Why stop there? Privatize the government entirely and let our corporate overlords lead us to a glorious, efficient future.

I don’t think this is a bad idea. I went to a small private school and I remember staring in awe the first time I went into an IPS school. WOW! They’ve got a gym in their school! Look at how big and nice their classrooms are! Daggum, ANOTHER gym! Wow they even have metal silverware!

The sad thing, without even the benefit of a tax base my little Catholic school put IPS to shame. IPS’ buildings were countless times newer and better, but that’s about all they had going for them. The townships are even worse. Who knew having $100 million athletic facilities helped you study for the SAT? Evidently.

Granted, I don’t think the schools are completely at fault. Most of it is lazy parents and kids who don’t care. Teachers can’t be expected to raise people’s kids, and I get the impression that what some of them expect these days. Uniforms are a very good start.

I heard an idea where the kids actually get to pick what school they go to and take their tax dollars with them. While it would be expensive to implement, history has shown competition spurs development. At least that way parents who genuinely care can put in some research and send their kids away from the dropout cesspools.

Doug, you beat me to it.

If I were a corporation, I’d want EVERYTHING privatized. That way I could be assured that taxpayer dollars were mandated to go into MY coffers. If I knew that politicians were open to the suggestion, I’d sink every last dollar into trying to make it happen. Hell, if I had enough money I’d even buy a newspaper or two and promote MY candidates – just to make it happen.

Abdul, I’m rather surprised at your advocacy of corporatism. The resulting corruption undermines the very core of our government. You can have all of the oversight in the world and it doesn’t change the fact that private organisations are profitting off of the fruits of our labor.

A better solution would be to announce that private industry may build schools and compete with public schools for attendance. Families opting to send their kids to the private schools would get a “per capita” rebate from the city to pay for the schools, and the private schools would also receive a “per capita” percentage of state and federal level funding.

That way everyone is forced to be honest. You force the public schools to straighten up and you simultaneously protect the citizens from officials who would use their authority to mandate that our tax dollars go into private accounts.

I think your general idea is on targer. However, I think there is a bigger difference than you realize between your proposal and vouchers (or Shorebreak’s proposal).

Monopolistic private industries are not much better than government-run industries. Indeed, one of the foundational problems of many government services, including public education, is that they are monopolistic. A private company, given the same territorial monopoly as the school district that they are taking over, would take on many of the same characterists. And the result would be little, if any, change.

To really get where I think you are trying to go, you need to look to vouchers (as a caller suggested today), to per capita funding (as suggested by Shorebreak) or to family tax credits. Any of those options would result in multiple options and parental-driven solutions. Your proposal would result in shifting the one and only option from a government bureaucracy to a privately-owned monopoly – and that would not be much of an improvement.

Off topic – sorry to interrupt the topic but this is big:

Watch Hillary accept a $2 million dollar campaign “donation” back in 2000. It’s a 5 year felony.

http://www.hillcap.org/default.php?page_id=2

If we go the voucher route, somehow we’ll have to compensate for the fact that some students are much more expensive to educate than others. I suppose we could allow public schools to expel students who are simply too resource intensive to educate — be it because of disability, disruptiveness, or whatever. This would put the public school on an equal footing with the private school.

Alternately, we could require private schools to take all comers at a price equal to the voucher amount.

The point that rarely seems to get addressed in voucher discussion is that easily educated students effectively subsidize harder to educate students. If you’re going to privatize education, you probably have to end that subsidy so that private schools can’t profit from cherry picking the easily educated children.

This knee jerk reaction to call everything private evil is baffling to me. I’ve spent my entire career in public service and there are admittedly things that should be left to the government, but I think those things are dwindling. Law enforcement is about the only thing I can see that needs to be left to the government, because everything from street repair to poor relief is done better by private entities. I have spent time checking again and again the cost of private versus public road construction and the savings in the private sector is astronomical. The efficiency realized by these private contractors is anathemas to public works and no one would want to pay the taxes it would cost to have highways constructed by government contractors.
New ideas should be considered when something is failing and admittedly public education is failing. I hear time and time again that it’s everything from poverty to lazy parents but what are the alternatives? We have spent over 40 years in the war on poverty and still no victory. Maybe we should pull the troops out and turn the education system over to someone who could find a profit in it.

Doug,

Two things for you to consider:

1) IPS will spend over $14,000 per student this year. Tuition at Park Tudor, the most expensive private school in the state, is $13,000. The townships and donut districts aren’t quite as high (somewhere just north of $10,000 per student), but the average Catholic elementary tuition is about $4000 (for non-parishioners) and less for families with multiple kids. So the money spent by public schools would be PLENTY to entice private schools to take more kids. No problem.

2) The experience with choice, including charter schools right here in Indy, is that the most expensive, most challenging kids are the ones who take those choices. It is not, as you suggest, the good kids who leave. Any why would they? They are doing quite well. In fact, if you are doing well at, let’s say, Broad Ripple HS, why would you even think about leaving? An “A” student at BRHS would likely be “C” or worse student at Chatard. (Say goodbye to that scholarship!)

So, if you want more “tough” kids to go to private school, then open the doors and let those students leave. They will. It’s already been proven. And the result for districts like IPS will be fewer students with higher average performance levels. Who loses in that situation? Other than the teachers unions?

My Two Cents — Would you require all private schools that take voucher money to accept any and all applicants at a cost not more than the voucher amount?

No, I disagree with privatizing IPS. As an alumni of the IPS System, 30-40 years ago IPS had excellent teaching staffs and the majority of your local leaders from this community attended an IPS school.

Many of the proposal Dr. white has been able to implement will definitely help to restore the districts reputation.

1) IPS is the largest school district in the State of Indiana and is open to any and all students within the boundaries of the old city with the largest number of students with disabilities,handicaps and needing special education.
These categories of students require more funding per child to educate.

3) IPS has a larger number of school buildings to maintain, a larger adminstrative, teaching, maintenance, bus drivers, social workers, security staff, teaching materials, etc.

2) The media has focused on most of the negatives in IPS rather than the positives. And there are more positives in IPS because there are more students and special programs.

3)IPS is over 52% black and minority student body, low to moderate income families, some middle class. Other school districts in Marion County have had the same problems with their students but it has not be widely publicized. (ex. gangs, drugs, fights, vandelism, sex, dropouts,etc.)

4)By design public education across this country has been sabotoged by the powers-the-that-be since the late 1960s when schools were order to integrate.

5) A quality education is the key to having a successful future. Why have our politicians failed to properly fund public educationa over the years to insure teaching professionals are paid well. Our legislators have no problem voting themselves pay raises and lifetime benefit packages.

6) Private school already screen students from families who can economically afford to attend and support the schools.

7) Private schools expell and suspend students at a higher rate than public schools when the student fails to achieve or measure up to its codes of ethical conduct. Those student usually return to public schools to finish their education.

Former IPS Student, some private schools ’screen’ students. I’ve never heard of a school run by the Catholic church that did (and most private schools in the city are run by the Catholic church.)

About the expulsion ratio, that’s probably the problem. They need to start importing nuns into IPS who don’t put up with BS. If I want to learn in IPS I have to do it with that anchor who sits in the back of class screaming for attention like a 3-year-old and picking fights at lunchtime.

I was happy to watch it –

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I was happy to watch it –

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