Hypocrisy of the Voucher Opponents

While we're hot and bothered about education policy, I thought I would add another log to the fire. From Megan McArdle,

I very rarely get angry about politics. But every time I see some middle class parent prattling about vouchers "destroying" the public schools by "cherry picking" the best students, when they've made damn sure that their own precious little cherries have been plucked out of the failing school systems, I seethe with barely controllable inward rage. It is the vilest hypocrisy on display in American politics today.

Comments

[Amy P]

Hypocrisy is overhyped as a sin these days (and righteous indignation is overhyped as a virtue), but I loved this phrase of MM's:

"the lesser sin of viewing real estate purchases as the natural vehicle through which one should excercise educational choice."

That's a very striking way to put the question: why should the purchase of a half million dollar piece of real estate (or equivalent rent) be your passport to a quality education? I could think all day about that without coming up with anything that holds water besides "they paid for that school, so they deserve it" or (as a number of people said on MM's thread) "if there were more minority children, it wouldn't be a good school anymore."

As I've said before, in a world where you can buy one song at a time, mix any paint color you want, and order things like a half-caf iced soy latte, there's no way that the live-in-neighborhood-send-child-to-neighborhood-public-school paradigm is going to hold up. Choice is the order of the day, and eventually parents are going to get it. They may want before care, after care, SAT prep, wall-to-wall AP courses, vocational courses, soccer, lots of time for music practice and instruction, homework help, math-science emphasis, foreign language immersion, community apprenticeships, scripture (whoops! public school! must remain ignorant of foundational texts of Western civilization!), arts emphasis, public service emphasis, International Baccalaureate, whatever.

[Doug]

"the vilest hypocrisy on display in American politics today"

McArdle brings teh funny. Question for the observers: wittingly or unwittingly?

[Amy P]

Well, there is a long list of major American political figures who sing the glories of public education while make good and sure that their kids don't get any (especially that offered by the District of Columbia). The issue comes up now and again, but I don't think they get nearly enough heat for it.

[Elizabeth]

I'm a reluctant supporter of vouchers for that reason -- while I don't think that they're a substitute for systematic school improvement, I don't believe that we've got a right to hold kids hostage in failing schools while we wait for the systematic improvements.

That said, I think most voucher supporters are also hypocrites -- while there are some who are truly concerned about poor kids, most of them are primarily interested in promoting the free market as the solution to all of the problems in the world and beating up on the teacher's unions.

[Doug]

That's a long, long way from "the vilest hypocrisy on display in American politics today."

[Tex]

Does anyone who opposes vouchers care to defend the hypocrisy to which McCardle refers? I’ve generally attributed it to a belief that the government knows what’s best for everyone, especially poor people. Therefore, the government will only spend tax money (your money) on what it thinks is best for you. Very condescending.

Or, in the case of politicians, pure unadulterated politics since they would hate to lose control of another government bureaucracy and because support from the NEA is crucial.

[Amy P]

Elizabeth,

I don't see the hypocrisy there. Isn't it possible to both think that the free market can generate a lot of neat solutions (in education and elsewhere), while also caring about poor kids? It's not necessarily an either or situation. The free market would be the means, and helping poor children would be the end. Plus, might one not honestly believe that teachers' unions have done for American education what the automotive unions did for GM?

I think that the situation with US education is very similar to US health care. If you are mostly happy with what the current system provides you, you don't want to rock the boat, especially if you suspect that any new, more equitable solution won't be quite so nice for you as the old system. In the case of education, there is a huge and very literal investment in the status quo. The fact that some schools are seen as better makes homes in those neighborhoods immensely valuable, and breaking the connection between neighborhood and school could lead to the loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars in value. (Of course, this would be most noticeable in high-cost areas.) In the face of that financial risk, it's not surprising that vouchers haven't gotten off the ground.

How to break out of this stalemate? I think at least part of the solution is pointing out that a lot of suburban schools aren't actually all that great, compared with what they could be, given the resources that they consume, as well as continuing to create more diverse school models.

[Siobhan]

Well, there are a variety of voucher plans out there. If we're referring to the ones that would give parents a fixed credit to spend on private school, well, what a disaster that would be: the price of private school would be driven up, and the poor families who couldn't afford to pay anything beyond the credit would be left in the resource-drained public schools.

Live by the free-market-solution-to-everything, die by it.

[Amy P]

Doug,

Well, imagine a captain reassuring his passengers that his sinking ship is doing fine, meanwhile lowering a lifeboat and escaping to safety while they all drown. That's a really harsh analogy, but it's in some ways well deserved.

[Doug]

Actually, I prefer to imagine a former mayor of New York saying that whether or not waterboarding is torture depends on who is doing it. When I think of really vile things on display in American politics today, that's one of the directions my mind runs.

Private schools are small beer by comparison.

[Tex]

Private schools are small beer by comparison.

It’s hard to rank hypocrisy or political evils, but in my book the abuse that many public schools are imposing upon American children is pretty high up. The potential negative effects upon our democracy loom large in my mind.

[Dr. Manhattan]

Tex:
No arguments as to the pure politics involved, but I don't think even the "vilest hypocrites" would (consciously) agree with your first proposition. More likely is cognitive dissonance, born of an inability to face the ramifications of their own (accurate) calculations of what is best for their own children.

[Amy P]

Dr. Manhattan,

Don't forget their (accurate) calculations that their political careers will go down the drain if they cross the teachers' unions on vouchers.

[Doug]

Riddle me this, conservatives over here: One of the things I think I often hear conservative people lamenting is the loss of community, the loss of common institutions, loss of common experiences that shape a local or national culture. Fragmentation of the public sphere is put about as a bad thing, part and parcel of general decay that must be fought.

And yet it is a point of conservative faith that public schools -- often called "the common school" earlier in history -- are irretrievably bad and must be replaced by some private-sector non-community approach to schooling. What gives?

(Ever so slightly more specifically, what gives outside of the South? Integration is what turned many conservatives in the South away from public schools, but did all the other conservatives just follow their lead?)

[jen]

Although my perspective on this goes beyond just the voucher argument, I believe it is possible to support public schools while sending your own children to private schools. If the public schools are totally awful, and you are activist in support of them, and vote in favor of appropriate taxes to give them the budgets they require, and make sure that needed ancillary services are provided, etc., you are helping those schools along to the point where eventually your own kids would go even if you could afford private school. I personally believe fixing the educational system is in the interest of everyone, parent or no.

One thing that makes it hard is that it's pretty easy to take that stance publicly, but then in reality never actually provide much support to the public schools. My sense is that many people have good intentions, but they find the problem to be so exhausting and intractable that they end up never doing anything.

That said, I think it's a bit much to characterize the state of the general American school system as "abuse". Is it a mess? For sure. Is it not achieving up to its potential? Absolutely. Abuse? Only in a few situations.

[Jackie]

I agree with jen-- you don't have to have kids at all to support public schools, much less have your kids in a public school. And I do agree that supporting public education is in all of our best interests. Of course, I'm a mom who sends her kids to public schools, so I have a vested interest. But I also teach at a private school, so I straddle a strange line.

The problem for me with vouchers is the old "good of the many, good of the few" conundrum. When kids leave a "failing" school so they won't be "held hostage," what happens to the kids, faculty, staff and community that got left? How does it work towards long-term school improvement at all?

[Megan McArdle]

I'm struck by the fact that opposition to vouchers is framed as "supporting public schools". I support public schools, but not to the tune of forcing kids to stay in awful ones because they owe it to the teachers. Those kids don't owe the other kids, or the teachers, or the community, one damn thing. The community owes them a good education.

And if you think that the kids who might leave do have some obligation, then your kids have even more obligation, because they already hit the pick-six in the genetic lottery.

[Tex]

Good point, Dr. M. Cognitive dissonance probably explains it better.

A decent education trumps support for community schools when the over arching objective is to produce a properly educated populace (3 R’s & some history) needed to maintain the best components of our national culture.

It is strong language, but I would characterize the way many big-city schools treat our children as abuse. Especially when the wasted resources are considered. Even in supposedly good schools, there is an abysmal failure to teach according to world class standards. Washington State is experiencing a particularly difficult problem with this now.

[Tex]

Correction -- I should have written “even in some supposedly good schools”

[laura]

There are several different reasons to support vouchers. For some people, they want support of religious schools. For others, it's a free market thing. And for some, it's a matter of equity. There are many lefties who support school vouchers for that reason, including myself and Harry Brighouse at Crooked Timber.

It is absolutely not fair for some kid in the Harlem to have to attend some crappy school, waiting around for some magic school reform that never appears. If he can attend a slightly better Catholic school down the block, then he absolutely should. Vouchers are not going to lead to wide scale improvement of public schools, nor are they going to trash the system. But it will help some kids, not all, have a much better future.

Keeping these failing schools going, because of some unquestioning support of public schools is just wrong. If the private schools in these neighborhoods are doing even a slightly better job, then get those kids in there right now. It's unfair to the kids to waste their youth in failing schools.

[Amy P]

Doug,

That's quite a good question, and this is going to be a long, multipart answer. First of all, I'd point out that liberals talk about issues of community all the time, for instance around here. Secondly, (as we discussed a while back), like it or not, there seems to be a relationship between homogeneity and community. You can see this (as I have) comparing Catholic parishes in the DC area. There are immensely diverse mega-parishes where you could attend for years and no one would ever learn your name, and just about everyone rushes out to the parking lot as soon as they decently can. Meanwhile, across town at Our Lady Queen of Poland and Our Lady of Lebanon, the whole parish hangs out outside after the liturgy, buzzing. (St. Nicholas's Russian Orthodox Church has a similar vibe down in the parish hall.)

And now for a partial tour of the conservative psyche. The question being, what do those "common schools" of old mean to conservatives? Let's look! (The following is not meant to be history.) Here we go:

1. To begin with, the common school does not really feature in the psyche of American Catholic conservatives (the following is a reconstruction, as I'm neither a cradle Catholic nor a member of the relevant generation). You lived in your ethnic neighborhood, you went to St. Whatsits's if you were Italian, and to St. Whosit's one block away if you were Irish. God forbid your parents send you to the public school, which was pretty much a sin (featuring as it did, a large unwanted dose of Protestantism Lite), plus it demonstrated rather clearly that your parents didn't love you. If you did go to public school, let's not talk about it! Hopefully you went to the parish school and studied with the sisters in a class of 40 or so kids, grew up, became middle class, and eventually joined the exodus to the suburbs.

2. What about the conservative Protestant psyche? (Here I'm a better authority, because it's where I grew up.) If this is you, the common school means reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic, ideally administered via the McGuffey reader in a small red one-room school house (I'm not joking about the importance of the McGuffey reader--you can still easily buy them online). Reading will be learned through the King James Bible, of course. All the classes are in a single room, and children progress through each subject at their own individual speed, and you don't move on until you know the material. You might be at one grade level in reading, and at another level in math. You finish school with eighth grade. If you are really exceptional, you might go to high school, but there may not be a high school available near you.

While the common school is a worthy ideal, it seems to me to require common values and common goals. Where those are absent (as in much of our society), the public schools will be an arena of conflict, with each interest group intent on reshaping the school in their image.

I think the parish schools of old were "common schols" in a very real sense, despite being private. Similarly, I've been surprised to discover that my daughter's new private school is in some sense our neighborhood school. We just moved to a small faculty neighborhood with 13 kids, and were surprised to discover that 9 of those kids are in families that send their children to this school. The larger neighborhood (graduate students, faculty, etc.) has a lot of kids that go to this school, and we're always bumping into new families wearing the school t-shirts at one of the cafeterias or just walking around.

[Dr. Manhattan]

Doug, I can't speak for the other right-wingers on this thread or elsewhere, but I reject your premise. Supporting vouchers or similar substantial reform is perfectly consistent with trying to improve public education, not destroy it.
And insofar as public education systems are dominated, too often, by internal bureaucratic interests rather than what's best for the kids- not exactly a controversial claim - then that cuts against your equation of public schools with "common institutions," or at least desirable ones. Telling families that dealing with failing school bureaucracies is a mandatory communal experience is not something that either conservatives or liberals should support.

[bj]

Hey folks, you're committing the same sin that you accuse us liberals of (about conservatives): assuming that because we disagree, that we must be motivated by evil.

Doug actually brings up the reasons I oppose vouchers (the community of public schools). Right now, anyone who chooses to attend a private school still has to be a part of the public school system (because we still have to pay taxes). Vouchers give you a choice of opting out of the system. Sending your kid to a private school doesn't mean your opting out, because you have to pay for both, kind of like paying for Social security & saving for retirement.

So vouchers, in any wide-spread way, (to me) is the road to ending public education, which I feel has been a strong and substantial force for giving individuals opportunity (I myself am an example).

Elizabeth says she supports vouchers because she can't see telling people who can't afford to pay for both private & public education, and for whom the only available public education is substandard and inadequate that they must just let their children suffer. I might consider supporting such a program, but it would have to come with significant constraints: 1) means testing -- I have no interest in subsidizing private education for people who could afford to pay for it and 2) significant limits on which schools it could be used for.

And,, ultimately, I don't think vouchers really work for those cases that Elizabeth is talking about (the poor, who really don't have access to better education in the public school system won't really have it, on any significant scale, with vouchers). As Doug states, the money gets sucked up in many substandard schools,, sucked away from public education. Maybe random individual children would benefit, but I'd rather see that come as scholarship programs for poor children, funded separately from public education. In fact, that sounds like a plan I would consider -- a federal tax increase that goes to fund scholarships for poor children who are attending "failing" public schools.

This really is the same debate about privatizing social security, privatizing education, privatizing health care. On each, we have different levels of public and private involvement, and we have a fundamental disagreement about which system provides better services. For all three I (an unabashed liberal) want a minimum level of service provided by a public institution. Then, people can opt to buy more, if they choose.

bj

[harry b]

I think this is a pretty low level hypocrisy, but it is worth seeing the institutional background to it. The fact that choice operates through the housing market obscures from people the fact that it is school choice. AFter all, school quality is rarely the only consideration in play -- we know we could get better schools by moving, but we like where we live for other reasons and the schools are good enough. And, to be fiar, its not our fault that zoning boards ensure that neighbourhoods (and therefore neighbourhood schools) are socio-economically segregated, so that our only realistic choices are very high poverty or very low poverty schools. And you might well think that vouchers don't do much, anyway, to help poor kids (they don't, its true). I actually think that most of the people Megan is so angry with are victims of the kind of opaqueness of social choices that protects a lot of people from seeing the vicious nature of their own inclinations. (Think of the people in the top 10-20% of the income distribution who whine about welfare and taxes).

Here's a suggestion to Megan. What I do, is I simply say that as someone who is very advantaged and who has bought a house partly on school-quality considerations, I personally find it impossible to oppose measures that allow people whose prospects are much worse than those of my children and whose schools are much worse, from having a bit more choice about where they go, even though I know that vouchers don't do much good, and aren't a long-run solution. That tends to give people pause, and helps them to think a bit harder.

[WendyW]

I just am never going to support using public funds for any school that teaches religion. I know it happens (in the school district my father taught in, public school teachers were sent to the local religious schools to teach some courses, on the taxpayers' dime), but I am not going to ever support it.

So here's a suggestion: if a crappy school in Harlem is failing, close it and let the kids' families choose nearby public schools that aren't failing. All this "Catholic school down the block" stuff seems patently unrealistic. Not only that, it's potentially discriminatory to atheists. Maybe I don't want my kid to move to the Catholic school down the block, but what if the nearest non-religious school is miles away? How is that fair? It takes a lot of money to fund a school, Amy pointed out. Why should Catholic schools have an edge on getting students (and their funds) when they themselves are funded by a diocese with access to millions of dollars plus cheap labor? What if I want no part of that? It's a system ripe for abuse.

Let the non-failing public schools get the student funding.

[WendyW]

Megan wrote: "I'm struck by the fact that opposition to vouchers is framed as "supporting public schools". I support public schools, but not to the tune of forcing kids to stay in awful ones because they owe it to the teachers. Those kids don't owe the other kids, or the teachers, or the community, one damn thing. The community owes them a good education."

OK, you support public schools. But not apparently because public schools are a public good. You seem to support them because public schools are good for the individual student.

Because you see, you can't have it both ways. Your statement that "the community owes [kids] a good education," while true to a degree, is not the whole story. If public schools are a public good, then it's not just about the kids.

I know you don't really have a communitarian mindset, but do you see what I mean? There are benefits of public schools that extend beyond the benefits obtained by the kids. So Jackie has a point.

[Jackie]

Thanks, Wendy! Also, I have to agree that I will never feel comfortable using tax dollars to support religious schools. Freedom of religion does not entail government funding for religious schools, and too many government dollars have already been funneled to religious orgs under the current administration, and to bogus items like abstinence-only sexual education.

[laura]

In New York City and in a lot of older cities, the only alternative to public schools are the Catholic schools. The other private schools are too pricey to bother with vouchers. The city Catholic schools aren't great by our suburban standards, but they are better than many of the failing public schools. If I was a needy parent, I wouldn't care if the school was teaching scientology, as long as my kid was also getting the basics of math and literature. There are a lot of non-Catholics in Catholic schools in the city, just for that reason.

In some neighborhoods, there is no alternative. If there happens to be one successful school, they don't have the desks or space to take in any kids from the failing school. Where do they have space? In the Catholic schools. Not enough Catholics anymore.

Of course, it's best to not get involved with mixed church and state, but we're left with very imperfect options in front of us. I'll take a little church/state overlap in order to get a few kids a better education. Believe me, every parent in those communities would happily choose the church school over nothing.

Again, if we have that option, so should they.

[Jackie]

Laura, I live in Baltimore, one of the oldest Catholic cities in the country, so I'm very familiar with the argument of which you speak. The Catholic church is still a huge presence all over MD. I also attended Catholic school as a student and considered them for my kids. I still don't think giving taxpayer money to religious schools helps anyone but a handful of students. And yes, that handful could see an improvement, but again, at what cost? Also, the jury is still out on whether voucher programs do result in academic gains for those students who take advantage of them.

[jen]

If it's been proven that vouchers don't work, then aren't voucher arguments just so many red herrings? i.e. "pay no attention to the elephant in the corner" -- that elephant being underfunded education across the board.

[Amy P]

Wendy,

I feel pretty queasy, too, at the prospect of public funding for the Abu Nidal Memorial School for the Greater and Lesser Jihad. There's already a certain amount of public funding for religious schools, including school buses and textbooks, as well as funding for disabled children attending religious schools. School busing isn't a problem, but I think state provision of state-approved textbooks has been, since textbooks are so closely related to content. I've heard a lot of complaints from Catholics about those textbooks, and how much damage they did to the Catholic textbook market. That's a warning sign, I think.

My suggestion would be to create an individualized education plan for each child, charting out expected yearly goals. Schools (public AND private) would then get funding based on how much progress the child made in a year (or a semester, whatever). That way you avoid the issue of religion--you're paying for a year's worth of algebra, or a year's worth of reading instruction, and you don't pay unless the child gets it and it sticks. History would be a sticky area (a lot of stuff happened over the last 10,000 years--how do you figure out which events or people are important?), but I think it would work pretty well otherwise. The state would move away from the position of providing instruction and regulating itself (never a good idea), towards producing curriculum, directing testing and distributing funding. I'm not sure which levels of government would do the job best, what income levels would be involved, or how this would work exactly, but I think it has potential. I think it would be very practical to contract with a private tutoring company to teach a bunch of 5-year-olds to read, and pay only if they learn to read. It's not a big deal, but it's got to be done right as soon as possible, or a child's entire educational future is in jeopardy.

With regard to church state entanglement, I lean towards paying for results rather than focusing on process. If a drug treatment program gets results with a combination of 12-stepping and glossolalia, or fasting and sweat lodges, why not?

[Amy P]

As to vouchers saving only a handful, I wonder if that is really such a good argument, and whether it isn't true that any broader societal change will have to start with a handful of individuals. W.E.B. Dubois talked about a "talented tenth," and said that "The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men." I think there's something to that.

[bj]

I won't take a little church state overlap in order to get a few kids a better education, and I have to wonder whether that's another case where people are insulated from the effect because of their own personal status. Laura you are catholic, aren't you? Of course, for a Catholic person, sending using tax-payer dollars to send a kid to a Catholic school doesn't seem like a very large overlap of religion and state. Instead, it's a pretty useful subsidy.

I freely admit that I'm insulated from a lot because I belong to an economically privileged minority. But those of you who belong to a socially privileged majority (Christians, white people, whatever) underestimate the impact of blurring lines that protect minorities.

As a member of so many different minorities (and my children are even more impacted, 'cause they get to combine the individual minority groups that each of their parents belong to), as Wendy says, I will use every single power I have to do every single thing I can to prevent withdrawing money from our inclusive and non-discriminatory public schools and sending it to schools that discriminate and whose purpose is (and should be) furthering their own religious based values.

[bj]

Amy:

I feel just as queasy about public funding for the local parish school (though I'll choose not to insult it by giving it an offensive name) as you do about giving money to the "Abu Nidal Memorial School for the Greater and Lesser Jihad"

That's why we have separation of church and state in this country, so that we don't have to have discussions comparing the worth and value of people's personal religious choices.

[bj]

Religion, politics, and education. Is it blog sweeps week or something?

I think it's all well and good to talk about "paying for results" and not worrying about the methods ("praying to the giant spaghetti monster"). But,, I think people only say that because they're pretty certain that the environment won't force them into a situation where the only option is praying to the GSM in order to get an education.

In a related matter, I participate in an nation-wide mailing list on education. One periodic lament that comes up is figuring out opportunities for your children if you live in Utah, where almost all activities for children seem to be religiously based (i.e. playing sports or any other type of enrichment activity), and you do not subscribe to the dominant religion.

[Amy P]

bj,

As I posted over at MM's place, a lot of people overestimate how religion-neutral public schools are (especially those people who are happy with the current recipe). In a lot of places, the modus vivendi is a sort of syncretism that isn't universally appreciated. In the early grades, we've got St. Patrick's, Valentine's Day, Hannukah latkes, and that winter-holiday-that-must-not-be-named. Sometimes, it feels like those holidays are the whole curriculum. (My daughter and her best friend were both whining last year to their respective mommies about how they wanted to celebrate Hannukah and get all those presents. It wasn't a big deal for us, but think how some Muslim parents might feel about it.) A year earlier (as I posted here a while back) her city public preschool program spent a month or so celebrating Santapalooza. There was also the time in pre-K when my daughter came home talking about how Grandma Buzzard had put the sun in the sky. Then there's those lengthy Ramadan simulations that some schools like to do. Very educational, I'm sure, but calculated to make a lot of parents mad. Plus, you know a lot of parents aren't crazy about Halloween. So, how do you run a public school system that's fair to the people who think this is no big deal and a cherished part of childhood, as well as the people for whom it's like fingernails on a dozen blackboards? Quick answer--you can't.

[Dr. Manhattan]

Jen, I think it is a massive overstatement to say that "it's been proven that vouchers don't work." At best the evidence is inconclusive.
And given the massive increases in education funding over the past few decades wiht a lack of corresponding improvement in outcomes (this was one of the points that inspired the Economist piece that touched off the last post), it's hard to identify underfunding as the main problem.

[Jackie]

I don't think you can consider public schools teaching about Ramadan to the kind of pervasive religious intstruction that heppens in religious schools. Again remember, I'm speaking as a former student in Catholic schools and someone who's checked out curent Catholic schools as a parent. Explaining how Hanukkah works is very different than teaching kids that the Pope is the infallible representative of God on earth.

I'd also like to second pretty much every point bj made in his/her comments!

[bj]

"Explaining how Hanukkah works is very different than teaching kids that the Pope is the infallible representative of God on earth."

Just as teaching about the bible's influence on literature and history is not the same as teaching that it is the word of god.

Public schools celebrate the culture we live in, which includes religion. Teaching children about celebrations and traditions does not blur the line between church and state, but teaching religion does. Some individual practitioners might blur the division (and individual children might misinterpret the lesson being taught). But, that's not an argument in further blurring the lines.

I'll admit to the possibility that public schools in some less diverse places than the one I live in are less religion neutral than they should be. But, that's only going to want me to re-double my efforts in favor of religious neutrality.

[Amy P]

bj,

As I was posting over at MM's place and here, history is a another difficult issue. There's so much material, so many places, people, and events, that to make any sense of it, you've got to (especially for the kiddies) fit it all on a narrative framework that the details can stick on to. This is unavoidably an ideological process. So do you teach kids about Helen Keller or about Elizabeth Anne Seton? It's not at all obvious why it should be Helen Keller, as it was when I was a kid in public school, but Elizabeth Anne Seton doesn't belong to a narrative that is taught in the public system (although she should show up in the Maryland curriculum). And so with a lot of people, places, and events. This is an insoluble difficulty of public schools--how do you truthfully deal with everyone's history?

[Amy P]

The Ramadan news story (which you may have missed) was about an extensive Ramadan simulation at a public school. Given schools' current emphasis on projects and experiential learning, it's going to be very difficult to draw the line between learning religion and learning about religion.

[Cates]

"One periodic lament that comes up is figuring out opportunities for your children if you live in Utah, where almost all activities for children seem to be religiously based (i.e. playing sports or any other type of enrichment activity), and you do not subscribe to the dominant religion."

bj, I'm mystified by this complaint. I'm a practicing Mormon, and I'll tell you for a fact that the church doesn't involved itself in any community sports leagues, music programs, or other children's enrichment activities, with the exception of Boy Scouts. (There are monthly church activities for children, and weekly youth group meetings for teenagers.)

[bj]

Cates:

I'm repeating second hand, poorly sourced information, so I can't personally vouch for the lack of opportunities for non-Morman children in Utah. But, you should ask non-Morman acquaintances in Utah how they feel about their access to activities, perhaps?

I think members of "in-groups" often have no idea of the ways in which others might feel excluded. (Mind you, I've come to the recognition that this is true about being in an economic in-group, too).

[Cates]

Fine, bj, I have no interest in instructing non-Mormons in how they should feel around other Mormons. (Incidentally, the Salt Lake metropolitan area is less than 50% LDS; the proportion is higher in rural areas.) But I did want to refute the dark implication that the LDS church is infiltrating civic organizations and structurally excluding non-Mormons, which is patently untrue. Please don't repeat poorly-sourced hearsay that is likely to create unnecessary fear and resentment.

[laura]

I never attended a Catholic school and never considered using one for my kids, even though we're Catholic. We have a perfectly adequate public school in town. (We're lucky that way.) So, I can't personally attest to how much forced indoctrination happens in Catholic school. But I have talked to a number of non-Catholics who attended parochial school, and they said it was no big deal. I don't think that electrodes are being attached to the kids' heads where they are brainwashed about popery. Nobody is forced to receive communion or get baptized.

Vouchers won't prop up the catholic schools. In fact, the Catholic Church only very recently has supported vouchers. When Reagan tried to get a voucher bill passed in the 80s, the Catholic Church actually wrote a memo to Congress saying that were against them. They didn't want to have to deal with the gov't strings that went along with the money.

I strongly am against the notion that public schools should be about anything else than education. (sorry, Wendy) If they aren't do their job, then I don't want them. I think that for the most part, they are doing their job. But in areas that they aren't. Where kids are being warehoused until they age out of the system. Then lose them. It is completely unfair to the kids in the schools to waste anymore time on magical reforms that never happen.

[bj]

Cates:

My statement did not say that the Mormon church is infiltrating private organizations, and I certainly didn't mean to allege some kind of dark conspiracy. The source of the comment was actually stating the lack of opportunities, not because the Mormon church was "infiltrating" secular activities, but because there were no secular activities available, because most of the children were participating in church based activities. The person was not in Salt Lake City, and in fact, the lament might have been true about any less-metropolitan community dominated by a particular group, of which one is not a member.

For example, in my own neck of the woods (a large metropolitan area) there is a Catholic youth league that runs soccer, and there is a private organization that runs soccer. So, one can play soccer if you're Catholic, or if you're not. If the private league disappeared (and that would not require any "infiltration" by the Catholic organization, just a perfectly reasonable choice of Catholics to play in their own league, and a large enough percent of Catholics in the area as to make the other league un-viable), and the Catholic league required (for example, prayer), the opportunity to play soccer would be gone for those who were unwilling to engage in Catholic prayer.

Not a big deal when we're talking about soccer, but indeed a big deal when we're talking about schools. The Catholic league is completely within their rights, and not doing anything wrong, but if there were no other league, it would exclude me and my children This is actually a true story, and in fact, the Catholic league in our area is inclusive enough to include non-Catholics, without requiring them to pray (though that deal was negotiated). But, that's generosity, not something that should be required of religious organizations. That's why I believe separation of church and state in the provision of essential services is absolutely vital, and a reason why I believe vouchers are a terrible terrible idea, if they are used for religious education. I am not willing to outsource the public good of education to religious organizations.

[Amy P]

bj,

I don't think you realize how controversial school curriculum is. Not even reading, writing, and arithmetic are safe--there are Phonics Wars, and Math Wars, and I expect Writing Wars any day now. The choice of books for assigned reading is famously controversial, and everybody's guilty, from the conservative parents who can't stand racy or depressing young adult stories to the parents who freak out over a Flannery O'Connor story with an un-PC title or Huckleberry Finn. Holidays are controversial. Character education is controversial. Drug education is controversial. Sex Ed is controversial. History is controversial, too.

There's no way to create a neutral public educational environment that's going to keep everybody happy, and neutrality itself is a fantasy.

[Doug K]

God bless my soul. More unexamined assumptions and dubious assertions masquerading as an argument, with a dash of pandering thrown in for salt. I'd recognize Jane Galt's style anywhere.

"seldom angry about politics" - Iraq, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo don't make you angry, but school vouchers do ?
"prattling about cherry-picking" - this is one of the least persuasive arguments against vouchers, there are many better: but those aren't as easily ridiculed. Either Jane doesn't know there are better arguments, or this is a choice for purposes of propaganda.
"vilest hypocrisy" - I agree with the earlier Doug, either Jane doesn't get out much, or this is mere pandering.

This discussion is taking place in the context of NCLB, which mandates high-stakes testing for public schools, but nothing at all for private schools. Vouchers will give private schools public money without public accountability. Before Jane drags out the raddled old Free Market Faery to assert that the market will provide accountability, it needs to be said that there is no reasonable way to characterize primary education as a free market. Complete information ? perfect competition ? it would make a cat laugh.

Add to this the detail that wherever and whenever vouchers have been tried, they haven't worked - see for example
http://tinyurl.com/2sdfql
and it appears to me there is a lot more work to be done by the proponents of vouchers before they can start hurling accusations.

To Harry's point - yes, that does give pause. However in the current US context as noted, I really don't think a case can be made for more voucher experiments, until the NCLB environment has been moderated.

[Amy P]

"seldom angry about politics" -Iraq, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo don't make you angry, but school vouchers do?

----------------------------
Doug,

I don't think you're being fair here to MM, but surely there is a case to be made that the preventable educational failure of millions of children, combined with generations of preventable poverty and ignorance is worth getting heated up about?

[Doug]

Except of course that's not what MM is heated about. What she describes as the "vilest hypocrisy on display in American politics today" is people making a choice about where to send their kids for school that she thinks is at odds with what these same people are saying. Is she seething about shortcomings in the systems of education? Is she seething about generations of preventable poverty? Is she seething about generations of preventable ignorance? No, she is not.

Everybody has their pet peeves, but I'm sticking with my first reaction, that particular posting is such rhetorical overkill that it's funny.