Word: vouchers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Obviously, school reform is badly needed. But many parents--especially minorities, who comprise 85 percent of CPS students--believe that even more drastic challenges to the education bureaucracy may be called for, and call for a privatized voucher system. As Professor Kevin Ryan of the Boston University Education School says, public schools have "all the problems of a monopoly, of a protected industry that is there to serve its own interests, not that of the consumer of education...
...should have the right to educate their children in the best manner possible. Right now, most CPS teachers are wealthy enough to send their children to private schools, and 46 percent do. The 67 percent of CPS parents who are below the poverty line cannot afford this luxury. A voucher system, in which the public schools would have to compete with more efficient private schools, might give parents that choice...
...backed a voucher program for parents who wish to send their children to private schools. Advocates a longer school year and increasing standardized tests. Proposes a system of rewards for teachers whose students perform well on these tests...
Under a full-fledged voucher system, private institutions would spring up to cater to the needs of parents who demand better education. The vouchers would, in theory, provide roughly the same amount of money as it now costs to educate each student in the public schools; in some over-bureaucratized systems like New York City's, that is more than $5,500 a year, higher than the tuition at some private schools. Government would still have a role: private schools, as they do today, would have to abide by state certification standards and could not racially discriminate. Chubb...
Critics argue that adoption of voucher plans would sound the death knell of the public school as a democratic institution that melds children from all classes, backgrounds and races in a modern-day melting pot. In truth, that pluralistic dream died years ago in most districts. Today 63% of all black students attend predominantly nonwhite schools. Public education is also increasingly economically segregated. A voucher system may not foster the ethnic diversity of a Benetton ad, but by diluting the distinction between public and private schools, it would add much needed equality to American education...