School Choice is Good For America; round 3

[DanteEstonia]

3 hours ago, Muda69 said:

So in K-12 education my tax dollars should only go to educate those children in my community that attend traditional government schools. 

Yes, because we don't live in a theocracy. 

[Muda69]

5 minutes ago, DanteEstonia said:

Yes, because we don't live in a theocracy. 

A weak argument.  Not all non-government schools are affiliated with a religious institution, you do realize that?  And as long as government doesn't deem to withhold taxpayer dollars from one or more specific religious institutions (i.e.  "We the government will only provide tax dollars to Jewish schools, the rest can pound sand.") then it shouldn't fall a foul of the establishment clause.

Just admit it Dante.  You and other government education zealots don't want the status quo upset because it could mean less money in your pocket down the road.  

[DanteEstonia]

Just now, Muda69 said:

A weak argument.  Not all non-government schools are affiliated with a religious institution, you do realize that? 

How many in Indiana aren't? Just limited to IHSAA members, how many private schools are not religiously affiliated?

1 minute ago, Muda69 said:

"We the government will only provide tax dollars to Jewish schools, the rest can pound sand."

The people of East Ramapo would like to have a word with you. 

[Muda69]

Just now, DanteEstonia said:

How many in Indiana aren't? Just limited to IHSAA members, how many private schools are not religiously affiliated?

Again Dante?  What does it really matter?

 

[DanteEstonia]

Just now, Muda69 said:

Again Dante?  What does it really matter?

It's data, and a proof point. An argument that can't be defended isn't valid. 

[Muda69]

Just now, DanteEstonia said:

It's data, and a proof point. An argument that can't be defended isn't valid. 

I defended my argument in a previous post.  Just because you chose to ignore it doesn't make it invalid.   But then again in your progressive fantasy world maybe it does...................

 

[DanteEstonia]

1 minute ago, Muda69 said:

I defended my argument in a previous post.  Just because you chose to ignore it doesn't make it invalid.   But then again in your progressive fantasy world maybe it does...................

 

Answer my question you liar. 

[Muda69]

2 minutes ago, DanteEstonia said:

Answer my question you liar. 

Somebody seems angry today.    I won't answer a question that has zero to do with the topic at hand.

Nice try.

 

 

 

[DanteEstonia]

Just now, Muda69 said:

Somebody seems angry today.    I won't answer a question that has zero to do with the topic at hand.

Nice try.

Cool. Now, for some data-

https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/education/charter-authority-moves-to-close-nevada-connections-academy-1948270/

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An online charter school serving more than 3,000 students will shut down after this year following a recommendation from the State Public Charter School Authority to deny the school’s request for a contract renewal.

A report compiled by SPCSA staff found that Nevada Connections Academy posts achievement rates far below those of other schools statewide, including other charter schools. The report also said that the school has consistently earned only one or two stars on the state star rating system.

“Significant evidence indicates that this is not a high-quality school for many students that attend, which ultimately does not align to the statutory purpose of the SPCSA,” the report said.

The authority’s board decided Friday to accept the staff recommendation after a marathon meeting that saw dozens of families speak up in support of the school. It will effectively close the school at the end of this school year, but school officials said they will explore all legal options to keep the school open.

Nevada Connections Academy Superintendent Chris McBride said the school serves a unique population of students, many of whom landed at the academy after struggling at two or more schools. The academy offers its students free computers and headsets for lessons developed by local teachers.

But the school has struggled with its performance, posting one-star ratings for its elementary, middle and high school programs in 2017-18. In 2018-19, its middle school program earned a two-star rating, with its elementary and high schools keeping the one-star designation.

Last fall, the school opted against seeking a renewal for its elementary school grades. McBride said the school believed that focusing on its middle and high school programs would give it a clear path to renewal.

“A lot of these families won’t have any other option,” McBride said. “It would be a tragedy for this school to close.”

In 2016, the school fought another potential closure over its low graduation rates, eventually coming to an agreement with the authority to improve those rates over two years. The SPSCA report acknowledged that the school improved its graduation rates to the agreed-upon levels but said that the authority has the discretion to look at the “totality of the evidence,” with no factor given more weight than the academic performance of the students.

“We feel that, with a new director, the authority is pulling a bait-and-switch on us,” McBride said.

The full 17-page report from the SPCSA staff found that while student proficiency data from the ACT assessment increased this year, it remains “far below statewide and SPCSA averages.” In 2018-19, 35.8 percent of NCA students were proficient in reading and 10.6 percent were proficient in math, compared with 46.7 percent and 25.5 percent of all students statewide.

In her presentation to the board, SPCSA Executive Director Rebecca Feiden said the staff recommendation was not made lightly and should not be taken to mean that the program is not working for anyone.

“When we say 1 in 10 kids is proficient, that means the program is working for one of those 10 kids,” Feiden said. “But unfortunately it’s not working for enough of those kids.”

 

[Muda69]

1 hour ago, DanteEstonia said:

Cool. Now, for some data-

https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/education/charter-authority-moves-to-close-nevada-connections-academy-1948270/

 

Yay.  Your "data" is one school.    

[Muda69]

Teachers Unions Push Families Out of Public Schools

 

https://reason.com/2020/09/04/teachers-unions-are-pushing-families-out-of-public-schools/

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New York City residents still dependent on public schools received good-ish news this week. The teachers' union—which threatened to strike unless the city met its demands for COVID-19 precautions—finally came to an agreement with Mayor Bill de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Richard A. Carranza. Under the deal, union leaders get to say they protected their members' interests, while city officials get to claim that schools are safer than ever. And parents get to figure out what to do with their kids during unplanned days of idleness as the beginning of classes is pushed back a week and a half.

"Under the terms of the agreement, all New York City public school buildings will remain closed to students until Sept. 21, while final safety arrangements are completed, including the assignment of a school nurse to every building, ventilation checks and the presence of sufficient protective and cleaning supplies," boasted the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) labor union. "The decision on whether to reopen a building to students will be based on the UFT 50-item safety checklist, including social distancing of student desks, the availability of masks and face shields, and a room-by-room review of ventilation effectiveness."

 

"This is a great day for every public school student in New York City," insisted de Blasio. "We face a return to school unlike any in our city's history, but New Yorkers have made it possible because of their extraordinary work fighting back COVID-19. Our agreement puts the health and safety of our 1.1 million students, teachers, and school staff above everything else."

The announcements resolved weeks of uncertainty for students and parents that saw the UFT threatening to strike as recently as the day before the deal was finalized. Families counting on the public schools for their children's education had no way to know if they were actually going to get any education in return for the $25,000 that New York City schools extract from taxpayers and spends per pupil every year.

The UFT isn't alone in its brinksmanship. Unions from Sacramento, California to Andover, Massachusetts held up the reopening of government schools, overtly using kids as bargaining chips to extract concessions over working conditions.

The United Teachers of Los Angeles went further, at one point demanding wealth taxes, police reform, and a moratorium on charter schools as necessary preconditions for reopening public schools. The union settled for remote-only classes.

Threatening strikes and refusing to show up for work have been effective tactics so far, since there's a lot of leverage to be had in keeping parents uncertain as to the educational fate of their children, or even as to where they will spend the day while their parents work. But the labor actions have also created openings for education alternatives.

Private schools, learning pods, microschools, charters, and homeschooling approaches offer parents options that suit their preferences—options that can usually be adopted without waiting on the pleasure of third parties with their own agendas. With their public spats, last-minute agreements, and one-size-fits-few compromises government schools and teachers unions are handing unprecedented marketing opportunities to the competition.

"If your school in the Greater Boston area has a delayed opening or is going fully remote, check out our website to find a Catholic school near you that is offering live in-person instruction," tweeted the Catholic Schools Office of the Archdiocese of Boston on August 28. "All are welcome—learn more today!"

"Do you know what you are doing for school this fall?" Prenda, which offers a model for microschools, posted on Facebook on August 27. "Join us to learn more about Prenda Family, our full-service at-home education program with a learning model, community, and curriculum that is designed to help your kids become empowered learners."

In other cases, parents tackle education with a DIY approach.

"Nobody working in education today can escape pandemic learning pods: the increasingly popular phenomenon in which families band together and hire a private tutor to offer in-person learning to a small group of children," The Washington Post noted this week.

Families that have neither the resources nor the inclination to pay tuition or a share of a tutor's fees are taking on the task themselves and discovering that education doesn't have to be expensive.

"Interest in homeschooling has 'exploded'," the Associated Press reports. "Some are worried their districts are unable to offer a strong virtual learning program. For others who may have been considering homeschooling, concerns for their family's health amid the coronavirus and the on-again, off-again planning for in-person instruction are leading them to part ways with school systems."

Kids are increasingly being educated by their own relations, or in co-op style by groups of like-minded parents who share responsibilities for a pool of children.

The move by motivated families who can manage education alternatives even as they pay taxes for institutions plagued by squabbling amongst union leaders and government officials has some people worried about inequality. Public schools are poised to become the Medicaid of learning—lower-quality government offerings of last resort.

 

If—when, more likely—that happens, education bureaucrats and union officials will have nobody to blame but themselves.

"Somewhere along the way, I believe we flipped the purpose of this," New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo told the New York Daily News editorial board during a 2015 discussion about schools. "This was never a teacher employment program and this was never an industry to hire superintendents and teachers. This was a program to educate kids."

But, as Cuomo acknowledged, kids are beside the point when government officials and union leaders keep them waiting on negotiations that serve everybody but the people who depend on public schools. So families are leaving to explore the world beyond.

And as families grow accustomed to choosing what works for their children rather than accepting what they're given, fewer of them are going to be eager to return their kids to the roles of hostages in labor negotiations. If we're serious about educating everybody, all families should be allowed the freedom to do the same.

 

[Muda69]

The Case for Private Education Co-operatives

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/case-for-private-education-co-operatives/

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Death, taxes, and appalling behavior on the part of public teachers’ unions: These are the three dependable certainties of modern American life.

One of these things is not like the others, however. Death and taxation tend to receive ample coverage in almost every news outlet across the land. Most newspapers contain a section for obituaries and an article or two each day about how the government has decided to spend the money of its citizens. But it hasn’t (yet) become a custom among the proprietors of newspapers or major networks to set aside a similar daily section for reporting the pernicious activities of the teachers’ unions. This is quite baffling. The abject moral destitution and thuggish intimidation tactics of these education cartels are at least as widespread as death and taxation. Editors and reporters all over the country could, therefore, save themselves a lot of hard work by simply allocating a certain amount of column inches or airtime each day to the coverage of teachers’ unions. At a time when media companies have mastered the art of monetizing outrage, it’s shocking that the behavior of these unions goes largely unnoticed most of the time. That is, it’s shocking until you remember that union members share a party affiliation with almost every employee of the mainstream media.

The pandemic, however, has made the modus operandi of the unions impossible to ignore for millions of parents in the United States. Teachers’ unions have always ransomed taxpayers until their demands are met. In this way, they’re no different from other public-sector unions. Government teachers are not content with using the proper democratic processes to ask that taxpayers give them every item on their Christmas wish list, presented with a bow on top. Whenever democracy disappoints them, these unions inevitably revert to strikes.

But teachers’ unions add an extra layer of malevolence to the already anti-democratic tactics of other public-sector unions. It’s not just taxpayers who are held for ransom by government teachers — children and parents are, too. If parents entrust the education of their children to a government school, they should know that the schooling will always take place on the terms of the teachers’ unions, which decide what to teach, when to teach, and the conditions under which teaching takes place. This is because unions know, and have made sure, that “management ” (read “government”) is not in a position to fire all of them — given that parents need somewhere to send their kids during the day and that kids need to be educated.

Several teachers’ unions have recently taken advantage of this sorry state of affairs to condition the reopening of schools on the attainment of their left-wing political objectives. At one point during recent reopening negotiations, the United Teachers of Los Angeles demanded a wealth tax, police reform, and a ban on charter schools. Rather difficult to make out how any of that would improve “staff and student safety” in the time of coronavirus. As late as the day before an agreement was reached with Mayor de Blasio last week, the New York City teachers’ union was threatening to strike. As a result of those negotiations, school reopening in New York has been pushed back an extra week and a half, to September 21, preventing many local parents from going back to full-time work until then.

In the best of all possible worlds, the president of the United States would simply stride out to the Rose Garden and announce that all public-school teachers were being fired, as Reagan did with the air-traffic controllers in ’81. The president would then announce that all federal education funding would be divided up evenly among American children and funneled to discretionary accounts controlled by their guardians and set aside for the sole purpose of private-school fees. Private schools across the land could then compete to enroll children, whose academic destiny would, at last, be in hands of the individual child and his family, where it has always belonged.

Sadly, this happy sequence of events probably won’t come to pass any time soon. For the time being, it’s up to parents and community leaders to take matters into their own hands. How is this to be done? By forming private education co-operatives. In his book The End Is Near and It’s going to Be Awesome, my colleague Kevin Williamson writes eloquently about the widespread existence of voluntary mutual-aid societies that existed in the U.S. before the New Deal. Their primary purpose at the time was to provide members with health insurance:

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Before the New Deal, a surprisingly large number of Americans were covered by social insurance plans — plans that existed entirely outside the sphere of formal politics. These programs offered a surprising array of services: life insurance, hospitalization, medical benefits covering everything from doctors’ fees and hospital charges to wages lost due to illness or injury, survivors benefits, old-age pensions, and even care at retirement homes. And these were not programs for the rich, but for the working class and the poor: Their members were disproportionately low-income laborers, immigrants, and African Americans. They were administered on a nonprofit, voluntary, peer-to-peer basis by community associations of a sort that have, unfortunately, all but disappeared, and the resurrection of which would offer a very attractive alternative to the declining entitlement state. Familiar fraternal organizations such as the Masons, the Elks Lodge, and the Odd Fellows, together with smaller groups and organizations specific to particular ethnic and immigrant populations, included an astonishing number of Americans in the first half of the twentieth century: About one in three Americans over the age of twenty-one belonged to such groups; that number, however, understates their prevalence, since many of those members were the heads of households whose wives and children were covered by the social insurance policies they offered.

Members of a community, whether religious, ethnic, or merely geographic, would ban together and pool their resources so that each could have access to quality health care. This stands in contrast to the public-insurance model, whereby resources are forcibly confiscated by the taxman and decisions concerning their use are referred to distant bureaucrats and political commissars.

Why not revive the model of private association in the context of education? Most parents send their kids to public school only because private schools are too expensive. But if churches, neighborhoods, and nonprofits formed private education co-operatives, in which poorer parents could draw on community resources in the context of face-to-face relationships and voluntary solidarity, communities across the country could begin to declare independence from government education.

At the moment, poorer parents largely do not draw on the financial resources of their community. Community is voluntary, face-to-face, human, accountable, and local. By contrast, government welfare is impersonal, uncaring, unaccountable, and coercive. It bequeaths material resources to recipients, but without any bonds of human relationship or mutual emotional investment. Even the word we use to describe this process, “entitlements,” connotes a relationship between the benefactor and the recipient that is far weaker than those in a community where money is exchanged on a voluntary basis. Because the government takes everyone’s taxes and puts them in one big pot and then spends this undifferentiated lump of money in the form of “government outlays,” the people who receive government funds generally have no idea who in particular is paying for the services they’re receiving. Government places itself between giver and receiver and annihilates the individual relationship between the two. The result is that the human element in this exchange of material resources is completely erased.

If communities throughout the country were to form private education co-operatives, poorer parents could put a name and a face to the funds that are propelling their sons and daughters to academic heights. Richer benefactors would also be able to witness how their wealth can enrich their community — a moralizing experience in itself that might serve as a social check against the materialist excesses of consumerism.

A local association of churches, for example, should have, as a part of its ministry, a Christian education co-operative. A sizable portion of each congregation’s tithe and financial donations could be channeled into the co-operative fund so that members of the church who could not otherwise afford to send their child to a Christian private school would have the same opportunity as the congregation’s wealthier members. After all, if a Christian church cannot voluntarily redress the disparities in wealth among its members, then what institution will?

This is not to say that co-operative enterprises like this would have to be religious in nature or motivation. Any and all kinds of communities should form these co-ops. The kaleidoscopic nature of America’s social variety is (along with its geographic variety) is one of the most enchanting and remarkable things about this country. There’s no reason why there shouldn’t be as many kinds of private schools as there are American ways of life.

We have become so used to the idea of government education that it does not strike us nearly as oddly as it should. For centuries, American parents have simply handed their children over to the state once they reach school age, much in the same way that they hand over the garbage when they take it to the side of the road. The negative consequences of this model are too numerous to list here. But, as I noted above, parents across the nation are experiencing some of them right now as the teachers’ unions threaten to stop work if their conditions are not met.

As long as the poor and the working class have no better option than to give their children over to the state for six hours a day, public education will always have an outsized and pernicious influence on our national life. The better-off parents among us cannot be content with simply sending our own children to private school and leaving the poor to suffer what they must at the hands of bureaucrats. An enlightened libertarianism will always seek to replace welfare with charity, and state coercion with voluntary community. The idea of private education co-operatives accords with every great American tradition of social action. It is local, voluntary, anti-statist, aspirational, enterprising, and infused with the spirit of moral mission that animated all of our great reformers. It is the kind of endeavor that would bring a knowing smile of recognition to the face of Alexis de Tocqueville. After all, the great Frenchman would surely recognize it as quintessentially characteristic of those restless colonial reformers at the edge of the known world whom he so admired when he came to these shores. The only question left to ask Americans today is, “What are you waiting for?”

 

[Bobref]

The economic case for school vouchers, i.e., how a voucher program actually reduces the cost of public education.

https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/419da43a-40bb-4ab4-819b-fca69b2fe891/the-fiscal-effect-of-private-school-vouchers.pdf