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Republicans Propose National School Voucher Program
As reported in today's New York Times, the proposal is to provide $100 million for vouchers to be made available to low-income students to attend private and religious schools instead of public schools.
An editorial from today's New York Times discusses a growing body of work that
has shown that the quality of education offered to students varies widely within all school categories. The public, private, charter and religious realms all contain schools that range from good to not so good to downright horrendous.
This point was underscored last week when the United States Education Department released a controversial and long-awaited report comparing public and private schools in terms of student achievement as measured on the federal math and reading tests known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress. As with previous studies, this one debunked the widely held belief that public schools were inferior to their private and religious counterparts. The private schools appeared to have an achievement advantage when the raw scores of students were considered alone. But those perceived advantages melted away when the researchers took into account variables like race, gender and parents' education and income.
Vouchers represent an attempt to blur the "wall" of separation between church and state by diverting tax-payer money, sorely needed for public education, to go to religious schools. |
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