In article ,
wrote:
On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 02:13:52 +0000 (UTC), "Bob Coleslaw"
wrote:

Is it better for the government to give out vouchers so parents can
send their kids to private schools, or to use that money to fix up the
public schools?

Bob Coleslaw

The latter.

As I have stated often, if you gave me an unlimited amount
of money and an unlimited amount of power, I could not fix
up the public schools in less than a generation.

This is a time when we do not need a central plan. The
main problem of the public schools is the idea that all
children should learn essentially the same; this was
introduced about 70 years ago, and is now
institutionalized. Most parents who do not have gifted
children would want anything else, and we have had cases of
parents objecting to their children not getting in honors
classes, often with disastrous results.

Unless we can make it very expensive for teachers and
administrators to ever hold a child back because of age,
and make "No child left behind" to mean "no child left
behind what that child can accomplish", there is no
hope for the public schools. The differences in mental
abilities dwarfs those in physical abilities.
--
This address is for information only. I do not claim that these views
are those of the Statistics Department or of Purdue University.
Herman Rubin, Department of Statistics, Purdue University
Phone: (765)494-6054 FAX: (765)494-0558