More on Vouchers
By OK, a little poking around found that the Cleveland voucher is now worth up to $5,000 per student, which is much closer to what the average per student funding is for public school students. And no schools have popped up.
It’s actually really expensive to run a school. The only way to break even with $5 – 7,000 is if you have packed class rooms. The church schools are able to function with low tuition levels and small classes, because they are subsidized by the church and they pay the nuns nothing.
To fill all those seats in the classroom, all the kids in a community would have to be eligible for vouchers and also use them. A education venture capitalist couldn’t make it in a community that had a competing public school system that drew away 50% of the population.
Right. And as I said in the previous voucher thread, even more problematic is that fact that the point is not to have private schools, but to have good schools. The invocation of private schools by voucher proponents can carry the suggestion that students will be able to attend high-performing, established private schools, but of course that won’t happen. It is much less obvious that newly formed private schools, with fewer resources to attract good teachers, provide facilities, etc. than both good private and good public schools in the metropolitan area and charged with educating mostly poor children will do a good job. Which, again, compels the conclusion that any remotely politically viable voucher program is likely to have an utterly trivial impact.
Dana has more. I’d be interested to know how many conservertarians purportedly defending the the interests of poor children oppose the funding of schools through local property taxes rather than through general state revenues, an obvious engine of inequality.