The Effectiveness of the Voucher System

The voucher system is a way for parents to have some say in school choice for their children. For the most part a voucher system is a program that will grant parents a tax break or a voucher that equals the amount of tuition for the school of their choosing, which is typically a private school. For many different voucher systems benefits are limited to students in failing public schools, which means that students struggling in a nearly failing school are left hanging until the school is actually deemed to be bad enough that the students can try out a different one (Garnet, 2005). Since the implementation of voucher system is fairly new there is still not a lot of research it is hard to come to a definitive conclusion about their effectiveness. Even without definitive research it is easy to see the truth of the effectiveness of them; school voucher systems do not have a significant effect on the education of students.

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...

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...whether or not voucher programs are benefiting the nations educational system it is clear that the benefits are not outweighing the risks. There is so much time and energy being spent on legal battles throughout the nation, when the federal Supreme Court has already declared that vouchers are within the rights of the Constitution (Garnet, 2005). It is pointless to waste so much time drawing attention to the legality of the school choice system and vouchers when you could be spending that time improving the implementation of the voucher programs across the nation, which would actually benefit the students (Manuel, 2006). In conclusion, voucher systems cannot be beneficial to students when they are not being effectively implemented and they cannot be effectively implemented when politicians and state leaders would rather argue than work together to improve the system.