> Vouchers are a great way to permanently cement the cradle to prison cycle.

I could as easily say they are a way out of the cradle to prison cycle for many at risk youths.

You want the brutal truth? Yes, that's exactly the solution. Want an education? Learn to behave in class.

And note that this is the only workable answer even in public school systems that aren't insolvent. No amount of money can educate a kid who refuses to be educated.

Who’s the job to teach those kids how to behave in class ? Their parents ? And what do you do if their parents don’t care (which is the common case with those kids) ? What do you do if the student has undiagnosed mental illness ? Entire generations of misbehaved children were in fact suffering ADHD. How do you manage a misbehaving children that is bullied every single morning when he comes to school ?

Not educating a kid is ruining its life and, since you speak with « brutal truth », yeah, just sentence those students to jail for life already, at least they’ll not have to struggle with hunger and homelessness during years.

Yes.

> what do you do if their parents don’t care

Then other family members should pitch in. Or other adults in the kid's life should pitch in. Or, if you believe the government can exercise such power with good judgment (I personally don't), you could have the parents' rights terminated and put the kids up for adoption.

What you can't do is ask schools to do the job, because that isn't what schools are for. Schools are not supposed to be rehabilitation centers for kids who can't be educated because they have bad parents. They're supposed to be places where kids who can be educated, are educated. Trying to make them into rehabilitation centers just ruins the education of all the other kids who can be educated.

> Not educating a kid is ruining its life

I entirely agree. But that doesn't change the fact that a kid who refuses to behave in class cannot be educated. Even if it's not the kid's fault, that's still the fact.

Also, if kids who can't be educated are put in schools, now you don't just have them not being educated, you have all the kids not being educated because of the constant disruptions. How is that an improvement?

[Edit: I see you mentioned specialized schools elsewhere in the thread. I'll respond to that point there.]

> just sentence those students to jail for life already

I didn't do that; the kids' parents did, by making them unable to be educated. So why aren't you all on fire to hold the parents accountable? Why are you going after me, who had nothing to do with it?

A lot of countries have dedicated schools for those children, so they damage nothing around them and can be treated individually. And in lot of cases, since it requires removing them from families where their problems comes, it’s a breadth of fresh air for them.

I agree, that special programs and schools are required for challenging students. But that is a different question.

I am sympathetic to the thought process behind it but the end results are hard to argue with.

Who pays for the specialized schools? If it's we, the taxpayers, then we have a right to expect that those schools do their jobs. Do they? Do you have any specific references you can give?

Are they getting an education now?

According to most metrics - including this article - more and more students are passed without meeting the requirements for their grade level.

You don't solve a problem by making it worse. Making smart and/or motivated kids stay in the same classrooms as disruptive and demotivated kids just turns the motivated kids into more disruptive and demotivated kids. Right now it looks like we can choose between some people getting educated, and almost nobody getting educated because of the disruptive environment.

Of course, it still takes thought to make sure that the public schools improve in this scenario, because they will also be fighting an adverse-selection headwind of being stuck with students from lower classes and those that the private schools don't want. But if you can shrink classes and cater classes to similar ability levels, I'd think this would win out.

In other words is it simply a case of $10 000 per child per year, so here's a voucher for 10k, go wherever you like?

There are no extra resources here for underperforming schools - in fact there are likely fewer resources. Public shools won't get smaller though, they'll just merge together to create fewer schools, and the bad teachers will go away.

And perhaps therein lies the root of the resistance to vouchers. It starts to measure school, and by extension, teacher quality. And that's not a rabbit hole teacher unions want to go down.

When vouchers were proposed in California in 1993, it was to be half the amount spent by the state on each child for public education. In 2000, it was to be $4000/year, when the state spent about $7000/year per student.

Of course, there's the big existing population in private schools that would also have been eligible for vouchers-- about 7%-- so these amounts probably still would drive down per-pupil spending in public schools. You'd need to roughly double private school enrollment to "break even" in per-pupil spending.

I favor something like 20-33%-- that might reasonably be expected to both make it significantly easier for parents to send their children to private schools and increase resources per student in public schools.