Word: voucherization
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Cleveland took this controversial step across the church-state line out of desperation. As elsewhere in the U.S., many of its inner-city public schools are a physical and academic dead zone. In California, Colorado and Oregon, voters have turned down voucher initiatives that would extend school choice statewide because most suburban voters are not that unhappy with their public schools. So programs targeted at minority kids have become the new, more ambiguous school-choice battleground--one on which liberals don't always know which side to take. For some poor children, the chance to go to private school could...
Charter schools have been warily approved by the teachers unions that strongly support Bill Clinton. But the same unions furiously oppose private-school vouchers. For one thing, they fear that a privatized world would mean lower pay for teachers. In Catholic schools faculty salaries are sometimes 20% below those in surrounding public schools. Voucher opponents also argue that in a nation worried about the fraying of its common ties, public money for private instruction would bring on a patchwork of taxpayer-supported ideological enclaves--not just Christian, Jewish, Muslim or Buddhist, but schools arranged by black and white separatists...
...Catholic schools can be more selective than the public system, so they may end up with a student body more likely to succeed. What everyone agrees on is that the parents of parochial-school children are more involved in the education of their children. One hope behind the Cleveland voucher program, says Bert Holt, who administers it, is that it will draw more parents into an active relationship. "Parents think, 'I'm going to be signing off this tuition payment, which is going to educate my child. I have a stake in this.' For many of these parents, this...
...total public-school choice as well as charter schools...It may be very effective politically to use my daughter as an example, but it is not fair because of her own unusual circumstances, and it doesn't deal with the fact that what [Republicans] want to do [with their voucher program] is to take funds now going to the public schools and give them to private schools when the public schools are already underfunded...
Peterson noted that the control group in the public schools was drawn from a pool of students rejected from the voucher program, thus ensuring that these students were from families concerned about education...