Should taxpayer dollars be used to fund private education?

[Luisa]

Guys,

I am doing research on this topic and I would love to hear your opinions. I am of the opinion that no taxpayer dollars should be used to fund private education. What do you think?

[piercehawkeye45]

Are you talking about how taxpayers will pay kids (usually inner city) to go to private schools because their school is inadequate for them?
Or that the state funds private schools?

The state funding private schools is a big no no. That is why we have private schools as an alternative. If someone doesn't want there kids to go to public school, they should pay for their kids by themselves.

On the other spectrum we get inner city kids with a lot of potential that want to get out of the inner city so they have a better chance of success later in life. Each child gets a certain amount of tax dollars that fund them going to public school so the issue is should the government pay that amount to private schools so the kid can go there instead? This issue I'm pretty much 50/50 on but until we get better education in the inner city, I will have to go with letting the kid go to private school but you have to limit the number of kids.

[glatt]

I think the last thing our public schools need is for their funding to be siphoned off and sent to private schools, which is what this question boils down to. I'm against it too. But I'm not sure how you can turn a failing public school around. I know cutting its funding will just make it sink faster. You might as well just close it to start with if you are going to do that.

[Beestie]

I think the answer is clearer when asking an analogous question:

Should tax dollars be used to build private roads?

The idea that taxpayers should foot the bill to send a child to a private school because the state has failed to provide an adequate public education to that child is the very pinnacle of stupidity.

Private school must remain private. And no, parents who send their kids to private school should not get a tax break any more than I should get a tax break for not driving on a road the state just built.

Rich kids get a better deal than kids who aren't. This is also true in Communist China.

[lumberjim]

should the people that do not use public schools have to pay school taxes? Should tax credit be given for tuition paid to private schools?

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by lumberjim

should the people that do not use public schools have to pay school taxes? Should tax credit be given for tuition paid to private schools?

Originally Posted by Beestie

And no, parents who send their kids to private school should not get a tax break any more than I should get a tax break for not driving on a road the state just built.

[Beestie]

Originally Posted by lumberjim

should the people that do not use public schools have to pay school taxes? Should tax credit be given for tuition paid to private schools?

Absolutely not. The idea of a government supplied commodity is that you cannot opt out (of the burden or the benefit). It only works when participation is mandatory.

Opting out would eventually cause entire school systems to collapse. The costs to provide an entire education system are not incremental - schools, once built must be paid for. If a school is built for 1,000 kids and 300 opt out that leaves the remaining 700 families to cover for the 300 that left.

And it kind of kills me to hear the argument: why should a bright kid be forced to stay in a bad public school when the state could send him to a good private school? Some might worry about the one bright kid in a bad school. I worry about the 99 kids behind the bright kid that no one seems to care about. The bright kid should stay and the 99 kids who've been cheated of a quality education should be sent to private school to catch up.

The federal government needs to exit stage left and leave educating our most precious national resource, our children, to the state and local level. That's the first step towards closing the gap between public and private schools and making the entire question (the original question) moot.

[Clodfobble]

Originally Posted by Beestie

The idea that taxpayers should foot the bill to send a child to a private school because the state has failed to provide an adequate public education to that child is the very pinnacle of stupidity.

But the taxpayer is already footing the bill one way or the other; the money sending the ambitious inner-city kid to private school is in theory being directly taken away from the crappy public school. It's your money, if you had a choice wouldn't you buy the better product?

Edit to add:

Originally Posted by Beestie

The federal government needs to exit stage left and leave educating our most precious national resource, our children, to the state and local level. That's the first step towards closing the gap between public and private schools and making the entire question (the original question) moot.

I'm totally with you here.

[piercehawkeye45]

Originally Posted by Beestie

And it kind of kills me to hear the argument: why should a bright kid be forced to stay in a bad public school when the state could send him to a good private school? Some might worry about the one bright kid in a bad school. I worry about the 99 kids behind the bright kid that no one seems to care about. The bright kid should stay and the 99 kids who've been cheated of a quality education should be sent to private school to catch up.

Of course that is perferable but that won't happen. Inner city schools are just on a downward spiral with multiple reasons why they are failing. I don't see how switching the 99 kids would solve anything because you don't fix the source of the problem. Plus, I would like to find a private school that would accept those 99 kids. The way I'm looking at it is that I would rather save one or two kids instead of having them all fail. Saving them all would obviously be the best idea but it is not an option.

[Beestie]

Originally Posted by Clodfobble

But the taxpayer is already footing the bill one way or the other; the money sending the ambitious inner-city kid to private school is in theory being directly taken away from the crappy public school.

That's the problem. Its not being taken away from the bad public school. Its being paid twice.

If the bad school costs 100,000 per year to operate and there are 100 kids in it than the cost per kid is 1,000. Removing one child from the school does not reduce the cost of operating that school by 1,000. Teacher salaries don't drop, fixing the roof isn't any cheaper, running the school bus isn't any cheaper, the light bill doesn't drop, etc. Yeah, you might save fifty bucks in books but you haven't saved any money by pulling Jimmy Neutron out of Wee Suck Elementary to use to pay Einstein Academy.

What Fairfax County did, and its public school system is already very good, is create a magnet school within the system to send the best and brightest to.

[Clodfobble]

Originally Posted by Beestie

I worry about the 99 kids behind the bright kid that no one seems to care about. The bright kid should stay and the 99 kids who've been cheated of a quality education should be sent to private school to catch up.

The problem is that of those 99 kids, about 40-50 of them are the real problem. The only reason the bright and average kids are being cheated out of a quality education in the first place is because the school must spend time and resources dealing with the kids who can't be made to care. Personally I'd like to see more options for expelling the bad apples from traditional schools and putting them in vocational training instead, which will ultimately be more helpful to them than a class like World Geography anyway.

[lumberjim]

Originally Posted by Beestie

Absolutely not. The idea of a government supplied commodity is that you cannot opt out (of the burden or the benefit). It only works when participation is mandatory.

Opting out would eventually cause entire school systems to collapse. The costs to provide an entire education system are not incremental - schools, once built must be paid for. If a school is built for 1,000 kids and 300 opt out that leaves the remaining 700 families to cover for the 300 that left.

I can see the validity of this argument. and accept it. The families that can afford, or choose to make it a high enough priority to send their kids to better schools, can always fall back on the public system if they lose the ability to.

And it kind of kills me to hear the argument: why should a bright kid be forced to stay in a bad public school when the state could send him to a good private school? Some might worry about the one bright kid in a bad school. I worry about the 99 kids behind the bright kid that no one seems to care about. The bright kid should stay and the 99 kids who've been cheated of a quality education should be sent to private school to catch up.

this part i have a big problem with. especially that last sentence. educational socialism? i don;t have time to flesh this out right at present.....dammit

[Undertoad]

Personally I'd like to see more options for expelling the bad apples from traditional schools and putting them in vocational training instead, which will ultimately be more helpful to them than a class like World Geography anyway.

That sounds like a good idea, but it does mean that a lot of the 40-50 top kids would suddenly be ranked in the lower half. It is politically preferable that the vocationally-oriented kids stick around, so that everyone who wants to be, can be ranked superior.

[Clodfobble]

Originally Posted by Beestie

What Fairfax County did, and its public school system is already very good, is create a magnet school within the system to send the best and brightest to.

Austin has done that with several schools. Except they turned it around--they declared the worst schools to be "magnet schools" to lure the bright kids to transfer in. That, plus strategically rearranging their students with complex bussing (kids on one side of town go to a school on the other side) they've ended up with a bunch of mediocre schools and no really good or really terrible ones. Which is one form of success, I guess.

[Beestie]

Originally Posted by Beestie

The bright kid should stay and the 99 kids who've been cheated of a quality education should be sent to private school to catch up.

I don't mean this literally. I'm adament that the state should not send any child into the private school system.

My point is that the focus of this issue has always been the one bright kid when I think it should be on the "other 99 kids."

We (us - you and me) are not going to fix the school system by getting Jimmy Neutron's SAT from 1150 to 1250. We WILL fix the school system if, through our efforts, the average SAT for the entire school (as but one measure of success) increases from 820 to 890 or 910 or 950.