Public school teachers/unions are so afraid of vouchers. They will continue to say there is not enough evidence that voucher students have improved performance (though I believe there is enough evidence to refute that claim) but will also continue to fight as hard as they can to prevent more evidence from being collected.

Bumping for "choice".

I love having my kids in a private school. I'd be even happier if I didn't have to pay tuition AND taxes for public school I'm not using.

I put my 4 kids through private schools, all the while paying taxes, just as if they had attended public schools. Vouchers should not be direct subsidies to the schools, but to the parents so that they can have "choice." Competition for voucher money will produce better schools.

But opponents of the scholarship program say more concrete measures are necessary to determine that vouchers improve education.

Any education is better than the crap gov schools put out. My kids will go private even if I have to work three jobs.

For 15 years we paid tuition and taxes also. It was worth it for our daughters to receive a good education. My husband's job takes us all over the U.S. now, so we home school our son. He has never been in a government school.

What am I missing? There simply must be one group or another studying this issue. What about those distributing the vouchers?

We have no voucher programs in my neighborhood. We do have private schools throughout the metropolitan area, often very close to the public schools. Within my city the results of academic tests among the public school students is frightfully poor. The results in the private schools is infinitely better. These tests are not all that challenging.

I would say that simply the great failure in the public schools suggest they ought to be dismantled brick by brick. Never the less, if I were responsible for delivering the vouchers, I might be tempted to track to make sure my dollars were being spent effectively. The schools' output based on the tests is self-evident. I would still take satisfaction in knowing "my" kids were passing with improved knowledge.

It also should be noted that Holy Family is in a neighborhood which has steadily decayed for many years, so it's not like the kids are being sent to a some high-tech beautiful school either.

The anti-voucher argument that I find telling is the presumed requirement that vouchers should be banned without consistent and demonstable improvements in student learning as defined on test scores. I would think that the only threshold based on merit is that the students do not do demonstrably worse in the private schools. Even if vouchers were a wash academically vs. public schools; that is a specious argument against them. If a child does no better one way or another, then why should the state care where that mediocrity is achieved? Doesn't it then become an argument of personal preference? The claim that parental preference is irrelevant is itself irrelevant. I think that the "needs to be demonstrably better" argument needs to be challenged as an insufficient rationale for banning vouchers.

"If a child does no better one way or another, then why should the state care where that mediocrity is achieved? Doesn't it then become an argument of personal preference? The claim that parental preference is irrelevant is itself irrelevant. I think that the "needs to be demonstrably better" argument needs to be challenged as an insufficient rationale for banning vouchers."

I agree completely. Now if we could just compress it into a snappy sound bite.