Communitas: Mass Incarceration (Glenn Loury & Ross Levine)

[breadcrust]

Originally Posted by Wonderment

Yes, of course. It's a propaganda piece by Reason in favor of "choice." They admit in the video, however, that 75% of applicants to the program are rejected. What's their choice?

The program is small and needs to have its kinks worked out. You don't want to go in with a huge program and fail. Of course, thanks to his close ties to the teachers' unions, Obama wants to kill it because it looks so good.

Also, omitted is the impact on poor public schools (the video misleads the public in suggesting that all schools get an equal cut of the funding pie). The worst schools will tend to lose their best students and per/pupil funding under voucher programs, thus making the majority ONLY option even worse than it already is.

We should stratify schools by intelligence and diligence. It's pointless to try to optimize one big school to a bunch of kids of radically different abilities. The U.S. is not Finland. They don't have a bunch of Jews and North-East asians blowing the curve in every school and a bunch of blacks who tend not to graduate. And, no, the schools shouldn't be explicitly racially grouped, but if they're going to be grouped by I.Q. then they're going to be grouped somewhat by race.

Like Obama, I find vouchers experiments interesting. But you have to look closely at the impacts across the board.

In addition, I don't get the economic model. Supposedly the $7500 pays for a year of good schooling? How's that work? Good private day schools (nonprofits) cost a lot more than that nowadays. How are they getting decent teachers to work for less salary and benefits than in public schools? What other subsidies are the schools getting?

The voucher program costs more than $7500, but it costs much less than the current system. School would be much cheaper if not for the teachers' unions, but Chris Cristie is doing something about that.