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Starting this fall, thousands of poor and middle-class kids will get vouchers covering the full cost of tuition at more than 120 private schools across Louisiana, including small, Bible-based church schools.
Quote:
The school willing to accept the most voucher students -- 314 -- is New Living Word in Ruston, which has a top-ranked basketball team but no library. Students spend most of the day watching TVs in bare-bones classrooms. Each lesson consists of an instructional DVD that intersperses Biblical verses with subjects such chemistry or composition.
This is what you get when you try to privatize.
Lots more of these bogus *schools* in the article.
Note the end of the article, btw. The private schools see this as an economic boon so they won't go out of business. I thought the competition was supposed to allow schools that didn't make it to go out of business.
The most disturbing thing about Louisiana is that the superintendent of schools personally visited every school and individually approved every curriculum.
So it is not like this schools snuck by. The SoS had personal knowledge of the curriculum and facilities of every one of these schools and personally approved them.
This has disaster written all over it. Instead of taxpayer money going to public schools, it will go to schools that have no current standards for accountability. I wonder how middle and working class families will feel about subsidizing these schools while paying out of pocket for their kids or seeing them stuck in public schools with declining budgets.
On the plus side, nice to see a shout out to the Dunham School as one of the top private schools in the state. Great people there.
Lots more of these bogus *schools* in the article.
Note the end of the article, btw. The private schools see this as an economic boon so they won't go out of business. I thought the competition was supposed to allow schools that didn't make it to go out of business.
Southern politicos have been trying to find a way around Brown v. Board of Education, Murray v. Curlett, and Engel v. Vital, the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 for years now. Vouchers for baby-sitting ventures finally has mainstream public approval and they did this by emphasizing the failure of underfunded public schools and the rush to establish "accountability standards."
Louisiana is not unique here. Many other states in the South and Midwest have been pushing vouchers for a long time.
Lots more of these bogus *schools* in the article.
Note the end of the article, btw. The private schools see this as an economic boon so they won't go out of business. I thought the competition was supposed to allow schools that didn't make it to go out of business.
From the article:
He pointed out that many kids applying for vouchers are now enrolled in dismal public schools where two-thirds of the students can't read or do math at grade level and half will drop out before they graduate high school. Given that track record, he argues it's worth sending a portion of the roughly $3.5 billion a year the state spends on education to private schools that may have developed different ways to reach kids.
The crazy, revolutionary idea here is that PARENTS will now have a choice where to send THEIR children. It's not my job to tell other parents how to raise their kids, any more than it's not anyone else's job how to raise MY children. If a parent wants their child to sit in a cubicle and learn about creationism and bible based information, so be it. As long as MY children aren't forced to do so, that's fine with me.
The crazy, revolutionary idea here is that PARENTS will now have a choice where to send THEIR children. It's not my job to tell other parents how to raise their kids, any more than it's not anyone else's job how to raise MY children. If a parent wants their child to sit in a cubicle and learn about creationism and bible based information, so be it. As long as MY children aren't forced to do so, that's fine with me.
Its not fine with me.
The same people who are pushing vouchers are the ones whining about our test scores on a global scale. The failure to educate children has effects for all of society. As a member of that society AND THE ONE PAYING FOR THAT EDUCATION we have the right to demand it meet certain standards.
If a parent want to pay for that for their child go nuts. BUT I AM PAYING FOR IT. If I and the rest of society have to pay for it, it better meet the minimum standards that society has set.
But what you want is for parents to choose, and society to pay. Not fair.
The same people who are pushing vouchers are the ones whining about our test scores on a global scale. The failure to educate children has effects for all of society. As a member of that society AND THE ONE PAYING FOR THAT EDUCATION we have the right to demand it meet certain standards.
If a parent want to pay for that for their child go nuts. BUT I AM PAYING FOR IT. If I and the rest of society have to pay for it, it better meet the minimum standards that society has set.
But what you want is for parents to choose, and society to pay. Not fair.
Hang on.
I don't want to be paying for the ineffective public schools we have NOW. We aren't meeting those minimum standards NOW. Throwing money at it hasn't helped....establishing a Dept. of Education hasn't helped.
I want parents to choose and pay. I absolutely DONT want "society" to pay. You may know nothing about me on CD, but I'm a firm libertarian. I'm tired of the socialist entitlement programs that do nothing but keep people dependent on the great "safety net". Parents (and kids) need to know that if they don't get an education, they won't get a job, and if they don't get a job, they won't survive, because there won't be "free" housing, food stamps, health care, etc.
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