28 School Vouchers

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">As a society we have chosen to educate all of our children, everybody’s children, regardless of whose they are but we are failing: the current education system needs radical change. Markets respond to change by giving people a choice, and letting the optimum solutions evolve. In the education debate, “choice” is synonymous with vouchers but, unfortunately, the word “vouchers” has been poisoned to mean just another teacher droning in another school somewhere different in the city, and lots of people see vouchers as taxpayers funding private schools. The real value of Vouchers is the opportunity to completely change education as we know it, and “choice” is the first step.<br /><br />There are already a myriad of proven learning techniques that have evolved over the past decades: Montessori, Kaplan, Home-Schooling, Special Ed, vocational-training & Internet-based-self-paced-study are already out there, they only need to be integrated into a public framework so that public criteria & oversight are enforced. So long as a student can perform to a predefined standard, there's no reason government should demand a lot of control over how that education is provided, instead Government contracts should be written to specify educational standards & outcome then they pick bids, not based on dollars-per-student but education-per-student, so that if one technique or supplier doesn't work for your child, try another regardless of cost, your voucher is for an education: the one that works for you.</p>