What we should do is abolish the public schools, give every parent/guardian(s) a voucher, and let them send their child to the school of their choice which will teach them their (the parent's) values, and not the state's (lack of) values.
The voucher scheme is the biggest con in the world.
Parents already have a choice. They have private school, home school and public school. They can even move area to put their kids in a different public school. And you want them to have "choice".... they already have it.
The voucher scheme is just a way of putting money into the pockets of people who already pay for private education, and there's no evidence that the voucher scheme works.
All that happens is they send some poor kids to these private schools and the poor kids do better. Hardly surprising, but they didn't improve the lot of the poor kids they didn't move to private schools, they just took money from those poor kids in public school so their schooling experience was even WORSE. And the poor kids in public schools were the overwhelming majority of poor kids, something like 99.99999999% of kids went to the poor public school and three went to the private school.
I don't understand why they don't run public schools like private schools if private schools are so great. That would mean: the school can pick and choose who they accept...the school can REQUIRE the parents to participate in volunteer activities....the school can kick any student out if they are disruptive or fail.
Private schools work well because they can pick and choose. What about those kids people don't want to choose, they have to be educated.
This is the basic flaw behind all these arguments.
There will always be bad students and it's the law that they be educated.
This is a smokescreen argument. Vouchers are for parents who want to get their children out of the ghetto school trap. There can be no help for the children of parents who don't give a damn.
Show me where this has ever worked. One example of where LOTS of kids have had this opportunity.
Indiana School Voucher Program Called A Success
"Indiana’s school voucher program has finished its first year, and state officials say it is a true success story."
"Mary Keefer, principal of Bishop Luers High School in Fort Wayne, told the Journal Gazette she picked up 58 voucher students and only had four or five left during the school year."
So, of 58 kids who were given vouchers and decided to go to this school, only 4 or 5 were left at the end of the school year. That's what they consider "success".
Do private school vouchers help? New study offers data.
"The randomized experiment compared about 1,300 students who won a
New York City lottery in the late 1990s for privately funded vouchers with a control group that applied for but did not win the lottery.
Tracking them until 2011, it found no significant effect in the overall group, but African-American students who used the vouchers to attend private schools were 24 percent more likely to go on to college than African-Americans in the control group."
The point being here that many students applied and didn't get into their school of choice. This is the first problem with vouchers. It offers choice up until a certain point, then it offers SCHOOLS the choice.
The reality is, that it's more simple to just open up choice with all schools in the first place, you don't need vouchers to do so.
Then parents can apply to better state schools and see if they can get in.
Or, how about just making all schools better? Instead of worrying about vouchers?
"Groups opposed to vouchers, as well as some academic researchers, point to the limited scope of the study and raise questions about the methodology."
"“Pundits may dismiss vouchers, but African-American parents know they work, and strong scientific data prove they work,” said Robert Enlow, president of the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice in
Indianapolis, in a statement."
He says they work, but then they work for those kids who GET IN to the program, but do they work for the kids who don't get in? No, they don't. So... here's the biggest problem.