Is it just me, or has everyone gone nuts over vouchers?
Okay, for that handful of people who don't know what school vouchers are, this is a scheme by the federal government to give public money to private schools on the pre-college level. Basically, some people decided they shouldn't have to pay education taxes while paying tuition to send Junior to a private school, and so they came up with the bright idea of the government issuing "vouchers" for their education taxes. In turn, those vouchers could be taken to Junior's private school to pay for his tuition, making things easier on Junior's parents. In fact, it'd even make things better for some of Junior's friends, because their parents can't afford to pay education taxes and send them to private schools, so they're stuck in the public school system - which, as we all know, is a Hell no child should be stuck in.
Yeah, everybody seems to think vouchers are the best idea since sliced bread...until some negative effects get brought up. For instance, there's that annoying little document called the Bill of Rights, part of which explicitly forbids mingling church and state. Has it occurred to anyone that a lot of those vouchers would be going to parochial schools, which violates that First Amendment separation of church and state? Of course it has - why do you think the Religious Right is pushing so hard for vouchers? They don't like that wall anyway; this is a handy excuse to tear down part of it while selling it as a good thing.
The problem there is, I don't think they've done their homework. Think back to - oh, not that long ago - when a woman applied to the Citadel and was able to force her way into that all-male institution. How did she manage that? Well, it seems that even though the Citadel was a private school and should have been able to set whatever criteria for entrance that they bloody well wanted to set, they made the mistake of taking government funds...which meant that they had to abide by certain government guidelines. In other words, once a school starts taking government money, that school is no longer strictly a private school. How does this relate to vouchers? Think it through - Our Lady of Perpetual Torment starts accepting vouchers, and then it becomes subject to the First Amendment - meaning that they can't teach religion or have prayer before classes. While I'm all for keeping religion out of the classroom and in private homes and churches where it belongs, it strikes me that perhaps this is not exactl y what the proponents of school vouchers are shooting for....
You see, vouchers don't make it easier for Junior to go to a private school. Instead, they make it easier for Junior's private school to become a public school. Think of all the benefits Junior's parents are looking for from that private school; every one of them goes away under vouchers. Exclusivity? Kiss that goodbye - they're making it easier for just anybody to get in; that's the whole point. Religious education or a single-sex institution? I just covered those. (And for what it's worth, I wouldn't wish a single-sex high school on anybody. I went through six years of that, only to hit major culture shock when I actually got out into the Real World with real women and had no way to actually deal with them in a rational manner. Maybe it works okay in a college environment....) Quality of education? Well, maybe that'll last a little longer - until Bubba Junior decides that he can cut up at OLPT even better than he could at old H.P. Nobody. With the increased number of students, the staf f at OLPT will be just as overworked as his old teachers...and since they're now part of the public school system, expulsion gets a bit harder to do. Parental control? That's always a good standby, isn't it? As if the overworked staff at OLPT can be any more responsive now than the staff of H.P. Nobody.
Vouchers simply aren't the answer to any of the problems they're supposed to fix. Instead of making better education available to the masses, they'd only make private education as bad as public education - which means people would only have the illusion of choice in education. Luckily, I have a better solution: sell the public schools. Yes, you read that right - sell the schools. It's already been demonstrated that private schools work better than public ones, so let's work with that. Instead of making all the private schools public, maybe we can make all the public schools into private ones.
Here's about how it might work. Somebody decides they want to purchase good old H.P. Nobody and make it a private school. They don't have to worry about anything like construction costs; the building's already there. In fact, they may not have to worry about any infrastructure development; I'm sure the government could transfer responsibility for staff salaries and other financial burdens to the new owner with a minimum of fuss. Why not even go whole hog and let 'em buy the buses and everything else while we're at it? Toss in the taxes earmarked for that school's upcoming school year - after all, the taxes have already been paid - and this starts to look like an attractive proposal for the company. In short, they pay some cash and get a school that's ready to run - teachers, students, buses, the works. That's their foundation. During that year, they observe how things work and maybe start making a few changes here and there - because conditions won't have changed much, after all.
Starting next year, things get interesting. The taxes that would have been set aside for H.P. Nobody get repealed, making things better for the community. The company now running H.P. Nobody has a good idea of the school's weak spots, and they now have the power to fix those - not to mention the incentive, which simply doesn't exist in a public school. (Really, what can happen to a public school - it might start losing money and go out of business? Yeah, that's going to happen....) If the company has any clue what it's doing, they can start making the school stand out with better education, maybe even for less money. (Last time I checked, the per-student cost of a public school is right up there with fancy private schools; you figure it out!) In turn, this attracts more attention - more companies start buying schools to do the same thing with them, which means more taxes get cut and education gets better for more students. The idea catches on in other places, and starts to snowball in effect....
Naah, that'd never work. It makes too much sense; after all, this is the United States we're talking about.