From: thant@void.esd.sgi.com (Thant Tessman)
Newsgroups: alt.politics.libertarian
Subject: Re: Education (Re: Questions about the TEN POINT PARTY PROGRAM.)
Date: 28 Sep 92 21:47:25 GMT
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc.  Mountain View, CA


In article <ISBELL.92Sep28161301@panther.ai.mit.edu>, isbell@ai.mit.edu writes:

[... a huge opportunity to talk about the harm the FDA and agricultural 
subsidies have done that took amazing self-control on my part not to 
respond to ... (maybe later) ]


> Instead, I will ask again:
> 
> |> I really don't see any reason for this to happen one way or the other.
> |> Unless you address the problem of where the kids who want to leave
> |> some school and go to a "better" one go while they're waiting, it seems
> |> to me that they'll just stay where they are and nothing will happen.
> |> [...]
> 
> Are you positing supermarket schools?  A school on every corner as a
> solution?  In the interim, how would you prioritize your criterion
> such that you rank each child to determine who goes where?  Charge
> more?  test four year olds?  their parents?  go by proximity?

Your flaw in thinking is that you assume that things get done only 
when the government does them.  I have no idea how to run a pizza-
parlor or a car factory.  But they happen.  And there is ample evidence
(in the Soviet Dis-Union, for a blatant example) that the more government 
is involved in either of these activities the worse the results.

To assume that vouchers won't positively affect education is to assume
that parents do not value education and will not seek out positive
alternatives when presented with them.  This point is independent 
of the specific details of the opportunites themselves, which is 
why your attempts to drag the subject back to these details is 
nothing more than a cheap rhetorical trick.  No one knows *the* best
method for providing education, and I won't pretend to be able to
describe it.  And in fact it is the education establishment that has
for decades operated under the premise that there is one best way
to educate.

Your line of inquiry is far more enlightening when aimed at the education
establishment itself.  How can education be improved?  Real spending on
education (i.e. adjusted for inflation) has gone up by 40% a decade for
the last 40 years.  In 1983, the National Committee on Excelence in
Education put into motion such reforms as stricter attendance rules,
minimum grades for participation in extracurricular activities, stricter
conduct rules, longer school days, more competence testing, more
homework, higher teacher pay, and a longer school year.  Spending on
education since the reforms has gone up by 29% (corrected for inflation).
Since the reforms there has been little to no improvement in reading,
math, civics, and writing test scores.

What would you propose next?  What evidence is there at all that yet
more reforms and yet more money will do anything at all to improve
the situation?

On the other hand, what I can present to you is direct real-world
evidence that vouchers do work.  And I can even tell you why they work.
It is because when parents are given a choice, they do seek out better
education opportunites for their children.  Is this so hard to
understand?  Or are elitist prejudices at work here?

Following are two articles.  The first describes a school-choice 
system implemented in East Harlem, and the second describes the
results of Polly William's experiment in vouchers in Milwaukee.


thant

-------------------------------

Subject: Harlem Schools - Choice Works!
Summary: no more teachers no more rules
Date: 19 Jun 92 13:38:27 GMT
Organization: IBM AWD, Austin

The following article is abridged from the 6/13/92 issue of "The
Economist".  It describes what happens when a little capitalism is
injected into the morass of socialism which is the NYC school system.

Public schools in NY are reinventing themselves from the inside out.
The results are often astounding.

"The kids are going to have a great time," says Lorraine Munroe,
headmistress of the new school, "but we're going to work the snot out
of them." A likely assertion in most places; but this is central
Harlem.  NY's ghetto schools have plenty of challenges--too many,
usually, to bother adding academic performance to the list.

It is easy to see why.  NY's public school "system" has just under 1m
students.  The city teaches 36% of NY state's students, including 3/4
of the state's non-whites.  There are 900 schools, a budget of $7
billion a year.  6000 people work for the huge bureaucracy in Brooklyn,
all laying down decrees.

The result is that, before giving children the best possible education,
NY's public schools are expected to carry out the bureaucracy's many
"system goals".  School principals must provide programmes to satisfy a
welter of city, state and federal requirements.  They may not hire, or
fire, teachers of their choice; that is up to the head office and the
unions.

Lacking control, the best that many schools can hope for is to cajole
enough students into school to keep attendance records high.  This
usually means teachers demand little of their students if students
agree not to cause trouble.  It is unsurprising then, that just 54% of
NY school children graduate from high school, against 73% nationwide.

So what to do?  Well, over a decade ago in East Harlem, the school
district had decayed so far that the school board, in effect, gave up
on it.  This allowed the district's schools to rearrange themselves
into schools of "choice".  That is students and parents could pick
among schools that offered a range of teaching methods and vocational
or specialized training ( known as magnet schools.).  School
principals, in turn, were able to control their own curriculums and to
recruit the teachers they wanted.

Children were expected to work hard, and the results showed.  At one
school in East Harlem, 80% of the children performed above standardized
reading test for their grade.  Before "choice", the figure was 3%.  In
1974, East Harlem was 32nd out of 32 school districts; in 1988, it had
climbed to 8th.

The East Harlem model is spreading across the city.  There are now 20
magnet schools, many of them on the sites of failed neighborhood high
schools.  The manhattan Centre for Science and Math recently replaced a
basket case, the Benjamin Franklin High School.  The new school
graduated its entire 1st class, and sent them all to college.  The
earlier school graduated 7% of its students.  A growing number of high
schools have devoted a wing to specialized schooling, be it training in
health care, finance or drama.  The enthusiasm of these wings palpably
affects the rest of the school.

The array of schooling options starting to become available in NY has
alarmed even some of the most vocal fans of school choice, who thought
the phrase signified a return to "traditional" schooling.  Some are.
Mrs. Munroe (who is building a high school, the Frederick Douglass
Academy, from scratch) believes rigorous testing is the best means of
assessment.  "Munroe does not let children fail," confides an admiring
teacher, "she beats them until they learn."

In Central Park East secondary school, on the other hand, classes are
rowdy and chaotic.  They last a half day rather than the standard 43
minutes.  The classes merge a range of subjects, and the noise is just
enthusiastic collaboration.  Fourteen year olds show an impressive
grasp of detail as they argue the merits of evolution over the 1st
chapter of Genesis, or as they calculate the forces on a computer drawn
suspension bridge.  Yet 1/4 of them live with neither parent; 1/2 are
on welfare; and all have been affected on way or another by drugs.

In aptitude tests, these schools' black students score 40% above the
mean; in other neighborhood schools, 30% below.

An effective response to the urban schooling problem, therefore,
already lies within its public sector.  This is not lost on NY's kids.
According to Robert Crain, a sociologist at Columbia, 80% apply to some
kind of special public school.  There is room for less than half.

The rest must attend neighborhood schools, even though these do not
deserve to exist.  Too bad the NYC School Board hasn't noticed THAT.

---

  Inner City Kids: Why Choice Is Their Only Hope
  by A. Polly Williams, State Representative, Wisconsin

  Since 1976, Milwaukee has been under court order to "racically balance"
  its public schools. Now, there are about one hundred-thousand school-age
  children in this city. Approximately 70 percent are black or belong to
  other minorities. How do you "racially balance" a system in which 70
  percent of the population is made up of minorities and only thirty
  percent is white? How do you justify the millions of dollars that the
  federal and state government are paying the schools to acheive this
  impossible goal?

  The same court order mandates that only 30 percent of the teachers can be
  black. "Racial balance" is the goal once again. But if the city is 70
  percent minority, where are the non-black teachers supposed to be coming
  from? And why are black teachers who want to work in the inner city
  prevented from teaching?

  Below are some maps that will show what happens when the government and
  the courts try to force "racial balance." [Two diagrams containing each
  of a hundred and four different schools. The first has bus routes between
  a single schools and the others. The second has bus routes between three
  schools and the others.] In the first map, the small circle is an
  inner city school, and every one of the round black dots represents one
  of the other schools in Milwaukee. Under the "racial balance" plan, black
  children who would ordinarily attend the inner city school in question
  are bussed all over the district -- to a hundered and four different
  schools.

  Historically, blacks have demanded equal opportunity education; what
  they've gotten instead is forced desegration. What do blacks want? We
  want the same thing whites want. We want our kids educated in their own
  communities. Yet look at the second map, showing the bus routes for just
  three schools. (Imagine a map showing the bus routes for over one hundred
  schools!)

  Better than anything, these bus routes show the chaos and confusion
  caused by "racial balance." They also show corruption: the government
  pays the educrats an extra thousand dollars in desegregation funds for
  every new route. For the last decade and a half, forced busing in 
  Milwaukee has cost taxpayers $335 million.

  Public Schools: 90 Percent Failure Rate

  In the meantime, the public schools are failing to educate our children.
  Sixty percent of all Milwaukee ninth graders do not complete high school,
  and of the 40 percent who stay in the school and walk accross the stage
  to receive their diplomas, only 10 percent can read. For what amounts to
  a 90 percent failure rate, we pay $600 million a year to support the
  Milwaukee public schools -- that averages out to about $6000 per student.
  The educrats keep saying, "You've got to give us more money, because it's
  tough to educate these inner city kids. They are poor, and they are
  raised by single mothers; we can't expect them to learn...."

  That's the stereotype: poor black children are slow learners, difficult
  and expensive to educate. Well, my children were raised in a single
  parent home. My husband and I divorced when the eldest was thirteen and
  the youngest was five. After the divorce, five of us had to live on my
  salary, which was only $8,000 a year. And we did live on it, though we
  were certainly living below the poverty level. According to the educrats
  and all the experts defining who we were, my children *were simply not
  supposed to make it*. I am happy to tell you that the educrats were
  wrong, because my children *did* make it and they were not stereotypes.

  But poor black children *do* share a major disadvantage. Unlike those
  whose parents can vote with their feet and enroll in good private
  schools, poor black children are forced to go to the school the
  government selects for them. That's not right. We're supposed to educate
  *all* children, because if we don't educate them we're going to
  incarcerate them -- Wisconsin, for example, has eight new prisons on the
  drawing board, but no new schools. The state should be encouraging the
  establishment of more private schools and more public schools and more
  private businesses -- giving children basic academic skills and putting
  adults to work instead of giving them endless social programs. Blacks
  want to learn and to earn their way just like everybody else. We don't
  want welfare that just puts us back on the plantation -- this time the
  government plantation.

  And blacks don't want their children to be forced to attend public
  schools if there are better alternatives. In the Milwaukee public school
  system, 62 percent of the teachers and administrators refuse to send
  *their* kids to the public schools. This flight from the system has had
  ironic results. When 23 suburban public schools were recently in danger
  of closing due to low enrollment, black children were simply bussed in,
  and the state gave the schools an extra $12,000 for each. So, the
  failing suburban public schools received a guaranteed source of students
  and more than $22 million a year in additional government funding.

  Private Schools and Parental Empowerment

  I opposed forced desegration from the start. I wanted what most parents
  want: for my children to be educated in their own community. At the same
  time, there were about a dozen private schools in the inner city of
  Milwaukee. They were previously Catholic institutions that had been
  reorganized as private nonsectarian academies, and they were a wonderful
  alternative for low-income and minority students -- predominantly blacks,
  but also Hispanics, Asians and whites. They allowed students to get a
  good education in their own neighborhoods with teachers who really
  believed in *them*, rather than the educrats' stereotypes. What's really
  impressive is that these private schools had a 98 percent graduation
  rate.

  But they couldn't get by on the tuition they charged, and although
  successful, they were in danger of closing their doors. Meanwhile, the
  public schools were getting millions of our tax dollars whether they did
  a good job or not. So a few years ago, a small group banded together and
  approached the state legislature. We said: "Why not allow tax dollars to
  go to the schools that *are* working?" We didn't know that vouchers had
  already been defeated in every other state where they'd been proposed,
  we didn't even call our proposal a voucher plan; we called it "parental
  empowerment" or "choice." Meetings were organized to discuss our
  proposal. We hoped to attract a few dozen people, but hundreds of
  enthusiastic parents began showing up and staying for sessions that ran
  on for hours. This shocked public schools officials, especially since
  they couldn't get more than a few parents to any of *their* meetings.

  People often fall into the habit of saying, "How do you get the poor
  involved in the education of their children? They just don't care, or
  they don't know enough to make 'intelligent' choices." But in reality, if
  you give them a sense that they can make a difference in the lives of
  their children, if you give them some power, you'll find out that poor
  parents can care more than anyone. They don't take education for granted.
  they know that education is the only way out of poverty. And when you
  empower people and give them a sense of ownership, they become
  responsible, and they learn how to make decisions. And when they are
  treated with dignity and respect, they respond to it.

  Choice empowers parents. It allows them to choose the best school for
  their children. It doesn't say, as the educrats do, that poor people are
  too dumb (they use the word "uninformed") to make choices. Poor people
  are the same as rich people. They may not have much money, but they have
  the same desires and the same needs. And poor people make decisions all
  the time. They decide where they are going to live, what grocery store to
  buy from, where to shop for clothes -- they decide everything, but all of
  a sudden, the educrats claim that they don't have enough sense to make a
  decision about the education of their children.

  But the teachers' unions, the NAACP, the bureaucracy, and the educational
  establishment didn't agree. In the name of protecting the poor, they all
  opposed choice. We didn't try to beat them -- they were too powerful.
  Instead, we went directly to the parents, and we organized the community
  from the grassroots level, from the bottom up. And they kept coming to
  our meetings by the hundreds -- even the Joe Six-Packs and the Archie
  Bunkers. Republicans, Democrats, Jews, Catholics, Protestants and Muslims
  publicly spoke up in favor of the plan, even when it had nothing to do
  with their agendas.

  When we proposed choice, the parents in the audience said "Are you
  serious? You mean we an take our children out of public schools?" They
  began showing up and sitting in the galleries at the state capital and
  watching the legislators, who, for their part, were shocked that the
  parents were there. Like the educrats, they also believed that the poor
  didn't care.

  And to everyone's surprise, the parental empowermet bill -- the first in
  the U.S. -- passed into law. Starting in the 1990-91 school year, up to
  1000 students could claim $2500 worth of tuition vouchers (a fraction,
  of course, of the per-student expense at public schools). This year, one
  private school had 600 applicants for 100 openings. Every private school
  in the inner city has a waiting list. Hundreds of low-income families
  want out of the public school system. Those who have succeeded in getting
  out are spreading the word: Their children, two to three grade levels
  behind in the public school, are now working at their grade levels. Once
  always absent, they are even refusing to stay home sick! A typical
  reponse is, "Please don't make me stay home -- my teacher is expecting
  me." There are no gang problems and only a two percent drop out rate.

  Sure it's only one thousand in a city that has one hundred thousand
  students, and the educrats are fighting the bill in the state supreme
  court, but I think it's a real victory -- and we've only just begun. If
  the poor people of Milwaukee can acheive something no other group in the
  nation has been able to do, then anything is possible.



Reprinted without permission from:
  Imprimis
  Hillsdale College
  Hillsdale, MI  49242