First shots fired in Republican plans to defund public schools

Seldom by handing out their products or services for free to little kids who don't know the value of them and cannot pay for them.

So apparently you've got something else in mind. Any clues?

 

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Oh, you mean like public schools?

Competition for the per-child taxpayer funding.

 

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Nobody else has managed to figure out how to do that - by what mechanism?

 

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Vouchers.

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And there you have the full circle.

 

And? Is all you have left is "vouchers bad, public school good"?

 

That's not in the quote. I do believe that public schools, when properly supported by government and the community, are very good. I never said vouchers are bad.
I asked, as I believe others have asked:
How does the voucher system work to the benefit of poor people?
and
How is the scheme to be financed?
and
How does removing funds from public schools improve education?
and
What is the plan for transferring a large number students from inner city public facilities to private schools in other districts?
and
Are there now, or is there a time-line for the establishment of, enough places in private schools for all the students that will be displaced?

to all of which you reply: Vouchers. which was your original comment; therefore:
full circle.

 

Yet funneling more money into them doesn't magically correlate with better outcomes. As I posted earlier:

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​

You're transparently intellectually dishonest if you claim those questions haven't been fully answered in this thread. Just because you don't like the answers...your bias is apparent in descriptions like "scheme".

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Okay.
Let's try something simpler.
What is the main central purpose of defunding public schools in general and lunch programs in particular?

 

That obviously doesn't work - it's just tax breaks for rich people doing what they already do, and duplicate tax-paid overhead afflicting the rest, with no way of assessing outcome by the voucher-holders or the children whose voucher holders are incompetent (so no competition).

 

Misses the point.

If schools were properly funded, there would be a negative correlation between school spending and academic achievement. That's because poorly raised and prepared children going to school in bad neighborhoods cost more and achieve less academically.

These people seem to be imagining that education for children is some kind of purchased consumer good or service.

 

The number of students in a public school district is always a part of the funding formula. Less students has always meant less funding. How hard is that to understand? Public schools will only lose the funds if they lose the students to competing schools.

Can you support that bare assertion?

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Have you never heard of means-tested vouchers?

Ah, the mythical "more money" solution that we've never found the final dollar figure to achieve.

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To the contrary:

For every 1.1 miles closer to the nearest private school, public school math and reading performance increases by 1.5 percent of a standard deviation in the first year following the announcement of the scholarship program. Likewise, having 12 additional private schools nearby boosts public school test scores by almost 3 percent of a standard deviation. The presence of two additional types of private schools nearby raises test scores by about 2 percent of a standard deviation. Finally, an increase of one standard deviation in the concentration of private schools nearby is associated with an increase of about 1 percent of a standard deviation in test scores. - http://educationnext.org/does-competition-improve-public-schools/​

Would you prefer scholarships to vouchers?

The Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program (FTC) was signed into law in 2001 and opened to students from low-income families in the 2002–03 school year. FTC provides corporations with tax credits for donations they make to scholarship funding organizations, the nonprofits that determine student eligibility for the program and issue scholarships. Corporations can receive dollar-for-dollar tax credits for up to 75 percent of their total state tax obligation each year. - http://educationnext.org/does-competition-improve-public-schools/​

 

Yeah... except it's the wrong way up.
"The bill establishes an education voucher program, through which each state shall distribute block grant funds among local educational agencies (LEAs) based on the number of eligible children within each LEA's geographical area. From these amounts, each LEA shall: (1) distribute a portion of funds to parents who elect to enroll their child in a private school or to home-school their child, and (2) do so in a manner that ensures that such payments will be used for appropriate educational expenses."
The schools that have been underfunded can't compete, and the ones that have been adequately funded are suddenly inundated with students they can't accommodate. So, either the private schools enroll the extra students, collect the extra money, and let standards slide (my guess), or there will be a waiting list, while students are stuck at old school, which is short-changed, while parents sit on worthless vouchers.

This, too, is back-assward. All it tells us is that rich neighbourhoods get better public schools than poor neighbourhoods. We knew that already.

 

Which is similar to noticing that most accidents occur within a mile of the home - so accidents can be avoided by having everyone move more than a mile away from their old home.

 

Like I said, distributing funds by number of students in a district and those funds follow the child, even if they are in public school. The whole point of competition is to bring failing public schools up to competitive market discipline, i.e. smarter spending. No private school can accept more students than it has capacity, so your boogeyman of funding fleeing the public schools with nowhere to go is nonsense. Markets are always quick to grow when more spending power becomes available. Again, just simple economics.
And the vouchers remaining in public schools are only as worthless as those schools remain.

Yet:

...they consistently indicate a positive relationship between private school competition and student performance in the public schools, even before any students leave for the private sector. - http://educationnext.org/does-competition-improve-public-schools/​

 

Okay, I get that math is not your long suit.

Duh! Private schools are established in rich areas, where people can afford them. Rich areas therefore have a choice of different schools.
Poor areas have no private schools and no choices.
In a rich area, all schools are better funded and better supported than schools in poor quarters; they have a choice of top teachers, who would rather live in the nice neighbourhood. The children of prosperous people had good nutrition and health-care from birth; own educational toys, books and gadgets as a matter of course; have had lots of parental (or care-giver) attention; they went to pre-school and are given help with homework and tutoring if they're slow.
Poor areas produce children who have been deprived of all these advantages, and very often come to school anxious, insufficiently rested and hungry.
Which reminds me: you never did explain what the objective is of scrapping the nutrition requirements.

 

I've never seen a voucher proposal that worked. Come to think of it, I've never seen an actual one that wasn't based on tax breaks. And I've never seen a voucher proposal that would pay for good private schooling for all the children of any poor community.

btw: In addition to religion, there's race motivating this: In the Confederacy, where vouchers are popular and sometimes proposed to benefit even middle class parents, the private schools involved are highly segregated by race even in the middle of multi-racial communities.

Tax breaks for rich people come under a variety of names - I don't have much preference for one over another.

 

I get that not so thinly veiled ad hominems are your only argument.

Can't be bothered to read, huh?

The Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program (FTC) was signed into law in 2001 and opened to students from low-income families in the 2002–03 school year.
Although little noticed, tax credit scholarship programs now send many more low-income students to private schools than do traditional school voucher programs.
FTC targeted students from low-income families, only 5 percent of whom had been attending private schools.
- http://educationnext.org/does-competition-improve-public-schools/​

Do you think the poor (200% poverty line or less) can afford to transport their children to richer neighborhoods, live close enough to make your argument moot, or school options were quickly established to accommodate the freed up spending power? Do you really think no one would be interested in a market monopoly opened up to competition? \

Lessons for America

So the accepted wisdom appears to be wrong. Though elite private schools do exist in impoverished regions of the world, private schools are not only for the privileged classes. From a wide range of settings, from deepest rural China, through the slums of urban India and Kenya, to the urban periphery areas o Ghana, private education is serving huge numbers of children. Indeed, in those areas where we were able to adequately compare public and private provision, a large majority of schoolchildren are in private school, a significant number of them in unrecognized schools and not on the state’s radar at all.

Ironically, perhaps, the accepted wisdom does seem to be right on one point: private is better than public. Of course, no one suspected that private slum schools would be better. Yet our research suggests that children in these schools outperform similar students in government schools in key school subjects. And this is true even of the unrecognized private schools, schools that development experts dismiss, if they acknowledge their existence at all, as being of poor quality.
- http://educationnext.org/privateschoolsforthepoor/​

Remember me saying something about market discipline? Unappetizing meals that lead kids to waste food (requirements to take a fruit or veggie, whether they will eat it or not) at huge school funding expense is part of what makes public school less competitive and fiscally inefficient. HHFKA has no means testing, so even those families that could provide their own meals do not. It's bloated, erodes parental responsibility (already lacking in poor educational outcomes), without outcome-based goals or long-term criteria for success.

 

The decision to scrap the nutrition requirements was not a market decision.

You keep talking about competition where there is no market setup, and if there were the costs of the entire system would go through the roof.

The best school systems in the world all feature public, tax financed, government run, schools. The higher the percentage of private schooling, the lower the educational level of the society as a whole.

The obvious way to look at their data is to see it as evidence that private schooling for the poor is a desperation measure employed under malfunctioning governments.

 

Try reading that again. I said "market discipline" not "market decision".

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Bare assertions are not arguments.

Support that assertion.

By that measure, apparently we've had a malfunctioning government for quite some time.

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Or do you think the poor have good outcomes in US public schools?

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