School Voucher Program: Helping Disadvantaged Students Pay for Schooling

Understanding income demographics can definitely help decide the level of difficulties employers will face, especially jobs that require higher level of skills. Many political leaders advocate school vouchers for students to attend higher performing schools, but the program does not offer enough capacity to close education gap. Especially since, not only, every student can take advantage of the voucher program, but voucher participating schools may not have the scope of enrolling every transfer, new, and disadvantaged students into their programs. Low-income schools, generally, obtain smaller amount of resources; therefore, have less access to challenging courses that will prepare students for the 21st century job market. “Only 8 percent of low-income students take a rigorous course load, compared with 28 percent of affluent students” (CED 2005). Ignoring this group and not providing enough guidance can definitely prolong the economic crisis, especially when many of these students may actually have a strong possibility for success and leadership. This crisis, will not only extend poverty cycle within this group, but decrease their confidence level that can make them lead to destructive paths. “Children raised in low-income, single parent families often suffer from a number of critical cognitive, health, and nutritional deficits that are likely to limit their future academic achievement and educational attainment” (ETS). Lower-income students may more likely suffer from malnutrition and other health problems, which may cause them to lack concentration in classrooms and trainings for the workforce. Since low-income students receive lower quality education, they will more likely struggle to attract future employers in highly technica...

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...less exposure to the 21st century job market. “Less than 4 percent of white students attend schools where 70-100 percent of the students are poor, however, 40 percent of black and Latino students attend such high poverty schools” (Kondracke 2009). White students are more likely to gain exposure to some type of 21st century training, while minorities may graduate from high school totally unprepared for highly technical industries. Since Blacks and Hispanics are more likely to live in impoverished communities, they are less likely to get access to computers that will allow them to become familiar with high-tech and software programs. These charts are showing that Blacks and Hispanics are less likely to be enrolled or are proficient in knowledge-based courses than Whites and Asians. Yet, Asians seem to be more proficient in math and science compared to White Americans.