Should taxpayer dollars be used to fund private education?

[Beestie]

Originally Posted by Clodfobble

But the taxpayer is already footing the bill one way or the other; the money sending the ambitious inner-city kid to private school is in theory being directly taken away from the crappy public school.

That's the problem. Its not being taken away from the bad public school. Its being paid twice.

If the bad school costs 100,000 per year to operate and there are 100 kids in it than the cost per kid is 1,000. Removing one child from the school does not reduce the cost of operating that school by 1,000. Teacher salaries don't drop, fixing the roof isn't any cheaper, running the school bus isn't any cheaper, the light bill doesn't drop, etc. Yeah, you might save fifty bucks in books but you haven't saved any money by pulling Jimmy Neutron out of Wee Suck Elementary to use to pay Einstein Academy.

What Fairfax County did, and its public school system is already very good, is create a magnet school within the system to send the best and brightest to.