Posted on 11/30/2012 7:24:49 PM PST by TurboZamboni
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal's private school tuition voucher program has been ruled unconstitutional by a state judge.
State Judge Tim Kelley said Friday that the program improperly diverts money allocated through the state's public school funding formula to private schools. He also said it unconstitutionally diverts local tax dollars to private schools.
Kelley ruled in a lawsuit backed by teacher unions and school boards seeking to shut down the voucher program.
The state education department and the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education said the programs were funded and created in line with the constitution.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
However,....The NEA and education establishment elites have done highly biased studies ( highly massaged with means and socio-ecnomic ratings ) that show that there is no difference in achievement between government schools and voucher schools when averaged over all the participants. None of these studies has shown voucher schools ( on average) to be performing worse no matter how hard they tried to mash the data to fit their agenda.
“Really. What do you think got us in this mess? Listening to little pissant judges....that’s what.”
Since 1803. That is how long we have been on a wrong track.
I don’t disagree, though it has never been as obvious as it has been since, gee, dang, to be honest, since George HW Bush.
Isn’t it puzziling how the left is so adamant about denying kids financial aid until they graduate from high school and then do a about face and demand financial aid for the same kid to attend collage?
My main objection to many existing voucher programs is that they are deliberatley targeting minority children while whites have to pay the full freight for private education while subsidizing the vouchers for “others”. I’m involved with Catholic groups here in NJ that have these drives to petition for vouchers in NJ, but they target areas that are not just “ethnic” - they aren’t Catholic at all (though the drive is being pushed by a coalition fighting for Catholic schools). I have Catholic children that can’t go to Catholic school; why would I send non-Catholics? They vote foe Dems that propagate failing public schools anyway.
Catholic schools in NJ are going the way of the dodo, and they should. Too many Catholics have been told they can vote Dem and attain salvation for their souls; I’m not God, but I wouldn’t want to be in their shoes when they meet Him.
You are not alone. It is a symptom of the disease that is killing our republic. Legislative power has been largely removed from bodies responsible to the people.
This is another BINGO!
Any child of any age who passes the GED, a similar private exam, or certain SAT/ACT scores should be given an official high school diploma from their local government school board.
Savings to taxpayers: ENORMOUS ( Plus extra taxes paid by the child for the extra years he works)
Cost to taxpayers: NOTHING
Benefit to child: Several added years of work experience, training, or higher education.
The choice part of the voucher argument sounds great, but another part is that private schools which accept voucher students are now accepting government funds, and the use of goverenment funds by schools has been used as the excuse to impose every type government dictate on schools.
How long before schools accepting vouchers will have some government bureaucracy suing over their curriculum, admission standards (accepting too many vouchers from white kids), religious content of school activities, and all the other practices that often bring law suits and governement interference in schools?
The solution to that might be tuition tax credits.
As long as the voucher debate has been around I've wondered if there is some part of it I'm not aware of. A main reason private schools are established is so that a better type, or different type of education can be offered, free of government meddling. It's always seemed to me that if vouchers ever gained widespread approval, that that would allow as much government meddling and law suit meddling into a private school accepting vouchers as has been the case with many state public schools for decades.
Accept government funds in the form of vouchers, surrender your ability to make decisions on how to run your private school.
I bet if vouchers become widespread, fewer and fewer private schools would accept them. Or else, there's some key point that I'm missing as to how a private school could accept vouchers and still make its own decisions about how to run the school, which is the purpose of most privates schools in the first place.
So private parks divert money from State Parks, etc. His reasoning would require many other private enterprises to go by the wayside I imagine.
And there is a voucher program of another sort that should provide some clues as to have a more general education voucher program might work: Section 8 housing vouchers.
Here is an article about the study:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444184704577585582150808386.html
The Marxist NEA have concocted highly massaged studies using social and economic class, poverty levels, free lunch participation, and race but even they can’t prove that voucher children ( on average) do worse. Their studies conclude that the outcomes are equal.
Of the 2,666 students in the original study, necessary information was available for over 99%. To see whether those who won the lottery were more likely to go to college, we linked student Social Security numbers and other identifying characteristics to college enrollment data available from the National Student Clearinghouse, which collects that information from institutions of higher education attended by 96% of all U.S. students. We know of no other voucher study that has been as successful at tracking students over such a long period of time.
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David Gothard
Although our study identified no significant impact on college enrollments among Hispanic students (and too few white and Asian students participated for us to analyze), the impact on African-American students was large. Not only were part-time and full-time college enrollment together up 24%, but full-time enrollment increased 31% and attendance at selective colleges (enrolling students with average SAT scores of 1100 or higher) more than doubled, to 8% from 3%.
Another voucher program is food stamps.
vouchers are issued to parents/children....where they use them should be irrelevant to anyone.
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