I doubt government programs can ever achieve excellence. But we ought to be able to maintain mediocrity for a lot less money.
I've heard a lot of progressives say they want to go back to the Clinton tax rates. That would be a good deal if we could go also back to Clinton spending levels.

Irish: There's plenty of nonsense that gets peddled at public schools. Let's not make perfect the enemy of good, especially since inner-city districts aren't going to be a magnet for Christian fundamentalism.

" Right now, for instance, D.C. kids get up to $7,500 for vouchers. In comparison, D.C. spends about $28,000 per public school pupil. It’s disappointing, sure, that at least for now, voucher kids are scoring about the same as their public school peers on academic tests."

Getting the same results for less money? That's not disappointing; that's an improvement.

I went to Catholic schools from K through 10 and they were great schools (better than the local public schools). Having said that, I understand that the religious angle makes vouchers a tough sell. It would be great if vouchers were approved for non religious schools.

"I can't get behind giving my tax dollars to schools that teach creationist nonsense"

Having children who had both public and parochial education, I assure you, that "nonsense" also prevails in the public school system. Its more subtle than presenting something as creationism but I assure you the messages promoted by government schools are far more destructive to personal development than a religious interpretation of the origin of life.

Besides, are they "your" tax dollars? Where did "my" tax dollars go when my kids were in parochial school? I got nothing to support 65% of their education. Cost? About $5,000 per year, per child, less than half the amount of spent by my Boston public system. I paid twice then, no? And that is fair, how?

The reason why public school teachers, administrators and unions cannot possibly allow the expansion of vouchers is just this fact: You can get as good or better results at half their cost with vouchers and the broader this fact is understood, the worse prospects for them sustaining their monopoly.

reheiler: I was responding to Irish and that mindset on their terms.

I am pro-voucher, but Mrs Trinko's numbers are misleading. Walk into a debate with an opponent even slightly aware of the facts, and such a comparison would leave you looking silly.

The Short Story: A $7,500 voucher for one student cannot be compared to the average spending per student in a public school system.

Private schools receive donations (that public schools do not) and often offer scholarships from a tax-deductible fund. That means a person donating to a fund is supporting an education rather than paying those taxes to the government.

Further, Public Schools must accept all students, including those that cost extra to educate (such as those with learning or physical disabilities). Private schools have no such restrictions. In my home school district, we have a disproportionately large number of disabled students, and so the average spending is higher than in other districts.

Personally, I believe that if we actually crunched numbers, normalizing for the type of student and demographics, we would find the Voucher programs to be a better use of taxpayer money. BUT...Mrs Trinko's numbers do not prove this belief, and we cannot logically draw the conclusions she does from the numbers given.

General nonsense violates logic. Creationist nonsense violates separation of church and state. The latter is blatantly unconstitutional.

I support vouchers in the abstract, but when you do a little digging, or spend time launching a private school, as I've done, you quickly see that financially, offline, brick-and-mortar schools do not scale.

That is, there's no way to run a decent, self-supporting school that breaks even without at least two fo the following:

a) class size >30, and/or

b) minimum annual tuition of at least $11k, and/or

c) rookie teachers earning less than $40k per year.

Violate these three and you'll end up like the average California private school which, per the latest survey of some 171 such schools, found an average operating deficit of about -7% of total revenues.

The way most private schools deal with this quandary is to charge tuition north of $17k, keep class size under 20, and cover the gap with massive subsidies, ie private school endowments. Their are cheapo schools with teachers earning next to nothing, but these cater mainly to Indian expatriates who want their kids enrolled in a reading academy and couldn't care less if nearly everyone else in the class is from one ethnic background.

As to the parochial schools, they used to deal with the financial conundrum above by paying their nun and brethren teachers next to zip-- vow of poverty and all that-- and of course by owning the real estate, which will slash your costs by a few thousand dollars per student. But their pipeline of low-paid, talented working-class teaching talent has all but disappeared, so their model doesn't work anymore.

So really, you have to choose your poison. Personally, I'd opt for a), increasing the class size. The effect on reduced tuition is huge, given the fact that teachers' salaries and real estate will eat up 80% of your per-student cost. I've never seen ANY data that correlates educational achievement with class size beyond, say, the number of Plato's students sitting under a tree.

Once you get above 12 or maybe 15 kids, it really doesn't matter, so you might as well slash your costs by 10%, 20%, or even 30% and jack the class size up to 30 or more. The Koreans achieve spectacular results with 36 kids per class. So do the East Europeans and just about everyone else outside the US and W. Europe.

And then there's the value of, you know, t e c h n o l o g y in multiplying, augmenting, supplementing the teacher's classroom role. Give the kids cheap tablets-- not slate ones but Android ones for $100 each-- and let half the class do repetitive exercises while the other half gets the teacher's attention, then switch, rinse & repeat.

thibaud:"Give the kids cheap tablets-- not slate ones but Android ones for $100 each-- and let half the class do repetitive exercises while the other half gets the teacher's attention, then switch, rinse & repeat."

Didn't the DOJ just settle a pretty big lawsuit where Colleges tried to do that and were slapped for ADA violations because tablets are inherently discriminatory toward those with visual impairments?