Larry Blanchard wrote:
On Thu, 18 Dec 2008 20:51:28 -0600, Morris Dovey wrote:
Your input makes me a bit less resistant to Tim's position that
education should be privatized (but not enough so that I'm willing to
adopt his view without a /lot/ more information).
Private education in this country consists of high end "exclusive"
academies for the rich and schools operated by religious groups. There
are few affordable secular private schools.
Not even remotely true. There are plenty of people home schooling
their children for a fraction of the cost of public- or private
schools. And these home schooled children consistently outperform
their public schooled counterparts academically when they later attend
higher education.
Moreover, I think the real cost of public schools is way, way higher
than most people believe. Something like $3000/yr of my property taxes
go to the school system. But ... this is far from the whole story.
There are state, local, and county sales taxes getting poured into the
educational system. Then there are the many Federal taxes that are
levied (income, excise, import duties, service fees ...) some portion
of which get sent back to the States for education. Then there is the
money sent to the educators from State lotteries and other gambling
sources. Finally, there are private sector institutions and
individuals that donate time, materials, and money to their local
schools. If someone could tally this all up, I'd guess that a public
school education actually costs more than a private education and - on
average - produces a more poorly educated graduate. But, by golly,
those public school grads have been well versed in identity politics,
tolerance (for everything but traditional Judeo-Christian values),
sexual politics, and collectivist political ideology.
A depressing number of Americans are incapable of imagining a world in
which government is not their Mommy and Daddy, There is thus little
widespread interest in exploring private school options for the
masses.
And private education for a fee is an unaffordable tax on the poor,
especially if it remains illegal to not send your kids to school. A
tax supported system is the only chance many poor kids have to get a
smattering of education, even if the school quality is low.
There are many implicit and wrong assumptions in this paragraph:
1) You assume that - in the face of a more rational tax system -
there would not be sufficient charity to educate those in genuine
need. I might point out that my undergrad program paid *100%* of
*every* student's tuition once they were accepted to study there.
It was and is a parochial program paid for by the alumni (as opposed
to paying for, say, a football stadium). So, yes, Virginia, it
is possible to have education paid for entirely in the private sector.
2) You assume that tax supported immediately leads to public schools.
Vouchers are one compromise way to improve what we have today
considerably by putting the parents in the position to have real
school choice. You get both tax support and a strong imperative
to move to private education and/or massively improve public schools.
These are opposed notably by the NEA because the teachers' union
does not want their constituency to be meaningfully held accountable
for their work product.
3) You can't fix education without fixing the lousy parenting that
dominates the culture. This lousy parenting transcends demography
and geography. It isn't just inner city ghetto dwellers ignoring
the education of their children, its the lily white suburbanites
as well. Where children have become an income stream to the
putative poor, they've become a fashion accessory to the affluent.
It's kind of hard to educate a child when their own parents
aren't paying attention. "Tax support" does not fix this in
any way. In fact, it is "tax support" that created the
"children as an revenue stream" problem in the first place.
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Tim Daneliuk
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