What School Vouchers Are
The public has been searching for ways to reform the educational structure that is currently established within the United States. The public school system has been accused of being detrimental to the education of our societies children. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of school vouchers, as a type of educational reform, on all aspects of society. It has already been proven that “family background, economic status and place of residence” all help to determine the amount of success a child has at a particular school (Raywid, 1989, p. 7). Can it consequently be expected that the choice of which particular school to go to will also make a difference in the child’s success?
School Vouchers are a form of educational reform that redirects the flow of funding from school districts to individual families (Coulson, 1998). These vouchers give parents the opportunity to send their child to a private school with the help of state money. Vouchers help to pay all or part of the tuition for families that choose a private school rather than the public school system.
What School Vouchers Are Supposed to Help
Currently, there are only two voucher programs that exist within the United States. However, the topic is of much debate in communities around the country. Both the Milwaukee program and the Cleveland program are meant to help lower income families receive the best available education (Maranto, Milliman, Hess, & Gresham, 1999, p. 19). These school vouchers are supported on the basis that education will be improved for all children given parental choice and a competition between pubic and private schools (Coulson, 1998). This reform represents a “shift of educational auth...
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... case for public schools of choice. Bloomington, Indiana: Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation.
Raywid discusses the idea of school choice within public schools. This is a little different from school vouchers; however, it raises some of the same issues.
Smith, K., & Meier, K. (1995). The case against school choice. London, England: M.E. Sharpe.
Smith and Meier discuss many cons to the school voucher debate. They strongly oppose school choice as a means of school reform.
“School Choice.” The American Heritage College Dictionary. 40th ed. 2002.
School vouchers: The wrong choice for public education. (2001). Retrieved October 8, 2003 from http://www.Anti-Defamation League, 2001.org/vouchers/print.asp
The Anti-Defamation League discusses the idea that school vouchers threaten the American value of separation between church and state.
In the beginning of the film, Mr. Incredible is very proud and believes he can handle anything on his own. He doesn't want any help from his wife, Elastigirl, or an adoring super fan, Buddy. (The.) What Mr. Incredible doesn't realize is that he is making a huge impact on Buddy by shunning him and refusing his plea to help. Mr. Incredible spends his time fighting crime in the city with his close pal, Frozone. Both men were two of the best super heroes back in the day, and they try to escape their lives now by going back to the days of their prime. (Gillam.)
The idea that vouchers give parents a choice of schools for their children is simply incorrect. The only people who have any real choice in the matter are the private...
Of the non-public schools that participate in the Ohio vouchers program, 82% are religious schools. Almost 88% to 96% of the student who participated in the program have enrolled or is attending a religious school. So the government funds that are being d...
She realized that choice and accountability were not the answer, but that curriculum and instruction were more viable solutions to America’s educational dilemma. Ravitch suggests that to abandon public schools is to abandon the institution that supports our concepts of democracy and citizenship and to the promise of American life (Ravitch, 2011, p. 12-14). The idea of school choice is rooted in Milton Friedman’s essay concerning the government’s role in education. Friedman asserted that society should support and contribute to the maximum freedom of the individual or the family. He maintained that the government should provide vouchers to help support parents financially on their children’s education, which parents could use at the school of their choosing; so long as the school met set standards. Therefore, this creation of choice would stimulate competition, which Friedman believed would increase the development and improvement of nonpublic schools, as well as, create a variety of school options (Ravitch, 2011, p. 115). As a result of the choice movement, the public received three versions of school choice: voucher schools, private schools, and charter schools. Each of these schools receives public funding, but do not operate as traditional public schools, and are not managed by a government agency (Ravitch, 2011, p. 121). Charter schools became the most popular choice of this new
Why would anyone wish to withhold support for a program that has the potential to revolutionize the, often, insufficient American education system? This question has undoubtedly entered the mind of proponents of education voucher systems across the country. However, despite the pressure placed on legislators everywhere, close scrutiny of the real issues should not be clouded by public fervor. It is my belief that, after a thorough examination of the merits of such programs, school vouchers would be a gross detriment to both the American education system and the nation itself.
Vouchers have grown into an important and powerful tool that government can use to provide directed goods and services to specific groups. Voucher systems have become a highly effective tool that is not only used for food/nutritional and housing services, but secondary educational and child-care services, as well. Although voucher systems continue to remain a heated public and political debate, success stories, as the one mentioned in the case examined will only give rise to such systems in the provisioning of public education in years to come.
Public School Choice is an easy program to understand and it contains many advantages but also many disadvantages. Public School Choice is when parents can elect to send their children out of a school that has not made adequate yearly progress for two consecutive years into a school that has made progress. (McClure, 2002) If there are no available schools within the original school district, then a family can choose to send their children to another district. This only happens when the other schools in the original district are all labeled as ‘underachieving schools’ and have not made the adequate yearly progress. (McClure, 2002)
It is a growing debate in an area that American society cannot afford to ignore, as the discussion on voucher schools directly affects our youth, the very foundation of our country. Many cities across the United States have proposed school voucher programs in an effort to improve the education of inner-city children that come from low-income families. However, with this proposition arises certain questions that cannot be avoided. Although proponents of school vouchers argue differently, challengers of the system expressly state that the taxpayer-funded voucher system infringes upon our First Amendment rights. Additionally, opponents suggest that the money being used for vouchers be provided to failing public schools, as used to be, and should continue to be, the American way. At the same time, voucher advocates believe that the consequences of a full-scale voucher policy for our nation’s public schools would, in fact, be beneficial. Still, both sides of the argument agree: our nation must find a way to give every student in struggling schools the best education possible. The complex disagreement lies in the steps that must be taken in order to achieve this goal. Should the government adopt a taxpayer-funded voucher system or otherwise explore alternate routes that could more effectively ensure the success of the American educational system?
When looking at a brief overview of voucher systems it is important to realize that No Child Left Behind is the policy that really sparked the implementation of school accountability and therefore the idea of school choice. Politicians wanted to improve America’s education system so they began mandating standardized tests at public schools and designating letter “grades” to overall school performance (Garnet, 2005). The implementation of school voucher systems became a way to scare failing schools into improving because it allowed parents the opportunity to transfer their children to private schools, which would mean that the public schools would lose students and more importantly funding (West, 2005). Although this seems like a great idea it is statistically flawed in many aspects including the reach of students tha...
Vouchers redirect money that would have been spent on educating a child in the public school system to a private school of the parent’s choosing. Voucher use is based on two factors, student eligibility and school eligibility. Those students who would be eligible for vouchers are among those in low-income families. School eligibility widely varies state by state. In some states school eligibility is restricted only to nonsectarian private schools, where elsewhere any private school is eligible (Resnick, 1998). Those who support vouchers offer three reasons for their position. One reason being that most public schools are failing, secondly vouchers help the children who use them, and thirdly vouchers create competition that motivates public schools to improve (Resnick, 1998). However, opponents argue that funding should be put toward improving the current public school system for the masses instead of allowing a better education to an elite few. Research is largely opposed to vouchers. Vouchers imprudently use public funds to back religious education, degrade public education, and support elitism.
Roberts, Nanette M. and Glenn, Charles L. “School Vouchers: Two Views.” Sojourners (January - February 1998): 22-25.
The overriding rationale for education vouchers is the simple fact that private schools are better than public schools and public schools are a disaster, creating an illusion. There is a wide assumption that private schools somehow increase educational equity, with the interpretation that all low-income children and minorities can take advantage of private education. What is not known about education vouchers is the way it uses private school as a scapegoat in order to avoid the real issues surrounding the problems of public schools. Private school choices only serve as an excuse because they only offer admission to a limited portion of low-income and minorities. The seats are limited, “all you are doing is making tiny adjustments in the allocation of educational opportunities for a very small number of children and still condemning a large number of children to poorly funded, inadequate schools” (Hammond 10). The histories of education vouchers go back to the 1776, when Adam Smith proposed that government give money to parents in order to diversify and up the competition in the classroom. Smith also concluded that because parents are the consumers, they should have the right to choose their children education. In the late eighteen century, Thomas Pain took Smiths concept to the United Sates, “the poor should be given special aid and parents should be required to purchase education for their children”. In 1859, John Stuart Mill contradicted Pain’s argument by imposing that government should require a minimum education for every child, but parents should have the option to seek education, how and wherever they wanted. By the 1800s there was a great influx of immigrants to the United States and public schools had to be readily ...
Use of School Vouchers There has been a lot of debate recently over the use of school vouchers. Voucher programs offer students attending both public and private schools tuition vouchers. It gives taxpayers the freedom to pick where their tax dollars go. In theory, good schools will thrive with money and bad schools will lose students and close its doors. Most people feel that taking taxpayer money from public schools and using this money as vouchers for private schools is a violation of the constitution.
There are divided opinions of which it is constitutional for government (federal) to give money to private schools, many of which are religious private schools. According to the NEA, “About 85 percent of private schools are religious. Vouchers tend to be a means of circumventing the Constitutional prohibitions against subsidizing religious practice and instruction” [NEA]. The parent of children who may receive vouchers viewpoint is the use of government funded school vouchers as an acceptable means of funding a child’s education. Reason, the family pays taxes and it should be allowed to have that money pay for their child’s education. But the question arises what about those taxpayers that do not have children, or children are no longer in public school. Aren’t they paying taxes also? So it is easy to say that there are more people against the school voucher
In this paper I will detail the reasons for my support of school choice, because its success does not necessarily rely on a change in all of the educational institutions involved. Rather, school choice allows a fundamental shift in how we participate in the education of our children. It involves the act of volition, and constitutes a practice that had generally been reserved for most other aspects of American society: free choice.