>On Behalf Of Michael Pollak
> On Tue, 22 Feb 2000, Max Sawicky wrote:
>
> > The fear is founded on the use of cross-jurisdictional registration in
> > vouchers *experiments* to dish the Democrats; it's been working well.
> > Black support of vouchers, outside of assorted liberal elites, is very
> > high.
>
> Is there a reason why vouchers experiments are cross-jurisdictional? Is
> it done explicitly to make it look better?
One of the most attractive features of vouchers is that they undermine the correspondence between municipal control of schools and thus corresponding de facto segregation that follows from our residential segregation. As well, the dependence on local government finance has largely forced poor, non-white inner cities to depend on a tax base of poor non-whites (especially given the corporate blackmail that has wrested so many tax easements from such cities) versus the well-funded rich white suburbs access to rich white suburbanites as a tax base.
So vouchers do have the advantage of overcoming both the racial and fiscal apartheid that permeates our present municipal-based school systems.
Back in 1996, the Right ran a pro-voucher initiative; they expected to court white suburbanites, but instead they found that many inner-city residents were supporting it, while white suburbanites voted is down in droves- fearing a raid on their schools. And California has far more equalized spending between poor and rich districts. In a place like New Jersey with incredible disparities in spending, vouchers would threaten those white suburbanites with pangs of racial and fiscal terror.
That said, the danger of vouchers is that they will be underfunded and leave disabled or unruly students completely shit-out-of-luck. The Florida regulations cited in the article seem designed to avoid those problems, but it is a serious danger.
On the other hand, as the article emphasizes, as long as only non-profits are involved, it is actually unclear what difference there would be in practice between a "public school choice" system and a heavily regulated "private school choice", other than a few church-based schools could on a voluntary basis offer religious instruction in classes (assuming that survives constitutional muster). Even the for-profit versus non-profit distinction does not make a clear line difference given the school systems that have begun contracting with for-profit endeavors like the Edison Project to run "public" schools.
-- Nathan Newman