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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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Arkady Grudzinsky 50+
If government stops taking responsibility for education and the economy starts suffering from the lack of skilled labor, wouldn't private corporations and citizens pick up the tab? Voluntarily? Not with the hidden agenda to fund religion (which wouldn't be an issue when no public money is involved), but with an open agenda of making more money? Does the financial burden need to be carried by the public at all?
A side benefit of this might be a less polarized, more responsible, and more charitable society that does not blame the government for its failures. Not to mention significantly smaller taxes and government budgets.
Don Anderson 20+
By simply allowing taxpayers without children to use the national-online education system, via something like X hours based on how much they helped pay for it.
Greg Swanson
Don Anderson 20+
I’m not saying online is better than classroom, nor would I say classroom is better than online.
Instead I saying 50% of both is better than 100% of one or the other.
And I’m talking about what online will/could be, currently its still in the Bata stage.
If you look at some TED talks about “online education” you can get an idea of where it is headed, and once it gets out of Bata it will no long be free. Envision a national system with literally thousands of teachers to choose from and in as many subjects as you can dream up.
Plus 50/50 would be an equalizer for students in poor preforming schools, in that a student’s online 50% would of equal value no matter what classroom school they went to.
Brock Hardwood
I'm not saying that it can't work, but I would want to see some real studies on it first, using a random group of students from all walks of life.
Brock Hardwood
Publicly funded education solves this problem.
Arkady Grudzinsky 50+
It might also exacerbate the problem of outsourcing of skilled labor, of course.
Brock Hardwood
If employers had to pay $200,000 to hire a new employee, nobody would hire new employees.
" not by childless people or elderly property owners"
Everybody benefits from a strong economy and an educated workforce.
Arkady Grudzinsky 50+
If $200,000 - perhaps not. But the cost of up to one grade might be reasonable. Often, companies pay relocation expenses in tens of thousands of dollars to hire a skilled employee from overseas.
Re: "Everybody benefits from a strong economy and an educated workforce."
This is a generalization. I have no idea who this "everybody" is. And this "everybody" seems to always have his own idea of what he benefits from.
Brock Hardwood
We are still left with the question of who is going to pay for the rest.
"This is a generalization"
It is a reasonable generalization. We are not writing stringent legal documents on this forum. Most people benefit from a strong economy. Is that better? lol
Arkady Grudzinsky 50+
The amount can be calculated based on how many times people change jobs over their life time, on average. It's not so difficult. IRS can come up with a number, so can ADP or BLS.
Brock Hardwood
Petar Ivanov
Theft of property by government through taxation is absolutely not fair, I agree.
The children and youth are the future of any country, so for money being taken from a childless parents and redistributed to parents who are educating the next generation of citizens --- I side with the students. With vouchers providing a free education market, at least childless taxpayers could try to get some their stolen money back by offering education services to the students receiving their tax money.
For social justice, A and B:
A.
If government is going to steal and redistribute, I would rather see the stolen property of taxpayers given to the poor, middle class, and parents than given to the political elite, bureaucrats, and politicians
The current system is top-down Stalinist redistribution of your property to government bureaucrats and political elite who make the the education decisions and allocations how they see fit. The poor and middle class are forcibly assigned schools by their zip code.
Vouchers is bottom-up grassroots redistribution of your property into the hands of all K-12 students and parents, most of whom are poor and middle where they make the education decisions and allocations with their children. And the market would be open, so they could choose the public school, private school, home school, tutors, apprenticeships, internships or anything else. The public schools would not close, they would just have to compete for students like everyone else.
I would rather have a robber stealing my money give it to middle class and poor K-12 students than to the political elite to make education decisions for the middle class and poor.
So with a voucher of $8000 you have complete education freedom for your three children, and $24,000 a year purchasing power. The low-income family of five would be receiving $40,000/yr for education. $24,000 of free education money for K-12.
Petar Ivanov
For removing government completely from the responsibility of education: financing, operating, management. Some people think vouchers are the best way to do that, (so for example, they go around telling all the religious Americans that vouchers assist in paying for fees at private religious schools --- which is true). And that's their overt goal ("hidden agenda" is nonsense).
Voucher money gets allocated at the local government level, this removes at least two layers of the government education bureaucracy. Federal education gives one choice, state education 50 choices, local education thousands of choices. Because vouchers is only financing, all levels of government (federal, state, county, district, city) are removed from operation and from management of schools.
Introducing vouchers at a start 1-2% of population, then progressing to 5-10%, then to 100%. The government financing creates ~$500 billion/yr market for education services for tutors, individuals, entrepreneurs, businesses and charities to innovative and compete in the education service industry. The public schools would set their price at the level of the voucher, and would have to compete. This allows the free market to compete on an even playing field with public schools and build up education infrastructure.
If there is a shift towards not-government education (K-12 students and parents choosing tutors, online services, home schooling, not-public schools) then the local voters can decide to go the route of a transition to free market education reducing vouchers to zero. This attracts the free market people to the town.
If they decide to raise voucher money higher, this attracts people that like education welfare to their town. If they all choose to continue going to their public school, then the only thing changing about the public school is that parents and students are paying for the service, and the money is not coming top down from politicians.
Arkady Grudzinsky 50+