The Utah Supreme court recently determined that an amendment to the voucher bill was not enough to stand alone as the law which would dictate that Utah schools distribute tax-supported vouchers to parents to want to send their children to private schools. In other words, the people will determine that in a vote in November.
I find it interesting that pro-voucher groups like Parents for Choice in Education spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to push the voucher bill through this past year’s legislature and to oppose the petition drive for a referendum allowing the people to vote in November on the issue. Why would anyone or any group oppose having the vote and voice of the people making the decisions?
According to an editorial in the Salt Lake City Weekly by Holly Mullen, a good chunk of the money for this group’s efforts came from out of state interests connected to Amway and WalMart.
Hmmm….vouchers don’t have anything to do with the interests of right-wing rich people, do they? Right….
Voucher post on Dee’s Dotes
Fall election will decide fate of Utah vouchers
Voters will decide fate of school vouchers, court says
Vouch for Us (opinion)
Deanna Dee-Dee Taylor 
We have a failing public school system which continues to suck down more and more money while delivering less in terms of well educated graduates.
We continue to fall behind the rest of the world in both the quality of our educational output and the quantity.
Tanya Clay House of the ultra-liberal People for the American Way recently declared, “We’ve never seen a shred of credible evidence that shows school vouchers actually help students learn. While all public schools must demonstrate success under No Child Left Behind, private schools are not held to the same level of accountability for their performance.”
But lets ask the question another way, speaking of those same shreds of evidence, we’ve not seen many that point to those now in charge of that public school system having the ability to turn that around. In fact, there seems to be more evidence than not that they’re incapable of doing so.
So the question becomes how competition could be any worse than monopoly? How could allowing the consumer of the education product to choose that which they find to best fill their own childrens needs be any worse than the arbitrary standards and needs of the monopoly?
From the side of the political spectrum which claims to be for “choice” this should be an issue for which they are fighting for the choice vouchers bring, not against.
Jason Bourne