Everytime that I see or HEAR! one of those KENNEDY boys ( not men, but TRUSTFUNDS BABY!) rant & shout about the EVIL OIL & GAS BUSINESS, or some bullshit comments about how the CORPORATE WORLD is destorying the mother earth spaceship called EARTH, I just shake my head.

I have done alot of Oil & Gas industry LANDWORK in the county that I live in.

Joe Kennedy – father, dad, grandfather, great-grandfather, ect. , who by the way got his start in BUSINESS by way of a illegal business ( Al Capone ect.) started a LITTLE oil & gas business in this county in 1959. Gusess what? They made millions, million, $1,000,0000 x 100 in 1960 $(United States Dollars). When Mr. Senator Kennedy (ROYALTY, KING, DICTATOR, ECT. ) gets on TV (often) and saids I DO NOT WANT A (1) WIND FARM OFFSHORE BECAUES? (who knows?) Rich Bastards are hard but not impossible to deal with, I said , I HOPE YOU & YOUR FAMILY FREEZES YOUR ASS OFF DURNING THE NEXT GLOBAL WARMING CURRENT CRISIS (AL GORE) WINTER . I HOPE IT HIT SOON.(COMMING WINTER SEASON) SOUTH TEXAS WILL BURN MESQUITE TREES TO KEEP WARM!

Separation of Church and State: first off, the parent decides what school the kid goes to so there is no separation issue, the government isn’t picking the religion for the child.

Second, Do you also have an issue with a college student on the GI bill which is basically a voucher, going not only to a Catholic College but also getting a doctorate in theology and becoming a priest on the government’s dime? Which, I might add is perfectly fine.

Third, If a religion sold a product OTHER than education, say the sold cheese burgers, would it be against the separation of church and state for the government through their many purchasing bodies to buy it because it was from a religious institution? I think you have lost sight of the fact that education is product, just like cheese burgers are.

I used to attempt to teach math at a public school (one of the good ones, no less). Let me assure you that while we are PAYING for kids to get a minimum education, the aren’t getting one.

There’s a big difference between publicly funding primary education and allowing the state to actually run the schools. What we need to do is give the parents the cost of educating their child in the form of a voucher and allow them to choose which school to send their kids to. All schools will be privately run. The schools will have to compete for the education dollars by meeting the parents’ and students’ demands. Let me assure you that even the least educated and most disinterested ghetto mama gets very interested and on the ball when you give her a choice.

Admission to the charter school in East Harlem is done on a lottery basis (so great is the demand). The auditorium is filled to the brim with ghetto mamas who were often teenage parents and high school drop outs themselves. If their child gets in, they act like they’ve just seen Jesus. If their child doesn’t, they are inconsolable. They want better for their kids, but if they don’t get into the charter school, their kids are stuck in the ghetto public school. What right does Barack Obama have to force such a fate on these mothers’ children while he pays lip service to fixing the unfixable?

It’s one thing to tax me to educate other people’s children (I don’t have any). It’s quite another to tax me to finance the board of Education and the teachers’ union and leave the kids unlucky enough not to be chosen in the lottery in the retardation holding pens passing for public schools.

No, it wouldn’t. The courts were pretty clear about that. Separation of church and state does not mean that public funds can’t be used for a religious institution to provide lessons in reading, writing and arithmetic.

Also, Phil, using a single study is not exactly proof of success or failure. Furthermore, once you have corralled kids into the worst of the worst schools, you can hardly expect the students to suddenly gain the discipline and skills necessary to raise their test scores in a single year. You also forget to mention the all out, no holds barred campaign the teachers union launched against the experiment. Lastly, that site is incredibly suspect. Who runs it? Why are none of the successful tests of vouchers listed and explored? You can’t possibly present this site as evidence with a straight face.

Esox Lucius, the site promotes the separation of church and state; this idea should be important to all libertarians. Since many private schools are religious, school vouchers would involve government funding of religious institutions, which does raise some constitutional questions. It may be biased, but it has an important reason for its bias. If Milwaulkee gave the vouchers to students from the ‘worst of the worst’ schools, then that is the best possible test case. The worst schools are usually attended by poor kids, whose parents definitely do not have the money for private schooling. Since these were the kids that the schools accepted, the progress should have been enormous. Instead, the result was low retention and stagnant test scores. This means that improving education will be a bit more challenging than merely outsourcing it to private schools.

I checked out your anti-voucher website. It looks about as impartial as the KKK would be while discussing blacks, Jews and Catholics. I have a Cousin that earned his dues teaching in Milwaukee Public Schools. The city gave the “voucher experiment” to the worst of the worst schools. Basically the schools that the Board of Ed gave up and surrendered on. Not a very good sample population if you ask me. Even then, if only a handful of students were saved from that hell hole, that’s a handful that didn’t have to grit out an “education” that was basically a warehouse for kids and little more (except, you-know, the violence and drugs).

I grew up in Chicago and still live in the area. Lab is one of the “big three” private schools in the city, along with Latin and Parker (I was a Parker kid, and we used to play baseball against Lab).

Mayor Daley, by the way, has never sent his kids to the Chicago Public schools. They went to Catholic schools all the way through.

I chose to move to the North Shore (the well-to-do suburbs on Lake Michigan north of Chicago) in part to avoid the expense of private schools in the city. We do pay ridiculous amounts of property tax (around $10,000 a year for a normal-sized house), but we do get great schools. I consider it a good investment.

The other aspect of “vouchers” that is completely ignored by opponents is that such a program INCREASES the amount of money per child in the “public” school system. That is, there is not one proposed voucher program that grants an amount of educational voucher equal to the spending per pupil. The difference is left in the government run school. THis means that on a per pupil basis the government school has even more money. Such machinations should allow the government schools the flexible funding to reduce class sizes and other programs they think are required. OF course, the government school monopoly probably cannot figure out how to do such things.

That’s about the best excuse for vouchers anyone has come up with… Public schools are so bad that only parents who don’t give a damn would keep their children in them.