Reply to Article about school vouchers WaPo

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]You all must be trolls.  It's a system that allows poor kids a chance to get up to a safe, quality education.  Give a kid who wants a better environment a chance to move up.  Get out of your west of the park high society security and come east and see how the other half lives.  You're afraid of vouchers because you know that expansion will cause your neighbors and even yourselves to take them up and go private.  Responsible parents want the best and safest education for their kids.  That's why charters are thriving too.[/quote]

I hear you. But the [i]theory[/i] is not what is practiced. If the goal is to provide equity of access, it gets an F. The funding model is a joke. It was set up back in the day to subsidize Catholic schools (some converted to charters later) that, surprise, have tuition the same level as vouchers. Just ask Kevin Chavous. One school on the list was a Nation of Islam madrassa.

It's a bait and switch. To qualify, you have to be really poor. Your child has to be [u]accepted[/u] at the school first. But the "scholarship" amount is tiny. It doesn't cover the upfront costs of testing and application fees and deposits needed to get accepted in the first place. If you can afford the out of pocket costs, you probably don't qualify for the program anyway.

Sure, you can "choose" a school that participates in vouchers, but the options are limited from the get go. These are not scholarships. It's an income-based grant which is inadequate to address the real need.

There's a long backstory of conservatives and/or education reformers experimenting on DC kids. Here's the Cliff Notes version of how we got here.

At one point, during No Child Left Behind days, parents from schools that failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress could seek discretionary placements at pretty much any DCPS with better results. How do you think we ended up with so many OOB legacies? Pre-Michelle Rhee, schools like Wilson, Deal, and even Oyster were majority OOB. Years of OOB grandfathering coincided with the Wild West charter boom (and dodgy real estate deals for facilities) and the post-Crack Wars baby boom of white people and gentrification. Residency was more of a concept than a requirement.

So where was all the voucher money going during those years? Were the kids really safer? Do these schools discriminate in admissions by religion or disability?

For schools: if you get public money, you should have public accountability. If a school's mission is to prepare "students
for the service of God's Church" while refusing to admit non-Christians, then raise your own damn money.

For taxpayers: if you want equity of opportunity regardless of income, are you willing to pay the full costs to escape poverty or just handout crumbs?

For School Choice advocates: Vouchers do not level the playing field, so stop lyin' or prove me wrong. [/quote]

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