I have seen proposals in the past for a tuition tax credit instead of a voucher. What say you?
Why get the government involved at all ? As an example, catholic parochial schools educate the K-8 group at a cost of about $ 2000 per year. If I took my property taxes as somewhat standard for a suburban area, I could pay to put 4 kids thru K-8 without one additional dime.
Why do all of you insist the government still has a role at all ? No tax credits, no vouchers, no property taxes, no state subsidies, no federal tax dollars. You would be surprised how cheap education would be, and how well accomplished kids would become when it becomes a voluntary activity.
In colonial days, an educated citizen used to spend no more than 3 years in a school situation, and some additional years before that at home spending a few hours a day at home learning to read, write, and do arithmetic. The statistic is that 97% of the population was at least literate(could read). Boys used to start attending Harvard University at 14 or 15. Are we intellectually inferior than our ancestors ? Men and women became productive members of the business community without 16 years of schooling. And please, don't use technology as the excuse for a greater need for education. Kids teach themselves computer skills with no problem.
Government has no business at all in the educational field except to indoctrinate the young and control society.
Nope, no thanks. I'm sick of the government trying to manipulate people's behavior through complicated tax schemes -- and a tax credit such as you propose would certainly not be made available to "high income" people (and like the current "alternative minimum tax" abomination, that would end up including people who live in very expensive parts of the country, who are struggling to pay for a very modest lifestyle -- did you see the article in the NYT a couple of days ago about the cheapest apartment for sale in Manhattan? $215,000 will get you a whopping 180 square feet, and of course on top of the mortgage you have to pay the coop/condo's monthly maintenance fee, which is usually well into the hundreds even for a tiny apartment, and if you want a parking space that will run another $350/month or so, so you'll probably decide to do without both the car and the parking space, even if you're making low 6 figures a year.).
And of course it's higher income people who currently pay a disproportionate percentage of the public school-supporting taxes, have fewer children on average than average and lower income people, and are usually paying the full tab for private schools for their own few children, while also paying the tab for other people's children to attend the public schools.
Enough already. Shut down all the public schools and hand out vouchers in the exact same amount for every child of a U.S. citizen. Anybody who wants a more expensive school for their child than the voucher will buy, can pay the difference out of pocket.