Utah Taxpayer

Excellent PsyOps in the last paragraph. The truth is though, privatization of our public schools has not prevailed in spite of large donor PAC money, persistence, and wishful thinking.

Charter schools are just the nose of the education reinvention momvement. With the prospect of new, smaller school districts, it will be interesting to see if more substantive changes can be made to the way we educate our children, how we view the various responsibilities associated therewith, and how that education is funded. It appears that ordinary parents are finally beginning to break that stanglehold of the education establishment that forces us all to march in lockstep, regardless of our child's abilities or needs.

In the international apples-to-apples comparisions, how much has ed spending increased in other countries?

Mike,

I suppose by your application of Godwin's law that Doug Holmes, chief hatchet man for Parents for Choice in Education, LOST the debate at the Utah Foundation forum when he referred to Stalin, Hitler, AND Communism - the trifecta of neoconservative lefty-bashing, in his speech. Not exactly a way to endear yourself to a room full of public education employees.

I do not condone Rep. Ure's comment but I find your selective application of Godwin's law hypocritical and self-serving.

Anon,

You're right on the application of Godwin's Law, but I think in all reality, Taxpayers was just trying to be funny. I don't think they honestly believe that any comparisons to Hitler are out of place and mean you're wrong.

But you have to admit that comparing the start of charter schools to the rise of Hitler is kind of ridiculous. I, on the other hand, didn't find it ridiculous when Doug Holmes asked if the quote concerning how the state should have supreme authority over the education of our children (even above the parents) came from Hitler or Stalin (which makes sense) when in the end, it came from the guy who founded our modern education system. And yet, teachers still wonder why parents aren't more involved when the very nature of our government schools is to usurp their authority over their children's education. Odd.

And going back to the Utah Foundation forum, what's the point of endearing yourself to public ed employees when you're talking about school choice? It's pointless. The establishment is so caught up in its own little box that no logic will prevail with them.

The other day, Kim Campbell of the UEA stated on the Doug Wright show that the studies are coming out and they show that vouchers don't help kids but are harmful to kids. What studies? She honestly believes (or blatantly lied) that the evdience is against vouchers, yet every random assignment study on vouchers has shown the exact opposite of what Kim said. How are you supposed to be endearing to people who can't even accept reality? By lying, too?

"Okay," admits Doug after realizing that he needs to be endearing to public ed employees. "I guess all of the researchers at Harvard, Princeton, Clemson, Marquette, Utah State, Indiana, the Hoover Institute at Stanford Univeristy, etc. were all wrong when they found that school choice improved education and lowered costs. Silly me."

"Oh, that Doug Holmes," replied an anonymous public ed employee who sometimes foams at the mouth when she hears the word vouchers. "He's so endearing!"

Anon,

You're right on the application of Godwin's Law, but I think in all reality, Taxpayers was just trying to be funny. I don't think they honestly believe that any comparisons to Hitler are out of place and mean you're wrong.

But you have to admit that comparing the start of charter schools to the rise of Hitler is kind of ridiculous. I, on the other hand, didn't find it ridiculous when Doug Holmes asked if the quote concerning how the state should have supreme authority over the education of our children (even above the parents) came from Hitler or Stalin (which makes sense) when in the end, it came from the guy who founded our modern education system. And yet, teachers still wonder why parents aren't more involved when the very nature of our government schools is to usurp their authority over their children's education. Odd.

And going back to the Utah Foundation forum, what's the point of endearing yourself to public ed employees when you're talking about school choice? It's pointless. The establishment is so caught up in its own little box that no logic will prevail with them.

The other day, Kim Campbell of the UEA stated on the Doug Wright show that the studies are coming out and they show that vouchers don't help kids but are harmful to kids. What studies? She honestly believes (or blatantly lied) that the evidence is against vouchers, yet every random assignment study (the gold standard of social science research) on vouchers has shown the exact opposite of what Kim said. How are you supposed to be endearing to people who can't even accept reality? By lying, too?

"Okay," admits Doug after realizing that he needs to make up stuff so that he can be more endearing to public ed employees. "I now believe that the researchers at Harvard, Princeton, Clemson, Marquette, Utah State, Indiana, the Hoover Institute at Stanford Univeristy, etc. were all completely wrong when they found that school choice improved education and lowered costs. Silly me."

"Oh, that Doug Holmes," replied an anonymous public ed employee who sometimes foams at the mouth when she hears the word vouchers. "He's so endearing!"

i heart school choice,

UTA is a comedic force. I applaud them for their consistent guffaw-inspiring banter :-)

Hmmm...it looks like my "reality" is not your "reality."

If you feel compelled to attempt some type of justifiable case for Doug Holmes' divisive comments, then, in fairness, you should also place Rep. Ure's comments in the proper context. Having listened to the Administrative Rules Review Committee meeting, I can say Rep. Ure was 100% correct in his assertion that removing elected governance is a very dangerous practice. In the extreme, when all elected representation is removed and any dissent is squashed, a society naturally falls prey to authoritarianism and abuses of power.

The state board rule ensures 1, ONE, UNO, you count it, a SINGLE elected parent representative on charter school governing boards. I personally think the standard should be much higher. Charter schools are public schools.

Second, Doug Holmes completely distorted the Dewey quotation. I could take quotes from Adam Smith or Milton Friedman out of context that would distort their intent and discount their legitimate philosophical views. Demonizing mainstream ideologies of good people trying to do good things is simply childish and unhelpful. I don't like being called a Communist any more than you would like being called a Nazi.

Finally, vouchers and charters are very different animals. You can support charters without supporting vouchers. The charter school community is full of such people (though obviously there are those that vigorously support both). The UTA's spin on school choice tries to paint the movement with the same broad brush. It is easy to see this strategy and disagree with it for what it is - conservative partisan rhetoric.

Sincerely,

i heart all school choice except for vouchers.

Allowing parents to vote with their feet (and/or their children's feet) is far superior than having one or more parents on the charter school board.

Parents, children, and taxpayers would be better off if none of our schools had elected officials and all schools were based on choice instead of geographic assignment.

Current school district governance is way overrated from a "good government" perspective anyway. Less than 1% of the population can name their school board representative. The school board election process is functionally controlled by the teachers union (That would change if school board races were partisan).

Only in a handful of instances -- when a school closure is proposed -- do voters even pay attention to how their school board representative votes.

At least with state legislators, who are also relatively unknown to the public but not as much so as the school board members, they have to go through the convention process and sometimes a primary. The level of public scrutiny in legislative races is several orders of magnitude higher than school board races.

The charter school model is based on choice. If parents don't like the way charters are run, their children go elsewhere and ultimately the state dollars follow the child.

"Allowing parents to vote with their feet (and/or their children's feet) is far superior than having one or more parents on the charter school board."

That is a logical fallacy as those options are not mutually exclusive. Furthermore, I find the "vote with your feet" argument ridiculous. We should all be in the business of creating better schools and working hand-in-hand with parents in a positive way. Unresponsive top-down governance is exactly what charters and school-choice are supposedly fighting against. Simply saying "vote with your feet" is denigrating to parents and teachers with legitimate concerns about a public school's operation. A responsive and cooperative environment is what is needed in our schools, not showdowns and chest-beating displays of power from unresponsive and potentially self-serving boards.

Next: "Parents, children, and taxpayers would be better off if none of our schools had elected officials."

This unfounded assertion is completely absurd and dangerous. Elected school boards are the bedrock of public accountability in our educational system.

You sound like an individual that might support ending all government involvement in education. The only result I see from this course of action would be the utter destruction of our country.

Anon,

What are you on? You really think that voting with your feet is ridiculous? Well, then I think you're in the wrong country because as I recall, the bedrock of America is individual liberty, not school boards.

Charter schools don't need local governance like traditional public schools because they don't force students to be there. Do you think your local grocery store needs a community council to vote on how it should be managed and what foods it should sell? No. Because if it makes poor decisions, it will go out of business. How long did it take your local grocery store to stop selling spinach once the E Coli threat became known? It probably didn't take but a few mintues.

But, how long did it take the Alpine School District to stop forcing kids to do Investigation Maths even when it was discovered that it wasn't helping half the kids in the district to learn a lick of math? Well, I'm still counting the years. The Alpine School District has finally given some room for schools to teach math normally, and what is it that caused that to happen? VOTING WITH YOUR FEET!! That's right. The Alpine District had more charter schools per student than any other district in the state.

Holding hands and singing kumbaya hasn't helped thousands of kids who are falling through the cracks. The main reason is because your ideallic vision of what is or should be occuring in public schools doesn't happen and won't.

How many school board members are there that represent the interests of minorities, or those who speak English as a second language? How many are there that represent the parents whose kids get bullied every day? How many are there that represent the parents who want religious instruction and morality taught in the classroom? How many are there that represent the child for whom the local public school just isn't helping because one size does not fit all?

The school board can't represent the interests of every parent, but school choice can. It gives them the power, which in my mind is the bedrock of this great country.

Give me liberty or give me death!!

P.S. To the anon that says they love school choice except for vouchers, I'm sorry, but you don't love school choice because school choice is empowering parents to choose the school they feel is best for their kids, whether it be public, private, religious, home school, charter, etc. And without vouchers or tuition tax credits, most parents in this state do not have the power to choose.

Please stop trying to redefine the word that voucher advocates created. It's like when liberals try to redefine what our founding fathers meant by freedom (it doesn't mean the freedom to not do anything but still make a living).

And so you know for future reference, charter schools are an element of school choice and a way of expanding school choice for which most school choice advocates are grateful, but charter schools by themselves do not complete school choice.

To "i heart school choice":

So by your definition anyone who thinks open enrollment, charters, magnets, and private schools is automatically opposed to choice in education if they don't support giving tax money to prop up private education businesses who can't survive on their own without society's help? Sounds like another name for corporate welfare. I think you are the one with a too-narrow definition of the debate.

"No taxation without representation" - that is an ideal our country was founded on. Where exactly is the representation and accountability in your risky voucher scheme? It sounds like you want to turn over our public's investment in an educated society over to corporations. Should we turn over our roads and armies as well?

If you want religious instruction, go to a private school or teach your children in your home. Don't you dare use my tax dollars for that!!!

Corporate welfare?
Taxation without representation?

You get bonus points for great sound bites. Too bad the substance isn't very good.

If vouchers for students attending private schools are corporate welfare, then I guess the following would also be corporate welfare:

- food stamps would be welfare for grocery stores

- heating assistance so the poor can pay their natural gas bill would be welfare for Questar

- Medicaid and Medicare would be welfare for hospitals and doctors

- tuition assistance for veterans and Pell Grants would be welfare for private universities

- and last but not least, paying a PRIVATE construction company to build a PUBLIC school would be welfare.

The list of corporate welfare recipients according to your definition would be huge. Essentially, any company that government contracts to provide services would be a recipient of corporate welfare.

As far as privatizing the army, etc., obviously some things can't be privatized or subject to competition (like sewer districts, police departments, etc.). However, just because somethings can be privatized or outsourced, doesn't mean nothing can be privatized our outsourced. The same principle applies in the private sector. Monopolies exist in natural gas and electricity distribution, but not in computers, cars, etc.

In some ways, I’m glad that our blog-debate has gotten to this point. I think we’ve done some whacking around the bush, but are now reachingthe core of the debate, which is important if we’re going to all get along because I’m positive that we have the same end goal of providing children with a quality education that will prepare them to be productive, active citizens.

From your most recent comments, it appears that you missunderstand the basics of school choice for one reason or another. I hope my response will clarify some things that the Man didn’t cover in his comments. If you disagree with them, please let me know why and be specific.

1) Vouchers are not corporate welfare. This argument is a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black. Could all public schools survive without the government forcing students to attend them, especially the failing Title I schools?

The purpose of vouchers is to open up the option of private schooling to middle and low income families. They currently do not have the resources to make that decision even though the average private school costs thousands less per year than what we spend in public schools. You talk about private schools as if every family had an extra $3,800 to spend per child to send them to a private school. Many families are not that fortunate.

One of the classic arguments against school choice, one that I bet you’ve used before, is that vouchers will destroy the public schools because all of the best students will switch to private schools leaving behind all of the “bad students” in the public schools. According to this argument, the only reason people actively send their kids to public schools is because they have no other options, but if given other options, they’d leave in a heart beat. From this argument, its sounds like our traditional public schools (i.e. government-run schools) are the one’s who can’t survive without public money, or at least without forcing student attendance.

I for one don’t think that vouchers will be the end of traditional public schools. Mostly because the suggestion is illogical and it goes against all of the evidence produced from areas that have vouchers. The people who search for schooling outside of their local public schools are usually the ones whose children need a different environment that their local public school can provide. The parents whose kids are doing well and having a positive experience in their local public schools are not very likely to all of the sudden want to send their kid to a private school. It doesn’t make much sense.

2) School Choice provides the best accountability there is—direct accountability. In our current system, there is no direct accountability to the parents and students who are receiving the services provided by our governemnt-run schools.

This accountability is the same accountability that makes every other industry run so well. This is the accountability that keeps E Coli off the shelves of our grocery stores. It’s called consumer driven acocuntability and it far exceeds the government-forced accountability that tries to imitate it.

Ask any teacher about No Child Left Behind or U-PASS and I bet they won’t have many nice things to say about them, but the existence of these standardized tests and rigid requirements are government’s attempt to imitate the accountability that would already exist if we had school choice. In the end, school choice would greatly decrease the need for all of these “public accountability” measures that result in the red-tape and rigid structure that so many educators despise. It would also change the government’s role from one of forcing accountability to one of making sure that things run smoothly (similar to how our government has a hands off approach to making sure that there’s quality food available in our grocery stores).

3) School choice creates an environemnt of direct representation, where individual citizens can represent their interests directly.

Of course, you might respond, where’s my representation in how my tax dollars are spent!!! Well, first of all, depending on your income and family size, your income taxes may not even cover the costs of sending your kids to the local public schools. If however you’re fortunate enough (or unfortunate enough depending on how you look at it) to pay income taxes that exceed $6,000 per kid in your household, then you might have some reason to argue that your tax dollars are being used on things you don’t support.

But I would argue that this is also probably not true because I doubt that the percent of students who would use vouchers exceeds the percent of taxpayers who oppose vouchers. A recent BYU poll found that 55% of Utahns atleast somewhat support vouchers, yet currently only 3% of students even attend private schools. I doubt that number would exceed 10% even if we had vouchers.

So when a voucher bill passes (and trust me, it will happen one of these days), just remind yourself that your tax dollars are going to the students in the public schools and that it’s other people’s tax dollars (like mine) that are supporting the students using vouchers.

And even if you still feel that your tax dollars are being spent on things you don’t support, do you oppose the fact that your tax dollars end up at privately-run grocery stores (including Wal-Mart), pre-k/daycare providers, hospitals, universities, construction companies (who build roads and public buildings), architects firms, etc? If not, then why do you oppose allowing k-12 education dollars to go to privately-run education providers? We do it inn every other sector where government subsidizes individuals. We even do it in higher-ed and pre-k, so why not k-12? We trust a 20 year-old to use a $3,600 pell grant (aka voucher) at the school of his choice, but you won’t trust a mother of five to use a voucher of $500 to $3,500 at the school of her choice? I don’t get it.

4) Concerning teaching religion or morals in the classroom, let’s not pretend that public schools are ammoral. Almost everything taught has moral underpinnings; the question is, what morals do we want taught to our children in our schools, and should students be forced to attend a school where the morals taught run against the morals that they believe in?

In addition, the government’s interest (as explained by the US Supreme Court in the 2002 Zelmann case) is that our children get an education. If that comes with religious instruction, that’s fine as long as the kids end up knowing how to think critically, read, write, do math, etc. Like you though, I would not want a government-run school to provide religious instruction.

Almost Done:
Sorry this is so long, but I honestly hope that you will consider what I have said. I would hope that we could also come to some udnerstanding now that we’ve gotten out our pithy arguments (mine included). So you know, vouchers are not about destroying public education. In fact, they’re a form of public education that I think is superior to our current system.

It works in every other sector, so why not in k-12 education? And according to the research, it already does. We just need to make the switch.

"The most feasible way to bring about a gradual yet substantial transfer from government to private enterprise is to enact in each state a voucher system that enables parents to choose freely the schools their children attend. I first proposed such a voucher system 45 years ago." Milton Friedman.

Posted by "I Heart the Spending Lobby"

I hope the last Anon is not trying to pull the old "voucher proponents want to destroy public education" argument. Though some may read the Friedman quote and think, "Hah!! I knew it!! You voucher people just want to destroy public education!!!"

Unfortunately for those who think they've discovered the deep dark secret that the Taxpayers Association and Parents for Choice have been hiding from all of us all along, you're wrong. Friedman isn't arguing for the destruction of publicly funding education at all. Read it carefully.

What he's talking about is who runs our public schools, not whether or not we should publicly fund them. We can have publicly funded schools that are managed, operated, and created (this is the enterprise part that he talks about in the quote) by private people. Just like we have privately owned grocery stores that recieve public funds through food stamps. Or privately run pharmacies that receive public funds through medicaire or medicaid payments. We can have the same thing with our schools, and that's what Friedman is talking about.

thank you.

What is this school choice your talking about? As I see it there is plenty of school choice. At anytime I can send my kid to a private school or home school or to another school in the district. I have lots of choices.

Vouchers won't do much but help those who are already sending their kids to private schools. The voucher would not be nearly enough for a poor family to send their kid/kids to a private school.

What about those without kids? Do they get vouchers for not having kids in public schools?

Can college kids get vouchers for choosing a private college over a public one?

If you have sufficient income/wealth, you have lots of choices. Lower and moderately low income households do not have a financially viable choice.

That's why vouchers are targeted towards low income households. That is, the lower the income the higher the voucher amount.

Most families that are currently sending their children to private schools will not be eligible for vouchers, certainly not the full amount (there is some debate as to whether they would get a small amount or nothing at all).

The maximum voucher amount will be between $3,500 and $3,000. Combined with other sources of financial aid (many private schools offer financial aid and outside organizations such as Children First Utah provide aid). While this won't be enough for Rowland Hall or Waterford, this would be enough for Catholic schools and other private schools.

Regarding those with no kids, they wouldn't get a voucher because they are not burdening the school system. Even those without kids benefit from vouchers because the voucher amount is less than what taxpayers -- including those taxpayers without kids -- are paying per student in the public system.

I forgot to address your last question about students attending private colleges.

I am glad you asked that because the answer is YES. Pell Grants have been available to students at private universities for decades. Right now, there are students at BYU, Notre Dame, Baylor, etc that are receiving Pell Grants. Pell Grants are essentially federal vouchers.