School Voucher Initiative
* Prop. 174 is a fiscal Trojan horse that would destroy private school systems, add to an already bloated state bureaucracy to administer it and increase everyone’s taxes to pay for the new bureaucracy.
To see conservatives support 174 is to witness the abandonment of conservative principles and witness a turn to support swelling the girth of government and seducing private enterprise to feed at the tax trough.
Prop. 174 is a Trojan horse because the Supreme Court has steadily maintained that schools receiving public funds must adhere to public requirements. If 174 passes, in the four to five years it takes for challenges to wend their way through the courts, private schools will have become irreversibly hooked on public monies just about the time that the Supreme Court lowers the compliance boom on them for everything from building access, to curriculum, to credentialing.
It’ll be all over and we’ll be left without truly private school systems.
JOHN ROSSMAN
Tustin
* In response to “Real Lessons Behind Debate on Prop. 174,” by George Skelton, Sept. 27:
Skelton overlooked the real issue behind Prop. 174--motive. Our kids leave home for school with the values we teach them but come home with relative moralism as taught by the social engineers with their humanist manifesto agenda. And they still can’t read or write.
From one of those on the “religious right.”
DON KELLOGG
Hermosa Beach
* It may dispel some of the Prop. 174 hysteria to realize that we have had a school voucher system in place in America for generations--at the college level. Each year government gives billions (grants, scholarships, preferential loans, veterans credits) to millions of students who have absolute free will to pursue the school of their choice. And choose they do, everything from Harvard to neon fabrication trade schools to, yes, even Bible Belt seminaries run by religious fanatics and funded in part by your and my tax dollars. And guess what? The schools are allowed to set their own admission standards!
Have the public schools withered and died from this major private sector threat? Given my alma mater, UCLA, I would argue not. Quite the contrary, they have thrived in academic excellence.
DAVE QUICK
Santa Monica
* There are reasons besides those you list (editorial, Sept. 28) for opposing Prop. 174. Those advocating school vouchers ignore the fact that all taxpayers contribute to education, not just parents. Giving a $2,600 voucher exclusively to parents disfranchises childless people, parents of very young children and empty-nesters.
What’s next, issuing highway fund vouchers to freeway drivers, or distributing beach funds only to surfers and sunbathers?
If school vouchers are the way to go, then each taxpayer should get one (for considerably less than $2,600) to support the educational structure of his choice.
KEN BROCK
Moreno Valley
