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You should be extra cautious around any suggestion of voucher programs. We've heard them proposed for schools and we've heard them proposed for healthcare expenses. One fundamental problem with vouchers is that they are set to a fixed amount of money, but what happens if quality service requires more than that? Well, people just don't get quality service, right?... And that's the intentional gimmick. That's the goal. In the past the government might provide a service using tax dollars, then it switches to vouchers, but then when the vouchers don't provide enough cash now the service itself gets cut. And somehow it's supposed to be inevitable.
I was reading a study about education reform over the last 20 years and essentially the push for rewarding teachers based on student performance and voucher systems and the idea to make schools compete highly against each other, that's all totally failed to improve the quality of education in multiple countries. If you remember when Bush was pushing NCLB, one of the ideas was the notion that we should make teachers and schools compete just like businesses. But that actually doesn't make sense on a national policy level intuitively, because you don't want one school to be better than another, you want all schools to be better. (Or rather, I want all schools to be better, but some people have really f***** up values.) And then now there's solid data from large international groups that show our intuitions were accurate.
NCLB at face value isn't bad, and I wouldn't characterize it as a competition, but it had a few fundamental flaws. The biggest was punishing underperforming schools, which is just... really stupid, like how exactly is that going to make the schools better? The second was teach to the test, since we quantified (poorly) what education is. That enforced rote memory over critical thinking and reasoning skills.
My more personal gripe is statistical, though. Using cutoff scores without actually accounting for covariates (like previous scores) has also gotta be the worst possible way to track success. If a student is reading at a 4th grade level while in 10th grade, a school is punished if they read at an 8th grade level in 11th grade (a four year improvement!). Like, Jesus Christ, I'm so glad Obama admin at least fixed most glaring problems in 2015, cause yikes.
I'm with you. Education, in my opinion, is one of those things that's too important to leave up to private. I don't get the plan here, so really just trying to understand.