Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You all must be trolls. It's a system that allows poor kids a chance to get up to a safe, quality education. Give a kid who wants a better environment a chance to move up. Get out of your west of the park high society security and come east and see how the other half lives. You're afraid of vouchers because you know that expansion will cause your neighbors and even yourselves to take them up and go private. Responsible parents want the best and safest education for their kids. That's why charters are thriving too.

Gimme a break with the hyperbole. The entire city is nice these days, has been for a while. Drive all through SE and you see awesome, renovated and new houses and clean, renovated city parks. Yes, (gasp!) even dogs having fun in the parks. The only truly awful part DC (in terms of uncleanliness, poor upkeep, and localized criminal activity) are the pockets of lower income that are public and subsidized housing. That's what everybody complains about, but you accept it because we live in a society.

You don't have to raise the spectre of 1980's DC to make a solid argument for vouchers: if the schools aren't good, then outgoing parents should use every opportunity to find a better spot.

PP, you have no idea what you're talking about. Why don't you volunteer in some of these lower performing neighborhood schools and then tell me how rosy everything is. Ignorance is bliss for you.

Anonymous wrote:You all must be trolls. It's a system that allows poor kids a chance to get up to a safe, quality education. Give a kid who wants a better environment a chance to move up. Get out of your west of the park high society security and come east and see how the other half lives. You're afraid of vouchers because you know that expansion will cause your neighbors and even yourselves to take them up and go private. Responsible parents want the best and safest education for their kids. That's why charters are thriving too.

Gimme a break with the hyperbole. The entire city is nice these days, has been for a while. Drive all through SE and you see awesome, renovated and new houses and clean, renovated city parks. Yes, (gasp!) even dogs having fun in the parks. The only truly awful part DC (in terms of uncleanliness, poor upkeep, and localized criminal activity) are the pockets of lower income that are public and subsidized housing. That's what everybody complains about, but you accept it because we live in a society.

You don't have to raise the spectre of 1980's DC to make a solid argument for vouchers: if the schools aren't good, then outgoing parents should use every opportunity to find a better spot.

The other thing about the DC system is that parents don't find out if they were accepted into the program until the late spring, often after the enrollment deadlines for the elite private schools have passed. So they either have to take the chance of losing the $500 or $1000 deposit required by the schools or else it really limits the private schools available to them.

I work with these families at a social services agency and trust me, I want what is best for them. This program is smoke and mirrors- I've visited many of the voucher-funded private schools. In many cases these schools are way worse than some of the lowest performing public schools in the city. And parents are told that private are better option- but we aren't talking Sidwell/Gonzaga/NCS etc. There is no oversight and it's astounding.

Anonymous wrote:YResponsible parents want the best and safest education for their kids.

This person is the troll. I believe that's a direct DeVos quote...

Are you one of the 4% who voted Trump in DC, or just someone working for DeVos?

Anonymous wrote:You all must be trolls. It's a system that allows poor kids a chance to get up to a safe, quality education. Give a kid who wants a better environment a chance to move up. Get out of your west of the park high society security and come east and see how the other half lives. You're afraid of vouchers because you know that expansion will cause your neighbors and even yourselves to take them up and go private. Responsible parents want the best and safest education for their kids. That's why charters are thriving too.

I hear you. But the theory is not what is practiced. If the goal is to provide equity of access, it gets an F. The funding model is a joke. It was set up back in the day to subsidize Catholic schools (some converted to charters later) that, surprise, have tuition the same level as vouchers. Just ask Kevin Chavous. One school on the list was a Nation of Islam madrassa.

It's a bait and switch. To qualify, you have to be really poor. Your child has to be accepted at the school first. But the "scholarship" amount is tiny. It doesn't cover the upfront costs of testing and application fees and deposits needed to get accepted in the first place. If you can afford the out of pocket costs, you probably don't qualify for the program anyway.

Sure, you can "choose" a school that participates in vouchers, but the options are limited from the get go. These are not scholarships. It's an income-based grant which is inadequate to address the real need.

There's a long backstory of conservatives and/or education reformers experimenting on DC kids. Here's the Cliff Notes version of how we got here.

At one point, during No Child Left Behind days, parents from schools that failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress could seek discretionary placements at pretty much any DCPS with better results. How do you think we ended up with so many OOB legacies? Pre-Michelle Rhee, schools like Wilson, Deal, and even Oyster were majority OOB. Years of OOB grandfathering coincided with the Wild West charter boom (and dodgy real estate deals for facilities) and the post-Crack Wars baby boom of white people and gentrification. Residency was more of a concept than a requirement.

So where was all the voucher money going during those years? Were the kids really safer? Do these schools discriminate in admissions by religion or disability?

For schools: if you get public money, you should have public accountability. If a school's mission is to prepare "students
for the service of God's Church" while refusing to admit non-Christians, then raise your own damn money.

For taxpayers: if you want equity of opportunity regardless of income, are you willing to pay the full costs to escape poverty or just handout crumbs?

For School Choice advocates: Vouchers do not level the playing field, so stop lyin' or prove me wrong.

Anonymous wrote:You all must be trolls. It's a system that allows poor kids a chance to get up to a safe, quality education. Give a kid who wants a better environment a chance to move up. Get out of your west of the park high society security and come east and see how the other half lives. You're afraid of vouchers because you know that expansion will cause your neighbors and even yourselves to take them up and go private. Responsible parents want the best and safest education for their kids. That's why charters are thriving too.

Not trolling. I think it is a disingenuous program where they say you get money to go to private, but the privates that accept them aren't very good and the best privates don't want or accept voucher kids. If every low income child in Washington DC was given a voucher and every private school had to accept them, there would be no low income kids in DCPS and the privates would only be low income students. There aren't enough quality slot available. It would be better to use the money to help get charters buildings or just give the parents the money to be able to move.

You all must be trolls. It's a system that allows poor kids a chance to get up to a safe, quality education. Give a kid who wants a better environment a chance to move up. Get out of your west of the park high society security and come east and see how the other half lives. You're afraid of vouchers because you know that expansion will cause your neighbors and even yourselves to take them up and go private. Responsible parents want the best and safest education for their kids. That's why charters are thriving too.

It does seem like a system that encourages fraud.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:How come nobody's discussing this yet? https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/trump-wants-to-spend-millions-more-on-school-vouchers-but-whats-happened-to-the-millions-already-spent/2017/07/15/ab6002a8-6267-11e7-84a1-a26b75ad39fe_story.html?utm_term=.50f02adaab8e

Discuss!

Main absurdity: that parents don't need "more information" or data, they need "more choices". Seems this very forum would completely prove this wrong given the detailed familiarity of parents with MySchool data sets, and the use of this resource to determine their best options.

WTF in other words....

I had no idea the voucher thing was so big here, so opaque, and so federally funded.

Really? It's been policy for more than a decade, the city and Obama (and congressional Dems during the Bush Administration) fought to end it every single year.

But the thing about not requiring standardized testing or publishing even who is going where - and how much they're getting?? That's nuts.

Yep. Take it up with Congress.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:How come nobody's discussing this yet? https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/trump-wants-to-spend-millions-more-on-school-vouchers-but-whats-happened-to-the-millions-already-spent/2017/07/15/ab6002a8-6267-11e7-84a1-a26b75ad39fe_story.html?utm_term=.50f02adaab8e

Discuss!

Main absurdity: that parents don't need "more information" or data, they need "more choices". Seems this very forum would completely prove this wrong given the detailed familiarity of parents with MySchool data sets, and the use of this resource to determine their best options.

WTF in other words....

I had no idea the voucher thing was so big here, so opaque, and so federally funded.

Really? It's been policy for more than a decade, the city and Obama (and congressional Dems during the Bush Administration) fought to end it every single year.

But the thing about not requiring standardized testing or publishing even who is going where - and how much they're getting?? That's nuts.

-- what I mean is how many students go where, not literally who. The supposed privacy defense to releasing such data is inane.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:How come nobody's discussing this yet? https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/trump-wants-to-spend-millions-more-on-school-vouchers-but-whats-happened-to-the-millions-already-spent/2017/07/15/ab6002a8-6267-11e7-84a1-a26b75ad39fe_story.html?utm_term=.50f02adaab8e

Discuss!

Main absurdity: that parents don't need "more information" or data, they need "more choices". Seems this very forum would completely prove this wrong given the detailed familiarity of parents with MySchool data sets, and the use of this resource to determine their best options.

WTF in other words....

I had no idea the voucher thing was so big here, so opaque, and so federally funded.

Really? It's been policy for more than a decade, the city and Obama (and congressional Dems during the Bush Administration) fought to end it every single year.

But the thing about not requiring standardized testing or publishing even who is going where - and how much they're getting?? That's nuts.

Anonymous wrote:How come nobody's discussing this yet? https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/trump-wants-to-spend-millions-more-on-school-vouchers-but-whats-happened-to-the-millions-already-spent/2017/07/15/ab6002a8-6267-11e7-84a1-a26b75ad39fe_story.html?utm_term=.50f02adaab8e

Discuss!

Main absurdity: that parents don't need "more information" or data, they need "more choices". Seems this very forum would completely prove this wrong given the detailed familiarity of parents with MySchool data sets, and the use of this resource to determine their best options.

WTF in other words....

I had no idea the voucher thing was so big here, so opaque, and so federally funded.

Really? It's been policy for more than a decade, the city and Obama (and congressional Dems during the Bush Administration) fought to end it every single year.

Yes, vouchers sound good on paper but in reality they have set up a system where low-income parents get scammed by schools that have no accountability. It's an outrage.

Love how the best private schools barely have anyone on vouchers. It's not a good idea for the federal government to half heartedly fund unaccrecdid schools via vouchers just so some people don't have to have their children learn about evolution (some voucher advocates are major holy rollers). And the mom of 5 loves her childrensschools via vouchers because they are safe, but there's no way to check what the kids have actually learned.

How come nobody's discussing this yet? https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/trump-wants-to-spend-millions-more-on-school-vouchers-but-whats-happened-to-the-millions-already-spent/2017/07/15/ab6002a8-6267-11e7-84a1-a26b75ad39fe_story.html?utm_term=.50f02adaab8e

Discuss!

Main absurdity: that parents don't need "more information" or data, they need "more choices". Seems this very forum would completely prove this wrong given the detailed familiarity of parents with MySchool data sets, and the use of this resource to determine their best options.

WTF in other words....

I had no idea the voucher thing was so big here, so opaque, and so federally funded.