Jophiel wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Those statistics about attrition from choice schools was from the first 5 year period of the program (upon which the study is based), and did not contain the religious schools. Did you bother to read what you linked? Or did you just skim for a useful quote?
I quoted it because it reflected what Smash quoted. Religious schools lost 23% of their population between 1998-2005. It's impossible to say what percentage of the 10,000 voucher students in religious schools were previous full-tuition students whose parents lucked into getting vouchers but either that accounts for the bulk of the students or else there must be a
lot of turnover among new MPS transplants into the religious school system. Either way, it largely negates your premise -- either those voucher students were there to start with or else they don't last long.
Ok. But what's the point? Are you arguing that the rate at which religious schools lost members was
increased by the implementation of school vouchers? I think we can all reasonably assume that that 23% number would have been at least as high, and likely higher if not for the vouchers. They certainly didn't cause the reduction at all...
Which supports my first statement. That religious schools were losing students. You do recall that one, right? It's the one you insisted that I should find data to support. Can I assume you're now in agreement that this is happening?
The second point is that according to my link, once the school vouchers were opened up to religious schools, most parents choose to use them for religious schools (2/3rds IIRC).
If you can draw anything from the two links, it's that school vouchers *didn't* work well when applied only to secular private schools, but worked quite well when applied to religious schools. And that religious schools are in decline and the limited run of vouchers available (10k isn't that many really) despite 2/3rds of them going to religious schools, still didn't prevent their total population from decreasing by 23%.
I'm not seeing how any of this disputes my original argument about public education negatively affecting religious schools, and this being one of many reasons why the religious right sees such programs as a threat to their right to practice their religion.
Heck Joph. You were around for the thread a couple months ago about religious schools. You know. The one where many of the posters actually argued that parents shouldn't have a right to send their child to a religious school because they're imposing on the child's right to be not be taught to believe in religion, and was equivalent to torture or brainwashing. Given that environment on this board alone, can you really say with any certainty that the religious right didn't have a legitimate reason to form a political block, and that they're "wrong" to think that there's an active secular movement with an agenda to eliminate religion from our culture?
You've seen that exact sentiment on this board enough times that you can't possibly think this is made up or something. How can so many people present those arguments against religious instruction and then also argue that all these publicly funded secular alternatives really don't have any intent to accomplish exactly that elimination of religion. And, agree or disagree with the religious right themselves, they certainly have a right to defend what they see as an attack on their beliefs.
Red asked me why they formed. I gave that answer. I still believe it's completely accurate. They formed out of a growing perception that a strong secular movement had taken root in the Democrat party, and that if they wanted to preserve their schools and their rights to teach their religion to their own children, they'd need to form a political block in the Republican party (for all the other reasons I stated).
Are you disagreeing with any of that? Let's get away from ********* over which voucher program did this or that. Can you seriously state with a straight face that their fears are unfounded?
