Tax Dollars Should Not Be Used For Private schools.
Should parents be allowed to choose their children's schools? This is a question that goes much farther than simply just choosing schools. Do parents really have a choice? Some parents can afford to send their kids to a private religious school but some don't have the funds to do this. Some say that the government should offer tuition vouchers so that the poor and minorities can have a choice. This seems to be a good idea but there are many debates in whether or not it is constitutional. In the following I will discuss why vouchers are a horrible idea.
Vouchers are plans that allow tax dollars to be used for tuition at private schools, including religious schools. The government pays for each and every citizen in America to go to school. They pay for students to go to a public school within their area but sometimes the public schools in some areas are not very good such as the inner city schools. The idea of vouchers would allow poor students to have the chance to go to a better school and rise out of poverty. Some of the questions that are being asked are will they actually help the low class or will they only help the more advantaged students? Another question is if vouchers are constitutional or not, and have there been any experiments with vouchers yet. .
Right now there are two programs providing public dollars to pay tuition for low-income students to attend private schools, in Milwaukee and Cleveland. Both include religious schools. These are considered to be experimental programs. These programs have been looked at and the problem so far that seems to be the most apparent is the fact that vouchers may just benefit the more advantaged. According to the Ohio official state evaluation (Metcalf 1998): "Scholarship students who accepted a scholarship to move from the Cleveland public schools to a private school were achieving at higher levels of achievement than their public school peers before they entered the program.