Anti-Voucher Bias in Schools Story

To the Editor:

I enjoyed your feature article about school vouchers and the burgeoning philanthropy that is supporting private-school choice for low-income parents (“Donors’ Choice,” November 19). However, I was disappointed with the clumsy attempt at hiding the anti-voucher bias of the writers.

In the accompanying article “Debate Over Government-Paid School Vouchers Is Accelerating,” this bias is intimately woven into the facts of the issue. It is not until the end of the article that some balance is, almost reluctantly, provided.

As a spouse of a teacher who has worked in a big-city urban public school and a suburban Catholic school, I can say with some degree of certainty that much of the anti-voucher argumentation is inspired by good, old-fashioned self-preservation, seasoned with a touch of patronizing pretension. Teachers’ unions, public-school administrators, and activists who favor the status quo are placing their own needs above the educational aspirations of low-income families and their children.

Somewhere along the line we forgot that the public school is not the same thing as public education. The public school is, simply, a delivery system. In places where the public-school system is no longer providing the desired quality of education (or the base of moral formation sought by parents today), parents are turning to private and parochial schools (religious and not) for learning opportunities no longer provided by the public school.

A final comment about the source of the funding for school vouchers. The Chronicle articles refer to these funds as “government-paid.” This is misleading. The source of the funds is taxpayer dollars. It’s our money, not the government’s. When we concede to the state the control and responsibility for our children’s educational formation, then we have taken a giant step toward the dismantling of liberty and individual rights.

Michael Perigo
Indianapolis