Abstract The school voucher system has a colorful history that stretches back for almost a century and a half. From a system designed to help rural children that had no access to public schools to be able to achieve an education, to now being able to provide parents with the choice of where to put their tax dollars to use for their child’s education, the school voucher system helps those in need as well as those whose parents desires must be met. The proponents of this system seek to privatize education for the long run and establish that it is the parent’s right to decide where their children are educated rather than having possible assignment to a poverty-stricken school district. The defendants of the system will argue that by utilizing …show more content…
Since Vermont’s school voucher inception there has been twelve voucher programs added nationwide, seven of which were after 2003 when the outcome of Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, in which the Supreme Court upheld that school voucher were in keeping with the United States Constitution. The voucher system has always favored the disadvantaged in some way or another and it was the original concept of the voucher system that remains today. Trends will show that a child born into the middle class has an equal chance to either rise into the upper class or fall into the lower class bracket, whereas a child born into the lower or upper class has greater chance of staying in the bracket (Sawhill, 2013). Originally, the rural populations in Vermont and Maine that did not have schools in place in their communities for them to attend, and then, the voucher system began to shift favor to families at or below 185% of the poverty level in cities such as Milwaukee, Cleveland, and the District of Columbia. Now, five of the twelve programs strictly gear themselves towards students with inhibiting disabilities that public schools are unable to cope with, but private schools are able to attend to those with certain disabilities. In Arizona, there is a program strictly in place for children in the foster system so that they do not have to change schools in the event that they have to change to a different foster family. The state of Ohio offers a voucher program that includes only students that are within a school district of either “academic watch” or “academic emergency” (Wolf, 2008). Whatever the case may be, the main reason that school vouchers are in place is to aid the