The studies are in, and the results are clear: voucher programs for students don’t achieve any better results than students get in traditional public schools.
Vouchers don’t work in Milwaukee, famous for its 20 year failed experiment in vouchering, and they don’t work in DC, home to possibly the worst public school system in the country.
And this has been clear from day one, despite the efforts of free-marketeers and right-wing ideologues to suggest that making education profitable makes education better.
Voucher programs enable rich people to avoid paying higher taxes for public schools, while pretending to care about the poor.
Parents love the idea of choice, and those who have money can choose to live where better public schools (and wealthier people) live.
Poor people don’t have that choice, and they don’t do any better when sent miles away to a school predominately populated with rich kids.
Public schools alone can do very little about poverty, missing parents, and the lack of meaningful career opportunities in poor neighborhoods.
Students in voucher programs don’t seem to see any difference between public schools and voucher schools.
The problems with American public education are many: poor teachers, lack of funding for schools with poor students, too much dependence on local property taxes to fund education, inadequate national academic standards, a school year that’s much too short, etc. etc. etc.
None of these problems will be solved by allowing a significant number of parents to stop participating in the public school system, or by pretending that making education work for poorer students requires less money.
Vouchers, charter schools and all the rest are nothing more and nothing less than an attempt by our society to escape responsibility for the proper funding and higher standards that are necessary to revive American’s very low educational standing.
Gorilla says: “Spare the rod and fund the child!”
