I wanted to post this essay to HN because I think the specific mechanism of how averages hide highs and lows is of interest to a technology community. Vouchers are one instance of this problem but I am confident there are many others hiding in plain sight.
I’d love to hear which aspects of the medical system you think work this way. I’m looking for other examples to write the broader essay on understanding averages but I’m not completely sure which particular issue you mean here.
Medical insurance is the obvious example that comes to mind. If everyone is forced the pay for medical insurance (e.g. everyone is taxed for it), then the net results is the same, the healthy people subsidise those the sick.
Which is why in countries where medical care is not guaranteed through taxes (e.g. USA) insurance companies try to find out about any pre-existing conditions before they give you a rate; they try to figure out if you're in the healthy group which would otherwise be subsidizing the sick people, or you are one of those sick people.
I say that without any value judgements one way or the other.
Note how few "indemnity" health plans we have anymore in the US--everything is now HMO/PPO.
This was the mechanism. The HMO/PPOs were wildly more profitable--because they picked off the "below average cost" patients leaving the "above average cost" people to the indemnity plans.
Of course, then the indemnity plans collapsed under the weight. And then the HMO/PPO systems created "recission groups" to prevent having to take them on. And then it took until the Affordable Care Act forced the coverage of "preexisting conditions" to unwind the bullshit that the HMO/PPO systems caused in the first place.
Thanks. Math illiteracy aside, the effort to privatize public schools is as old as integration. They’re not tricking people aside from decades of attacks against all social services except policing.
> such smaller vouchers would not be an equitable program as they would need to be topped up with additional funds in order to offer the full cost of admission to a number of lower cost private schools.
If a smaller, constant-amount voucher is “not equitable”, is a $0 voucher more equitable somehow?
I think the trade off being evaluated is the damage to the public system against the benefit of choice that a voucher provides. $0 vouchers minimize damage to the system which is fairer to low-income individuals compared to vouchers that are too small for them to afford using.
There is a potential benefit to them for having smaller vouchers. But such a program would need to be framed as such and the merits of that program would need to be debated. Current voucher programs use the artificially inflated size of the voucher to argue that low-income students are the prime beneficiaries. My sneaking suspicion is that a program designed predominantly for middle income individuals at the expense of low income ones wouldn’t have the broad base of support necessary to become policy.
If you put together a program that credibly promised to save local taxpayers money by providing small vouchers, I think you might be surprised at the pretty broad support it would garner.
You’d have to have evidence that the small vouchers changed behaviour enough that the uptick in private school enrolment gave enough reduced costs to the system to pay for the small vouchers for all the people who are already in private schools without any vouchers. I’m skeptical that small amounts of money will change behaviour enough to do this.
You'd have to convince voters this would save them money. Having evidence that small vouchers changed behavior enough is only one way to do that (and is probably the least likely path).
I think the coalition of private school voters is incredibly small relative to public school ones. There is a much larger block of voters to oppose measures that cost the system money than there is to support measures that save private school users money. I think you do have to convince public school users they will save money to have the votes. Public school users only save money by the behaviour change I posited.
If the typical private school admitted student costs a district $6000 while the average student costs $9000, it seems like a $3000 voucher helps the public school funding situation rather than harming it, while simultaneously allowing some middle-class families to elect private school who couldn’t pay the full amount.
This is an interesting point of debate. The question is whether the $3000 saved on the new students electing for private schools is larger or smaller than the cost of providing the $3000 benefit to all individuals already in private schools. My suspicion is $3000 is a small enough benefit that it doesn’t more than double private school enrolment.
Yeah, have the school calculate the average cost for a student in x grade with y test scores and z conditions, and send them off with a voucher of that cost.
The real scam with private school vouchers is making tax-payers foot the bill to send your child to a "private school" that isn't, like what often happens in Florida, or worse, to a "school" that is really just a religious indoctrination tool.
You shouldn't be allowed to take money from the public coffers because you want your child to only think things like evolution are not settled science or "just a theory".
I have sympathy for kids whose parents are awful but we will have to disagree on what the real scam is. I think the inherent cost disease and misleading nature of current voucher programs is far more pernicious than the fact that some users of vouchers end up in awful schools due to a poorly made choice. Many kids don’t even get a choice to leave while it’s pretty clear the current cost structure subsidizes the kids who do leave in rather unfair ways.
Putting aside discussion of where the child is sent.
The "money from the public coffers" didn't appear there out of thin air. The argument with school vouchers is that the money there belongs to the parents because it came from the parents as part of taxation.
If we take that argument to the extreme then people without kids shouldn’t pay school taxes at all. Fundamentally I don’t think that is how the system should work. There is something unfair about parents paying once through taxation and again through tuition but I think there is a reasonable case to be made that that is a lesser evil than programs that damage public education.
Taxes are not a majority program though. The way something like this would end up working is the kids getting 90's in high school and going to top tier engineering programs would happily pony up the money along with a few other demographics that were confident in their earning potential. The vast majority of high income earners that pay the majority of taxes would disappear from the income system by having paid back just their costs. But the system needs the high income earners to pay more than one person's fair share. This would be a one time tax grab that would destroy the future tax base in a disastrous way.
Well put. The division between parents and non-parents grows each year, at least in America. I’m shocked by what my single 20-something friends can just spout off about kids or “people who have kids” and stuff. It’s bizarre.
Educating children is just part of the social contract, the cost of living in a stable society, like roads, water, prison, army, hospitals. Imagine saying "I've never committed a crime. I should not have to pay for the police." Same energy.
You might disagree with the wars that your country prosecutes, or what the police do, but you cannot just "take the tax money and choose how to spend it" for military, nor police, nor any other commons. Why would you expect to do that for general education?
Unlike, say, army, however, you are free to pay for private school. So, take the money that you have, and pay for private school, and be thankful that you live in a society that values education enough to make it available for all, because the alternative is dreadful.
If you feel that general education is not up to high enough standards, this may well be true. Whatever the answer to that, it is not for people who don't have children, or choose private education for their children, to "take the tax money and choose how to spend it".
> You might disagree with the wars that your country prosecutes, or what the police do, but you cannot just "take the tax money and choose how to spend it" for military, nor police, nor any other commons.
I know that this is not what being discussed, but just for the sake of exchanging some ideas... In my ideal model for governance, this would be possible.
In my ideal taxation model, we would only pay taxes at the most local sphere: municipalities. And everything would be either based/budgeted on either (a) insurance funds or (b) service fees. States and Federal Government would then only as act as managers of mutual insurance funds between the cities themselves.
IOW, it would all be a giant bottom-up insurance/re-insurance system.
This way, the allocation of funds going to military spending wouldn't be determined by the individual, but it would be very close to that. Healthcare as well. Education could be financed both via a "service fee" (to cover the regular, cheap students) and an insurance fee (to cover for students with special needs). So those without kids and those that want to put their kids on private school would be able to claim a deduction for the "service part", but still had to contribute for the insurance part.
The original argument is about having the ability to dictate HOW the tax dollars are spent on education.
> If we take that argument to the extreme then people without kids shouldn’t pay school taxes at all.
This is not taking the above argument to the extreme, it’s introducing an extra proposition, mainly “if I don’t have kids I should pay taxes for schools”.
This is about IF my tax dollars should be spent on education.
>You shouldn't be allowed to take money from the public coffers
It's hard to get people to understand how it is "taking money from the public coffers".
Because they think that if the public schools have one fewer student, they should have proportionally less in expenses.
Advocates for the public schools have tried to explain why this isn't true or reasonable for many, many years and it doesn't seem to have accomplished anything.
The USA has the highest spending per student in OCED but we do not have the highest test scores. When increasing funding does not improve results, funding is not the issue.
At a more basic level, school has a big issue with consent. We force kids to attend at the barrel of gun, we force adults to pay for it at the barrel of a gun. How bout we chill with all this non-consensual educational activity. If you have to force someone to use/pay for your product you are not adding value.
Education is a fundamental human right. It needs to be provided to all, including those who can’t afford to pay for it. I view providing it as more important than maintaining some abstract right to non-taxation. Plenty of systems that are suboptimal can still nonetheless add value and I think public education is one of those.
On the funding point, for elementary and high school education the US has a rather poor funding record. It’s only when you include the costs of providing university education that the US is the most expensive. Many US states spend half of what Ontario does on K-12 education and Ontario has a much higher educational attainment.
Compulsory schooling is just involuntary servitude for kids. "Go to this place and preform this labor or else agents of the state will hurt you until you comply."
Sorry not ok.
There is merit in the idea of cost sharing for the kids who are in school by their own volition, but as long a coercion is involved any benefits are outweighed by the moral injuries.
Children cannot be expected to make responsible decisions. Kids might not understand properly why they are being taught basic math, but it'll most certainly be helpful to them in the future, anyway.
It's the same as a parent, you're not going to allow children to drink alcohol or smoke either.
As such, they must do what adults think is best for them until they are able to support themselves, at which point they can stop doing what anyone else thinks is best for them.
I think it's best for children to go to school and learn, because this gives them greater opportunities and improved future life outcomes.
What would your alternative proposal be to prepare children to support themselves?
1) The town where I live in Vermont does not have a high school, and instead offers a voucher that pays for high school students to attend elsewhere. This can be at another public school, either in Vermont or in nearby Massachusetts. Or it can be used (possibly as partial payment) to a private school. It's expensive, at about $16,000 per student, but overall seems like a better use of funds than trying to run a full high school for a handful of students, and probably provides a better education as well. I don't know how they deal with special needs students who would have costs higher than this. More details about the program here: https://www.edchoice.org/school-choice/programs/vermont-town...
2) When you are calculating the costs per student for the purpose of valuing vouchers, I'd guess you need to include the students who are are being homeschooled or are currently attending private schools without vouchers as part of the denominator. Presumably the vouchers wouldn't be restricted to only the students who are switching, but instead would be given to all? Since about 10% of students are currently private schooled (I presume homeschooling is much lower?), this would reduce the "fair" value of the voucher by another 10% or so if you were trying to keep it cost neutral.
I agree vouchers may make sense in small towns where it’s not cost effective to have an education system at all. I think the town is relying on it’s smallness to avoid costs relating to special needs though and will run into substantial challenges the moment it tries to give a $16,000 voucher to a student that costs far more to educate.
On 2) I agree that my calculations are simplified in the article and further reductions are necessary for cost neutrality.
Thanks for writing this. You motivated me to go digging for any studies that have evaluated the outcomes of these voucher programs. Looks like there are dozens of studies that showcase just how bad these programs can be.
This study by American Progress supports your thesis.
American Progress is a left-of-center alternative to the right-leaning Heritage Foundation. I haven't finished looking for the right wing think tank's studies, but I'll share anything of particular interest when I do.
"This analysis builds on a large body of voucher program evaluations in Louisiana, Indiana, Ohio, and Washington, D.C., all of which show that students attending participating private schools perform significantly worse than their peers in public schools—especially in math"
I’d suggest you try and look for more mainstream academic studies. American Progress is basically the left wing version of the Heritage Foundation as you highlight. Like the Heritage Foundation their activism often clouds their research to the point that many would express doubt about the conclusions of their studies.
Parents of low-cost students can send their kids to the “high information market” (the schools that can reject high-cost students). Parents of high-cost students have to send their kids to the “low-information market” (the public school that can’t reject high-cost students). Any school that can reject high-cost students can make themselves more attractive to low-cost students, which then feeds on itself, as the “low-information” school ends up with more and more high-cost students.
In this case, both schools have the same information, it’s just that one school isn’t allowed to act on it.
There are similarities undoubtedly. I think the major difference is the source of the distorted subsidy. In the market for lemons bad cars are subsidized by people thinking they might be good ones. In the voucher system low cost students are handed a massive subsidy by government pretending they have average cost. I think the voucher market is more dangerous since government ends up on the hook for all the increased costs of education because of the artificial subsidy.
Im not qualified to judge the voucher program, but if the value of the voucher was cakculated as the median and not the arithmetic mean, would that reduce the scam that the article claims?
This would certainly help as the majority of low cost kids would have cost similar to the 50th percentile. I think this isn’t a general fix though and only works in this case because of the nature of the data distribution.
You're arguing against a straw man: most existing voucher programs are means-tested already (ie. only available to your "high cost" students) which negates your argument that the low cost students will use vouchers leave the system.
Means tested doesn’t mean only available to high cost students. Means tested means available only to certain income demographics. A high cost student in the essay is someone who costs more to educate for instance a special needs student who requires a full time assistant.
Most vouchers are variable based on what the school would get, not a flat amount. Example in Arizona most (>50%) of vouchers are used by disabled children and can top $40000.
Did you know that many schools out source highly disabled kids to specialized school, in essence running their own voucher system?
While some vouchers are based on this data shared elsewhere in this thread indicated that most are not. Outsourcing disabled kids to a specialized school has a number of disadvantages and is not a program I would broadly support. I think the most notable is that it reduces the interaction of the typical student populace with disabled students causing them to be less aware of the challenges and issues they may face. A lot of education is exposure to different peoples and perspectives. I had a disabled child in one of my classes at a young age and think that experience helped develop my empathy for people who had a different experience of life than my own. If the benefits to disabled students are sufficiently large they may outweigh the gains to the broader student body but designing systems to be insular rather than reflective is something that should be done with an abundance of caution.
Do you have any evidence to back that up? I see no reason why students need to literally be in the same classroom all day with disabled people to learn empathy for them. There are many other ways they could interact with them without forcing students with vastly different needs into the same box (consider how home schoolers do it).
I don’t have evidence in the form of research or empirical data but I’m happy to talk from my own experiences. Genuine empathy comes from a place of understanding and is almost impossible without seeing one’s struggles. I also think students who aren’t exposed to racially diverse populations struggle to emphasize on racial issues. If you don’t have exposure it’s something novel and foreign. Our first intuitions are often incorrect. These aren’t things that one magically gets correct from principles but rather that one slowly accumulates by interacting with diverse populations.
If your evidence is only anecdotal then I think you need to go find some better evidence or go back and rethink your argument. Calling voucher systems a "scam" based on this reasoning is a big stretch. There are lots of other ways for "low cost" students to accumulate interactions with "high cost" students that don't require them to all be educated in the same manner e.g. out of school activity clubs, local community groups, religious organizations, boy/girl scouts. Why not give students a say in how they are educated and make those opportunities more accessible / subsidised?
I have evidence on the main point of the argument which wasn't what I thought you were asking for. It sounded like you were asking about a specific niche use of vouchers for disabled students. There can be merits to a specific voucher program for disabled students. That doesn't make voucher programs that take money from disabled students for non-disabled students any less of a scam. It's a completely separate point that is orthogonal to the main one.
This seems like a really arbitrary line of evidence. Absolutely having exposure to peers with disabilities is a good think for young people, but there are also significant costs/complexities that come from trying to do it all. I don’t see any consideration for the other half of the equation in this comment
Many states have variable funding for students based on SES, grade level, and disability and in many states with vouchers, the voucher is some percentage of what the local school would get, not a flat amount...
Thanks for sharing this it’s helpful. A quick look shows that in most states the % of what the local school would get is high. It’s still fundamentally a program that makes a lot of assumptions that low cost students cost more than they actually do. I’m glad to see additional funds for special needs kids but the distribution seems flatter than reality. The kids with a special needs assistant aren’t getting the full cost of that assistant more on the voucher and the kids without a special needs assistant are getting some portion of the cost of providing for special needs kids in theirs.
So your argument and basis for calling vouchers a Scam is because the dollar amount for the voucher is not granular enough? Maybe the dollar allocation could be better, but it doesn't make vouchers a scam. If you'd like more confirmation in your beliefs may I direct you here...
IMO, vouchers have a place in school choice and I would prefer that they are used to give disabled, disadvantaged, and hard to educate children more options. I am a bigger fan of open enrollment and charter schools as zip code\housing affordability should not dictate a child's educational destiny.
Yes. Vouchers are a scam if the dollar amount is insufficiently granular in ways that benefit those taking them at the expense of those who don’t.
Most voucher programs aren’t targeting or benefiting any of the groups you highlight as the granularity of the funds is biased against them.
I’m personally against open enrolment as I think it creates a prisoner’s dilemma race to the bottom where districts worsen their education system to provide tax relief knowing their students can enrol in neighbouring systems. Of course if the neighbouring systems follow their incentives to do the same the net result is a gutting of the education system. I emphasize with the idea of providing more broader access to good systems I just think the mechanism to do so has to protect the incentives to make the systems good.
>I’m personally against open enrolment as I think it creates a prisoner’s dilemma race to the bottom where districts worsen their education system to provide tax relief knowing their students can enrol in neighbouring systems.
In my state with OE, I've seen district schools add phonics, world languages, Cambridge, IB, etc, to compete with neighboring districts.
> I emphasize with the idea of providing more broader access to good systems I just think the mechanism to do so has to protect the incentives to make the systems good.
When your child is finishing third grade and you finally realize the curriculum at your district school is lacking you might not have the luxury of waiting for the "good systems" to arrive.
Are you in part of the majority of the US where the bulk of education funding comes from local taxpayers in the form of property taxes? It’s the combination of that funding mechanism with OE that I view as dangerous. If you’re in one of the parts where the large majority of the costs come from state and federal funds it may work better. For what it’s worth in my province (state-equivalent) we fund schools entirely through income tax at the provincial and federal level so the funding for schools is completely independent of property values. Good neighborhoods still have better schools for complex reasons but those better schools don’t have funding advantages over the worse ones.
I suppose the other possibility is the program might be designed in a way that each kid child being educated in a neighbouring district comes with a transfer of tax funds. If the transfer is larger than necessary to educate the child then districts would be interested in competing for students and will make quality improvements to do so. I may revisit my position on OE based on this. I am coming around to the idea that well designed OE programs could work. I think the “well designed” is key though as poorly designed programs can do a lot of harm by lowering the quality of education across the board.
This is a good observation that I wish that more people understood around schooling and funding for the public good. I live in a small town with about 1000 children total in grades Pre-K through 12. Schools are funded through local property taxes, which almost entirely fall on home owners and renters. Every year we need to vote on the town budget which inevitably tweaks our taxes a little bit up or down.
A few years ago our town approved a budget and then held another budget referendum about two months later. That’s not completely unheard of - we’ve needed it after natural disasters or other unexpected costs in the past - but what was weird is that taxes were going down in the proposed new budget. The cause was a single student who had moved out of the town that was costing the town more than $225,000/yr for special needs education. In the end, my taxes went down by a little over $100/yr as a result of the change which was strictly for a single student.
All this goes to show that not only are vouchers a racket, because for the most part the private schools are getting more than it takes to educate an average student, they’re also a racket because students with additional needs don’t get enough funding for the private schools to take them. Further starving the system.
I'm not pro-voucher but I think it's a bit unfair to compare case based public funding to flat value voucher funding and declare all voucher funding is a racket based on that comparison. There is no reason vouchers couldn't also have value based on how much the student costs, in fact some voucher systems work exactly this way.
All that is to say: this is an example of why _flat rate_ vouchers don't make sense.
I agree this is a case for why what you call flat rate vouchers don't make sense. But what you call flat rate vouchers is also the predominant program of vouchers being advocated for in most policy. When the mainstream discussion moves on to better programs of vouchers I'm happy to discuss the separate merits of those programs. As long as people are advocating for stealing money from vulnerable groups I think that is the most important issue with these programs that needs to be highlighted.
I very often, though, this is how privatization schemes end up working. The private sector takes over the most profitable consumers, leaving the unprofitable, costly customers to the public sector.
And realistically, if a voucher policy were implemented, it is unlikely that it will be perfectly designed. Unfortunately public policy is not driven entirely by well designed models.
IIRC the prior conversation the voucher system is supposed to enable people to choose winners and losers. Whether people should be able to choose where to put their children to get education is non-negotiable.
Vouchers simply take away the burden of tuition from parents. Whether it is the best solution, that's debatable.
If the alternative is that all children in a neighborhood must stay in poorly ran school then the voucher system is slightly better.
It is clear that there will be more space for an industry of fraudulently ran private schools. But that will hardly change from what there is now. Whether the bad schools will survive depends on how much parents care about their children.
Vouchers don’t simply do anything though. They need to make assumptions when they decide how much to give a student and when those assumptions are made badly they can do lots of damage.
There isn’t one voucher system that’s better or worse than a public system it’s a complex interaction. If some children leave a poorly run school by a program that steals money from special needs students to subsidize their tuition up to the amount a private school charges I don’t think that’s a moral trade.
There for sure are students who need $225,000 a year for a dignified existence. There were some at Stanford, they'd advertise they needed a femme (meaning person without a penis, Stanford should put the definitions and meanings on a website somewhere. The only other way to figure it out is by inventing one yourself or witnessing punishment for trespassing a definition...I guess you could also tune in to the slander on every channel), at any rate, a femme like companion but not companion a different word, but someone who made sure the student survived the night and had dignity during the night shift. She needed 24 hour care. All that was expensive, I met another person with serious health problems and she was like an insurance lawyer by this point, she knew everything inside and out, Antonia her name was.
Now I get that it's expensive, but helping others sure sometimes you can give someone a trivial piece of advice that changes their life, other times it's an uphill battle, fucking Iwo Jima. It's up to you if you want to or not.
We have the same thing in France with competition between public funded hospitals and private one ( called clinique). Just replace student with surgery...
As a parent of a public school kid, I am deeply frustrated by the overburdened mission scope of the school system. Schools must be a social welfare program, a babysitting service, and an educational system -- my impression from my own kids' journey through the system is that the priorities go in that order.
When the essay talked about "high cost" students, my first thought was special ed. In my district, the 2021-22 budget allocates about $71M and 513 FTEs to serve 10,475 special ed students. Or, about $6778/yr and 2 hours per week per student. I've aggregated that across several categories -- in the most expensive of those, the per-student cost is $21,351/yr and 7.9 hours/week., which is over triple the average cost of an average student. This may sound shocking, but these kids have special needs, and those needs require resources to be met.
Now let's look at a "low cost" special need: kids whose academic performance is very strong. In my district, the principal way that these kids are served are through the "Talented and Gifted" program (TAG). This program is nearly unfunded. The district has an annual budget of roughly $1b/yr., and serves nearly 40,000 students across over 50 schools. About 6,333 of those students are in TAG. The program has a total budget of roughly $387k/yr., or about $61/student/yr. It has 0.8 FTEs allocated -- that is to say, the budget allocates 32 hours a week of labor to serve the entire district's TAG K-12 needs, or about 18 seconds per week per TAG student.
"TAG" kids are successful but they still have needs. They need extra attention from teachers and mentors. They need the opportunity to work on challenging coursework, focused on their areas of talent and interest. They need to be able to work with peers who can keep a similar pace. All of that costs a lot more than $61/yr. and needs more than 18 seconds/week of someone's time, but that's presently what they get. And I think that's because these kids look like they're doing great -- they get good grades, they're less likely to be on drugs or involved in gangs, and their attendance is usually solid. But that viewpoint only considers these kids in terms of the needs of the school and society at large, rather than their own need to be stimulated and cultivated and to have so much of their childhood spent wisely. Because nothing immediately blows up when those needs are unmet, nothing is spent to meet them, and the money goes towards the squeaky wheels.
So when the linked essay talks about "low cost" students, I think it fails to address that they actually have high cost needs that are going unpaid. As a result, their parents have to shoulder the extra cost themselves by either paying out of pocket for a private school, or taking the time (and career sacrifice) to home school. That's exactly the kind of burden social programs like public education are supposed to avoid! Many families simply can't afford this or are unable to do this due to other barriers, and so their kids' needs simply go unserved.
To be clear, there are many possible solutions here, of which the status quo and vouchers are just two. I don't think they're even the best options. But I also don't think advocates of either are dishonest. I don't think parents are running a scam when they advocate for their kids to receive just as much support as anyone else's. I don't think it's dishonest for them to want access to schools that specialize in their kids' needs, and I don't think it's unfair for those schools to reject students whose needs are very different.
In a certain sense everyone is high cost because the Bloom 2-sigma effect says that giving a student one-on-one tutoring instead of other methods of education will move them from the 50th percentile to the 98th percentile. As much as the quality of gifted education can be woeful and quite limited in the US and those students have unmet needs by arguing that those needs deserve budget taken from special needs students you're implicitly arguing that those sets of needs are morally equivalent.
A gifted kid without enrichment is overwhelmingly likely to perform at grade level. A special needs student that needs a special needs assistant and isn't given one is overwhelmingly likely to not be able to attend school. These aren't at all equivalent.
To be clear the argument that vouchers are a scam is entirely about taking money from special needs students by hiding it in the average cost. There is no moral basis for students to be entitled to the average cost. I'm not saying gifted students don't deserve enrichment I'm just saying it doesn't provide a moral basis for taking money from special needs students through vouchers.
I make no claims of morality here, implicit or otherwise. I agree that everyone is potentially high cost, and that's the point. We have to decide who gets more, and who gets less. Some people are going to say that it is more moral to invest in the kids who are most able to deliver return value to society, and they're also going to say that those are the high-achieving kids. Some people are going to say that every kid should have an equal claim to public funds, and it immoral to allocate resources so unevenly. You may not share such perspectives, but there's no reason for anyone who does not already share your moral framework to agree with your assessment either.
I think we are moving well outside the Overton window with your example though. The specific things being balanced in this case are a quality improvement in a specific student's education against a resource necessary for a student to receive education. By advancing the idea that the later claims don't have moral priority over the former you seem to be contradicting the idea that every child has a right to an education. I don't think you meant your statement that way but that is the effect of ideas like "every child has an equal claim to public funds and it is immoral to allocate resources so unevenly." Vastly unequal allocations of public funds are simply necessary to meet special needs so if we want to provide those kids an education we have to accept that consequence even if we have desires to spend the money elsewhere.
You seem to be appealing to the presumed moral superiority of your position. Others disagree, both with your expectation of what is a right and what must be done to respect those rights. The existence of vouchers demonstrates that they exist and in sufficient numbers to get their way in at least some areas.
We live in a pluralistic society, in which compromises between differing moral systems
are required. Someone with either of the alternative claims I listed (fund the high achievers who are most likely to repay society, fund all kids the same) has every bit as much claim to moral righteousness as you, and every bit as much right to invoke the word “scam” to describe your preferred policy. Planting your feet and asserting your moral correctness, as evaluated by you, doesn’t change that.
Yes, we live in a pluralistic society. We still have a certain amount of base values and organizations and institutions that accompany that. The right to an education is enshrined in the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights a multilateral treaty adopted by the UN General Assembly.
I think there is some value in establishing the fact that the positions you initially argued were morally neutral are now being established as moral positions. There is also some merits to the discussion of the consequences of each of these policies. You've advanced two positions that take money away from special needs students for other students in ways that deny their right to an education. I'm glad you now somewhat acknowledge that consequence by appealing to arguments that seem to amount to "Education is not a right and even if it is, that doesn't mean special needs assistants are necessary to provide that right." I think it's useful to expose the position that is a consequence of a seemingly much more benign funding claim. I suspect many people might have a surface level agreement with the initial funding policy but will nonetheless reject the idea when they see the consequences on the right to education. Just because we have different moral positions doesn't make all positions equally valid and exploring the consequences of moral positions is still a useful exercise.
0. I'd say if you want case studies in how little agreement there is in moral reasoning, look no further than attempts to turn such lofty ideals as UN covenants and declarations into actual public policy! Countries wildly differ in their interpretations of these things. Even within those interpretations, they implement them differently. Within those implementations, people in those countries still disagree with the principles of those declarations. And in any case, the US is not even a party to the one you mentioned.
1. "I think there is some value in establishing the fact that the positions you initially argued were morally neutral are now being established as moral positions."
I've been quite consistent here. In regards to your claim that my top post was morally equivocating funding gifted kids and special ed kids, I pointed out that wasn't doing any such thing because I made no moral claims in the first place. I stuck to what was either quantitative (my district allocates $61/yr to TAG students), or clearly demarcated subjective opinion. ("I think...")
You then made categorical claims about what "moral basis" might exist: specifically, that there is no moral basis for kids to be entitled to the average amount of spend, and that there's no moral basis in favor of funding gifted kids at the expense of reducing special ed funding from their present levels. The purpose of my listing those two other positions is because they are clearly based in reasonably common moral principles that lots of ordinary people hold, and lead to exactly the positions you're thinking have no moral basis. I certainly don't claim those are morally neutral -- the whole point is that they are not.
2. 'You've advanced two positions that take money away from special needs students for other students in ways that deny their right to an education. I'm glad you now somewhat acknowledge that consequence by appealing to arguments that seem to amount to "Education is not a right and even if it is, that doesn't mean special needs assistants are necessary to provide that right."'
When I argue that a thing isn't necessary to respect a right, then that's not even "somewhat" of an acknowledgment that failing to provide it is a denial of that right... it's exactly the opposite! :)
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 158 ms ] threadIn general, it's using averages and then being able to filter out people.
Investors work that way too. Let the entrepreneur take the largest risk upfront and then pluck the highest things likely to succeed.
Which is why in countries where medical care is not guaranteed through taxes (e.g. USA) insurance companies try to find out about any pre-existing conditions before they give you a rate; they try to figure out if you're in the healthy group which would otherwise be subsidizing the sick people, or you are one of those sick people.
I say that without any value judgements one way or the other.
The same is true with other forms of insurance.
See broadly Adverse Selection, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_selection.
This was the mechanism. The HMO/PPOs were wildly more profitable--because they picked off the "below average cost" patients leaving the "above average cost" people to the indemnity plans.
Of course, then the indemnity plans collapsed under the weight. And then the HMO/PPO systems created "recission groups" to prevent having to take them on. And then it took until the Affordable Care Act forced the coverage of "preexisting conditions" to unwind the bullshit that the HMO/PPO systems caused in the first place.
If a smaller, constant-amount voucher is “not equitable”, is a $0 voucher more equitable somehow?
You shouldn't be allowed to take money from the public coffers because you want your child to only think things like evolution are not settled science or "just a theory".
The "money from the public coffers" didn't appear there out of thin air. The argument with school vouchers is that the money there belongs to the parents because it came from the parents as part of taxation.
I don't see that as an argument or related. That is, it's obviously wrong, but doesn't reflect on the other thing, I don't think.
People already got the benefit of schooling, whether or not they have kids, so it's just a matter of paying it back through taxes.
It seems to me unlikely that a majority of people end up paying taxes back to the school district they attended.
What about those who were homeschooled, etc.?
I'd rather take the tax money and choose how to spend it on the education of our kids.
Unlike, say, army, however, you are free to pay for private school. So, take the money that you have, and pay for private school, and be thankful that you live in a society that values education enough to make it available for all, because the alternative is dreadful.
If you feel that general education is not up to high enough standards, this may well be true. Whatever the answer to that, it is not for people who don't have children, or choose private education for their children, to "take the tax money and choose how to spend it".
I know that this is not what being discussed, but just for the sake of exchanging some ideas... In my ideal model for governance, this would be possible.
In my ideal taxation model, we would only pay taxes at the most local sphere: municipalities. And everything would be either based/budgeted on either (a) insurance funds or (b) service fees. States and Federal Government would then only as act as managers of mutual insurance funds between the cities themselves.
IOW, it would all be a giant bottom-up insurance/re-insurance system.
This way, the allocation of funds going to military spending wouldn't be determined by the individual, but it would be very close to that. Healthcare as well. Education could be financed both via a "service fee" (to cover the regular, cheap students) and an insurance fee (to cover for students with special needs). So those without kids and those that want to put their kids on private school would be able to claim a deduction for the "service part", but still had to contribute for the insurance part.
The original argument is about having the ability to dictate HOW the tax dollars are spent on education.
> If we take that argument to the extreme then people without kids shouldn’t pay school taxes at all. This is not taking the above argument to the extreme, it’s introducing an extra proposition, mainly “if I don’t have kids I should pay taxes for schools”. This is about IF my tax dollars should be spent on education.
It's hard to get people to understand how it is "taking money from the public coffers".
Because they think that if the public schools have one fewer student, they should have proportionally less in expenses.
Advocates for the public schools have tried to explain why this isn't true or reasonable for many, many years and it doesn't seem to have accomplished anything.
It might be good to reflect on why.
At a more basic level, school has a big issue with consent. We force kids to attend at the barrel of gun, we force adults to pay for it at the barrel of a gun. How bout we chill with all this non-consensual educational activity. If you have to force someone to use/pay for your product you are not adding value.
On the funding point, for elementary and high school education the US has a rather poor funding record. It’s only when you include the costs of providing university education that the US is the most expensive. Many US states spend half of what Ontario does on K-12 education and Ontario has a much higher educational attainment.
Sorry not ok.
There is merit in the idea of cost sharing for the kids who are in school by their own volition, but as long a coercion is involved any benefits are outweighed by the moral injuries.
As such, they must do what adults think is best for them until they are able to support themselves, at which point they can stop doing what anyone else thinks is best for them.
I think it's best for children to go to school and learn, because this gives them greater opportunities and improved future life outcomes.
What would your alternative proposal be to prepare children to support themselves?
2) When you are calculating the costs per student for the purpose of valuing vouchers, I'd guess you need to include the students who are are being homeschooled or are currently attending private schools without vouchers as part of the denominator. Presumably the vouchers wouldn't be restricted to only the students who are switching, but instead would be given to all? Since about 10% of students are currently private schooled (I presume homeschooling is much lower?), this would reduce the "fair" value of the voucher by another 10% or so if you were trying to keep it cost neutral.
On 2) I agree that my calculations are simplified in the article and further reductions are necessary for cost neutrality.
This study by American Progress supports your thesis.
American Progress is a left-of-center alternative to the right-leaning Heritage Foundation. I haven't finished looking for the right wing think tank's studies, but I'll share anything of particular interest when I do.
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/highly-negative-imp...
"This analysis builds on a large body of voucher program evaluations in Louisiana, Indiana, Ohio, and Washington, D.C., all of which show that students attending participating private schools perform significantly worse than their peers in public schools—especially in math"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
Parents of low-cost students can send their kids to the “high information market” (the schools that can reject high-cost students). Parents of high-cost students have to send their kids to the “low-information market” (the public school that can’t reject high-cost students). Any school that can reject high-cost students can make themselves more attractive to low-cost students, which then feeds on itself, as the “low-information” school ends up with more and more high-cost students.
In this case, both schools have the same information, it’s just that one school isn’t allowed to act on it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_voucher
Did you know that many schools out source highly disabled kids to specialized school, in essence running their own voucher system?
https://www.ncsl.org/research/education/voucher-law-comparis...
https://dianeravitch.net/
IMO, vouchers have a place in school choice and I would prefer that they are used to give disabled, disadvantaged, and hard to educate children more options. I am a bigger fan of open enrollment and charter schools as zip code\housing affordability should not dictate a child's educational destiny.
Most voucher programs aren’t targeting or benefiting any of the groups you highlight as the granularity of the funds is biased against them.
I’m personally against open enrolment as I think it creates a prisoner’s dilemma race to the bottom where districts worsen their education system to provide tax relief knowing their students can enrol in neighbouring systems. Of course if the neighbouring systems follow their incentives to do the same the net result is a gutting of the education system. I emphasize with the idea of providing more broader access to good systems I just think the mechanism to do so has to protect the incentives to make the systems good.
In my state with OE, I've seen district schools add phonics, world languages, Cambridge, IB, etc, to compete with neighboring districts.
> I emphasize with the idea of providing more broader access to good systems I just think the mechanism to do so has to protect the incentives to make the systems good.
When your child is finishing third grade and you finally realize the curriculum at your district school is lacking you might not have the luxury of waiting for the "good systems" to arrive.
A few years ago our town approved a budget and then held another budget referendum about two months later. That’s not completely unheard of - we’ve needed it after natural disasters or other unexpected costs in the past - but what was weird is that taxes were going down in the proposed new budget. The cause was a single student who had moved out of the town that was costing the town more than $225,000/yr for special needs education. In the end, my taxes went down by a little over $100/yr as a result of the change which was strictly for a single student.
All this goes to show that not only are vouchers a racket, because for the most part the private schools are getting more than it takes to educate an average student, they’re also a racket because students with additional needs don’t get enough funding for the private schools to take them. Further starving the system.
All that is to say: this is an example of why _flat rate_ vouchers don't make sense.
And realistically, if a voucher policy were implemented, it is unlikely that it will be perfectly designed. Unfortunately public policy is not driven entirely by well designed models.
Vouchers simply take away the burden of tuition from parents. Whether it is the best solution, that's debatable.
If the alternative is that all children in a neighborhood must stay in poorly ran school then the voucher system is slightly better.
It is clear that there will be more space for an industry of fraudulently ran private schools. But that will hardly change from what there is now. Whether the bad schools will survive depends on how much parents care about their children.
There isn’t one voucher system that’s better or worse than a public system it’s a complex interaction. If some children leave a poorly run school by a program that steals money from special needs students to subsidize their tuition up to the amount a private school charges I don’t think that’s a moral trade.
Now I get that it's expensive, but helping others sure sometimes you can give someone a trivial piece of advice that changes their life, other times it's an uphill battle, fucking Iwo Jima. It's up to you if you want to or not.
When the essay talked about "high cost" students, my first thought was special ed. In my district, the 2021-22 budget allocates about $71M and 513 FTEs to serve 10,475 special ed students. Or, about $6778/yr and 2 hours per week per student. I've aggregated that across several categories -- in the most expensive of those, the per-student cost is $21,351/yr and 7.9 hours/week., which is over triple the average cost of an average student. This may sound shocking, but these kids have special needs, and those needs require resources to be met.
Now let's look at a "low cost" special need: kids whose academic performance is very strong. In my district, the principal way that these kids are served are through the "Talented and Gifted" program (TAG). This program is nearly unfunded. The district has an annual budget of roughly $1b/yr., and serves nearly 40,000 students across over 50 schools. About 6,333 of those students are in TAG. The program has a total budget of roughly $387k/yr., or about $61/student/yr. It has 0.8 FTEs allocated -- that is to say, the budget allocates 32 hours a week of labor to serve the entire district's TAG K-12 needs, or about 18 seconds per week per TAG student.
"TAG" kids are successful but they still have needs. They need extra attention from teachers and mentors. They need the opportunity to work on challenging coursework, focused on their areas of talent and interest. They need to be able to work with peers who can keep a similar pace. All of that costs a lot more than $61/yr. and needs more than 18 seconds/week of someone's time, but that's presently what they get. And I think that's because these kids look like they're doing great -- they get good grades, they're less likely to be on drugs or involved in gangs, and their attendance is usually solid. But that viewpoint only considers these kids in terms of the needs of the school and society at large, rather than their own need to be stimulated and cultivated and to have so much of their childhood spent wisely. Because nothing immediately blows up when those needs are unmet, nothing is spent to meet them, and the money goes towards the squeaky wheels.
So when the linked essay talks about "low cost" students, I think it fails to address that they actually have high cost needs that are going unpaid. As a result, their parents have to shoulder the extra cost themselves by either paying out of pocket for a private school, or taking the time (and career sacrifice) to home school. That's exactly the kind of burden social programs like public education are supposed to avoid! Many families simply can't afford this or are unable to do this due to other barriers, and so their kids' needs simply go unserved.
To be clear, there are many possible solutions here, of which the status quo and vouchers are just two. I don't think they're even the best options. But I also don't think advocates of either are dishonest. I don't think parents are running a scam when they advocate for their kids to receive just as much support as anyone else's. I don't think it's dishonest for them to want access to schools that specialize in their kids' needs, and I don't think it's unfair for those schools to reject students whose needs are very different.
A gifted kid without enrichment is overwhelmingly likely to perform at grade level. A special needs student that needs a special needs assistant and isn't given one is overwhelmingly likely to not be able to attend school. These aren't at all equivalent.
To be clear the argument that vouchers are a scam is entirely about taking money from special needs students by hiding it in the average cost. There is no moral basis for students to be entitled to the average cost. I'm not saying gifted students don't deserve enrichment I'm just saying it doesn't provide a moral basis for taking money from special needs students through vouchers.
We live in a pluralistic society, in which compromises between differing moral systems are required. Someone with either of the alternative claims I listed (fund the high achievers who are most likely to repay society, fund all kids the same) has every bit as much claim to moral righteousness as you, and every bit as much right to invoke the word “scam” to describe your preferred policy. Planting your feet and asserting your moral correctness, as evaluated by you, doesn’t change that.
I think there is some value in establishing the fact that the positions you initially argued were morally neutral are now being established as moral positions. There is also some merits to the discussion of the consequences of each of these policies. You've advanced two positions that take money away from special needs students for other students in ways that deny their right to an education. I'm glad you now somewhat acknowledge that consequence by appealing to arguments that seem to amount to "Education is not a right and even if it is, that doesn't mean special needs assistants are necessary to provide that right." I think it's useful to expose the position that is a consequence of a seemingly much more benign funding claim. I suspect many people might have a surface level agreement with the initial funding policy but will nonetheless reject the idea when they see the consequences on the right to education. Just because we have different moral positions doesn't make all positions equally valid and exploring the consequences of moral positions is still a useful exercise.
1. "I think there is some value in establishing the fact that the positions you initially argued were morally neutral are now being established as moral positions."
I've been quite consistent here. In regards to your claim that my top post was morally equivocating funding gifted kids and special ed kids, I pointed out that wasn't doing any such thing because I made no moral claims in the first place. I stuck to what was either quantitative (my district allocates $61/yr to TAG students), or clearly demarcated subjective opinion. ("I think...")
You then made categorical claims about what "moral basis" might exist: specifically, that there is no moral basis for kids to be entitled to the average amount of spend, and that there's no moral basis in favor of funding gifted kids at the expense of reducing special ed funding from their present levels. The purpose of my listing those two other positions is because they are clearly based in reasonably common moral principles that lots of ordinary people hold, and lead to exactly the positions you're thinking have no moral basis. I certainly don't claim those are morally neutral -- the whole point is that they are not.
2. 'You've advanced two positions that take money away from special needs students for other students in ways that deny their right to an education. I'm glad you now somewhat acknowledge that consequence by appealing to arguments that seem to amount to "Education is not a right and even if it is, that doesn't mean special needs assistants are necessary to provide that right."'
When I argue that a thing isn't necessary to respect a right, then that's not even "somewhat" of an acknowledgment that failing to provide it is a denial of that right... it's exactly the opposite! :)