Arizona's school voucher plan is better for everyone
Giving every parent in the state $7,000 a year per child and letting them take that money to any public or private school -- or no school at all -- is a century overdue.
If Arizona's sweeping school voucher program survives and is actually implemented, all 1.1 million students who attend public or charter schools in Arizona will qualify for $7,000 per year in taxpayer-financed tuition to attend a private or religious school, or get home schooled.
About 60,000 private and religious school students and about 38,000 children who are being homeschooled in Arizona are immediately eligible for up to $7,000 per year per child.
This is a revolutionary move by Arizona, and the fact that it is about a century overdue is testimony to the stupidity of our political class, the failure of black politicians (Obama immediately comes to mind) to push for real school choice and the political power of the public teachers unions within the Democrat Party to preserve their near monopoly over public money spent for education.
True statewide school choice, whether suburban families in their pricey houses like it or not, will do more than end the de facto segregation that still exists in public schools, however.
As consumers of schooling, all parents in the state will be afforded the geographic freedom to live anywhere in a city and still send their kids to a better school -- a public or private school of their choice.
Kind of like the way they have ‘job choice’ or ‘car choice’ or ‘grocery store choice’ or ‘movie theater choice’ ….
In a perfect world, government (and the politics that can't help but infect it) should have nothing to do schooling. Separation of school and state should have been added to separation of church and state long ago. But school vouchers are a better way, a fairer way, a more market-friendly way for government to be involved in schooling.
School vouchers -- like ‘housing vouchers’ or food 'vouchers' -- end the power of government and politicians to control schooling by making strict school district boundaries as irrelevant (and as absurd and as evil) as 'housing districts' or ‘grocery store districts.’
Before she became what she is today, before she had to adjust her 'core beliefs' to fit her presidential ambitions, Senator Liz Warren knew another good reason for being in favor of school choice:
"It was nearly two decades ago when Warren, then a professor at Harvard Law School, published what is still regarded as a breakthrough study on the causes of personal bankruptcy, The Two-Income Trap (2003). The biggest reason for adults going broke, her research showed, was not wasteful spending at the mall, fancy vacations, or some other stereotypical profligacy. It was people with children over-extending themselves to buy a home in one of the relatively few US communities with good public schools.
"For Warren, the obvious way to not only reduce the national bankruptcy rate but help all families financially was to employ the one education policy that could break the unfair connection between quality K-12 schools and pricy zip codes. School choice, she wrote in her book, would “relieve parents from the terrible choice of leaving their kids in lousy schools or bankrupting themselves to escape those schools.”
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https://spectatorworld.com/topic/universal-school-choice-transform-real-estate/
Competition always makes things much better. It can be win- win if the focus is on the kids!
Move forward Arizona!