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1. I would desegregate schools by changing school district boundaries so that they do not divide along racial/ethnic/income lines. That is what is done when political district boundaries are done properly without gerrymandering. For example, the west side of a city could be combined with the suburbs on the west to create a racially diverse school district without needing long distance busing. I would also end the practice of funding schools with local property taxes and replace it with state-wide funding so that the funding is based on number of students and those student's needs instead of the local community's property values.
I'm going to need something a little more than your say so on how the lines are made, with evidence that the lines are drawn to segregate races and income levels and not based upon population and distance from school. Between myself and my children, we've been in four separate school system is three different states (MD X2, GA and CT). While indeed that is a small sampling, the radical difference in the area cultures can be noted and in all of those school districts a large range of ethnic, racial and income diversity. This sounds a like like the fear mongering lines that conservatives are frequently accused of.
2. The Indianapolis Star had an article Sunday on what it described as increasing diversity in Indiana’s school-voucher program. The evidence: Of 301 schools accepting vouchers, eight are now non-religious, two are Jewish and three are Muslim. The rest are Christian.....
More on the money behind the Indiana school-voucher law | School Matters
96% of the schools receiving Indiana's vouchers are Christian schools.
Oh really? 96% of the whole state of Indiana? Let's look a little further into that cited article shall we?
To be fair, the article’s focus was local, and last year, there was apparently only one voucher school in Marion County that was not a Christian school. Now there are four: an Islamic school, a Hebrew school that admits only Jewish students, a school for high-functioning children with autism and a school for highly gifted students.
Local focus article. Somehow I doubt that the whole state of Indiana was being looked at. Let's do a little comparison:
The state of Maryland has 1475 public schools, 42 charter schools and 815 private schools. Last I checked Indiana was bigger than Maryland, so I am guessing that 301 schools accepting vouchers is not really very many and may not be all the ones in the state accepting vouchers. Just all the ones looked at by the article. Let's add to that, that the cited article in the blog you linked to was inaccessible unless I paid for it. So I certainly can't check this guy for accuracy or context manipulation. And just who is stevehinnefeld anyway and why should I believe him over even an actual reporter, yet alone actual researchers?
Finally look at that last line again. 4 new school open up after the voucher system starts (assuming that I am reading the blog correctly) and they meet specialized needs within the market. Wasn't that pretty much one of the things us proponents said would happen? I wonder how many other schools have opened in the year and a half since that blog was posted.
Oh yeah here's the other big question. WHY are there so few non-Christian schools accepting vouchers? Is it a pure lack of "supply"? Well the last line in the blog seems to indicate that more non-Christian schools are on the way. No indication of Christian promotion going on by the government here. Was it because most of the non-Christian schools elected not to accept the vouchers? If so, there is no problem here, and certainly no promotion. Is it because of certain criteria that the non-Christian schools didn't meet? Well with that it would all depend upon the criteria. With that there may or may not be. Another question I don't see noted. Are there any Christian schools that are not accepting the vouchers and why?
How would they get to these schools outside of their district?
The same way they would get to the private ones. This really isn't a hard concept. If the parent is willing to take them out of the local school (local meaning the one for where their home is) to go to a different school, then they are already looking at having to transport them. At that point, how much of a difference would it be to arrange that transport to a different pubic school than to a private school?
Vouchers will result in an increase in even more economically, racially and religiously segregated schools than we have today, which is probably among the reasons a John Birch Society leader supports them.
Forced segregation is wrong and immoral, but if segregation happens naturally because of the choice of all the people, then it is proper and...well right in one sense of the word anyway. For example's sake let's say we have town that has 300 students half white and half black. The students/parents have the ability to choose which school the individual students will attend. 100 black students choose school A, 100 white students choose school B, while the remainder choose school C. School D closes because no one chose it. Now liberals will tell us that schools A and B are wrong because they are segregated. But since no one forced them to go to those schools there is nothing wrong. I grant that this is a simplistic example, but it illustrated the point well. Again this sounds like a fear mongering line without a lot to back it up.