Karen, Thank you for posting the link and article (in yours of 11:23 05/11/02 -0800). Obviously, the voucher system is still at an early stage of trialing in America and there are going to be a lot of problems—particularly financial balancing acts between rich and poor communities.
In England, the state school (and university) system had become totally dominated by a London-based centralised department of education with a heuristic- rather than achievement-type ideology for most of the past 50 years, and strongly backed up by teachers unions in comprehensive schools and in the teaching-training colleges (and, more recently, among the staff of the plethora of second- and third-grade universities that have been instituted in the last couple of decades). Thus, the whole system has a lot of intertia and had to start failing quite badly before any thoughts of reform could be entertained. Now that the (Labour) government is accepting the failure, several experiments are now being carried out. It seems to me that little bit by little bit, both countries are feeling their way to a fair voucher system (by this I mean that the vouchers fully represent *all* the admin+school costs that the state [or states] now spends and not some lesser amount as is usually the case). It's obviously going to be a number of years before new private schools emerge that are properly funded. The previous chief government inspector of schools in England is proposing a new type of private school that will be less costly that the typical state school but the gap between the costs per pupil and the value of the vouchers that are likely to be available in the near future is still quite a large one. The state system over here will probably have to deteriorate a lot further yet before the government (or, rather, the educational establishment behind it) will seriously allow fair play to privately-run schools. Probably the most crucial event in the next year or two will be a runaway collapse in the numbers of maths and science teachers. We're very close to this now as the total number of graduate scientists available for all purposes is now drying up. Keith ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------ Keith Hudson, General Editor, Handlo Music, http://www.handlo.com 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England Tel: +44 1225 312622; Fax: +44 1225 447727; mailto:khudson@;handlo.com ________________________________________________________________________
