i am all for school choice... it is the voucher system that i feel needs work... tax funds that follow the child will be helpful.
vouchers tend to drive costs of private schools up... to avoid letting in the voucher class
I like Australia’s system.
All private schools receive a degree of government funding worked out on a formula. On average, it’s about half the amount of funding children in a government school get (about $7,000 a year versus about $13,000 - Australian dollars which are currently worth about three quarters of what the US dollar is).
The formula is pretty complicated (largely because of years of horse trading by the conservatives and the socialists - although governments on both sides consistently support the basic idea, they prioritise the funding a little differently) but in essence, it’s based on the socio-economic status of the family’s served. Expensive private schools which tend to serve richer families get less government funding per student. Private schools that serve poorer communities get more.
This leads to a lot of fairly low fee private schools that create a lot of genuine school choice in Australia - a third of children attend private schools at any time, and around half will do so for at least part of their schooling. It also means the government schools have to meet minimum standards because it’s obvious if they are not - if kids from the same working class neighbourhood attending the cheap private school up the road are getting much better results, people notice.
And the expensive private schools do offer a lot of scholarships to smart kids from poorer backgrounds, because it makes reasonable economic sense for them to do so.
It’s not a perfect system - but I really do think it works well, and while it was somewhat controversial to begin with, over time, most people have come around to the idea that it works well.