The Official School Voucher/General Education Thread

As someone who fully supports public schools, I am not sure how to take this.

On the one hand, my response is "so". The issue, as I see it, is this countries abandonment of the principle of schools teaching students to be good citizens with a common vocabulary and love of democracy and knowledge and equality. If charter schools do crappy, does that actually promote a reinvestment in public schools? Or would we be better off (I believe we would), if charter schools absolutely kicked public schools' butts?

 

I don't understand what you're saying. Could you clarify for me please? Thanks.

 

Probably something to do with teaching what the special intrest groups what taught.

 

No, I mean, Crew Dust is a bicycle seat sniffing twerp.

Sorry I was unclear. St. Paul's Catholic in San Antonio did not teach me the idioma universal.

 

Actually, I should have just said, what Mortimer Adler said. Pretty good book if you have the time.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t...=sr_1_15/102-8627107-9564934?v=glance&s=books

 

Aren't charter schools different than private schools? In fact, I think that even public schools can be charter schools. So this does nothing to argue for or against vouchers.

 

Many charter schools are inherently designed to appeal to children are having problems. The effectiveness of the charter schools should not be judged based on the standards of the entire studen body of the country but rather based on the performance of students who were in similar circumstances.

Even if charter schools are a failure, and that's way too early to say, I think this argues for more school choice programs, as now we have some actual data to argue over and to use to draw real conclusions. We will never get that for school choice programs if the progress comes a single district at a time.

 

I didn't bother reading the article above but I want to clear up a question that was raised. Charter schools are, for the most part, public schools which have some sort of focus around which they base their teaching. In my area most charter schools are elementary schools though they can be any level. Some focus on math and science, some on learning through nature with a focus on environmental sustainability, some focus on language development etc etc. Anyway, one of the problems with judging charter schools with general schools, like someone has said, is that charter schools tend to appeal and even recruit disadvataged youth. Most of the charter schools in my area are in the inner city, while most of the general public schools are in the suburbs.
When you talk about 'school choice' there are three types: Interdistrict; where students can go to a school in another school district if they choose (this is almost universally accepted), intradistrict where students can transfer to schools within a district (this is accepted in some states) and finnaly the highly controvertial vouchers where a student can take public money to go to a private school (this is only approved in Miluwaukee[sp] and Cleveland I believe). Here is my opinion on school vouchers. One study found that over 90% of the students in Clevland who use vouchers go to a religious school, so you can make the argument that public money is being used to fund private religious schools (seperation of church and state). And that's just one problem.... Imagine if a school district has 10 schools with 25 1st graders at each school and each student brings 1000 dollars to the district. That means that there is a total of 250,000 dollars for the district. If a private school opens and pulls 25 students out of the public system that means the district will have 25,000 less dollars. The problem is that the students will generaly go to the private school from all 10 public schools so you either have to operate each school on a smaller budget or close a school and bus kids further away (read more money).

I don't feel like typing anymore. Hope this cleared a little up.

Tom