-14 "Then the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, “Bring the one who has cursed outside the camp, and let all who heard him lay their hands on his head; then let all the congregation stone him." ----- Wave the bloody Sheet or, Dead. And father fined. Deuteronomy 22:20 "But here is the proof of my daughter’s virginity.” Then her parents shall display the cloth before the elders of the town, 18and the elders shall take the man and punish him. 19They shall fine him a hundred shekels b of silver and give them to the young woman’s father, because this man has given an Israelite virgin a bad name. She shall continue to be his wife; he must not divorce her as long as he lives. If, however, the charge is true and no proof of the young woman’s virginity can be found, 21 she shall be brought to the door of her father’s house and there the men of her town shall stone her to death. She has done an outrageous thing in Israel by being promiscuous while still in her father’s house. You must purge the evil from among you." ------- Women are property, and the Bible lists a price sheet. Rape is just fifty silver shekels. Not dead, but now married because you were raped. Deuteronomy 28 "If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, 29he shall pay her father fifty shekels c of silver. He must marry the young woman, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives." ----- Some Sexy Times Ironically, the least offensive thing here. Ezekiel 23:19-21 "There she had longed for her lovers. Their private parts seemed as big as those of donkeys. And their flow of semen appeared to be as much as that of horses. You longed for the time when you first became impure in Egypt. That was when you allowed your breasts to be kissed. And you permitted your young breasts to be touched.”
davemp 3y ago
> Why not make public schools better? Because you can’t feasibly make public schools better. There are too many entrenched players and layers of bureaucracy. > If you want to 'choose' to indoctrinate your kids into your particular religion of 'choice', that can be done at home. But everyone should learn the old Reading/Writing/Arithmetic. Afaik charter schools are already obligated to teach the minimal set required for standardized testing.
latency-guy2 3y ago
> Why not make public schools better? It'd be nice if you could explicitly define how that would work. I can understand some ideas not working 100% of the time, but throwing money into black holes where nothing comes out is an insult to taxpayers. Baltimore [City] has been the clearest example. I believe we're around $25k a head in a seat so far there. At what number specifically do you think all that gets turned around? $50k? $100k? If you can't answer that, why should anyone give a shit about what you think is good for society, demanding everyone pay into ponzi schemes like Baltimore? If you refuse to answer that, then you are out of your depth completely and you have no basis for making or influencing policy decisions. It's far too easy to use other people's money and then wring your hands about not getting the results you advertised. edit: [City] need to discriminate between Baltimore county and Baltimore city here since there may be eventual confusion on school system ratings
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  So, you need an explicit policy plan and how to implement it, but you can take one cherry picked example from Baltimore to justify turning the US into a Taliban style theocracy?
  - latency-guy2 3y ago
    > So, you need an explicit policy plan and how to implement it Yes? That's how things work everywhere in the world. I'd like $50 billion and the biggest yacht in the world, I don't plan on doing anything to get either of those things, so magically, they will appear to me as soon as I walk out the door in 20 minutes. > but you can take one cherry picked example from Baltimore to justify turning the US into a Taliban style theocracy? I don't think I addressed religion once until just now, so this is coming out of left field to say the least. But since you want to be hyperbolic about things I never said, I'll imagine your ideas are no more than theft and money laundering. I suppose that's the end of this discussion.
    - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
      Joke? This whole thread is about religion. People are arguing that they need Private Schools so they can have the 'choice' to indoctrinate their kids into their specific religion. And because public schools 'bad', religious schools 'good’, They feel justified in taking public funds, to support those religious schools. This breaks the separation of church and state. Think this is the old “I Require more proof from you, than I provide” argument. No, posting an entire policy and implementation plan to reform the education system, is not commonly done in internet arguments with trolls. Neither have you provided any detailed analysis of your point. I venture to say, the rest of the world does NOT make their policy decision based on something posted in an online argument.

hibikir 3y ago

Even among private schools, pricing differentiation happens. My local catholic parish has many schools: Some are very affordable, but those are not the good ones. The ones that are competitive with the secular private schools charge just as much, and it's not due to facilities suddenly costing five times as much: It's that, for the most part, only the kids with rich parents will afford them, plus a few rare scholarship targets that happen to make the school look a little diverse. The high price is a feature. So Vouchers do not have all choices available: Having a voucher doesn't guarantee acceptance to a school. And depending on your voucher legislation preference, you aren't going both force all schools to accept vouchers and make sure they don't raise prices. Ultimately, being selective is a feature, and therefore prices will go up, not unlike how easy student loans for colleges help raise prices. The top schools will eat the entire value of the voucher in cost increases, or just refuse the value of the voucher if they can't. You are right in the fact that really, most people in America have to pay for the good school district, either straight up in cash, or in significant increases in home costs. I've seen 30% drops in home values as, within the same district, the line of who got to go into the 'good' public school changed. Vouchers probably make the school choices far more explicit, and might lead to less housing segregation. But they sure aren't going to make all choices available to everyone, any more than I can choose to marry a supermodel, or own a private island.

cmurf 3y ago

I went to a Catholic one of these. World religion was a double edged sword. If you're born a Muslim and are a good Muslim you go to heaven. But it's better to "upgrade" by converting to Catholicism. That's what we were taught. Including the inferiority of evangelical Christianity. i.e. belief in Christ as a deity and your redeemer, isn't good enough to get you into heaven. You have to do good works. I have every confidence religious schools teach the superiority of their religion. With a white Jesus on a cross. It's not Jewish and Muslim schools pushing for public money without strings attached into private schools. It's Christian schools. Well maybe there will come a time once again when folks understand Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptists, from which we get the wall of separation between church and state phrase. It is in the letter from the Danbury Baptists we see what they were worried about. It wasn't Jews, Muslims, atheists, or anti-religionists. They were worried about the Danbury Congregationalists. Christians are not on the same page, is an understatement. They really aren't all on the same book either. It's impossible to promote them all the same. And they will not and should not permit dissimilar promotion. The only sane solution to preserving freedom of religion is to also preserve freedom from it. The government must only promote secularism. Everything else is playing with fire.

brightball 3y ago
> The only sane solution to preserving freedom of religion is to also preserve freedom from it. The government must only promote secularism. Everything else is playing with fire. There's nothing about vouchers that prevents the creation of secular private schools. Religious schools that you have no choice but to attend are very, very different than religious schools that your parents choose for you because they think it's the best place for your education.
- cmurf 3y ago
  Government providing $1 to a religious private school is finding favor in that particular religion. Since Christian schools are more common than any other, public funding in any amount is the state promoting that religion above others. A possible work around is the state donates $x to each registered religious organization in that state. Every group gets an equal amount. John Rawls "veil of ignorance" thought experiment applies here.

JamesLeonis 3y ago

> My kids go to a private religious school in South Carolina. > They are taught about world religions, evolution, have chapel twice a week and allow prayer. It’s also the best school in the entire state. My kids go there because it's a great school. I also went to a private christian high school and it was all that you say here. However I also remember many very rich, ultra religious parents that ousted three principles over religious horseshit while I attended until my latin teacher became Principal and told them all to pound sand or go somewhere else. I also went to a private catholic elementry school. While it was good at the time, recently it's falling apart. The church has distanced itself from it, attendance YoY is falling, and it'll likely close in the next few years. However unlike a public school, these private schools can close and lean on the public system to catch all of the students they shake out. Unlike the private and charter schools, the buck stops at Public schools. > The reality is that the only people with true choice in school selection have to either be able to afford private school, afford to move to a house zoned for a better school or afford to have parent who can facilitate a home school group. Charter schools kick out kids as well, so all of these problems apply to them too. The only purpose of charter schools is to make their lobbyists (like Bill Gates and Betsy DeVos) rich by siphoning public money like defense contractors. All this talk about Charter Schools is about Options for students/parents, but nobody is talking about who is Obligated to those students, parents, and the tax payer. When a charter or private school closes, it dumps its students into the pubic system [0]. > Consider City High School in Los Angeles, California, which received a $575,000 grant from the federal government. The school had barely started its second year when it suddenly closed, leaving 116 students scrambling for a new school. Similarly, a charter school in Wilmington, Delaware, received a grant of $350,000 but closed just five months into its first school year, forcing 206 students to look for a new school. > The Acclaim Academy charter school chain in Florida received grants of $375,000, $175,000, $175,000, and $19,198 for its four schools. One never opened, another was taken over by the district due to financial concerns and mismanagement, and the two other closed suddenly with no notice, in the middle of the year, leaving students, some of them seniors preparing college applications, searching to find new schools. Then there is the low attendence and fraud. > The report locates much of the blame for this waste of taxpayer money on the Department of Education’s practice of awarding grants to states with few rules and virtually no accountability. Often, grants were “doled out to individuals who had no credentials or experience to open up a new school,” according to the researchers. > The report also identified a “pattern” of charter school operators—even before their school opened—funneling money from grants to their own personal accounts, to purchases of expensive equipment, and to “for-profit consulting and education management organizations” that do not publicly divulge how they spend money. The report concluded that, due to these practices, the charter school grant program “has become a magnet for grifters, consultants, and charter entrepreneurs who see an easy way to cash-in.” The kicker: > When members of Congress repeatedly referred to those findings when questioning Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, she dismissed the findings as “political.” History is littered with corpses and bailouts. At the end of the day, it's all about privatization of public institutions for private profit. It's also an open secret that private schools rose as a response to desegregation [1] [2]. Privatization is cancer. [0]: https://progressive.org/public-schools-advocate/new-report-waste-abuse-charter-bryants-191212/ https://progressive.org/public-schools-advocate/new-report-w... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segregation_academy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segregation_academy [2]: https://southerneducation.org/publications/history-of-private-schools-and-race-in-the-american-south/ https://southerneducation.org/publications/history-of-privat...

MisterBastahrd 3y ago

Voucher proponents want to get parents hooked on the idea of charter schools, and then the schools will invariably raise their prices past the cost of voucher when the undesirables start trickling onto their campuses.

AlgorithmicTime 3y ago
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aidenn0 3y ago
There is a world of difference between means-tested vouchers and non-means-tested vouchers. Non-means-tested vouchers will have the effect of making expensive private schools more affordable for the upper-middle-class, while means-tested vouchers can't do that.