Better Education
Better Education: The Controversy Over School Vouchers Education remains America's most influential avenue of opportunity. Most Americans recognize the necessity of an elementary and secondary level of education to succeed within the highly competitive world beyond adolescence. Without a basic foundation of fundamental knowledge, an opportunity to compete against a world of advancing proficiency would leave those lacking such aptitude behind. Like the millions of Americans who recognize education as the one of the nation's priority concerns, George W. Bush, the 43rd president of the United States, led his 2000 presidential campaign with education at the top of his agenda. Bush's principles of interest for education reform include seven specific points: achieving equality, promoting excellence, to stop funding failure, to restore local control, to provide parents with information and options, to ensure every child can read, and to improve school safety (George W. Bush). Of these proposed programs, the most controversial idea supported by the Bush campaign includes an unprecedented wide-scale school voucher system. This program suggests that tax dollars will be provided as vouchers for parents to send their children to the s
The Milwaukee pilot voucher system has endeavored to set precedence for future school reform, and researchers have concluded, as reported in "The Effectiveness of School Choice in Milwaukee: A Secondary Analysis of Data from the Program's Evaluation", that improvement in students' achievements does not occur until the third or fourth year into the choice program, however, drastic significance in student performance has not been reported (Greene). Though I do admit, all plans for reform and improvement take experimentation as well as time and patience, I also believe that the school voucher system leaves too much room for damage to a schooling establishment that cannot handle the effects of further degeneration. Advocates believe that by keeping schools in constant opposition to one another, the quality of education would increase because schools would then be held accountable for the performance of their students. Rather than settle for the school offered by the public education system within the district of one's residence, vouchers would allow parents to send their children to better schools district-wide, statewide, or to the private school of their choosing (Education Week). The program began, at first, only providing money for lower-income parents to send their children to private, non-secular schools. On the other hand, though vouchers claim to offer opportunity to students who could otherwise not afford it, opponents of school vouchers argue that there are many loopholes not considered by advocates. Supreme Court was filed, the justices of the Supreme Court later voted to not hear the appeal. The idea that schools would be a competing, open market for school voucher slips manifests the thought that allowing private schools to take public money with little oversight opens the way for "mismanagement and even corruption" (Education Week). Though I believe that the school voucher proposition is by far one of the most innovative ways at tackling a declining education system, I also feel that it remains very flawed and imperfect. The many loopholes remaining in the school voucher education program leave too much room for error in the way the program is run. Though the evaluation of each measure has been carefully weighed, controversy arises among the opposing viewpoints of each argument. One researcher, Caroline Hoxby, found that "greater private school competitiveness significantly raises the quality of public schools. One opponent emphasizes, "they are talking about vouchers for about 5% to 10% of the children who are presently in the public school system, leaving the other 90% to 95% of the kids in the system at a further disadvantage" (Jones). Because private schools are able to pick and choose who they accept and are not subject to the bureaucratic requirements in reporting and screening that public schools must comply with, public schools have an unfair disadvantage. Idealists hope that school vouchers will extend the concept of choice in education, improved education standards, and give equal education opportunity.
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