School vouchers are the perfec reasonable answer to state imposed education (aka. indoctrination). It's not a coincidence that only neo liberals protest against it, since the vouchers may promote a breed of free and progressive thinkers. The feds should get off the school system and let each State decide what's best for them.

These things should be outlawed immediately because they don't do anything to improve public education, and usually serve as nothing more as taxpayer-funded cash giveaways to religious organizations.  The big hoax the supporters of this questionable practice maintain is that taking funding away from the public schools and funneling it to private education promotes competition.  This is utter bullsh*t.  What it does is take resources away from troubled public schools to support, for the most part, their parochial counterparts, giving the private schools an advantage at the taxpayers' expense.  This is also an enfranchisement of religion, which is a violation of the establishment clause.  Most importantly, it's a cowardly running away from the problem in public education, not taking the issue head-on.  If vouchers are the answer, why don't we give them to all the children so they can all go to private school and we can close down the public ones?  How absurd.  This is not a commitment to the dilemma in public education, it's a contributing factor to it.

All this is going to do is take money away from cash strapped public schools. So at the expense of many a few will get to go to private schools. Many private schools do not even require teaching credentials and are not over seen by a school board. Why would we want to batter the already struggling system with this stupid idea.

The idea behind vouchers is two fold, both are exactly what the rebulicans want. 1.) The voucher system will allow for CERTAIN students to go to private schools, not all. This will mean that while some will be postivly affected, most will be negativly because it will allow republicans to further succeed in their resistance to fixing public schools. The answer is not to partially fix the problem, its to go in and make sure that every kid as an equal and excellent education. 2.) 95% of private schools are christian, meaning that under this system a child not under a christian faith is forced to go to a religious school and forced to take part in the religion or else won't get an education.

The issue of school vouchers boils down to a question of tax equity and whether the plan would help to improve public schools. On the first question, vouchers are basically a way in which a parent gets credit for the amount of marginal cost savings to the government due to keeping a child out of the public school system. In other words, how much money was saved by the state by not having to educate that child? This makes sense from a tax equity standpoint, but also opens up a can of worms since many taxpayers have no children, so how much do they get? The answer for childless taxpayers is to switch to some kind of student tax on parents with school aged children, leaving some part of education expense spread among everyone since education does help society as a whole as well. The second question of whether vouchers will increase competitive forces making public schools better is a more complex matter. Frankly, we will not know until someone tries, and complaints about lack of funding are just wrong. As I noted in another comment, some states spend in excess of 50% of their budgets on education, and that doesn't include federal and local spending; therefore, lack of funds is not the problem. The problem is clearly how efficiently the funds are spent, and an increase in the number of private schools is certainly a worthwhile experiment to improve efficiency. Finally, some critics of vouchers have expressed concern about them being a public funding of religion. This is easily addressed by limiting the value of vouchers to that necessary to pay for the secular portion of the curriculum. The fact that this may increase other private and school funds for non-secular purposes is irrelevant as the same argument could be made for any and all government assistance (eg food stamps, medicare, and social security).

A serious credibility issue for liberals who are for freedom of choice for everything except vouchers.The voucher issue also insults the intelligence of people who want quality choice for their kids-and instead are told that they will be sending them to inferior schools-to todays public schools.

Absolute local control for school districts.

Funding public schools properly is paramount to the future of this and any country. The bulk of the student population attends community funded schools. My children do not. I'm a product of the public school system, but fortunately finished before the overwhelming changes began in the late 70's and 80's and that continue today. My kid's attend private schools for two reasons. The first is the minimal social pressure to comply with all of the expensive, sometimes hurtful trends that marketing experts force upon on kid's. The second is the educational standards set by the state are easier to comply with when class sizes are small and personal. A voucher against my tax bill would help and not because of greed, but because I've worked very hard and suffered many self imposed hardships to carve out a place for my family. If you compare the actual cost of private vs. public schools the cost per student are similar. The biggest problem with improper funding to our schools is the power grab between the school boards and the teacher associations. The voucher idea is complicated. Renters for example pay part of their rent towards property taxes,but do not get credit for their cash contributions to the tax base. How would you calculate a voucher amount for these people? How would property taxes be written off at tax time if vouchers represented only a portion of a families true tax burden? The bottom line is this. My family comes first, then yours.

I do think something does need to be changed in regards to this issue. I’m a parent who has home schooled one child that went on to college. I have a daughter that has never seen the inside of either a public or private school because she has been home schooled thus far. She’s just turned eight years old and is in the fifth grade. My point is, I’m paying taxes that is being used in the school system where I have no children. And, because I believe that I am able to give my children a better education than what is currently available to them in the public sector; I am having to pay for supplies for our home school program. Paying for my children’s education twice you might say. It would be nice to see a tax break or a voucher of some type that I could apply toward the cost of giving my children a decent education.

"Why should my hard earned money go to help kids in school?" It SHOULDN'T; that's the reason for the voucher idea. Vouchers represent a REFUND of tax money you paid for schooling, and your own money comes back to you to spend as you please! It is the PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM that is taking your money; the vouchers are a way to get some of that money BACK. I don't think vouchers are the solution though. I think the public education concept should be thrown out the window altogether. My money is not to be stolen from me and given to somebody else, be it through welfare or public schools.

Not an important political issue, per se, but I understand that the voucher acts as a refund since those who send their children to private school are paying taxes which aid public schools. It's a tough call, cosidering that we've already got too little funding for many areas to afford to give any refunds like that back, but at the same time I can understand a parent's frustration of paying for both private and public schools. Perhaps just a tax break for those who send their kids to private school that covers the amount of which would have otherwise been used for public schools would be an easier solution, and probably a less costly one for the goverment to implement? Anyway, I think the big issue is to improve our public schools to meet decent standards, if they really want to fix the underlying problem here.

I'm not really an expert on this subject- but I would say that the answer is more local control of schools so they can access the problems and then ask the government for funds or laws- rather than a national law which controls not only the bad schools but the high-performing ones as well. Instead of moving to private schools- I'd say that we should work on local initiatives to fix public schools.

I don't like the idea of school vouchers. Instead of taking even more money out of the public schools so some select students can go to a private school, why don't we work on improving our public schools so that all children can benefit? Everyone deserves a good education.

Choice is okay for everything except the fundamental responsibility of parents to educate their children. Privatize public (government) schools.

No, no, no. FIX public schools.

This is not an attempt to improve public education, it is an attempt to destroy it in favor of corporate and church-run alternatives. Let's see, schools are having problems--so let's take money that would have gone to them and give it to private and parochial schools instead, that'll fix 'em--by siphoning off their funding and leaving them with all the "problem" students that the private schools won't take. Sound like a plan? Where I live we have a form of this, called "charter schools." These are private schools that get public school funds based on how many students they take in--all taxpayer supported, no tuition cost to users. As private schools, they get to be selective about who they let in, whereas public schools do not. An acquaintance of mine has a child with behavioral "issues." He was not getting along in regular school, so they put him in a charter school with state-of-the-art teaching methods and a better teacher-to-student ratio. He lasted less than a year before they kicked him out. Now he's back disrupting class in our local public school. This is what vouchers do--leave public schools responsible for the most high-maintenance, academically-challenged and otherwise at-risk students while leaving the poorest districts more underfunded than before. Those who favor vouchers would do well to consider that, just because you have the money in hand to pay for private school tuition, that doesn't guarantee your kid a spot.

Great idea. My children are already in private schools so this would help out a lot.

I don't in particular agree with the conservatives on this issue. The whole point of the debate is not about the separation of church and state per se. It's more about the sheer unpracticality of the voucher system itself. For one thing, there aren't enough seats in the private schools to house all of the kids in bad schools. Is it fair for one kid to go to a better school and leave the others behind in a bad school? Supporting school vouchers is somewhat akin to giving up on the public school system. There are many faults with it, but we should by no means give up on it. Vouchers will benefit the private schools financially, but there is another side to the argument. These schools, some of them which are religious, will have adjust to standards that are set by the state. Some of these may include what is taught concerning religion. Plenty of parents send their kids to those schools for religious education. At the end of the day, those schools won't benefit by having religion being taken away from their curriculums. Those schools exist for that reason. The public schools won't benefit by having precious funding being taken away from them. We can't give up on the system; I think that we need to put more money into education at the federal level. The future is in technology and in order for us to remain competitive in the world, we need to produce people who are skilled. Higher standards need to be enacted in the public schools; higher standards will lead to better teachers entering the field. Students will also benefit by becoming motivated and that should be the goal at the end of the day. Vouchers don't solve the problem, they relocate it.

If it will lead the eventual destruction of the public school system, then I support it.

The education establishment will only understand head-to-head competition. They're deathly afraid of vouchers and charter schools, because it breaks their bureaucratic stranglehold on the system we have presently.

The issue is both important and very necessary to the country at this point in time. Definitely an extreme measure, but how else will public schools feel pressure to really improve? Our current public education "system" is hobbling along, at best.

Not a good idea. It would, in the long run, drive the country into the poorhouse. It costs a ton of money to get into private and parochial schools...how long are we going to be able to send to private school every child whose parent wants a transfer? Two weeks? And then only to the crappiest ones out there. A better solution would be to simply shine some light on successful public schools. I'm getting a fantastic education and would not rather go anywhere else...in a public school. Take care, everyone!