The answer I've reluctantly come to: One-size-fits-all education doesn't work for every student, and our public schools don't have the capacity to educate every child well.
Plus, quiet as it's kept, there's already a voucher program in place for some of the district's more challenging students. Is it fair to offer better schools to problem children and not those who strive to excel, or at least get educated?
For one, the Catholic Archdiocese already educates many who might very well fall through the cracks if left in traditional public schools.
Under the Williams/Piccola bill, which goes into Senate Education Committee hearings tomorrow, poor parents with an income cap of $28,665 in a family of four whose children are in failing schools would qualify to receive vouchers worth up to $9,000 per child to use at the private schools of their choice. Private tuitions range any where from $6,750 (Bishop McDevitt) to nearly $25,000 (at the city's more elite Quaker schools) - and that's before books and supplies.
Is it dreaming to think that private schools that require rigorous entrance applications and are very difficult to get into (even for students whose parents pay full tuition) would accept some of these students?
And how would the parents of voucher kids subsidize the balance of those expensive tuitions? It's fairly obvious that Catholic schools, many of which have been folding across the country, would benefit the most from a voucher program.
But that's not all bad, as I found out with my own son, who out of my five children received one of those "special" private-school educations in a Catholic school.
