You're not making very coherent arguments. What's wrong with a voucher system whereby the PARENTS of the children being educated are the ones who determine which child the school goes to? Doesn't that make it very easy for the parents to shut bad schools down very quickly? It seems like that solves all the problems you're worried about, while also providing more choices to parents and students. What's the downside?

Voucher and Charter School are two different things. Charter Schools are taking over Public School System. Vochers are evil for many social reasons. I'll just focus on one.

So Vouchers really will be the new segregation tool for the 21st Century. Your money will be used to send kids to religious schools you don't like teaching Islam, Christianity in all its forms, or who knows what and if they want to teach the children ignorance and hate and you as a tax payer just flipped the bill for this and can't stop it. I can't see a good voucher system that would answer my fears of miss used funds spent on poor education back by people groups that will not teach based on various world views that are not politically correct and just wrong. Our Brain Drain in America will go into Nuclear Meltdown.

To quote the 2002 Supreme Court Voucher Dissent: Justice Breyer on Descent “... all religious institutions cannot be given equal opportunities to the government funding and trying to do so not only turns back the clock on the Constitution, but creates a powder keg in our society.” http://www.pewforum.org/2002/06/28/judgment-day-for-school-v...

Back ground: I went to private school and graduated with a Theology Degree and worked as a Pastor for years. I absolutely know that many in the voucher movement see the Government footing the bill for their Christian Education. You have no idea how deep Crazy Christianity can get (Westborogh is just the tip of the ice berge). They will spew their version of crazy that they got with no academic or logically training to children with your tax dollars paying for it.

I've never been able to make sense of these arguments. Can't parents already teach their kids that without sending them to a special school?

And what about the people who don't have some religious agenda, but simply want to get away from crazy school administrations like, well, this one? "We're worried that you might be religious, so we're adamantly against leaving you any option whatsoever to avoid a known bad local school" doesn't exactly make a compelling argument if it's your kid suffering.

FWIW, I did go to a normal, public school. Mine wasn't so bad, but some of the usual idiocy was still present, like getting punished for "fighting" when I was attacked, unprovoked and had not even touched the other party.

So the money for education can only be spent on the kind of education YOU like, and not the kind of education that the parents like? You do realize that's incredibly arrogant, right? You and other enlightened people know what's best, but everyone else who disagrees with you about what's best is unenlightened swine? That's tautological.

Your missing the point. They can spend their money where you would be mad. So if they go to a school where history is through the lens of white supremacy and teach that science is evil because it contradicts their narrow version of the Bible and that God created black people because of the curse on Noah's son for having homosexual sin with Noah your fine? By the way a LOT of people believe this especially in the south. (Also BTW Noah's son Cush who did this "looking on his father naked" the scriptures say they went to Persia and NOT to Africa but that is another matter of facts getting way to their fictionalized bibles)

Also show one example where vouchers BETTERED students education? It didn't in Switzerland it actually made their scores worse since 1992.

I am saying that if you apply that argument inductively, then nobody should be able to do anything because there will always be someone to object to it. Public money can't be used by anyone for anything because someone will have a problem with it. You do see how that could be, don't you?

I am in group X and I object to things that you value in group Y. You in group Y object to things that I, in group X, value. What do we do?

Once you have a particular group that claims to have the moral high ground for some nebulous definition of "the high ground" the whole argument is lost because so few people agree on so few things.

I get that creationists are annoying, but I'll give them credit for not demanding that science not be taught, just that they wanted their pet theory taught too. That looks a lot more reasonable (from a certain perspective) than the evolutionists who insist that evolution is the only possible explanation ever, with quite religious zeal, despite having only circumstantial evidence. Evolutionary science is nowhere near as rigorous as physics and won't be for thousands and thousands of years of highly accurate recordkeeping. At that point the creationists will have suffered a thorough defeat, but until then, well, truthfully the science isn't settled. At least to the degree of rigor that I would personally care for.

> I'll give them credit for not demanding that science not be taught, just that they wanted their pet theory taught too

This was largely demonstrated to be a ruse by so-called "Intelligent Design" proponents in the Kitzmiller v Dover trial[0].

I would respectfully suggest that you haven't really looked into the evidence that carefully if you question the degree of rigor that underpins evolutionary science.

Large parts of evolutionary theory are indeed based on circumstantial evidence. But the quantity of such evidence is so overwhelming[1] that questioning its explanatory power is rather foolish. It's the sort of evidence where coming up with any alternative hypothesis besides evolution quickly becomes an exercise in futility. Unless, that is, you don't care if the hypothesis is testable or not, in which case creationists have many.

Moreover, evolution does not only have circumstantial evidence. You and I are living through the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria - an evolutionary change that is being observed and documented as it occurs. Fruit flies from the same species have been split into physically isolated groups, allowed to breed over many generations, and subsequently reintroduced, only to discover that they had become reproductively isolated.

There's more evidence discussed here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_of_common_descent

Or here:

http://amazon.com/dp/1416594795/

Or here:

http://www.talkorigins.org/

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitzmiller_v._Dover_Area_Schoo...

[1] For example, here's Wikipedia's list of transitional fossils (so-called "missing links" between divergent extant species) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_transitional_fossils

Look I'm not suggesting that evolution is completely unfounded or anything like that. And I agree that we're witnessing it unfold with antibiotic resistance and the like.

But what I am saying is that physics has a lot more rigor for the claims by virtue of how it works, and what people are looking for there. Evolution is punctuated equilibrium and human beings haven't directly witnessed this to the same degree that people have in physics.

I think the direct witnessing aspect is important, even if others may disagree. The reason I think it's important is that there are other possible though highly improbable explanations for various physical phenomena we see on earth.

If there really was a "guy in the sky" he could have absolutely made a bunch of stuff and "planted the evidence" all over the place to fool people. But if also for some reason, he always handled the laws of physics just the way things are now, we wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

To me it's kind of like the people who suggest that we should try and see if reality is just a simulation being run in a computer. The odds -- at least in my mind -- are absolutely astronomical against. But just because it's a "crazy idea" and there's "no way" it could be true doesn't mean I get to dismiss it offhand and maintain my intellectual integrity.

> Evolution is punctuated equilibrium and human beings haven't directly witnessed this to the same degree that people have in physics.

I don't think this is really true. For most important effects in large domains of physics, directly witnessing the underlying processes is as impossible as directly witnessing the history of evolution (to the extent that "directly witnessing" is even meaningful -- on a detailed level, all witnessing other than of ones own internal subjective mental states is through several layers of indirection.) We witness them indirectly, through various media whose mechanism are explained by other well-tested scientific theories.4

> If there really was a "guy in the sky" he could have absolutely made a bunch of stuff and "planted the evidence" all over the place to fool people. But if also for some reason, he always handled the laws of physics just the way things are now, we wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

IF there's really a "guy in the sky" exercising arbitrary power over the physical universe, even if he had not always handled the laws of physics in the same way, we couldn't necessarily tell the difference, since he would also have the power to make it so that our perception of evidence we examine at any given time (including our present recollection of what we might have done in the past) is always consistent with physical law always having been the same, even if it wasn't, and even if our actual observations in the past would have differed.

How is the idea that our whole universe is merely a simulation inside someone else's computer practically much different than the idea of there being a "god"? From a certain perspective, they're one and the same. They can both change the universe arbitrarily either by changing the rules of the simulation or the state of the simulation.

I agree that both are incredibly unlikely, but you can't say for certain that it is not so.

Just for the record Charter Schools have a purpose BUT not to replace Public schools.

1) I think in experimentation charter schools do serve a good purpose, but right now it is the battle of not having another New Orleans (New Orleans has ZERO public schools and its school board has dissolved).

Are Texas public schools not proof that public schools are not immune from this "teach the children ignorance and hate" thing you speak of? You have to think past stage-one if you want to meddle with peoples' lives on such a grand scale.

I graduated from a Texas high school in 2008. Never heard a peep about intelligent design and the school was 1000% better than the school I moved away from in California. The two weren't comparable—the CA school was a prison, the Texas school was a palace of education.

In many cases, that's not true. Until recently, charter schools in my district received 17% of the per-pupil funding compared to district-run schools. That's changed recently, but who knows how long that will last.