No one has yet designed a system of education that would deliver a perfectly equal education to all children. At present, educational choice is concentrated among wealthier families, who can opt for private schooling, and who can more easily relocate to areas with better quality schools.  Poor inner city children, by contrast, are frequently stuck in dilapidated government school buildings and offered an abysmally poor education compared with their suburban counterparts. This is the baseline to which alternative forms of school governance must be compared.
     The question is thus, would vouchers or some other form of scholarships for low-income families reduce or enlarge the educational gap between rich and poor that exists in public schools. If we look at currently operating voucher programs, the answer is clear. Because these programs are compensatory in nature,  they award vouchers only to poor children, thereby increasing the range of educational choices open to low-income families, and reducing the education gap. From both an economic and an educational standpoint this approach offers the most promise for future voucher programs as well. A mounting body of evidence also shows that private schools help to reduce the socio-economic achievement gap, and help to increase the level of integration between racial and socio-economic groups within schools.
     None of the proposed tweaks to existing public school systems (such as higher funding or national curricula) can offer the range of benefits enjoyed in a free educational marketplace, and scholarships would allow all families to participate in that marketplace.

Would government-funded educational scholarships violate the first amendment proscripiton against an establishment of religion if the scholarships could be redeemed by religious schools?

     On this issue, the jury, or rather the U.S. Supreme Court, is still out. Both proponents and critics of vouchers can cite Supreme Court precedents which favor their positions, but no definitive precedent has yet been set.
     Even if the First Amendment does not preclude vouchers, however, Americans must ask themselves if they feel it is right for citizens to be forced to subsidize religious education which may conflict with their beliefs. Wisconsin's state constitution specifically prohibits the compelled support of religious institutions, and the expansion of the Milwaukee voucher program to include religious schools was struck down by an appelate court as a violation of that clause--even though no particular religion was favored by the program. That verdict was subsequently appealed to the Supreme Court of Wisconsin, which reversed it--allowing the expansion of the voucher program to include religious schools. An appeal of the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling was made to the US Supreme Court, but the high court refused to consider the case, allowing the Wisconsin Supreme Court verdict to stand.
     It must be remembered, however, that state and federal constitutional problems are only endemic to government voucher programs. One of the many advantages of privately-run and -funded scholarship programs is that they engender no such legal issues. Private voucher programs are thus superior in this respect to government programs.

     Once again, it is necessary to compare market-based school reforms with the status quo, rather than with a mythical ideal in which every family could obtain precisely the education it sought. At present, the vast majority of children are simply assigned to a public school, and have little choice in the matter. What voucher programs would do is allow those children a choice. While not every child will secure a place at his number one choice of school, his chances of finding a high-quality, appropriate educational environment will be vastly greater than under the present conformist state-run system. In Japan, the only nation with a thriving for-profit educational market, most private schools respond to pent-up demand by expanding their operations, rather than by turning away students--just as do for-profit enterprises in other industries. Supermarkets and bookstores do not put their customers on waiting lists, but rather expand their facilities to meet the demand.
     While non-profit private schools are considerably less responsive to fluctuations in demand than are their profit-making counterparts, even they offer students with a wider range of choices than government school systems. The National Catholic Education Association reports that almost three quarters of its schools accept roughly three quarters of their applicants--hardly a stringent selection process. Furthermore, many rejections are due to lack of space, a problem that would be reduced if vouchers were available to pay for new classrooms. An educational market supplemented with scholarships for low-income families would clearly improve the almost total lack of choice imposed on most families by the public school system.

     This is one of the most pernicious and flagrant of the anti-choice claims. To begin with, the overwhelming majority of public schools are not underfunded, including those in depressed, inner-city areas. While there are some poorly funded districts scattered around the country, low funding is not the chief cause of decaying facilities and moribund materials. Public school per-pupil spending, taking inflation into account, is now 14 times higher than it was 70 years ago. On average, public schools now spend close to $7,000 per student per year, twice the average at private schools. In some inner-city public school districts, such as Hartford, Connecticut, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Maryland, etc. an annual outlay of roughly $9,000 per pupil is so poorly managed that many schools are falling apart and failing even to supply their own bathrooms with toilet paper.
     Statistics published by the NCES reveal that the 300 largest big-city school districts spend roughly the same amount per pupil as the average of all 15,000+ districts in the United States. Studies of inner-city Catholic schools demonstrate that low-income students can learn more at far less cost, and in far safer and more agreeable surroundings in the private sector. The fact that government school equipment and facilities are deteriorating or have become outdated is most often a sign of mismanagement, not lack of funds.
     The financial effects of vouchers, even vouchers for the full per-pupil expenditure of public schools, should be negligible. For every decrease in the amount of funds directed to public schools, there would be a commensurate reduction in the work load and hence costs of operating public schools. If a given public school was so bad as to see an exodus of all its pupils, it could be shut down and its buildings leased or sold, actually generating income.
     Few voucher proponents have suggested vouchers equal to the full cost of public schooling, however. Most offer or recommend vouchers in the range of $3,000. If students were given $3,000 vouchers, enough for most private elementary schools, they would be saving the public system an average of $4,000 per year! And even if some of that savings were returned to tax-payers, there would still be enough for yet another increase in public school expenditures, if that is what voters wanted.
     Why, then, would the teacher's unions oppose such programs? Because fewer public school students would mean a need for fewer public school teachers. Unions protect their members' jobs. That is what they are for and that is what they do. It would be naive to expect otherwise.

     Here the MEA and NEA are simply out of touch with the educational research community. Paul E. Peterson and Jiangtao Du of Harvard University, along with Jay P. Green of the University of Houston, recently led a statistical reanalysis of the public Milwaukee voucher experiment. They found that after three years in private schools, choice students showed greater gains in both reading and mathematics than those unfortunate students left behind in the public schools. Positive results continue to come in from other voucher programs.

     This problem is easily avoided. Vouchers for students already in private schools could be phased in over time, and paid for entirely from the savings generated by the shift of children from government-run to independently-run schools. Furthermore, vouchers could be varied in size based on need, being cut-off above an agreed family income level: after all, there is little sense in taxing wealthy families to pay for their own children's education, when they could (and in many cases already do) pay for it themselves.
     Finally, even if the popular consensus was that every family should receive a voucher for the full value of their children's education, the system could still easily avoid increasing the overall tax burden. As is well known, public schools are notoriously inefficient when it comes to spending, costing more than existing private schools. As competition amongst private schools intensified, prices would no doubt drop even lower. The 11% difference would be more than made up for by these factors.