Is public school as we know it ending?
Private school vouchers lost a lot of battles, but they may have won the war.
Here's the growth of vouchers over the past 30 years:
You can interpret this in two ways. First, after three decades vouchers still account for only about one-half of one percent of all school enrollment. Second, voucher use has tripled over the past ten years.
However, even if you assume the worst—namely that this tripling continues unabated—it still only gets us to vouchers accounting for 3% of school enrollment by 2040. And even that's pretty unlikely when you look at school enrollment more generally: public school enrollment has steadily risen from 88% of all students to 90% of all students over the past few decades. There's not much sign that public schools are in danger of extinction.
Most private schools of any quality will make sure their tuition is always higher than the voucher, to ensure they don’t have to take any poor kids who are likelier to have academic and emotional problems that drag down the school’s rep.
This in turn means that vouchers will never kill off the public schools. They’ll simply strip them of all the wealthy and middle class kids whose parents agitate for higher quality.
Vouchers account for too much of the states school budgets that offer them.
Well, you have to start somewhere. A lot of movements that eventually succeeded stayed unpopular for a long time and then for one reason or another gained a lot of converts.
But the immediate problem is how the privatizers are working so hard to cripple public schools to make people want something else, even if they can't see the disadvantages. The accusation of supposed academic failures of public schools goes along with the claims that they are too "woke". This is an objective on which the people in the affluent wing of the Republican party, who may be sending their kids to private school anyway and resent paying taxes for schools, can agree with those in the bigot wing, who want their kids in all-white schools. The Catholic church can also benefit from privatization. There's a lot of money behind breaking down public schools.
Around here (TX), it's not classic private schools. It's for profit charter schools that are siphoning off students and money. The big difference is that they can select their students (cream skim) and leave the lower performers, bad behaviors, ESL, and disabled to the public schools.
If I were still a parent of school age children, I would definitely push them into Charters.
I'm glad you're not a parent of school-age children.
and you missed my point and/or clearly don't have kids.
No he did not. You are being naive about the quality of those charter schools.
Again, I think national numbers do not tell the story - you need state breakdowns. (I wonder if I should compare this to WSJ/Forbes publishing graphs without adjustments for inflation...) I suspect large blue states are in no danger but I keep reading Jessica Piper's warnings about charters taking money out of public schools in MO.
But are vouchers available and usable everywhere? A voucher does no good if the closest school one might send a kid to is a hundred away. We should be subtracting schools where there are either no vouchers available or no voucher school.
The Mk I eyeballs may be failing me, but wouldn’t that be assuming a linear continuation of what appears to be an exponential curve?
As people have mentioned, it's actually charter schools that are growing significantly, with about 7% of public school students.
Vouchers are unnecessary when barriers to religious schools are dropped - which is very much where things are headed.
There is no recourse when charters are highly segregated. Because each is it's own school, and parents choose, you can't really force busing or mess with neighborhood boundaries to get diversity. Plus, you can create charter missions that are designed to bring in only certain subgroups.
Charters keep the "wrong" kids out of Private schools. Vouchers risk inundating Private schools with kids that the schools don't want, potentially making it harder for the kids they want to get in.
Because there are so many rural districts, a "takeover" of American education will never be 100%. Some places are so small that it is nearly impossible to get a Charter or Private school established. But in urban areas the spread of Charters will really upend education systems. In my city the Charters have about 22% of kids and the Privates another 12%. Both the Charters and Privates are more segregated than the public school district. The growth has caused school closures in the public schools, and SPED is still concentrated in the publics.
We've also had some pretty serious issues with Charters here. There is little oversight. The authorizes are hands-off, and there is no elected school board for them or way for the public to know what is happening. Years ago one started doing religious instruction. Since all the families were Muslim there, it's not like anyone wanted to snitch. Just recently another charter lost millions of dollars to a con artist and horrible investments. It was a standard affinity scam targeting an immigrant group. The craziest part was when the head of the school tried to get the school to pay for her defense lawyer! Since she controlled the school's board, she thought she could get them to do it.