School Vouchers Redux

["Michael Hoover" <hooverm@xxxxxxxxxx>]

sent below several years ago at time
list was discussing school voucher
topic:

private schools shouldn't be a 'right' for affluent...there should be no 
private schools
at all & no parents should be able to choose
'exit' option, school district fiscal
disparities caused by uneven distribution of
property tax revenues (which still generate
about 50% of public school funds) must be
eliminated, and the approximately 16,000
independent school districts need to be
consolidated (consider that there were over
60,000 such districts at mid-century)...

re. universal fully-funded vouchers, they
aren't gonna happen because the premium
attached to the value of homes is directly
related to quality of the local school district...middle/upper-middle strata
parents are generally satisifed with the
quality of their kids education and
*anything* that could equalize quality
between districts runs counter to what
they perceive their interests as homeowners
- life, liberty, and property values! - to
be by devaluing their premium...

moreover, many parents who have already
placed their kids in private schools (as
well as private school administrators) are
not strong advocates of vouchers because
they sense that public funds will come
with strings attached (church-state,
affirmative action, sex ed, equal access,
etc. issues)...

studies of universal fully funded voucher
plans in the Netherlands and Chile (begun
during Pinochet's dictatorship) indicate
that they have exacerbated already existing inequalities/inequities of public 
systems...
privatization increases such gaps without
making schools better while reducing public
efforts to reduce such conditions because
it relies on the market to bring about
improvements that never come...

while polls show that more minority parents
support vouchers than their white
counterparts, the movers and shakers of
such schemes are "free market" ideologues
who have long opposed equal funding to
public schools...   michael hoover





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