For School Choice

Response to those who pit vouchers against public education - a false dichotomy in my book ...

Burka: "I'm not 100% against vouchers. I'm FOR public education."

you should be for education, and vouchers = better quality in education.

To be pro school-choice is to be pro-school-children.

" I just can't figure out how to have a voucher program without hurting the public schools."

Vouchers help the STUDENTS. the idea that our education funding should be for the benefit of the institutions and not the students is why we have a broken school system. wrong priorities! The system should help the *child* not the system help itself. Who gets hurt when students and parents get choice? Does a school get hurt when a child leaves the school? Why? they have one less student, a student they obviously couldnt teach properly since they are losing that child? Should we be concerned about the school? The school exists to educate the child - but we have 'advocates' who trat children like cattle and the institutions as the be-all and end-all ... so we "help" the school "system" by locking a non-learning child into a failing school and telling the child we have to spend $8,000 a year and their parent have no say in it (for whose benefit?) ... How crazy dumb is that?!?

Rule #1: Put the child first!!! What do the children need? They need involved parents and they need the right environment - school choice enables both. It enables taking kids out of failed situations - either the 15% of schools that are failing or cases where a teacher is a bad one, and lets parents 'vote with their feet' and put the child in a better school environment. This is a surer path to school reform than any of the failed-miserably attempts at reforming the unreformable system.


When you look at countries like New Zealand that went fully for school choice, what happened? Did public schools fail.NO! They prospered. Why? Because they were forced to perform or die. When given that choice, the better instincts of good principals and teachers kicked in. School choice *liberated* the public schools from being locked into rigid bureaucracy and failed approaches, as they new they 8had* to go with what works or they lost students. It liberated teachers by showing that the way to success was - what it should have always been - about helping student succeed in ways that parents and students could see.

Today, we rely on the good nature of teachers to do the right thing, because this 'system' in no way rewards excellence, let alone competence to a large degree. School choice is the best possible pro-education reform we could make on behalf of the schoolchildren of this state. School choice works. Its way past time we gave it a try in texas.