6 ms·

$7,200 for Every Student: Arizona’s Ultimate Experiment in School Choice

31 points by mathattack 3y ago

cykotic 3y ago
It sounds great in principle. What will happen is that there will be schools that only fairly well off people can go afford. The poor will be stuck with schools that cost exactly what the voucher is worth and will be bare bones. The public schools will be left with those who, for a variety of reasons, can’t get to a voucher school and those who are too unruly or otherwise “defective”. This will have bad long term consequences.
- Scaevolus 3y ago
  How is that different from the status quo? It seems likely that more students will end up going to private schools because of this subsidy, and some public schools will have to shrink, but why is that bad?
  - jncfhnb 3y ago
    Because it’s funneling public funds into private hands. Funds that would previously have gone to the public schools. Now the public schools are worse and the private schools are elites only but also subsidized.
    - akomtu 3y ago
      The price of keeping public schools the way they are is trashing the future of many bright but poor kids who have no choice but to waste their time in what seems to be a mix of a kindergarten and a corrections facility.
      - cykotic 3y ago
        I wish people would think as much about the poor when it came time to fund job programs, healthcare, childcare, food stamps, universal pre-school, raising the minimum wage, increasing public transportation, and improving working conditions.
        aapl88889 3y ago
        Europe is very progressive in all those issues but they're still poorer than Mississippi.
        MoreSEMI 3y ago
        What bothers me about this right here is that at one time or another one of these was heralded as THE solution that would alleviate poverty. Why is it always food stamps, minimum wage, and ubi? I thought minimum wage would have solved/alleviated the food problem. It seems to me that there is a general failure to acknowledge the big picture. Being impoverished means lack of resources. I say pick one general solution, either ubi or negative income tax, and let the poor choose what they need. It does a real disservice to the poor to always be for every policy that is notionally meant to help them. It seems disingenuous and not very well thought out. As Eminem famously said,”these goddamn foodstamps won’t buy diapers”.
        cykotic 3y ago
        The people most in favor of school vouchers in the U.S. are mostly conservatives who oppose programs for poor people in almost all other contexts. When it comes to school vouchers though they act, disingenuously in my opinion, as if concern for the poor is what really matters to them in this issue. School vouchers, ultimately, are a way for religious conservatives to have the public pay for the religious indoctrination of their kids. My comment was an attempt to point out this hypocrisy.
        jncfhnb 3y ago
        A sufficient minimum wage would cover these problems for most working class poor. We don’t have that.
      - edmundsauto 3y ago
        The price of failing the not bright kids is we end up with a mob of undereducated people who are unable to function as contributing healthy adults in today's modern society. It's a hard problem, but I can't fault people who believe public schools should focus on not failing the bottom section rather than accelerating the top achievers.
        chad_stevens 3y ago
        >The price of failing the not bright kids is we end up with a mob of undereducated people who are unable to function as contributing healthy adults in today's modern society. This is already the case though. I grew up in a “low income” area and whenever I visit my parents I see people I went to Highschool with walking around in the streets. Something’s got to change but unfortunately I do not have the answer. Hopefully AI will save us all.
        edmundsauto 3y ago
        It can get a LOT worse.
        patrickthebold 3y ago
        > should focus on not failing the bottom section The problem is they focus on not failing the bottoms section, and also completely fail the bottom section.
      - gowld 3y ago
        Paying for private versions of the same doesn't seem to be a big improvement.
      - jncfhnb 3y ago
        I guess we should try and come up with a solution that addresses that then
  - esotericimpl 3y ago
    [dead]
  - cykotic 3y ago
    The status quo is that 10% of k-12 students to go private school. Most private school have a religious affiliation. That may or may not matter to you. It does matter to me. What we see in higher education are two types of private schools. One type are nonprofit and one type are profit. The for profit schools tend to be predatory have much worse outcomes than the public schools or nonprofit ones. The nonprofit ones tend to fall into two categories. The ones with nice endowments are exclusive and very good. We will see this happen with k-12 with vouchers. From a school’s perspective a voucher is exactly as if a student got a student loan in that amount. Those who think federally backed loans are a problem in higher education ought to be opposed to vouchers for k-12.
    - aapl88889 3y ago
      - There are many non-religious private schools like magnets and charters. - The schools must be accredited. I can't find one good reason to restrict a poor student from choosing a magnet or a charter school over their local public school.
      - Jtsummers 3y ago
        > - There are many non-religious private schools like magnets and charters. Magnet schools are public schools in the US that draw from multiple schools and usually have a particular focus (arts & languages, STEM, etc.). The main limiter on magnet school attendance is their capacity. I ended up in one in HS with a capacity of 1500 students, for a city with over 1 million people at the time (not sure the number of HS aged people). It cost nothing extra to attend, you had to apply and interview to get in and the public school bus system took care of getting everyone to the school no matter where they lived in the county. EDIT: And I had to double check because I've only recently lived in an area with charter schools and have no kids yet so didn't really care much, but they're also technically public schools in the US. They are publicly funded and have no tuition costs to attend.
        aapl88889 3y ago
        You're right that they're public schools. School choice would allow parents to choose these other public options in addition to private schools.
- mamonster 3y ago
  Until public schools get rid of the delusion that putting troublemakers/educationally challenged kids into a class of average to highly capable kids will pull the troublemakers upwards escaping public schools is a worthy goal for most middle income families. Talk to any middle school teacher, in a class of 20 people there are 3-4 people that slow everything down for the other 16 and there is no feasible way of disciplining/getting rid of them. Not sure how applicable this is to the U.S, this is the case in a lot of Western Europe.
  - landemva 3y ago
    In some USA school districts there are "gifted and talented" programs to put high performers into their own curriculum tracks with similar peers. More parents would flee public schools without these segregation programs.
  - silisili 3y ago
    This is the case in the US, too. They do exactly this, and instead of bringing anyone up, it brings everyone down. Most exasperated by the fact that teachers and schools have zero recourse in those situations. My public school tenure was an absolute nightmare. For my kid's sake, I'll never live in another place that does 'socioeconomic bussing.'
    - grammers 3y ago
      In theory, integration sounds nice. In reality, schools don't get enough funding/resources/teachers to make this work. Integration has failed/is just a money saver for politicians. It's time we said this out loud instead of pretending otherwise.
  - DonnyV 3y ago
    Question? How many teachers do you have per class?
  - hattmall 3y ago
    This is the case for most everything though. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. It plays out in larger society as well, on both ends. You have a few billionaires doing outsized damage destroying society through marketing / antisocial business practices and on the other end you have the 1000 people that commit 40% of crime in Atlanta. https://www.11alive.com/article/news/crime/1000-crime-atlanta-police-repeat-offender-unit/ https://www.11alive.com/article/news/crime/1000-crime-atlant...
- samr71 3y ago
  The schools that cost exactly what the voucher is worth and are bare bones are the public schools. Now they have to compete.
  - cykotic 3y ago
    There is a huge disparity across some k-12 school districts in terms of resources and accompanying culture regarding education. There are lots of k-12 schools that are not bare bones. Look at higher education and we can see a wide disparity between the different types of institutions. What will happen with vouchers is a Corinthian Collegeing of k-12 in certain low income districts.
  - Rebelgecko 3y ago
    In practice, students don't cost the same. eg a special ed student will cost 10x more than a student in a general ed or gifted program. So I think in practice they end up subsidizing the cheap-to-educate kid's private school education, while expensive students stay in public schools (which makes the private school voucher amount go up while decreasing the quality of public school instruction for the majority of students). Kind of a vicious cycle.
    - alephnerd 3y ago
      > special ed student will cost 10x more than a student in a general ed or gifted program Special Ed students and the staff supporting them are subsidized and paid for by the US Dept of Education. When you have an Autism Specialist or a Special Education teacher, the school district will go to the US DoE to get the SpED staff's salary comped. This makes sense because of how expensive special education is, yet how critical of a social function it has. My mom is a Special Education Teacher and she's always been funded by the Federal DoE. The issue is "tracking" is very expensive and a bit of a political landline, so plenty of less academically included students end up in AVID track or Low Severity Special Education classes - neither of which are subsidized by the DoE. School Boards don't want to deal with the expensive and politically suidical option of saying some kids are dumber than others, so this is the backdoor solution they use. Also, by tracking that means you have to hire 2x the number of teachers, while still having the same budget, and local voters don't want to see a 2x increase in Sales Tax and/or property taxes.
- ethagknight 3y ago
  What will happen if people continue to vacate urban areas as major metro districts remain stuck in their current messes. School choice is rapidly becoming a life and death matter for cities as school districts continue to flounder. My city, Memphis, Tennessee is currently in danger of a death spiral, largely due to collapse of its school system. Why continue to mandate a failing system, when many private options are both accessible and successful? Why prevent or restrict, lower middle income students from going to higher quality schools?
- xhkkffbf 3y ago
  Yes, the market will probably end up that way, but the poor still get a choice. They're not stuck with the one-size-fits-all system that the public school system often provides.
rdtsc 3y ago
https://archive.is/QzFl6 https://archive.is/QzFl6
pstuart 3y ago
Public funding of religious indoctrination is bothersome.
ericmcer 3y ago
Heck yeah, directly giving people money has always fixed all the underlying problems in our systems.
- aapl88889 3y ago
  How exactly is this different from food stamps?
  - gowld 3y ago
    Groceries are a well-understood commodity product.
    - aapl88889 3y ago
      And? The poor are allowed to choose food options for their kids but not schools? Please elaborate.
DrNosferatu 3y ago
Didn’t Sweden try this with bad results?
gumby 3y ago
> many students in the program were already in private schools or home schools. So the private schools raise tuition by $7,200 and everybody wins, right?
m463 3y ago
I wonder about this in terms of capitalism. Doesn't capitalism work? Everywhere I've worked, the company cafeteria doesn't have to compete and usually sucks. If it was on level footing with restaurants that are open to the public, it would have to do more and do better. Some companies slightly understand this and have an internal subway or starbucks and although they are franchises, they are generally well regarded and do well.

31 points by mathattack 3y ago

It sounds great in principle. What will happen is that there will be schools that only fairly well off people can go afford. The poor will be stuck with schools that cost exactly what the voucher is worth and will be bare bones. The public schools will be left with those who, for a variety of reasons, can’t get to a voucher school and those who are too unruly or otherwise “defective”. This will have bad long term consequences.

Scaevolus 3y ago
How is that different from the status quo? It seems likely that more students will end up going to private schools because of this subsidy, and some public schools will have to shrink, but why is that bad?
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  Because it’s funneling public funds into private hands. Funds that would previously have gone to the public schools. Now the public schools are worse and the private schools are elites only but also subsidized.
  - akomtu 3y ago
    The price of keeping public schools the way they are is trashing the future of many bright but poor kids who have no choice but to waste their time in what seems to be a mix of a kindergarten and a corrections facility.
    - cykotic 3y ago
      I wish people would think as much about the poor when it came time to fund job programs, healthcare, childcare, food stamps, universal pre-school, raising the minimum wage, increasing public transportation, and improving working conditions.
      - aapl88889 3y ago
        Europe is very progressive in all those issues but they're still poorer than Mississippi.
      - MoreSEMI 3y ago
        What bothers me about this right here is that at one time or another one of these was heralded as THE solution that would alleviate poverty. Why is it always food stamps, minimum wage, and ubi? I thought minimum wage would have solved/alleviated the food problem. It seems to me that there is a general failure to acknowledge the big picture. Being impoverished means lack of resources. I say pick one general solution, either ubi or negative income tax, and let the poor choose what they need. It does a real disservice to the poor to always be for every policy that is notionally meant to help them. It seems disingenuous and not very well thought out. As Eminem famously said,”these goddamn foodstamps won’t buy diapers”.
        cykotic 3y ago
        The people most in favor of school vouchers in the U.S. are mostly conservatives who oppose programs for poor people in almost all other contexts. When it comes to school vouchers though they act, disingenuously in my opinion, as if concern for the poor is what really matters to them in this issue. School vouchers, ultimately, are a way for religious conservatives to have the public pay for the religious indoctrination of their kids. My comment was an attempt to point out this hypocrisy.
        jncfhnb 3y ago
        A sufficient minimum wage would cover these problems for most working class poor. We don’t have that.
    - edmundsauto 3y ago
      The price of failing the not bright kids is we end up with a mob of undereducated people who are unable to function as contributing healthy adults in today's modern society. It's a hard problem, but I can't fault people who believe public schools should focus on not failing the bottom section rather than accelerating the top achievers.
      - chad_stevens 3y ago
        >The price of failing the not bright kids is we end up with a mob of undereducated people who are unable to function as contributing healthy adults in today's modern society. This is already the case though. I grew up in a “low income” area and whenever I visit my parents I see people I went to Highschool with walking around in the streets. Something’s got to change but unfortunately I do not have the answer. Hopefully AI will save us all.
        edmundsauto 3y ago
        It can get a LOT worse.
      - patrickthebold 3y ago
        > should focus on not failing the bottom section The problem is they focus on not failing the bottoms section, and also completely fail the bottom section.
    - gowld 3y ago
      Paying for private versions of the same doesn't seem to be a big improvement.
    - jncfhnb 3y ago
      I guess we should try and come up with a solution that addresses that then
- esotericimpl 3y ago
  [dead]
- cykotic 3y ago
  The status quo is that 10% of k-12 students to go private school. Most private school have a religious affiliation. That may or may not matter to you. It does matter to me. What we see in higher education are two types of private schools. One type are nonprofit and one type are profit. The for profit schools tend to be predatory have much worse outcomes than the public schools or nonprofit ones. The nonprofit ones tend to fall into two categories. The ones with nice endowments are exclusive and very good. We will see this happen with k-12 with vouchers. From a school’s perspective a voucher is exactly as if a student got a student loan in that amount. Those who think federally backed loans are a problem in higher education ought to be opposed to vouchers for k-12.
  - aapl88889 3y ago
    - There are many non-religious private schools like magnets and charters. - The schools must be accredited. I can't find one good reason to restrict a poor student from choosing a magnet or a charter school over their local public school.
    - Jtsummers 3y ago
      > - There are many non-religious private schools like magnets and charters. Magnet schools are public schools in the US that draw from multiple schools and usually have a particular focus (arts & languages, STEM, etc.). The main limiter on magnet school attendance is their capacity. I ended up in one in HS with a capacity of 1500 students, for a city with over 1 million people at the time (not sure the number of HS aged people). It cost nothing extra to attend, you had to apply and interview to get in and the public school bus system took care of getting everyone to the school no matter where they lived in the county. EDIT: And I had to double check because I've only recently lived in an area with charter schools and have no kids yet so didn't really care much, but they're also technically public schools in the US. They are publicly funded and have no tuition costs to attend.
      - aapl88889 3y ago
        You're right that they're public schools. School choice would allow parents to choose these other public options in addition to private schools.
mamonster 3y ago
Until public schools get rid of the delusion that putting troublemakers/educationally challenged kids into a class of average to highly capable kids will pull the troublemakers upwards escaping public schools is a worthy goal for most middle income families. Talk to any middle school teacher, in a class of 20 people there are 3-4 people that slow everything down for the other 16 and there is no feasible way of disciplining/getting rid of them. Not sure how applicable this is to the U.S, this is the case in a lot of Western Europe.
- landemva 3y ago
  In some USA school districts there are "gifted and talented" programs to put high performers into their own curriculum tracks with similar peers. More parents would flee public schools without these segregation programs.
- silisili 3y ago
  This is the case in the US, too. They do exactly this, and instead of bringing anyone up, it brings everyone down. Most exasperated by the fact that teachers and schools have zero recourse in those situations. My public school tenure was an absolute nightmare. For my kid's sake, I'll never live in another place that does 'socioeconomic bussing.'
  - grammers 3y ago
    In theory, integration sounds nice. In reality, schools don't get enough funding/resources/teachers to make this work. Integration has failed/is just a money saver for politicians. It's time we said this out loud instead of pretending otherwise.
- DonnyV 3y ago
  Question? How many teachers do you have per class?
- hattmall 3y ago
  This is the case for most everything though. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. It plays out in larger society as well, on both ends. You have a few billionaires doing outsized damage destroying society through marketing / antisocial business practices and on the other end you have the 1000 people that commit 40% of crime in Atlanta. https://www.11alive.com/article/news/crime/1000-crime-atlanta-police-repeat-offender-unit/ https://www.11alive.com/article/news/crime/1000-crime-atlant...
samr71 3y ago
The schools that cost exactly what the voucher is worth and are bare bones are the public schools. Now they have to compete.
- cykotic 3y ago
  There is a huge disparity across some k-12 school districts in terms of resources and accompanying culture regarding education. There are lots of k-12 schools that are not bare bones. Look at higher education and we can see a wide disparity between the different types of institutions. What will happen with vouchers is a Corinthian Collegeing of k-12 in certain low income districts.
- Rebelgecko 3y ago
  In practice, students don't cost the same. eg a special ed student will cost 10x more than a student in a general ed or gifted program. So I think in practice they end up subsidizing the cheap-to-educate kid's private school education, while expensive students stay in public schools (which makes the private school voucher amount go up while decreasing the quality of public school instruction for the majority of students). Kind of a vicious cycle.
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    > special ed student will cost 10x more than a student in a general ed or gifted program Special Ed students and the staff supporting them are subsidized and paid for by the US Dept of Education. When you have an Autism Specialist or a Special Education teacher, the school district will go to the US DoE to get the SpED staff's salary comped. This makes sense because of how expensive special education is, yet how critical of a social function it has. My mom is a Special Education Teacher and she's always been funded by the Federal DoE. The issue is "tracking" is very expensive and a bit of a political landline, so plenty of less academically included students end up in AVID track or Low Severity Special Education classes - neither of which are subsidized by the DoE. School Boards don't want to deal with the expensive and politically suidical option of saying some kids are dumber than others, so this is the backdoor solution they use. Also, by tracking that means you have to hire 2x the number of teachers, while still having the same budget, and local voters don't want to see a 2x increase in Sales Tax and/or property taxes.
ethagknight 3y ago
What will happen if people continue to vacate urban areas as major metro districts remain stuck in their current messes. School choice is rapidly becoming a life and death matter for cities as school districts continue to flounder. My city, Memphis, Tennessee is currently in danger of a death spiral, largely due to collapse of its school system. Why continue to mandate a failing system, when many private options are both accessible and successful? Why prevent or restrict, lower middle income students from going to higher quality schools?
xhkkffbf 3y ago
Yes, the market will probably end up that way, but the poor still get a choice. They're not stuck with the one-size-fits-all system that the public school system often provides.

rdtsc 3y ago

https://archive.is/QzFl6 https://archive.is/QzFl6

pstuart 3y ago

Public funding of religious indoctrination is bothersome.

ericmcer 3y ago

Heck yeah, directly giving people money has always fixed all the underlying problems in our systems.

aapl88889 3y ago
How exactly is this different from food stamps?
- gowld 3y ago
  Groceries are a well-understood commodity product.
  - aapl88889 3y ago
    And? The poor are allowed to choose food options for their kids but not schools? Please elaborate.

DrNosferatu 3y ago

Didn’t Sweden try this with bad results?

gumby 3y ago

> many students in the program were already in private schools or home schools. So the private schools raise tuition by $7,200 and everybody wins, right?

m463 3y ago

I wonder about this in terms of capitalism. Doesn't capitalism work? Everywhere I've worked, the company cafeteria doesn't have to compete and usually sucks. If it was on level footing with restaurants that are open to the public, it would have to do more and do better. Some companies slightly understand this and have an internal subway or starbucks and although they are franchises, they are generally well regarded and do well.