(if you don’t know, Utah is voting on a bill that would provide “vouchers” — tax breaks to parents who move their children to private schools)

I have seen a bunch of commercials about this, pushing both sides, but you know how commercials are… Neither side gave any information.  I bounced around on the internet reading bits and pieces till I found a site had a PDF of the actual bill and I read through it.  (not super carefully, and I didn’t cross reference anything so I may have missed some details)

So far, based on what I’ve seen, I don’t agree.  Fundamentally I think that the state shouldn’t pay private schools. 

The “pro” referendum 1 commercials always talk about how the vouchers only make up a part of the state allocated money for each student, and that the schools keep the rest.  But that is only a temporary solution, the schools only get the money for 5 years.  And still, why is the state paying anything to private schools?

I agree that teachers deserve to be paid more, that smaller class sizes are better, and I think that private schools have an important role, but I don’t think that this is a solution.

I have also heard that the vouchers encourage “capitalistic” education.  They seem to suggest that the good teachers, and the good students will move to private schools, which will have more funding.  Public education will be left with–the leftovers, and in a few years, underfunded again.  Competition (capitalism) exists now.  Referendum 1 will take money, good teachers and goods students out of public schools, that sounds like killing the competition.  I think it is naive to assume that the only recourse the state will have will be to improve public education.  They might not.  We risk ruining it for the (significant) portion of families who can’t afford private schools, with or without vouchers.

I think that we need to address the actual problems.  Increase wages for teachers, increase accountability for public schools, make it easier possible to get rid of teachers that are not pulling their weight, and build more schools to reduce class sizes.

 That’s where I want you to put my money.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 26th, 2007 at 1:35 am and is filed under Exclamation Mark, Pseudo Semantics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.