Reason Editor in Chief Matt Welch on DC Opportunity Scholarship Program

Reason Editor in Chief Matt Welch appeared on Federal News Tonight on April 22, 2009 to talk about the controversial requirement to reauthorize of the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program.

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• school vouchers
• obama
• matt
• welch
• reason
• magazine
• arne
• duncan
• school choice
• education

[PressForFreedom]

Public schools are not about education, they are centers of indoctrination.

Shame it's such a sham.

[NoEoAoRo]

Hope and change. Of course the democratic propoganda minstry (read CNN, MSNBC, ABC, etc) will never let this story see the light of day. This is a victory for greedy teacher unions, and leftist ideologues. Obama can afford private education for his kids but he couldn't care less about poor families that can't. Keith Olbermann, I dare you to defend Obama for this. Jeanine Garofalo, I dare you to call anyone who points out this petty act of political pandering a racist.

[Morrakiu]

Vouchers are supposed to give low-income families a much larger "market" of both private and public schools to choose from. But it does run the risk of increasing the price of private education IMHO.

Charters just seem like public schools with better incentives.

[AndroidPolitician]

Well at least from what I heard anecdotally there are several vouchers/charters that basically only keep 4.0 students to better their performance.

Also curiously what is the difference between Vouchers and Charters (at least in theory). Because the charter movement got hijacked from the original ideals into what basiclly amounts to vouchers.

[Morrakiu]

Yeah, schools can kick out low performing students, but they'll have a very limited incentive to do that if the money follows the child. On top of that, people might not want to send their kids to a school that would expel their students over a string of low grades.

But a voucher definitely shouldn't cover all of the tuition. Charter schools aren't exactly what I'm talking about, although they do receive money on a per student basis.

[AndroidPolitician]

@Morrakiu

uggghhh schools aren't businesses that keep trade secrets from each other and try to compete, education is a cooperative effort.

The problem with charters and vouchers (which is virtually the same thing now) is that "school choice" works both ways in that schools can kick out low performing students to make thier status look better (as opposed to actually teaching those that aren't doing well).

Also a Stanford study came out and said that Charter schools do much worse anyway.

[azulo65]

Free the students to go to the school they want to go to and you free their minds.

[Martian74]

Why don't we just make the kids take tests to determine who is smarter and put them in the better schools. That way you put more money into kids that are going to make better use of the schools. Put the less smart kids in the cheaper schools as they aren't going to do as well anyway.

[jon8917]

obama is skilled at hiding stuff like this i just what other has been brushed under the rug sort of speak

i also agree with some of the other commentors on several things in particular that the money should be assigned to a student not a school so that the schools have to actually produce so students will go there

[marco114]

Money should be attached to a student and not a school. Schools should have to wine & dine you to get you to come to their school. If they want your business. If they don't, they can just watch their students go away to the competition. Easy.

[freesk8]

Vouchers are a step in the right direction.

But we need a separation of education and state.

Reason Mag. is great!

[MooseOfReason]

I see stories on the news all the time where they have "lotteries" for entry into charter schools, and people are happy to have "won".

Is a good education supposed to be a prize to be won in a contest?

Education should be a service, and people in a free market system should be able to offer a service to people willing to VOLUNTARILY hand over money to pay for it.