Vouchers are one of the stupidest ideas ever to come down the pike.

We have had its equivalent in tertiary education for decades, and all it has done is made things more expensive, while decreasing quality. The same will be true in primary and secondary education.

The government will use the lever of vouchers to impose its will on the schools. Once you take the King's shilling and all that. What makes private schools have any success is that they are just that, private. They are free to make their own rules, concerning dress, deportment, curriculum, admission, etc. If you don't follow the rules, they boot your sorry fat butt out. When the schools start getting government money, that all changes. The rules will be subject to bureaucratic challenge, the curriculum will be forced to comply with what the government wants, and admissions will be under scrutiny. There will be Hell to pay if there aren't enough one-legged Aleutian Muslims in your voucher-subsidized Jewish school for example. IOW, private education will be subject to all the constraints suffered by public education, and the results will be the same. Only it will be more expensive for all of us.

Bart:

What's with the psychotic fear of giving folks choices of how to educate their kids? I thought you were a libertarian.

Bart, you make two conflicting arguments, and both of them are false.

Private liberal arts colleges that take students who use federal money still do quite well. It is the public universities who are getting more and more diluted.

Your second claim, that the govt. will closely monitor the policies and makeup of these schools isn't borne out at all in the experience of private colleges, even though you claim earlier that their experiences will be parallel.

I went to Thomas Aquinas College. It's a point of principle (not to say pride) with them not to accept federal or state money. They have no problem with students paying their tuition using Pell grants, Cal grants or Stafford loans and they've had pretty good success in keeping the more intrusive forms of state regulation out (by which I mean that their buildings are built to code but there is no director of gay and lesbian students' outreach).

Maybe the regulation gets more intrusive when there are five-year-olds involved rather than 18-year-olds, though.

Random:

Not when the Religious Right is writing the law.

That's right OJ, but what happens when the religious right isn't writing the laws?

h-man: The case you fear - leftists regulating voucher-receiving schools so that they look like public schools - merely reverts us back to the present case: left-wing schools receiving govt money and independent schools receiving no support at all. Whatever probability p you give to that happening, there is a 100% probability of being in this bad state if we don't get vouchers. Isn't p*bad+(1-p)*good better than 100%*bad? QED, you should support vouchers.

pj:

I went to public school--that equation's over my head.

Timothy,

Schools like Bob Jones University, Grove City College, Hillsdale College and Thomas Aquinas College have all had their policies challenged and have either dropped out of the system or have changed their policies in accordance with government fiat. Either you have freedom or you don't.

Most private colleges have a virtual open-admissions policy and have a whole plethora of remedial courses on offer.

OJ,

I'm all in favor of educational choice with the public schools operating as a necessary default option. Just make a choice with your own money, not mine.

The option I'd prefer is rolling back public education to what it was like in the 50s and early 60s before the liberals got a hold of it.

Vouchers are our own money.

For what it's worth, I strongly support vouchers, but Bart raises valid issues.

Orrin, I have always said that libertarians are either drug addicted conservatives or cheap liberals. Perhaps, Bart is among the latter.

All private schools are already somewhat regulated by the government because all schools must be accredited. I attended Catholic schools, and I remember that every 5,10 years or so, some government education officials would come to inspect the schools to make sure that the they were actually teaching something. Furthermore, I don't think that private schools can discriminate on the basis of race or ethnicity. Even homeschoolers are monitored by the government to make sure that the parents are really teaching their kids. So, this argument that vouchers would eliminate private schools' autonomy is just nonsense.

What Bart says is what the Catholic Church said when I was going to Catholic schools.

Enforced, literally, by threats of hellfire and damnation.

Now our moral guides have reversed themselves and taken exactly the opposite stand they did in the 1950s.

One of those stands had to be wrong, right, Orrin?

What stands?

Against public money for Catholic schools in 1950, for it now.

And promising eternal damnation if you disagreed.

When you go to church, do you listen to the lesson? I always did.

School taxes in 1950 were a fraction of what they are today. Secularists tried pricing parochial schools out of existence. Times change.

Morals, too. If you're a Christian.