Flat tax rate system should be enforced now.

[mrstickball]

The_vagabond7 said:

mrstickball said:

 

Actually, if you look at test scores vs. funding, you find that the less a school gets, the better the grades. Compare inner city Detroit schools which get ~$16,000 per student with my rural Ohio school which gets $6,000 per student. Actually, you can compare virtually every under-performing school in any city with virtually any school outside and find that the inner city schools always spend far more for far less.

Heck, look at Cornerstone in Detroit. They have a 98% graduation rate and cost about $10,000 per student. They take the same poverty-striken kids on welfare and graduate them at a rate 3x that of public school. I wonder...Why should we continue to fund failing schools when we see private ones that do so much better with so less?

Now, I haven't looked into this but it sounds like the causation is the other way around. It's not "if you spend less money you get better grades" but rather "struggling schools get more money". That doesn't mean spending less money is the answer, it more likely means the money needs to get spent trying to change inner city culture, which is probably the actual culprate.

The reason private schools do better isn't necessarily that they are just so much more thrifty and smart, so much as culturally a private school is going to be vastly different than an inner city public school. You don't pay top dollar to put your kid into a private school and then they are spending their time trying to get their gun through the metal detector because a rival gang is gunning for you for dealing on their turf.

I really don't think that the spending is the causal agent here, and saying that privitization is obviously the key to better education because they get more for less, is probably ignoring a number of cultural factors. If you removed the inner city public schools where way too much is being spent on students, and suddenly there was nothing but private schools, all of the drug addiction, teen pregnancy, violence, abusive households, uneducated parents, and alcoholism don't just disappear because the school is thrifty and trying to aggressively seek profit.

I agree about the spending vs. results . I should of worded in differently.At any rate, you always find that funding has virtually nothing to do with results. Here's the Heritage study of graduation rate vs. spending among major urban centers:

As I said, though, there are cases where private schools have taken in the same kids, and done far better. For example, Cornerstone in Detroit MI (average graduation rate in Detroit is 25%). 50% of their student base is below the poverty line, and they graduate 95% of students.

That is why I am for school vouchers. The American education system costs more, and gets far less than most every other developed country....And we're only getting worse. If we allow schools to be built and demolished on merit, not location, they will get better. Allowing parents and children to choose where to get their education would be a great tool. I understand that most private schools get specific advantages in terms of who they get to come to their schools - that is why I believe we should allow average children without privledged backgrounds to go to such schools.