From: gpalo@digi.lonestar.org (Gerry Palo)
Newsgroups: tx.politics
Subject: Re: CHOICE: DEBATE BASED ON COMPETING PHILOSOPHIES
Date: 16 Nov 92 17:36:43 GMT
Distribution: tx
Organization: DSC Communications Corp, Plano, TX

In article <1992Nov15.222048.27816@mksol.dseg.ti.com> mccall@mksol.dseg.ti.com (fred j mccall 575-3539) writes:
>In <1992Nov12.223257.11398@digi.lonestar.org> gpalo@digi.lonestar.org (Gerry Palo) writes:
>
>
>>There is no doubt that private school tuition would rise with the 
>>availability of voucher money.  But public school cost would decrease 
>>as the schools focused less on a top heavy bureacracy and more directly 
>>on the parents and local community.  One way to keep things in check 
>>would be partial vouchers. Require, say, that the parents pay some 
>>percentage of the tuition based on income. This would keep total 
>>costs down and allow for choice as well.  I'm a long time advocate 
>>of private schools and choice, and I have 3 kids.  But I would find
>>this solution acceptable.
>
>This is actually a worse solution than the idea of giving full
>vouchers to people to send their kids to religious schools.  What is
>someone who can't afford to pay the rest of the tuition to a private
>schools supposed to do with a PARTIAL VOUCHER?  Sounds like a great
>way to encourage middle-income flight from the public schools.
>
>All the 'good examples' everyone quotes to 'prove' how effective
>'choice' would be are examples of PUBLIC SCHOOL choice?  So why don't
>people push for that (which they can probably even get) since it seems
>to work so well, instead of insisting that they want to send their
>kids to Jo Smo's Acadamy of Charismatic Intolerance on tax money?
>
>-- 
>"Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don't have the balls to live
> in the real world."   -- Mary Shafer, NASA Ames Dryden
>------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Fred.McCall@dseg.ti.com - I don't speak for others and they don't speak for me.

The idea of a partial voucher is to give the actual parents a
little bigger material stake in their kids' education.  You
could easily make it a sliding scale, based on income, with
a poverty floor below which one would be exempt from the
partial payment.

People do push for choice.  The established parties are very
much against it (except for a large number of conservative
republicans -- this should be an anomoly, as liberals should
also see the benefit).

One reason why all the choice programs have been public school
choice programs is that private school programs have not been
allowed yet.  The few attempts to establish them have been fought
ferociously by the education establishment.  But the success of
the public school choice programs does demonstrate the effective-
ness of the principle.

As for your fear of millions of kids getting their brains beat
down by Jo Smo's Acadamay [sic] of Charismatic Intolerance, I
offer the following:

"Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don't have the balls to live
 in the real world."   -- Mary Shafer, NASA Ames Dryden

Your paternalistic educational state has the creation of a perfectly
safe (and utterly grey) world as one of its primary objectives.

Cordially,
Gerry Palo (73236.2007@cis)
Newsgroups: tx.politics