Vouchers

Vouchers are certificates issued by the government to parents for the education of their children at a school of their choice. Vouchers function like admission tickets. Parents “shop” for a school, make their choice, and give the voucher to the school. Vouchers are designed to provide parents freedom to use all or part of the government funding set aside for their children's education to send their children to the public or private school of their choice. In the field of curriculum studies, the topic of vouchers brings to light the various obstacles that many students face in gaining access to an education of quality. This topic also reveals how school funding methods and programs play a role in how students come to acquire the knowledge, skills, and values that they do in schooling.

The history of school vouchers dates back to 1792 when Thomas Paine proposed a voucher-like plan for England. In the United States, popular and legislative support, however, did not begin until the early 1950s, when states in the Southeast established tuition grants to respond to anticipated school desegregation. In a 1955 article, Milton Friedman, an eventual Nobel Prizewinning economist, proposed vouchers as free-market education, to separate government financing of schools from their administration.

Friedman's view was that market-style competition for students would spur the development of schools that were better tailored to families' needs and cost less than those run by inefficient public bureaucracies. Friedman argued that universal vouchers for students, from elementary through secondary schooling, would help launch an age of educational innovation and experimentation, increasing the options for students and parents and establishing the necessary conditions for promoting all sorts of positive outcomes.

Plans for a federally funded voucher program were developed by Christopher Jencks, a Harvard sociologist then working for the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity. Congressional bills to fund such programs were introduced several times in the 1970s but these did not have broad support and were easily defeated. The voucher idea received more support after President Ronald Reagan endorsed it, and attempts to fund vouchers through federal funding surfaced repeatedly in the 1980s. These legislative proposals, however, were perceived as elitist and were also defeated. In 1990, the first publicly financed voucher program began in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Wisconsin lawmakers approved a plan for Milwaukee students to receive approximately $3,000 each to attend nonsectarian private schools. This law was amended in 1995 to allow students to attend religious schools as well. It is this inclusion of religious schools first in the Milwaukee voucher plan and then in a similar plan in Cleveland, Ohio, that ignited the heated controversy and a series of lawsuits about vouchers. In 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the Cleveland program constitutional, paving the way for expansion to religious schools elsewhere.

Even though Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court have given their approval to vouchers, state courts and lawmakers remain cautious about these programs. Voucher programs exist in a small number of states. U.S. citizens remain divided about the voucher idea. Proponents argue that voucher systems promote free market competition among all types of schools, nonprofit or for profit, religious or secular. This competition among schools provides the necessary incentive for those schools to improve. The idea is that successful schools would attract students, and poor performing schools would be forced to reform or even close. Supporters further argue that voucher programs would help to equalize educational opportunities. The primary goal behind this idea is to localize accountability rather than relying on government systems of control to make school more equal in the United States.

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