Not sure how applicable this is to the U.S, this is the case in a lot of Western Europe.
My public school tenure was an absolute nightmare. For my kid's sake, I'll never live in another place that does 'socioeconomic bussing.'
Look at higher education and we can see a wide disparity between the different types of institutions. What will happen with vouchers is a Corinthian Collegeing of k-12 in certain low income districts.
So I think in practice they end up subsidizing the cheap-to-educate kid's private school education, while expensive students stay in public schools (which makes the private school voucher amount go up while decreasing the quality of public school instruction for the majority of students). Kind of a vicious cycle.
Special Ed students and the staff supporting them are subsidized and paid for by the US Dept of Education.
When you have an Autism Specialist or a Special Education teacher, the school district will go to the US DoE to get the SpED staff's salary comped.
This makes sense because of how expensive special education is, yet how critical of a social function it has.
My mom is a Special Education Teacher and she's always been funded by the Federal DoE.
The issue is "tracking" is very expensive and a bit of a political landline, so plenty of less academically included students end up in AVID track or Low Severity Special Education classes - neither of which are subsidized by the DoE.
School Boards don't want to deal with the expensive and politically suidical option of saying some kids are dumber than others, so this is the backdoor solution they use. Also, by tracking that means you have to hire 2x the number of teachers, while still having the same budget, and local voters don't want to see a 2x increase in Sales Tax and/or property taxes.
If you've ever had a an internet plan that promises you speeds of "up to" $FOO, you can probably guess how IDEA goes down in practice. In my state (California), the Feds reimburse about 10% of the cost, which leaves the state and local governments on the hook for the rest. In practice the allocation is also weird for the federal money, since it doesn't take into account that students have different needs with drastically different costs (e.g. an IEP for a kid with shitty handwriting vs a kid on Home & Hospital who has personalized 1:1 instruction+care all day)
My comment was an attempt to point out this hypocrisy.
It's a hard problem, but I can't fault people who believe public schools should focus on not failing the bottom section rather than accelerating the top achievers.
This is already the case though. I grew up in a “low income” area and whenever I visit my parents I see people I went to Highschool with walking around in the streets.
Something’s got to change but unfortunately I do not have the answer. Hopefully AI will save us all.
The problem is they focus on not failing the bottoms section, and also completely fail the bottom section.
What we see in higher education are two types of private schools. One type are nonprofit and one type are profit. The for profit schools tend to be predatory have much worse outcomes than the public schools or nonprofit ones. The nonprofit ones tend to fall into two categories. The ones with nice endowments are exclusive and very good. We will see this happen with k-12 with vouchers.
From a school’s perspective a voucher is exactly as if a student got a student loan in that amount. Those who think federally backed loans are a problem in higher education ought to be opposed to vouchers for k-12.
- The schools must be accredited.
I can't find one good reason to restrict a poor student from choosing a magnet or a charter school over their local public school.
Magnet schools are public schools in the US that draw from multiple schools and usually have a particular focus (arts & languages, STEM, etc.). The main limiter on magnet school attendance is their capacity. I ended up in one in HS with a capacity of 1500 students, for a city with over 1 million people at the time (not sure the number of HS aged people). It cost nothing extra to attend, you had to apply and interview to get in and the public school bus system took care of getting everyone to the school no matter where they lived in the county.
EDIT: And I had to double check because I've only recently lived in an area with charter schools and have no kids yet so didn't really care much, but they're also technically public schools in the US. They are publicly funded and have no tuition costs to attend.
Most private k-12 schools are religiously affiliated.
Do you have this much concern for the poor when it comes to funding public transportation, healthcare, childcare, pre-school, school lunch, and dental care?
- Mississippi is richer than Germany and France without progressive social policies. Since you are questioning my motives, do you have a concern for the poor yourself?
By what measure? Using GDP Mississippi appears to have a GDP of around $100 billion. France and Germany both have GDPs in the trillions. Normalized by population, both are still larger than Mississippi.
Mississippi: $105 billion / 2.95 million = $34.90k/person
France : $2.958 trillion / 67.75 million = $43.66k
Germany : $4.26 trillion / 83.2 million = $52.2kFrance: 43,658.98
Germany: 51,203.55
Mississippi: 48,744*
I was off on Mississippi but they are still very close to Germany's, which is good considering they are the poorest state in the USA.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
So you were half-right, congrats.
Having a few more dollars doesn’t make up for these discrepancies.
Why continue to mandate a failing system, when many private options are both accessible and successful? Why prevent or restrict, lower middle income students from going to higher quality schools?