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YouDebateIt.com -- Should a voucher system be used to give parents a choice of schools?
Topic: Should a voucher system be used to give parents a choice of schools?

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Opinion #1
Debater: Stef
Taking from the poor to subsidise the rich
The idea of draining funds from the state run schools (the only education the working class can use) to promote paid education to the middle classes through subsidised vouchers is discriminatory and wrong. Another policy aimed to fill the pockets of business at the expense of the people.
Unless the voucher pays for 100% of the schools costs, poor families will not be sending their kids to paid education, they will have no choice but to continue to send their kids to an already underfunded education system, which will have just got a lot worse through the drain required to provide these vouchers.
The only people for whom a door will be opened will be the more afluent of the lower middle classes, the major beneficiaries will be the rich middle class who can already afford paid education and will then get a bargain saver on top, and the businesses that run the schools.
Simple equasion is money taken from the taxpayer to pay for the rich to buy things they can already afford.
Opinion #2
Debater: The Wild Goose
Vouchers are only necessary to ensure education for the poor.
School vouchers stem from a desire to harness "market forces" to do two things. First, they are designed to "make public schools competitive", by supporting schools to compete with public schools, thus forcing the public schools to reform, as a private company might reform in response to a vigorous newcomer to a market over which it previously exercised total control. Second, and most significantly for this discussion, vouchers are meant to adjust the market to provide goods which, according to "public goods" theory, "would not be provided by an unregulated market in sufficient quantity". This, by the way, is the only viable reason to have public education at all- if this is not the case, purely private education is more efficient and just. In the case of vouchers, they are meant to provide poor families with an education that "would not be available to them in an unregulated market". If there is a flaw with vouchers, there is a flaw with public education as a whole.
Supporting URL[s]:
http://www.acton.org
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