Posted by
Josh Todd on Saturday, June 09, 2007 9:45:43 AM
The following piece was prepared for and posted on the Montgomery County Ohio GOP Blog at http://montgomerycountygop.wordpress.com/.
Students of education are taught in the university about multiple intelligences, or how each child is smart in his or her own way. Likewise, they are taught that each child learns more from varying types of instruction, prompting the idea of differentiated instruction (i.e. vary instruction techniques so to reach all students at some point).
Having said that much, if a student does not perform well (and, thus, does not learn much) in one school’s instructional culture, he or she would probably do well in another school.
Furthermore, we often break down, for purposes of public policy and comparison, our educational spending into cost per pupil. In other words, we spent, say, $12,000/student in District A versus $7,500 in District B. Essentially, we have allocated a number of dollars that a school needs to instruct one child.
Thus, we have school vouchers. Allow a student to move, with his or her dollar allocation, to another school across town more suitable to his or her academic strengths.
Absent one student, a school, presumably, would not need that student’s dollars. The school wants to keep that money, anyway, but under a voucher system the student and his allocation leave. Such a condition creates an incentive in the school to alter instruction and structure so to meet the needs of the most number of students in order to keep enrollment up, which keeps the dollars in house and that group of teachers on the payroll.
But such a system would create another condition. Not only will students leave the school where they are not learning as much as they could, other students who would learn well in that school would move from other schools where their needs were not met. In other words, we have a market-type of effect in the education system.
Not that the education system is the main problem with our society’s learning woes (take a look at, say, the ever-breaking nuclear family), but educators can only do so much—and school vouchers, properly structured, are a good step in the right direction.
In districts with a low socioeconomic status—such as Dayton—parents often cannot afford to send their students across the city line to Kettering schools or Huber Heights schools (and we’re not even talking about those “evil” “religious” Catholic schools that would break the sacred separation of church and state, according to voucher opponents) where they would receive more appropriate instruction. Vouchers would allow them to do so, and it’s a shame that the new governor wants to rid the State of Ohio of them.