Originally posted by: zendari
I wouldn't categorize buses as variable. Even with less students, a bus has to swing by your house to pick up neighbors. You can't have less buses and simply drive faster. And you need a minimum number of buses to cover the entire district in a short (say 30 min) period of time.
Agreed. I'm not entirely sure how "most" K-12 districts handle transportation. I do know that some districts, and my former college campus, farm the task out to vendors. Routes are fixed, bus drivers simply keep a tally of the number of students boarding each bus. Schools are billed a fee that includes a variable cost of the number of riders + the fixed route cost.
Even assuming that districts maintain their own fleets, etc., looking at the total cost for educating an individual student for a single day, transport to-and-from the school itself can't possibly approach the cost of paying tenured, unionized, educators for 5-6 hours of daily instruction. For the sake of argument, though - I'll call transportation a fixed cost.
A good school will have a large variety of classes, such as different levels of math or AP classes. If you don't have enough instructers, you might not be able to offer the courseload that you could otherwise. I'd estimate that in a high school with less than 1000 kids, cutting down the faculty would do something like this.
This is true with or without a voucher system in-place. The fact that not all schools are the same size means that you will have some schools offering classes that other don't, in different quantities, etc. If a public K-12 school with <1000 enrollment exists, I highly doubt that a nearby private school would be able to successfully stay in business with or without a voucher system in-place. Just in-case, I'd support some kind of voucher program exemption for schools/districts of this small size.
In normal-size public schools: If parents pull enough students out of a school that is underperforming, sure, some classes and teachers will no longer be necessary. The specifics on which classes will be cut, of course will vary from school to school. I think these cuts would only be a serious problem for schools where there is clear evidence of lack of performance by the school itself, leading to mass numbers of parents who decide to pull their students out of that school.
In such a case, the underperforming school - by reducing the number of students, the number of classes, and the number of teachers, the idea is that the school itself will become "leaner and meaner". Any management problems which are causing the school to underperform its neighboring schools will become more readily apparent, and thus easier to solve, in a smaller setting.
As new policies are introduced, and new teachers/administrators whip the school into shape, as the students become more willing to aspire to the expectations of the school, it will become a more desirable campus for parents to send their children.
Neighboring schools, may have become overconfident in their success. They may not be increasing performance at a rate they once were, and now may be threatened by the renewed energy of the formerly-underperforming school. The two will strive to compete with each other, in order to retain their share of public education dollars.
Schools that are unable to resolve their internal problems leading to underperformance, will ultimately be forced to close. In my opinion - this is a good thing. :thumbsup:
