Vouchers are a disaster for students

Lloyd Lofthouse

Vouchers have caused more damage to the education of OUR children, not the children of billionaires, than the COVID pandemic and Hurricane Katrina.

GFBrandenburg's Blog

It’ll be a few more days for the final election results to be tallied nationwide, but it seems clear that with midterm wins by voucher supporters in places likeOklahoma,Texasand even Pennsylvania—where even the Democratic gubernatorial victor ison recordin cautious favor—voucher opponents are going to have to keep working hard to block public funding of private and religious schools.

School vouchers have devastating effects on student outcomes. Full stop. That’s something even the nation’s voucher advocate-in-chief Betsy DeVos has had toadmit, because the data are so stark.

Large-scale independent studies inD.C.,Indiana,Louisiana, andOhioshow that for kids who left public schools, harmful voucher impacts actually meet or exceed what the pandemic did to test scores. That’s also a similar impact in Louisiana to what Hurricane Katrina did to student achievement back in 2005.

Think about that next time…

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Responses to “Vouchers are a disaster for students”

  1. sgtsabai Avatar
    sgtsabai

    Agreed, 1,000%. My mother taught school way back when schools were really schools. She taught from the 1920’s until I went in the Corps in ’64. No standardized tests, you learned, or you stayed in that grade, Same all the way through high school. As a classmate of mine, flew C-130′ out of U-Tapao, said we hated school, but we got an education and learned to think for ourselves. Not today and the privatization of schools for profit is why.

    Reply
    1. Lloyd Lofthouse Avatar
      Lloyd Lofthouse

      No big deal. Lots of kids hate school. Some hate the discipline, got to behave so the teacher can teach and children can learn but those kids don’t care (they may be the future adult narcisists. I’m sure bullies and narcisists don’t just bloom as an adult. They were that way when they started school in kindergarten). Some want to do whatever they want to do.

      Many kids hate the bullies and being trapped with them in school.

      And every adult sociopath, psychopath, misogynist, fraud, crook, killer, et al. was a child once. Some critics even blame the schools for kids that grow up to be one of them, but the schools didn’t give birth to them or raise them.

      Some hate having to do classwork and homework. Some hate to read. Some hate being asked questions (this may be the one with the most hate)

      Many kids also hate cleaning their rooms, following the rules at home, and doing chores.

      Hell, I hated working for crappy bosses (there seem to be too many of those), getting up early in the morning for decades to go to work and taking work home.

      I taught in a high school for the last 16 years of 30, and one year when those effing annual standardized test scores came out allegedly revealing how poorly the students were doing. my students laughed at me and asked me what it felt like failing as a teacher and working in a failing school. I didn’t hesitate to set them right. I told them those scores weren’t mine. Those scores were theirs and if we swapped them for the students at a highly ranked, successful high school, they’d take their poor test scores with them and the students from that other school would still do great at our school with the same teachers they had. I pointed out, if anything, those low scores tell us that many students are living in poverty, not reading at home, not doing classwork, not doing homework, watching too much TV, texting too much, playing video games too much, not studying, et al. Those low test scores don’t reveal what kind of a teacher I am. They reveal what kind of a students you are. Some of you are great. Many of you are not.

      I wonder how many Marine recruits loved boot camp, MCRD or Camp Lejeune. What’s strange is that I don’t remember hating being in combat and being shot at or shooting back or calling in a napalm strike. But I did not enjoy state side duty on a Marine base. In combat the officers and sergeants are nice. Stateside, many of them turned into monsters we loved to hate.

      Reply
      1. sgtsabai Avatar
        sgtsabai

        The gest of my comment is that we got a real education, learned to thing for ourselves and benefited greatly from that. Same with Boot Camp, I already knew the in’s & outs from friends recently graduated. I also knew what our DI’s did was to keep us alive. At least for me, it worked. I survived with PTSD, but I survived.

      2. Lloyd Lofthouse Avatar
        Lloyd Lofthouse

        Me, too. I hated K-12 school but not because I had to go to school. Bullies, Jerks. I didn’t hate boot camp or the Marines. More like fear I’d disappoint the drill instructors. But I wouldn’t want to do it all over again. I also don’t want to forget. The Marines changed my life and I think those changes were for the better in a big way.

      3. sgtsabai Avatar
        sgtsabai

        I was the oldest. USMC Birthday Ball, Vientiane, Lao 2022. Once a Marine, always a Marine, and I was VVAW.

      4. Lloyd Lofthouse Avatar
        Lloyd Lofthouse

        I’ve thought long about “Once a Marine, always a Marine.” It think it means: our attitude, our discipline, our work ethic …

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