Tag Archives: jobs program

With a proposal in the state legislature, Georgia is having a debate right now over universal vouchers for K-12 students. The bill, sponsored by state senator Eric Johnson, would attach $5,000 to each child for their parents to select the public or private school of their choice. The debate over such a radical change makes events down in the Peach State worth watching closely: Will one state dare to make the leap to truly competitive, student-centered, customer-friendly public education? Are our schools foremost a jobs program for adults or a place to serve the needs of students? I think most parents and many teachers would choose the latter, but connecting that perception to constructing a more competitive system of consumer empowerment is easily lost in the heated rhetoric that inevitably follows the word “vouchers”.

The big story in the news is about President-elect Obama’s giant “stimulus” plan – better known as a giant spending spree that hangs even more debt on the shoulders of me and other kids growing up around America. That part is bad enough. But three leading education reformers – Michael Petrilli, Checker Finn, and Frederick Hess – see other serious problems that it will create for trying to improve our schools and help students learn. In the column they wrote for National Review yesterday, the authors challenge the suggestion that tons of federal government money “invested” in education will yield more positive results down the road: In concept, of course, well-delivered education eventually yields higher economic output and fewer social ills. But there’s scant evidence that an extra dollar invested in today’s schools delivers an extra dollar in value — and ample evidence that this kind of bail-out will spare school administrators from making hard-but-overdue choices about how to make their enterprise more efficient and effective.