True school choice is an illusion as long as private schools are free to decline unwanted students that cost more to teach. The advocates of such policies tend to ignore the fact that it would leave disabled and other special needs students in a public system that no longer had enough other students to pay for their higher costs. That’s a problem that requires an adequate solution before any type of voucher is reasonable.
>The advocates of such policies tend to ignore the fact that it would leave disabled and other special needs students in a public system that no longer had enough other students to pay for their higher costs.
People already pay for public schooling through income and property taxes, whether they're children use it or not. I don't see how your theory prevents higher cost students from being taught. It just sounds like you're advocating for a crab bucket.
Every proposal I’ve seen for vouchers tries to tie the amount to average spending per student. My point is that’s fundamentally unfair because private schools are only interested in students that cost below the average to educate. They work hard to exclude and disqualify those with costly special needs. The result is you leave the public education system with all the high cost students but still getting the $X k they had per student when they had low cost students too. The net result of vouchers is raising the per capita cost of public education without raising the per capita funding. That’s unfair to everyone forced into using that system.
If you're issue is mainly with vouchers, then why not get rid of the need for vouchers in the first place by getting rid of limiting attendance by zip code? It's unfair for anyone, not just "high-cost" students, to be forced riders in an education system for which they have no agency. Fairness isn't determined on the basis of who in particular is negatively affected. Either the principle itself is fair or it isn't.
The only solution compatible with choice and public education is to allow all students a free-for-all to attend any public school within driving distance. Tuition isn't usually the biggest or first barrier to entry in attending better schools, it's bureaucracy.
I think the follow-on effects of delocalizing schools can be pernicious. In the extreme case you can look at districts in Vermont and Massachusetts where some towns provide vouchers to other education systems instead of having one themselves. Having non-local education systems almost completely disconnects costs from funding. It potentially creates a race to the bottom where districts lower property taxes and make their own education system worse knowing that everyone can use other systems. Of course if everyone does that we set the entire region/country backwards a great deal but prisoners dilemma systems are seldom successfully solved.
Stop holding 95% of students hostage to a tiny minority. They deserve better education. They deserve their teachers' focus instead of them having to devote inordinate amount of time to the mainstreamed special needs students.
Accept the 30% voucher that represents what a typical student getting into private school costs the system instead of demanding 50% as fair when that leaves the system too impoverished to deal with the students that remain.
The attendant should be tutoring the 95% of kids to keep them from falling behind. Only 35% of fourth graders read at grade level. Why do we spend inordinate resources on those that are incapable of ever reading at a fourth grade level when so many are effectively denied being educated?
A fair point. But the unions have been anything but reasonable on this issue. True, some have opened up to charter schools, but many have rescinded that option as soon as it was politically feasible. True choice can only happen when a different management of schools is in place. They have been obstinately against this.
