Vouchers for homeschoolers?

Vouchers just one more way of subsidizing education, 14 July 2007, Salt Lake Tribune, Salt Lake City, Utah My neighbor hates school vouchers because he does not believe that taxpayers should subsidize families choosing to send their children to private schools. He often says, “Utah families already have school choice. They can send their kids to public, private or home schools. Why should I pay for the personal choices of families to send their children to private schools?”

To which I respond that my wife and I pay large amounts of state income taxes each year to subsidize the education of neighbor children even though we home-school our own.

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By contrast, my family has saved taxpayers $360,000 and has benefited the public school system by another $100,000 in taxes. We agree that we want every child to receive a good education. That’s why I support school vouchers – if we are going to subsidize every child’s education anyway then why not let parents choose what is best for their own children?

For a long time, I was on the fence about vouchers. My gut feeling was, ‘no,’ but I didn’t have anything to cement the feeling to the ‘no.’ While researching a response to Kimberly Yuracko (which should be in next month’s Home Education Magazine), I found one.

Zelman’s Future: Vouchers, Sectarian Providers, and the Next Round of Constitutional Battles, Notre Dame Law Review, vol. 78:4

PDF-page 40

James Dwyer appears to have the most novel set of reasons for preferring a school voucher program; he would use such a program as a way of limiting the influence of traditional religious beliefs in the education of children. JAMES DWYER, VOUCHERS WITHIN REASON: A CHILD CENTERED APPROACH TO EDUCATION REFORM (2002). [capitals in original]

The book I read, which included the ‘control education via vouchers’ idea was, Religious Schools v. Children’s Rights by Prof. Dwyer. My impression after the one reading that I had before the inter-library loan time ran out, was ‘enforced neutrality of everyone’ rather than ‘everyone pluralistically equal.’

posted by Valerie

Tags: home-school, homeschool, Salt Lake City, Salt Lake Tribune, school vouchers, subsidizing education, Utah