jim rozen wrote:

In general I tend to agree with you Fitch, and will certainly
agree with that proposition in general - but the reason I bought
up the class size thing (because I was sure the anti-public
schooling folks would say this) was my personal experience
with my daughter's primary schooling in a local private
(catholic) school. In spite of large class sizes (typically
35-ish) and the lack of any aids in the classrooms at all,
it seemed to me that the teachers were doing an outstanding
job of getting the material across to the kids.

The Catholic school in Traverse City also did an excellent job. I've no
concept of the relative cost though. I think the school was subsidized
by the church, but maybe it wasn't.

Now of course (mind reader that I am) I will suspect that
your next comment will be "but just think of what they
*could* have done with half the number of students!"

G

Because my story is anecdotal only, I would have to smile
and agree. But honestly, totalling up what the operating
budget for that school was (based on the per kid cost)
and then dividing by the number of teachers to get the
rough pay for each one, I was pretty flabbergasted that
they could run a school on that little money. But they
did.

Which gets me back to the point that the reason they
*could* do that is because the kids are cherry-picked.
If you had to admit the way a public school does, the
entire thing would have the wheels come off in short
order I bet. This implys that if you try to generalize
that education system to the entire population, ie.
close the public schools and voucher all the kids, then
the total per-kid cost will have to wind up being much,
much higher than one would think. My strong suspicion
is it will assymptote to nearly the present cost of
a public school education in whatever area is being
looked at.

I agree that being able to filter the student population is a big
factor. I think they admit them all, or nearly all - i.e. they get a
chance, but if they are a problem, they are sent back to public schools.
The advantage in being able to get rid of problem kids is huge. They
also aren't subject to the "mainstreaming" nonsense in public schools
that has kids who have no business in a regular class in there anyway
totally screwing up the learning environment for the other 39.

The other huge advantage is that they aren't subject to the incredible
collection of BS imposed by the state and the Federal governments. So
they don't have to spend the manpower to fill out all the dumb reports
that are used by the politicians and state bureaucrats to justify their
positions and staffing - at incredible cost.

I tend to agree that if the voucher system is put in place, it will,
over time, succeed in raising the cost of education at private schools
to about where it is now in public schools. Why? Because in no time at
all you will find all sorts of new regulations being imposed on the
private schools - they will be spending government money, and the
government will want to tell them "exactly" how they are to spend it,
and have in place "processes" to monitor that, and prevent fraud, etc.
Look at the welfare administration overhead - transfer that exact mind
set to administering voucher money (its the same government), and you
have the picture. It isn't pretty.

Fitch