The voucher scam: Are we too mathematically illiterate to notice
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A few years ago our town approved a budget and then held another budget referendum about two months later. That’s not completely unheard of - we’ve needed it after natural disasters or other unexpected costs in the past - but what was weird is that taxes were going down in the proposed new budget. The cause was a single student who had moved out of the town that was costing the town more than $225,000/yr for special needs education. In the end, my taxes went down by a little over $100/yr as a result of the change which was strictly for a single student.
All this goes to show that not only are vouchers a racket, because for the most part the private schools are getting more than it takes to educate an average student, they’re also a racket because students with additional needs don’t get enough funding for the private schools to take them. Further starving the system.
All that is to say: this is an example of why _flat rate_ vouchers don't make sense.
And realistically, if a voucher policy were implemented, it is unlikely that it will be perfectly designed. Unfortunately public policy is not driven entirely by well designed models.
Vouchers simply take away the burden of tuition from parents. Whether it is the best solution, that's debatable.
If the alternative is that all children in a neighborhood must stay in poorly ran school then the voucher system is slightly better.
It is clear that there will be more space for an industry of fraudulently ran private schools. But that will hardly change from what there is now. Whether the bad schools will survive depends on how much parents care about their children.
There isn’t one voucher system that’s better or worse than a public system it’s a complex interaction. If some children leave a poorly run school by a program that steals money from special needs students to subsidize their tuition up to the amount a private school charges I don’t think that’s a moral trade.
Now I get that it's expensive, but helping others sure sometimes you can give someone a trivial piece of advice that changes their life, other times it's an uphill battle, fucking Iwo Jima. It's up to you if you want to or not.
2) When you are calculating the costs per student for the purpose of valuing vouchers, I'd guess you need to include the students who are are being homeschooled or are currently attending private schools without vouchers as part of the denominator. Presumably the vouchers wouldn't be restricted to only the students who are switching, but instead would be given to all? Since about 10% of students are currently private schooled (I presume homeschooling is much lower?), this would reduce the "fair" value of the voucher by another 10% or so if you were trying to keep it cost neutral.
On 2) I agree that my calculations are simplified in the article and further reductions are necessary for cost neutrality.
This study by American Progress supports your thesis.
American Progress is a left-of-center alternative to the right-leaning Heritage Foundation. I haven't finished looking for the right wing think tank's studies, but I'll share anything of particular interest when I do.
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/highly-negative-imp...
"This analysis builds on a large body of voucher program evaluations in Louisiana, Indiana, Ohio, and Washington, D.C., all of which show that students attending participating private schools perform significantly worse than their peers in public schools—especially in math"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
Parents of low-cost students can send their kids to the “high information market” (the schools that can reject high-cost students). Parents of high-cost students have to send their kids to the “low-information market” (the public school that can’t reject high-cost students). Any school that can reject high-cost students can make themselves more attractive to low-cost students, which then feeds on itself, as the “low-information” school ends up with more and more high-cost students.
In this case, both schools have the same information, it’s just that one school isn’t allowed to act on it.
https://www.ncsl.org/research/education/voucher-law-comparis...
IMO, vouchers have a place in school choice and I would prefer that they are used to give disabled, disadvantaged, and hard to educate children more options. I am a bigger fan of open enrollment and charter schools as zip code\housing affordability should not dictate a child's educational destiny.
Most voucher programs aren’t targeting or benefiting any of the groups you highlight as the granularity of the funds is biased against them.
I’m personally against open enrolment as I think it creates a prisoner’s dilemma race to the bottom where districts worsen their education system to provide tax relief knowing their students can enrol in neighbouring systems. Of course if the neighbouring systems follow their incentives to do the same the net result is a gutting of the education system. I emphasize with the idea of providing more broader access to good systems I just think the mechanism to do so has to protect the incentives to make the systems good.
In my state with OE, I've seen district schools add phonics, world languages, Cambridge, IB, etc, to compete with neighboring districts.
> I emphasize with the idea of providing more broader access to good systems I just think the mechanism to do so has to protect the incentives to make the systems good.
When your child is finishing third grade and you finally realize the curriculum at your district school is lacking you might not have the luxury of waiting for the "good systems" to arrive.
You shouldn't be allowed to take money from the public coffers because you want your child to only think things like evolution are not settled science or "just a theory".
The "money from the public coffers" didn't appear there out of thin air. The argument with school vouchers is that the money there belongs to the parents because it came from the parents as part of taxation.
I don't see that as an argument or related. That is, it's obviously wrong, but doesn't reflect on the other thing, I don't think.
People already got the benefit of schooling, whether or not they have kids, so it's just a matter of paying it back through taxes.
It seems to me unlikely that a majority of people end up paying taxes back to the school district they attended.
What about those who were homeschooled, etc.?
I'd rather take the tax money and choose how to spend it on the education of our kids.
Unlike, say, army, however, you are free to pay for private school. So, take the money that you have, and pay for private school, and be thankful that you live in a society that values education enough to make it available for all, because the alternative is dreadful.
If you feel that general education is not up to high enough standards, this may well be true. Whatever the answer to that, it is not for people who don't have children, or choose private education for their children, to "take the tax money and choose how to spend it".
I know that this is not what being discussed, but just for the sake of exchanging some ideas... In my ideal model for governance, this would be possible.
In my ideal taxation model, we would only pay taxes at the most local sphere: municipalities. And everything would be either based/budgeted on either (a) insurance funds or (b) service fees. States and Federal Government would then only as act as managers of mutual insurance funds between the cities themselves.
IOW, it would all be a giant bottom-up insurance/re-insurance system.
This way, the allocation of funds going to military spending wouldn't be determined by the individual, but it would be very close to that. Healthcare as well. Education could be financed both via a "service fee" (to cover the regular, cheap students) and an insurance fee (to cover for students with special needs). So those without kids and those that want to put their kids on private school would be able to claim a deduction for the "service part", but still had to contribute for the insurance part.
The original argument is about having the ability to dictate HOW the tax dollars are spent on education.
> If we take that argument to the extreme then people without kids shouldn’t pay school taxes at all. This is not taking the above argument to the extreme, it’s introducing an extra proposition, mainly “if I don’t have kids I should pay taxes for schools”. This is about IF my tax dollars should be spent on education.
It's hard to get people to understand how it is "taking money from the public coffers".
Because they think that if the public schools have one fewer student, they should have proportionally less in expenses.
Advocates for the public schools have tried to explain why this isn't true or reasonable for many, many years and it doesn't seem to have accomplished anything.
It might be good to reflect on why.
In general, it's using averages and then being able to filter out people.
Investors work that way too. Let the entrepreneur take the largest risk upfront and then pluck the highest things likely to succeed.
Which is why in countries where medical care is not guaranteed through taxes (e.g. USA) insurance companies try to find out about any pre-existing conditions before they give you a rate; they try to figure out if you're in the healthy group which would otherwise be subsidizing the sick people, or you are one of those sick people.
I say that without any value judgements one way or the other.
The same is true with other forms of insurance.
See broadly Adverse Selection, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_selection.
This was the mechanism. The HMO/PPOs were wildly more profitable--because they picked off the "below average cost" patients leaving the "above average cost" people to the indemnity plans.
Of course, then the indemnity plans collapsed under the weight. And then the HMO/PPO systems created "recission groups" to prevent having to take them on. And then it took until the Affordable Care Act forced the coverage of "preexisting conditions" to unwind the bullshit that the HMO/PPO systems caused in the first place.
Did you know that many schools out source highly disabled kids to specialized school, in essence running their own voucher system?
If a smaller, constant-amount voucher is “not equitable”, is a $0 voucher more equitable somehow?
At a more basic level, school has a big issue with consent. We force kids to attend at the barrel of gun, we force adults to pay for it at the barrel of a gun. How bout we chill with all this non-consensual educational activity. If you have to force someone to use/pay for your product you are not adding value.
On the funding point, for elementary and high school education the US has a rather poor funding record. It’s only when you include the costs of providing university education that the US is the most expensive. Many US states spend half of what Ontario does on K-12 education and Ontario has a much higher educational attainment.
Sorry not ok.
There is merit in the idea of cost sharing for the kids who are in school by their own volition, but as long a coercion is involved any benefits are outweighed by the moral injuries.
As such, they must do what adults think is best for them until they are able to support themselves, at which point they can stop doing what anyone else thinks is best for them.
I think it's best for children to go to school and learn, because this gives them greater opportunities and improved future life outcomes.
What would your alternative proposal be to prepare children to support themselves?
When the essay talked about "high cost" students, my first thought was special ed. In my district, the 2021-22 budget allocates about $71M and 513 FTEs to serve 10,475 special ed students. Or, about $6778/yr and 2 hours per week per student. I've aggregated that across several categories -- in the most expensive of those, the per-student cost is $21,351/yr and 7.9 hours/week., which is over triple the average cost of an average student. This may sound shocking, but these kids have special needs, and those needs require resources to be met.
Now let's look at a "low cost" special need: kids whose academic performance is very strong. In my district, the principal way that these kids are served are through the "Talented and Gifted" program (TAG). This program is nearly unfunded. The district has an annual budget of roughly $1b/yr., and serves nearly 40,000 students across over 50 schools. About 6,333 of those students are in TAG. The program has a total budget of roughly $387k/yr., or about $61/student/yr. It has 0.8 FTEs allocated -- that is to say, the budget allocates 32 hours a week of labor to serve the entire district's TAG K-12 needs, or about 18 seconds per week per TAG student.
"TAG" kids are successful but they still have needs. They need extra attention from teachers and mentors. They need the opportunity to work on challenging coursework, focused on their areas of talent and interest. They need to be able to work with peers who can keep a similar pace. All of that costs a lot more than $61/yr. and needs more than 18 seconds/week of someone's time, but that's presently what they get. And I think that's because these kids look like they're doing great -- they get good grades, they're less likely to be on drugs or involved in gangs, and their attendance is usually solid. But that viewpoint only considers these kids in terms of the needs of the school and society at large, rather than their own need to be stimulated and cultivated and to have so much of their childhood spent wisely. Because nothing immediately blows up when those needs are unmet, nothing is spent to meet them, and the money goes towards the squeaky wheels.
So when the linked essay talks about "low cost" students, I think it fails to address that they actually have high cost needs that are going unpaid. As a result, their parents have to shoulder the extra cost themselves by either paying out of pocket for a private school, or taking the time (and career sacrifice) to home school. That's exactly the kind of burden social programs like public education are supposed to avoid! Many families simply can't afford this or are unable to do this due to other barriers, and so their kids' needs simply go unserved.
To be clear, there are many possible solutions here, of which the status quo and vouchers are just two. I don't think they're even the best options. But I also don't think advocates of either are dishonest. I don't think parents are running a scam when they advocate for their kids to receive just as much support as anyone else's. I don't think it's dishonest for them to want access to schools that specialize in their kids' needs, and I don't think it's unfair for those schools to reject students whose needs are very different.
A gifted kid without enrichment is overwhelmingly likely to perform at grade level. A special needs student that needs a special needs assistant and isn't given one is overwhelmingly likely to not be able to attend school. These aren't at all equivalent.
To be clear the argument that vouchers are a scam is entirely about taking money from special needs students by hiding it in the average cost. There is no moral basis for students to be entitled to the average cost. I'm not saying gifted students don't deserve enrichment I'm just saying it doesn't provide a moral basis for taking money from special needs students through vouchers.
We live in a pluralistic society, in which compromises between differing moral systems are required. Someone with either of the alternative claims I listed (fund the high achievers who are most likely to repay society, fund all kids the same) has every bit as much claim to moral righteousness as you, and every bit as much right to invoke the word “scam” to describe your preferred policy. Planting your feet and asserting your moral correctness, as evaluated by you, doesn’t change that.
I think there is some value in establishing the fact that the positions you initially argued were morally neutral are now being established as moral positions. There is also some merits to the discussion of the consequences of each of these policies. You've advanced two positions that take money away from special needs students for other students in ways that deny their right to an education. I'm glad you now somewhat acknowledge that consequence by appealing to arguments that seem to amount to "Education is not a right and even if it is, that doesn't mean special needs assistants are necessary to provide that right." I think it's useful to expose the position that is a consequence of a seemingly much more benign funding claim. I suspect many people might have a surface level agreement with the initial funding policy but will nonetheless reject the idea when they see the consequences on the right to education. Just because we have different moral positions doesn't make all positions equally valid and exploring the consequences of moral positions is still a useful exercise.
1. "I think there is some value in establishing the fact that the positions you initially argued were morally neutral are now being established as moral positions."
I've been quite consistent here. In regards to your claim that my top post was morally equivocating funding gifted kids and special ed kids, I pointed out that wasn't doing any such thing because I made no moral claims in the first place. I stuck to what was either quantitative (my district allocates $61/yr to TAG students), or clearly demarcated subjective opinion. ("I think...")
You then made categorical claims about what "moral basis" might exist: specifically, that there is no moral basis for kids to be entitled to the average amount of spend, and that there's no moral basis in favor of funding gifted kids at the expense of reducing special ed funding from their present levels. The purpose of my listing those two other positions is because they are clearly based in reasonably common moral principles that lots of ordinary people hold, and lead to exactly the positions you're thinking have no moral basis. I certainly don't claim those are morally neutral -- the whole point is that they are not.
2. 'You've advanced two positions that take money away from special needs students for other students in ways that deny their right to an education. I'm glad you now somewhat acknowledge that consequence by appealing to arguments that seem to amount to "Education is not a right and even if it is, that doesn't mean special needs assistants are necessary to provide that right."'
When I argue that a thing isn't necessary to respect a right, then that's not even "somewhat" of an acknowledgment that failing to provide it is a denial of that right... it's exactly the opposite! :)