Citation? The private schools in my area charge tuition well in excess of the county/city expenditure per student.

[Fairfax County Public Schools, $16,000/pupil/year: http://www.insidenova.com/news/education/fairfax/fcps-per-st...

Madeira School (girls prep school), $45,000/pupil/year: http://www.madeira.org/admission/tuition-financial-aid/cost-...

Nysmith Academy (elemetary school), $30,000+: http://www.nysmith.com/tuition-fees/

St. Stephen's & St. Agnes (parochial), $30,000+: https://www.sssas.org/page/admission/tuition-and-financial-a...

Paul VI (parochial), $18,000: https://www.paulvi.net/page.aspx?pid=257

Also of note - PVI charges more for special ed students.

Fairfax County, VA. It's one of the wealthiest counties in the US, so there's plenty of discretionary income for private school. But, I wouldn't have guessed other areas had tuition less than average spending per pupil at the local public schools.

I suppose there is always going to be a 'elite minimum' so that the precious child won't have to deal with the riff-raff. Very much like unpaid internships often become.

When I started editing my post you hadn't yet replied. So I'll just have to be sorry and leave it at that.

> That is a result of schools being funded by property taxes and levies. Our current system allows this to happen and switching to a system where the school is paid per student reduces the problem.

Not exclusively. People want to live close to good schools so people who can afford to live close to one do. Performance is related very closely to the socioeconomics of the area. In Chicago and New York, schools in poor neighborhoods under perform, despite receiving the same funding. Anecdotally I see the same here. Of course, this is the argument for vouchers; get kids out of schools that under perform, but the cost of doing so can be onerous, not just in money, but in time. Getting a kid from a poor neighborhood to a better school is costly and difficult. I actually think open enrollment is a better answer for this, because the public can pick up the transportation costs (as much as the current implementation of that chagrins me). And of course you have the problem of admission and extra programs that are funded by backers, not the public, which could complicate the process a great deal. (for the record, taking sports out of schools is something I support regardless).

> Public schools spend a lot of money outside the classroom on admin which most private schools don't find necessary.

I don't know that there's much more than anecdotal evidence for this. In my experience (which I fully knowledge is anecdotal) most administrative expenses in the public sector surround the need to be accountable to the public. This creates cumbersome red tape like complicated purchasing policies, regulation, auditors and so on. My observations of the school system here leads to much the same conclusion. Part of the admin overhead is their requirement to meet certain standards and provide certain required services. If private schools were to start taking public money, I believe administrative overhead would follow closely.

The thing is, I'm not categorically opposed to vouchers. I think that there is a place for parents to argue that their kids are not being served by the public school system. But I cannot see how a blanket voucher program can avoid the same pitfalls public schools currently have. As someone said upthread, a critical part of the free market is the ability to fail, and the last thing we can have happen to a school is to have it fail. To avoid that we would regulate private schools to the point they are a public utility, technically private, but really indistinguishable from what we once had.