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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]NO.  It is much better for all of society if we invest in PUBLIC schools, not send our tax dollars to private schools.  Private schools have zero obligation to actually teach facts or teach everyone, including the difficult children.

Private school vouchers are just modern day segregation with new vocabulary.[/quote]

No- we can't just keep throwing money at failing programs. Clearly public schools aren't working currently. Our test scores are declining, kids are disruptive, and teachers are leaving. Fix what's wrong. If you look at the actual dollars, schools have enough. Are they spending them effectively? Being forced to litigate nonstop special ed violations is a big budget killer.[/quote]

FCPS spends nearly $20K/yr educating each student versus a US national average of $16K. Germany spends $15k/yr, so it’s not about throwing more money at the problem. We need to fix the issues in the schools and remove wastes. Despite their lower pays relative to other professions, public school teachers have higher salaries and benefits than private school teachers. If public teachers want higher pay, remove the layers of bureaucracy and administrators, and allocate those funds to teachers salary. However, hold the teachers accountable for their students’ performance. Fire chronic under-performing teachers and administrators. That’s what privates do.

We’re in private and would love to send our child back to public. We don’t want to see the limited public funds diverted to privates but if the public school boards won’t solve the problems, they should live with the consequences of a death spiral that vouchers will bring. [/quote]

This is why vouchers are necessary.  Either the patient is cured or dies.  Otherwise just throwing good tax dollars after bad on failed public school systems. [/quote]

WTF - no, we aren't going to "let the patient die". That would be devastating to our community.

Here in the DC area, the community values good education. We aren't going to trash our public schools just because Republicans want to subsidize their kids' private school education. 
[/quote]

We bought our house in a good public school system (both DH and I got amazing educations in public schools, including ones that many folks would probably consider “bad” school - ie, high poverty neighborhoods) with the intent to send our kids to our neighborhood school.

The neighborhood school was not a good fit for our oldest, and there was little communication or support from the teacher when DC didn’t learn to read in K, despite me asking and trying to figure out what was going on.

We moved them to an independent school where we have found the teachers and administration to be a good partner for their education. DC now a great student in middle school. But we pay tuition for 3 kids to go to independent school, in excess of $150K per year.

Why should only rich families like ours get to have an option when their local school doesn’t work for their child? We have friends who send th eir kids to the school my child no longer attends and they are doing well, so I recognize that it can be a great school for some kids, but it wasn’t for my child.

There is little incentive for public school districts to be innovative or meet the needs of their students if they have a monopoly on free education. I think it’s a positive thing at independent schools that the contract is year by year so families which are unhappy can go elsewhere - it means that schools are paying attention to what the families are asking for and what the kids need. I think families and kids would benefit from more choices.

It’s complicated for kids with special needs, because I do understand that these charter schools might not serve their children — especially if they need significant supports. There is already a lack of needed supports in the current system. Would school choice necessarily make things worse for these students? Sincere question - I understand it wouldn’t make things better, but are there studies showing things are worse?

I am a moderate democrat, have never voted for a republican, and my kids attend a secular school, so I don’t have any sort of agenda other than wishing that parents could have options if they don’t find their local school to be a good fit for their child, like we did.[/quote]

"Incentive"?

No, defunding public schools doesn't provide any "incentive" for schools. It just makes them LESS capable of serving the kids in the community.

Your kid's school needed [u]more[/u] reading specialists, not [u]fewer[/u].

There are multiple studies/case studies already shared on this thread demonstrating that vouchers do make things worse in a variety of ways.

Our schools need help - the solution is increased funding to reduce class size, give more planning/grading time, and bring in more specialists (reading, math, SPED). Defunding our public schools is not the solution -- it's the opposite. 
[/quote]

FCPS and MCPS are already spending more money per student than the national average. We spend more than most OECD countries. Public school teachers make more than private teachers so the answer is not to throw more money at it. [b]It’s holding the teachers and administrators accountable.[/b] [/quote]

Do you have a plan?[/quote]

1) Remove chronic disruptive students - suspend or expel them so teachers don’t have to waste their time on these kids. Put them in special schools if needed.

2) Fire 75% of the non-school administrators/school board staff. Re-allocate that budget to teachers and staff.

3) Change teacher’s contract to make it easier to [b]fire low-performing teachers. Hold them accountable to standards. Teacher’s promotions and bonuses should be tied to students’ achievement, community feedback, and academic rankings[/b] just like in privates.

4) Remove stupid rules and policies that waste teachers’ time and not focused on educating students. [/quote]

Again, I’d need to know more about this plan. Would the schools interview families and the students to determine who they would accept? Would a teacher with advanced academic students be held to the same standards of student achievement as another with more English language learners in the class? Does a student’s own motivation get figured in? Would the performance of a student who got a good night’s sleep and ate breakfast be weighed differently than one who didn’t get a lot of sleep and didn’t eat before school? How would you compare the performance of a student who attended preschool and was read to at home vs one that didn’t get that benefit?

Regarding the special schools for chronic behavior problems. Would the staff at those schools be evaluated differently?

How did you come up with the 75% reduction number? [/quote]

We can start with how many students in the school pass standardized tests and how that compare to schools in the state, county, and immediate surrounding areas. We then compare how the schools and each class level performed year over year. Then, we drill down to the grade level and class level. Finally, we normalize for the students’ demographics. Of course we would have different metric for HS vs MS vs ES. We would also have higher expectations if a school if full of UMC families, that’s why comparison to previous year and YoY improvement is important.

Schools in well-resourced neighborhoods will typically perform better and teachers there will be compensated for it. It will make other teachers want to teach at these high performing schools or improve their own schools to increase their pay. [/quote]

Why should those teachers be compensated for it when the high performance is almost always a result of the school being in a “well-resourced” neighborhood? BTW, you can just say wealthy or rich.

Your system would guarantee the lowest performing schools would have the worst and lowest paid teachers. Sounds like a real plan.

[/quote]

You can say the same thing about teachers at private schools. Using your argument, they should be pay a lot less because they’re handed rich kids who are already high performing. But it’s the opposite because private school students and parents expect more. If these teacher don’t live up to those expectations, they should be replaced. This is how you drive accountability.

You hide behind the excuse that it’s impossible to hold public schools accountable so don’t bother. Just hire more teachers and pay current ones more that’ll improve everything despite what the data have shown.

My system would also give teachers who made the biggest improvement the largest bonus. So if teachers want to make more, they can go to a low performing schools and improve them.[/quote]

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