Correct, however the local system still has to maintain infrastructure because parents could cancel private school attendance and return their children to public school at any time.
Happens all the time, kid gets kicked out of private school and the public school system must accept them.
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.WW, PHS
So… and please correct me if I am wrong… the issue is a tad more complicated than allotting a dollar value per student and having that dollar value be spent wherever
That there has to still be a certain amount of spending into the public system regardless.
The government allows tax deductions for all kinds of things. Please don’t pretend it couldn’t figure out how to give parents back what they contribute to education. It’s not that complicated, you liberals just hate the idea of any young impressionable mind missing out on being taught things like the history of perversion in America and the great contributions perverts have made to our nation.
Schools are funded through a number of ways, but since we have a Secretary and Dept of education, and since we know that Michelle Obama was able to single handedly dictate school lunches, I think the federal governments involvement in public schools is, to say the least, massive.
About 10% of kids go to private schools. Instituting vouchers would result in an immediate 10% reduction in school funding without a single student transferring.
I’m even sympathetic to the idea of vouchers but the reality is…troubling.
As conservatives love to point out, if you subsidize something, like healthcare, and make it available to all then prices will rise and/or lines will increase.
Applying that to education has the costs of private schools increasing and/or them being more selective. Remember they don’t have to accept anyone if they don’t want to.
So likely prices to private institutions will rise. Perhaps beyond the cost of the voucher so then education becomes an additional cost to the family. I wonder who will pay that?
Add in the availability of the schools. Where will the private schools be located? Not in the worst neighborhoods so how do those kids get to the nearest private school? Cars? Buses? They cost money, time and commitment from parents that may lack those resources.
No, vouchers, given time, would devolve into subsidies for private schools for parents that need it the least.
Don’t get me wrong, I think some private schools would be created to serve troubled communities. But I doubt enough would be.
In the meantime, the public schools serving those communities would have to make do with less. Separated by income, and quite unequal.
Today’s schools are not perfect. Far from it. But vouchers are not the solution.
Far better to figure out how to fix our troubled public schools. We know public education by itself is not the problem. The suburban public schools test very well.
We’ve gotten a little away from the point I was making. While schools exemplify part of the issue, there are other questions that come to mind. Many, perhaps most of the government buildings and monuments have very Christian things as part of their construction. The ten commandments or other scriptures are inscribed prominently on display. If government must be absolutely 100 % separate from church, how could these Christian / biblical things been inscribed or displayed? Isn’t this an “establishment of religion”? Didn’t people back then know the constitution prohibits such things? Why haven’t these offensive buildings and monuments been torn down?
I think that it is fair to discuss what the funding scheme would look like and the results would be if a 100% voucher system were to be in place and private schools would then get public funding.
Thank you for taking the time to write that response. It was helpful and informative. I am at work so can only offer limited reply (for now).
As long as none of my tax dollars are spent on running a private Catholic school, I don’t have a problem with it. I do think that you may be interpreting “establish” in a pretty narrow way. I’ve never done a deep dive into the debates over that language, but the case law has developed to apply it quite broadly.
