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but having lived in DC (and sending daughters to private and parochial schools,) I recognize the need to provide whatever help possible for families who seek good schools, many of which are simiply not available in some public systems. (p.s., I attended publc schools through college. Times have changed.)

pps, WELCOME!

And educational excellence is too variable and elusive an animal to leave to boilerplate one-size-fits-all approaches.

People on this board hold varying points of view, usually because of their life experience. I am not in favor of vouchers for private school programs or schools.

Last edited Wed Aug 1, 2012, 11:10 PM - Edit history (1)

It's a band-aid on a problem that needs a blood-transfusion.

With robust funding of our public school system, all of our schools could be wonderful schools. Vouchers take money from already hurting school systems and reduce the pool of money that could be used with the remaining children--plus the amount on the voucher isn't really enough to cover all of the expenses of private education.

At any rate, the right-wing is pretty frank that they want vouchers to reduce demand for public schools and have the whole system disappear. I don't think that was ever a secret.

Post I did two years ago about this very thing: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x8471844

I was educated in private schools and have taught for most of my career in public schools. I don't approve of opportunity scholarships because they do not provide equal opportunities. Private schools have many additional expenses besides tuition. I can still remember my parents struggling to pay the extras - activity fees, book fees, lunch fees, transportation, etc. Vouchers rarely cover the full cost of tuition and never cover the additional fees.

Also, private schools rarely admit students with special needs and even in the 21st century, there are private schools that do not admit minorities.

Then there is the separation of church and state issue. I don't believe tax dollars should support religious education. Again, my own parents, who were far from wealthy, found a way to educate all of us in private schools without any help from the taxpayers.

DU is a mix of left-of-center, centrist, conservative, and corporate Democrats. Fewer of the first, more of the rest, than there used to be.

DU is unlikely to be united on the topic of vouchers or any other privatization tool. Democrats used to be, but no longer.

Vouchers use public funds for private, un-regulated schools. That's unacceptable, and SHOULD be unconstitutional.


This left-of-center liberal doesn't support privatization. I can't speak for the rest of DU.

1. Vouchers divert public resources from public to private schools, in essence subsidizing people who can afford private education at the expense of those who can't.

2. Vouchers segregate the K-12 school population. Vouchers were lobbied for by the Catholic Church for decades but morphed in Virginia after passage of the Civil Rights Act in an attempt to thwart integration. It took the courts to strike it down. That they have condoned it now is a disgrace and reflects how far right our judiciary has slithered and how much influence churches have gained over legislatures.

3. Charter schools were created as the intermediate life form between public schools and private schools to be financed with public money. As charters wither due to poor accountability, unaccountable voucher schools will replace them.

4. There are no normative standards for private schools. They traverse the spectrum from Ivy League prep academies (which won't be in the voucher business save as a tax deduction for wealthy parents) to little schools that have nothing but a Bible or a Koran for a text and revealed doctrine as a curriculum.

5. Private education for the masses is the road to democratic extinction and the Balkanization of the American people, something public schools were created to avoid.