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Education "vouchers" solve the fiscal crisis, and also lead to economic recovery?
Simply open up K-12 education to the market place, with government only playing a role by financing the students with a yearly education check of $8000.
*www.usagovernmentspending.com shows American local governments spending $458.3 billion for K-12 education in 2012.
*(Sir Ken Robinson says this education system is a complete failure)
*The new education cost of $8000 education check to 50 million K-12 students is $400 billion per year
*This saves $58.3 billion
*(a $6000 check would save $158.3 billion)
*The yearly education check allows students(and their parents) to choose how, when, where, and what they learn, and also who teaches them
*The yearly education check of $8000 opens up a $400B/year market to entrepreneurs, teachers, and creatives
*($6000 check opens up a $300B/year market to entrepreneurs, teachers, and creatives)
State fiscal crisis solved, federal fiscal crisis solved, and the new education market leads America's economic recovery.
Thoughts everyone?
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shawn disney 10+
Then there is the question of just what will "parents" (if any) do with their chunk of money. Suppose they spend it on cigarettes?! Remember , this is the next generation of voters you are talking about.l
Petar Ivanov
Vouchers are not about privatizing the schools! Vouchers are about parents and students funding the public schools by choosing to go to them.
Right now politicians spend $458.3 billion a year to decide when, what, where, and how your K-12 students learn. This East German education system of politicians calling the shots from high has failed.
Vouchers put that $458.3 billion into the hands of the K-12 students and parents. And the parents and students decide who, when, what, where, and how their children learn.
Vouchers change the financing mechanism of public education by making funding for education grassroots and bottoms up, coming from the people.
So what happens with vouchers is the public school sets a price equal to the vouchers, the K-12 students that are American citizens get their $8000 of cash for their yearly education, then the student can choose to give that money to the public school.
Brock Hardwood
Actually, 458.3 Billion is the cost of the entire education system that servers 50 million children, to include administrative costs. It is not the cost of decision making. If private schools provided the same amount of education, serving the same number of children, at the current average tuition charged by private schools of 20K, education would cost 1 Trillion dollars. (50 million children * $20,000 = $1 Trillion)
So much for the efficiency of private industry.
Petar Ivanov
You already dodged the question about freeing slaves being a good decision, which speaks volumes.
Brock Hardwood
TED readers can read all of my posts. Not one of them ever talked about slaves. You have now PROVEN yourself to be a liar.
Freeing the slaves was a great thing...Now you can't use that BS argument anymore...You lose. The problem with you is that you actually think people are stupid. They are not. Most actually read my comments, and get that you are grasping at straws. You harm your own arguments and don't even realize it.
Petar Ivanov
So freeing the slaves was a great thing, yet Americans should be slaves to a government education system? And the poor and de-facto ethnic minority communities should be forced to go to schools within their own zip code? That's still racist, Brock.
What is it about individual liberty that you don't understand?
Mike Colera 10+
I am lost on the problems with private prisons. I understand that there are successful private prisons all over.
Public Education has always been a local endeavor and until about 50 years ago, it was a pretty good system when compared to other schools systems around the world. Then the Federal Department of Education came on board to resolve the issues of segregated education. Once that problem was sort of resolved, they expanded into providing an equal education for all at a common level and provided funds to make that happen. Now, I am not privy to the full effects of standardized tests, dumbing down standards,
no child left behind, which I think means that a child can't fail his grade.
So now we have public schools collecting local school property tax, state education lottery receipts, as well as federal funds, All this money and what to do. Well, too many public school systems figured out that raising the learning curve was hard, but expanding the bureaucracy was easy, Now, the are school districts that have nearly 50% of their employees not teachers and they are still looking for more money.
So, will school vouchers improve children's education at a lower cost thus saving tax funds and by extension the fiscal crisis our government is in?
Can't hurt.
Brock Hardwood
Can't hurt."
Yes, as a matter of fact, it CAN HURT.
Private schools have not been shown to improve education.
Private schools, on average, cost more than twice as much per student ($20K vs $9K)
Private schools have no curriculum standards, meaning that the tax payers simply don't know what they are buying. Public schools are accountable to your elected school board.
Vouchers are a bad idea.
Mike Colera 10+
I am not sure you said what I understood.
There are public schools that do a great job as there are private schools that do the same.
But, the overall quality of our national education system is way down the list of industrialized nations and even some "Third World" counties according to UN observations.
25% of students who start K never pass 12, The next 25% who do are functional illiterates,
The next 25% can be functional adults, and 25% gain great knowledge, sometimes I think in spite of attending public schools. I don't blame teachers for this situation. As a large group of professionals, some are brilliant, most do a good job and a few should be out catching dogs and that is true of most large groups of professionals. I blame the ego centric bureaucracy of public education who are more concerned with it's own growth then the outcome of the students. The mantra of give us more money and we'll do a better job is getting old.
Further, how can you possibly think that parents who have accumulated wealth to afford 40 or 50K per year for their children's education and pay for a substandard result. These same people who will return a 500 Mercedes because the glove box is a 1/16 off. I am sure those kids are getting good schooling.
Elected school boards? Aren't they supposed to insure the public their children are getting a better education then nearly number 30 on the world list?
Vouchers? I am not sure they are as fiscally curative or educationally superior as Petar holds, but I am sure they can't be any worse then the status quo
Petar Ivanov
Brock must be paid to post here. After lying about his main concern being religion, now he is onto lying about costs and economics.
Summary of the testimony by Senator Piccola:
"Let me see if I can summarize: parents are more satisfied with school choice, schools that children choose are less segregated, it saves money, kids do better, improves public schools... why would anyone be against this?"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTbMJtQL5ew
Brock Hardwood
they CAN be worse than the status quo for exactly the reasons you stated...They are not educationally superior, and they cost twice as much.
Petar Ivanov
Meta-analysis:
"out of 17 studies examining how vouchers affect academic achievement in public schools, 16 showed improvement. None showed that vouchers harm public schools. The review found that "every empirical study ever conducted in Milwaukee, Florida, Ohio, Texas, Maine and Vermont finds that voucher programs in those places improved public school."
Washington DC longitudinal study:
"In Washington, D.C., the young Opportunity Scholarship Program "significantly improved students' chances of graduating from high school," according to the Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences. Both parents and students reported higher satisfaction and rated schools safer if the student was offered an OSP scholarship."
Milwaukee longitudinal study:
"Dr. John Warren of the University of Minnesota found that students in the MPCP had an 82% graduation rate in 2009, compared with 70% in Milwaukee Public Schools. MPCP ranked higher than MPS in graduation rate in six of the seven years in the study. A report from the University of Arkansas estimated that MPCP saved taxpayers $37.2 million in 2009, because the size of the voucher is significantly smaller than per-pupil spending in MPS."