Why School Vouchers Can Never Work

For many reasons school vouchers are back in the spotlight as a “solution” to the current educational woes. The basic mechanism of school vouchers is that a family can get a voucher for their per pupil cost that would normally go to their neighborhood school, and can then choose which school, public or private, to take the voucher to. The school of their choice then gets the per pupil cost. Essentially, students choose their school and the money that is allocated for that student within the public education system follows each student.

More personal motivations for vouchers also include thoughts like “Since I already paid for my child’s education through taxes, I should choose how that money gets spent”, “I should get to choose what my child learns and the government shouldn’t”, and “Rich kids get amazing educations, and my kid deserves one too, so I’m taking my voucher and going to a private school.” These are the “selfish entitlement” arguments.

Arguments for vouchers rely mostly on beliefs around free choice and free market. Both of those things are excellent keystones of our society, so surely they will work for education, right? The more theoretical view towards vouchers is that capitalism solves everything through a free market. If every student is free to choose the best school, schools will compete for the money by becoming better. Schools that don’t have enough money will naturally close, and they should because they weren’t good enough to attract enough customers, er, students. These are the “education as a free market good” arguments.

Both of these families of arguments are a logical starting point, but both overlook the basic fact that makes it so vouchers can never serve our nation effectively: an educated populace is a public good. Read more “Why School Vouchers Can Never Work” →

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Students Don’t Need You for Facts: The Myth of…

Our goal at TSFires is to prepare as many teachers as possible for the future of our profession. The need for teachers is just as strong now as at point in history. But there are some unfortunate truths that we must face if our profession is to move forward. This post is about the often denied reality that we are teachers, not masters of content.

There was a time, both simple and sad, when the schoolmarm for the village was the master of basically all academic knowledge. If anyone had a question about math, history, or the few scraps of science that were known, they took their question to the marm. If you were a super classy village maybe you had a lawyer or an architect in which case they were also content masters, but wouldn’t share their knowledge for free, so, back to the schoolmarm with any questions.

Until quite recently this was still fairly true. Within any school the teachers were still masters of their content area, and students relied on teachers for any fact checking or question seeking. Then, as now, better schools tended to have better masters of content. Richer districts have people with masters and doctorates in their content area, while poorer schools have people with a bachelors in the same or at least a related field, and the poorest schools have substitutes and unlicensed teachers.

But now those degrees, that hierarchy of content knowledge being fully owned by the teachers of the school, that is all meaningless in the world of smartphones. Whether you have a doctorate in American studies from Harvard, or a bachelors in political science from a community college, the student with a question about the civil war can now find their answers and supporting evidence during their passing period.

For each fact or law we dispense about spelling or physics, students can easily find a counterexample or the exception to the rule. They can also stay up to date with changes in a given field faster than any full time teacher can keep up with them. Students simply don’t need teachers for content mastery anymore. Read more “Students Don’t Need You for Facts: The Myth of Content Mastery” →

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