The voucher system of education would be better for the US than it's current education system

Thank you for responding, You first begin with my statement on the fact I cannot guarantee that the education would be any better but their are 2 issues I have with this: 1. What I meant when I said "While I have to agree that it is not absolutely certain that a voucher system will guarantee a better quality of education" was that my certainty wasn't 100% and that I could be wrong. I still have great confidence that the education of our youth would be improved. 2. The education system could be improved even if the education wasn't better. Ex. If we could get the same quality and quantity of education for half the cost than that would be an improvement in the system. His second response was that if a school were to "decimate itself" that it would show up on government test and would endure the wrath of sanctions and send teachers in said school to find out the problem. One issue with this statement is that it assumes that the schools with the lowest scores are most in need. When I was in public school the days before a government test would be taken a review would ensue which for the most part gave us the answer to any potential problems on the test which would skew the results. Since he conceded to my second point on religion there is no reason to think that a voucher system would necessarily violate the first amendment. You mentioned that I was contradicting myself when talking about private schools so I will clarify what a meant. I was saying that under any condition where the demand for a private school is greater than the quantity supplied so they could choose between students applying. In my above argument I stated that "When the voucher system is in place discrimination will become more costly to any school because to not allow a student into a school is to sacrifice some vouchers and therefore some profit" this was just to say that the voucher system would make the private schools less exclusive since more people would be able to afford them. His statement of "the schools were failing it's not because it was poor could be a factor but in fact because the students are morons so if a school fails no new schools are made the students are distributed to the schools already in place." I don't really understand what you mean by this. Yes some children are naturally more gifted than others in education but that wouldn't mean that new schools wouldn't be made. In this case schools may be created in order to help these students learn. Even in the US there are certain companies popping up to help students with trouble learning such as Sylvan Learning Centers. In any other market such as the grocery market most people wouldn't say that if a grocery company went bankrupt than then some people wouldn't be able to get groceries. In the short run these people would find other places to get their groceries but in the long run some grocer's would expand and some new grocery stores would pop up. In order explain the voucher system more completely I will start by use of an scenario. In any human system there are actors who interact with each other. An important part of any human system is the incentives created by the structure of said system. In our scenario there will be 7 actors, the government, 3 families with a child That will be called A , B , and C and 3 schools which will be 1 , 2 , and 3 . First we will look at the the original US system: In this system the government funds schools 1,2 and 3 directly. Families A,B and C send their children to schools based on which district they live in. Family A goes to School 1,family B goes to school 2 and family C goes to school 3. The only way for any of the families to send their children to a different school is to live in a different school district. This means that the school has little risk of losing their students because of quality. As my opponent stated their is a minimum quality for any public school has to meet with the government but beyond that there is very little incentive to make the school better other than sheer altruism. In the Voucher school system funding for education is divided by the number of children of school age and be sent to every family based on the number of children they have. In our example lets say we have 12000 USD examples which would be split based on the number of children. Since each of the families has one child each would receive a voucher for 4000 USD which could be used to send their children to any of the three schools. Because of this each parent will want to send their children to the best school possible they will choose schools based off of quality. Competition will ensue by the schools in order to persuade the families to send their children there. Like any other competitive market companies (schools) will offer better quality products (education) in order to attract customers (families with children). In the short run there may not be a great change in school quality but in the long run schools will raise in quality. In many countries where the voucher system has been put in place the quality of education has increased such as in Sweden. And in the few US states which have had voucher programs had seen a healthy competition and an improvement in test scores. This is why the voucher system is better. I look forward to the next round. http://www.csmonitor.com.... http://www.edchoice.org...