From: mccall@mksol.dseg.ti.com (fred j mccall 575-3539)
Subject: Re: School choice (Re: Is this a socialist county?)
Organization: Texas Instruments, Inc
Date: Fri, 14 Aug 1992 16:31:18 GMT

In article <1992Aug11.130834.4017@encore.com> rcollins@encore.com writes:
>mccall@mksol.dseg.ti.com (fred j mccall 575-3539) writes:
>|> Now, one more time.  Start from the current situation.  You are going
>|> to increase the number of students being funded out of tax dollars by
>|> 33%.  NO ONE HAS MOVED TO OTHER SCHOOLS YET.  How is this going to be
>|> cheaper for me?  Are you postulating not providing enough money in the
>|> voucher to allow students to attend public schools, or what?
>
>Where does the 33% figure come from?  Does anyone have a real number
>for percentage of K-12 students *already* attending private schools?

The real figure is 25% (from NPR).  That says that if you add that 25%
back into the pool getting money, you have increased the number of
students the government is paying to educate by 33% with no increase
in funding.

>
>First of all, I think it makes more sense to see that families
>that use private schools currently have already saved you tax
>dollars.  If you got a tax refund one year, and decided out of charity
>to contribute it to the federal treasury for reducing the debt,
>and the next year you decide to keep your refund, would you want
>people to start hounding you for making them pay more taxes now that
>you're not returning your refund?

Excuse me, but this bit of illogic has me totally lost.  Given -
everybody pays to support education, even those of us with no kids.
Given - some people elect to not use the publicly funded and provided
education, for whatever reasons.  Conclusion - people who elect to not
use the publicly funded system to educate their kids should get their
money back (while those of us without kids must, of course, continue
to pay as always).  Sorry, but that just doesn't make sense.

>However, the voucher system could exclude families making over,
>say, $100K per year, thereby excluding most of the students
>who are currently affording the private school in the current
>system.

But those people who currently have their kids in private schools are
the bulk of the people screaming for vouchers!  That's part of the
problem with the whole idea.  There are a lot of others, but let's
just face the fact that if we implement a fair voucher scheme, it is
going to call for a short term INCREASE in taxes to pay for it while
things shake out.  All the folks talking about how if we do vouchers
taxes will drop aren't taking any of this into account.

In addition, if the policy is "all children should be educated through
grade X", can you reasonably say that people making over $100k/year
shouldn't be eligible to have their kids' educations paid for with
public monies?  This is tantamount to saying that in addition to their
usual taxes, people in this income range must pay if their children
attend public schools (since the idea behind the vouchers is 'school
competition', you almost have to set it up so that ALL schools
(including the current public schools) run of the vouchers).








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