Comment by marcuskane2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marcuskane2 | Hacker News Reader

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Internet commenters try to get me to hate lots of people for lots of reasons, but "Parents trying to send their kid to a school that fits their kid's needs" seems like such a hard sell.

Like, I get the desire in a hypothetical, that you hope that people in power would use their power to make public schools better if their kids were forced to go there.

But in reality, the actually powerful can just pay for private schools out of pocket and the vouchers help a lot of middle-income families send their kid to a school that can provide a better environment for whatever definition of better is relevant to that individual.

It just seems like such misplaced anger and energy. You could just advocate for improving public schools, without attacking regular families trying to do their best while trapped inside a system they have very little influence on.

The voucher system is seen as an attack on IEP / special ed children, since public schools rely on distributing money away from the general population of students and into special ed and IEP students who, by various measures, can consume 3x the amount of money per student. They need lots of non-special-ed students to subsidize the special ed ones at the current levels.

If enough people use the voucher system it basically forces the per student spending to get closer to a purely egalitarian spending per student, with the result that public schools have to spend about the same amount on special ed kids as the voucher kids get (in the extreme, that's all the students they're left with). While this is objectively fairer in my opinion, it's viewed as an entitlement that the special ed kids can take more money at the expense of everyone else.

Obviously though this has to be carefully framed to sell it properly. Very few are going to knowingly sign up to lose funding for their own student to help some other student who is already getting 3x the money as them, so instead it's framed as some sort of evil capitalist agenda against public schools.

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