Some questions regarding the current Douglas County School Board push for vouchers:
Would it be appropriate, much less legal, for the governing board of a public library system to allow current library subscribers, if they so chose, to receive library funds to rent DVDs from Netflix, Blockbuster, or the local video store down the street (do these still exist)?
I am, of course, trying to make an analogy to the current push by Douglas County school board members to establish a “scholarship” program whereby families would receive tax money dedicated to public schools to use as tuition at private schools. Is my analogy off the mark, or could we even apply it to other public services? Park districts, police and fire protection, maybe even our justice system?
Does the school board of Douglas County, or any school board for that matter, have the legal authority to establish a voucher system? Isn’t the purpose of public school boards to govern the public schools under their jurisdiction? I realize that public schools contract out some services to private companies, including contract schools. But the school board still “governs” those private companies ensuring that the private companies follow contractual obligations thereby ensuring the tax payer that funds are being used wisely and effectively.
Vouchers, used as tuition for private schools, are not “governed” by the school boards.
Does it matter if the funds used for vouchers come from the state or come from the local school district taxing authority? Can the state deny the use of state education funding for vouchers?
Are we ready to admit now that vouchers are not about improving student achievement? They are about an ideology that values choice, regardless of effectiveness?
My questions are not intended to be rhetorical in nature (Yes, they are biased in nature, can’t help that since I am not afraid to let my bias show). They are intended to further provoke the discussion about vouchers and for the dissemination of information. Please keep this in mind.
Popularity: 25% [?]
Solid points, let me ask is it appropriate for the income and sales taxes collected in this county to be redistributed to fund failure in the Denver Public School District? Especially since that district has a 50% (or there about) failure to graduate rate and has a huge amount of illegal aliens diluting the state’s general fund? Douglas County is seeking to be innovative; Denver Public School’s are poised to export failure on to its suburbs like so many other large city districts who suckle the money of those around them to lower the standard of all. My point is this is a small program in a district that is carrying more of the burden (cost of education than they should (Denver gets 4000 more per child this year alone) parents here are sick and fed up with state and federal redistribution formulas and mandates base on free and reduce lunch needs that are already addressed through the state’s welfare system. Vouchers allow children seeking an alternate education the chance to afford it. Is this an ideological argument, yes, many people are afraid of paying for Jesus in the classroom, and feel that public money should not be used for it. I am afraid of stupid in the class room and am tired of having my money redistributed to aford failure. It would appear we are at an impasse.
It seems to me that the people who support vouchers are often strong supporters of accountability. So my question is, where is the accountability in the proposed system? I might be willing to support such a system (or at least not complain about it) if the private schools that accept public money also accept public accountability systems, specifically CSAP (and its successor) and the provisions of SB191. Those are the conditions for receiving public education dollars for everyone else. Why should private schools taking public money get a pass?
David DiCario has data to support his sense of frustration with the performance of some districts in comparison to his own. We have some idea of what we’re getting for what we pay in Colorado. How will we know what we’re getting for the voucher dollars in DougCo and how will we know how those results compare to the results of the rest of that county and with the state in general? How will we know if the program is worth continuing or if it’s an unproductive drag on revenues?
Jeff,
The DCSD scholarship proposal as is requires CSAP participation of its students.
As far as comparing results before they exist, I think we need to have data to compare data. Therefore it would be impossible to know if a program is worth continuing if it never gets off the ground.
This must have also been the case in the mid 1800′s when public schools as we know them were designed. I am also theorizing that there were probably critics at that time who argued that they did not want their taxdollars going to something which future value was unproven.
Were they right?
Part of the frustration comes from top heavy government claiming that they know better than parents what their children need. CSAP and standardized testing does little good when successful districts are fiscally punished for their stellar results. If we are talking about accountability I say we start in DPS, i have more confidence in a private school education than I do for the one I am paying for in Denver. Denver should be accountable to the tax layers of the state and rebate funding based on drop out rates yearly. My point is that this is an ideological argument on meritts of institutions which are difficult to compare (private vs. Public) however, it is easy to compare teachers, students, funding and parental involvement between DPS and DCPS. Who has results? DCPS. Who has the money and gets more every year (percentage)? Denver. That is upside down to me because punishing success will breed failure. This is the paradigm we labor under. My children do and will attend public school regardless of vouchers, choice or scolarships are concerned, but I wish people in this county were as angry about blatant wealth redistribution as they are about choice. Most anti choice people I have spoke to have chastised me for not wanting to do my part for the wider world. Do my part? Of course I will do my part, but I will not sacrifice the future of my children on the altar of failure for anyone. A line has been crossed (fiscally) and choices, difficult choices have to be made. I feel education is a local issue and that is the way we must treat it. The fed and state have done nothing but allow the exportation of failure into our classrooms and removed the meaning of a quality education by filling the heads of children and their parents with pseudo entitled rubbish that cheapens its value. The responsibility rests in the hands of the parents and voter and we must choose the course carefully because the road ahead is unconventional, we too must be unconventional in our approach to it.
David, it’s pretty clear from your opening sentence where you are coming from.
It seems to me your wholly ideological approach is much more conventional than not and one largely discarded some decades ago. The states and countries of the world which display the highest levels of educational performance are ones with strong publicly-supported schools. I can’t seem to find anywhere that largely privately-financed and managed schools are the norm. Schools in world-leader Singapore are mostly public schools.
And why this antipathy towards DPS? What about Aurora, Adams, or Greeley schools? I can’t read a Denver Post article about DPS without people writing in about how much the Denver schools fail or the leadership is corrupt or other such overly critical language. Perhaps you could enlighten me.
@Jeff comparing US student with students across the world can be a quagmire. One we hear a lot about as of late is China or India, both of these countries educate only part of their children and then want to make comparissions to the rest of us. I am not entirely sure if Singapor falls in the same category, but rest assured I’ll find out. If we educated like these countries, nearly 1/2 the poPulation of DPS would evaporate over night. Personally my issues with DPS are as follows:
1) they benefit from the states lopsided funding formula that punishes success, according to this formula a duo 71% of all children in DPS qualify for free and reduce lunch and because of this they receive $4000 more per head. Now before inallow anyone to accuse me of being insensitive to hungry children I would point out that these children and their families either qualify or are receiving public assisatnce. So we are now paying for the same meal twice. Parents have a responsibility to care for their children and when the can not or hit hard times they have a responsibility to use the resources that their taxes support to better their situation. All this free and reduced lunch has done little good because apparenly no matter how welll fed these children are 50% will fail to graduate. Pumping in more money has yet to fix this fact. So now I am Paying to perpetuate a welfare system inside my public education system that is failing and in this recent culture of cut to education budgets my children are suffering as a result.
2) they are a school district who educated illegal alien willingly, but the tax dollars they are using to do this come from the rest of the state. Denver is a Sanctuary City so do what you want but not with my dime. Those children have no right to an education here in the US and they are diluting down the resources and tax dollars of the state not just DPS.
3) The Superintendent of DPS Tom Bosaberg is more concerned with the laws of Arizona (his boycott of AZ over their illegal alien laws is well documented) than he is about his own pathetic failure to graduate rates.
4) Denver is slowly exporting it’s failure onto is suburbs, the more they get the less communities who earn the money keep and the worse our schools become. Money is not what teachs children, good teachers do that, but a certain level of this is needed to maintain subsistence, Denver has far more than it’s share and is growing yearly. As an invested in their district through my tax dollars I feel I am getting a very poor return on my money.
there is a difference between doing ones part for the whole and covering yourself with parasites. DPS is a failure and a costly one at that.
Are you familiar with the Gallagher Amendment? TABOR? If you are and if you really crunch the numbers, placing your anti-immigrant ideology aside, you may find that school financing is indeed a problem but not for the reasons you claim.
“Who has the money and gets more every year (percentage)? Denver” – Ugh, I hate to break it to you but DCPS has the money, a lot more money, the same way the CCSD has the money. They’re both very wealthy school districts compared to DPS. I love the part about how people from wealthy school districts always complain about “wealth redistribution,” which is of course what vouchers are. Steal from the poor to give to the rich, and then complain about the poor performance of the poor school districts. Bill Gates, Michelle Rhee, & Arne Duncan idiocy aside, because of course neither they nor their kids have ever attended a day of public school in their life, poverty does matter, and comparing DCSD to DPS is comparing apples to oranges… (or in this case, expensive organic apples to to crappy free-school lunches)
Yes, taxpayers should be held accountable. But the children? Let’s say a horrific natural disaster hits Douglas County–one that overwhelms the county’s ability to handle it. Should surrounding counties refuse to let their tax money be used to help? No, of course not. Even if there was proof that the county might have somehow mitagated the disaster by having some early warning system in place, or could have shored up dams to limit the impact of a major flood, the state should rush in with resources. As should the state “redistribute the wealth” to DPS.
Are the children responsible for the struggling academic performance of their schools? Cut off or limit funds where they could do some good hurts the children, and many would argue, all of the citizens of the state when these children become adults. I do not think the future of your children will be adversely affected by the “redistribution of wealth.”
I understand your frustrastion, I really do. But unconventional should not mean punitive
Mark, the analogy you’re making doesn’t compare. A disaster in any area is a one-time cost. The redistribution of wealth to fund the underprivileged is a much different, ongoing and often over-priced luxury afforded to those who either cannot or will not, improve their own standing. I am often times ok with the government helping the underprivileged. But there needs to be a set of standards that does not allow for multiplicity of those funds.
David is simply arguing that on top of DPS’ already high $/student they are getting additional money from those school districts that are already using money in a more effective manner.
The crux of the issue is the lack of incentive system that has been established in the educational system (and everywhere else in the public sector for that matter). The better your school does, the less money you get per student. The less money you get per student, the more students you need to allow into the school to fund the current programs. The more students you allow in, the less time teachers have with each student. I think you can figure out what the logical next step is…
Skipper, can you show me an example of your scenario? I am hard pressed to think of an example where high performing schools started to underperform due to a constriction of funds due to their previous high performance. This certainly has not happened in Doug Co has it?
It is punitive right now that my children get $ 4000 less per year that DPS children do based on archaic formulas that use free and reduced lunch criteria to “redistribute” our money. These children in DPS benefit from welfare and food stamps and now additional money in the classroom, it is triple dipping in some cases for the same need and it is not making a positive impact, it is exporting their failure onto the rest of the state through fiscal terrorism. The pendulum has swung completely their way and the feel I have is that all children are equal but some children are more equal than others. I understand your points, but I must say that as a parent and a tax payer my children are more important to me than the whole. I must fight for what is fair and even for them. DCSD is 631 million in debt to ills bond and mills, that is 2/3rds of a billion dollars surpassed only by DPS, so the richest county (per capita) in the state has a debt the size of the larger county and district, why? Because Douglas Count is a net giver and loses it’s money to the funding formula then has to burrow it back at intreats to keep the doors open, that is the plain and unvarnished truth. An the insult to this injury is the county benefitting from out income taxes and sales taxes turns the cash into a 50% failure rate, then says the solution is to give them more money. Douglas County can help the state by paying it’s own way and keeping it’s tax dollars and education local. Denver needs to innovate and break it’s mold, doing the same old things gets the same old results and the question is how much longer can the rest of the state afford to pay their way. The natural disaster already hit in Denver, it’s is call 40 years of welfare mentality beating the drive out of parents and students because there is always the safety net to catch them, that is not the real world, sometime people fall. I would rather live in the rugged individualist world of Theodore Roosevelt than the smoke and mirror world of Franklin Roosevelt any day of the week and that is just what we have here with DPS, smoke and mirrors.
“Let the watchwords of all our people be the old familiar watchwords of honesty, decency, fair-dealing, and commonsense.”… “We must treat each man on his worth and merits as a man. We must see that each is given a square deal, because he is entitled to no more and should receive no less.”"The welfare of each of us is dependent fundamentally upon the welfare of all of us.”
Teddy Roosevelt. New York State Fair, Syracuse, September 7, 1903
David, can you give me some examples of how your children have been harmed or punished?
Oh Mark, I am sure you didn’t mean to compare ANY school system with a natural disaster?
That would imply that none of the adults involved in education, elected leaders or paid professionals, have any blame or responsibility for the state it is in. A disaster, I can agree with in some instances, but it is anything but natural.
I also don’t follow how the taxpayers are the ones to be held accountable for the outcomes of public education.
Isn’t that a bit like suing the patient for doctor malpractice because the patient paid for the health insurance?
I do have sincere compassion for children, regardless of which school system they are in.
Like many others I don’t mind paying for the common good of others.Although question remains if the funding as designed is going more toward common than the good? And also why is it that so much less is costing so much more in certain districts?
When it comes to comparing DPS and DCSD it is a bit like comparing Athens against Sparta. Although the Arthenians were not funding the Spartans and vice versa.
So back to the blog, why is it that you automatically assume that a private organization overseeing fiscal education expenditures would be doing a worse job than the government? Personally I believe there is good and bad examples in both arenas. I am also not sure why it is assumed that it is easier to hold the government accountable for outcomes than private organizations, educational, fiscal, or otherwise? If so, then why do we have the so-called (natural) disasters of failing schools and enormous debt?
Lastly, the library is not limited to media produced by PBS and NPR or other government entities. Just like Netflix, they also have material available for checkout that were produced by mainstream media–with one swipe of your publicly funded library card.
Are we ready to admit now that the government school monopoly is not about improving student achievement? It is about an ideology that values control and standardization, regardless of effectiveness?
Food for thought.
Using loaded terminology isn’t going to help.
Perhaps the vast majority people who run public schools are not motivated by ideology at all, even at the highest levels. It might seem that way though, to someone who does have a very pronounced ideological worldview. Perhaps these are decent people who are simply doing the best job they know how and that the problem of improving achievement is an inherently complex one. My guess is that there are so many cooks in the school kitchen that few districts or places in “local control” US can do more than try to maintain a stable-state when everybody and their cousin thinks they have an answer and wants to have things their way. School leaders are so busy trying to please everyone that no one is ever satisfied and continual a call for reform seems like failure.
To the ideologically-driven of any political bent, this behavior probably does look like the leadership is a bunch of agenda-driven control freaks. More food for thought.
“Using loaded terminology isn’t going to help.” I agree. Which is why I appropriated the precise structure and wording (replacing “vouchers” with “government school monopoly,” and “choice” with “control and standardization”) from Mark’s post to make a rhetorical point. All things being equal, though, I’ll take the side of “choice” as an ideology. I’m not interested in demonizing individuals of various positions nor in devoting any considerable attention to analyzing their complex motivations. I presume the vast majority of people operate according to rational self-interest and respond to incentives embedded in policies established at all levels. The challenge of education reform isn’t that simple, and it’s even less easy.
“School leaders are so busy trying to please everyone that no one is ever satisfied and continual a call for reform seems like failure.” One of those incentives at work. A problem that a consumer-centered, choice-driven system of public education would help alleviate. How do you make the system less political?
Great question, Ben. This deserves a thread all its own. “How do you make the system less political?” But I disagree that the vast majority operate on self-interest. Nations may do that and some number of people may do that but I would argue that there are many who never consider your libertarian take and are very motivated by more egalitarian and selfless drives. Plus, we all act like “self-interest” is itself a completely transparent idea or term when it is no such thing. You cannot assume others operate in accordance with incentives which are after all, created by various actors informed by various worldviews. A consumer-centered system would work in the sense that people and economic entities would make money. But that is all a capitalist system is interested in–the bottom line.
Is not one assumption of the market system of rational players that most if not all will have adequate (if not ‘perfect’) knowledge of the product and its instrumentality? You will have to convince me that the combined self-interest of the citizenry would have the where-withall to make the kind of rational judgments you suppose. If cable teevee is such a marketplace as you would have education, we are all surely doomed. Turning education over to the mythical free market will not make it less political because there will still be governmental regulations to consider. All markets are regulated. My best guess to reduce is to further professionalize teaching as we find in medicine. But this discussion could really get involved and very lengthy.
With flawed and fallen human characters, there is no such thing as a perfect education system. But a system driven by choice and competition (and dare I say it, even “the bottom line”) is freer and more adept to make needed changes than a system that relies on command and control. As the old saying goes, “The problem with capitalism is capitalists. The problem with socialism is socialism.” Having a completely free market is likely not achievable. Yet we are far from such an ideal and could make many significant steps toward a freer market while maintaining minimal regulation and accountability.
As to the problem of information, it’s not an artificial one. But it shouldn’t be a reason to resist choice. Rather, it should be a key reason to recognize choice isn’t a panacea and work to fill the gaps — as we have done with our SchoolChoiceforKids.org site. If you are interested in thinking more deeply on “how to make school choice work,” I recommend this excellent essay written by AEI’s Frederick Hess last fall: http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/does-school-choice-work
Cheers.
Where does the $4,000-more-per-head come from? The excerpt below is from an EdNews article.. According to DougCo’s own information, DPS receives $691 more per pupil than DougCo. In the meantime, again according to DougCo schools and this article, Boulder receives$1,553 more per pupil than DougCo because Boulder citizens have voted to tax themselves at higher rates to fund their schools while DougCo voters have not approved tax increases to support their own schools. So, the main reason why Douglas County Schools are funded at a lower level than surrounding districts appears to be that Douglas County voters have chosen to fund their own schools at lower rates.
“Douglas County voters have twice declined to approve tax increases for operating dollars in recent years, said Susan Meek, the district’s communications director.
One result is the amount of funding from operating increases, or mill levy overrides, has decreased in Douglas County from $700 per student in 2004 to less than $400 per student in 2010, Betz said.
At the same time, the district has added more than 14,000 students and, with more than 56,000 students, is the third-largest school district in the state.
Betz produced a chart showing Douglas County, one of the state’s most affluent districts, receives fewer dollars than other large metro-area districts in state education funding, which takes factors such as poverty into consideration. In 2010-11, for example, Dougco is receiving $6,541 per student compared to Denver’s $7,232 – a difference of $691.
Add dollars that districts currently receive for tax operating increases into the mix, and the gaps between Dougco and some other districts are even greater. Dougco receives $7,123 per student in both state funding and mill-levy dollars compared to Boulder’s $8,676 – a difference of $1,553.
Print
I would be curious to hear Mr. DiCarlo’s proposal for fixing DPS. I realize it would begin by deporting every student of Hispanic descent (regardless of whether they’ve ever been to Mexico or not) but after that, what? Poor white kids often don’t do any better than their “illegal” classmates. Should we – like China and India – only take on the task of educating the children who “deserve” it? (aka wealthy, white, christian kids)
That just doesn’t sound “American” (or very christian) to me.