School Vouchers - Update

I am opposed to federal vouchers that allow some students to opt out of their neighborhood public school and attend a different public or private school. The system as proposed by GW Bush and operating in Washington, DC is offered only to children of low income families. The objective is to make a better educational environment available to children in failing public schools whose families cannot afford to move their children to better schools. The expectation is that these students will perform better if they attend better schools, which without exception are private schools (72% are parochial schools). My issue is that a disproportionate amount of federal funding is spent on the few students that use vouchers, which leaves far less money to support and improve the public schools. How can we justify abandoning the majority of public school students to underfunded schools so that a small percentage of students can attend private schools?

Although the expectation is that these students will receive a better education in a better school, the reality is that these students are not performing better than they did in their neighborhood school.

The federal government subsidizes the Washington, DC schools as they do all school systems. The subsidy is intended to improve the educational system, i.e. more and better teachers, more and better equipment. Washington, DC receives an educational subsidy of $74 million of which $18 million is earmarked for the voucher system. The Washington, DC school system serves 71,629 students in public schools (37% attend charter schools). Private schools in Washington, DC serve 17,562 students. A total of 1,903 students attend private schools using vouchers.

Students using vouchers are only 2.6% of the total of public school students yet the voucher system receives 24% of the federal funding to Washington, DC schools.

One parent of a voucher student, Breanna, said the prospect of turning her daughter over to a public school was frightening. "I didn't feel that was a good environment," Ms. Walton, a single mother of two, said. "But I couldn't afford to send her anywhere else." Breanna is now a 6-year-old first-grade student at the private Rock Creek International School, where the average class size is 12 and the student-teacher ratio is 7-to-1. She has as classmates the children of international corporate executives and foreign ambassadors. Breanna's curriculum is the International Baccalaureate program, and she is taught regularly in English, French, Spanish, and Arabic. Trips abroad - to Europe, Africa, South America, the Middle East - are part of the curriculum, and Breanna will participate. The school's facilities are bright, colorful, and clean, on a quiet, tree-lined street in Georgetown. According to Ms. Walton, it's a far cry from what awaited Breanna at her local public school.

Although most if not all parents would prefer that their children attend such a school. It is not and never will be available to all the Washington, DC school children. The "children that are left behind" in the public schools can only expect that their educational experience will worsen as more vouchers result in less funding of the public schools.

In my opinion the voucher system is the means by which the federal government diverts educational funding from the public school system to the private school system. Is the ultimate goal to privatize education?

In January GW Bush will be out of the White House. Congress does not plan to extend the voucher system. I hope the next president will focus on improving the public school system rather than abandoning it.

School Funding and the Separation of Church and State

I found and old but interesting article about the subject of “separation of church and state”. The churches that demanded a constitutional separation of church and state now lead the effort to eliminate it. It’s all a matter of whether it is perceived as a benefit or not. I can understand why parochial schools would like to have their students’ allotment of the funding for the public schools that the parochial school students do not attend. But, I see two reasons why the educational vouchers will have a destruction effect on the public school system.

1. Vouchers were created by GW Bush to subsidize the education of students whose parents choose to transport them into a different school district or to a private school. The voucher is not enough to pay for the transportation of a student to a different school nor is it enough to pay the tuition of a private school. Therefore, most, if not all, of the students that will move to a better school district or to a private school are those whose parents can afford to move their children with or without the voucher. The school that loses the student and the funding associated with their voucher will find it increasingly harder to achieve competitive performance and the students left behind will suffer for it.

2. If the parents of school-aged children can withdraw their child’s share of the school’s funding to do with as they see fit, including home schooling. Then does the taxpayer who has no school-aged children have the right to withhold his share of the school’s funding? Why should the childless taxpayer be obligated to support a school which taxpaying parents will not support?

Schools and the education of our children are a benefit to the entire community rather than only to the students and the parents of the students. Imagine the future condition of our communities and society if we did not provide free public education to all students regardless of economic class. The English realized the need for this a couple hundred years ago when they created what became the public school. But, Bush and his elitist kind do not, in my honest opinion, care about the education of the economic underclass. They don’t care at all about the economic underclass as long as there is more than enough of them to fulfill labor needs. Labor rates, like the price of oil, can be and is manipulated to maximize the cost of oil and minimize the cost of labor. This is not done for the benefit of the masses. It is done only for the benefit of the economic upper class. McCain recently taught us who the upper class is; they earn more than $5,000,000 per year.