Kenneth Meier and Kevin Smith have shown that race and religion are prime movtivators in private school enrollment (_The Case Against School Choice)...how many of these folks agree with Pat Buchanan that vouchers are 'wolves in sheep's clothing' that will mean multicultural and sex education?...
...free market ideologues have exploited anti-gov't sentiment that they conveniently helped create through think tanks such as Heritage, American Enterprise, Cato, Hudson, Media Research Center, etc...still mass movement doesn't exist, there have been more than 20 referenda about school vouchers in various states in last three decades and all were defeated (most recently in California in 1994 where opposition came from Christian Right when it learned that a coven of witches intended to establish a voucher school...now there's an idea, how about marxists, Afri-centrists, Queer Nation, Redstockings, nudists, deconstructors, left-wing basketball players)...
vouchers are policy wonk and opinion poll driven...middle & upper- middle strata suburbanites don't care about dysfunctional urban schools...they are, in general, satisfied with their kids' public schools a voucher system that might offer lower-income students a choice (i.e., covering the cost of tuition) runs counter to their interests because it devalues the premium which links school quality to the value of their home...
as for magnets, they offer veneer of accomplishing desegregation but may actually leave most minority students worse off than before while offering excuse not to implement more fundamental changes...Michael Hoover