Why? I mean yeah…I can and do understand that thinking…gotta let every tax payer parcipatate…but WHY does a middle class and above taxpayer need a voucher? Generally their kids are getting pretty good educations overall. They don’t nessarily NEED to transfer schools. With that population, you’d get a ton of helicopter parents who are just SO convinced that their wittle Smashlie needs to go to Prestigious Prep School, so she can become something “prestigious”
Education for your average kid isn’t something Harvard-caliber yes…but it’s far from really craptastic. However, we DO need to fix kids who are on the lower end of the spectrum educations, since they tend to drop out and not go to college and not have as many oppertunties as middle class and above kids.
Yes, we need to get rid of the “one size fits all” education. Hell…I am hard of hearing, learning disabled, AND gifted . I had " trickle down" access to a typical suburban education…but b/c my teachers had NO clue how to educate a kid like me. As a result, my acheivement in school wasn’t that great. How the hell could vouchers have helped me? How the hell can vouchers help the Average Kid? We need a multitude of options…but we need to try to fix and improve public education BEFORE dismantling it to " free market" forces.
Actually, there ARE cases right now where kids can attend a private school under the taxpayers dime. …If disabled kids aren’t getting the proper education, they can attend a private school for kids with various and sundry disabilites.
It was a response to your argument by carefully-constructed biased hypothetical example that public education cannot possibly be made worse by the removal of money from public schools.
You apparently are terribly ashamed of that argument you made, since you don’t seem to want to touch its obvious implications with a ten-foot pole, but the simple, plain, and clear fact for anyone to read here is that you have, at least once, supported your pro-voucher argument by literally dismissing the possibility that the voucher program could reduce the quality of public education for those not able to get themselves into a private school on the voucher alone.
You may pretend that you haven’t made this argument, and you may fallaciously pretend that that one throwaway but of hyperbole of mine is the core of my argument, and you may even try to leverage that bit of hyperbole to pretend that I am being “idiotic” and that my argument (which you are utterly failing to address) “fails by default”. But for the sake of humanity in general I hope to all dieties everywhere that the only person that these desperate evasion tactics of yours convinces is you.
Because now these people would be on the receiving end of the dole. They only support it because it would subsidize their kids private school tuition.
Public policy is determined (or should be) based on what is good for the country even if it mean stepping away from laissez faire policies.