Should taxpayer dollars be used to fund private education?

[Beestie]

Originally Posted by Clodfobble

But the taxpayer is already footing the bill one way or the other; the money sending the ambitious inner-city kid to private school is in theory being directly taken away from the crappy public school.

That's the problem. Its not being taken away from the bad public school. Its being paid twice.

If the bad school costs 100,000 per year to operate and there are 100 kids in it than the cost per kid is 1,000. Removing one child from the school does not reduce the cost of operating that school by 1,000. Teacher salaries don't drop, fixing the roof isn't any cheaper, running the school bus isn't any cheaper, the light bill doesn't drop, etc. Yeah, you might save fifty bucks in books but you haven't saved any money by pulling Jimmy Neutron out of Wee Suck Elementary to use to pay Einstein Academy.

What Fairfax County did, and its public school system is already very good, is create a magnet school within the system to send the best and brightest to.

[Tonchi]

Originally Posted by Beestie

If the bad school costs 100,000 per year to operate and there are 100 kids in it than the cost per kid is 1,000. Removing one child from the school does not reduce the cost of operating that school by 1,000. Teacher salaries don't drop, fixing the roof isn't any cheaper, running the school bus isn't any cheaper, the light bill doesn't drop, etc. ......

Actually, that is not true here. In California, the schools are given money based on the head count. If a school has a high drop-out or truant rate, the funding is cut according to the population change. At this time, many schools have flat-out lied on their reporting in order to avoid having their funding cut to the point that they would not even be able to continue operating.

When I was a kid in North Carolina many years ago, the schools were funded by property taxes collected in the districts they served. As a result, the more wealthy suburbs had fantastic schools, the urban areas had strong support, and the rural areas (of which there were a lot more in those days) did not have good facilities and children often had to be on a school bus for an hour coming and going. Not to mention that until the mid-1960s we were segregated. In my time, the education system of North Carolina was considered one of the best in the nation, now it is considered at the very bottom of the list. What happened? The Feds took over, to make everything fair and legal. Before, some areas had considerably better advantages. Now, everybody has equally crappy facilities and not enough funding no matter where you live. It is hard to imagine how the situation could be made worse, but the Republican brainstorm to use tax credits for the rich to send their kids to private schools, further reducing the inadequate funding to public schools, would definitely do it.

[tw]

Where did anyone first learn the numbers? An assumption without first learning facts: private schools must be better education. An assumption based in business school logic: because the education is more expensive, then it must be better. Folks - this thread is chock full of assumptions better described as lies. No wonder George Jr thinks we are all so dumb as to believe his lies about an Iraq Surge.

From the NY Times of 14 July 2006:

Public Schools Perform Near Private Ones in Study
The Education Department reported on Friday that children in public schools generally performed as well or better in reading and mathematics than comparable children in private schools. The exception was in eighth-grade reading, where the private school counterparts fared better.

The report, which compared fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math scores in 2003 from nearly 7,000 public schools and more than 530 private schools, found that fourth graders attending public school did significantly better in math than comparable fourth graders in private schools. Additionally, it found that students in conservative Christian schools lagged significantly behind their counterparts in public schools on eighth-grade math.

Remember the point I have been making for years. The mental midget president is such a scumbag as to even have Cellar dwellers promoting his politically inspired speculation and lies into facts.

“The administration has been giving public schools a beating since the beginning” to advance its political agenda, Mr. Weaver said, of promoting charter schools and taxpayer-financed vouchers for private schools as alternatives to failing traditional public schools.

Meanwhile, Ameican soldiers are being wasted to maintain the glory and legacy of that same liar. To adult Americans, it should be THE MOST IMPORTANT FACT ON THEIR MINDS. The scumbag mental midget lies routinely even to massacre American soldiers to protect his legacy. He even has some in the Cellar promoting his education lies.

Students in private schools typically score higher than those in public schools, a finding confirmed in the study. The report then dug deeper to compare students of like racial, economic and social backgrounds. When it did that, the private school advantage disappeared in all areas except eighth-grade reading.

Why do you think I saw throught the scumbag mental midgets lies in 2002. I came from the public schools. My most accomplished friends - and everyone in the list I believe to be millionaire? All product of public schools. All came from families of moderate means.