Will Vouchers affect the Football landscape in Indiana?

[Irishman]

2 minutes ago, Daniel_Bragg said:

To the end of more internship hours, it is natural for the state to want to generate their own workforce.  The reality is that Indiana needs blue collar workers.  So, the DOE and political leaders are changing the curriculum to match the workforce needs.  

I usually don't get involved in political discussions on forums, as being a local elected official brings its own volume of discussion, but I did want to engage with that point.  I'm not saying I agree with the plan.  I prefer that we prepare our children for a life that leads to being the most educated that they can be.  However, when college has been proven over the past several decades to be more of a "piece of paper" than an achievement that prepares you for the real world, it is only natural that state governments would start getting pressured to deviate from that model.

I would be curious to find out. Ask the Internship Coordinator at Sheridan how challenging it has been in recent years to place interns; prior to these changes? I know in our building, she was struggling to place the ones who signed up for the class. Last school year, she had around 200 students to place. A handful already had jobs, but most of those will not count toward the new requirements. With about 300 students per class in our building, that challenge will increase dramatically. 

I get the whole thing about college. The problem with a pendulum swinging in these topics is that it never stops at dead center. It will swing too far the other direction. So, I might be able to find an electrician every couple of blocks, I will have to drive farther to find a doctor or a dentist. One downside to the focus on trades, or even manual labor is that too many students settle. They don't want to push. We see fewer students entering nursing programs, teacher programs, medical school, along with other professions requiring a degree. 

 

[Daniel_Bragg]

2 minutes ago, Irishman said:

I would be curious to find out. Ask the Internship Coordinator at Sheridan how challenging it has been in recent years to place interns; prior to these changes? I know in our building, she was struggling to place the ones who signed up for the class. Last school year, she had around 200 students to place. A handful already had jobs, but most of those will not count toward the new requirements. With about 300 students per class in our building, that challenge will increase dramatically. 

I get the whole thing about college. The problem with a pendulum swinging in these topics is that it never stops at dead center. It will swing too far the other direction. So, I might be able to find an electrician every couple of blocks, I will have to drive farther to find a doctor or a dentist. One downside to the focus on trades, or even manual labor is that too many students settle. They don't want to push. We see fewer students entering nursing programs, teacher programs, medical school, along with other professions requiring a degree. 

 

I know Sheridan has A LOT of students out of the school on a daily basis for internships.  They are proud of that fact.  From what I have seen/heard though, most are in internships for college credit.  

I wholeheartedly agree about the pendulum swinging.  In almost every scenario, when the government tries to fix one thing now, they cause more problems later.  I think there can be a middle to all of this.  In career fields that are vital and currently experiencing shortages, I.e. teaching, nursing, etc...the government should create incentives for students to choose those career paths.  I'm not going to go into proposals for those incentives, but I imagine you can come up with a few yourself.

Now, back to "will vouchers affect the football landscape", I honestly don't think so.  Top performing public school kids aren't going to switch to voucher schools, just because they can.  If I had to venture a guess, the more likely to make these moves are guys who don't get a lot of playing time, and just want to win a ring with minimal effort, riding on someone else's coattails.

If a kid is starting at a team that is competitive, I don't think he'll move to a school just because of vouchers.

[Irishman]

7 minutes ago, Daniel_Bragg said:

Now, back to "will vouchers affect the football landscape", I honestly don't think so.  Top performing public school kids aren't going to switch to voucher schools, just because they can.  If I had to venture a guess, the more likely to make these moves are guys who don't get a lot of playing time, and just want to win a ring with minimal effort, riding on someone else's coattails.

If a kid is starting at a team that is competitive, I don't think he'll move to a school just because of vouchers.

I would agree on all counts. Any advantages gained in football from the vouchers already took place early in the voucher era. A couple schools I know firsthand had a number of players using them were Ritter and Luers; to the extent both schools were told to back off. Both have lost legacy families and while Luers seems to have bounced back, Ritter is still struggling. Most of their legacy kids have been going to BC, Cathedral, and Brebeuf. 

[Sparty]

50 minutes ago, Irishman said:

$$$$$$ in their pockets and from the donors pushing the agenda. You think anyone in the supermajority in our Statehouse listens to their constituents? 

Teachers in their unions have to decline having their dues sent to politicians.  Teacher’s unions largely support the left.  

[Irishman]

4 minutes ago, Sparty said:

Teachers in their unions have to decline having their dues sent to politicians.  Teacher’s unions largely support the left.  

Not accurate. It is illegal for the association to use dues collected to fund political campaigns. Contributions to a PAC are voluntary. 

[Sparty]

2 minutes ago, Irishman said:

Not accurate. ISTA is a 501c5, a not for profit organization. It is illegal to use dues collected to fund political campaigns. Contributions to a PAC are voluntary. 

If they are voluntary, why do they need to check NO?

[Irishman]

1 minute ago, Sparty said:

If they are voluntary, why do they need to check NO?

Check no on what? 

[Irishman]

[Muda69]

56 minutes ago, Irishman said:

I will add...pay attention to other things going on. Relaxing of child labor laws has been attempted the last couple of sessions, and could likely pass. The new graduation requirements dramatically increase the amount of internship hours students have to complete (aka free labor). these legislators want to guarantee a line of working class citizens. 

 

There is still a direct connection between the groups that support privatizing education as well as privatizing the prison system. Failing schools and/or lack of access to any school keeps that pipeline going. 

You do realize that one of the reasons given for the creation of a government school system was to create docile factory workers?

https://tuttletwins.com/blogs/blog/the-surprising-history-of-public-education-how-it-was-designed-to-create-factory-workers-and-what-we-can-do-about-it?srsltid=AfmBOoocS0GLFfyFZjk-Gq2tzeVvhwzk_sexY7HKf_sO5uWgLww-PD-0

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Have you ever stopped to think about why public education exists in the way that it does? If you’re like most people, you probably just assume that it’s always been this way and that it’s the best system for preparing young people for the real world. But what if I told you that public education as we know it was actually designed with a very specific purpose in mind – one that has nothing to do with helping kids succeed in life?

According to John Taylor Gatto, a former New York State Teacher of the Year and a vocal critic of the public education system, public education was actually created to turn kids into factory workers. In the 19th century, as the Industrial Revolution was in full swing, factory owners realized that they needed a reliable workforce of obedient, well-behaved employees. They also realized that they could save money by not having to provide on-the-job training – they could just send the kids to school to learn the skills they needed.

And so, public education was born. But it wasn’t designed to be a place where kids could learn and grow and explore their interests. It was designed to be a place where kids could be molded into the kind of workers that the factories needed.

One of the key features of public education is its emphasis on standardization. From the curriculum to the way that classes are structured, everything is designed to be the same for every student, no matter where they are or what their interests or goals might be. This might seem like a good thing at first glance – after all, shouldn’t everyone get the same education? But in reality, this standardization is actually a way to make sure that all kids are learning the same things in the same way, so that they can be plugged into the “system” without any hiccups.

And of course the great essay "Against Schools" by the aforementioned John Taylor Gatto, something everyone should read:

https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~abatko/interests/teaching/essays/Against_Schools/

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I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn't seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren't interested in learning more. And the kids were right: their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.

Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teachers' lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn't get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?

We all are. My grandfather taught me that. One afternoon when I was seven I complained to him of boredom, and he batted me hard on the head. He told me that I was never to use that term in his presence again, that if I was bored it was my fault and no one else's. The obligation to amuse and instruct myself was entirely my own, and people who didn't know that were childish people, to be avoided if possible. Certainty not to be trusted. That episode cured me of boredom forever, and here and there over the years I was able to pass on the lesson to some remarkable student. For the most part, however, I found it futile to challenge the official notion that boredom and childishness were the natural state of affairs in the classroom. Often I had to defy custom, and even bend the law, to help kids break out of this trap.

The empire struck back, of course; childish adults regularly conflate opposition with disloyalty. I once returned from a medical leave to discover that all evidence of my having been granted the leave had been purposely destroyed, that my job had been terminated, and that I no longer possessed even a teaching license. After nine months of tormented effort I was able to retrieve the license when a school secretary testified to witnessing the plot unfold. In the meantime my family suffered more than I care to remember. By the time I finally retired in 1991, 1 had more than enough reason to think of our schools-with their long-term, cell-block-style, forced confinement of both students and teachers-as virtual factories of childishness. Yet I honestly could not see why they had to be that way. My own experience had revealed to me what many other teachers must learn along the way, too, yet keep to themselves for fear of reprisal: if we wanted to we could easily and inexpensively jettison the old, stupid structures and help kids take an education rather than merely receive a schooling. We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness-curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insightsimply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids to truly competent adults, and by giving each student what autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then.

But we don't do that. And the more I asked why not, and persisted in thinking about the "problem" of schooling as an engineer might, the more I missed the point: What if there is no "problem" with our schools? What if they are the way they are, so expensively flying in the face of common sense and long experience in how children learn things, not because they are doing something wrong but because they are doing something right? Is it possible that George W. Bush accidentally spoke the truth when he said we would "leave no child behind"? Could it be that our schools are designed to make sure not one of them ever really grows up?

Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn't, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever "graduated" from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn't go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren't looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multivolume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated.

We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of "success" as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, "schooling," but historically that isn't true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the world today find a way to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prisons. Why, then, do Americans confuse education with just such a system? What exactly is the purpose of our public schools?

Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold:

1) To make good people. 2) To make good citizens. 3) To make each person his or her personal best. These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education's mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong. Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling's true purpose. We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not

to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States... and that is its aim everywhere else.

Because of Mencken's reputation as a satirist, we might be tempted to dismiss this passage as a bit of hyperbolic sarcasm. His article, however, goes on to trace the template for our own educational system back to the now vanished, though never to be forgotten, military state of Prussia. And although he was certainly aware of the irony that we had recently been at war with Germany, the heir to Prussian thought and culture, Mencken was being perfectly serious here. Our educational system really is Prussian in origin, and that really is cause for concern.

The odd fact of a Prussian provenance for our schools pops up again and again once you know to look for it. William James alluded to it many times at the turn of the century. Orestes Brownson, the hero of Christopher Lasch's 1991 book, The True and Only Heaven, was publicly denouncing the Prussianization of American schools back in the 1840s. Horace Mann's "Seventh Annual Report" to the Massachusetts State Board of Education in 1843 is essentially a paean to the land of Frederick the Great and a call for its schooling to be brought here. That Prussian culture loomed large in America is hardly surprising, given our early association with that utopian state. A Prussian served as Washington's aide during the Revolutionary War, and so many German-speaking people had settled here by 1795 that Congress considered publishing a German-language edition of the federal laws. But what shocks is that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens 11 in order to render the populace "manageable."

It was from James Bryant Conant-president of Harvard for twenty years, WWI poison-gas specialist, WWII executive on the atomic-bomb project, high commissioner of the American zone in Germany after WWII, and truly one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century-that I first got wind of the real purposes of American schooling. Without Conant, we would probably not have the same style and degree of standardized testing that we enjoy today, nor would we be blessed with gargantuan high schools that warehouse 2,000 to 4,000 students at a time, like the famous Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado. Shortly after I retired from teaching I picked up Conant's 1959 book-length essay, The Child the Parent and the State, and was more than a little intrigued to see him mention in passing that the modem schools we attend were the result of a "revolution" engineered between 1905 and 1930. A revolution? He declines to elaborate, but he does direct the curious and the uninformed to Alexander Inglis's 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education, in which "one saw this revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary."

Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole.

Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modern schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:

1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.

2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.

3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.

4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.

5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.

6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.

That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country. And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American school system designed along the same lines. Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South, surely understood that the Prussian system was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers. In time a great number of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending just such a herd via public education, among them Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.

There you have it. Now you know. We don't need Karl Marx's conception of a grand warfare between the classes to see that it is in the interest of complex management, economic or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to discard them if they don't conform. Class may frame the proposition, as when Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said the following to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909: "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." But the motives behind the disgusting decisions that bring about these ends need not be class-based at all. They can stem purely from fear, or from the by now familiar belief that "efficiency" is the paramount virtue, rather than love, lib, erty, laughter, or hope. Above all, they can stem from simple greed.

There were vast fortunes to be made, after all, in an economy based on mass production and organized to favor the large corporation rather than the small business or the family farm. But mass production required mass consumption, and at the turn of the twentieth century most Americans considered it both unnatural and unwise to buy things they didn't actually need. Mandatory schooling was a godsend on that count. School didn't have to train kids in any direct sense to think they should consume nonstop, because it did something even better: it encouraged them not to think at all. And that left them sitting ducks for another great invention of the modem era - marketing.

Now, you needn't have studied marketing to know that there are two groups of people who can always be convinced to consume more than they need to: addicts and children. School has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts, but it has done a spectacular job of turning our children into children. Again, this is no accident. Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up. In the 1934 edition of his once well-known book Public Education in the United States, Ellwood P. Cubberley detailed and praised the way the strategy of successive school enlargements had extended childhood by two to six years, and forced schooling was at that point still quite new. This same Cubberley - who was dean of Stanford's School of Education, a textbook editor at Houghton Mifflin, and Conant's friend and correspondent at Harvard - had written the following in the 1922 edition of his book Public School Administration: "Our schools are ... factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned .... And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down."

It's perfectly obvious from our society today what those specifications were. Maturity has by now been banished from nearly every aspect of our lives. Easy divorce laws have removed the need to work at relationships; easy credit has removed the need for fiscal self-control; easy entertainment has removed the need to learn to entertain oneself; easy answers have removed the need to ask questions. We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults. We buy televisions, and then we buy the things we see on the television. We buy computers, and then we buy the things we see on the computer. We buy $150 sneakers whether we need them or not, and when they fall apart too soon we buy another pair. We drive SUVs and believe the lie that they constitute a kind of life insurance, even when we're upside-down in them. And, worst of all, we don't bat an eye when Ari Fleischer tells us to "be careful what you say," even if we remember having been told somewhere back in school that America is the land of the free. We simply buy that one too. Our schooling, as intended, has seen to it.

Now for the good news. Once you understand the logic behind modern schooling, its tricks and traps are fairly easy to avoid. School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they'll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology - all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone, and they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more meaningful life, and they can.

First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don't let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a pre-teen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there's no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.

 

[Irishman]

23 minutes ago, Sparty said:

If they are voluntary, why do they need to check NO?

Welll????? Looking at the enrollment form now laughing boy.

Not a single box marked "No" on either page. There are options to have additional funds taken out that would contribute to a PAC and/or an Educational foundation. 

[Sparty]

51 minutes ago, Irishman said:

Welll????? Looking at the enrollment form now laughing boy.

Not a single box marked "No" on either page. There are options to have additional funds taken out that would contribute to a PAC and/or an Educational foundation. 

Hit a nerve huh?  Lol

[Irishman]

Just now, Sparty said:

Hit a nerve huh?  Lol

Nope....cannot admit you were wrong huh? lol 

[Sparty]

53 minutes ago, Irishman said:

Welll????? Looking at the enrollment form now laughing boy.

Not a single box marked "No" on either page. There are options to have additional funds taken out that would contribute to a PAC and/or an Educational foundation. 

I stand by what I said.  

[Irishman]

Just now, Sparty said:

I stand by what I said.  

As I do with what I said, which means you are wrong. But good luck with that. 

[Sparty]

Just now, Irishman said:

Nope....cannot admit you were wrong huh? lol 

I wasn’t.  You knew EXACTLY what I meant.  
 

Glad parents can use their tax dollars to choose where their money is spent.  

Just now, Irishman said:

As I do with what I said, which means you are wrong. But good luck with that. 

Lol

[Irishman]

Just now, Sparty said:

I wasn’t.  You knew EXACTLY what I meant.  

Yes I did....you claimed that teachers joining the association have to claim they do not want their dues being sent to politicians. And I provided evidence to show that it cannot happen. You have provided nothing to back your claim, including showing the "No" on the enrollment form. 

[foxbat]

7 hours ago, Daniel_Bragg said:

I know Sheridan has A LOT of students out of the school on a daily basis for internships.  They are proud of that fact.  From what I have seen/heard though, most are in internships for college credit.  

I wholeheartedly agree about the pendulum swinging.  In almost every scenario, when the government tries to fix one thing now, they cause more problems later.  I think there can be a middle to all of this.  In career fields that are vital and currently experiencing shortages, I.e. teaching, nursing, etc...the government should create incentives for students to choose those career paths.  I'm not going to go into proposals for those incentives, but I imagine you can come up with a few yourself.

Now, back to "will vouchers affect the football landscape", I honestly don't think so.  Top performing public school kids aren't going to switch to voucher schools, just because they can.  If I had to venture a guess, the more likely to make these moves are guys who don't get a lot of playing time, and just want to win a ring with minimal effort, riding on someone else's coattails.

If a kid is starting at a team that is competitive, I don't think he'll move to a school just because of vouchers.

Given that the vast majority of vouchers are used by kids that aren't or haven't been in public schools, it's less likely to pull kids out of public schools solely for the idea of athletics.  In addition, with the new "free transfer" policy from the IHSAA, that will make the appeal of public-to-private voucher use less likely combined with sports.  There are more options in public schools for the ability to move to more competitive programs or less effort situations than the private school options.  As we've already seen in other threads, there seem to be quite a few "commitment" announcements that don't mention saints or religious education.  Also, with regard to private schools, while they'll certainly be happy to take the voucher money, they aren't likely to tolerate minimal effort in athletic endeavors from "outsiders" ... non-legacy folks ... unless there's a major counter-effort in the classroom as they can't afford someone in the ranks who isn't contributing on the field and not contributing in the classroom ... again, unless there's some legacy connection. 

[MHSTigerFan]

On 7/23/2025 at 11:01 AM, Irishman said:

Less than half of property tax dollars go to the school corporation. You want your tax dollars to pay for your child, I have no issue with that. But a LOT of other people's tax dollars are paying for it as well. 

If that was the case last time you looked, then it has been a while. Segregation is not just based on race. 8.9% of voucher students are African American, while less than 20% are Hispanic. Most voucher students come from homes with an income of $100K or more. Over 30% come from homes earning more than $150K. So students are segregated based on economics as well. Then there are students on non diploma track; special needs students. Most non public schools will tell parents your child is better off in the public school. It's those students after all, that set the amount per student that schools get. So the value of a voucher is based on the costs related to the students in schools who would never be admitted to a voucher school. There are a number of other students as well who would never be considered when applying to a non public school. Those schools get to pick and choose who gets in and who does not. They also get to choose who stays and who they ask to leave; setting standards that are illegal to have in public schools. 

At the end of the day, I don’t understand why it matters what school a kid chooses to attend and use the taxpayer dollars allotted for his/her education.  Whether it’s School A or School B, the purpose of the expenditure is their education.

And can you elaborate more on this “segregation” point you’re trying to make?  You cite racial statistics that roughly a third of the voucher students are minorities.  But then go on to say it’s some other form of segregation….by explaining that 70% of the users have household incomes of less than $150k?

Where does the segregation come in?  Which schools are being segregated…and how?  Because neither of the stats you cite suggest segregation by either race or income.  In fact, both stats suggest a pretty diverse mix.

[Irishman]

5 hours ago, MHSTigerFan said:

At the end of the day, I don’t understand why it matters what school a kid chooses to attend and use the taxpayer dollars allotted for his/her education.  Whether it’s School A or School B, the purpose of the expenditure is their education.

And can you elaborate more on this “segregation” point you’re trying to make?  You cite racial statistics that roughly a third of the voucher students are minorities.  But then go on to say it’s some other form of segregation….by explaining that 70% of the users have household incomes of less than $150k?

Where does the segregation come in?  Which schools are being segregated…and how?  Because neither of the stats you cite suggest segregation by either race or income.  In fact, both stats suggest a pretty diverse mix.

You are simply choosing not to see the disparity in the groups you mentioned. Try another angle. Bishop Dwenger and New Haven are in the same sectional often. Dwenger has With similar populations, Dwenger has just 5% of its students who qualify for free and reduced lunch. New Haven has 67%. The minority population at Dwenger is 19%. At New Haven, it is 55%. That said, you left out one group I mentioned, special needs students. On most voucher and charter schools, that population is non existent. Statewide, only 9% are special ed students. To meet the needs these students are allowed by law is what the per student money is based on in Indiana. For a comparison, Bishop Dwenger has 45 students who are labeled special needs. None of them are on certificate track. New Haven has 289 students labeled as special needs, or 21% of their population, and about 15% are certificate track. Another school in the sectional, Wayne HS has 264 special needs students, or 19% of their population. On a personal note, I had 150 students in class last semester. 79 of them had either an IEP or ILP. Of the ILP students, I had 16 that spoke no English. 8 of them were in 1 class period, and represented 5 different languages. Those students’ parents would not even know what a voucher was. And there is zero chance they would have been admitted if they did. 
 

[Muda69]

9 minutes ago, Irishman said:

On a personal note, I had 150 students in class last semester. 79 of them had either an IEP or ILP. Of the ILP students, I had 16 that spoke no English.

Shouldn't every student have an Individual Learning Plan?

Quote

Dwenger has With similar populations, Dwenger has just 5% of its students who qualify for free and reduced lunch. New Haven has 67%. The minority population at Dwenger is 19%. At New Haven, it is 55%. 

*hold my beer*  Those are chump numbers compared to Frankfort High School:

https://indianafederalreportcard.doe.in.gov/profile/School/3435

 

[Irishman]

11 minutes ago, Muda69 said:

Shouldn't every student have an Individual Learning Plan?

*hold my beer*  Those are chump numbers compared to Frankfort High School:

https://indianafederalreportcard.doe.in.gov/profile/School/3435

 

So I should have 150 individual learning plans? Pretty unrealistic. That said, I try to use as many different styles as I can to reach as many as possible. 
Posting Frankfurt’s numbers helps my point. Just more kids where voucher schools will tell them they are better served in a public school. 
Also, try to find a voucher or charter school with numbers close to your Frankfurt numbers or the ones I posted. 

[Muda69]

29 minutes ago, Irishman said:

So I should have 150 individual learning plans? Pretty unrealistic. That said, I try to use as many different styles as I can to reach as many as possible. 
 

Yes, you should.  Another reason why the cookie-cutter approach championed by government schools doesn't work.  It is usually just a race to the bottom.  Where the bottom is mediocrity at best.

 

31 minutes ago, Irishman said:

Posting Frankfort’s numbers helps my point. Just more kids where voucher schools will tell them they are better served in a public school. 
Also, try to find a voucher or charter school with numbers close to your Frankfort numbers or the ones I posted. 

FTFY, you educational professional you. 

But, but don't the charter schools just need more money in order to adequately serve these ESL and Disabled students?  That is the government school monopoly argument.

 

 

[Irishman]

8 minutes ago, Muda69 said:

Yes, you should.  Another reason why the cookie-cutter approach championed by government schools doesn't work.  It is usually just a race to the bottom.  Where the bottom is mediocrity at best.

See…this is one of those detail things, where if the conversation were about software engineering, I would not even begin to consider venturing into. And then you make assumptions based on that lack of understanding. Do you really think voucher and charter schools have individual plans for every single student? 

[Muda69]

2 hours ago, Irishman said:

See…this is one of those detail things, where if the conversation were about software engineering, I would not even begin to consider venturing into. And then you make assumptions based on that lack of understanding. Do you really think voucher and charter schools have individual plans for every single student? 

Yes. If they don't I wouldn't send my child to one. 

 

 

[Bullhorn99]

8 hours ago, Irishman said:

You are simply choosing not to see the disparity in the groups you mentioned. Try another angle. Bishop Dwenger and New Haven are in the same sectional often. Dwenger has With similar populations, Dwenger has just 5% of its students who qualify for free and reduced lunch. New Haven has 67%. The minority population at Dwenger is 19%. At New Haven, it is 55%. That said, you left out one group I mentioned, special needs students. On most voucher and charter schools, that population is non existent. Statewide, only 9% are special ed students. To meet the needs these students are allowed by law is what the per student money is based on in Indiana. For a comparison, Bishop Dwenger has 45 students who are labeled special needs. None of them are on certificate track. New Haven has 289 students labeled as special needs, or 21% of their population, and about 15% are certificate track. Another school in the sectional, Wayne HS has 264 special needs students, or 19% of their population. On a personal note, I had 150 students in class last semester. 79 of them had either an IEP or ILP. Of the ILP students, I had 16 that spoke no English. 8 of them were in 1 class period, and represented 5 different languages. Those students’ parents would not even know what a voucher was. And there is zero chance they would have been admitted if they did. 
 

Would these numbers be significantly different if vouchers went away? You may be able to prove me wrong, but I'm guessing those numbers would be about the same. So is the problem vouchers or is the problem private schools? You could probably find the similar disparities between public schools from affluent communities versus public schools from poorer communities.