See the US prior to around 1865.
*Nowhere* are children forced to go to public school.
Wuhaaat? If you can't afford private school or homeschooling, people with guns will come to your door and take your children away from you.
On the other hand, a voucher system respects parents' fundamental right to be the primary educators of their children.
Yes, at *additional* taxpayers' expense, above and beyond what we pay now (which is enough, thank you.)
If the voucher is valued at half of the current per-pupil government school expenditure, how does this increase taxes? Please explain.
Those who think vouchers are ever going to be available to the middle classes are living in a fantasy world.
Is this a fact? An argument?
They are at present a *welfare benefit* given to the poor, and they don't come anywhere near to the cost of paying for a non-Catholic private school education.
If Catholics can do it, anyone can do it. Do the math yourself, $3500 x 20 students is $70,000 per year per classroom. You couldn't run such a school profitably?
If not, add another five kids per class and make it $87,500 annually.
Our system of compulsory schooling is appropriate for a totalitarian regime, not a free society.
Really?
Yes.
People in totalitarian societies get to homeschool their kids & teach them anything they wish re: curriculum and political views? They get to send their kids to any religious schools they want (even pernicious ones that teach jihad and black out Israel on their maps?)
10% of the population is effectively free, although they are forced to finance the system that denies the other 90% of the families the right to educate their children as they see fit.
People in totalitarian societies get to move freely from one community to another, so they can exercise their own *free choice* to spend more for a house in a better school district? (I thought that was "the American way" - exercising one's economic freedom - pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, etc.)
Right. Just move from the city to a wealthy suburb (where children still aren't allowed to learn about God, the Summum Bonum of human life).
What's *socialistic* is telling middle class people they have to support yet another transfer of income above and beyond the common-school taxes to poor people who have children out of wedlock, use drugs, and do not pull themselves up to move to better neighborhoods with better schools.
Again, if the voucher is valued at half of the current per-pupil government school expenditure, how does this add to the tax burden?
The proof is in the pudding - in every "failing inner city school" across the country there are immigrants (mostly from Asia, but some Euros like Bosnians) whose children *do* succeed in those schools, and who aren't in them very long, because they economically better themselves and *move out.*
Because some children survive horrible schooling, the system should be perpetuated?
Most vouchers are about $2000, but for the sake of argument use $3500 as you say. Let's also assume full enrollment, which is a *very* generous assumption, especially in the first 5 years or so of a new school's life.
Yes, you bring in $70,000 per classroom.
What then? In a K-8 school, that would mean nine classrooms if you have 20 kids per classroom. Assuming full enrollment, that will mean 180 kids and at minimum ten staff members (nine teachers and a principal.)
It also means a commercial building in a suitable location for a school. Nine classrooms is a bit too big for some church's basement, so that means renting commercial property somewhere. This means utilities, including larger air conditioners, furnaces, and electrical wiring than people have in their homes. It means a property with sufficient parking to accommodate all the staff (usually this is a zoning requirement), and at minimum some kind of play area for the children as well as a common area for lunch, etc. (You can't expect kids to sit at their desks all day long.)
The school will have to have insurance. This is not a trivial cost.
Finally, there's the pay issue. How much are these suffering servants going to expect in pay? Remember that salary isn't just the base salary; it's base salary X times 1.5 to include Social Security, workman's comp, Medicare, etc. as well as any employee benefits. Also, principals are generally paid more than teachers. Finally, who's going to clean the school, do repairs, remove snow and ice from the grounds? They're going to expect to be paid too, even if they're not union.
We haven't even gotten into the other issues of running a school in an inner city, where the students are *not* academically prepared and generally have far more behavioral problems. So without having any real-life small private school budgets in front of me, I don't think $3500 a year is reasonable - I think $6000 a year is more like it, maybe more.
That's why I think we need to compromise - at least end compulsory attendance at 14, and make high schools all "specialized" - so that those with good test scores *can* go to a rigorous college-prep high school. But the US now isn't the same as it was in 1865, and some of those old solutions don't apply.
If the voucher is valued at half of the current per-pupil government school expenditure, how does this increase taxes? Please explain.
Because the vast majority of students will still be educated in public schools, especially those with learning disabilities and/or behavioral problems. People *politically* still control school issues. People are *not* going to want their schools consolidated and closed; they want their kids to go to a neighborhood school, even if it has 100 students instead of the 300 it was built to hold. We'll still have to pay to keep those schools open, and even if some of them close, we'll still have to pay to have students bussed to more distant schools. It's not strictly a 1:1 transfer, because there are minimum costs to keeping a school going that don't go away to zero.