From: nate@psygate.psych.indiana.edu (Nathan Engle)
Subject: Re: Chelsea's school ...
Organization: Psych Department, Indiana University
Distribution: usa
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 1993 17:01:53 GMT

mike@execu.execu.com (Mike McCants) writes:
>Nathan Engle writes:
>>    To me Bush's "School Choice" plans sound a lot like a bunch of 
>>disgruntled parents wanting to suckle up to another governmental teat.

>So far, Wil or I (or both) have taken issue with nearly every statement
>in your post except this one.  So I'll give this one a try.

    Actually I've been surprised that it took so long for people to react 
to that one. Ever since Rush started expounding his analogy of government 
as a sow I've been looking for chances to turn the analogy on its head.

>I am also going to claim that fairness ought to require that any
>public school student should be able to transfer to any other
>public school in the same system REGARDLESS.  (Normally this is
>forbidden of course.  We wouldn't want parents/kids to be able to
>choose which public school they attend.  That would be competition!)

    Actually in Indiana there's a program that's just started which will 
allow parents to choose to send their kids to a "magnet" school (presumably 
a school that excells in some area). It's certainly not down to the level 
of being able to go downtown on Monday and to the suburban school on 
Tuesday, but it *is* moving in that direction.

>So, I think your "sounds a lot like a bunch of disgruntled parents
>wanting to suckle up to another government teat" is way off base.

   Perhaps so, but not (IMHO) much more than Rush is off base when he 
tries to use the same analogy.

>I think that "competition" would "require" public schools to improve
>or close down and that's why it would be good.  And school vouchers
>is one good way to foster competition.

    Allowing parents to choose magnet schools is another.

>I guess we "right-wingers" just have too much faith in "competition".
>Please explain to us again why this kind of competition would be
>a terrible disaster compared to the current terrible disaster.

    The reason I think that it would be a bad idea is that our public 
schools are a "safety" net into which most of our "disadvantaged" students 
are placed. The sort of competition that you're describing would very 
likely result in a long-term improvement in private and parochial schools, 
and that might even lead to an eventual improvement in the public schools, 
but there's going to be a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth in the 
process (and a lot of kids would be even worse off than they are now).

    Back during the Gulf War there were a lot of peacenik types going 
around talking about stopping the war by withholding funding. As I recall 
Rush criticised these people very severely, even going so far as to call 
them unpatriotic and/or unamerican. I have to wonder, in light of the 
arguments that have been proposed here, what the reaction would have been 
if the peaceniks had tried to argue for the idea of "Defense Vouchers" 
which they could elect to spend on whatever form of national defense they 
thought was the most effective? I might also wonder what would be the 
reaction to the idea of "Transportation Vouchers" to allow people to 
elect just which potholes they want to have fixed. I'm not saying that 
either of these propositions would be good ideas, but I do think that it's 
a double standard to hand money to the Pentagon with the insistence that 
Pentagon experts determine how the money should be spent, but when we hand 
money to educators all the sudden we want everybody to have individual 
control.

--
Nathan Engle                        Software Juggler
Psychology Department               Indiana University
nate@psygate.psych.indiana.edu      nengle@copper.ucs.indiana.edu
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