[3pt14159]

Oh please. I went to a (religious, not preppy) private school and the the non-unionized teachers did just fine. My family also paid about between 5 to 9k a year (complicated reasons for the range, basically the school over charges single child families and undercharges multi-child families, but also gives you a break if you have kids in an elementary school and a high school) Canadian dollars (so at the time, it would have been 3k to 6k American) for two children in private school. The average the province of Ontario paid at the time was 11k per child.

The market can handle delivery of education just fine without complicated unions and pay scales. All we need to do is to ensure that every family can afford to send their kids there (vouchers, or whatever).

[yequalsx]

That's great that it worked for the private school you went to. Does this scale for a country with 300 million people?

[yequalsx]

I guess the answer is that it might not scale to a nationwide level when 300 million people are involved.

Saying, "At my school...." is sort of like saying, "I got a web server to work on my home machine and now I'm ready to handle Amazon level traffic." You gotta think about how it's going to scale. You gotta think about unintended consequences and whatnot. Pointing out an example of how one particular school worked and how it worked well is not an argument for nationwide policy changes.

[schmittz]

You're criticizing someone's argument by using a parallel argument. There's also no reason for it to not work, at least that you've demonstrated. The web server analogy falls apart because the server is analogous to a single school, so a series of web servers may work... The point is that, in general, private education spends less per student. That's compelling evidence to at least investigate the effect of single employer, unionized employment systems on education quality. You can argue that vouchers will have some sort of distribution issues between socioeconomic levels and education quality, but as to whether they could allow realized savings on education (with the savings being used to subsidize failing schools), that seems pretty settled.

[yequalsx]

I'm unable to reply to your comment below so I'm replying here.

Edison is a for profit company that run schools in Philadelphia. It used to, I don't know if they do now. Edison has run schools in other districts. Results are mixed as far as I know.

No Child Left Behind has provisions about tutoring and many for profit tutoring companies are making money off of the mandate. Incidentally, one of George Bush's brothers is involved in with a tutoring company. There is a drive to privatize education by going to a for profit model.

For profits (and non profits) don't provide busing. They don't provide school lunches for low income students. The U.S. has dreadful public transportation in most localities and the lack of adequate transportation is a major problem for poor people who get vouchers. For profits don't normally build schools poor neighborhoods. Actually, for profits don't build schools. They get the taxpayers to pay them.

For profits provide workers with sub standard pay and benefits. That's how they become more efficient. For profits provide the corporate leaders with huge salaries though. The realized savings don't occur when one factors in long term damage that will be done.

[schmittz]

I am not advocating for the abolition of public education, but rather true equal "opportunity." You do cite valid concerns about private educational facilities, but that does not mean parents shouldn't have the opportunity to send their child to a school if they so desire. There's never anything wrong with maximizing someone's choice. I'll have to look more into these for-profit companies running schools. That's too bad that public money is being used to fund them. I also don't like the assumption that a for-profit company will do "damage" to education by virtue of the fact that it is for-profit. Although, they may ultimately not be effective in serving students needs.

[yequalsx]

Actually, I didn't criticize the argument. I asked a valid question. Namely, does the idea scale for a nation of 300 million people.

When you include private education do you include private higher education? Do you include for-profits? Their overall expenditures per student aren't less.

[schmittz]

I apologize for misinterpreting your attitude from your subsequent response to your own comment as disbelieving of the original commenter's viewpoint. Consequences of voucher systems are as-of-yet unknown or unexplored, but I greatly dislike fear of consequences as a reason for abandoning the pursuit of change altogether. Why would you include higher education? Higher education is a completely different issue from "the education problem." I'm unaware of any for-profit, private, non-postsecondary schools in the country. Obviously, if we did move to a voucher system, for-profits would not be included as it makes no sense for citizens to obligatorily fund a corporation when alternatives exist.