No, thank you *not filtered, and not caring that it's not filtered*
It came out a couple of days ago that Mississippi Governor Bobby Jindal has proposed the privatization of all primary and secondary schools in the state. I argued with one person already who thought it was a Very Good Idea, claiming that anything of value should be paid for appropriately. When asked where the money for the vouchers would come from, they remained silent.
My take:
The money for the vouchers would come from taxpayers, just as funding for public schools do now. The differences: now the money would be going to for-profit institutions...which have a demonstrated track record (I don't have any of the studies bookmarked, but they're likely readily searchable on Google) of poor performance compared with public schools in the same area. And since they're for profit, the proposed schools would be beholden first to the stockholders instead of the state Board of Education. That, in turn, would mean the people in charge of the school would likely have "MBA" after their names instead of "M.Ed." or "Ed.D". Finally, since they would (again) be for profit, the costs would rise by a factor of at least four, if not an order of magnitude, whilst student performance on standardized testing (e.g. SAT, ACT) would markedly decline.
In short, we'd be paying four times as much for half the quality of education.
No, thank you. I rather prefer keeping public schools public, despite their current poor performance when compared with the rest of the industrialized world. They're still demonstrably better than the voucher-funded charter schools. If Jindal truly wanted to improve the schools, he'd put more into the state education budget, sacrificing legislative and state-executive pay to make up the difference. For that matter, if every Governor truly wanted to improve school performance, they'd pressure Congress to cut the defense budget by at least 15%, and dump the savings into education. Do the math on THAT one, kids.
I've said enough on this. The Giants are playing, and my hunny's already parked on the couch watching the game. Time to join her and root for the Guys In Orange.
*poof*
My take:
The money for the vouchers would come from taxpayers, just as funding for public schools do now. The differences: now the money would be going to for-profit institutions...which have a demonstrated track record (I don't have any of the studies bookmarked, but they're likely readily searchable on Google) of poor performance compared with public schools in the same area. And since they're for profit, the proposed schools would be beholden first to the stockholders instead of the state Board of Education. That, in turn, would mean the people in charge of the school would likely have "MBA" after their names instead of "M.Ed." or "Ed.D". Finally, since they would (again) be for profit, the costs would rise by a factor of at least four, if not an order of magnitude, whilst student performance on standardized testing (e.g. SAT, ACT) would markedly decline.
In short, we'd be paying four times as much for half the quality of education.
No, thank you. I rather prefer keeping public schools public, despite their current poor performance when compared with the rest of the industrialized world. They're still demonstrably better than the voucher-funded charter schools. If Jindal truly wanted to improve the schools, he'd put more into the state education budget, sacrificing legislative and state-executive pay to make up the difference. For that matter, if every Governor truly wanted to improve school performance, they'd pressure Congress to cut the defense budget by at least 15%, and dump the savings into education. Do the math on THAT one, kids.
I've said enough on this. The Giants are playing, and my hunny's already parked on the couch watching the game. Time to join her and root for the Guys In Orange.
*poof*