Do you support school choice?

Lord Tammerlain said:

And people without kids have to pay for everyone kids to go to school without any benefit to themselves at all

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Sounds like good candidates for more opt outs.

haymarket said:

Allow me to chime in both as a parent and as a 33 year former teacher in the public system. Of course, every parent has the right and duty to see that the education given to their child is the best that they can possibly give them. And if that means a school other than the local public school - so be it.

At the same time, we also have to accept and realize that there is a societal price to pay for that. The most motivated parents leave the public system and the contribution they could have made to that local public school is often never replaced or made by the less motivated or less educated or less involved parent who is still in the public system.

You multiply that times hundreds and thousands and millions and it becomes just like a big city like Detroit losing the tax payers over time and only keeping those who pay little but absorb much services. it has to have an overall negative effect on the system and on society.

It is not a win/win situation.

Maggie - I was a longtime union activist who went to the monthly meetings and screamed that the union get involved in improving the schools and setting high standards when the administration refused to do so. I was repeatedly told that such things were beyond the scope of unions. Thankfully, in the last ten years, this has started to change and now improving schools is seen as union business by the two major educational unions. Sadly, the damage has been done and for some districts, the situation may be impossible to reverse.

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And for that reason (bolded above), parents should be allowed to voucher their kids to other schools that aren't broken.

It isn't difficult to improve public schools. Society just doesn't have the will to do so. And, when push comes to shove, unions aren't so interested in the students. Their interest in the students is only inasmuch as they relate to union jobs and job security.

Improving their image is even more difficult than improving public schools in general.

MoSurveyor said:

You can send your child to any school you want, just don't expect tax money to do so. Even though my child is grown I still have a say in our public schools. The same is not true of private schools.

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It's not "tax money." It's my money.

I would be ok with charter schools so long as schools have proper accreditation for their curriculum that were aligned with what a state college would accept.

Basically, so long as this isn't used to get around a proper education (like substituting creationism for an actual science education), its ok by me.

If its a fully private school and not paid with state funds, they should be given much more room in their curriculum choice, but I cannot in good conscious or morality support dumbing down our populace in the name of some religious agenda.

Yes, I am absolutely in favor of school choice. Choice is good.

The Gov't brags about its' spending on Education, and a lot of money is spent. It is spent on buildings, sports complexes, etc., but not on merit based teacher pay increases. Therefore, communities get some really nice buildings that look good and that is IMAGERY, not substance, when you are discussing education. US students have regressed on a world wide scale due to Federal teaching guidelines of sound good, accomplish nothing platitudes and programs with no substance. In New York State, the schools don't like home schoolers because the Local School Districts get about $88/day for each student from State aid and they don't get that for the home schooled. That just gets lost. The Local School Districts don't want to acknowledge when home schooled are ready for college long before their institutionalized counterparts and fight to prevent issuing the paperwork necessary to enroll these students in College. If the home schooled are ready for College long before the Local School students, it makes the local School Districts look bad. Actually, it just puts a microscopic view on the fact that our educational system has some flaws and no one wants to fix them because they will lose their monetary windfalls. Online education is the future and it only requires that the online student be properly motivated and acknowledges it is the student's responsibility to do the schoolwork. It is not a teacher's responsibility to beat knowledge in to the student's head. Many parents think that is how school works and that schools are just convenient babysitters. There is never a "one size fits all," but in the USA personal responsibility for one's educational motivation is a lost agenda.

scatt said:

Sounds good, just let them opt out of taxes paying for other kids.

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We all pay tax's for things that we dont use. If we allow it in this case then we must do it for everything. Which would be problematic.

joko104 said:

I suppose all but vouchers to religious church rule schools. That should not be paid by tax dollars nor a basis for tax deference or avoidance.

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If the school that a set of parents deems best to educate their child happens to be a religious school, then I see no legitimate reason to override their choice and to discriminate against that school, simply on the basis of it being religious. Indeed, a true understanding of the First Amendment would prohibit such discrimination. Alas, we belong to a generation in which the First Amendment has been twisted and perverted into an excuse for exactly the sort of discrimination that it was supposed to forbid.

FreedomFromAll said:

We all pay tax's for things that we dont use. If we allow it in this case then we must do it for everything. Which would be problematic.

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I certainly agree there is a massive difference in what people actually want and what people want if they are taxed.

FreedomFromAll said:

We all pay tax's for things that we dont use. If we allow it in this case then we must do it for everything. Which would be problematic.

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Yeah, only having use taxes would reduce our quality of living drastically. I prefer modern living.

tacomancer said:

Yeah, only having use taxes would reduce our quality of living drastically. I prefer modern living.

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There is nothing modern about forced taxation.

scatt said:

There is nothing modern about forced taxation.

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1. That had nothing to do with my observation
2. Who cares if its modern or not, that was not my point. Modernity in terms of having a society that functions fairly well (albeit not perfectly) is the convenience I referred to. If it weren't for the foundations put in place by general taxation as opposed to use taxes, we would not have the infrastructure to build a lot of what we expect and are used to (like grocery stores having an extremely high degree of reliability of being stocked with food, without modern roads, this would be very unlikely to happen) and things would be a lot more volatile and there would be far more suffering than we have right now and we have altogether too much suffering in even this set up we have now already.

tacomancer said:

Who cares if its modern or not, that was nothing about my point. Modernity in terms of having a society that functions fairly well (albeit not perfectly) is the convenience I referred to. If it weren't for the foundations put in place by general taxation as opposed to use taxes, we would not have the infrastructure to build a lot of what we expect and are used to (like grocery stores having an extremely high degree of reliability of being stocked with food) and things would be a lot more volatile and there would be far more suffering.

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You care, that is why you mentioned it.

If you are telling me people would not pay for services they do not use or want, I would agree with you.

scatt said:

You care, that is why you mentioned it.

If you are telling me people would not pay for services they do not use or want, I would agree with you.

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They would, but people are stupid, they would only try to pay for services they directly use and tend to have an "out of sight out of mind" mentality. Our current system of taxation fixes that problem and makes society function better than it would under a use tax system.

another example is the notion that only parents should pay for school, people who don't have kids never realizing that a generally educated society makes their lives a whole lot better.

also LOL of course I care about MY point not your misunderstanding of my point

haymarket said:

Allow me to chime in both as a parent and as a 33 year former teacher in the public system. Of course, every parent has the right and duty to see that the education given to their child is the best that they can possibly give them. And if that means a school other than the local public school - so be it.

At the same time, we also have to accept and realize that there is a societal price to pay for that. The most motivated parents leave the public system and the contribution they could have made to that local public school is often never replaced or made by the less motivated or less educated or less involved parent who is still in the public system.

You multiply that times hundreds and thousands and millions and it becomes just like a big city like Detroit losing the tax payers over time and only keeping those who pay little but absorb much services. it has to have an overall negative effect on the system and on society.

It is not a win/win situation.

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In any free market, a particular business, offering a particular service; if it offers a poor service for the money that it charges, compared to other competing companies, then it does poorly, and is very likely to go out of business. Those companies that provide the best service for the best prices are the ones that succeed.

It seems to me that the whole of your argument is that it is a bad thing for one business to fail, if its service is so poor and its prices so high that it fails to compete with other businesses offering the same thing; and that we need government to forcibly tax the population in order to prop up the failing business; lest the failure of that business “have an overall negative effect on the system and on society.”

I reject this argument completely. If the government cannot operate a school that can compete on a fair, level field, with privately-operated schools, then let the government schools fail, and let government get out of the business. We simply do not need nor want to have government providing an inferior service for a higher price, when we could have private industry providing a better service at a lower price. We certainly do not need government propping up failing enterprises at our expense.

And we sure as hell do not need government taxing us to pay for a failing service, on top of what we must then pay to a private company in order to provide the service that government is failing to provide in exchange for the tax that it is fraudulently collecting for that claimed purpose.

scatt said:

I know, private school parents pay for everyone's kids to go to school through taxation, and they pay for their kid to go to school with after tax funds.

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MoSurveyor said:

As it should be.

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Why should a consumer have to pay twice, for a service that he receives once?

tacomancer said:

They would, but people are stupid, they would only try to pay for services they directly use and tend to have an "out of sight out of mind" mentality. Our current system of taxation fixes that problem and makes society function better than it would under a use tax system.

another example is the notion that only parents should pay for school, people who don't have kids never realizing that a generally educated society makes their lives a whole lot better.

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Yeah, stupid people support forced taxation. Fixing the problem of no demand is not fixed by forced anything.

Charity.

ttwtt78640 said:

Who gets to decide what "failing" means? If one student is permitted to graduate HS, while reading at only an 8th grade level, then that school system has failed, IMHO. To say that if 80% are performing at grade level then that school is "passing", only applies to that 80% - the other 20%, of the students, are being failed by that "satisfactory" public school.

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Obviously at some point you have to set a standard for what a failing school is. No school will have perfect results because some of the results depend on parents. However, I think its easy to see what a successful school district is. For example, here are the stats for the public school district our kids attend:

Average ACT Scores: 25.2
Average SAT Composite: 1,789

Proficient in Reading: 96%
Proficient in Math: 96%

In comparison, the average ACT Scores for Home Schooled kids is 22.6. The average SAT composite for home schooled kids is 1083. The point being that there are lots of public school districts with exemplary performance, so why should parents in those school districts get a taxpayer funded voucher to send their kids to a private school that doesn't even perform as well as the public school does?

scatt said:

Yeah, stupid people support forced taxation. Fixing the problem of no demand is not fixed by forced anything.

Charity.

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People who value modern society and functional societies support this tax system. If you want to call that stupid, go ahead.

tacomancer said:

People who value modern society and functional societies support this tax system. If you want to call that stupid, go ahead.

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They support forcing others to pay, that is not actual support.

scatt said:

They support forcing others to pay, that is not actual support.

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you should look up the definition of support then.

Here is a hint, if one is a proponent of something, they are supporting it, even if only emotionally.

RabidAlpaca said:

Absolutely. People should have a selection where they can educate their child. The only people that oppose this are statists that don't want competition between schools. Taking someone's money then forcing their kid to go to an inferior school when a better one is available is distinctly anti-liberty.

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what do we call it when there is NOT a better school available ... because the seats are already occupied by incumbent students from the nearby community

MaggieD said:

It's not "tax money." It's my money.

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It's not enough just to “Like” this. This needs to be repeated and emphasized.

Statists think of tax money as money that belongs to the state, and which the state is entitled to collect and use as it sees fit, regardless of the interests of those who are forced to pay it.

That's wrong.

Tax money belongs to the people from whom it is taken, and those people are entitled to have that money used to their benefit.

When the state collects taxes, and then uses them in a way that does not benefit the people from whom these taxes are collected, then the state is simply stealing. That's not legitimate government; that's crime under the false guise of government.

tacomancer said:

Here is a hint, if one is a proponent of something, they are supporting it, even if only emotionally.

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Yeah, support requires proof. If you support it, you would pay.

scatt said:

Yeah, support requires proof. If you support it, you would pay.

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In what nation on earth does a resident get to pick and choose which taxes they want to individually pay?