School Vouchers Will Improve the Education of Our Children

A child I know is a tall, blond, precocious, nine-year old in the fourth grade at a local elementary school. Two or three times a year the students partake in STAR and Accelerated Reading testing which evaluates the reading level of each student, shows their current level, and suggests what grade span of books the child should be reading. This particular child is rated at the twelfth grade in the third month currently. The books at the library go as high as the thirteenth grade in the second month [Potter]. Books that reach this grade level make up less than one percent of all the books in the library and are generally very old and may not hold much interest for fourth and fifth graders.
My wife Heidi, a former school teacher, and I had to beg, pester, cajole and prod the school and district administration to allow certain children into the Program for Academically Talented Students, or PATS. Although this program is designed to meet the needs of gifted students, it only meets once a week. If we could, Heidi and I would place all of our children into private school in an effort to give them every advantage in their education, however the cost makes this an impossibility for us. Our family can not afford to send one student, let alone three, to private school. We would pay tuition for private or parochial school and we would be paying taxes to support the local school district. We can't afford this solution as it is right now. The result of this is that kids will be caught in an unsatisfactory situation.
There is one solution that is available if parents want it enough to vote such legislation in to law. School vouchers would allow families and students to choose a school that suits the child and would improve their education. Increased competition would force public schools to improve their standards and compel the system to improve its fiscal efficiency.
By attaching tax dollars to individual students rather than to districts or particular schools, vouchers would allow parents to determine what type of school they feel is in the best interest of their child. The private and parochial schools would expand and new ones would be created as demand increases. These schools would be in direct competition to attract students from the public schools, meaning it would be in the best interest of the school to provide a quality curriculum, and produce tangible results to continue attracting new and returning students. Public schools would then face a paradigm shift that would force them to educate our children better and for less money.
Ending the connection between government and education is something that is in the interest of every family and community [Bast]. We, as a society, would never allow the government to tell us what to fill our bodies with when it comes to food, why do we allow it when it comes to learning? Schools have become a bastion of amorality, limited freedom of speech, and ultimately educational mediocrity. Parents are often unaware of this or unable to do what we deem best for our children, most often because of finances.
The telecom industry is an example of how market competition will improve the product. We now enjoy very advanced technology and the price, due to competition continues to fall [Stossel]. The same will work for schooling of our children. Graduate school is an example of how private schooling that is subsidized can be fantastically successful, when money follows the student and schools are competing for those dollars. Graduate schools in this country are literally second to none [Bast].
In his essay "Vouchers and Educational Freedom: A Debate" Joseph Blast et al. makes the case for vouchers in part this way:
"Social justice." Government subsidy of education should be truly universal and not arbitrarily exclude religious and private schools. Also, the poor deserve the same choices as the rich. Competition. Free-market competition among schools would generate better quality public and private schools. Save private schools. Vouchers would save thousands of struggling private and religious schools that are providing a great service to the communities where they operate. Save government schooling. Vouchers would save government schooling by forcing competition among schools and improvements across the board.
Allowing parents to choose private or parochial schools should not be excluded from government funds, a decision which has been up held by the Supreme Court, is fair to everybody, and starts to break secular control of funds that pay for education. "Public schools do respond constructively to competition, by raising their achievement and productivity. The best studies on this question examine the introduction of choice programs that have been sufficiently large and long-lived to produce competition. Students achievement generally does rise when they attend voucher or charter schools" States Caroline Hoxby, Harvard College Professor and
Allie S. Freed Professor of Economics. Allowing parents to choose where they want their children educated, how that education takes place and burdening our public school system to improve through the force of market is to every citizen's benefit. Teacher unions and administration officials have a very different view of the voucher system.
Vouchers do not improve student performance. Vouchers hurt the vast majority of students by taking money from public schools. Vouchers do not guarantee "choice" or "competition," because private schools do the choosing, and do not have to compete on a level playing field with public schools. Vouchers do not bring more accountability to education; they bring less. Small class sizes and other targeted reforms--not vouchers--are the answer for improving education for all children, and for minority students in particular. [NEA]
As I cited before the argument against vouchers based on the idea that students will not perform better is born out of the fact that studies have been done to disprove this notion. Students do perform better when they are in a school setting they can thrive in. Several of the studies done in Milwaukee and Philadelphia are based on first year performance of the voucher system in those cities, and they are corrected to balance the outcome of the results.
I concede the fact that money taken from public schools through the vouchers system is true, however with fewer students present in the building, fewer dollars are required to operate the school. If the school administration finds that they do not have enough funds, they will be forced to improve their performance in a variety of ways to increase enrollment. They have the option of things like restructuring the curriculum, hiring better teachers and exploring new ways of educating the students in measurable ways. Certainly one would agree this can be done more efficiently than is currently happening right now.
Limitations on choice are not a problem of the public school system. If a child can not get into a private school due to, for example, the child's special needs, or no available slots for the child to fill, the parent will make the choice of how to resolve the issue. Some parents will almost certainly want a public education perhaps because of religion or a program available to the student not available in private school. The choice should be in the hands of the parents, the very people who know what is best for their child and family.
Money spent through vouchers does not have to and should not be controlled by the state. Monies that subsidize college education can essentially be spent as the student sees fit, at the school of their choice. Why parents should not be permitted to spend what is essentially subsidized dollars on their child as they see fit? That money can be spent in the private sector as the parents and schools see fit. If that money is spent unwisely the parents will hold the school accountable. If the private or parochial school does not respond to the children they educate and their families, that school will face a loss of customers. The money does not belong to the public school administrators, it belongs to the taxpayers.
The United States has been working on reduction of class sizes at least since the 1970's [Stossel], and it has not improved our standards or our "product" which is to say students in these thirty years. Japan has class sizes that would be incomprehensible to us here in the U.S. yet they routinely out score our students on standardized tests. So do other nations France, Germany, Finland, and Ireland.
Our school system in this nation spends more than $8997.00 per pupil per year educating our children. This adds up to more than 535 billion dollars per year in school spending [DOE]. "Of the other 38 comparison countries, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong-China, Iceland, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Macao-China, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, the Slovak Republic, Sweden, and Switzerland outperformed the United States in mathematics literacy in 2003. These same 23 countries, plus Hungary and Poland, outperformed the United States in problem-solving [DOE]." I could not have said it better myself. What this demonstrates is that a monopoly by the government is not working and introducing competition will improve education for everyone. There is a great deal of room for improvement in our public school system "evidence suggests that there is room for productivity gains of 50 to 69%" [Hoxby]. Productivity gains means better students produced.
School vouchers are perhaps not the only solution to the problem of poorly run or failing schools. Charter schools are demonstrating wonderful results in Arizona, and other places. Public school has a place in our society right now and will not simply disappear over night. Programs like tracking students may have a place in all this as well. However parents should be the persons who ultimately decide where and how a child is educated. We should no longer tolerate the poor results that our public monopolistic centers of education turn out. Breaking the bond of government and education is necessary to improve our children's education, and will serve our society better in a time of increased local, national and global competition.