| sapphi_snake said: Well, here in Romania part of the tax money you pay every year is for education. You don't pay directly to the school. It seems quite odd that your tax money goes directly to the school your kids go to. The proble with your voucher sistem, as I said, is that there are going to be kids forced to go to the crappy schools (because there isn't going to be enough room for all the kids in the better schools). This will lead to the crappy schools becoming even crappier. Also, what will be the schools' selection criteria for students? You may want your kid to go to a better school, but so will everybody esle. Right now the school from you district has to accept your kid. But why should that better school accept your kid and not soem other kid who wants to go there? And why should your kid get a place in that school and not some kid who actually lives in that better school's district? I don't think this voucher system will change much. It seems like one of those "running away" solutions. I also bet there's gonna be a lot of cases of corruption regarding which kids get accepted to the better schools and which don't. Improving the schools seems like a much better ideea in the long run. Regarding the teacher situation, a solution would be to evaluate them using different criteria, rather than the performance of their students. |
The thing is, with the voucher system at least some kids get a better education in the worst case scenario. The best case scenario is that due to no districts, there may be as many schools as needed to support children in a given area. You assume there can only be 1 good and 1 bad school in an area. This would not need to be the case. The crappy school would have to get better, as if it failed to do well, other schools could be created that would outperform this bad school. Again, it destroys the need of districts and instead focuses on how schools can specialize and improve, rather than merely stagnate or devolve due to their monopoly on education.
A voucher system would change a lot, despite your argument. With a virtual monopoly on students, public schools have very little incentive to be good, and make changes as needed to ensure kids get a good education. If that monopoly was taken away, they would have to either get better, or close up shop. You attacked the voucher system without providing any tangible arguments on how to fix our horrible education system.
As for teacher evaluations - unfortunately, the NEA is opposed to the idea of paying teachers via their worth, or fire them in most cases. That is one major hinderance to our education system: The NEA always believes that, no matter what, more money will fix education problems.
Back from the dead, I'm afraid.
