Re: students leaving the public school system in droves as a result of vouchers:

This would not be "fair." Fair to who? No one is ever quite clear on this. And no one seems to pay attention to what this reveals about the public education system.

Oh, people have been quite clear on this. The public schools will become the schools of last resort for the kids who get expelled from the schools who profit from the vouchers. They can't be expelled from the public schools unless they commit felonies. So they will be all together in an institution with no opportunity to meet, let alone fraternize with, people their own age with ambition and discipline. What kinds of teachers would work in such an environment? Mother Teresa, Forrest Gump, and the warden from "Cool Hand Luke". Experience tells us that there are few Mother Teresas out there.

It has also remained unclear whether private schools accepting public monies to educate students who would otherwise attend public schools are required to make the opportunity open to everyone. Perhaps the private institutions will be allowed to cherrypick, thus eliminating not only students with behavior problems, but also those with borderline intellectual incapacity and certain intransigent health problems. They will thus not bear the financial burden of providing "special education" and exceptional facilities like speech therapy. That too will be left to the public schools, which will suffer a reduced budget because of the vouchers.

I went to a high school that had an admission exam. Those who didn't pass went to the public high school. We had very high SAT scores compared to the public schools. Gee, I wonder why.

My Catholic high school accepted non-Catholics. They had to pay tuition like anyone else, and they got a study hall when the rest of us went to religion class. Some of them wanted to go to religion class: one of the priests used it to teach psychology, and another taught logic and syllogistic argument, as a prelim for the study of Acquinas.

The public education establishment does not have the goal of educating students. It has the goal of increasing its size and power. Whether little Johnny learns to read is as irrelevant to them as insuring a decent retirement income for the elderly is irrelevant to the Social Security program.

If I made the statement that the military has a goal of killing and maiming people, and whether peace and justice enters into their plans is irrelevant to them, I think many folks who post here would be up in arms. Rightly so, because they would recognize that "the military" is actually composed of people called "soldiers", most of whom are brave and decent people who actually don't like killing people and do care about peace and justice. I submit to you that your use of terms like "the public education establishment" is in tremendous dissonance with your sincerely expressed admiration for the people who teach your children. The bumper sticker has got it right: "I Am the NEA". I see it on the cars of admirable teachers all the time.

"What if some crook opens a school just to get voucher funds, and parents stick their kids in there?"

Pennsylvania is examining just such a possibility in the ongoing fight over the Einstein Academy, a cyberschool that seems to have grossly misrepresented itself, and that operates under a state mandate to allow charter schools. The charter school initiative in PA is as close to vouchers as Tom Ridge could get while he was governor. I'm sorry about the age of the link; this was the beginning of the fight. More and more school districts are challenging Einstein, but I haven't done more than a cursory search, and my own newspaper charges for archived articles.

One of the virtues of the public schools is that they are governed by school boards which are elected by the people, unless you live in Philadelphia. The "education establishment" can't take over the world without some cooperation by the board.

You certainly don't seem to be a dummy. Many of our greatest people were educated in one-room schools where, yes, the upper classes helped teach the younger ones. You obviously see this as a negative. I'm not sure why.

Thank you. I see this as a negative because I was a 6-year-old with a junior high school reading level spending an entire year teaching 7- and 8-year-olds how to read instead of getting any instruction myself. (The 8-year-olds had failed the second grade already.) I had no authority of age or size to draw on, a fact that I was painfully aware of while on the playground and walking home. It also didn't help that one of the children whom I taught was my dad's boss's kid. If I had been 10 in a group of 7- and 8-year-olds, no doubt my perspective both at the time and now would be very different.

Ideally, of course, schools would be completely private, but a voucher system, although it uses taxpayer funding, is at least a step in the right direction.

Some things need to be held to public standards. Education is one of them. The product is something we will all have to live with.

You say the public schools are doing a crummy job. I say that they can only work with the tools and the raw material they receive.

The original mission of the public schools in America was to produce a minimally acceptable product to work in a nation entering the Industrial Revolution. They are still doing that. What they need now is not to be abolished, but updated. Turning teachers into crowd control specialists will not affect this change.

Regards--
Mary Anne