Hacker News Reader

Comment by tdba | Hacker News Reader

You're arguing against a straw man: most existing voucher programs are means-tested already (ie. only available to your "high cost" students) which negates your argument that the low cost students will use vouchers leave the system.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_voucher

View on HN

Means tested doesn’t mean only available to high cost students. Means tested means available only to certain income demographics. A high cost student in the essay is someone who costs more to educate for instance a special needs student who requires a full time assistant.

Most vouchers are variable based on what the school would get, not a flat amount. Example in Arizona most (>50%) of vouchers are used by disabled children and can top $40000.

Did you know that many schools out source highly disabled kids to specialized school, in essence running their own voucher system?

While some vouchers are based on this data shared elsewhere in this thread indicated that most are not. Outsourcing disabled kids to a specialized school has a number of disadvantages and is not a program I would broadly support. I think the most notable is that it reduces the interaction of the typical student populace with disabled students causing them to be less aware of the challenges and issues they may face. A lot of education is exposure to different peoples and perspectives. I had a disabled child in one of my classes at a young age and think that experience helped develop my empathy for people who had a different experience of life than my own. If the benefits to disabled students are sufficiently large they may outweigh the gains to the broader student body but designing systems to be insular rather than reflective is something that should be done with an abundance of caution.

Do you have any evidence to back that up? I see no reason why students need to literally be in the same classroom all day with disabled people to learn empathy for them. There are many other ways they could interact with them without forcing students with vastly different needs into the same box (consider how home schoolers do it).

I don’t have evidence in the form of research or empirical data but I’m happy to talk from my own experiences. Genuine empathy comes from a place of understanding and is almost impossible without seeing one’s struggles. I also think students who aren’t exposed to racially diverse populations struggle to emphasize on racial issues. If you don’t have exposure it’s something novel and foreign. Our first intuitions are often incorrect. These aren’t things that one magically gets correct from principles but rather that one slowly accumulates by interacting with diverse populations.

If your evidence is only anecdotal then I think you need to go find some better evidence or go back and rethink your argument. Calling voucher systems a "scam" based on this reasoning is a big stretch. There are lots of other ways for "low cost" students to accumulate interactions with "high cost" students that don't require them to all be educated in the same manner e.g. out of school activity clubs, local community groups, religious organizations, boy/girl scouts. Why not give students a say in how they are educated and make those opportunities more accessible / subsidised?

I have evidence on the main point of the argument which wasn't what I thought you were asking for. It sounded like you were asking about a specific niche use of vouchers for disabled students. There can be merits to a specific voucher program for disabled students. That doesn't make voucher programs that take money from disabled students for non-disabled students any less of a scam. It's a completely separate point that is orthogonal to the main one.

This seems like a really arbitrary line of evidence. Absolutely having exposure to peers with disabilities is a good think for young people, but there are also significant costs/complexities that come from trying to do it all. I don’t see any consideration for the other half of the equation in this comment

Reply on news.ycombinator.com