School vouchers
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Voting Style: | Open | Point System: | 7 Point | ||
Started: | 1/5/2008 | Category: | Politics | ||
Updated: | 14 years ago | Status: | Voting Period | ||
Viewed: | 7,239 times | Debate No: | 1404 |
Debate Rounds (3)
Comments (10)
Votes (8)
School vouchers are great. They reward hard working students at bad school with the opportunity to go and get a good education at a decent school, it's not being prejudice it is rewarding good students. Privatizing the school system is a great idea.
I believe public education is already vastly underfunded. As you say, these students who would get vouchers are at "bad schools"-- this is because of poorly allocated funds. What would deem a "good student" when the bad students are often bad because of the poor quality of their schools? I agree that schools ARE in bad shape but the answer is not to give vouchers but to more properly fund our public schools. |
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it has been proven that sinking more money into schools does not help. We need to create competition. WE need to let the students decide what school they want to go to, if the school has bad teachers and they get bad test scores you send them to another school and and the bad school has to close.
Please provide evidence that "sinking money" into schools doesn't help. Better funding can provide new textbooks, computers, and an overall improved learning environment. If you see the difference between an inner city public school and a rich community's public school, you will know it is money that is the issue-- private schools function well because of the money they have, and public schools that do poorly are severly underfunded. Teachers at some schools get paid essentially $10 an hour for while their at school and a lot of unpaid hours for their grading and other work they do outside of the building. Increasing salaries would increase moral and therfore how they're teaching. Along with that, many text books are outdated (my textbook in public school for World History had a map of the Soviet Union) and made to appeal to sometimes entirely different generations. Public schools lack new technology-- they need more computer labs and better libraries. I'm afraid I don't see your logic. In your opening statements you said good students would be able to leave bad schools, and now you're saying that bad students would put into the private schools. Private schools can still reject bad students, so closing schools that aren't doing well will not be effective and just overcrowd the other public schools. In the end you would be dooming the students who are already struggling even more. |
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No, if we privatize schools it will create "competition"; i know that's a horrible word for our children to hear, but we need to stop the cycle of the teachers unions not working hard enough for our children's education.
But what would determine the competition? And would those who "lost" in the competition be stuck in even more underfunded schools? I understand you are interested in the idea of vouchers but I don't think you understand what they would entail, or at least the type you're implying. The difference between private schools and public schools is mostly that private schools have a lot more money, so instead of offering The $20,000 for one student to go to a private school, why don't we give the money to public schools? Vouchers would exclude all the people that the school system really needs to help, and if the government were ever to actually spend that much, it'd be much more beneficial to go to public schools. |
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8 votes have been placed for this debate. Showing 1 through 8 records.
Vote Placed by tarsjake 13 years ago
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Vote Placed by raptor10 14 years ago
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Vote Placed by Farooq 14 years ago
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Vote Placed by Stoogy 14 years ago
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Vote Placed by Robert_Lee_Hotchkiss 14 years ago
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Vote Placed by l2jperry 14 years ago
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Vote Placed by miraquesuave 14 years ago
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Vote Placed by mindjob 14 years ago
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A poor person however, wouldn't have anything to add to the voucher. To make matters worse the vouchers given to the middle class parents would cause inflation in the education market. The poor students would be getting much worse schools than the wealthy which would just exasperate the already growing class system in the states.
The most likely outcome would be that the poorest students and those with disabilities and discipline problems would be left in virtually unfunded schools that would be virtual hells on earth.
Some things just don't work in a market system. Imagine if the military gave vouchers for gear. The rich people would be riding in tanks and the poor people would be wearing paper hats for helmets.
Similarly we want students tor receive funds according to their needs not according to their parent's income level.
sorry your comment seemed a lot more informed at least than your comment so i didn't realize it was the same person
It is impossible to instill true competition in education because that entails accurately judging each school and student while on even ground. Standardized tests are imperfect at best, and judging an inner-city school against a wealthy suburban school is just stupid. Would you judge the quality of a dentist based on the number of cavities that his clientele have, regardless of the education level surrounding his practice and their ability to maintain good oral hygiene? I would certainly hope not. What voucher supporters tend to do is hand public schools a fixed deck and then wonder why they can't win. They get underfunded while surrounded by violent and poor neighborhoods, then you claim they are hopeless and inferior to private schools and therefore take even more money from them in the form of vouchers.
When the proper reforms are implemented, such as reinvesting in talented and motivated teachers and administrators and renovating the schools so they don't look like prisons, in addition to a more rigorous curriculum, public schools perform on par or better than private schools, largely because public schools are held to higher standards than private schools. To claim that private schools are better is largely just a guess since private schools don't have to take the same tests as public schools. Without this knowledge, how are parents suppose to make informed decisions?
To give you an idea of how competitive American schools are and how U.S. students performed compared with their European counterparts, we gave parts of an international test to some high school students in Belgium and in New Jersey.
Belgian kids cleaned the American kids' clocks, and called them "stupid."
We didn't pick smart kids to test in Europe and dumb kids in the United States. The American students attend an above-average school in New Jersey, and New Jersey's kids have test scores that are above average for America.
Lov Patel, the boy who got the highest score among the American students, told me, "I'm shocked, because it just shows how advanced they are compared to us."
The Belgian students didn't perform better because they're smarter than American students. They performed better because their schools are better. At age 10, American students take an international test and score well above the international average. But by age 15, when students from 40 countries are tested, the Americans place 25th.
American schools don't teach as well as schools in other countries because they are government monopolies, and monopolies don't have much incentive to compete. In Belgium, by contrast, the money is attached to the kids -- it's a kind of voucher system. Government funds education -- at many different kinds of schools -- but if a school can't attract students, it goes out of business.
Belgian school principal Kaat Vandensavel told us she works hard to impress parents.
She told us, "If we don't offer them what they want for their child, they won't come to our school." She constantly improves the teaching, saying, "You can't afford 10 teachers out of 160 that don't do their work, because the clients will know, and won't come to you again."
"That's normal in Western Europe,"