School Voucher Initiative Essays - Education, Education Economics

School Voucher Initiative In The United States today, there is a broad consensus that the nation's public education system needs improvement. Despite enormous budget increases, American public schools are not adequately educating their students, inevitably weakening the nation's future. Private and Parochial schools, however, generally continue their tradition of education and discipline and produce graduates properly equipped to meet the challenges of the workforce. A movement aimed at correcting this disparity in the hopes of improving overall education has recently been gaining momentum in the political and media arenas. School voucher initiatives, will help revamp the education system by creating competition between public and private schools and offering American parents and students the freedom to choose the best school for their individual needs. Such voucher programs, though not yet thoroughly proven, is consistent in promoting the American ideas of independence, freedom, and free market competition, while upholding both clauses of the First Amendment. The Current State of American Education "In the United States, most public school districts make enrollment assignments without regard to student or parent preference. Students are simply assigned to the school nearest their home. While occasionally students can be assaigned elsewhere for administrative reasons such as racial balance, the administrators who determine enrollment generally do not consider the unique aptitudes and interests of individual students and the learning environment that would best foster their growth. School choice is non-existent. School vouchers provide a comprehensive kind of choice that allows parents to choose from among not only government schools but independent schools as well. While there are several ways to create this choice, the one most proposed is through state-issued vouchers worth up to a specified dollar amount when redeemed at participating schools for tuition. School choice lets parents determine what schools best meet the needs of their children. Parents may choose any qualifying schools with space available, public or private, either within or outside the district. The dollar then follows the scholar. Students choosing public schools continue to receive state funding. Students opting for private schools may receive state scholarships worth, under most voucher proposals, half the per-pupil cost of public schooling. If a state's system of public education costs the taxpayers $6,000 per student?near the national average?a student attending an independent school could receive a scholarship of $3,000. That is more than enough to cover the tuition at most independent schools, a fact that in and of itself speaks volumes about the state of U.S. public schools. School vouchers dramatically increases equality of opportunity. Schools will be funded only to the extent that parents voluntarily decide to enroll their children in that particular school. Like private enterprises, the schools will need to compete to satisfy their customers. No customer will be forced to accept unsatisfactory performance." Agenda for America 131-133 America's public education system is at a crossroads. Too many of our citizens are not educated. Illiteracy has become a national epidemic. American students are scoring significantly lower than their international counterparts on international exams, and our Scholastic Aptitude Test scores have fallen dramatically, down nearly eighty points in the past three decades. 1 America has the best-paid educators and the least-educated teenagers in the developed world. America has the best-organized teacher unions and the most chaotic schools in the developed world. Agenda p. 127 A Harris poll of employers found that only 22% feel today's entrants to the workforce know math well. Only 12% feel that new employees can write well. A mere 10% believe that graduates know how to solve complex problems. Only 30% of emplyers tanked the overall education of current students as positive. Source: Scan...NCPA #1 Education spending in constant dollars has increased 12-fold since 1920. But in spite of longer school years, a doubling of teachers' salaries' and dramatic downsizing in classrooms, one-fourth of American children cannot, or can barely, understand written English. Census data show public schools have become the second likeliest place in America for a violent crime to occur. The solution is to unlock the public-school door, so kids and parents can escape failed schools if they choose. THOMAS #1 After more than a decade of national attention and reform efforts, there should be little doubt that America's schools remain in crisis. The number of college freshman taking remedial courses in reading, writing, and math is rapidly accelerating. America's public school system was initiated in the early 1900s by Progressive Era reformers who believed that a rational, professional, and bureaucratic system--a "one best system"--could be established to maintain certain standards of education for all of society. Although such socialist thinking and economic planning have collapsed elsewhere in