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Seuss said:
> Teacher's unions represent their own interests.  They work in the interest of teachers and not children.

Teacher's unions work in the interest of the teacher's union, not the teachers and not the children.

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Falcon91Wolvrn03 said:

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JesusChrist said:
Outside the usual suspects there is not a lot of excitement to save the program even as you're really hard pressed to find anyone who thinks it's doing any harm?

You wonder where the liberals are that constantly proport to care for all the poor black children.

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Jesus Christ, you've got to be kidding me.  Vouchers take money from public schools to help pay for private schools.  Take from the poor to support the rich.  The poor couldn't afford private school even with vouchers, so it's extremely harmful to them.

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This is an outrage to me. … This is so important that you give young people a chance to have an education in America and especially in a failing public school system like you have in the District of Columbia. This voucher system is a direct threat to the unions. And so I think everybody on Capitol Hill, that’s getting money from the NEA or AFT, they should be called on the table. They should ask them, ‘where do you send your kids to school?

And are you willing to say these kids getting the vouchers…and doing better than the rest of the kids, that these kids aren’t deserving of an opportunity to succeed in America?’ You just want to scream. Why Duncan and Obama aren’t in the forefront of education reform is an outrage and an insult to the very base that voted for them.

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When we all bid for houses in better school districts, we merely bid up the prices of those houses.

In the 1950s, as now, families tried to buy houses in the best school districts they could afford. But strict credit limits held the bidding in check. Lenders typically required down payments of 20 percent or more and would not issue loans for more than three times a borrower's annual income.

In a well-intentioned but ultimately misguided move to help more families enter the housing market, borrowing restrictions were relaxed during the intervening decades. Down payment requirements fell steadily, and in recent years, many houses were bought with no money down. Adjustable-rate mortgages and balloon payments further boosted families' ability to bid for housing.

The result was a painful dilemma for any family determined not to borrow beyond its means. No one would fault a middle-income family for aspiring to send its children to schools of at least average quality. (How could a family aspire to less?) But if a family stood by while others exploited more liberal credit terms, it would consign its children to below-average schools. Even financially conservative families might have reluctantly concluded that their best option was to borrow up.

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This is an eloquent indictment of our perverse system of linking schools to real estate. We don’t generally limit access to hospitals, libraries, or colleges by geography, and there’s no good reason children’s schools should be determined that way either. People should be able to live wherever they want, and then they should be free to send their children to any school that meets their needs. There are a variety of ways to allocate space in the most sought-after schools—academic merit, aptitude in the school’s area of focus, demographic diversity, or by lottery—that would be more reasonable than our current policy of arbitrary geographic boundaries.

And yes, some schools would choose students based on their ability to pay. What Frank’s article nicely illustrates is that our current system of geographically-based school assignment already segregates children by their parents’ income, it just does so in an unnecessarily cumbersome manner. If we had a free market in education, parents who wanted to invest in sending their children to a better school would be able to do so directly, instead of having to buy more house than they might want just so they can get a spot at a better school.

The most important thing to note, though, is that the scarcity of good schools Frank identifies is not an inherent fact about the universe, but a consequence of the public school monopoly. In a competitive education market, a shortage of good schools in a given area would spur people to either start new schools or expand the best of the existing ones. But the public school system has few mechanisms for doing either of those things (charter schools are a very limited mechanism for starting innovative public schools). Which means that the supply of good public schools is artificially limited, leading parents to bid up their price. The way to alleviate the shortage of good schools is not to re-regulate the mortgage market, but to reform the education system so that it’s easier to start and expand high-quality schools. Few things would do that as effectively as a robust program of school choice.

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Barack Obama cites approvingly the 2003 book "The Two Income Trap" in his "Audacity of Hope." The mother and daughter team of Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Warren and former McKinsey consultant Amelia Warren Tyagi explain in the Two Income Trap:

"The average two-income family earns far more today than did the single-breadwinner family of a generation ago. And yet, once they have paid the mortgage, the car payments, the taxes, the health insurance, and the day-care bills, today's dual-income families have less discretionary—and less money to put away for a rainy day—than the single-income family of a generation ago."

The two authors note:

"The brunt of the price increases has fallen on families with children. Data from the Federal Reserve show that the median home value for the average childless individual increased by 23 percent between 1983 and 1998 … (adjusted for inflation). For married couples with children, however, housing prices shot up 79 percent—more than three times faster."

Many economists shrug that this vast rise in prices increases Americans' net worth. "But that net worth isn't worth anything," the two women point out, "unless a family plans to sell its home and live in a cave, because the next house the family buys would carry a similarly outrageous price tag."

Further, this housing cost rise transfers hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth from young families to aged empty-nesters—which probably isn't the most sensible way to run a society if the welfare of the next generation is a high priority.

Warren and Tyagi made an impressive survey of 2200 families that declared bankruptcy. "Our study showed that married couples with children are more than twice as likely to file for bankruptcy as their childless counterparts," they write. This will come as no surprise to married couples with children. Even more striking: "This year more people will declare themselves bankrupt than will suffer a heart attack."

The biggest single cause of this growing financial stress on middle-income parents: the breakdown of much of the public education system. As Warren and Tyagi note,

"Even as millions of mothers marched into the workforce, savings declined, and not, as we will show, because families were frittering away their paychecks on toys for themselves or their children. Instead, families were swept up in a bidding war, competing furiously with one another for their most important possession: a house in a decent school district… "

Warren and Tyagi report: "A study conducted in Fresno … found that, for similar homes, school quality was the single most important determinant of neighborhood prices …"

They go on to say:

“Bad schools impose indirect—but huge—costs on millions of middle-class families. In their desperate rush to save their children from failing schools, families are literally spending themselves into bankruptcy."

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JesusChrist said:
The Washington DC School district currently spends $26,555 per pupil as a district.  The average cost of the voucher is under $6,000.

Do you want to do the math for me and explain how this spending hurts the DC public schools?

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JesusChrist said:
If these kids rejoin the DC public school system funding per pupil will go DOWN.  If more children were admitted into the program funding per pupil would go UP.  If you want more resources per student in the DC school system, you would support vouchers.

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JesusChrist said:
And how do you justify the statement that vouchers are taking from the poor to support the rich?  Do you use class warfare rhetoric to argue against every program you don't like?  Where can you back that up?

The people using these vouchers in DC are over 90% black.  The average income of the voucher recipients is around $23,000.  That is less than the DC schools spend on educating one child for one year.  If that family choose to use a voucher, how would that be taking from the poor to support the rich?

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Falcon91Wolvrn03 said:


Sure.  For each kid that uses a voucher, that's $6,000 less for public schools.

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You incorrectly assume the $26,000k per student is a variable cost.  But most of it is a fixed cost (adding one more student into a class hardly changes costs, other than the extra paper/supplies the school gives to that student).

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The average price for private school in Washington DC is $15,000.  A voucher of $7,500 covers half of that.  If you're making $23,000 you can't afford the average private school.  You can send them to a below average private school, but it's at the expense of kids who are still stuck in public schools. 

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Why not put that money into public schools?

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Better yet, why not focus more on improving public education?

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Republicans make it sound impossible, but that's because public education is always a low priority for them; I think they want public education to fail so they make it a self fulfilling prophecy

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I believe public education will improve significantly under Obama, as he has the will of the Democratic Congress behind him.  That's why money is being channeled back into public schools, along with upcoming education reform

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