The Nation Needs School Vouchers
Let's face it - public schools are failing. SAT scores have steadily declined since 1960. Results from other tests of public high school seniors conducted by independent research groups show a serious decline in the quality of public education over the last several decades. A national voucher system would be a good start at restoring competition and parental choice in education.
Accompanying the steady decline in the quality of education has been a significant increase in the cost of public schools. Spending per student in public schools has increased over 400% in real terms since WWII. Much of the spending increase has gone to finance a bloated, costly administrative bureaucracy, not for putting more teachers in the classroom. The number of administrative employees of the public school system is now almost equal to the number of teachers. Declining academic quality in our public schools at increasingly higher costs indicates that something is fundamentally wrong the current system.
Public education is suffering from the problems of inefficiency, declining quality and rising costs that result when an organization is protected from competition. Insulated from competition, public schools do not face any pressure to operate efficiently or deliver a high quality educational product. In fact, operating efficiently undermines the agenda of the public education bureaucracy, because efficiency would lead to a reduction in funding.
Perverse incentives are in place to guarantee the failure of public schools - the worse public education is, the more money and resources will be budgeted to try to solve the education "problem." Delivering an inferior product will result...
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...ources would be redirected away from inefficient failing schools to the more efficient, successful schools. In other words, the competitive forces unleashed by a voucher program would give us better schools in The United States at a lower price.
Nothing is more important than the education of our children. There is no surer way to guarantee that our children continue to receive an increasingly inferior education than by continuing to insulate public schools from the very market forces that would promote higher quality education at lower prices. Our country has achieved the highest standard living in the history of the world by encouraging and fostering competition and choice in the marketplace, not by restricting the choices available to consumers. A voucher system would be a good start at restoring competition and parental choice in education.
The basic idea behind vouchers is for the government to use taxpayer money to encourage the transfer of a student from a public school to a private one with the expectation that his performance will improve. That any government official would actually support a program that essentially encourages parents to remove their children from public schools shows that they have no commitment to public education. Consider these arguments:
In “End Them, Don’t Mend Them,” P.J. O’Rourke vehemently argues that the public school system needs to be shut down and ended for good due to a monumental increase in spending per pupil with no significant standardized test score improvements made in the past forty years. O’Rourke describes his view of a typical public school family that the public school system has marred with quirks and educational flaws to open up his essay. He then contends that putting a child through public school costs a fortune by pointing out that the average cost per pupil from pre-K through 12th grade is $11,749. O’Rourke cites an annual Gallop Poll conducted from 2004-2007 to explain that Americans find insufficient spending to be the top problem with public schools.
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.
Only now is evidence emerging testifying to the fact that much of the criticism leveled at public schools is exaggerated and misplaced. It is easy to forget that schools reflect what is happening in society, not cause it. Schools of today have recently shown that they are performing better than ever. Unfortunately, the traditional challenges confronting schools have increased dramatically and broadly as the world and students have changed. Now schools are facing drastic change -- necessary change that must take place quickly so students are able to cope in a dramatically changing world of the future. All of the criticism creates fear in teachers and administrators rather than a desire to embrace change.
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?
...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.
The American people have a decline of confidence in the educational institutions in America. This has lead to theories behind how to improve the public schools' situation. The most recent argument has been over school vouchers, which allow students to use a determined sum of taxpayers' money to help in the tuition costs of private schools. This use of public funds for private education should not be allowed because it would discriminate against students who would be going to private schools for economic, political and social reasons. It will segregate the classes even more than they are today because in order for a voucher to be helpful to a family, they must have a substantial amount of money to begin with, resulting in a stratified society. Primarily however, school vouchers are a violation of the national constitution and most state constitutions.
The oversite committee then evaluates the success of their money allocation and incentivize the success of the public school’s education. “Americans do not appear ready to pay the price.” (Barber, p. 215) Money is the most powerful motivator, and if the success of school districts reaps the benefits of more financial resource, educators will fight to be the best. This new desire to be the best, is possible with the equalization of opportunity from the allocation of funds to the poorer schools. The race to the top would already be won by the larger, richer, and more powerful school districts without those foundational funds. “Because we believe in profits, we are consummate salespersons and efficacious entrepreneurs.” (217) Barber’s essay supports the idea of incentivized results. Not only would districts compete with other schools, but their standards would be raised year after year in consequence to the oversite of the
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 ...
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. Most private schools in America right now are run by religious organizations.
Strauss, Valerie. "Vouchers and the Future of Public Education." Web log post. Washington Post. The Washington Post, 05 June 2012. Web. 21 Nov. 2013.
A major problem with public school is lack of funding, and it seems as if nobody follows the money once it gets to the school. The students and staff both suffer from the lack of money in schools. I attended a really poor middle school named Bishop-Spaugh Middle School. In middle school, students were almost never assigned any homework because students didn’t have any books. Teachers at this school also were compelled to buy many essential items such as paper, markers, and erasers because the school didn’t have enough money to provide the supplies to them. Money inside of schools isn’t being handled correctly. In the movie The Cartel, $1 billion was given to a construction company to build and improve schools. However, a couple of years passed and the company never built a single structure and the money was gone. Nobody knew where the money disappeared to (Ventures). The same people in charge when the money disappeared stayed in charge for a very long time. Because of the lack of money, schools we...
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
Even in this time of struggle, with billions of dollars going towards various war efforts overseas, America still has managed to keep taxpayer investments in education higher than that of funds for national defense (U.S Department of Education). In the 2004-05 school year, there was an estimated amount of 536 billion dollars set aside from taxpayer investment for education purposes. Without a doubt, education is a priority for the American government, and if these funds are used in the correct way, there is no reason why each and every kid in the United States shouldn’t be getting a quality education. However, the organization of the financial system is flawed, funds are not handled proportionately at the state level; rather, this system favors the wealthier districts and hands more funds to them while the less wealthier districts are handed a smaller pool of funds. This really affects America’s quality of education, which also reflects upon how America fairs on the world stage when it comes to competition in education with other countries. The disorganization of funds in the United States can be seen in the Hoover City School district, which has bought every student in that district an iPad for use in school. The first problem with this is that this school district does not even have a viable bus system that can transport students to and from school. Secondly, not even 20 miles from this district lies the Birmingham City School district where a little more than half the students are graduating, compared to Hoover City Schools where a bit more than 90 percent of the students are graduating. If anything, the state should be working towards improving educational standards in lower-income communities rather than debating on the log...