> > I stated my views on this topic in an earlier post, so I won't repeat myself. However, I will pose one question to you, MarkN. How will your plan help the children whose parents cannot possibly afford to pay any extra money for education? In California, the voucher proposal that recently got voted down was for $4,000. After you add up all the extra fees, a lot of private schools cost more than $4,000. If you do away with public education for all, America's citizens will become even more stupid. I say this because, if you privatize the school system, you can no longer legally require that all children go to school. If that happened, you would see that the current public education system is better than none at all.
> >
> > Ell"Not so narrow minded that I would even pretend to believe that I am right and the rest of the world is wrong"myruh

Okay, I'm afraid I may have jumped down your throat a little bit, and I apologize. I'll give a bit of background so you know where I am coming from. Except for the first grade and half of second grade, I went through the California public school system. That year and a half in between was when my mom homeschooled me. She stuck to it for quite awhile, but it soon became obvious that our situation was simply not suited for homeschooling. The program was through the church we were attending at the time, but we had to buy the books. The answer keys were in town, a good 15 minutes away, and my cranky two-year-old sister did not make life easier. It wasn't the best of conditions. Every day, as soon as Math time rolled around, I would cry. I finally went back to public school, and Math ceased to be a problem. I know that, under different conditions, homeschooling probably would have been more enjoyable for us. However, I do admire those parents who have the time, energy, and devotion to homeschool their children.

> It's not the place of our government to solve everyone's problems. They can only do so at the cost of redistrubting prosperity to those who "need" it more, and by restricting our freedoms.
>
> Freedom means freedom to fail. If a parent chooses not to educate their children properly, the government can't step in there and say otherwise. The school officials in the state of California would like to make home-schooling illegal, because they feel that it is an inferior education system, and harms those who participate in it.

I differ with you when it comes to the government's role in education. If the parents can't be bothered to see to their children's education, are you proposing that we simply ignore them? I have friends who got an education only because it was free and mandatory. Their parents really couldn't have cared less if their children went to school or not. The parents didn't graduate high school, so education was just not one of their priorities.

> The voucher system that got voted down in California system definitely wasn't perfect. It would be better to have the system be based upon tax credits and refunds, rather than having the money change hands at all. But it's a step in the right direction. At least the 4000 dollars would give parents a larger amount of freedom in deciding how to educate their children.

I really do not see how tax credits and refunds really make a difference, other than to make politicians look good. I did my best to watch Al Gore and George Bush objectively, but Al Gore's college tax cut that drew cheers from a large percent of voters really does not do much. His plan gave a tax break for up to $10,000 of college tuition. However, a large part of the cost in attending college is room and board, which was not accounted for in the tax break. Most of these tax credits look good on paper, and that's about it.

To use myself as an example again, I'll show why both vouchers and tax credits would have been useless to my family. My mom got divorced when I was somewhere between 11 and 13. She was left to raise three kids, and I was the oldest. She got child support for my two sisters, and that totalled a whopping $114 a month. If my mom had wanted to put any of us kids in private school, it would have cost her money, even if vouchers were in place.

That $4,000 voucher would have to cover tuition, fees, books, transportation to and from school, field trips, lunch, and who knows what else. However, public school did not cost any money, the school bus was free, and we qualified for the free lunch program.

The tax break would have been pointless because we were already below the poverty line, which meant that my mom didn't have to pay taxes. (Before anybody comments on that, let me just say that, as a full-time student and a part-time employee, I am now making almost the same amount of money per month that my mom did, and she had three extra mouths to feed.)

Now, I did not mean this to be a pity party for myself. I don't feel sorry for myself because, all in all, I was a happy kid. I am now in college, I just got inducted into a National Honor Society, Yahoo picked up one of my articles a few weeks ago, and my highschool-aged sister recently got a perfect score on the verbal part of the SAT.

And we went through the public school system.

Ell"Survivor"myruh