School Vouchers Essay

exercise thereof” (Hanus & Cookson, 1996). The controversy lies in the interpretation. Do voucher programs violate the First Amendment by providing public money indirectly to religious schools? The first voucher program was put into action in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1990. The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program offered $2,900 in private-school tuition for children of low-income families and in 1995 religious schools were added to the program (Hadderman, 2002). In June 1998, the Wisconsin State Supreme…

Vouchers provide parents with significant authority over the knowledge and skills their child will learn. The parent is the one who knows the child best, so it is very beneficial to the student to have someone who knows his exact learning style. These benefits are just a few advantages to school vouchers (www.ncspe.org). However, like any other government program, it has its disadvantages. Increased inequality among schools is one of them. Unregulated markets among schools may produce widely…

The voucher program must not give parents any incentives to pick religious schools over non-religious schools. The program must provide parents genuine, practical, legitimate secular options, including adequate traditional public schools, adequate non-traditional public schools such as community and magnet schools, and adequate private non-religious schools. The purpose of the program must be to advance secular education, not to funnel state funds to religious schools (www.au.org). Many…

There are several equally strong arguments for this type of system. In the 70's, the primary argument for vouchers was presented by Milton Friedman, who thought that by taking the money out of the government and putting it into the hands of the citizens to be spent on their children's education many of the bureaucratic steps involved in the schooling process would be eliminated, leading to a more efficient establishment ("Educational Issues", "Short Takes"). This efficiency would lower the overall…

their children to attend these schools with high tuition, but could never afford it. There are also disadvantages with the voucher program. The voucher program is set up to improve student performance. However, its not one hundred percent effective. According to data received from two different cities a Wisconsin program indicates that three years in private schools, voucher students showed greater gains in both reading and mathematics. In an Ohio program voucher students according to Bob Chase…

change, where modern tuition vouchers will take care of any financial assistance crucial to keeping the system going. School vouchers are a form of scholarship, which transmits the flow of funding that is devoted to education and directs it to consumers rather than to school districts. This gives families the freedom to choose any school and thus send their children to institutions they feel are best suited to their children’s needs. There are government funded vouchers, as well as that made available…

And why should concerned parents support public schools over vouchers? The answer, according to Chase, is simple, as public schools over the past thirty years have halved the performance imbalance between white and African American students and, within the last five years, have raised the achievement level of the nation’s poorest children by an entire grade (Chase 1). Chase maintains that, instead of “throwing money” at poorly managed schools, a “genuine commitment be made to giving all children…

problems have been fixed? Illiteracy is still high, American standards are still low, and graduates are still unprepared. Each generation feels that schools are worse than the generation before. America has been attempting to solve the problems with its education system for 200 years, but nothing has changed. According to Rothstein: Schools are not up to the task of readying young people for the challenges of the next century. An apparently watered down curriculum ensures that all students…

proponents of the voucher debate also state that it will help to rid of “double taxation”, the idea that parents of private school children are paying not only for private school but also public school, which is a service they do not use. Since they do not use this service they should be able to receive money back to help pay for private schools. This seems to be an unnecessary demand. No one is forcing them to send their children to private schools rather than public schools that the government…

proposal for Wisconsin's schools embraces this belief system it is a denial of the fundamental role of public education in affirming the public good.A second issue which remains unexamined in the rush to the marketplace concerns the claims offered in defense of private school choice. Choice is offered as a "lesson learned" rather than a proposition to be examined. Advocates of private school choice have ignored its history. Despite the claims made for a market-based school restructuring strategy,…