Recently, there has been a push for tuition vouchers to be commonly distributed throughout the United States.
What are tuition vouchers?
Tuition vouchers would be something to the effect of a "75% off one private K-12 school tuition" coupon that would be distributed to all families with children. (I totally made up the 75%. All the different ways of granting the vouchers are under question; that's the easiest way to explain it.)
How would they work?
As a very general statement, private schools offer a better education and turn out more competetive scholars than public schools. Theoretically, the tuition vouchers would make it much easier for families of all backgrounds to send their students to private schools.
What about families who still couldn't afford to send their children to private schools?
Their children would go to public schools.
What would happen to the public schools?
Ideally, public schools would work harder to stay on par with the private schools. Therefore, the standards of public education would be raised. For public schools that couldn't keep up with private schools, they would close and those students would attend a different public school nearby.
The other side of that would be that the public schools would not be able to keep up with private schools, funding would be focused more on the private schools, and the government wouldn't take as much care to keep up public school standards because, Hey! A ton of kids are going to private schools now! The public schools' quality would decline continuously, the poor students would get worse education, and they in turn would not be able to get into the same colleges that private students could attend. The cleavage between the poor classes and the richer classes would be heavily increased (as if it needs any increasing...).
What about religion?
Oh, yes. Most private schools are affiliated with a religion. Now, I don't think that's a bad thing, but education is generally government-controlled, and there would arise many disputes over seperation of Church and State. The government probably shouldn't hand out vouchers for education when, most of the time, the institution the voucher would be used on is religiously-affiliated, and the religious teachings are practically impossible to avoid in that sect of education. Seperation of Church and State is a good thing in a secular nation. I swear.
Of course, there are many other sides to this argument, but I wanted to be brief.
What say you?
I wish they had tuition vouchers for colleges whether they're religious or non-religious.
By pulling the education system out of a monopoly (a government one at that!) the tuition vouchers would spur competition to turn out the best test scores(!), most hands-on learning(!), or most club oriented school(!). At an average of six thousand per student, annually, there is a lot of money to be made in education with vouchers allotting even half of that, or just encouraging more students to attend private schools. Many private school's charge tuition that is less than $2,500. There is nothing to lose by throwing the education system into the ever-innovating world of business.
intersting.. im intrigued..