Seriously, Folks: School Voucher Proponents Need to Get Real
I’m happy to support a program that helps out some students, but I can’t get too worked up about it.
It’s cheering to hear this response about current voucher proposals. It’s not a usual one from many of the groups opposed to vouchers. The NEA, for example, has to my knowledge universally opposed voucher plans to date, and has filed lawsuits to bar voucher use on 1st Amendment grounds.
Schools in urban areas will continue to – to put it bluntly – suck because the voucher amounts will not be sufficient to bring about good alternatives to a public school system
If we are indeed talking about “fantasy vouchers,” it is hard to see how this point can follow. Either there is or there is not some price at which education can be provided to children in urban areas. That’s the cost of education: be it via public provision or private provision. Vouchers will only fail if there is reason to believe that it will cost *more* to educate children privately than publicly. And we have no evidence of that. If the point is just that it costs more to educate certain children, then (as people have pointed out above) one just needs to provide these children with additional resources. This will of course be true regardless of whether they are educated publicly or privately. It’s not like the public system educates special needs kids at the same cost as non SN-kids. And the same incentives to classify kids as special needs to get more $ will exist in either a public or private system.
