rents of school reform thought, and most particularly of one which has not been drawn into the recent flood of mandated changes. I refer specifically to public policy proposals which would allocate resources to private schools or to their participating families; and this largely has come to mean enacting some sort of education tuition voucher or tax incentive for private school attendance. This discussion explores the recent politics of these proposals: How do school parents and voters generally perceive them? What sorts of support have been given to voucher and tax credit ideas? In what arenas? How has support been organized? How close have voucher and tuition tax credit laws come to success? The analysis attempts to track public sentiment for such ideas through the various channels engaged to transform such desires into public policy. This is done by cataloging the various ways in which citizens have had opportunities to express themselves on these issues in recent years and by trying to capture the nature of the messages that have ultimately emerged. We concentrate on education vouchers and tax credits when speaking of proposed aid to private schools simply because most plans for assistance incorporate one or the other. This appears to result from a widely presumed constitutional imperative to direct such aid to families, rather than to institutions that are in majority tied to religion.' Numerous and varying other forms of public aid exist across the states, such as assistance with textbooks and transportation, participation in special education programs, and exemptions from taxation (Encarnation, 1983). But the agenda for dramatically altering our system of relations between government and private schools at present boils down to vouchers and tax credits.
Read full abstract
Jan 1, 1985
Henry M Levin + 1
Open Access