[eadmund]

> Especially consider the bitterness of such parents whose taxes pay into the school system but those same taxes aren't utilized for homeschooling families: so it's literally the government taking money to pay for a service for all citizens -- except you, you're not getting what you paid for.

That's also, of course, true of those who send their kids to private school. I think that there's an excellent argument for vouchers which enable parents to allocate the funds that would have gone to a public school to a private school. There are some dangers (because once something is private, it can be advertised and the system can be gamed), but overall I think this is far better than our current 51%-of-parents-decide model.

I don't feel that it'd be a good idea to give homeschooling parents a similar voucher, but only because it's too ripe for abuse: an abusive parent could take the voucher and spend it, and not bother to educate his kids. I don't know how likely it is, but it's worrisome nonetheless.

[souprock]

I could really use a voucher for homeschooling. I've spent a lot on books, calculators, and even paper. (11 kids) I think I spent about $1000 to do chemistry labs.

With the voucher I probably would have added a condenser, nickel crucibles, a kiln, an extra digit on my balance, decent-sized platinum electrodes, and a spectrophotometer. Make it a big voucher and I'll get an electron microscope, an extreme-ultraviolet photoelectron spectroscope, and a DNA sequencer.