The Evansville Courier Press has an editorial on the demise of school vouchers in this year’s General Assembly. Their take: generally supportive of vouchers, but given the state’s financial situation, this isn’t the time to spend money on experiments.
In another year, in another era of school funding, a good argument might be made for a voucher program such as the one that received serious consideration from the Legislature this year. But it was ill-timed, considering everything else under consideration for public schools. Indeed, with the current state funding crisis, a perfect storm appears to be bearing down on large urban districts such as the Evansville-Vanderburgh School Corp. The voucher proposal might have merit, but in the context of everything else headed for the EVSC and similar districts, it amounted to piling on.
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[The voucher bill] would have allowed parents of children in schools that are not meeting the standards of No Child Left Behind to transfer their children to other schools, including private schools. The money that public school would have received from the state for that child would have followed the child to the private school, further cutting the funds going into public schools.
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