Well, you realize the marginal political will for vouchers is being driven by public schools’ inability to either punish or exclude problem students, right?
There’s some demand for homeschooling or religious schooling, but it isn’t what’s driving it at the margins.
Yup, those parents gotta take their kids away from the blacks and the poors. Fortunately there’ll be no blowback there.
There was literally a Battle Royal at a local public high school a couple years back. A 14 year old was arrested a couple days ago with a loaded gun. All gang related, of course.
When physical safety can’t be assured in the school, if you call it racism and classism that people want to pull their kids out, aren'tyou just assuming that certain races and classes are inherently violent and criminal?
I’m saying that parents view certain races as inherently violent and criminal. They are the ones who will be choosing where their kids go.
And this is not theoretical. This is what actually happens.
The article in question doesn’t seem like a very convincing counterargument, honestly. It’s not so much that people want to take their kids out of “ethnic” schools because they’re racist, it’s that people want their kids in good, safe schools, and those are heavily linked to class and economic factors, and those are heavily stratified by race due to legal and historical factors. But you’d see the same general pattern even in a society with no racism, it’d just be aligned on whatever axes of social inequality were most relevant in that society.
Personally, I have mixed feelings on the subject. The current system fucks up property values in ways that have negative side-effects, it’s still gameable, and it’s essentially crab-bucketing – the idea is to make it hard for even upper-class people to escape terrible hell schools, so that they’ll be motivated to make them less bad, but that doesn’t seem to have really manifested.
On the other hand, social stratification is certainly going to be worse under vouchers, and it will mark a movement to a more high-pressure cram-school type lifestyle for students. It will diminish the proportion of the population that’s trapped in the dead-end hell schools while still keeping it enormous, which increases the likelihood that they’re there for good. So it’s really a question of what percentile we want to optimize for here. Obviously, people mostly want to optimize for theirs, but it’s not at all clear to me that there’s a right answer.
The upper class people aren’t *allowed* to make the schools less bad. When some kid comes in with the intention of starting a knife fight, knife in hand, he needs to be either punished hard, or kicked out of the school. Ideally bad behavior should be punished proportionately long before then. It doesn’t take much to disrupt a classroom if no one has the ability to remove a child or punish them for being disruptive and the kid knows it.
Many on the Left think it’s just about being discriminatory, but do people really think my parents would give a damn about the number of black kids if they were all college-bound? No, this is almost entirely about selecting the kids whose parents will punish them for causing trouble (which is what actually gives detention any teeth) and kids who actually have something to lose.
It’s been deemed unethical to allow the schools to punish the children, so that just leaves exclusion.
To prevent stratification, just don’t make the vouchers additive - you either pay only the voucher or you pay the whole thing yourself. That will allow routing around the political damage.
All this complaining about racism and classism, but who is really being hurt most by the status quo? It certainly isn’t upper middle class suburbia.
