Parent-Child Negotiations

"R. Steve Walz" wrote in message
...
Nathan A. Barclay wrote:

I know this from personal experience as someone who had to be made
to go to school through most of elementary school, but who ended up
getting
a master's degree.
--------------------
Which has left you as stupid as any other deluded drop-out baptist
store clerk. You see, learning does NOT work if you don't WANT IT!

You didn't learn ****, you passed a feew tests superficially, and
then forgot it all and never applied it to your whole life!

LOL. You sink to new depths of absurdity yet again. Tell me, how well do
you think someone could do (in terms of percentile) on the ACT, SAT, and GRE
tests if all he did was pass a few tests superficially, and then forget it
all? Especially if he didn't bother to make any special effort to study for
the GRE?

"R. Steve Walz" wrote in message
...
Nathan A. Barclay wrote:

Accountability to government is failing miserably. Accountability to
individual consumers works much better.
----------------
Falsehood! The government IS MERELY the Union of All Consumers!
Anything more privatized and they have even LESS power!

No. A voucher system is based on the union of desires of all consumers.

What the public school monopoly system does is strain out minority desires
(unless the minorities have strong enough political clout), throw what's
left in a blender, and claim that whatever comes out of that blender is what
"The People" want even though far less than a majority want the particular
combination that came out of the blender.

I explained how weak "public control" over the public schools really is a
couple messages ago. I'll add back the material at the end of this message
in case you missed it the first time. (After all, you made no attempt to
refute it.)

an
education system that serves individual children and their families well
can be expected to serve the interests of society as a whole well in the
process.
--------------------------------
And vice versa.

Not true. The public school monopoly system has proven quite capable of
failing miserably for large numbers of children yet still claiming that it
serves the interests of society as a whole "well."

Are food stamps a violation of the will of the voters?
----------------
Nope, they voted for them.

So if we vote for vouchers, that overcomes your "will of the voters"
problem.

----
Excerpted from a draft version of _Are_Public_School_Monopolies_
Unconstitutional?_, by Nathan A. Barclay
----

At first glance, it seems self-evident that if schools receive public money,
they should be subject to public control. After all, what could be fairer
than having the people who pay for a school be the ones who control it? And
what could be more unfair than expecting people to pay for a school over
which they have no control?

But as we saw in the chapter on Equal Protection, this position completely
ignores the value of a child's time and a child's future. Parents may not
have significantly more money than anyone else invested in their children's
education (although school supplies do require at least some additional
investment), but once the value of children's time and the importance of
education to children's futures are taken into consideration, families have
more invested in their children's education than everyone else combined.

Even aside from that issue, however, the public's control over public
schools is often far more illusion than reality. In contrast, the degree to
which schools in a voucher system would have to reflect the will of the
public is vastly greater than it might appear at first glance. Indeed,
looking from the perspective of the entire public rather than just the
majority, a voucher system would reflect the will of the public far better
than the public school monopoly system possibly could.

The first problem with the idea that "public control" should go with "public
funding" is that the two uses of the word "public" involve radically
different meanings. When we talk about public funding, we talk about money
from all taxpayers. In contrast, public control reflects the will of only
the majority. Even when the democratic process works perfectly, up to half
of the taxpaying public is locked out of the control structure because their
side lost the election.

But the reality is much, much worse even than that. All along the path from
the campaign trail to the classroom, there is one landmine after another
waiting to blow up our ability to get what we want in the public schools.

The first of these obstacles stares back at us whenever we look in our
mirrors: are we ourselves willing to vote for what we really want? This
question may seem absurd at first, but it is not. Respect for the rights of
others is buried deep in the character of most Americans. When we recognize
that voting for what we really want would threaten the rights or legitimate
interests of others in some way, we often shift our votes to take their
interests into account.

That characteristic is admirable when we have no choice but to have
government impose a single decision onto everyone. But it tends to limit
our ability as individuals to get what we want for ourselves and for our own
families from a system controlled by government. The end result is that
while the public schools are less tyrannical toward minorities than they
would be if the majority insisted on getting exactly what they want, the
ability for the majority to get what they consider ideal for their own
children is compromised.

The second obstacle to public control is the question of who is running for
a particular office. Candidates tend to have their own agendas, and in many
cases, none reflects the preferences of the majority on every issue.
Further, most of us do not take the time to find out exactly where every
candidate stands on every issue. Thus, the difficulty of finding and
identifying candidates who agree with us across the entire spectrum of
educational issues interferes with our ability to get what we want.

This problem is even greater with regard to offices responsible not only for
education but also for many other matters. In elections for president,
governor, and federal and state legislatures, the combined importance of
other policy issues can easily drown out the question of which candidate's
education policies are most in line with our own views.

Third, assuming our candidate of choice wins an election, there is still the
question of whether the person we elected will actually deliver on his or
her campaign promises. It is not at all rare for political candidates to
mislead voters to varying degrees in order to get more votes. Lobbyists,
special interest groups, and bureaucrats can all pressure candidates not to
follow through on what the people who elected them expected them to do.
Legislators sometimes trade their vote on one issue for someone else's vote
on another issue, thereby trading away some of the desires of those who
elected them. Thus, voting for candidates who say they want something is no
guarantee that they will push the issue once they are in office.

Fourth, when government is involved, courts sometimes stand in the way of
getting what we want. Too often, choices that pose absolutely no problem at
all if chosen voluntarily become violations of minority rights when imposed
through a political process. Even the threat of lawsuits is often enough to
affect policies. Thus, ironically, "public control" sometimes results in
the exact opposite of its stated purpose by making it impossible for the
majority to get what they want in their own children's schools.

Finally, the fact that politicians make a policy is no guarantee that the
public school bureaucracy will implement the policy fully and competently.
Administrators at various levels may deliberately resist policy changes they
disagree with, or may adopt changes half-heartedly but not put in the effort
necessary to make them work properly, or may simply not be competent enough
to do a good job implementing what the voters want. In any of these cases,
the will of the majority is further diluted by the time it reaches the
classrooms. It is also entirely possible for individual teachers to resist
fully implementing policy changes that they dislike.

Even beyond the difficulty of having "public control" survive intact from
the campaign trail to the classroom, there is yet another very serious
problem with "public control." The control over education that parents
value most is their own control over their own children's education.
Further, parents know far more about their own children's needs and desires
and about what is going on in their own children's schools than they do
about the needs and desires of children they've never even heard of as
specific individuals and about what is going on in a school they've never
even driven past. Thus, parents are far more competent to exercise control
over their own children's education than they are over other children's
education.

When each family gives up almost all control over its own children's
education in return for tiny slivers of control over everyone else's
children's education, the average net result is an enormous loss of
knowledge and dedication. Control shifts out of the hands of the people who
know individual children best and who have the strongest motivation to make
good decisions for those children's education, and into the hands of people
who mostly do not know the children as individuals at all and have far less
reason to care about them as individuals.

On Wed, 23 Jun 2004, toto wrote:

On Wed, 23 Jun 2004 03:34:01 -0500, "Nathan A. Barclay"
wrote:

No. A voucher system is based on the union of desires of all consumers.

Excuse me? The public schools are paid for by all of us regardless of
whether or not we have children. Vouchers are not the union of the
desires of those who pay for the schools. In fact, vouchers are in
many cases the desire of parents who do not consume the services
of the public schools because they already pay for private school.

This is no different from government grants giving to college students
so that they can CHOOSE whatever college, public or private, to attend.
It's not true that parents use vouchers to pay for private school. In
many cases, vouhers can only be used if the school the children attended
has proven to be substandard. BTW, the teacher union is the one
vehemently opposed voucher. Do you happenned to be a teacher, Dorothy?

Doan

"toto" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 23 Jun 2004 03:34:01 -0500, "Nathan A. Barclay"
wrote:

No. A voucher system is based on the union of desires of all consumers.

Excuse me? The public schools are paid for by all of us regardless of
whether or not we have children.

I'm a bit skeptical about whether people who don't have children ought to be
regarded as "consumers" of the education system. As a non-parent, I have no
more than a few pennies invested in any one child's education. A child has
over a thousand hours per year of time, not to mention his or her future, at
stake. So I am clearly not a "consumer" in anything even halfway resembling
the same sense that the child is.

And while I might be arrogant enough to think that if I knew enough about an
individual child, I could often make as good or better choices regarding
that child's education than the child's parents could, I am certainly not
arrogant enough to think I can make better decisions for a child I've never
heard anything about - not even the child's name. The one area where I
might make an exception to that is in regard to determining what is "truth."
But freedom of religion says I'm not allowed to impose my religious beliefs
or viewpoints onto other people's children, and trying to use government
power to impose my version of "truth" in other areas would violate freedom
of speech and of the press. There might be special cases where what parents
want to teach a child is so dangerous that government intervention could be
justified - efforts to sow racial hatred, for example. But at least in
general, society is better off if we don't engage in the sin and tyranny of
taxing each other to impose our viewpoints on each other or on each other's
children.

Further, do you have any reason to believe that the desires of non-parents
are particularly different from those of parents? Except to the extent that
there might be non-parents who want something that no parents want, what
vouchers provide would still be based on the union of the desires of all
consumers because the desires of non-parents would be reflected by the
choices of parents who want the same things they do. In a voucher system,
the interests and desires of non-parents are represented in the choices of
parents who hold similar views.

Vouchers are not the union of the
desires of those who pay for the schools. In fact, vouchers are in
many cases the desire of parents who do not consume the services
of the public schools because they already pay for private school.

They ALREADY pay for a private school? The reason they have to pay out of
their own pockets for a private school is that government has created a
system that holds their children's education hostage, allowing the families
to get better (or even just different) education for their children only on
the condition that the family release the taxpayers from the taxpayers'
normal obligation to pay for their children's education. From where I sit,
in terms of practical effect, the role of government and the majority looks
an awful lot like that of kidnappers making a ransom demand.

A few decades ago, southern states used "separate but equal" as an excuse to
stick black children in schools that were in reality less well funded,
thereby saving the taxpayers money or (from a different perspective) making
more money available to educate the white majority's children at the black
minority's expense. That was not only despicable, but a serious violation
of the Equal Protection Clause as well.

Yet when we refuse to fund the education of children who attend privately
operated schools at all in order to save money, or in order to make more
money available for the education of the majority's children who attend
government-run schools, no one seems even to notice that there's a problem.
Worse, there are even many who try to portray taking advantage of a minority
for the benefit of the majority as a good thing.

If families who sent their children to private schools were all
millionaires, that might not be such a big deal. But there are families
with average and below-average incomes who scrimp and save to put their
children in privately operated schools while at the same time being forced
to pay to help educate children of millionaires in government schools.
Those cases are not only incompatible with the way stereotypes are often
used to pretend that the public school monopoly system isn't really unfair,
but are in fact the exact opposite.

If it could be demonstrated that government schools produce better education
than privately operated schools, or that children who come out of them are
better citizens based on objective criteria, a difference in funding based
on the difference in value produced could be justified. But I have seen no
evidence of the former, nor have I seen any actual EVIDENCE of the latter in
spite of all the claims made by the government system's supporters. In the
absence of such evidence, I see no reason why arbitrarily taking advantage
of a minority whose love for their children causes them to make a different
choice for their children's education should be considered less of a
violation of the Equal Protection Clause than arbitrarily taking advantage
of any other kind of minority for the benefit of the majority is.

"Doan" wrote in message
...

has proven to be substandard. BTW, the teacher union is the one
vehemently opposed voucher. Do you happenned to be a teacher, Dorothy?

Good teachers have nothing to fear from a voucher system, and I don't
especially like the implication that if Dorothy is a teacher, that would
give her a vested interest in opposing vouchers. That kind of language
helps to create an "us against them" mentality instead of trying to enlist
good teachers in support of vouchers. The people who really have something
to fear from vouchers are the union leaders and the teachers who aren't
doing a good enough job to justify their paychecks.

In most professions, people who do a good job neither need nor want a union
to negotiate for them. Professionals who are good at their work can choose
jobs that are willing to give them the pay and respect that the quality of
their work is worth - and, if it matters to them, to give them the freedom
to do their work the way they think it ought to be done instead of having
someone else micromanage what they do. Good teachers would have that same
kind of power and opportunity in a voucher system.

But for the union leaders, the situation would be a disaster. They wouldn't
have as many members to draw on (in some cases against the members'
preferences) for financial support and political clout. They couldn't make
demands during negotiations that are contrary to children's best interest
without driving families away and hence eroding their power base. Their
ability to use their union leadership roles to try to promote ideological
agendas that some families agree with but others don't would be seriously
diminished. So it's little wonder that the union leaderships do everything
they can to oppose vouchers.

And of course vouchers would also be a bad thing for teachers who aren't
doing a good job. Burned-out teachers with a lot of experience could no
longer command premium salaries just because they've been on the job for so
long. Incompetent teachers (and there are at least a few out there)
couldn't expect nearly as much protection against being fired; certainly not
in the private schools, and not in the government schools either unless the
government schools are in a mood to commit suicide. But in those cases,
what would be bad for the teachers would be good for the children - who,
after all, are the ones whose needs and interests the system ought to be
focused on.

Nathan

I'm a teacher-and I have nothing to fear from vouchers (I've turned down job
offers from private schools to stay in the public sector before now, and the
number of children won't change). However, I don't feel that they would be a
good thing for the students I teach. And therefore, I can't support them.

I teach inner city children. Most of my children come from families without
telephones, let alone cars. Parents either have to get groceries from small,
expensive neighborhood liquor stores which carry a limited selection, or
walk to the bus stop (about 10 blocks) and take a bus to a shopping area.
There are NO private schools anywhere nearby the neighborhood my children
live in. While most of the parents are concerned and want everything for
their child, they simply do not have the resources to take advantage of even
the limited school choice available within the city system (Memphis, has
both an excellent magnet schools program and intra-district school choice).
The only hope for these children is to improve the local, neighborhood
schools such that they can get a good education close to home.

My school offers classes and programming from 7:00 am to 7:00 pm-at no cost
to the parents. Two meals and snacks are provided free of charge or at low
cost (depending on income level). We provide all supplies, books, and even
uniforms at no cost to a low-income parent. Saturday school, tutoring after
school, and summer school are all provided, free of charge. Parents can have
their child's yearly physical and dental exams done on-site at the school,
via TennCare. All of these are things middle and upper class students
simply don't need-but if our kids don't have them, they may not be able to
learn effectively.

Until voucher schools will make the effort to reach out to these low-income
children and provide the extra supports they need, I can't support them.
Vouchers would help me, as a parent-because I'm definitely in the income
band where private school would be possible, but a stretch. They won't hurt
me as a teacher (and might open up more professional options). But, having
seen what needs my students come into the public system with, frankly I
don't expect any school who doesn't have to put in the work to serve these
students to do so. Whether schools should do so is an open question-but the
fact remains that these are services provided by public schools which are
allowing these students the chance of getting an education despite their
financial instability at home.

"Donna Metler" wrote in message
...

I teach inner city children. Most of my children come from families
without
telephones, let alone cars. Parents either have to get groceries from
small,
expensive neighborhood liquor stores which carry a limited selection, or
walk to the bus stop (about 10 blocks) and take a bus to a shopping area.
There are NO private schools anywhere nearby the neighborhood my children
live in.

The reason why there is no supply is that under current economic conditions,
there is nowhere near sufficient demand. In economic terms, "demand"
requires not just that people want something, but that they be willing and
able to pay for it. In neighborhoods where most families have very little
money to spare, in the absence of vouchers, there is no meaningful demand
for private schools unless a religious or other charitable organization is
willing to pay most of the cost.

But with a suitably funded voucher system, that situation would change.
Families could afford to send their children to private schools, and in a
market economy, a situation where a demand exists and a supply does not is
an opportunity. It wouldn't happen overnight, but over time, privately
operated schools would become available.

The bigger problem you raise is that your school has become so much more
than just a school. But do all the families the school serves need and want
all of those services? For example, if a family wants its children home at
the same time suburban schools let out, why do they need a school that is
willing to keep the child until 7:00 p.m.? Even if a lot of families need a
school that provides the extra services, is that a good reason to deny
choice to families that don't?

Further, the extra things your school does could also be done in other ways.
It might be a little less convenient for parents to have to take their child
somewhere other than school for dental care, but not enough so to pose a
serious obstacle. If money would be made available, private schools could
have after school child care and tutoring programs and Saturday programs
similar to what the government school offers, or such things could be
operated separately from the main school. Indeed, there might even be
capacity for at least some children to get their main education from a
privately operated school and then go to a public school for its other
programs, especially if the private school they attend is in another part of
town where such extensive programs aren't needed. (For that matter, the
same would also be true with public magnet schools and such.)

You write farther down, "Until voucher schools will make the effort..." I
contend that if a voucher system makes it possible for voucher schools to do
so, the laws of supply and demand will cause them to do so. Voucher schools
won't operate a program that costs $8,000 per year per child on a voucher
amount of $4,000 per year per child because doing such a thing is
financially impossible (at least without an awful lot of help from
donations). But if we set the voucher amount high enough to pay the costs
involved (based on what public schools would pay to provide a child with the
same things), the fact that a free market, like nature itself, abhors a
vacuum will produce its effect over time.

I'll also point out one last, huge difference between how government does
things and how the private sector does things. With government programs,
everything has to be solved from the top down. Thus, a person designing a
program has to have a clear picture in advance of what it will ultimately
look like in order to make sure it will work.

But with the private sector, problems are solved bottom up, often just a few
people at a time. That makes it a lot harder to say in advance what the
situation will actually evolve into over time, but it also means we don't
HAVE to say in advance. What happens will be what people's choices of what
they want, out of the options that it is practical to provide, cause to
happen. And as long as your public school is preserved essentially intact,
with voucher schools having to offer families something they like better in
order to draw away students, the result can be expected to do more good than
harm.

Nathan

"Nathan A. Barclay" wrote in message
...

"toto" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 23 Jun 2004 08:17:13 -0700, Doan wrote:

Do you happenned to be a teacher, Dorothy?

Yes, I am a teacher, but I am not a member of the NEA.

There are actually two major teachers' unions, the NEA and the AFT.
Should
we gather that you're not a member of either (if you don't mind my
asking)?


AFT doesn't seem to exist locally here. NEA does, but I'd say that its maybe
10-25% of teachers, at most. They lost a lot of support when they started
covering administrators-and, at least here, have a reputation for siding
with the district over the teacher.

I've never been a member of either. I carry a private professional liability
insurance policy (which actually gives me more coverage than the union
would), and everything else I leave.

"toto" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 23 Jun 2004 12:13:55 -0500, "Nathan A. Barclay"
wrote:

Good teachers have nothing to fear from a voucher system, and I don't
especially like the implication that if Dorothy is a teacher, that would
give her a vested interest in opposing vouchers.

I don't fear vouchers. To be honest as a teacher who worked in the
inner city, I would like to see *all* public school teachers go on
strike or for the public schools to be totally dismantled in every
case since for the most part it is on the backs of teachers who spend
for their own supplies that the schools are financed as well as from
those who cannot afford it.

Ask any teacher in the inner city how much they spend every year on
essentials for their classroom that is not reimbursed. You will find
that even though salaries are substandard, teachers are spending
about 1/10 of their salary to subsidize the things that the schools
should be buying - this can include copies, paper, pencils, notebooks,
and even books.

Then ask how it is that when a grant allows teachers to buy books that
are good, the administration is allowed to dump them after two years
because they want to go to books that are less difficult for
*everyone.* That was when I quit teaching in the public high schools
- when my honors classes were denied the books I had worked my
tail off to get through a grant.

I average $2500/yr on classroom expenses-and have written over $65,000 in
grants over the last 5 years. However, since I don't teach regular, tested
subjects, I have almost complete flexibility to use whatever materials and
methods I see fit as long as it meets the curriculum goals.



--
Dorothy

There is no sound, no cry in all the world
that can be heard unless someone listens ..

The Outer Limits

"toto" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 23 Jun 2004 08:17:13 -0700, Doan wrote:

Do you happenned to be a teacher, Dorothy?

Yes, I am a teacher, but I am not a member of the NEA.

There are actually two major teachers' unions, the NEA and the AFT. Should
we gather that you're not a member of either (if you don't mind my asking)?