How do you want your schools to offer a higher caliber of instruction? and are you willing to pay for it?
There is much to respond to in your piece, but I've been driving half the night and the thing that jumped out was this pair of statements.
I think that, for the most part, the supporters of vouchers fall into two very different camps. The first is the pro-religious trying to expand their sphere of influence. Maybe that isn't so good, though if religious instruction is what many parents want I hesitate to call them wrong even though it's not what I want.
The second group supporting vouchers are what I will call the "free-marketeers". This group tends to believe that in human endeavors, those things in which competition is required tend to be produced in a higher caliber fashion that is more effective and pleasing to consumers, and those things that are monopolistic in structure tend to be produced in a low caliber fashion that is not effective and frustrates consumers.
Whether education is a valid place for that theory is open to debate, of course. But I think that the free marketeers would offer to answer your question "How do you want your schools to offer a higher caliber of instruction?" by saying that there are many examples where introducing competition produced a higher caliber of service and preventing competition perpetuated a lower caliber of service.
Airline tickets used to be too expensive to allow the masses to fly.
People used to worry about the cost of making long distance calls.
People used to buy unreliable American (and Canadian <g>) cars instead of Toyotas.
People frustrated by operating system crashes had no real alternative.
There are literally hundreds of examples. The point is, people in many places are frustrated by the level of service provided by the local public school. If those people lack enough funds to do anything about it, their kids are stuck with that education. Vouchers, implemented properly, might give them a way out. And, in so doing, might spur those schools that aren't performing to do better.
Toyota doesn't make better cars because the government tells them to. They do it because if they don't, their customers will buy somebody else's cars. And maybe those who run substandard public schools will be spurred to do the same. Maybe.
As for being willing to pay for it, I think that consumers are willing to pay for well run schools and not willing to pay for poorly run ones. And a common theme in industries where competition has been introduced is that costs go down, often way down. Competition has a way of forcing that to happen. |
