Arizona's Dismantling of Public Education

You can get Q out of the covid thread but you can’t get the covid thread out of Q.

A temporary safety measure doesn’t compare to a permanent defunding but thanks for playing.

 

Cool. I’d like a voucher for military defense. I’ll hire private protection if the Chinese invade. Take my money from the military and give it back to me to handle my secure like I want. Looking forward to my tax refund.

 

Then make whatever the successful public schools are doing for their students universal. The private schools are only as good as the socioeconomic makeup of those students that attend. Just to be clear, there are two types of private schools. There are those that are legit and offer small classes, discipline and a challenging curriculum. Then there are non schools with non teachers teaching and an owner that just takes and takes $$ until it closes.

I don't blame the teacher's union for wasting tax payer money to pay for non schools to "teach" kids who knows what, and schools that those going there can afford to pay for on their own.
My DIL is a 4th grade teacher and she has to pay for everything in her classroom and parents have to pay for a laundry list of items for the classroom, all the while these fake schools reap big profits from vouchers. Nice.

Teachers aren't paid what they are worth, not by a long shot and we are wasting millions on fake schools. Great idea.

I doubt you'll be able to read all of the articles, but here are some links to the investigation into the voucher program in Fl.

Private schools’ curriculum downplays slavery, says humans and dinosaurs lived together – Orlando Sentinel

Anti-LGBT Florida schools getting school vouchers

State clears troubled Florida voucher school again


Florida dumps another $130 million into wild west of unregulated, unaccountable voucher schools| Commentary – Orlando Sentinel

Oh and edited to add that in Florida we also have a list of disabled children waiting for state help to meet their daily needs. Most die before they get any help.

 

Any time!

 

When was the last time I posted in the Covid thread?

 

So we have established, then, that a 90% white population, though integrated, is "too white." Just so we can agree on what words mean, what is the maximum acceptable percentage of a white population in any school? By contrast, is there a minimum acceptable white population that if a school drops below that percentage it can no longer call itself diverse? Do these rules, whatever they are, also apply to the black population? We have established that there is certainly a minimum percentage, though no one has specified what threshold brings us from "tokenism" to "diverse." But is there also a percentage that brings us to "too black" and we are no longer diverse for that reason?

 

Hmmm... ironically the issue in that second sentence is also the thing you are trying to replicate in the first sentence.
Funny how a public school in a well off neighborhood has high performing students just like an expensive private school.

 

Public school teachers on average make far more the private school teachers. There is nothing wrong with that. Throw in the the defined benefit package and DROP and they crush it in Florida. I know the teachers union will cry foul over it. But reality is teachers are compensated well. The best absolutely deserve more. I know multiple teachers that I wish were paid way more. And I know others that should probably be paid less. Unfortunately in a government profession you sign up for the pay scale. At least in teaching it is way better than the Private sector the majority of the time.

The idea of taking a successful public program and making it universal is just not reality. Sadly most successful programs go as the leadership goes. We had two of the best elementary schools in the state of Florida here in Marion County for years. Top 10 in testing for years. One arts the other stem. Now they are both just really good. No longer elite. Really sad to watch. I would love if we tried to emulate what they were doing. Instead “fairness” got involved. I would have left my middle at NH Jones if my youngest did not have so much longer to go as Covid was going. The 4th and 5th grade teachers she was lined up for in the gifted program are Elite Professionals! But the school was headed the wrong way and dealing with a “universal” idea was a major reason to move them. Our oldest is still Public and crushing it.

I think it would do you good to realize both public and private are good. And it is okay to support both as everyone should want what’s best for each INDIVIDUAL KID.

 

Lolwut.

Nobody said there was an “acceptable” number, the statistic given however offered 90% as it’s threshold. Sorry if a random number triggered you.

I’m sure if one lives in Iowa, the % of kids attending an 90% white school is even greater. The whole state is 80% white (and was probably well in excess of 90% at the time of segregation). So theoretically in a place like that they could be fully integrated at a technical level and still have 90% white students. The point is in the Deep South this was not the case, the black population was 30%, 40% or more and those were treated as second class citizens. This was the reason for integrating schools, no? You are getting enraged at the wrong side of the metric, and yes it’s arbitrary. They could have measured who attended at 85% or 95% white schools, but it’s still saying the same tale. Those are segregated schools when the population on the whole is not nearly that homogenous. Atlanta suburbs != Dubuque Iowa.

 

I am neither enraged nor triggered. Did not mean to give you that impression. But it is fair in an open, liberal society to know what the rules are. The statistic you quoted absolutely implied that 90% is "too white." I simply inquired -- not just of you; anyone can opine -- at what point are we "too white" and what point are we "not white enough." You seem to suggest that local demographics are part of the equation. I can accept that. In some parts of Maine, you are more likely to find a Martian than you are a black person. In the part of Montgomery, AL where I lived last year, the opposite was true, and I was that Martian. Still even if local-area demographics have some control, there are fair answers to this fair question. I stand by my original point that whatever cute methods people used to get around integration in the late 50s and early 60s do not apply to the issue at hand today. The schools we are talking about do not restrict on the basis of race and in fact have an interest (perhaps not to your level, but an interest nonetheless) in recruiting a racially diverse population.

 

I would disagree with your first statement, maybe people aren’t as blatant about it today, but this definitely still happens. Not to the same degree as the immediate aftermath of integregation. Obviously you aren’t going to literally see people picketing the arrival of a black student today (I guess those sorts have moved on to picketing buses of immigrant children). But let’s just put it in this context, you think voting districts are the only things being gerrymandered? Lot of people pretend race has nothing to do with those gerrymanders either.

I don’t think schools themselves are “discriminating” necessarily, but clearly the idea of going for a racially diverse/representative cohort is under attack. Some would call that very concept of seeking diversity “Woke” and a thing to be attacked. In reality, the school choice and school vouchers are partly to blame. The parents might not explicitly be saying their “school choice” is over race, hell some might not have a racist bone on their body. Nevertheless, the stats say segregation is on the rise.

 

1954 was when SCOTUS decided separate but equal was hogwash, and the decision was loudly condemned by the right. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 explicitly prohibited discrimination. Guess who loudly voted against it. Integration did not really begin, at least in the South, until the early 1970's, with some schools integrating in earnest earlier than others. Guess which political party members still raised Hell?

Yes, there have always been Catholic and other such schools, but they dramatically proliferated after integration was mandated. Guess why, and guess which party the parents of the kids in those schools overwhelmingly supported.

THAT is the pig without the lipstick.

 

If schools were to teach Religion, warts and all, as an academic subject, as it was when I was at UF, wonderful. I have nothing against religion. Virtually every Homo sapiens wants to know what's going on and what happens when we die. Religion offers great comfort to many - most - of our species. It also provides the vehicle by which those of our species who like to help their fellow man can do so. (I worded that sentence to imply religion itself is not the primary reason good people want to do good things.)

But when it comes to one religion and only one, even if it's the predominant one, being taught in our schools, public or private, I'm against that. It's divisive everywhere in the world.

Private religious schools add to the divisiveness without a benefit which justifies it. I agree, it would be divisive even if taught and practiced at home and in places of worship, but is my belief it would be less so.

 

I have a feeling you’re about to get several challenges to your “history” of integration. You, like many revisionist Democrats, want to pretend that absolutely nothing happened to further civil rights between Brown v. Board of Education (a case that inconveniently occurred in Kansas, not the South as some would like to pretend) and the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Unfortunately, though, two previous Civil Rights Acts (1957 and 1960) passed during the Eisenhower Administration over largely Democrat opposition. And it was Eisenhower who unhesitatingly sent in federal troops to enforce school integration (over loud Democrat opposition) starting in 1957. Before we trot out the canard that the Democrats who opposed civil rights were not “real” Democrats, they were not “rightists.” The leading Democrat in opposition to civil rights was Richard “Uncle Dick” Russell, a liberal New Deal Democrat and mentor of LBJ. In his cabal was former Klansmen Robert Byrd, another liberal Democrat whom Democrats still try to make excuses for today. Sure, a couple of the more fiscally conservative members, such as Strom Thurmond, later became Republicans, but the majority of them stayed Democrats and were the people President Biden bragged he worked with to get stuff done in the late 60s. Your version was deliberately incomplete, because narratives are neat and clean, but real history is complex and ugly.

And your assertion by implication that it was mostly Republicans who put their kids in private schools to avoid integrating with black students … well, I don’t think you’ll find any studies, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Those actions mostly took place in dark blue Southern states, where there had not been a noteworthy Republican population since the early 1870s.

 

But City, we could go back and forth all day. Education though is a deeply personal thing in some regards. Parents are deeply invested in this as a part of raising their kids the way they choose in a free society. What I am suggesting would place the exact same amount of money into the pot for the common good because the voucher/credit would be based on what was already allocation to that child for education.

 

Any reduction in public funding for parent choice is a non starter. If republicans want to hand out free cash for people to go to private schools they can raise taxes. Maybe this could be an issue we could compromise on slightly, but given that the leadership of your party wants to kill public education with school choice as one of the main vehicles it’s hard to want to compromise.

 

Would be great if it were actually for the common good, though. There's far too much evidence that the converse is true.

How School Voucher Programs Hurt Students

Let’s start with who benefits. First and foremost, the answer is: existing private school students. Small, pilot voucher programs with income limits have been around since the early 1990s, but over the last decade they have expanded to larger statewide initiatives with few if any income-eligibility requirements. Florida just passed its version of such a universal voucher program, following Arizona’s passage in the fall of 2022. In Arizona, more than 75% of initial voucher applicants had never been in public school—either because they were new kindergartners or already in private school before getting a voucher. That’s a problem because many voucher advocates market these plans as ways to improve educational opportunities for public school children.

And what about the students who do leave public schools? Some plans, like the currently proposed bill in Texas, restrict eligibility to students in public school for at least one year. But for the children who do transfer using a voucher, the academic results in the recent scaled-up statewide programs are catastrophic. Although small, pilot-phase programs showed some promise two decades ago, new evaluations of vouchers in Washington, D.C., Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio show some of the largest test score drops ever seen in the research record—between -0.15 and -0.50 standard deviations of learning loss. That’s on par with what the COVID-19 pandemic did to test scores, and larger than Hurricane Katrina’s impacts on academics in New Orleans.

What explains these extraordinarily large voucher-induced declines? Aren’t private schools supposed to be elite educational opportunities? When it comes to private schools accepting voucher payments, the answer is clearly no. That’s because elite private schools with strong academics and large endowments often decline to participate in voucher plans. Instead the typical voucher school is a financially distressed, sub-prime private provider often jumping at the chance for a tax bailout to stay open a few extra years.

That is what research on school vouchers tells us. Vouchers are largely tax subsidies for existing private school families, and a tax bailout for struggling private schools. They have harmful test score impacts that persist for years, and they’re a revolving door of school enrollment. They’re public funds that support a financially desperate group of private schools, including some with active discriminatory admissions in place.

 

One thing left off the history lesson was the southern Dixiecrats, who were mostly racist Democrats back in the day began switching to Rs. Barry Goldwater outlined the "Southern strategy" and by the time Reagan was in office, the south was solidly Republican. The Southern strategy had the R party embrace religion, become anti-abortion, and attract the Dixiecrats, who felt the Ds let them down by embracing desegregation and equal rights.

 

Again, I recognized that there are good private schools and before Desantis gave away the farm to all students and not just the children in failing schools, none of them took vouchers. I have a huge issue with the voucher program because of the unaccountability of the "schools" and I'm not here to give you a discount to your elite school when you can afford it on your own.

Even when Desantis tried to compensate the best teachers, he made it contingent on their SAT scores. My DIL came from a poor family and took it at 15, they didn't have the money for her to take it again. Other very affective teachers couldn't find the evidence of their scores because it had been 20 + years. Dumb dumb dumb. My DIL by the way has been a teacher for 10 years and was rated highly effective every year. She couldn't get the bonus. I don't trust any of it anymore and I hope sometime in the future it is taken away. Take that money and build more schools so classrooms don't have 30 kids in it. Teachers can be more effective that way.

I'll add one more thing. My DIL complains about how the kids that come from these voucher schools are so far behind, she has to work twice as hard to get them up to speed as she does for the other kids. It tears at her because she loves all of her "kids".

You also didn't respond to the fact that disabled kids are being forgotten.

 

Foundational for a democratic civilized society is a strong public education system. Undoing that so we can indoctrinate children into Christianity is the opposite of why our nation was established. We fled religious nuts only to find them reared on this new soil.