State Church Separation

The term "vouchers " encompasses various proposals with the common goal of providing public funding to parents to use toward the costs of educating their children in a private school. This booklet presents an overview of educational vouchers and explains why they are an ineffective and inequitable strategy to improve education. Vouchers ignore the reasons for the creation of American public schools, run counter to the concept cf publicly funded services, would create problems of equal access, would draw the higher achieving students from public schools, would divert resources from public schools, would grant private schools benefits while not holding them to the same accountability standards that public schools must meet, do not stimulate educational improvement, and use taxpayer contributions to support religion. The booklet concludes that parents are attracted to vouchers because of legitimate concerns that should not be dismissed, and that educator