President of Black America? Was an election held?

I have yet to hear or read a credible economic argument for vouchers as a large-scale solution to the education problem.

AWG: As with a credible definition of “credible,” the arguments are endless. I can’t possibly guess your definition of “credible,” (at least not with live hip-hop in the background).

The folks at the Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions have developed various local economic arguments for school choice and vouchers that boil down to a simple point: if parents have a choice, they are often the best decision-makers for their children, and this puts pressure on schools to innovate and change.

I and my laptop spend a few hours last night with a metro schoolteacher whose night was spent in the inanity of writing detailed “scripts” of her classes for the next week — beginning with “hello class–” which he/she has to turn in before teaching. This is an inane waste of resources, and I pause to imagine what my (public school) education would have been like with such a rule.

Highest salary in my district at the time: $18K. Average for tenured faculty: $12K. (With KERA and inflation, salaries are effectively 180% of that now, and the systems are a mess that make MGRHS seem like heaven).

About six months ago, a school board member asked BIPPS’ director if he wanted to “take” the argument “outside” during a public meeting. How do we expect children to behave given such examples?

The quasi-religious underpinnings of the vouchers movement and its errors aside, another point is that individuals (such as myself) should not be taxed to provide for the “common good” of education– and then have to pay for that good again for our children because the government cannot, as measured by any reasonable criterion, effectively manage and direct an educational system.

But that’s not entirely an economic argument: it’s one of justice and democracy.

The problem with Ken’s point is a stumbling block for many defenses of vouchers: the parents are assumed to be equally viable advocates for their kids. So the well-educated middle-class parent in an urban area and a poor immigrant parent with a shaky grasp of english are pitted as equals in the search for a better school. Similar inequities exist today, but the voucher system relies on that assumption instead of bumping up against it as an unfortunate side effect.

Eventually, to even such differences out, vouchers end up replicating much of the educational apparatus out there, so as vouchers become bigger and bigger programs geared toward every student and family, they easily can become a bureaucratic mess eerily similar to the complaints that lead to vouchers in the first place.

Arrogant dogooders at it again! Get them out of the decision making loop.

Rory,

“Good points,” but:

the parents are assumed to be equally viable advocates for their kids.

This is ‘not entirely’ ‘the case.’ In the African-American community debate, (one) premise is that the ‘public’ [|State] system takes control and competence away from parents– “disempowering” them, to use the lingo– and a system such as vouchers, by putting “power” back in their hands, will increase their (admittedly not even) ability to advocate for their children and communities. In such a perspective, “they” are presumed to be unequal advocates, and, roughly, their ‘inequality’ to be an artifact of “the (educational) system.”

All of this (including the terms) is highly “problematic:” ‘all’ the sociology/demographic work indicates that the resource problems are deeper, and reach into far many more ‘institutions;’ the voucher movement (IMHO) is more-or-less fully compromised by its “cross-cutting” ‘religious’ and ‘ideological’ goals. (Yeah, I love the Hayek readers, but then they start talking about teaching their kids …)

Skip some beats: “Which is to say,” if affluent mid-class whites won’t walk into the effective ghettos in Bowling Green or the Paris banlieu, because they don’t feel safe and stigmatize the inhabitants (that’s more than a “gloss,” we can throw all the state financial resources we want at the problem (France has): but we’re not going to hit the causes of fundamental inequality.

the well-educated middle-class parent in an urban area [:] a poor immigrant parent with a shaky grasp of english [::]

What’s the logical coupula at the other side of this implicit metaphor?

There’s something very presumptuous in such a characterization– an inherent premise that the person on the right side of the statement is necessarily the ‘looser’ in such an equation (they are not necessarily, btw), and that their cultural resources are inferior (ditto).

I might “flip” the situation a little: one of my favorite ‘overheard’ quotes from Mexico City in the previous months was “Honey, it’s not because you’re Jewish, it’s because you’re white.” In context– the Jewish individual was forth-generation and of course spoke perfect Spanish– the expression of rejection based on an intersection of religion, class, culture, … is almost beautiful. ‘Competence’ and ‘access to resources’ is secondary to a structural inequality.

(Following the side-trails: what does it take to be “Mexican” in this sense? )

In either case, I beleive the Green/Nader critique would be (roughly) to get the State (’government’) out of the equation ‘as much as possible’ by returning ‘local’ control ‘as much as possible:’ in Oaxaca, by respecting local ‘judicial’ institutions and ‘traditions,’ as well as opposing ’state-run’ projects such as highway building and construction, as opposed to local situations:

that’s not quite right, both in the sense that it doesn’t accurately characterize the position, and I don’t believe it is “the solution.” As much as I’d like to see highway-building and other pork disappear from the US budget, simply devolving to a pre-modern model of local control is neither realistic nor beneficial: neither China, India or Mexico are going to choose to accept the limits that would place on ‘growth’ and ‘development’.

Footnote: an interesting version of this debate from today’s propaganda from the Asamblea Nacional is in Gloria Sanchez’s testimony here:

[fast&dirty translation:]
I began to participate in the movement in the past months. There are important issues of education, issues of health, issues of energy and so forth…

I have been a teacher for more than 30 years, and I am very interested in the issues facing public education… I am against privatization of the educational system, and I against that which has been called “market forces”… and in favor of a ‘right’ which is for all Mexicans…

which is obligated to pay attention to and say “no” to the initiatives of privatization
“no” to the initiatives of privatization…

[literally:] We have to be part of a State… it is an obligation [more literally: it is obligatory]

That last statement is truly amazing… I’m overemphasizing the meaning of ‘estado,’ but not too much… and let’s not forget that this is fully scripted, essentially a PR statement ‘adopted’ (by the media), but crafted as a political statement…
Also truly beautiful that Reforma swallowed this piece hook, line & sinker… probably because the media was provided to them “pre-packaged”… and suddenly we’re seeing a fairly complex media game and Reforma give allegiance to the provisional government… and Obrador willing to skewer Calderon’s camp with the very PEMEX issue that they used to dog him…

Rory is right. Vouchers are bad news for the poor. Unless of course, every kid HAS TO BE ACCEPTED into any voucher school, and the amount of the Voucher can only be used, IF IT PAYS THE ENTIRE BILL. Without such a check and balance in place, all vouchers would do is take money away from public education and give it to wealthier and/or more capable kids who can go to better schools. This is not an equal playing field. If we give a rich person all the money back from the tax base that would have been spent on public education for another child, so he can spend it on his kid going to Exiter (which he would have done, anyway) all we are doing is robbing the poor to feed the rich.
Can you imagine if we paid vouchers in Williamstown? Man, MGRS would be even more broken than it is now.
If we give every wealthy family in town the money they pay in taxes back to send their kids to private schools then the per capita spending on public ed goes down. The public education system would get less money per kid for education. It is as simple as that.

Yes, but the idea is that the system creates an incentive for the public school to try to be a good school so that parents will choose to send their children there and the public school will get the money.

Exeter.

Diana- The argument is to “help the system” by giving it an “incentive” (less money)? Don’t we already have that with No Child Left Behind?
Follow this rational… we shall give them less money, so that they will do better. You are not going to attract better people by producing more failure.
What is needed is more control of public ed at the local level.
Sorry about the spelling on Exeter… lol.

Ken just underhandedly, either purposefully or not, accused me of, at least, paternalism, at most, racism. It is neither, I must say, though it might have been sloppy language aimed at not sounding high-falluting. Would Ken have preferred me writing, “parents with more social and cultural capital”, which was the point?

In the case of a free market, those with the most knowledge and the most resources get the best result. The same will happen in a voucher based system.

The African-American community debate, as Ken terms it, is an idealized free market argument, one that fails to properly account for the white reaction, as he points out, of white flight. We’ve seen white flight in every institution (education, housing are the two prime examples) that integration has been legislated into effect. There’s little doubt a similar experience would happen here. And so, while the african-american community might experience more individual power, they continue to have less power than the wealthy whites. Such are the structures Ken points to in his third paragraph–vouchers by themselves are a recipe for disaster. Any voucher system that attempts to correct such results will lead to the reimplementation of the bureaucratic control vouchers are supposed to eliminate. and so the cycle continues…

this is not in anyway to criticize the suborned group in the least, only to point out that rarely, if ever, is a market-based solution that pits the subordinate individual and the privileged individual as competitors a smart public policy.

Rory,

No personal attack was intended, and I tried to be careful. And your point that “no market solution that pits {individuals} against one another” is sound is well taken, if I would (of course!) have objections.

My general point is that there is a “structural discrimination” in the line of thought, and a “hidden dependency” whereby the assumption of inequality in fact (hermeneutically) (re)enforces the inequality it posits. (There is a somewhat more flippant articulation of this in the Dan Drezner vlog which David references, when Dan makes fun of the idea that unbridled markets will ‘erode’ the individual, though I’m equally willing to accuse Hayek of ‘racism’ (or whatever it is) as you, the Greens, or Obrador’s/our articulation of ‘patriotismo nacional’).

My general point is that the (Keynesian) articulation of state protection may erode individualism and privacy as much as it claims to protect it; and the Green’s anti-statist/ism articulation is equally problematic… in (at least) the sense of the fact that there is something incredibly arrogant about the idea of independently wealthy white (US) American anthropologists denying ‘economic development’ to ‘their natives’ in the name of ‘preserving their interests’.

I’m onto my 14th hour of hashing datasets (and hashes) today, so I’m not going to even look at whatever drivel I wrote in response to you last night… but there is a fundamental tension and irony in a ‘provisional’ and ‘revolutionary’ ‘alternative’ government, which openly calls for a reworking of every institution, and then falls back on stale ideologies of nationalism, protectionism and, ahem, the ‘liberal’ articulation of the project of enlightenment…

[in progress...]

affordable car insurance SSANGYONG
car insurance price

car cheap insurance quote CADILLAC
on line car insurance quote

cheapest car insurance INFINITI
cheap car insurance rate

discount car insurance VOLKSWAGEN

Do we want educational changes, which resolve society’s broad ills or which, on balance and in a financially practical vein, improve education more for the most kids? Right now we aren’t doing very well on either score.