Question

Prepare a report on the benefits and disadvantages of private vouchers as a way to improve public school education. The proposal is that every parent/guardian should be given a voucher for each child that can be used to pay for the child's education at either a public or private school. Include in your report a discussion of the economic principles of (a) accountability, (b) welfare, (c) competition. Why are most teacher's unions opposed to the private voucher system, while minorities are in favor?

Answer 1

A school voucher, which is also commonly referred to as an opportunity scholarship, is a certificate that is funded by the government to pay for a child to attend private school.

Proponents of school vouchers say that parents should have the right to choose their children’s education; that vouchers create a free marketplace for education overall to improve; that socioeconomic and racial segregations can be overcome with vouchers; and that vouchers lead to better student performance.

Opponents say that vouchers violate the separation of church and state; that vouchers financially harm already-struggling public schools; that vouchers disadvantage special needs students; and that vouchers lead to worse academic performance.

Pro 1: Vouchers allow parents to choose their child’s education	Con 1:Tax dollars are intended for the better secular education of all children, not the private religious education of a few.
Pro 2: School vouchers improve education in general by making public schools compete with private schools for students in a free market	Con 2: School vouchers funnel money away from already-struggling public schools and children and redistribute tax dollars to private schools and middle-class children
3. Pro 3: School vouchers allow school districts to overcome racial and other segregations.	Con3: School vouchers fail to accommodate and support disabled and special-needs students.
Pro 4: School vouchers offer students in failing schools access to a better education.	Con 4: School vouchers do not improve students’ academic performance.

Every parent/guardian should be given a voucher for each child that can be used to pay for the child's education at either a public or private school.

1. Accountability: Of all the arguments that critics of school voucher programs advance, the one that may resonate loudest with the public concerns school accountability. Private schools participating in voucher programs, tax-credit programs, scholarship programs and such are accountable to parents via the school choice marketplace. But I don’t dismiss it, either. For both substantive and strategic reasons, I believe it’s time for school choice supporters to embrace accountability, done right.

2. Welfare: School vouchers might seem a natural feature of the liberal welfare model of the U.S. and American society generally.

3.Competition: School vouchers will increase the quality of education in public and private schools. The primary reason for the ambiguity is that vouchers may reduce the enrollment response to changes in public-school quality by placing different households at the margin of deciding between public and private education.

Why are most teacher's unions opposed to the private voucher system?

what are the interests of the teachers unions? Job security, high pay and control of job conditions, just like every other labor union. School Vouchers represent a threat to the unions because it allows parents to direct education funds to non-unionized schools - it subjects teachers’ unions to competition.

Why minorities are in favor of School Vouchers?

School choice has been shown to benefit minorities and the poor substantially. One Harvard study examined how a school choice program in New York affected college enrollment. According to the authors, “Using a voucher to attend private school increased the overall college enrollment rate among African Americans by 24 percent.” Additionally, the National Bureau of Economic Research found that among poor children, school choice increased secondary school completion rates by 15–20 percent.