In the article by Friedman, he states that the only way to improve our current education system is through privatization. He believes that our schools need to be handed over to private individuals or enterprises and that in turn will force improvement of our school systems. I could not disagree more with this. He believes that using vouchers for school will lead to a large demand for private schools thus increasing the privatization process. How will this help our schools or our low income students that attend these schools? Even with vouchers, most low income students still could not afford to attend a private school. Friedman is also under the assumption that our schools are so horrible because of the teachers, etc. He never mentions all of the out of school factors that kids arrive at school with that disrupts their learning. He also thinks that there should not be any conditions attached to the vouchers. I just don't understand how that could work. If there are not any conditions, how will these private schools be assessed? Privately run schools will not have to have their records open to the public. How will this help our public schools? I just do not agree with privatizing public schools. I think we need to improve the education of our students in low performing schools through other methods.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Privatizing schools
After reading the article for last week's assignment, I decided to write about privatizing schools even though I have already blogged about school vouchers. In one article I read, privatization was defined as "the act of reducing the role of government or increasing the role of the the private sector in an activity or the ownership of assets". (http://www.aft.org/topics/privatization/index.htm) Is this really the direction we want our schools to go?
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This is a difficult issue - the idea behind the voucher system is also that if public schools must compete for funding, they will work at improvement. True, however, that poorer students may still not be able to afford private education. At the same time, people could choose to have their tax dollars go t the school of their choice - or homeschoolers could use the money towards their children's education. both arguments seem to make some ense to me.
ReplyDeleteI am not an advocate on privatizing schools in totality. I believe we are all confused on just what will work. Our public schools are failing and everyones pointing the finger. As you mentioned, low income students may not, in fact, I'm sure they will not be able to afford private schools independently. I'm sure if they could afford private schools, they would send their children to private schools from the start. On the bright side, in some cases there is government assistance that can aid families.
ReplyDeleteIn short, privatizing schools will not fix our problem. I think our problem goes deeper than just taking needed money from public schools and passing the buck to private schools. I'm sure once parents have more choice, those that have higher performing children will take their children from underperforming schools and put in private schools or better performing schools, but I do not blame them because I would, too. Once those children are taken out of the equation, tests scores will continue to be low and schools will continue to lose funding or be closed. How will this solve our problem?