Over the last decade, Pennsylvania has seen the establishment of charter schools, cyber charter schools, and an effective educational improvement tax credit program. I think the snowball is rolling.
Opportunities:
** It immediately gives the child a chance to escape an abusive environment. There are collectivist government schools that are so vile that it would be better for the child **never** to step one foot inside. Hey! Illiterate and innumerate can be fixed. Dead can't be. And..If the child survives the experience, permanent psychological and emotional injury can't be fixed either.
** Vouchers can be the means to build the private infrastructure needed for complete privatization and complete shut down of the collectivist government system of K-12 schools.
Disadvantages:
** With vouchers often come government strings. Vouchers could be used as a means to turn private schools into government schools. Then **all** schooling would be government controlled.
** We could see the same thing with K-12 vouchers that we see with college and university government scholarships and loans. The very instant that government increases Pell Grants and loan limits, the colleges and universities raise their tuitions. It is a never ending upward spiral of college tuition increases.
Conclusion: If vouchers are designed so that parents will, over the next 10 to 20 year, take on the full responsibility of educating their own children, with charity educating the poor, then I support them.
If vouchers lead to government taking over the curriculum and policies of private schools and ever spiraling tuition increases then I don't support them.