The elephant in the root is that the US already experimented heavily with a hybrid public/private model for educational delivery in its higher ed (colleges/universities) sector. Perverse competitive incentives on all fronts drive prices through the roof, quality stagnates/declines, and the downmarket options make impossible promises while offering curricula with such terrible outcomes as to be borderline fraudulent. When public funding is cut, it's replaced with debt, and people are deep under water to the investment class before they even start life.
I'm not here to defend the status quo, but reformers should carefully consider "how do we prevent turning American K12 into American higher ed."
> Perverse competitive incentives on all fronts drive prices through the roof
I don't think it's been established that competitive incentives are driving the price through the roof. There are other theories, e.g. that massive increases in subsidization via guaranteed loans and other mechanisms are driving the price from the demand-side.
Sure, but if you are a private school charging $20k a year now, why wouldn't you charge $25k when every potential student gets a $5k voucher? Then we need to increase the size of the voucher to meet the original goals of the program. Rinse. Repeat.
Every child must either meet some government-mandated educational standard, or enroll in a program which brings some threshold percentage of its students to said standard. $VOUCHER_AMOUNT is adjusted on a per-region basis based on the average tuition within each region. If the institution's tuition is higher than $VOUCHER_AMOUNT, the parents pay the difference out of pocket. If the tuition is less than $VOUCHER_AMOUNT, the parents keep the difference.
Parents obviously want to minimize the amount they're paying out of pocket, and they'd like to keep some of the voucher money, so high-end schools as well as low-end schools are incentivized to keep their costs down.
Parents putting their kids in K-12 private school aren't optimizing for cost. They are optimizing for exclusivity and educational "quality". If their school just became more affordable to the unwashed masses, they will gladly pay the premium to keep them out.
That is true for some subset of wealthy parents, and if they want to pay extra for exclusivity, that's their choice. But I think it's reasonable to assume that the parents of the 90% of K-12 students who attend public or charter schools [1] are prioritizing cost over exclusivity.
It's true that many families will pay more to buy a house in a good school district, but I suspect that the school itself isn't the whole story: rather, many people interpret the school district's reputation as a proxy for the safety of the neighborhood and socio-economic status of its residents, as well as a proxy for their own socio-economic status.
Ulimately, I suspect that with the free market voucher system I described in my parent comment, legacy private schools would continue to charge outrageous tuition. But I think we'd also see some new, possibly virtual "bang for your buck" schools which would compete on price and which would be exclusive due to entrance exams and high academic expectations for enrolled students.
I'm not sure I follow. Many students/families choose community college for the freshman and sophomore years to minimize cost. Many opt for state universities over out-of-state/private universities for the same reason.
> I don't think it's been established that competitive incentives are driving the price through the roof.
I suppose the money for fancy facilities and armies of recruiting staff grew on a tree in the quad?
> There are other theories, e.g. that massive increases in subsidization via guaranteed loans and other mechanisms are driving the price from the demand-side.
As I stated,
>> When public funding is cut, it's replaced with debt
And, actually, that's the good outcome! The more realistic outcome is folks can't afford the price spiral and decide that Johnny doesn't need much more than a 6th grade education. Which I'm sure will bode well for our country.
An additional outcome in higher-ed was the perceived dilution of the religious characteristics of Catholic universities (a large portion of the prominent private universities) who took the money; the more-religious types complain about Jesuit schools, Notre Dame, etc. for being beholden to the whims of the state for so much of their funding that they cease to serve their mission, and their remaining supporters are mostly the ones who care about sports and the brand-value of the school name. For charter-schools at the secondary level, I'd expect the same kind of thing, only much faster.
In the college sector, the price ramped after Clinton signed law to prevent student loans being discharged in bankruptcy. And now parents co-sign and the parent's social security is sometimes taken to pay the child's non-dischargeable student loans.
K-12 public school is government paid.
1. The state has to remain in the school business as a back-up for schools that fail, kids who get kicked out, and regions that have insufficient capacity because it's not profitable to run schools there. The public schools need to provide excess capacity so the private ones can operate at capacity and take financial risks. As a result, the state bears the risk.
2. A fleet of SUV's hit the road at 6:00 AM every day to carry kids to the far flung schools that their parents managed to get them into.
3. A shortage of available capacity, turnover in administration and ownership of schools, statistical variance, and opaque metrics make it impossible for parents to actually make an informed choice based on the quality of schools. It will be a crap shoot.
> opaque metrics make it impossible for parents to actually make an informed choice based on the quality of schools. It will be a crap shoot.
Nope, people will probably figure out the "best schools" via their private social networks and cloistered communities, and find ways to pull up the ladders behind them.
...or they'll send their kids to evangelical-Christian "schools" that don't really teach much except counter-factual history and creationism and of course their own particular ideology. The very same people who have totally fabricated a panic about teaching CRT in public schools are more than happy to do far far worse in their own schools. Most of my cousins spent at least some years in such schools. They were worthless money sinks even long ago, and I don't imagine they've gotten any better.
In my view the worst thing is that those schools can be well funded, and easily price secular schools out of the market. When I was living in Texas, it was before we had kids, but I noticed that among private schools, the secular ones were absolutely priced out of our reach.
Religious hospitals and medical clinics can do the same thing in rural areas.
#3 I think would solve itself. Wow is US News college rankings big business and important. And uppity New Yorkers seem to know quite well what the pecking order is in elite preschools (I'm facepalming that this is true)
Class paranoia is too strong. Something would serve it.
Vouchers would likely involve a lot of fraud, the charter school system already has. A shift to full vouchers would be an expensive cost, one that democrats won't get past republicans.
Indeed, the question is whether emulating the current college system would be considered a success or a failure. I'm thinking more in terms of the middle and working classes, who will simply end up trading one bad school for another one that's also 40 miles away.
Also, it would remain to be seen if K-12 schools stay in business long enough to gain a reputation without becoming franchises of one or two giant nationwide corporations.
The for-profit colleges are the worst segment of the already degenerative upper education system. That fact alone indicates we should pause on full-on free market vouchers.
I think the problem is that, at least at the high school level, a school under 1000 kids starts to suffer in terms of services: not enough smart kids, not enough activity participants, not enough special needs for the special teacher. Perhaps "specialty" schools would help a bit ...
We know what happens. Educational outcomes drop. There's a strong bloc of hard-right ultra-religious conservatives who don't care if Jonnie or Jayden or whatever learns how to read or add, and they really don't want Kayden or Charlotte or whatever to learn any biology or autonomy.
They vote with their vouchers for truly terrible schools. It siphons a tremendous amount of money from "traditional" public schools and delivers a hugely negative return.
It's a mistake, but it's a mistake we can't help but keep making because we're so determined to make everything function like a pseudo market.
Is there any empirical evidence for educational outcomes dropping? The ultra-religious types would be homeschooling with or without the financial incentives to send children to private schools.
Not every hard-right ultra-religious parent has the means to homeschool their kid or to enroll them in private school. Vouchers really help lower that barrier.
> Students in Louisiana's voucher program showed a decline in scores, especially math:
Let's see...
> Any changes in the second year of reading were unclear.
Hmm.
> Past research on Louisiana’s school-voucher program came to a bleak conclusion: Students who used the program to transfer to a private school saw their test scores plummet.
> A new study complicates that narrative, finding some good—or at least, less bad—news about the closely watched program.
> The research shows that, for students who received a voucher at the middle or end of elementary school, there were no statistically significant effects on their math or reading test scores by the third year in the program. That’s a boon for voucher advocates who have argued against judging a program by its initial impacts.
> The research shows that, for students who received a voucher at the middle or end of elementary school, there were no statistically significant effects on their math or reading test scores by the third year in the program. That’s a boon for voucher advocates who have argued against judging a program by its initial impacts.
They deliberately cut the results off in the second year because the study was conducted by those whose livelihoods are threatened by vouchers.
> What evidence is there that vouchers are helpful?
> Who benefits? (the answer here isn't "everybody")
In areas that have done charter schools, the result is that poor-performing school administrations/companies (in terms of standardized tests) lose their charter and effectively "close down." Better performing ones are allowed to replace them.
The students benefit because they end up with better quality educations. They're no longer forced to go to terrible schools that keep getting money thrown at them despite having deeply-rooted problems: problems that the school has no incentive to fix due to the way the current public schooling system works.
I benefit by sending my child to a school where the teachers are incentivized to teach them reading, writing, and arithmetic, while leaving their politics and activism at the door.
> What evidence is there that vouchers are helpful?
> James also said that school choice has “not proven effective at improving education.” That is also highly misleading. Ten of the 16 random assignment evaluations on the topic find that private school choice programs increased math or reading test scores overall or for student subgroups at a fraction of the cost. Only two of the 16 random assignment studies, both of which examined the highly regulated Louisiana voucher program, found negative effects on test scores. And four of the six rigorous studies on the topic found that private school choice increased educational attainment overall or for student subgroups. None of the six studies found that school choice reduced educational attainment.
I'm not here to defend the status quo, but reformers should carefully consider "how do we prevent turning American K12 into American higher ed."