School Tuition Vouchers
June 8, 2007
What are your thoughts on school tuition vouchers, which allow parents to send their children to the school of their choice?
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June 8, 2007 at 5:24 pm
I think school tuition vouchers are the way to go. It is the Parent’s responsibility for their child’s future and should have the right to make education choices that is best for their child. It also places schools whether public, charter or private on notice that they will need to compete for their business rather than rely on Standard Achievement Tests to keep State funds. More importantly, it empowers families with constructive options and would give solid accountability. Education begins at home. Parent’s first not children. You can have the best school system but without Parents taking the lead first and parther with the school…the results still waver. Empowering Parents~real choice!
June 8, 2007 at 5:24 pm
I’ve railed about the failures of the public education system for years. Particularly in a city like Dayton, with a school district that spent so long in “academic emergency” and is now in a state of “continuing improvement” (i.e. “We don’t suck as bad as we did last year..”) school vouchers offer lower income or lower-middle class parents an option in their child’s education. If government schools can’t use our tax money efficiently, it’s time to take some of that money and give it back to the parents who are supporting the system with their tax dollars.
June 8, 2007 at 5:28 pm
Although the government has absolutely NO constitutional role in education, vouchers are an incremental step in the right direction to introduce competition and break the strangle hold of the teachers unions. From there, over time, we should eventually privatize all education.
June 8, 2007 at 5:48 pm
I have always tried to move to an area, in the general area of where I was working, BECAUSE of the schools. I moved back from San Antonio, Texas to live in Oakwood (Dayton) solely because of the school system; however, if I HAD to live in a particular area and did not approve of the school system in that area I would love to be able to have a school voucher to use. Therefore, I am personally in favor of the voucher system. Does it place a presure on the existin school system? Yes, it does. Is this “fair”? I’m not sure that it is; but from a consumer point of view I am in favor of it.
June 8, 2007 at 5:52 pm
THe problem with public schools is that the State has bound teacher’s hands when it comes to discipline. You can’t have an atmosphere conducive to learning when chaos reigns in the classroom. The lack of discipline has cultivated a resistance to and lack for authority.
Private schools don’t have this problem – they administer discipline and get the parents involved when doing so. They have classrooms where children actually pay attention.
School vouchers are a great idea if you want your child to actually learn something in a school where they apply discipline. If you want to be an involved parent, and you should be, go to a private school.
June 8, 2007 at 6:16 pm
The public schools are the second biggest source of misimformation about the U S and freedom. Give parents a choice.
June 8, 2007 at 6:24 pm
The choice should be given back to the parents. The fact that the democrats fight so willingly against vouchers is yet another example of how they want to teach our children how to be “good little democrats”. With the teachers union taking the point in this fight to denounce vouchers it shows just how much the union thinks of our children and their education. To wit, very little. It’s is all about “molding” the future generations. Don’t think, don’t question, just accept what we tell you as the truth. And that, my friends, is the sad state of public/government education today.
June 8, 2007 at 6:46 pm
Vouchers are the best way to get the best in education for our children. When teachers and schools have to compete in the market place then they will either fail or get up to speed to properly educate our children.
Vouchers do not take away from public education, rather they enhance the performance of our schools.
June 8, 2007 at 7:29 pm
It must be remembered that quite recently our new Democratic Governor was faced with the choice of continuing or not vouchers for public school children. He opted for the latter and, being a representitive of the “sick men” of public education, the OEA, it’s not surprising. That act of abandonment itself reveals the central problem of current day public education: The quality of a child’s education is not the goal. The needs of the union and their membership,the public school adminisration and bureaucratic self-aggranizement is. It’s that simple. If there is little accountability at the administrative level for the real learning ability of the student, something had to be done. And vouchers are ideally a sure-fire way for competiveness to sharpen the quality of union-driven government schools and better academic performance for all students in the system.
When government schools are turning out miserable results, when disinterest in school is puctuated by a 40% drop-out rate in Dayton high schools, when political correctness dictates that God is taken out of the classroom with a threat from the ACLU and (for recent example in another public school system) replaced with mandatory field trips to the local mosque (with headscarves for the girls to boot), intersted parents need a remedy; not just a statement from the Superintendent that “we’re under continuous improvement” but real results that for many are only gotten through a positive educational experience payed for partially by a voucher.
June 8, 2007 at 10:30 pm
I 100% believe in educational choices. In Ohio, there are educational options, listed below: That “choice” status is absolutely great and needs to be funded! Our great Governor, Ted, does not believe in educational choice. We need to fight him on this issue.
1. Home education
2. Public Schools
3. Chartered NonPublic
4. Cyber Schools
5. Non Chartered NonPublic
I believe the parents should be able have more control. I believe that public school option is fine for some, but we have elected to educate our children under the home education regulations. Home education allows us to taylor the education around the children’s needs and teach Christian philosophy.
Parents have choices in Ohio today. I would like the Republican freedom loving Ohians to fight for those choices, even those I would not opt to use.
I believe in edcuational choice. Vouchers definitely give back some control to the parents to help foster excellence in education. I personally would not use them (vouchers), but believe they are a great tool to for those parents who do not use other educational options like home education.
By the way, home educators won the national spelling bee, geography bee, and so on. If you would like more information on the choices, then I can post like the Ohio rules and regs or deeper research on which educational choices are more effective (academically, comunity, socially, Christian Philosophy and why). The number one answer is parental involvement or lack thereof.
June 8, 2007 at 11:19 pm
I am 100% in favor of school vouchers!! The Dayton
School system is producing pupils more in the mold
of Joseph Stalin and Karl Marx! Where is GOD ever
taught in our schools?? The current Governor is of
no help to the school voucher program! He is a slave
to the teachers union and the National Democratic Party!
School vouchers offer a choice to send your kids to
another school, but teachers unions don’t like competition, so they will make our current Governor
bow to THEIR NEEDS!!
ENOUGH SAID!!
June 9, 2007 at 1:44 pm
Students of education are taught in the university about multiple intelligences, or how each child is smart in his or her own way. Likewise, they are taught that each child learns more from varying types of instruction, prompting the idea of differentiated instruction (i.e. vary instruction techniques so to reach all students at some point).
Having said that much, if a student does not perform well (and, thus, does not learn much) in one school’s instructional culture, he or she would probably do well in another school.
Furthermore, we often break down, for purposes of public policy and comparison, our educational spending into cost per pupil. In other words, we spent, say, $12,000/student in District A versus $7,500 in District B. Essentially, we have allocated a number of dollars that a school needs to instruct one child.
Thus, we have school vouchers. Allow a student to move, with his or her dollar allocation, to another school across town more suitable to his or her academic strengths.
Absent one student, a school, presumably, would not need that student’s dollars. The school wants to keep that money, anyway, but under a voucher system the student and his allocation leave. Such a condition creates an incentive in the school to alter instruction and structure so to meet the needs of the most number of students in order to keep enrollment up, which keeps the dollars in house and that group of teachers on the payroll.
But such a system would create another condition. Not only will students leave the school where they are not learning as much as they could, other students who would learn well in that school would move from other schools where their needs were not met. In other words, we have a market-type of effect in the education system.
Not that the education system is the main problem with our society’s learning woes (take a look at, say, the ever-breaking nuclear family), but educators can only do so much—and school vouchers, properly structured, are a good step in the right direction.
In districts with a low socioeconomic status—such as Dayton—parents often cannot afford to send their students across the city line to Kettering schools or Huber Heights schools (and we’re not even talking about those “evil” “religious” Catholic schools that would break the sacred separation of church and state, according to voucher opponents) where they would receive more appropriate instruction. Vouchers would allow them to do so, and it’s a shame that the new governor wants to rid the State of Ohio of them.
Then again, I’m preaching to choir here, am I not?
June 9, 2007 at 2:45 pm
I, too, strongly support tuition voucher programs. That such programs are not widely available or otherwise under attack by the NEA, together with those beholden to the NEA, represents a tyranny of the minority in my opinion.
June 16, 2007 at 1:31 am
Support, support, support and increase, increase, increase!
Frankly, I’m plain tired of dealing with all of the adults who have been indoctrinated er, I mean, “taught” by government schools. A vast number of them have little ability to reason, no real idea about our system of economics, and actually believe that we are a “democracy”.
The school voucher program should be greatly expanded in scope – even to include those who homeschool. It should be equal to the entire subsidy per child given to the particular school system in question.
Then, one by one, those government schools which perform poorly (the overwhelming majority of all of them) should just plainly be put out of business.
Another caveat to be added to the voucher program is that it should not be available for sending a child to a school in which any teacher is a member of any of the major teacher’s unions.
July 16, 2007 at 5:34 pm
Public schools have become propaganda schools. They want to indoctrinate our children into leftist socialist robots who will procreate without limit and go on the government dole.
Vouchers brings accountability, but if allowed to their fullest extent would put the public school system out of business. That is why Governor Ted Strickland is fighting so hard to reverse the small partial victory that parents have achieved for school choice vouchers.
The reason Christians schools will not accept government money (except through vouchers) is that they will not compromise their values and convictions for the sake of government control. They still teach the Ten Commandments and Scripture like all government schools started out doing.
Most government free public schools were started by Pastors and children learned to read by reciting the Bible in American prairie schools. Many children in our country’s founding were home schooled by their god-fearing Mothers!