Should private schools exist?/Should public schools exist?

[Nym90]

Of course both should exist. More options are almost always better; certainly this is true in education.

[Nym90]

yes/yes

no on vouchers- the academic prep schools wouldn't allow enough kids in on vouchers to make it a truly broad based govt program. Government programs shouldn't serve the few. And I can't support public funding of religious education. If communities want some kids from their neighborhoods  to attend private school, they can pool resources and offer scholarships. That would be an admirable plan, but should not mix this money in with the public budget.

I agree they should be locally controlled, with accreditation associations possibly regional rather than local, as they now are.

Regarding vouchers, I'd be willing to support them as long as no money was taken away from the public schools in the process (as it is now, if a public school loses a student to a private school via a voucher, they lose funding, since funding is on a per pupil basis; I'd support changing this to allow the same funding for the school even after losing the student, which would be likely to help improve the public school in the process, as they'd have more money to spend per pupil). I also strongly feel that the church/state seperation needs to be maintained.

The reality of vouchers, I think, is that government money would be more efficiently spent on improving public schools rather than spent on vouchers. Private schools are very expensive, and thus any comprehensive voucher plan would be extremely costly in order to give any great number of students a quality education.

So while they sound good in theory, in actual practice I can't see them being a really good idea unless one believes that public schools are irrevocably broken beyond repair, and can never succeed under any conditions, which seems preposterous to me.

[Nym90]

I see what you are saying, and I do mostly agree. I did say that I supported vouchers under certain conditions, remember.

If the private schools in question are indeed cheap and high quality, then vouchers make a lot more sense in those cases, for sure. It obviously depends on the local area, which is why I support more localized education, with more power in the hands of local school boards, which can be more directly influenced by those in the community through local elections, and in which the people will be more likely to be heard at local school board meetings.

You are correct that bad parenting is mostly to blame for bad schools rather than the schools themselves. Obviously if the parents have no desire to improve a school, it isn't going to improve. I just don't believe that there are large percentages of parents who don't truly want a good education for their kids; I think that most of them just simply never learned the skills themselves in the first place. It's a vicious cycle, to be sure, but I think that ensuring high-quality teachers, a high-quality facility, and administrators and educators that take pride in their job can turn around these areas, albeit slowly. The schools can be a force for changing the attitude of the community, rather than having to be strictly responsive to it. It can help instill pride and a sense of hope into the area, the lack of which is responsible for a lot of the problems of the area.

I think that the liberal attitude is more that no one is completely beyond hope for redemption, no matter how hopeless their situation. An enduring faith in the ability of all people to overcome adversity, basically, and as a result, a conviction that we as a society have a responsibility to try to help the downtrodden in their quest to turn their lives around.

I personally believe that this is true, though in many cases individuals must reform on their own, as it would be too expensive for society to give them the help that they would need. If helping some people would drag down the vast majority of others to a lower standard of living in the process, it's not going to be a good idea for the nation as a whole to do it.

So regarding the schools you consider unsaveable, I favor a compromise approach; allow those to escape who want to, yes (as I strongly favor choice, and not forcing anyone into an educational system that isn't working for them personally) but also continue to work strongly to improve the school, rather than simply abandoning it, as vouchers often do in their current form. I agree that money itself isn't the answer, the money has to be used in a constructive way to change people's opinions and attitudes about life, but I think it can be done. If we spend money smartly and attract the right people, it can and will work, and the long-term positive repurcussions will be well worth it.

[Nym90]

No/no would result in there not being any schools...

Well there'd be homeschooling, of course.