Are you for or against school vouchers and why?

Sure, I don’t see why not. I would have done much better at a different highschool than the craptacular one I went to. People will say it violates the establishment clause of the Constitution, but I don’t think so. The government isn’t really endorsing any religion by allowing vouchers. But what do I know? Oh well, I’m going to a great college for free, so I shouldn’t be complaining.

For. Poor students have the right to the same education. Here they get that opportunity.

Surprisingly, against. It’s a twist on the Groucho Marx quote, “I wouldn’t belong to any club that would have me as a member.” Just because you would have a voucher to attend a private or parochial school, it doesn’t mean that that school would necessarily have room to take the student. The schools that are desirable as private and parochial schools have waiting lists for spots. These schools control their own enrollment. I have yet to see anything that shows how that issue would be addressed.

EDIT: I don’t see how vouchers would give “all schools a better chance.” A better chance for what? In 1990, the Kentucky state legislature declared its statewide school systems illegal, and initiated the Kentucky Educational Reform Act (KERA) which balanced school system funding across all 140 counties. Prior to that, the schools in the state were funded by tax base, which gave schools in industrialized counties a marked advantage in terms of funding over those in the more agrarian areas. In Jefferson Co. KY (Louisville), county wide bussing for racial reasons began in 1976, with Brown vs. The Board of Education. This has yet to equalize the quality of schools across the metropolitan area, and for its size, Jefferson County has a disproportionate population of parochial school students.

That’s a good point, @PandoraBoxx, I hadn’t considered that.

I mean ALL students at EVERY SCHOOL public, magnet, private, charter etc. Then all schools would have to up their game because the better schools will attract most of the students. Vouchers ahould not be used only for private schools, that is an underuse of what vouchers could do.

But as a parent of students in private schools, what exactly do I have to gain? If my school needs something, parents pay for it. The better schools do attract the most students, without vouchers. There are waiting lists. Good schools don’t want for students.

There’s a section in Freakonomics on Chicago’s school system, where students have the choice to opt in for a lottery that could place them in better schools. No matter where these students ended up, they did better than their peers. Better schools made less of a difference than the student’s own initiative and drive; the lottery just made the good students stand out statistically. It would be a good for high-performing students to be able to opt into better schools.

The interesting thing with the Jefferson County bussing is that bussing to meet racial quotas fails to address the disparity between low income whites. There is a magnet school program in place, where motivated students can apply and are alloted spots based upon their zip code of origination. Not all of these students succeed, but the ones that are highly motivated do. The problem is not just the school system, but the community where the student resides.

I personally think the answer is public boarding schools for at-risk students. The programs in place, like the SEED school in NYC shows good results for this concept.

Kids who are at-risk often start school with their parent’s own failed experience with the educational system as an additional burden. If you’re a student whose parents did not have a good experience with school during their own tenure as a student, then the child of those students have an added disadvantage that children of college educated parents, or a household where parents are confident in navigating the educational system.

I am ticked that the republicans took hold of this concept. I thought of it 30 years ago when I was in college. (And I am NO REPUBLICAN!)
I had received grants to go to college and I wondered why they didn’t just give out grants for schools, set up minimum competencies and force them to compete.
Schools seem to spend way to much money on administration and way to little in the class room. Private schools spend way less per student because they are not so top heavy.
I know that there would be a lot of union oposition though.

But private schools are, in essence, community based in the sense that the “community” of parents who pay tuition fund the schools. With public schools, the disparity between community funding and the demands that parent educational background brings to the table affects how the school is managed. You will still have crappy schools in areas where the neighborhoods are homogeneous. The only effective solution is better integration of incomes into school districts, so that lower income families are able to have access to the advantages afforded by living in middle and upper middle class neighborhoods. Traditionally, before the car era, cities did a better job of scattered site housing.

Children who are sent to better schools that are outside of the community where they live do not have the same access to after school activities because of transportation issues, and fees associated with participation in those programs. The Medina OH public school system charges $650 per student per sport/activity. If you have two kids in high school and they each play two sports, which is not uncommon, you’re paying $2,600 a year for those kids to play the sport.

I’m uncertain on the issue. Good private schools will still be highly selective about their enrollment and are also far less top-heavy in administration. Good teachers should be encouraged to teach, not become administrators. Adminstrators should be paid no more than a good teacher and have no more “perks”. Vouchers may help good students get out of bad government schools, but it will also make the bad schools even worse since they are still required to educate all comers and will be left with only the unmotivated or troubled “dregs” that can’t “voucher out”. Taking the public schools off the property tax base would be a good start. Reducing administration and paying good teachers better is also needed. The physical plant of a school and its facilities are greatly over rated IMHO. Excellent schools are a function of excellent teachers and little else.

The brightest and most motivated will always rise to the top regardless of obstacles. The problem is giving the best quality possible to those who are good, but not the best and give an adequate education to those in the middle. Those at the bottom either intellectually or behaviorally should be educated seperately so as not to monpolize the teachers time and drag down the standard of learning for those avarage students. It used to be done this way until about 50 years ago in many school systems. Now “mainstreaming” is all the rage and good students are held back by the attention given to “special needs” students in their classrooms.

Perhaps the answer would be to make state colleges free or affordable to students who qualify as college/university material. Then the motivation will be there to work hard in school, and students who work hard will derive financial reward for their efforts.

One of the biggest feats that the Right could hope for is to demolish the public school system. If they could simply keep their children in private schools (or even homeschooled), they could more easily accomplish a desecularization of our society. I am opposed to that with every fiber of my being.

This is why a voucher system is one of the core planks in the Right’s platform. If they could make sure that only the worst students remain in the public school system, it will have very little choice but to collapse, and they’ll be right there with a faith-based curriculum to ensure that they get the youth while they’re young. In fact, I believe the controversy around the use of Ritalin to treat children with ADD/ADHD is related to this. Part of the public distrust of Ritalin use can be traced back to a smear campaign by organizations tied to the Religious Right. And if affected kids aren’t treated, it’s one more way to make the public school system look like a stinking pile of Failure. And because private schools can cherry-pick their students, this makes the private schools look like they’re doing an artifically good job, and makes the public schools look artifically bad. (Yes, there are Lefties who also oppose Ritalin use, but their approach doesn’t have the same emphasis on denying access for others.)

But anyway, how does this relate to vouchers? I think vouchers make it appear easier to just let the public system collapse, rather than have to fix it. Like people above me said, the best schools have waiting lists. They can choose who to let in – it’s a matter of supply and demand. The solution is not to just let all the kids go to the best schools, it’s to help the worst schools succeed – and “no child left behind” is making that worse rather than better.

@Hypocrisy_Central, I understand your idea is to voucher all children, and I believe your solution is headed to the right place on the wrong road. The best schools don’t have room for every kid that wants in – and it’s misguided to believe that the worst schools would be left empty and the best ones would still be just as good with double or triple the student load. Plus (and this is why I went into my opposition to vouchers up there), a voucher system could be misused by the very people who have the most interest in demolishing the public school system. Once you divorce schools from having to be accountable to certain standards set by We The People (through our representatives) and allow them to teach whatever they deem appropriate, sure, you’ll have some decent schools, but you’ll get some awfully wacky ones as well.

The source of some of my information and ideas is The Fundamentals of Extremism: The Christian Right in America, edited by Kimberly Blake. I recommend it for anyone interested in reading more.

While the voucher program sounds really good in theory, it only works when the parents/family care enough to make use of the opportunity to improve their children’s education. The reason many people in lower performing schools are there is because no one in their family cares.

Here in California, Charter Schools are making a big dent in the underschooled population. They are much closer to the old fashion local rule school system of old, and the students themselves can actually make a difference in their own lives.

I favor school vouchers because no one should be stuck in a truly bad school just because they are born in a particular district.

As a conservative I believe in good old Darwinism for businesses, for schools…most everything where there is competition. Competition means that the less successful enterprise is replaced by a more successful enterprise.

The option is of course to prop up the less successful enterprise – as we do with schools, some of which continue to fail for decades, producing drop-outs and future drop-outs in stoopid quantity.

But the less successful school eats money that a more successful school could put to better use.

Research shows that vouchers do not improve student performance significantly (Washington DC research) and that very often, the students academic performance or poor attendance due to illness or transportation issues cause them to lose their vouchers after their first year (Columbia SC research). Most communities do not have a large enough pool of secular private schools with enough openings to absorb the number of students that could potentially have vouchers.

Things that could work to improve at-risk schools:
Consistent building upkeep and environmental standards
Smaller class sizes, especially in elementary levels, to offset educational disadvantages from home and community environment.
Parent education and liaison programs; community outreach to better coordinate school-to-home
Public boarding school during middle school and high school years
Free after-school programs with tutoring services
More scattered site housing to move families into better school districts so transportation to school is not a problem for students.
Charter school programs

Vouchers should not be restricted to private schools or other non-public schools. ALL schools should be run via a voucher that is attached to the student and not just the district. And not all students will have a place in the best schools, that is no deferent than today with colleges. For a time the better schools might have to have larger class sizes, they have them in Korea, Japan, and China and they still out pace us academically; so larger class sizes is not a reason of failure. I don’t think many would trust a boarding school because they cannot control who their kids are hanging with when out of class, what values they are being taught, and always the biggie, if any of the staff is taking liberties with them.

If all schools were on a voucher system then those schools who got better teachers, had better and more interesting class lessons to teach the min requirements and then some they will have the most students, and thus, the most vouchers redeemed. The lesser or worse schools will be forced to improve if they want to keep from getting closed. If the school staff thought if they went business as usual, one day soon their school would close and they’d have no jobs, I think they would get creative in how to make school more fun and cut wasteful spending, because their actions will be more tied to the health of the school than it is now.

SEED School is an interesting program.