Parents would be free to use the voucher at any private school licensed by the state in lieu of sending their children to a public school. States may not license schools that discriminate on the basis of race. Recently, this idea has been assailed from both the left and the right. It is a complicated matter and requires careful consideration. But it is clear that a competitive marketplace is a superior source of most commodities and services, as evidenced by the collapse of socialist economies in Eastern Europe and in Asia.
Government monopolies are generally wasteful and inefficient.
The first complication is the matter of religious schools. Because of the lack of sufficient private non-religious schools and the wide support among Catholics of parochial school education, any viable voucher scheme must include sectarian religious schools. Of course this will invite immediate attack by the ACLU in addition to the teachers' unions as a violation of the separation of church and state, but this will not automatically rule the plan out. As we know, various exceptions to the rule have been approved by the Supreme Court, the most prominent being the World War II GI Bill of Rights, under which millions of veterans were educated by religious schools, including seminaries where some were trained as ministers of various denominations. There must be no financial incentive to parents to prefer private over public schools, or those of one denomination over another.