Your entire message shows that you are so jammed into the mindset of liberal elitism that I almost gave up on trying to dissect it. Every sentence shows your total conviction that without massive government oversight, the hapless population will immediately destroy their children in lousy schools.

The assumption that everyone except themselves is an idiot, is a hallmark of the liberal. This paternalism pervades most of their conversation, and drives their policy choices. As just one example, many of the hardcore liberals who post here have shown that they firmly believe that every Republican is by definition missing a few chromosomes. Since the free market presumes that most people make intelligent choices for themselves, one can see where the free market is seen as unworkable by liberals.

...The attorney presenting the case for vouchers, Clint Bolick has said the regulation of voucher schools "should be limited. It should not include any state oversight of curriculum, personnel or administration." In other words "we don't want anyone looking over our shoulders, we want the uncontested right to teach whatever we want, use whatever sort of person we want, with no checks on the operation."



...In Milwaukee, home of the oldest and largest voucher program, accountability is so lacking that NO data have been collected from voucher schools for the past six years. No one knows how students in voucher schools are performing academically. We have to accept their opinion they are doing well.



The liberal recoils in horror!! Obviously, an "unregulated" school will give its customers' kids a terrible education, and since the customers are all, of course, blithering idiots, they will continue to send their kids there year after year, tell all their friends to send their kids there too, and the rotten school will thrive and multiply. Meanwhile, unregulated schools which produce well-educated students at a reasonable price will go begging for customers, since of course all of us are a load of braying jackasses who don't know any better.

For God's sake, can you give the American population the credit for a little sense?

You say no "data" have been collected from the Milwaukee schools in six years. The concept that the people sending their kids there might be satisfied with their progress, or they wouldn't send them there for six goddam years, even to the point where the schools can't find room for them all, doesn't even occur to you.

Your faith in government as the ultimate source of goodness would be laughable if it didn't result in the constant eroding of my rights by people like you. Many governments, even at the state level, are wall-to-wall corruption, yet liberals continue to advocate giving them more power. Public schools are cooking their attendance, school lunch and grade numbers to keep the state funding rolling in. Is this supposed to be better?

Because voucher schools are private constitutional rights like due process are not applicable. Voucher schools can suspend or expel students at will.

"Due process?" To expel a student? The principals of the public schools I went to as a kid would laugh until they puked. There was damned little "due process" about booting a thug out of a school in those days. Of course, to a liberal the gang banger has just as much right to sit in a classroom as the students that he terrorizes. So nowadays the "rights" of a goon--held imprisoned in a classroom by mandatory attendance requirements--to disrupt classes are considered superior to the rights of the other students who are there to learn something. Never mind the rights of a teacher who may be physically threatened.

This opponent of vouchers has the overriding fear that extreme right wing conservatives will have their way and do to public education what Reagan did to aircraft controllers.

What??? Make the system work? Did planes suddenly fall out of the sky when the baton was passed to others? A moot point anyway, since Clinton rehired them all. Pretty weak.

Difficult for me to understand how a real conservative would want the public to subsidize his choice to send his kid to a private, religious school.



It would be funny if it didn't serve to drain public funds from where they are so badly needed in public education.



Amtrak, public education, hundreds of other government programs all have the same refrain: "If only we had more money, it would all be fine." After how many decades should a Federal program be considered a failure? Just curious. Oh, Amtrak will be subsidized again...

I would just as soon that people paid for education the same way they paid for cars, and that the government had nothing to do with it. Vouchers is a compromise of principle, but a step in the right direction for a change.

The screams of anger you hear from the anti-voucher special interests are the visceral sounds made by someone who is having political power removed--the near absolute power over education held by the State. A painful operation, and not usually one suffered in silence. Of COURSE they're going to object.

Again, the fact that thousands of parents WANT to flee the public education system for almost any alternative should tell you something, but it won't, because of your bone-deep conviction that these parents are ignorant, and need to be ruled for their own good.