politics

School vouchers are actually terrible. They take funding from already struggling schools and give it to private institutions which already don't have to follow many of the policies outlined above (they can discriminate in a lot of ways that public schools can't). They also mostly end up being a subsidy for the wealthy.

You should be extra cautious around any suggestion of voucher programs. We've heard them proposed for schools and we've heard them proposed for healthcare expenses. One fundamental problem with vouchers is that they are set to a fixed amount of money, but what happens if quality service requires more than that? Well, people just don't get quality service, right?... And that's the intentional gimmick. That's the goal. In the past the government might provide a service using tax dollars, then it switches to vouchers, but then when the vouchers don't provide enough cash now the service itself gets cut. And somehow it's supposed to be inevitable.

I was reading a study about education reform over the last 20 years and essentially the push for rewarding teachers based on student performance and voucher systems and the idea to make schools compete highly against each other, that's all totally failed to improve the quality of education in multiple countries. If you remember when Bush was pushing NCLB, one of the ideas was the notion that we should make teachers and schools compete just like businesses. But that actually doesn't make sense on a national policy level intuitively, because you don't want one school to be better than another, you want all schools to be better. (Or rather, I want all schools to be better, but some people have really f***** up values.) And then now there's solid data from large international groups that show our intuitions were accurate.

Others already cut to the chase, but yeah. The long short of it is that's just another move to siphon funds to the wealthy at the cost of the needy. I won't say it could never work, but it would likely be less efficient if you managed the same coverage as public school.

You could draw analogies to healthcare. When healthcare is privatized, not only does everyone pay more, it also leaves a ton of people without coverage. Same for education, as every child has to be covered. The voucher system works similar to subsidized healthcare (e.g. Medicare) which kinda works but why convert a perfectly acceptable universal option with a more expensive, more complicated, and more unequal system? You just inflate costs and certain people make money while everyone else suffers... without even improving quality, no less.

That all said, I'm generally open minded. It's frustrating knowing how much better private schools are vs public.... when I attended UCLA, I was frequently surrounded by private school alumns because they had connections. They had counselors, AP courses, tutors, and here I was, a first generation who only got in because of community college. It's very unfair as it is, and I fully understand the wishful thinking some (few) might have in a voucher system. But the research just isn't behind it.