School vouchers

A school voucher, also called an education voucher, is a certificate issued by the government, which parents can apply toward tuition at a private school (or, by extension, to reimburse home schooling expenses), rather than at the state school to which their child is assigned.

Under non-voucher education systems, people who currently pay for private schooling are still taxed for public schools; therefore, they fund both public and private schools simultaneously. Via offsetting the cost of private school tuition, vouchers are intended to allow students and families to choose the school that best fits their needs.

What are the canonical justifications for public expenditure and provision of education?

1.Public goods arguments: The major reason offered for taxing everyone then providing schooling for free (say the statists) is that education is a public good in the traditional sense. Since my education produces benefits for other people (e.g. I am a better voter, I commit less crime, etc.) and I cannot capture all of those benefits, then I choose to acquire a suboptimally low level of schooling.

2.Distributional arguments:We need to have publicly funded schools because some people are simlpy too poor to send their children to schools that cost money.

3.Behavioral arguments: Independent of income or free-rider problems, some people are just not sharp enough or unselfish enough to educate their children themselves, or to spend resources on the formal schooling of their children. Thus, without compulsory schooling laws and without free government schools, some children would be confined to lives of idiocy because of the irrationality and selfishness of their parents.

Why they are fallacies:

1.The free-rider argument does not apply here. The argument suggests that I won’t send my kids to school because if everyone else sends their kid to school then I get to consume the benefits of their education without having to send my kid to school at all. But the truth is that no one would refuse to send his child to school. The matriculation is competitive, so public good argument doesn't apply at least in schooling issue.


Private schools have an incentive to teach students and families things that are useful – particularly if they need to compete for students and dollars.


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