Seems Legit

So first you insult and then you demand I give it a rest? And yet not one of the people who claim the constitution mentions free public education have yet to provide a shred of evidence/ Just copy and paste itZ shut me up, prove me wrong, or if you can’t … insult me and tell me to just stop.

 

You do because not everyone can afford, nor to do they want to send their kids to private school. I'm a realtor, I'm telling you that the public school is important regardless of whether they plan to put their kids in public or private. Just because you don't personally benefit, it's part of the community. It's called future value.

 

Bottom line - It's a misuse of our public funds. Just throw that money out there without any regulation so it can be wasted by people who don't even need it. Seems like a fiscally smart thing to do.

 

you just described the entire social welfare system (safety net) of the United States. The execution is far removed from the goals.

 

There is no future value in red communities. It’s why they disvalue education, culture the arts etc.

 

Ten.

 

My wife has taught for over 30 years in the public school system and some of her colleagues with similar experience are retiring (to start receiving benefits) and then taking jobs to finish their careers with private schools.

The consensus among them is private schools require less work and are a lot easier with the exception of having to deal with the overzealous parents who expect more because they are paying so much money for a private school education. Most say that while there is way too much testing, public schools still provide a better education than the great majority of private schools.

 

And that may well be true where YOU live. It may not be true where others live. I have stated multiple times I am not against public schools. I am for parents having a choice and the vouchers make that possible for lower income families.
This whole thread started I. The premise that Private schools and Homeschoolers were using the vouchers for Disney tickets, paddle boards and new tvs. However, from what I have seen first hand, the parents never see the voucher money from private school tuition. It goes straight to the school. Homeschoolers could be a different story.
From there it has become a clear hit piece on private schools. Some are horrendous. Some are not. Some
Public schools are notorious for being terrible. Some are not. Boston public schools system
Has been under fire for years. Baltimores has been under fire for years (maybe decades). Just two examples. Greco in Tampa was listed as one of the most dangerous schools in FL. If those were your school systems wouldn’t you want the option of putting your child somewhere better? Somewhere safer?

 

Perhaps heavy regulation (opposite of what is happening in FL) can be effective to some extent. I've posted about Chile's privatization movement in the past . . .
Chile: An Invaluable Case Study for School Vouchers — COLUMBIA POLITICAL REVIEW

Vouchers have been implemented in the United States in a small number of cities such as DC and Milwaukee, but not a large enough scale to truly understand the full effects of the voucher system. To gain a better understanding of the consequences and results of such a system, it is critical that we look to Chile, a country in which school choice has been implemented on a nationwide level. Studies of the voucher system in Chile show that an unregulated voucher system leads to unimproved test scores and greater achievement gaps between the rich and the poor. Only through heavily regulating their voucher system did Chile improve its academic achievement levels.

Following the implementation of the voucher system in 1981, the share of students in public schools fell from 78% to 50%. This occurred because students used vouchers to attend private schools, thus causing many public schools to shut down. Contrary to Friedman’s idea that the voucher system would improve schools, student achievement did not improve, and the achievement gap between low-income and middle-income families grew. Segregation between low- and high-income families also increased as the two groups began to attend two different sets of schools.

There are two main takeaways from Chile’s experiment with a nation-wide voucher system. First, the failed voucher system in Chile after its initial implementation in 1981 shows that a free-market education system does not work without any additional regulation by the government. Milton Friedman’s idea of creating competition in the education market to improve schools might make sense in theory, but it fails in practice. The 2008 reforms by Michelle Bachelet transformed the voucher system of 1981 into a highly regulated system that counters Friedman’s belief that an unregulated education market would improve school quality by itself. These reforms improved student outcomes and decreased the achievement gap. However, the success of Chile’s post-2008 voucher system following 2008 cannot be used to justify DeVos’ plan, as it hardly resembles Friedman’s original proposal.

The second takeaway comes from the specific reforms that Bachelet made to the voucher system in 2008 that ultimately increased test scores and helped close the achievement gap. These reforms included a heavier focus on “Priority students” by increasing the value of the voucher for these students, prohibiting schools from charging these students, and prohibiting schools from selecting students based on academic merit. Another contributing factor to the success of the reforms was the government accountability system that drove schools to increase test scores and practice financial responsibility in their educational spending. These two specific aspects of the 2008 reforms ––increasing funding for low-income students and increasing the accountability of schools–– are changes that can be made to any education system, regardless of whether it uses school vouchers. Thus, the United States should learn from the success of the 2008 Chilean reforms and incorporate the objectives of increased funding for low-income students and increased accountability in order to reduce inequality and improve its schools.

 

In Finland, they prevent politics from screwing up Education.

Why Are Finland's Schools Successful? | Innovation| Smithsonian Magazine
In the United States, which has muddled along in the middle for the past decade, government officials have attempted to introduce marketplace competition into public schools. In recent years, a group of Wall Street financiers and philanthropists such as Bill Gates have put money behind private-sector ideas, such as vouchers, data-driven curriculum and charter schools, which have doubled in number in the past decade. President Obama, too, has apparently bet on competition. His Race to the Top initiative invites states to compete for federal dollars using tests and other methods to measure teachers, a philosophy that would not fly in Finland. “I think, in fact, teachers would tear off their shirts,” said Timo Heikkinen, a Helsinki principal with 24 years of teaching experience. “If you only measure the statistics, you miss the human aspect.”

There are no mandated standardized tests in Finland, apart from one exam at the end of students’ senior year in high school. There are no rankings, no comparisons or competition between students, schools or regions. Finland’s schools are publicly funded. The people in the government agencies running them, from national officials to local authorities, are educators, not business people, military leaders or career politicians. Every school has the same national goals and draws from the same pool of university-trained educators. The result is that a Finnish child has a good shot at getting the same quality education no matter whether he or she lives in a rural village or a university town. The differences between weakest and strongest students are the smallest in the world, according to the most recent survey by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). “Equality is the most important word in Finnish education. All political parties on the right and left agree on this,” said Olli Luukkainen, president of Finland’s powerful teachers union.

 

Not sure if I can embed a Tik Tok video, but here's one that lays out Rufo's privatization plan:
Rob Rogers on TikTok

• Create distrust in public schools and institutions
• Speak business jargon that sounds good in theory, but fails in reality
• Neglect the fact that vouchers can only be effectively employed by those with means.
• Harm public schools, particularly the teachers / eliminate the incentive for advanced credentials (holy hell ) / nullify the institutions of teacher preparation

 

Is this the same Rob Rodgers that is a cartoonist from Pittsburg? ( I’m working and haven’t watched the video)
If so does he talk about how he came to know this? Or is he just giving his opinion on what Rufo plans?

 

Different guy - from CO. Best I can tell, he's a businessman trying to get into politics.
Rob Rogers (Colorado)

His conclusions are directly in response to a speech Rufo gave at Hillsdale College.

 

Got it thanks
I am no fan of Rufo. I’ll listen to the vid and look him up…

 

Well our money is going to pay for these schools. You're ignoring the information that has been given to you:

1. The "best" private schools were not accepting vouchers
2. There is no accountability for these schools getting our money that should be going towards public schools, like reducing classroom sizes like we the people of Florida voted for
3. Now with the increase in our money going out there, they are giving wealthy people and home school people a discount. PLUS tv's and paddleboards???
4. Safe isn't always better, nor is it guaranteed.
5. Numbers are skewed by the socioeconomic makeup of both successful private schools and public schools who are in wealthy areas. Are you really getting what we paid for when you send a kid who may not have the same help at home that his peers in that private school has?
6. STOP throwing our money out there blindly!
7. SOME public schools are "notoriously" known for being awful, but many more voucher private schools are. The Orlando Sentinel did an in depth report over the course of several days in the paper about just what is happening in these voucher schools. They don't even have real teachers.
8. Is our state government saying they have no idea how to make our public schools the best in the nation, so instead they are throwing their hands in the air along with our money to fake schools to score points with the base?
9. Why not allow parents choose which public school they want to go to instead and provide transportation? I toted my two sons across town to go to a new middle school with a tough principal and an even tougher lineup of classes/teachers. I carpooled with other parents with the same idea. Parental choice.

Parents have a choice. Vote, pay for your own private school/homeschooling, and vote again.

I've had my say, now I'm going to see how I can actually watch ESPN for future football games. The Clemson game starts in 15 min.

 

I've always believed in a hand up,not a hand out. So there is that.

 

As I said before, it is not thrown out without regulation. See my earlier post in the thread as someone with kids who ACTUALLY USE the step up program as opposed to a journalist trying to get clicks and views by generating controversy. It's not easy to get the funds, and use of funds is reviewed and scrutinized for an educational tie in. Most of the kids who are part of these programs have some form of either financial hardship or some form of disability or both.

 

And what about the schools and what they teach? What about the fact we just dropped the income qualification? What if we took that money and made the public schools better? I get it that the far right has wanted this forever, but it's wrong on so many levels. I'm also guessing that you don't believe a several months long investigation into the entire voucher system in FL?

 

I'm not in FL, but at first blush this appears to be a blatant abuse of the system. I like the idea of vouchers with the intent of kids getting ahead in education, but this is a terrible misuse.

 

The right-wing war on education has been going on for decades. Here's a good read on the playbook. The tactics of today are not much different from those in the past: Blame unions, accuse teachers of grooming and indoctrinating children, divert funding . . . all under euphemisms such as "parental rights," used to fool the followers. In recent years this Farris person has more aggressively pursued vouchers, which divert funding away from public schools.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/educ...n-the-right-wing-plot-to-end-public-education

Now, speaking on a confidential conference call to a secretive group of Christian millionaires seeking, in the words of one member, to “take down the education system as we know it today,” Farris made the same points he had made in courtrooms since the 1980s. Public schools were indoctrinating children with a secular worldview that amounted to a godless religion, he said.

In Florida, a home-schooling mom introduced Farris’s ideas to a state lawmaker, setting in motion the passage of the state’s Parents’ Bill of Rights in 2021. The law, repeatedly touted by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on the presidential campaign trail, laid the groundwork for the state’s controversial Parental Rights in Education Act, dubbed by its critics the “don’t say gay” bill.

Yet to those who have followed Farris’s career, the adoption of his arguments by so many families unconnected to home schooling is a measure of his success. In the eyes of his critics, he has masterfully imported an extreme religious agenda into the heart of the nation’s politics through the seemingly unobjectionable language of parents’ rights. Some argue that it has always been the goal of the most radical Christian home-schoolers not merely to opt out of the public schools but to transform them, either by diverting their funding or allowing religion back into the classroom.

In the early 1980s, Farris argued that a high school English class was promoting a religion of “secular humanism” by teaching “The Learning Tree,” a novel by Black filmmaker Gordon Parks. His efforts on behalf of his client to have the book removed from the curriculum were rejected by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. But his most famous confrontation with public school officials came during a 1986 trial in Tennessee. His clients were born-again Christians who argued their children should not be required to read “Rumpelstiltskin,” “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” and other material that they said undermined their religious beliefs.