First shots fired in Republican plans to defund public schools

Tenure interferes with the free market. Academic freedom just means they can waste the taxpayer's money on stuff that doesn't pay. All that stuff is socialist governance - taxing the rich to pay for socially owned and controlled goods and services.

The Chinese don't need it. They have cash. They need focused agricultural research to support their food supply during the incoming climate change, which bids fair to destroy a good deal of Chinese agriculture.

 

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Many of the wealthy chinese send their children to our universities.
These students seem more dedicated...they seem to have a drive to excel.....walk into the university library on a thursday, friday, or saturday evening, and almost all of the faces you see will be chinese.

 

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I guess you've never heard a Democrat politician infer a Republican was racist.

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Apparently you don't understand vouchers.

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It's called the First Amendment. Look it up.

 

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No problems with any child praying however he or she wants in school.
BIG problem with a government-paid teacher leading children in a Christian prayer.

Don't understand the difference? It's called the First Amendment. Look it up.

 

Imply and infer are opposite sides of the same situation. A Democrat may very well infer racism from the actions and speech of a Republican - gods know, they make enough comments and laws that have every appearance of racism. A Democrat may also imply that a Republican is racist, without saying it in so many words. Implying something about somebody is not an actual charge; it results in no reaction, unless the hearer/reader takes the inference as fact. Inference is not evidence of anything.
Here endeth the lesson in philology.
It has no bearing on the topic.

No, I do not. Explain how it's going to work in Detroit.

 

You're absolutely right, I did use the wrong word. Good catch. This is the sort of implication I had in mind:

"(Romney) is going to let the big banks once again write their own rules, unchain Wall Street," Biden said at a campaign event in Danville, Virginia. "He is going to put y'all back in chains." - http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.co...eys-wall-street-will-put-yall-back-in-chains/​

The problem with the implication is that Democrat voters do seem to take it as fact. Answering your "Where have the Republicans been all this time?"

Detroit is a city with many educational options, more than most other American cities. Excellent Schools Detroit connects parents to information about those school options. - https://www.excellentschoolsdetroit.org/en/what-are-my-options

Detroit's problems are often considered an outlier, but urban public school districts in Chicago, Philadelphia and Cleveland are also struggling with declining attendance figures and structural deficits amounting to tens of millions of dollars. Michael Griffith, a finance analyst for the research group Education Commission of the States, says lawmakers with ailing districts will likely be watching Detroit's new district to see whether the legislation stabilizes the public school system. -http://time.com/4390000/detroit-public-schools-charters-debt/​

 

It is. But still off-topic.

No, it didn't. My question was in reference to your statement that failing inner-city schools were run by Democrats. I asked, if that is so, why had the Republicans made no attempt, all this time, to improve those failing schools. To which people imputing racism to other people is a non-sequitur.

I see a web-page about school information.
I do not see you explaining how the voucher system works.
If you're uncomfortable with Detroit, explain rural Alabama or wherever you like.

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What I don't understand is:
How will education be fair, accessible and universal if money is taken out of the system?
What new choices do parents have that they didn't have last year?
What standards will apply?
When a student nearing the end of secondary education, how will he know whether his diploma qualifies him for college admission?
How does the arithmetic work?
Public school cost: infrastructure + furnishings and equipment + maintenance + utilities + staff + administration + supplies = x$
Private school cost: infrastructure + furnishings and equipment + maintenance + utilities + staff + administration + supplies + profit = x+p$
How will the 9% that the federal government kicks in for local public schools cover the difference and still save money?

 

You keep saying that, without justifying the assertion. While quite to the contrary, it is the decades of Democrat dominance in urban areas that raise the question of who really has destroyed those schools.

It's not rocket science. If Republicans can't get elected in those areas, how do you expect them to improve those schools?

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Do you think they're magic?

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Poor memory? You said, "THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH FREE CHOICE", so my reply showed examples of choice. Now you seem to be moving the goalpost to cost, but I haven't seen anyone claim that vouchers inherently "save money", so that seems completely non-sequitur.
Vouchers work to allow competition, which is a natural mechanism for reducing costs and improving service. Any reduced costs may even be absorbed in improved/expanded service.

In the United States a quality assurance process exists that is independent of government and performed by private non-profit organizations.[1] Those organizations are formally called accreditors. All accreditors in the US must in turn be recognized by the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI), which is an advisory body to the U.S. Secretary of Education, in order to receive federal funding and any other type of federal recognition. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_accreditation​

If you don't see how parents being able to pick schools they couldn't otherwise afford without vouchers (forced to remain in failing public schools) is more choice...I really can't help you. Willful ignorance maybe?

 

By ceasing to block revenue sharing efforts and other modifications of school funding that starve poor neighborhood schools of necessary funding. By taxing rich people to support public services such as schools, regardless of where they live in given region. By seeing to it that teachers get paid as much as similar professions are paid, and providing them with the working conditions taken for granted in these other professions. By desisting from their continual efforts to screw around with the curriculum, especially in the realm of the sciences, history, and literature. By restoring basic features of the education of the young such as physical activity, a daily meal of good food, vocational skills, and the various arts of their society. By seeing to it that schools attended by the children of the poor reflect the adult understanding that raising the young is a primary and fundamental responsibility of the adults of the larger community, and the best wishes of these adults attend them. And so forth.

By not being stupid about it, in other words.

Vouchers do not increase competition, unless they are generous enough to allow any child to attend whatever schools are in alleged competition. And they do not reduce costs - by financing redundancy in infrastructure and bureaucracy, as well as providing a profit margin over and above the costs, they increase overhead. They would have to provide benefits justifying this increase in costs - they don't, as far as anyone can tell.

So you would make sure the vouchers covered the cost of those other schools, including transportation etc, so that the parents in the areas featuring failing schools would all be able to choose? That would eliminate most voucher programs.

 

Your reply shows the examples of choice that already existed. Choice that was never impeded by funding public schools.
It shows the exact opposite of your previous statement that public schools have a monopoly, and that they limit the freedom of parents.
It does not show how a change in federal policy increases freedom of choice.

Budget - money.
Cutting budget - saving money.

If it's not about cutting costs, then defunding public schools accomplishes --- what?

How? Putting the word 'natural' in doesn't make a claim any more plausible.

That last title sounds like government to me. I bet they demand Core Curriculum. Maybe even environmental science. Then where is the gain in freedom to be stupid?

That's because you won't do the math. Where are the new schools the poor people are supposedly now able to send their children to? The existing private schools can't take in millions of extra students. It takes years to build anew school and a lot of money. It takes minutes to draft a bill taking money away from a school that already exists. Neither the time nor the money balance.

How does the federal money cut from public schools translate to vouchers? How much is that in dollars?

 

I never said the choices didn't previously exist. You seem to be laboring under the...naive...impression that low income families could afford any choice other than public schools. You seem completely ignorant of the fact that vouchers allow these parents to take the taxpayer funds that would have been applied to their child in public schools and CHOOSE to apply it in another school. Those same low income families who would otherwise be stuck in low preforming schools.
No one is advocating vouchers to primarily help those who could already afford such options.

You do realize that vouchers simply move the money from public schools to other options, right? This simply allows the existing funds to be reallocated...by following the student. It accomplishes allowing low income families to get out of the low performing schools that help keep them, generation after generation, a permanent lower class.
Come on, be honest. You really just want to keep these people in their place, right?

Economics 101.

Perhaps you missed that the Secretary of Education (DeVos) just changed with the new executive administration. But please, do show me where the NACIQI requires common-core or environmentalism for all the accreditors it recognizes.

Didn't you JUST get done saying, "Your reply shows the examples of choice that already existed."?
Vouchers cannot be applied unless children are enrolled, so it's not like children are going to be set adrift. And as these schools get and compete for the newly available funds, they will naturally look to expand to accommodate more students, because more students means more money.
You, again naively, seem to think that vouchers instantly defund public schools. That's nonsense. The funds stay with the child, whether in public school or elsewhere. Look it up....maybe somewhere other than fear-mongering leftist sources.

 

It doesn't fix the low performing public schools that most people go to, does it? What if everyone went to the new voucher funded school? Wouldn't they just get the same low funding the old school got? What makes you think bad schools aren't just a function of low funding?

 

Of course they are. "No wealth redistribution" is a rallying cry for the right. Vouchers would help rich people eliminate what they see as a parasitic drain on their wealth.

You do realize that vouchers do not automatically allow poor parents to afford better schools, right?

. . . thus moving funds from public to private schools. Thus defunding public schools.

You just destroyed your own argument.

 

Every voucher system I have ever seen advocated does exactly that.

It primarily, in practice, moves wealthy people's tax funding out of the public schools and into the private schools, where to a disproportionate extent their children already are.
The children trapped in the public schools are thereby further deprived.

You're duplicating overhead - that's a waste of public money.

 

Saying Economics 101 doesn't cover the vast mathematical gulf.
The Tooth Fairy will provide for those who have faith.

 

Public schools are in dire need of learning market discipline, instead of getting guaranteed funding regardless of outcome. Private schools already operate in a competitive market....and one that includes a free option at that. They cannot continue to draw new students if they have consistently poor outcomes...because the next private school can offer better.

Pixie Dust

"It's not about the dollars," says Stan Saylor, chairman of the education committee in Pennsylvania's House of Representatives. "It's where that local school district spent those dollars over the last many years."

And Saylor is not alone.

"Money isn't pixie dust," declared the Texas assistant solicitor general, arguing his state's side of a school funding lawsuit before the Texas Supreme Court. "Funding is no guarantee of better student outcomes."

This idea, that sprinkling more dollars over troubled schools won't magically improve test scores or graduation rates, is a common refrain among many politicians, activists and experts. And they have research to back it up.

This report on school spending from the libertarian Cato Institute is just one entry in a decades-long body of work that suggests there is little to no link between spending and academic achievement.
- http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/04/25/468157856/can-more-money-fix-americas-schools​

Yet you haven't refuted anything I've said. Just some ad hominem poisoning the well in lieu of actual argument.
Look up 'market discipline'.

 

Outcome?
Is that how you teach your feet to behave - tell them if they don't run faster you will refuse to buy shoes for them?

So the fact that they so often underperform the public schools is a bit of a mystery for you. Until you realize that there is not, and never will be, a whole bunch of redundant educational capacity lying around waiting for poor people's children to show up and take advantage of it without paying. And most of such charity private schooling is going to be religious.

So there's no educational benefit from depriving schools of funds.

Meanwhile: In a sane world, with everything set up as it should be, there probably would be a negative correlation between funding and academic achievement - due to the greater cost and difficulty of educating poorly prepared and badly raised children, and the greater expenses of operating schools in bad neighborhoods. Well prepared and well-parented children in nice neighborhoods are much cheaper to educate. So the bulk of your funding should be going to the worst schools, if outcome is your priority.

 

Throwing a hominem down a well doesn't necessarily poison the well, though the cattle might refuse to drink that water.
I refuted everything you said, twice over, on previous pages, and have no taste for any further repetition.

That would not be a substitute for the explanation I asked you for.
You say this will work.
I ask: how will it work?
You say something meaningless like "economics" - of which discipline you seem as innocent as you are of education.
So, what's the point of continuing?

 

In many cases that is true. The converse, however, is provably true - defunding is a guarantee of worse student outcome.

Fortunately, most educators do not believe that merely "sprinkling more dollars over troubled schools" will "magically improve test scores or graduation rates." They do, however, firmly believe that SUFFICIENT funding is critical in ensuring good test scores and graduation rates.

 

I must have missed it...or it only occurred in your head.

How does any business work in a competitive market? Look, I'm not going to hold your hand and spoon feed you what education you can get yourself, for free, from Google. If you can't be bothered, I'll happily chalk it up to willful ignorance.

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Apparently nothing, since you only have ad hominems in lieu of argument.
And apparently that's what you call a 'refute'.

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