Interesting. I’m looking at Iowa. If I can’t use an aggregator site, then it’s hard because a lot of schools don’t publish amounts on the internet. They might be trying to figure out what to do with Iowa’s voucher program. I got a few:
Scattergood Friends School, HS Day student:… $19,000
Des Moines Dowling (catholic) HS, Non Members: $12,800
Pella Christian HS: … $10,000
Waterloo Valley Lutheran, all grades: $8,600
Des Moines Christian, HS: … $11,600
Since the Iowa voucher program is $7,600, I assumed it was targeted at “reasonably priced Christian” schools. That’s enough to make almost all schools “affordable”. Scattergood is the outlier, it strikes me as a traditional high end private school rather than a Christian school.
I am pleasantly surprised that the voucher bill failed in the GA House given the big push by GOP leadership.
That doesn’t mean efforts shouldn’t be made in struggling schools. They absolutely should, but giving welfare to wealthy families wasn’t going to help the vast majority of kids in those schools.
I am now aware of a single instance of a school system truly throwing money at the problem.
Too early to see impacts on the kids, but this impact on hiring is a huge change:
In recent years, we generally would be lucky to have a single applicant for a position, fully qualified or otherwise. After announcing the salary schedule change, we had pools of qualified applicants to consider. It was a fun spring. Our administrators were having to have these rich conversations about best fit, really digging into things like, ‘Here’s a full table of highly qualified people; who is going to best fulfill the needs of our school? It’s a conversation that most districts don’t get to have right now.
The top end is still too low, but paying new teachers a decent wage and quickly moving them to a good wage is great.
Article below, and a relevant snippet. I’ve seen similar data from other states, it appears this is largely welfare for the wealthy or at least wealth-ish families. So the wealthy get cash back, and folks maybe at the margins who couldn’t afford private school can now afford them. So then you’ve got everyone else… a lof of public schools are already struggling, and if you siphon out 10%, I don’t see how public schools can succeed. F*ck the poor, amirite?
“In Florida, 84,505, or 69 percent, of these new voucher recipients were already enrolled in private school. A much smaller group — 16,096, or 13 percent of voucher students — left their public schools to enter the program.”
One of the many things I didn’t like about teaching in Charlotte is how it’s one school district for the whole county. So if that district happens to be shitty and self-serving and broken like Charlotte-Mecklenburg is, there’s no escape unless you go to the next county. I understand why the people who prefer it that way have that preference, because (in theory) it’s supposed to make the distribution of resources fair. But what I observed is that the “good” schools (which happen to be in the wealthier north and south parts of the city, which happen to also be the whiter parts of the city) still get more attention – and therefore resources – than the middle of that shit sandwich does.
So imo, public schools don’t get out of criticism in this conversation. School choice isn’t inherently bad, but things like this scholarship thing need to be need-based so that, as someone mentioned earlier, it doesn’t just become welfare for the already well-off.
If you’re going to have vouchers at all then I like the restriction that the school is not allowed to charge anything above and beyond the value of the voucher.
This puts the private schools that accept them on a level playing field with the public schools.
Can’t educate children for $13,000 per kid? No vouchers for you!!!
The elite schools will go on charging astronomical tuition that parents pay 100% out of pocket (or with scholarships) but if the public schools are complete crap then it gives some actual options to poor parents. Not the elite schools, but some that are at least better than the public schools (hopefully).
Even then, it’s not a level playing field as the private schools will usually not take the special needs students or ESL students. The more expensive kids to educate are left in the public schools, while the private schools take only the kids they can make money on. Also, as per the article above it’s not a coincidence that most of the private schools taking vouchers wind up being predominantly white despite being in mixed districts.
They should absolutely have to as a condition for accepting vouchers although to the extent that there is extra state and federal funding for those kids I’d say the private school taking the vouchers should also be entitled to the extra funding.
Are there any states using vouchers the way you would like them to?
They are always designed as tax breaks for the middle/upper middle/upper class at the expense of public school funding. I have yet to see one in practice that I think is equitable. I was pointed to Iowa earlier in this thread, which was somewhat of a joke IMO.
Sweden’s voucher program does not allow “top up fees” (ie tuition above the voucher amount). I’m guessing that’s the one I read about, but I still can’t find the article.
Sweden’s results are hard to tease out because they overhauled their curriculum at the same time as they introduced the vouchers. Performance declined. Opponents of vouchers point to the vouchers, while proponents point to the curriculum overhaul. They overhauled their curriculum again, keeping the vouchers the same, and performance increased, so I tend to suspect it was the curriculum that caused the decline, but it’s impossible to say for sure.
The current program in my state applies to students in failing schools. Iirc, the per student funding amount is available to the student to apply to a different school (it might not be limited to private schools, but may also apply to out of district public schools). I think they recently revised the program to expand vouchers, but my kids are beyond that age, so i haven’t paid attention. There is also a state tax assignment to Scholarship Granting Organizations, but it is limited to a total dollar amount over the entire state.
My kids went to a (Catholic) diocesan high school. Tuition rates depend on income. The school does receive federal title 1 funds for students that qualify. It is a somewhat diverse school. They don’t have programs for students who need intensive services but did have instruction for some many years ago.