> As opposed to what? Controlled by Coca-Cola? Starbucks? -- "Do you have a degree?" -- "I sure do, I graduated with MS in coffee arts (MsCA) from Starbucks University, Phoenix". Or just got a "PhD in applied lobbying from Lockheed"
My primary issue with school vouchers is the poor state of private schools, at least here in GA (outside of the major cities like Atlanta and Savannah). The Catholic schools are decent to good, but often are only K-8. There are few private secular schools. The rest of the private schools are very conservative "Christian Academy" types whose education leaves their students complete morons in some fields (math, science, history, civics; I guess, really, everything).
I bet that if we switched to vouchers then you'd see a lot of new private schools catering to a wider audience. It also might be reasonable to exclude private schools with religious instruction from the voucher program.
I'd like to be that optimistic, and maybe it'd happen, but the politics around here would make it unlikely.
Also, wrt the exclusion of religious schools, that'd be a non-starter in the southern states at least. It'd probably make more sense to mandate some minimum curricula or require that inspectors be able to attend the school unannounced if the school is receiving public moneys via vouchers. There'd likely be a tantrum about religious oppression, but, really, man and dinosaurs, contrary to the teachings at many of the churches and Christian academies around here, really didn't live together [1].
[1] Ok, in the conventional sense of dinosaurs, not the XKCD sense of birds as living dinosaurs. http://xkcd.com/1211/
Wow, most other places in the US it is the opposite. Private schools are considered superior. They have to be, because there is otherwise no reason to both pay property taxes and also pay tution.
Around here it's largely politics and religion, not the quality of the school. There's one catholic school with a good academic reputation. The other two I know of are ok. The rest of the private schools are bad to mediocre. They may be better in some ways than the public schools, but not enough (IMO) for the tuition costs.
School vouchers are a great alternative to public schools http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_voucher