A better way to fix education than with vouchers

The perceived quality of an elementary or secondary school seems to be entirely a function of the socioeconomic status of the students' parents, even if the people perceiving the quality pretend to themselves that such is not the case.

To state this even more simply (though politically incorrectly), poor children ruin the quality of a school.

Suburbs usually have better schools than cities for the simple reason that, through zoning, suburbs have prevented poor people from living there, ensuring that there are no poor children in the suburban schools.

In my view, the advantage of vouchers is that they will allow better socioeconomic sorting of students. This will benefit middle class parents who will be able to use vouchers plus some extra money they contribute themselves to send their children to a school without poor children whose parents can't afford the extra money.

Other voucher supports believe that vouchers will actually improve the quality of instruction by creating competitive incentives. After thinking about this, I don't think this will make much of a difference. Parents probably have no basis to judge the quality of instruction. Parents are only able to judge the quality of a school based on the socieoeconomic status of the other parents.

The supposedly high quality schools in the suburbs may actually have pretty bad instruction, but no one notices so long as the students do well on standardized tests. Test performance is almost entirely a function of the students' innate intelligence, which is correlated with their parents' socioeconomic status. And that is the primary reason why socioeconomic status determines school quality.

Instead of sorting students by socioeconomic status, it would be more efficient to sort them by intelligence. And this is something that vouchers can't really accomplish, but a large public school system can accomplish this by testing students and busing them to a school with students of like intelligence. This will ensure that level of instruction can be geared to all of the children in the class. The discipline problems are almost all caused by the less intelligent children, and they will be congregated in schools where discipline can be the primary focus.

Sorting by intelligence would be the fairest and best way to help poor children who are smarter than their peers, because they would be given the opportunity to escape the ghetto and get a better education.

UPDATE

People stumbling across this post seem to take issue with the notion that intelligence is a trait that varies between children. Please refer to my post NY Times says IQ is genetic.

Comments

[Austrian]

Leaving aside the somewhat ambiguous nature of IQ tests, and the political suicide bomb that testing for IQ would be, I question the dismissal of vouchers because parents "have no basis to judge the quality of instruction".

Choice allows one to make judgements based on all sorts of information, whether it is false, ignorant, or well-researched and pertinent. It is how the free marketplace works (of which the US is a pale but closest example). You do not need to know how to judge the relative merits of a V8 vs 4-cylinder engine when deciding to purchase a car (although if you do happen to know, it can't hurt your decision); there are third-party evaluations available, for those who care to look. And more important to 99% of parents than the type of car to drive, is their child's education. Letting them choose where to send their kids (or rather: letting them choose to purchase the product they want, with the money the government takes from them), will drive competition, efficiency, and improvement, as it does in every other market commodity.
And if you want to send your kids to school with other children who score high on standardized IQ tests, there will be a supply to meet that demand - but first you need to give the consumers a choice.

[Dan Morgan]

I have thought before that it would a good experiment to make a school for low-IQ kids that is completely geared to them. They could drill the basics over and over and work on a sense of pride in mastering them -learn grammer well, be able to write decent paragraphs, nail general math, etc. With huge numbers of people with low IQs, how to better educate them seems to be a long neglected issue. (I guess it goes along with ignoring the whole subject of IQ differences.)

Regarding vouchers, the high IQ poor kids might still get in to better schools via scholarships. So vouchers may indirectly help these kids by allowing more flexibility in where they attend, plus paying most of their tuition.

[William]

Or how about just making the schools of poor neighborhoods better...?

Poor kids don't ruin schools, poor neighborhoods do. Disregarding the nuisances of crime (another, although related, problem), because schools are funded by property taxes, schools in rich neighborhoods have more money to throw around, and vice versa for poor neighborhoods. Blaming their problems on the kids is entirely missing the point.

Furthermore, dictating ones future based on a test that would presumably be taken at some insanely young age seems like a terrible idea. Even coming out of highschool, colleges are increasingly depending on a variety of factors, such as extra-curriculars, schools grades, and teacher recs, and a variety of tests, such as the ACT, SAT, AP's, and SAT II's, to make their selection.

That a kid can be judged by one test, at any age, putting he/she in a track that will dictate the quality of their elementary, highschool, and ultimately college education, runs contrary to common logic. And it would also be insane to attempt to judge some pre-schooler based on the factors colleges consider, seeing as they have not yet had the opportunity to prove themselves.

Furthermore, the inert intelligence is crap. Intelligence is by no means everything. I knew a kid in school who was very intelligent but also very lazy. I also knew a kid who was mediocre but a very hard worker. The former consistently scored higher on aptitude tests, the latter lower, but the second would consistently get higher grades, did more stuff, and got more done. I preferred having him in class, and thought him more beneficial to the school's environment, yet under your system he'd be relegated to some second or third tier school because he only did so-so on aptitude tests.

Give everybody the same opportunities, then judge them based on what they do with those opportunities, not some test and certainly not their economic status.

[L]

I'm late to the game, but I'd still like to say a few things.

One advantage of vouchers is to avoid fights about what is to be taught.

It is widely believed that European schools are better than American. I think they have vouchers, at least in Scandanavia.

[Anthony]

William,

Did it ever occur to you that your hi iq classmate would have worked harder and accomplished more if he was in an environment with people like himself; And that what you were really seeing from your not so smart but hard working friend was one of the benefits of attending a school with people like himself. I think Half's idea is right on the money.

Instead of sorting students by socioeconomic status, it would be more efficient to sort them by intelligence. And this is something that vouchers can't really accomplish

No, this is incorrect. If school managers reckon that inherent intelligence is especially important, a private schooling system can sort students efficiently by establishing admission criteria or charging differential prices.

For instance, less intelligent students would be charged less at schools where discipline is the primary focus and peer effects are less important.