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A school voucher would allow direct transfer of funds from the educational department to any approved school that a parent would opt to send his or her child to.
This would allow so many great choices for each and every student and fill many special needs that are all so often not readily available within the public-school system.
Besides the many benefits this would contribute to the educational growth of each and every child this also breeds a wholesome competition within the public-school system and in fact within the private school system as well.
As I have been working on this for a while and am currently compiling many facts and figures and thoughts for presentation. I would like if possible to incorporate some public feedback as well.
If you would be so kind as to leave your thoughts and ideas regarding this momentous innovation. On some posts it would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!
I love the idea of school vouchers. That might be the only way to save our school system. Then the schools that were good and working, would get more money to grow and continue doing whatever it is that's working. The schools that were bad, and were not doing the right things for our children, would end up not being able to stay open unless they changed. This would also give parents the ability to send their kids to schools closer to where the parents work, so that those who had to commute a long distance, could have their children much closer to them. This would be much better for our economy even, because then parents wouldn't have to take off of work when a child was sick. The school would be close enough to where the parent works, that they could run to get their child, and bring them to their office.
Even if this particular idea didn't include homeschooling (which i think it should to give parents the most choices), i'd still be all for vouchers. It would help so many people in so many ways. As individuals and as a community we'd all be better off with educational chioces like this.
The question I have for everyone who likes school vouchers (and I like the idea of being able to select where my kids go to school, btw) is- how do you propose balancing the capacity of the schools? Say schools "A" and "B" each have the ability to house and instruct 1,000 students, and school "A" is a very desirable school, while "B" is crummy. Now, suppose the parents of 1,800 of the 2,000 kids in the area want to send their kids to "A"- obviously there's not enough classrooms, nor enough faculty, so what do you do???
I don't know how that could logistically work, for the reason stated by BobKovacs... where do you put all the kids? And the building itself is not the reason most parents would want to switch, I wouldn't think... the teachers from crummy school B would just be transferred over to desirable school A, which wouldn't solve anything, if the teachers are the problem. If it's the families and kids that are the problem, they'll just transfer over to the desirable school anyway. I don't know that vouchers would solve anything at all, in the long run.
My biggest problem would how would kids get to school. Parents? Hah. And you can't have a bus system running around picking up kids when every child down the street goes to a different school.
Take my brother. He's a senior in high school but doesn't have a car because college is more important. My parents both leave for work by 6:30 AM. High schools don't start until 8:30. So what should he do if there were vouchers? Wait around for 2 hours in the parking lot for school? Or longer since both parents are going to OPPOSITE direction of school. Our middle schools start even later.
So all I see is a way to cause more pollution, placing undue competition on students (think the NYC system where kids have to TEST INTO the good public schools and all private schools- don't think that wouldn't happen with vouchers), and playing Russian roulette with kids who end up for whatever reason in poor performing schools. It's not as if those would magically disappear.
Very interesting article on why vouchers/school choice may not be enough of an answer...
"In the market system, Ravitch predicted, “most schools will reflect the dominant ideas of the schools of education, where most teachers get their training, so most schools will adopt programs of whole language and fuzzy math. . . . Most students under a pure choice regime will know very little about history or literature or science.” The system with the first-rate curriculum and effective pedagogy, Ravitch argued, would produce better education outcomes."
"While the arguments about school choice and markets swirled during the past 15 years, both Ravitch and Hirsch wrote landmark books (Left Back and The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them, respectively) on how the nation’s education schools have built an “impregnable fortress” (Hirsch’s words) of wrong ideas and ineffective classroom practices that teachers then carry into America’s schools, almost guaranteeing failure, especially for poor minority children. Hirsch’s book didn’t just argue this; it proved it conclusively, to my mind, offering an extraordinary tour d’horizon of all the evidence about instructional methods that cognitive neuroscience had discovered."
The liberals and the teacher's unions will never allow this come to fruition nationally. It's not going to happen on a mass basis. It's here and there (I think Cleveland does it), but not nation wide. Those powerful lobbies will not allow it.
In my neck of the woods, school taxes are paid by homeowners in a district. Instead of offering a payment to be applied to a private or religious school tuition, offer a school tax credit in the amount of the proposed voucher to homeowners who have school-aged children that opt not to send them to the local public schools. For example, if Family A owns a home and pays the school tax, but decides to send their child to a private school or homeschool, they get a break on the amount of school tax they pay - this rewards them for saving the school district money by not adding to their rolls. If Family B rents and pays no school tax but wants to send their child to private school, no tax credit, since they are not paying any share of the school budget to begin with. No tax credit either for Family C who owns a home but has no school-aged (K-12) children.
This would avoid having schools have to pay out cash, which would only result in them having to raise more revenue via taxes. Instead they are taking in less cash up front but with the compromise that their operating costs would be lower. This would also avoid the argument that vouchers shouldn't go to religious schools under separation of church/state arguments.
By the way, I'd put limited stock in what E.D. Hirsch has to say about education.
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School Vouchers!
