I need to ask questions about vouchers so people can answer them.
ex. Do you believe vouchers violate the establishment clause of the first amendment because statistics show that 99% of pupils who receive vouchers attend a religious affiliated school?
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Questions To Ask About Education Vouchers?
Posted on March 20, 2012.
The government isn’t telling those students to attend those religious schools. They are doing so on their own.
I am a firm believer in the ‘wall of separation’ between church and state. But I don’t have a problem with the govt. subsidizing religious schools, so long as the schools meet federal standards. I don’t like the idea of a school teaching creationism, for instance, or requiring students to learn that their religion is the only ‘correct’ one. I don’t like schools excluding kids of other religions. But some of the greatest universities in the world have religious roots.
As to vouchers, I have other reasons for opposing them. We had an initiative on our ballot here in California that would have brought a voucher system and The People rejected it. The very same initiative was run again and it was rejected again.
The problems with this plan were that it didn’t really set a ‘level playing field’ between public and private schools. First, private schools were allowed to charge the voucher amount plus whatever more they could get from the parents. So private schools that were already established and successful would only raise their prices by the voucher amount, the children of less well-to-do parents would still be out of them. Secondly, public schools had to hire only certificated teachers and pay them the going rate, while private voucher schools could hire anyone and pay them whatever they’d work for (obviously this was meant to save Catholic schools, to allow them to hire nuns, and I don’t even have a problem with that. But other private schools could hire just ANYONE!) Finally, private schools could pick and choose among their students, to cherry-pick those who already had good academic records and would make the school look good while public schools would have to take all applicants.
The end product of all of this would be to put kids in a graduated school system, where they would get only exactly the level of education their parents could afford. At the bottom level would be defunded, falling-apart public schools, the repositories for all the damaged kids, ‘problem kids’, etc.
The Republicans seem to want this kind of system. So the children of the well-off won’t have to compete with the ‘rabble’ for the few good jobs that will be available when they get out of school. It has nothing to do with religious education at all!