Since public schools in the US are funded primarily by local property taxes, I don't know how you could really implement an "everyone just enrolls where they want" system. It seems like you'd wind up with whichever (public) schools are locally perceived as The Best being overcrowded with students they may not even be getting funding for. The whole idea of the voucher is that whatever tax money the student's neighborhood school would've received to educate them (based on per capita averages relative to the school's tax base) gets transferred to a school they freely chose instead, sort of with like a food stamp--you "pay" your new school with the voucher, which they then submit to the government to get their due funds to educate you. Thus, "good" schools are rewarded with more funding while "bad" schools are punished by losing it, applying market forces to education which (so the thinking goes) will result in "bad" schools either being forced to clean up their act or go under.
In practice though, in most places in the US that have a voucher sytem, most students use them to go to a private school, not a public one, with their families making up any difference out of their own pockets. Also, the number of vouchers available is kept quite small relative to the total number of students, so as to prevent overcrowding and/or mass abandonment. So far as I know, the main criteria for voucher eligibility with all current US voucher programs is financial need, not academic merit. However, since private schools aren't obligated to take students they don't want and public schools have enrollment limits, in practice I suppose merit (i.e., previous academic record) probably does enter into it somewhat.
Flying FuManchu said:
How much potential has been lost b/c of peer pressure and an anti-education culture that seems to be prevalent in inner-city public schools.
Giving the "smart" kids the opportunity to progress faster while the other kids get to progress at their own pace is what I look at school vouchers being similar to in theory.
The problem with this is, a "prevalent anti-education culture" shouldn't be any child's "pace." I don't know about where you live, but everywhere I've ever lived, it's not like there's (e.g.) one high school with a great rep for vocational ed, another with a great rep for humanities education, another with a great rep for sci/tech preparation, and another one that's great for artsy kids or whatever. Basically there are just one(s) that are considered Good, ones that are considered merely OK, and ones that are considered Bad, and pretty much all parents know which is which. And almost invariably, this stratification is directly linked to the socioeconomic demographic of the school in question. Good schools are Good because they're in well-off areas with predominantly white-collar and professional families who provide their kids with lots of educational and achievement-oriented-social stimulation outside of school; Bad schools are Bad because they're in poor areas with predominantly blue-collar and undereducated families who can't or don't offer their children those kinds of resources. So I find it hard to be optimistic that "market forces" alone would suffice to transform that in most cases; education just isn't a discrete "product" in that hard-and-fast sense. The alternative, I guess, would be to have some sort of separate-the-academically-challenged-out-early-and-stick-'em-in-vocational-ed type system, more like what some European countries traditionally had; but actually most of them are increasingly moving away from that approach nowadays, as the nature of what it takes to make a living in an increasingly post-industrial economy changes.
It's hard not to be hypocritical about this topic for most of us, though--I doubt there are many in here who went to primarily poor, inner-city public schools, or would want their own children to go to them.
I guess in my case, I'm not so much bothered by the thought of giving academically high-achieving poor students the opportunity to leave for a better school--in fact, I benefitted from just that myself in high school, though it was through scholarships, not vouchers--as I am by the thought that this in and of itself is seen as a "solution" to the problem of "Bad" schools. Because what about all the other children who get left behind--because their grades weren't that great, or their parents make just a few dollars too much to qualify for a voucher, or there weren't enough vouchers to go around, or whatever?
It just sounds more like fatalistic triage than transformative competition.
