The Los Angeles Times featured an amazingly inane editorial Sunday that celebrated the overturning of Florida’s school voucher system:

… In Florida, where the state Supreme Court ruled Thursday against the only statewide voucher system in the nation, standards appear to be a one-way street. Supporters of vouchers talk about parents being free to choose schools, but they also tout vouchers as the path to accountability. The idea is that competition with private schools will lead to an improvement in the public school system.

The problem with this theory is that the only schools held accountable are the public ones. Voucher students in Florida take the same standardized tests as those in public schools, but those scores aren’t made public. So private schools face no public penalty if their scores are poor. Parents are free to keep their children in such schools, of course, but should public money be spent to support a substandard education? (emphasis ours - ed.) …

Hmmmm …. there is some irony around here somewhere … and do I hear the rustling of a straw man?

The Times implied solution: business as usual. Parents should be forced to forced to choose between spending their own take home pay for private school, after already being taxed for the public system, or sending their child to the prescribed substandard “free” public school. It’s worked so well in the past.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 11th, 2006 at 1:06 am by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under (Un)education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.