School Vouchers and Catholic Schools

[Julianna]

Thoughtful reply.

My response would be (regarding the last portion of your post) is (I think you would agree) we cannot control outcomes, only conditions – where there’s a will to change the conditions of the school environment. It used to be that authority was assumed. No longer so. That change has migrated into explicit school policy, so that now, especially with HIPPA, FERPA, and a whole host of other individual protections – some legitimate, some not – a school’s options are sometimes limited with respect to student behavior. In other cases, a school’s options are simply not utilized by weak-willed administrators, because of the administrator’s choice to submit to political pressures (litigious parents, poltiically correct community, socially-conscious school boards & superintendents, etc.)

Explicit and implicit restraints on authority are often extreme and serpentine now, in some regions. If and when voters and parents are willing to rise up to reclaim they own legitimate adult authority, conditions in the school sites can change. Sort of…

What also has to change is the school’s agenda: Are we an academy or are we a branch of the Social Security Administration and the Social Welfare branch of county gov’t? And are we also a branch of local law enforcement (doing their work for them, or commenting on their work, interfering with their work)? And are we also a child psychiatric ward, mainstreaming untreated PTSD students, as well as those on the autism spectrum that are not well-served by full-day mainstreaming, and whose presence dominates the agenda of the classroom? Public schools need to decide whether they can realistically be a Treatment Facility simultaneously with being an effective/efficient academy. So far, this has proved unworkable, and I will tell you that in my region, Treatment Facility is winning. Normal students are losing, and losing big-time.

Thirdly, we need to re-prioritize curriculum, back to traditional academics (updated to assimilate modern life/technology), and away from touchy/feely inappropriate curriculum, such as full classes for children in Anger Management, Crisis Intervention, personal values (often a cover for political agendas, btw, and I don’t mean Catholic or other religious ones), and individual psychological journeys. Children in most public school districts are way behind in critical reading skills (not literal reading skills, as much), in writing, in historical knowledge, in math facility, and overall in functional literacy. We just don’t have the luxury of psych-trips within the school day.

So, let’s fast forward in tafan’s fashion , and assume optimistically that we can narrow/limit agenda, and that there is a majority of parents willing to re-empower adult authority, and that curriculum is once again suitable, while modern. That will change the conditions of the classroom for everyone. Teaching will be far more efficient than it is now. And I think (Major) that’s all we can expect. If schools provide those optimum conditions, we cannot control what parents do and do not contribute. Some students will continue to underachieve by personal choice, or because of compromised home conditions (including ineffective parenting or compromised parental literacy), some will be lost and maybe turned around later.

How can exceptional children (children with autism, learning disabilities, etc) participate in education if your plan, (and please correct me if I’m reading too much into this) is to keep them out all together?

My son has HFA Aspergers Syndrome…will not look you in the eye,…doesn’t make friends easily, has specific things he likes to talk about…doesn’t understand social cues or facial expressions…however, can knock the socks of any “normal” student in math and science. He now has an AAS degree in Mechanical Eng Drafting/Design and is working on his BS Degree in Mechanical Industrial Engineering. AutoCad is like a third arm. The Catholic school failed miserably at working with him, because they did not have the resources. It was the exceptional children’s program in high school that saved him. He attended class in the morning there for reading and english, and was mainstreamed the remainder of the day. Should these programs be done away with? Would vouchers and free choice of school leave children, such as my son, to the winds?

 

[Elizabeth502]

How can exceptional children (children with autism, learning disabilities, etc) participate in education if your plan, (and please correct me if I’m reading too much into this) is to keep them out all together?

Show me where I said that SpecEd sutdents “should be kept out altogether?”

He attended class in the morning there for reading and english, and was mainstreamed the remainder of the day. Should these programs be done away with? Would vouchers and free choice of school leave children, such as my son, to the winds?

Actually one of my earlier posts implied that Spec Ed kids are serviced well by publics, although I was not explicit about that. (I did indicate that our States’s stock-in-trade is testing, which I complimented them – the publics – on doing an excellent job at. Primary in that is their role as SpecEd evaluators.) Had the thread title been School Vouchers, Catholic Schools, and Special Education, I would have been specific about how Spec Ed would or would not fit into vouchering. I do not believe that that was the focus of the person who started the thread, and since it wasn’t, I did not think it fair of me to hijack by getting off-topic on my own. Educational services are educational services. Public systems which serve particular special ed needs (those schools which are suitable for that particular child’s need – and most general privates are not) would continue to serve such children. Vouchers would not change that.

But I was not addressing that per se. I was addressing the fact that in my State, you are out of luck if you are a normal child, in any definition of normal. If you are not a criminal in training, if you are not in severe need of social services (such as what social agencies provide), if you have one or two responsible parents at home, seeing to behavioral correction and insisting on consequences and giving two figs about your education, you will be ignored in all but the very wealthy public schools, where you will fit in. When one adds to that the often full-day inappropriate mainstreaming of students with untreated, unassisted, and sometimes untreatable conditions (some of which can be educational/academic on the extreme end of spectrum, others of which are sometimes psychiatric – such as PTSD), what you have on a daily basis is a portrait of a Treatment Facility. You are the favored group if you need treatment; if you do not need treatment, you can be, in many classrooms, pretty much on your own. I know, because I have taught in so many of them. As a teacher, you will also be directed to play roles for which you have no license, which is illegal and i.m.o. a form of malpractice. Someone who is on the severe end of the autism spectrum needs a teacher with Spec Ed credentials, if that child is truly going to be mainstreamed for most of the day. Otherwise it is unfair to the child, the teacher, and the rest of the class.

Juli, I don’t want to get O/T, because I don’t think that’s fair to the OP, but an underlying question in any reconfiguration of a school system includes how SpEd kids will be assimilated: In SDC’s (Special Day Classes, for the lay audience here), in half assimilation, or in full assimilation. The problem I have with my State (including all the other problems I mentioned) is that conscious decisions are not made, which is a dysfunctional way to run an already overly impacted bureaucracy. If as a school system or Dept. of Education, you’re not clear about goals, priorities, implementations, and self-evaluation, then you put yourself in the unhealthily passive position of just letting society happen to you – if you’re in a State (or perhaps a country, for that matter) that does not know how to say No, to solving the problems of the universe, or put some boundaries on that. The well-functioning students in my classrooms over the last few years have been cheated, major. I would be very angry as a parent, and this is why my children went to a Catholic school. (My younger one does have LD, but that did not become certain until the rigors of high school manifested. And no, the Catholic high school did not have good resources for her cognitive processing challenges; she coped there because she is extremely bright and creative. Individual high school teachers there offered her accommodations often, and out of pride and competitiveness she refused every accommodation offered. But she was a thoroughly mainstreamable child, as anyone with her varieties of LD would be; she did not need exceptional attention.)

In my State, the government has taken over child rearing – such as it is.

Some enterprising people are finally realizing on their own that there are some conditions which are not well mainstreamed, which required very specialized resources and expertise, and have built entire schools for such types – such as kids with CAPD. Classrooms and materials in those cases are set up with special auditory assistance, etc. For the moment, these kids rely on outside activities to be the venue for their mainstreaming. It may not be perfect, but it sure is a heck of a lot better both for them and for the non-Spec-Ed kids, for the former to receive the professional support they need, by highly qualified teachers.

I really can’t go more into this, because I feel it’s not fair to my debaters. Sorry.

 

[Elizabeth502]

Back to the main topic: I think I didn’t adequately address the issue of competition as a motivator. I’ll tell that you so far, in my State – where there is tremendous competition from charters, for example --they are being created faster than the State can really examine whether their charters are sound – it is not resulting in the public site schools getting better, as a response. What is happening is two things: The State is beginning to play Hard Ball with charter applications, including charter homeschool applications, as well as Independent Study supplementation to the high school program. They’re restricting any study completed away from the school site, even though routinely this has been allowed until now. They are using their monopoly and their muscle to limit options, rather than using the threat and reality of competition to become more attractive in the marketplace. They don’t consider themselves part of a “marketplace.” They consider themselves the arm of the almighty government, with the power to grant graduations, release transcripts, and prevent truancy action.

I actually think – I’ve shared with other teachers for quite some time – that the only way our particular State public education system is going to change, is for it to crumble due to accumulated loss of population. Charters have made the most significant dent: Within about 5 years, it is predicted that half of the publics in the State will be charters. But that still keeps the public site schools barely in business. Having far more privates, in addition, could tip the balance into unworkably low Attendance for public site schools which could force an examination about the role of the State in education.

 

[pnewton]

Should these programs be done away with? Would vouchers and free choice of school leave children, such as my son, to the winds?

Of course not. Everyone who posted here and whom I have ever heard recognizes the need to continue with special education programs. Everytime I have seen a comparison of education costs there has always been a caveat that exempts such programs or recognizes that they skew the figures. It is help that many parents need to make a free choice, not a full tuition. It is well recognized that some students require much more money per student.

 

[CPA2]

“Public” schools are no longer public (local). Power has shifted from the parents at the local level to the state. That is the main problem with government schools. That is why “public” schooling is now a dismal failure. School vouchers would shift power back to parents and away from the state and teacher unions. In business we call that decentralization.

 

[gurneyhalleck1]

As a sixth grade teacher in the public system that regularly gets vilified in CAF as it did with the OP’s statements, let me address a few things. And these things are from experience and first-hand observations:

Teachers have little control over disciplining and guiding children mainly due to PARENTS. If you get to actually be in a classroom, you’ll find it’s a lot more difficult to trash educators; you’ll see it’s grueling work, often thankless, and teachers are always the scapegoat.

My school is in a middle to lower middle class neighborhood. Each year about 60% of my students’ parents are divorced. About half those divorces are UGLY and I see first-hand the fact that these parents are not on the same sheet of music about homework, studying, expectations, attendance, goals, and they’re usually out of the loop with curriculum and schedules.

I had a mom in my class this year who didn’t even know what grade her daughter was in! She argued with me for five minutes swearing up one side and down the other that her daughter was a fifth grader! And she only has two kids!?

Usually by the end of the year, out of 30 kids there are 10 that still don’t know where the classroom is and many haven’t even bothered to meet me!

Attendance is horrific, that is a PARENTAL problem. Parents at my school regularly pull their kids out 1-2 hours early because it’s “more convenient” for them since they got off work early or want a three-day weekend.

I see a tremendous amount of sexual abuse, drug abuse on the part of parents, and emotional abuse. Again, a PARENT problem.

Parents regularly don’t know what the homework is. Why? They don’t bother to ask. At our school and in all the others in which I’ve taught, the parents never show up when you need in-class volunteers to read or assist. They never bother to come in and observe or take an academic interest. But boy when we have a carnival or BBQ or party they all show up!

We have a huge amount of cohabitating parents shacking up and the kids get yanked in between. We have a lot of parents who dump their kids in daycare, don’t take an interest, and are just in la-la land.

Most of my kids, especially boys, are HEAVILY INTO VIOLENT video games and many are overweight. They eat a diet of donuts, pizza, fries, and fried garbage. It’s not unusual to see kids out at 10:30 or 11pm on a school night so they’re development is being stunted and affected.

We have huge amounts of “English Language Learners” from Mexico flooding the system, parents who can’t step up, ADHD epidemic going on, a culture of “I don’t spank my child!” and apathy. Most of my parents don’t even know who Alexander the Great was. They haven’t a clue nor do they care.

Now I ask you, in a world of horrible parenting, cultural decay, excuse-making, morals melting away, LAWSUITS, how can we think that just plucking kids out of the public system and sticking them in private will cure it all? It’s absurd.

And regarding teacher tenure, 9 out of 10 people think it’s a setup for we teachers to just say whatever we want, brainwash kids, and libertine ourselves guilt-free and never be held accountable. BULL. It’s merely a system of checks-and-balances and legal protection, representation for when we’re accused. I had a kid make up a lie to his mom one time in which I supposedly whispered in his ear every day that I was going to “get him” and “make him pay!” Then he got in cahoots with a few boys in the cafeteria and he said they should all make up a lie that I threatened and mocked him on the playground. Luckily a bunch of kids overheard it. Tenure is meant to protect us from frivolous nonsense like that. I’ve seen teachers accused of “he touched me” when it was bull. Tenure is nothing but a check on threatening accusations.

If you observe the REAL cases of abuse, sexual harrassment, and over-the-top inappropriate behavior on the part of teachers, most are stripped of tenure and let go. I’ve seen it happen.

Principals CAN get rid of teachers with documentations, PAR panels, and it’s not that difficult. It’s an urban myth that we’re bullet-proof maniacs.

 

[gurneyhalleck1]

Questions and observations about vouchers I see:

Private schools don’t HAVE TO accept students. They have to qualify. What happens if a student is mentally-challenged, has a learning disability, or emotional problems?

Will all the high-achievers bail and go to private schools leaving only the low children in public school effectively crushing the public system?

Private schools don’t always require credentials. That is a big concern.

Will vouchers make the public system more competitive? Really? Seriously? If all the high-achieving/GATE kids dump out of the public into the private, and with all the insane amount of testing we have coming from the right wing, how will public schools get leaner and meaner?

If you tend to say that public schools aren’t strict enough, whose fault is that? Isn’t that a parental influence over the last few decades?

If you tend to say that kids don’t learn enough social studies and history curriculum, might that be because it’s NOT TESTED and teachers tend to focus (thanks to the no child left behind debacle) only on testable standards, right? No Abraham Lincoln on the state test = not essential. Don’t blame the teacher, blame the conservative test mentality.

If you think teachers are too tenured up, chalk it up the lawsuit happy culture we have that affects doctors in the same way leading to defensive medicine.

If you’re concerned with low achievement, ask yourself why a parent can do like some of mine and have their kid miss FORTY DAYS out of 180 in a year and get away with it!

And if you think public education is anti-God and anti-religion, check out our California Sixth Grade standards curriculum for social studies in which we spend a large amount of time studying Judaism and Christianity in depth! My kids usually tell me that they learn more about Christianity from my class than catechism and their churches!

I think it helps add perspective and common sense and a reality check to actually BE a teacher or at least work with a teacher, observe long-term, walk the walk, then the voucher competition and “public education imprisons our youth!” diatribe starts to evaporate. Education is a reflection of the values, morality, sensibilities and limitations of our culture.

 

[Elizabeth502]

“Public” schools are no longer public (local). Power has shifted from the parents at the local level to the state. That is the main problem with government schools. That is why “public” schooling is now a dismal failure. School vouchers would shift power back to parents and away from the state and teacher unions. In business we call that decentralization.

This is one of the problems, yes, just not the only or even the most looming problem. The bigger and more diverse the State, the less appropriate that the delivery of local curriculum and other decisions as to policies and implementation should occur at the State level. There are several other issues, though: issues that have not even been brought up yet, and these also affect efficiency, such as the multiplication of “programs,” the unreal mutliplication of unnecessary specialties of credentials, the extreme and sometimes unworkable conditions of heterogeneity (particularly language) and yes – just the stranglehold of policy and procedure technicalities, the multiplication of regulations, and more.

 

[Elizabeth502]

GurneyHalleck has reiterated and further detailed in posts 47 and 48 some of the earlier home/parent problems I alluded to.

I agree wth all of that. I also do see, however, even locally, that the entire ‘Union mentality’ can be a toxic element, in that it is another layer of bureaucracy/procedure/ and technicalities governing decisions and common sense when it comes to teacher professionalism. ‘I won’t do thus and so because it’s not in my contract’ is not a professional response. That was never the way I was trained, nor did I approach this very special vocation as a journey into my daily rights and limitations within a punched-clock mind-set. And certainly no Christian teacher on this forum should be mentally organizing his or her approach based on the minimum service he or she “has” to do, let alone being in lock-step with other union members. (Not saying that the poster in 47 and 48 is doing that, certainly. It’s just an additional problem I see locally and statewide that is huge.)

The points brought up in 47 and 48 illustrate one of the essential differences between publics and privates. In my State, parents have almost no accountability in publics. Quite the opposite in just about any private, but especially in Catholic schools. In some charter schools, there is also parental accountability, but in some ways this is kind of circular: it tends to be that the population interested in charters (and often creating charters) is the population that is responsible in the first place.

Finally, public schools in my State pander to the culture. This is seen in textbook publishing and in textbook decisions. Even the bleepin’ state legislature gets involved in deciding what’s politically correct for kids to read. The previous poster was right, in that there’s a prejudice against Christianity in the textbooks, often, but my bigger issue is that the textbooks reflect and support the low literacy expectations of students (with minimal emphasis on words, maximum emphasis on visuals) and the demand for distraction and entertainment.

 

[pnewton]

Will all the high-achievers bail and go to private schools leaving only the low children in public school effectively crushing the public system?

Why would this happen? If the public school offers an education commensurate with its price, why is there an assumption that private education would be considered a better option?

Something else to consider is that a increased role of private schools would offer an alternative career track for educators. Now, if a teacher wants to teach at a private or parochial school, he is more likely to take a more severe pay cut. If more equitable funding options were available, then pay could be more equitable if a teacher wanted to teach outside the public system. I doubt it would ever be equal or more, but at least the cut would not have to be so severe.

No one is interested in punishing public schools. We just want some control of the some of the taxes we pay for our children. It is amazing that this would be seen by the TEA as a bad thing, unless it is really the teachers that are more important than the job for them.

 

[vz71]

Questions and observations about vouchers I see:
…
with all the insane amount of testing we have coming from the right wing, how will public schools get leaner and meaner?

…Don’t blame the teacher, blame the conservative test mentality.

Pray tell, how do we objectively measure performance if not by testing?

 

[FlyCatcher]

Now I ask you, in a world of horrible parenting, cultural decay, excuse-making, morals melting away, LAWSUITS, how can we think that just plucking kids out of the public system and sticking them in private will cure it all? It’s absurd.

What’s absurd about it? You identify a lot of jerks in the classroom and a lot of parents who are jerks. Let the parents of the kids who want to learn get their kids away from the jerks.

i agree the problem is not the teachers, unions, or administration. it’s the jerks. So, let’s take vouchers and get away from them. if the jerks try to follow, the private school can kick them out.

Of course it won’t cure it all. There is no single tactic that will. But that is no reason to reject incremental improvements. Plucking good kids out of the mess you describe is exactly what we should do.

 

[gurneyhalleck1]

Pray tell, vz, have you ever read the tests or actually studied or taken them yourself? Do you actually know what’s in them? Do you realize that they don’t measure writing ability (except in fourth), history, geography, science (except in fourth grade and eighth) and there is no CONTENT KNOWLEDGE embedded at all. For example, you’ll never be asked “how many senators are there in the U.S. Senate?” or “who was the sixteenth president?” or “Which three gifts of legacy did the Greeks provide for us?” or “what elements combine to make water?” nothing substantive.

What you get on the tests is TRICKERY. These tests are worded BACKWARDS. In other words, you read a LONG, boring, banal text about something like hungarian cabinet-making and then you answer a question like: “which of the following is NOT true about the tools needed for hungarian cabinet-making?”

They ask the most absurdly difficult questions that don’t mirror the standards that they ask us to teach.

And you might reply, “well that’s not to say that testing should be abolished. Just fix and improve the tests!” I’d say, true enough to some degree.

I think you’re assuming that teachers want to abolish testing. Absolutely NOT. I think it’s critically important to test, hold students to a high standard. Ask any of my students. I am 5 times harder than the other two sixth grade students.

My class is full of engagement. My history lessons every day are not only from the book but they are taught from my own personal power points, videos I’ve accumulated, real hands-on, good solid stuff. Yet none of the content depth taught in history or science is tested?

Ever watch “Jay-Walking” where Jay Leno on the Tonight Show walks down Hollywood or Sepulveda Blvd. and miscellaneously asks people childishly stupid trivia and nine out of ten people can’t even make an educated guess? That’s because we’ve taught to a test. No content depth-pure reading comprehension.

Reading comprehension is the main focus of testing along with genre identification, drawing conclusions, inferences, vocabulary, spelling, etc. Math is almost completely word problems and they’re absurd at times. Truly absurd.

We should have MULTIPLE MEASURES of assessment, not a make-or-break situation with one test for the entire year based on a few hour state test that is poorly-constructed.

Another thing is that these tests you laud so much do not really gauge many factors of growth. What about English language learners? I have a girl from Mexico, had her sister also last year, in my class. This girl learned English in TWO YEARS!! And her English is just amazing! Her communication, we call BICS, and her academic language is really improving. Problem is, on the tests she does very poorly because she’s not there yet. How does this test gauge her growth and really show all the improvement and hard work she’s shown? It doesn’t.

I don’t think you realize the scope of testing’s influence and stress it puts on educators and kids. Field trips have gone by the wayside in favor of test preping kids. Test prep, teaching only the BIG standards on the test while ignoring other crucial information, testing strategies, all this stuff has become the current state of affairs.

Please follow this link that I’m giving you and check out what our test looks like. These are released test questions. They are actual tests I have given during testing season for STAR in the past, no longer used, so the State released them for practice or examples for the kids.

cde.ca.gov/ta/tg/sr/documents/cstrtqela6.pdf

Scroll down a few pages and check out the questions.

Pray tell, how do we objectively measure performance if not by testing?

 

[gurneyhalleck1]

So as a public ed. teacher, all I will be left with is jerks? Basically you’ll be assigning me to a special ed. class is what you’re saying. Not being a teacher, I don’t think you realize how important these smart, responsible, focused, dedicated students are to my classroom. They provide leadership, they inspire, they help the lower to middle students in group work and in doing so only improve themselves. Being asked to teach something only solidifies our own skills. I have to tell you, Fly, that my students and parents really love me. I get a lot of positive feedback and praise. And it means a lot to me. My kids were all crying the last day of school, even my tough macho boys. They didn’t want to leave. And the kids and parents who like me the most are the HIGH-achievers. They like the way I utilize their skills, give them responsibilities, respect, and challenge them. I think you’re making the assumption that the “jerks” are the ones dragging the smart kids down and as a result we need to privatize schools with vouchers. Wrong. Bigtime wrong. The high-achievers in my class and in most classes at my school are challenged greatly.

My posts have tried to address the problems with the jerk parents and kids, not the high-achievers.

Realistically, what do we do for the middle to low students? The retarded kids? The kids with learning disabilities? The kids with handicaps? The English Language learners (millions of Mexican kids who know no English?)? What do we do with these kids? I guess we toss em away like a crushed Coke can and just focus on the geniuses? Vouchers wouldn’t change things. Just a new school, new faces, lower-paid teachers with less credentialing, and the mental state of mind that you’re getting a better education when it’s really a lateral move.

I know SO MANY friends and parents who pulled their kids out of charter, montessori, and private Christian and Catholic schools because the education was sub-par!! People in CAF don’t realize that often times. Our Catholic school here in town is abysmal! It only is know fully-credentialed! And often times parents take over for teachers who are on leave or sick and they don’t even have a college degree? I know a guy who is rich, pulled his kid out of the expensive ($575 per month!!) Anglican School here because the teacher was incompetent in math at grade four and five!

At the Anglican School most of the kids are rich, spoiled brats.

Another thing to keep in mind is that “jerks” abound in our culture. You’re basically setting up kids in la-la land until high school thinking that the world out “there” is rosie, white picket fenced, and pure. Wrong. It’s going to be a culture shock for the sheltered, naive, and spoiled kids when they enter the real world. What a rush that’ll be!

What’s absurd about it? You identify a lot of jerks in the classroom and a lot of parents who are jerks. Let the parents of the kids who want to learn get their kids away from the jerks.

i agree the problem is not the teachers, unions, or administration. it’s the jerks. So, let’s take vouchers and get away from them. if the jerks try to follow, the private school can kick them out.

Of course it won’t cure it all. There is no single tactic that will. But that is no reason to reject incremental improvements. Plucking good kids out of the mess you describe is exactly what we should do.

 

[gurneyhalleck1]

The key word is “if.” Comensurate pay is a possiblity, not a given. Secondly, if you ever spend time teaching, you’ll appreciate your union, trust me. I’m a union rep and proud of it. I wouldn’t want it any other way. Union or bust!

I often also hear this argument that unions and teachers care more about teachers than kids. Silly. And wouldn’t a union be pretty pitiful if it didn’t fight for the best pay, benefits, retirement, and treatment for its membership? Do you want a union that sells teachers short? Your last statements pre-suppose that kids are getting short-changed. I’m not seeing how? My pay is $60,000 after 13 years of teaching. I have a Bachelors Degree and a Bilingual Spanish Credential BCLAD certification that took me five years of education to obtain. Show me jobs with that much education and years in that gets $60k in California! My wife is in the nursing program, a two-year program. RN’s in California START at around $58,000 to $60,000. START. Most nurses I know make around $90,000 or more after five years. So it’s not like teachers are driving Mazeratis and living the high life! My wife and I struggle like crazy financially!

I’m actually posting from the Philippines right now. My wife is filipina. The kids here have to pay for their own books, supplies, paper, uniforms, you name it, in public school! In California we buy all the supplies, the kids are given awesome exposure to technology and state-of-the art learning modalities. I bust my butt for my class. I spend so much time at home making activities and presentations, worksheets, group assignments, games, etc. to make learning exciting and fun. I guarantee you NO private school in my town could compete with me. My class rocks and I’m proud of it. Vouchers wouldn’t help my class or me, just leave me with low kids and ruin the public system.

Why would this happen? If the public school offers an education commensurate with its price, why is there an assumption that private education would be considered a better option?

Something else to consider is that a increased role of private schools would offer an alternative career track for educators. Now, if a teacher wants to teach at a private or parochial school, he is more likely to take a more severe pay cut. If more equitable funding options were available, then pay could be more equitable if a teacher wanted to teach outside the public system. I doubt it would ever be equal or more, but at least the cut would not have to be so severe.

No one is interested in punishing public schools. We just want some control of the some of the taxes we pay for our children. It is amazing that this would be seen by the TEA as a bad thing, unless it is really the teachers that are more important than the job for them.

 

[pnewton]

I guarantee you NO private school in my town could compete with me. My class rocks and I’m proud of it. Vouchers wouldn’t help my class or me, just leave me with low kids and ruin the public system.

That is in California. In my town, the Catholic school is quite competitive with superior SAT scores. But that is not an issue. You say you are pro-union. Do you believe only teachers should be able to campaign for economic fairness? Do not tax-payers and parents have the same right? It is not justice that parents have no choice in school other than paying double for education, and being taxed on the extra payment. At least you acknowledge that the TEA is a union and not some professional association. That way when the TEA takes an advisarial position to management (taxpayers), the the public can be advisarial in good conscience without all the hie and cry for “the children.”

If any type of voucher, even partial or phased in, would ruin the public school system, the system is already broken. I do not think either is the case. I do believe a good argument can be made for how much and how fast things should change in order to maintain a good, albeit smaller, public system.

 

[pnewton]

That’s because we’ve taught to a test. No content depth-pure reading comprehension.

You are correct. However, do not forget where these tests started from. Adults were passed on all the way to graduation without educational basics. Standardized testing was designed to fix a problem that already was evident. Perhaps the teaching of the tests has improved literacy, at the expense of other subjects, but no doubt any test that results in teachers having to focus just on showing students how to pass is a bad idea.

I think it would be sufficient, if literacy is the issue, to test just for that, pass/fail, with no record being used to rate teachers or schools.

 

[pnewton]

So as a public ed. teacher, all I will be left with is jerks?

Do you really think that public schools in your area are so bad that all the good kids would leave the system?

I know SO MANY friends and parents who pulled their kids out of charter, montessori, and private Christian and Catholic schools because the education was sub-par!! People in CAF don’t realize that often times. Our Catholic school here in town is abysmal! It only is know fully-credentialed! And often times parents take over for teachers who are on leave or sick and they don’t even have a college degree? I know a guy who is rich, pulled his kid out of the expensive ($575 per month!!) Anglican School here because the teacher was incompetent in math at grade four and five!

At the Anglican School most of the kids are rich, spoiled brats.

Another thing to keep in mind is that “jerks” abound in our culture. You’re basically setting up kids in la-la land until high school thinking that the world out “there” is rosie, white picket fenced, and pure. Wrong. It’s going to be a culture shock for the sheltered, naive, and spoiled kids when they enter the real world. What a rush that’ll be!

You seem to have a very poor attitude about others. You complained about those that are critical of public schools (which I am not, BTW) but you are not exactly charitable in your criticism of others.

 

[Elizabeth502]

gurneyhalleck, in my opinion you do come across as painting with a broad brush when it comes to private school students. It’s also a little bit classist, in my view. While riches can spoil kids, some rich adults and children are very nice and sweet. One such family was associated with our very middle-of-the-road (economically) Catholic elementary school. They had nice boys, were discreet about their income, and a few us only learned later that they were the financial base of a major symphony hall in the region. The Mom was a kind, charitable person. It can be more difficult to orient one’s children in the right direction in a rich family, but only if the parents’ heads are screwed on wrong. And with whom a rich family associates tends also to be a source of the problem.

Private schools – secular and religious – often include children from poor families who are on financial aid, so there is a certain economic diversity. A particular private school may have a preponderance of rich families.

Back to the argument: I think what many people rightfully object to in a heavily centralized, massive bureaucracy such as some public school systems are, is that the bureaucracy itself becomes a self-validating industry which exists to perpetuate itself, repeatedly justifiying its heavily bureaucratic face as somehow an absolute, even when that ‘absolute’ is at the expense of efficient, effective learning.

 

[FlyCatcher]

So as a public ed. teacher, all I will be left with is jerks? Basically you’ll be assigning me to a special ed. class is what you’re saying. Not being a teacher, I don’t think you realize how important these smart, responsible, focused, dedicated students are to my classroom. They provide leadership, they inspire, they help the lower to middle students in group work and in doing so only improve themselves. Being asked to teach something only solidifies our own skills. I have to tell you, Fly, that my students and parents really love me!

This isn’t about you. You are going to be assigned a special ed class? So what? Who cares what you are left with? Get another job if you don’t like it. Kids education shouldn’t be held hostage to your occupational comfort. If you want to hold good kids in a rotten environment where they can’t learn, then you are the problem.

Let those good kids go to an environment where they can thrive and fulfill their potential, not yours or the jerks’. No eight-year-old has any obligation to sacrifice his education for your comfort or for the jerks who ruin the learning environment.

They love you? Do they know you want to hold them back by chaining them to the jerks, while any parent with sufficient funds has the brains to get their own kids out of that environment?

Give those kids a voucher so they can get away from both the jerks and the policy of sacrificing good kids to make life easier for teachers.