Cycloptichorn wrote:gungasnake wrote:revel wrote:
Vouchers are funded by tax payers; there is simply not enough money to go around to fund every single child in America a voucher to go to a private school ....
My experience has been that private schools always cost some fraction of what public schools do on a per kid basis, usually about a third to about half.
How does that work out to being unaffordable??
I don't believe for a second that this is actually true.
Cycloptichorn
Private schools often spend less per child than public schools, but they offer a different product. Private schools typically skim the some of the low maintenance students from the system. Since they do not have to tolerate the wide spectrum of students the public schools have, they don't have to offer support for ESL programs, disadvantaged learning, special education, speech therapy, etc. They also don't bus children to school. I'm not saying that all schools don't provide these services, but many do not. Private schools use their low maintenance student bodies to attract teachers at lower salaries than the public school systems are required to pay. Often they have lower overhead since they use an actively involved parental base as volunteer labor. Consider this another form of tuition. They also do not support the regulatory bodies that monitor them like local school boards and state standards boards.
Vouchers would clearly drain funds from the public school system and the amount would not be insignificant as suggested elsewhere. By eliminating the economies of scale from the public system, the legal requirements would drive up costs dramatically. It's like allowing all the healthy people to move to their own private insurance and demanding that the insurance companies only insure the high risk portion of the population. Another analogy is the "white flight" from cities in the 70's. As people moved to secluded enclaves in the suburbs, there was less money to support the urban infrastructure, causing decay, causing more flight, causing more decay, etc.
Having a publicly funded education system that provides a reasonable quality of education to all children has been one of the greatest successes of the American experiment. If you aren't happy with the public schools, get involved and fix them.
One other thought: Many of those around here who have their children in private schools have another concern in mind: separating their children from those "disruptive elements" in the public schools. Here in the South, you can clearly read that as meaning the significant minority presence in the schools. (This is not to say that those advocating vouchers here exhibit such racially biased tendencies.) If people want to pay to keep their children in a racially pure environment, that is their business, but not with my tax dollars please.
