you could be right. things may not get better (at least not perminantly) with vouchers. but they deffinatly aren't improving as it is now.
every thing they do to make things better just screws it up worse. every time we go through an economic upswing, schools use the extra cash to set up stupid little pet-projects, these things are the last thing cut when money gets tight again.
our kids are being held hostage for the money. when we say we can't afford any more and they will just have to do with less (which is what we do. since taxes are based on a % of income the reason you don't have as much school funding is that the parents are broke), the schools don't try to do a good job with less.
they make sure every dollar they feel cheated out of costs us dearly. a lot like extortion.
for example, this last school year we had this huge budget mess. threats of closing schools early if we don't vote to raise taxes. shortened school year (longer vacations and the like)
the local middle schools plays a movie for the kids every other friday for a couple hours (usually something that is fairly new to video, not educational). movie day was not cut when days where being cut from the school year.
they days imediatly before 'winter vacation', spring break, and other holidays. no homwork is given and no real teaching done before vacattions because 'the kids have their minds on their plans' (possably because the teacher isn't teaching that day freeing up thir minds to wander), and they don't want to load them down on the first day back to allow them to 're adjust', a reasonable system would have seen wasted days as the places to make the cuts. instead it was the 'meat' of the years that was cut, all the frivolous stuff was kept, just the actuall learning was removed.
as yet another example of the stupid things our schools do. during this time my daughters class took a "feild trip" upto the snowbunny ski area, to go tubing.
yes the individual parents had to pay for tube rental. but our tax dollars payed for a school bus and driver, and the teachers pay for the day. when I went to school feild trips included OMSI (oregon museum of science and industry), art museums, natural history museums, zoo, forestry center, or a local company where we could learn something. if I want my kid to go play in the snow, I'll take her. if the teacher wants to go play in the snow she has plenty of days off to do that (not many people get a part time job that pays full time benefits)
but worst of all when we are staring down the barrle of a shortened school year they wasted a day they could have been teaching. as it is, the school year is something like 15% of the days we went 20 years ago. with many more half days, and teacher planing days (I guess they're planning what to do with all this free time).
