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Comment by pokstad | Hacker News Reader

Instead, allow for a voucher system where parents can apply the equivalent amount of money the public school spends and apply it towards private schools. Make it easy for teachers to start their own school or coop to compete for vouchers. Definitely a pipe dream but it might work.

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You do understand how this would and has played out, right?

Basically the government would be subsidizing private schools for the rich, and since rich people are getting their needs met the funding will evaporate for schools in poorer neighbourhoods. Society will be move divided and your ability to succeed will depend on the class you’re born into above all else.

How can developers understand the value and need for dogfooding your own products, and yet advocate for a two tier public-private healthcare or education system?

We did this in Indiana and handled this by having an income cap for voucher eligibility. The reality is that people living in poor areas now have access to better schools. Rich people don't get vouchers.

That’s good for Indiana if true. What about other places? My understanding was that many voucher proposals did not have income caps.

The means test was added to Indiana's voucher program to get it passed, and it was a good thing. I put a lot of time in doing grass-roots work to get it passed, and honestly it has been great for kids, teachers (unions are good, but having employers compete for you is even better)... the only people it's been bad for are professional public school administrators and construction companies that sell school districts new buildings instead of paying teachers more.

I’m with you on this generally, and I’m glad Indiana included a means test. But I’m not sold that a shift to voucher systems more broadly will include means tests.

> But I’m not sold that a shift to voucher systems more broadly will include means tests.

In many US states this will have to happen.

We did this in Indiana. Vouchers have been very popular, particularly with lower income families who are stuck with failing traditional public schools. In short, kids really don't have decades to wait for the existing system to be fixed, and vouchers give parents a way to make sure their kids are in better situations. It also has forced public schools to up their game in every way because if you don't offer what parents want, you will get competition. In well-funded, wealthy areas, vouchers have mattered a lot less.

Isn't the typical argument against such vouchers in Housing that companies will simply bake the voucher amount into the price, leaving us in the same place without a public option?

None of the voucher systems I've heard of abolish the public system. It simply gives parents and students more choices and actually forces the public system to compete instead of continually beg for more funding that ultimately goes into the pockets of administrators instead of teachers and resources for students.

I do not see what public education advocates are fearing here. If their systems are so amazing and essential than surely the private sector can do no better, right? This will force school systems to become more lean from an administrative point of view.

One issue is that good quality education isn’t linear in cost. A school with 5 students may have lower overhead but will lack amenities that enable better learning, eg athletic infrastructure, libraries, etc. We provide public versions of those things, but then we’re back to funding parts of the education system with public levies. Furthermore there are some economies of scale that a public system enables, particularly around equitable access. For instance, I read somewhere that the postal service loses money delivering to remote areas. But given their mandate to serve all Americans, those in remote areas have access to a postal service. A private model would not likely serve those people well, if at all.

The most important thing for young student success is small class size. These concerns you have are more applicable for older students but I’m sure there’s ways to mitigate them.

Small class size helps but you still need a good teacher.

From an economic scale perspective, I don't think you can just parcel out an individual student's "cost" like this.

Put another way: the tax is lower than the net individual cost. I suspect that most school voucher advocates understand this, and see it as a convenient way to additionally weaken public schooling.

What would stop this from further becoming a segregated system where public schools are left supporting IEP and other expensive student groups on a shoestring budget while private schools accept only the most profitable students?

Make sure IEP is covered as part of the law and the budget is allocated adequately? This is a hypothetical law, you can suggest whatever you want for the sake of discussion.

Ah yes! Funnel MORE tax payer dollars to the wealthy.

What a dystopian education system that would be.

Why? The idea that everyone is forced to go to the same place and be educated the same way is dystopian, IMHO. What ever happened to diversity?

You can have diversity without turning education into a for-profit hellscape.

I went to a small private school in a low income area. No one in my school was wealthy. Tuition was low. The school was a non-profit. You are spreading FUD.

Your anecdote doesn’t prove or disprove anything. Like a particularly snowy winter doesn’t disprove global warming.

Who said schools have to be for profit? In my state we have vouchers, and most voucher money goes to schools operated by not-for-profits. We also have charter schools, and most of those are operated by for-profit companies. Either way, they offer a way to get kids into a better environment/institution than trying to fix a failing public school system.

How long have you had vouchers, and what is the long term trend.

12-13 years. They work.

Uh-huh. 13 years doesn't make me feel even a little confidant you've proven they work. The arc of social changes are long.

The biggest risk is the status quo - kids forced to spend 13 years in failing schools is guaranteed to get the same results.

Vouchers are generally used at existing private and parochial schools, who do meet state education standards, and frankly, usually vastly outperform public schools on education outcomes... and in many cases offer opportunities outside the classroom that public schools can't really match (i.e. many elementary schools in Indiana don't offer arts, sports, scouting and other clubs where the private/parochial schools do) Most often those schools have been outperforming the local public schools for decades. It's really low risk and has been nothing but wonderful for the kids.

The charter schools are much more risky - they are much more like business startups, and many fail. But, again the worse risk of all is entrusting thousands of kids for 13 years to failing education systems, and that is the alternative.

False choice. It’s not failing system vs vouchers. It’s failing system vs vouchers vs fixing system.

You’re advocating for a solution to failing system, but it’s not the only one. And frankly, it’s likely it’s worse now than it was 13 years ago… i can think of one possible explanation why

> fixing system.

Kids don't have 20 years to wait for laws to change, demographics to shift, politicians to retire and local attitudes to change. They are in school for 13 years.

> False choice.

Nope, vouchers give families a choice. Doing nothing gives no choice.

Kids don’t have 20 years to wait for some voucher bill to pass, and then new schools to open up and then bad ones close down and better ones open up, all while social infrastructure develops to circulate good information about outcomes so parents can make informed choices, and backstop laws and bills to prevent islands of no-schooling or no-good-schooling to be passed either.

Both solutions take time. One solution injects a whole lot of the worst capitalist incentives into education (grift, hype, profiteering), the other doesn’t.

It might work in doing what exactly?

One thing that it’s really good at is diverting money from public schools to religious private schools. It’s also good at segregating the student population.

It allows more choice. Why should a poor student be forced to have only one public school option?

There are a limited number of spots in private schools, if everyone suddenly has $x more dollars to spend on private schools the private schools will raise prices by at least $x to reduce demand. The wealthy will still be the ones in private schools and tax payer money is diverted to the private schools instead of the public schools while the poorest are still in public schools.

There are also other hurdles to poor kids attending private schools, for example private schools don't have school busses, so they are reliant on kids having parents with the ability to drop their kids off and pick them up every day.

Many schools spend a lot of money on everything but the teachers. Voucher run schools are like small experiments to do things differently.

How about “also yes”

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