Who Wants School Vouchers? Rich Whites and Poor Nonwhites

Who Wants School Vouchers? Rich Whites and Poor Nonwhites

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Not surprising really. The groups of people who would benefit most are generally the very poor, particularly of racial minorities, or heavily religious people. I disagree with the benefits of the second group, mostly because there are plenty of state constitutional restrictions on public funding of religious institutions, including their schools. But if these private and parochial schools were placed on an equal footing with both public and private schools at present, and appropriate considerations for income adjustments could be made (right now this has been politically impossible), I would not care whether people sent their children to a religious school. It's their money. The real issue is the poverty adjustment. There's clear support among the poor for school choice reform, the reason being that the schools they have to send their children to usually are quite terrible. But the actual school choice debate never seems to acknowledge this as a key feature of a market for education nor does it appropriately compensate for the cost of education of lower income students (or the lack of funding to be provided by individual families). In Europe the debates over school reforms nearly always factor this in.

I guess the assumption made here is that poor people would be somehow happy sending their children to an incrementally better public school in this country while rich folk get to keep sending theirs off to a private academy, only with some public funding to make it easier still. Meanwhile it looks like if you were in the middle class, you don't care one way or the other. Probably because on average your children go to a decent school (or at least there is a perception that the school is decent, I'm highly skeptical of such claims when compared to schools around the globe in particular). Classic nimby sort of thinking. If it's not my problem directly, I see no problem for anyone else that needs resolving.