Posted on 07/08/2008 8:02:58 PM PDT by Amelia
Better schools. Higher scores. And satisfied parents. That's the record of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. It is helping us keep our promise to leave no child behind in America. If Congress is thinking of breaking this promise, the nation deserves to know the story.
Signed into law by President Bush four years ago, the program is the first to provide federally funded education vouchers to students. It awards up to $7,500 per child for tuition, transportation and fees; in 2007-08 it enabled 1,900 students from the underperforming Washington public school system -- the highest total yet -- to attend the private or religious schools of their choice.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
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Cal is one state where we badly need vouchers or something to wipe out the current system and start all over.
I am sort of in the middle about vouchers. I like the idea, but what if you take a kid from a failing school, put him/her in a school that has a rigorous curriculum, strict rules and a dress code and the kid flunks even more miserably?
Do the parents refund (hah!) the money back?
As we all know and have said a zillion times before, most of the reason for the failing school is apathy.
We shall see.
If it’s indeed a good school, they will actually teach the kid, causing him/her to catch up with the curriculum. Your objection doesn’t make much sense.
In D.C., some of the private schools had admissions tests, and if the voucher students didn’t meet their standards, they didn’t get in to begin with.
Apathy is a good point. There were very few applications from the very worst D.C. schools and quite a few from students who were already attending private schools.
I will point out that the researchers studying the voucher program hypothesized that there were so few applications from the very worst schools because many inner-city parents didn’t have the ability and/or time to figure out how to apply for the program and how to research and apply to private schools.
As an FYI, her two children go to a public school in Seven Corners. I forget the name, it was in an article in the WaPo.
I noticed the author and was a bit surprised, and no, I DID NOT know that her children attend public schools. That’s a bit of a surprise, too!
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