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What do you think of educational vouchers?

Should our government give certificates for government funding for parents to use for their school of choice?

What implications does this have in terms of religion? Do you think it will cause more indoctrination if this were to happen?

silvereyes 8 Oct 27
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9 comments

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I am opposed to them because I think the role of education is to prepare children to live in our common society. I cannot support public funding of any sub-category of common society. If people want to teach their children a sub-category they should pay their own way

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This will likely be an ongoing battle in most states for a long time to come. While I don't think the vouchers themselves are explicitly indoctrinating kids (most of those families using vouchers to go to religious schools are generally religious themselves) en masse, I do think it's a way for the haves to get what they want at the expense of others, over and above the church/state separation matter.

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I'm against vouchers because I expect them to increase the divide between the haves and have nots.
There would need to be a lot of conditions and I think there would still be negatives.
No public money should go in any way to promoting religion. So if voucher money pays for a building it must be rented for any such class and be available for other outside activities to rent. It shouldn't be during school time either.
The school must take all comers. No selectivity on difficulty or cost only behavior and there must be monitoring for misuse.
Money across all districts must be equal per student. Ideally nationally but possibly state by state if it must be.
Ideally no private additional fund contributions. I don't expect that to fly since public schools raise additional funds now.

I still expect aggregation based on race or intelligence or wealth in schools. I don't think that's good for societal outcomes.

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If there were more private quality schools teaching a better curriculum it would might work but it seems that private schools tend to be operated by religious organizations.

SamL Level 7 Oct 28, 2017
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Two things:
First, school vouchers are a violations of the separation between state and church since tax money which would go to the public schools, are instead going to support religious schools.
Secondly, We pay for many things in our society that we may not use as an individual, but they keep our society running for all of us. I do not have children, although I was a teacher, but I want an educated society. We need more resources put into education, than to waste it on indoctrination.

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What I've seen is that most parents don't want to have to choose the best school for their children. They just want their neighborhood school to be of high enough quality that they're OK with sending them there. They want their neighborhood school to be able to provide their children with a quality education.

I think the education of our children is way too important to leave it up to the free market. We need to ensure that every child has a quality education. Otherwise our democracy is in trouble.

Dylan Level 5 Oct 27, 2017
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No, need to make the public schools as good as possible.

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NO!!! Too lazy to enumerate all of the reasons this is a bad thing. Your example is one and is valid

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For a long time the rich who send their kids to private schools have been pushing vouchers for the purposes of subsidizing their kids private education. Thsi in effect takes money out of hte public school system and diverts it to private "for profit" schools. Most attempts at this have failed.

The religious angle is the latest way they are tryign to fool people into approving of school vouchers. The purpose is still the same, only now they have religious organizations who have religious schools (often for profit also), trying to bend education to teach religion in schools. Thsi works for the rich as students in those schools will not have the same critical thinking and reasoning skills as those educated in public schools, and the rich will still get their kid's private educations subsidized, taking money away from public schools, sot he quality of education for other kids will not be as good, which better insures a lack of challenges to family dynasties, or in other words, those born into rich families will be more likely to stay rich and those born into working families will not likely rise into the the ranks of the rich.

agreed

My general point I was trying to get across was that vouchers lower the quality of education for everyone, with the exception of the rich whose kids education would get subsidized under vouchers.

No, I don't have kids. Besides beign gay, I have to hereditary concitions, one an eye disease which has left me legally blind, and the other an auto immune disorder, which I would not want to pass on. However, I do have 17 nieces and nephews, and IU have talked about education with my siblings and their concerns. I am aware that the quality of education has fallen since I attended public schools and how the educations of my siblihng's kids have suffered from that.

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