Rural Republicans Are Fighting To Save Their Public Schools

Just LOL. Listening to a right-winger speak about education is like hearing Trump talk about, well, anything.

I am visualizing all of this poster's imaginary bad teachers who are being led by terrible "secular" administrators who have "lost their way."

I'll help though, since poster probably deserves to know the REAL situation and where his ganking voucher booty is having a deleterious effect.

Your top-of-the-line private school probably has up to 50% fewer students per class. And, broadly generalizing, likely has FAR fewer, if any, special needs students. And fewer behaviorally challenged students.

Amazing what money can buy, no?

 

1. I think the "shadiness" of charters is exaggerated. My wife worked very closely with three. .The rare bad pub was just dug up by people in the county schools not liking the competition.

2. Lets be honest reality has never been the criteria for discussion on TH.

 

I'll grant you one thing. You toe the company line. It's a somewhat ignorant take. But toe the line nonetheless and just keep right on denying minorities and people with lower incomes opportunity.

Hint: The schools would be more diverse, if people of all incomes could attend.

 

I responded to multiple posts. Over multiple years of this topic coming up. Had I been singling out just YOUR post, I would have quoted it.

 

Hint: I'm not a republican and disagree with them on a lot of issues. For the eleventy billionth time, I am giving a personal perspective. One that has changed a good deal over time.

 

Well, if you are giving multi-child households like $30,000/yr or $40,000yr towards $100,000/yr+ in tuition they were already paying. I’d suggest a couple of things:

1)The people were probably quite wealthy in the 1st place.
2)Despite that wealth, the money they are “getting back” is still almost certainly far more than they actually paid locally towards the schools anyway. This is a wealth transfer. So truly, a reverse welfare vs the previous status quo. Quite an insidious thing.

Every school system (just as any operation in general) has both fixed and variable costs. If you take the variable cost component (that it costs to have 1 seat in a public school classroom for 1 year), then it’s reasonable to use that as the voucher value to be used in school choice. The total cost is figured at something like $10k apparantly, but remember that includes infrastructure and already baked in fixed costs. I’m talking purely the amount saved to take 1 kid out of a classroom. That is the rational amount to voucher. I would also say I’m more ok with that $$$ going towards bonafide religious schools (if that’s what people choose), because the “charter school movement” overall is very much looking like a grifter scam which doesn’t add much overall value.

It should also be pointed out that charter schools technically ARE public schools. It seems to be mostly a vehicle to try and undermine teachers unions. Which, again might actually make sense in big cities with high paid teachers, and yet totally failing schools. The “what do we have to lose” logic can still apply. But in a state like FL or TX with weak unions it seems pretty laughable. How successful can a school be trying to undercut low paid $65k teachers with even lower paid $55k teachers? Wouldn’t most of the better teachers seek out the higher salary at the “real” public school vs the charter run public school? At some point it comes around to “you get what you pay for”.

 

Talk about an ignorant take. So many people have tried to explain to you how vouchers ACTUALLY work and you just refuse to listen/understand.

My take is to properly fund public schools in low income/minority areas instead of raiding the state education budget to give rich folks a rebate on their taxes.

 

I'm not commenting on you, rather your ideas on this.

With which the problem is (and no offense intended in criticizing your ideas) : there is NO REASON WHATSOEVER to think that Republicans would be (or are) governing in good faith on this. And Republicans are the ones pushing the voucher issue.

In short, many of your ideas are decent. But only a fool would advance them under the premise that Republicans would tie them to a good faith effort to protect and advance public schools.

 

Here we go again bringing up the people who were already going to private school. I addressed that, and how that’s not really a critique on vouchers, but on some of the people who get access to vouchers.

If they were wealthy in the first place, odds are they were paying more into the tax system than the people using the public school system. Most of our tax revenue comes from the upper middle class and up.

Democrats talk about the rich paying their fair share as though they don’t already account for by far the greatest share of our tax revenue. They look at things like how much individual wealthy people pay as a barometer for how progressive our tax system is. What they consistently fail to account for is that wealthy people can live well all over the world. It behooves the US to attract and retain wealthy people from all over the world (who are typically job creators), to have as many people as possible in those higher tax brackets.

Can we get away with higher taxes for the wealthy? Probably. But
1) that has real economic consequences even if people don’t choose to take their money elsewhere
2) Lack of tax revenue is not nearly as big of a problem in this country as irresponsible spending, wasteful spending, misuse of tax revenue, etc.
3) it’s only a matter of time before they do in fact take their money elsewhere if we keep testing the waters like that
4) The vast majority of Democrats preaching that the rich need to pay their fair share are just blowing hot air because they don’t want to bite the hands that fund their campaigns. Joe Biden has had a long career in politics to change the tax code. He has enjoyed Democratic control over both the House and the Senate far more than Republicans have enjoyed control over Congress. Yet nothing.
5) The ones that aren’t blowing hot air like Bernie Sanders or AOC are far too radical to know when they’re scaring too much money off of American borders.

 

This.

It's the REALITY of vouchers.....which we can *****ng see with our own eyes.

Versus faith in right-wing concerns for an egalitarian educational system.

(Sounded funny even typing that)

 

This reminds me of another point:
My generation will be a lot better when they have the mentality of wanting to be the rich guy, rather than envy the rich guy and force him to give them more of his money via Uncle Sam.

As far as that goes with school choice, if the major gripe is the kids receiving vouchers were already going to private school, that’s a compromise I’d be willing to make if that ended the conversation, but I have a strong feeling it wouldn’t.

That’s not the real reason Democrats oppose it. They oppose it because they think public school is special, and they think people should be forced into the system even if they disagree. And that’s the true believers. Don’t even get me started on the ra ra public school politicians who send their own kids to private schools.

 

So you're theorizing and I am theorizing.
I don't want rich people getting the money. Why do you keep saying the same thing even though I have shot it down?
..and before you say that my position isnt a current reality, well...neither is yours of seeing low income public schools funded properly.

 

Ok...look at that. Common ground.
Shocker alert: I agree.

I go one step further. Democrats, Republicans, Socialists, Capitalists etc. generally rule from their self interests and not REALLY to improve the common good.

Normal people like you and I, while disagreeing on the particulars, generally want common good.

 

I agree here. If we want to maximize the happiness of our citizens, we need to allow them to make their own selections among different choices. A world where there is only one TV channel is just never going to be as interesting to the populace, no matter how cleverly democratic we are about determining its programming.

Of course, the right is interested in restricting choice in other arenas (e.g. tariffs, DEI, Hamburger Mary’s, etc.), so neither side is scoring perfect on this measure.

 

You seem to keep conflating federal issues with state and local. Federal taxation isn’t relevant here. A person could be a multimillionaire paying $100,000+ in federal taxes and still only be putting in a few thousand of their real money to local schools as those are generally taxed through property taxes or allocated through sales taxes. Everybody has “skin in the game” in local schools, even the poorest of the poor. Because they still buy stuff and pay rent (indirectly paying property taxes). Also of course plenty of homeowners with no kids or grown kids who just straight up contribute with no direct benefit, only societal benefits.Much of the overall pool of funds comes from people with no kids as well as the apparant slush fund of lottery money. You can actually check your annual property tax bill and see how much goes to schools. Ever done that? It might wake you up to realize the number actually isn’t that large, especially with homestead exemptions and whatnot.

Obviously at the high end of real estate, some pay more than others. But the contribution to schools is still likeky to be in the low thousands. Almost nobody is paying $30,000 or $40,000 towards schools as a taxpayer, not even 1/10th most likely.

I basically see 3 categories here.

1) Wealthy people getting a straight windfall.
2) Middle tier that were on the cusp of affordability, it probably does give some a leg up if it puts them across the line for the “Catholic school of their dreams” or whatever.
3)People who straight up can’t use the vouchers, so it does nothing for them (or in fact harms them by making their schools worse).

#1 is just straight-up backasswards public policy. #2 is neither good nor bad on it’s own, but must be weighed against what we are doing with group #3. YMMV.

 

Vouchers seem to be a big hit in Arizona . . . a big hit to the state budget. This is your future, Florida.

Vouchers – Diane Ravitch's blog

Arizona was the first state in the country to enact a universal “education savings account” program – a form of voucher that allows any family to take tax dollars that would have gone to their child’s public education and spend the money instead on private schooling.

And Arizona is hardly alone: universal voucher programs are sweeping Republican-led states, making it one of the right’s most successful efforts to rewrite state policy after decades of setbacks. This expansion of vouchers in red states was facilitated by millions of dollars spent to fund far-right legislators in state races by Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children and other billionaires, like Jeff Yass, a Trump supporter and the richest man in Pennsylvania. Yass said to CNN: “School choice is the civil rights issue of our time,” an oft-cited but phony claim. In fact, school choice benefits the haves, not the have-nots, and it encourages segregation. Schools choose, not students or families.

In 2018, nearly 2/3 of Arizona voters rejected universal vouchers. Koch-funded Governor Doug Ducey kept pushing them, ignoring the will of the voters, and they were adopted in 2022. Now every student in the state can get a voucher, and most who take them come from families that can afford to pay their own tuition bills. But unlike some other states that have adopted voucher programs, Arizona has no standards requiring private schools to be accredited or licensed by the state, or follow all but the most basic curriculum standards. That means there is no way to compare test scores in public schools to students in the ESA program.

“There’s zero accreditation, there’s zero accountability, and there’s zero transparency,” said Beth Lewis, a former teacher who leads an Arizona nonprofit that advocates against school privatization. Arizona’s voucher program is busting the state’s budget. The state is facing a $1 billion deficit, caused largely by funding private schools that are discriminatory and whose academic progress is unknown. Public schools are barred from discriminating against students because of characteristics like their religion or sexuality, but no such rules cover private schools.

 

Well....usually self-interest mixed with desire for common good, however effective at achieving it. See : Bush, Obama, Biden.

Sometimes self-interest mixed with desire to steal and commit crimes: see Trump.

 

I refuse to believe that you are this dense. Rich folks ARE getting the money and because of these voucher schemes all public schools, not just those located in low income areas are being grossly underfunded.

 

I think early on most politicians have noble goals. I think they get seduced by the trappings of power and the common good becomes secondary.

 

No. You overlooked part of my post. I'd find vouchers more justifiable if they only went to kids whose parents were below a certain wealth/income threshold and the schools eligible for vouchers were highly regulated and held to the same testing and transparency standards as public schools.

But because of the mess Republican SCOTUS has made of the First Amendment, religious schools would have to get their piece of the pie, which leaves me in opposition to vouchers. Though, I do support public charters in appropriate circumstances.