News

The Politics of NJ’s “Voucher Bill”

March 22, 2013

Laura Waters

My post this week at WHYY’s Newsworks looks at the politics of NJ’s embattled school voucher bill, which has evolved from a sprawling overreach to a (potential) timid pilot. And, of course, how the strong feelings aroused by this bill erupted into a particularly nasty exchange between Gov. Christie and Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver:

New Jersey’s education politics have, once again, gone viral: from The Huffington Post to U.S. News and World Report, Americans are reading about the kerfuffle between Gov. Chris Christie and N.J. Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver over an oft-proposed voucher bill called The Opportunity Scholarship Act (OSA). In short, at a town hall meeting in Paterson last Tuesday, our mellifluous governor lumbered into dangerous territory when he criticized the Speaker for refusing to allow the Assembly to vote on the controversial bill.

OSA would award tax credits to corporations that provide scholarships to private and parochial schools for some poor kids in failing districts. These scholarships are often referred to as “vouchers” because they allow families to exchange them for tuition at a school other than the state-assigned public school.

Read the rest here.

Laura Waters

2 Comments

Stephen Graff, March 27, 2013 @ 11:28 pm Reply

I agree with the concept of school choice, and I'm a public school teacher. But there are ways to enable greater flexibility in education–including setting up county run public education with an array of magnet schools that parents can choose from. But parents should not be given across the board choices to vacate the local public schools because this be the equivalent of closing down these schools, or turning them into even lower-performing institutions with less and less funding to provide the kind of education where children can be successful. Funding, actually, has to be more fairly distributed. And schools have to be held accountable. At the same time, children have to be given more choice in the kind of education they receive–beyond the limited scope we have at present where we are teaching and adhering curriculum to standardized tests. In so doing, we are forgetting about the educational needs, learning needs, and gifts and talents of students.
Stephen Graff, March 27, 2013 @ 11:30 pm Reply

meant to write “this would be the equivalent.”