So allowing the government to select certain companies to get rich off of government money... There's a word for that ideology, I forget what it is.

If government programs are socialism, what is it called when the government selects certain companies to provide those services?

His new chief is a cartoon character!!!

I understand it is a difficult concept for some people to understand. The government does not select who receives the money. The parents make the selection based off the needs of the family. I liken it to food stamps-the government is providing the money, but the consumer is the one choosing where the money is spent. 

You are right, someone doesn't understand.  You are the independent-ish libertarian-ish one, you should see the big glairing flaw in your reasoning.

If the government creates even one restriction on what school or type of education  they fund, then they are selecting who to give the money to.  If they don't then there will be horrible abuse as schools will entice parents with kickbacks, ideological,religous, or attractive teaching methods that may or may not be effective.

It's a lose-lose scenario.

There's also a key difference between food stamps and this program.  Food stamps goto the poor, this would go to people who are able to use it.

Who would be more likely to send their kids to the school of their choice? A wealthier parent who can pay the difference and provide transportation to the private school or the poor parent who takes the bus to work or leaves too early or too late to provide transportation?  A parent in the suburbs would be more likely to use it than a parent in poor urban (real estate and staffing problems for private schools) or rural areas (distance and staffing problems).

Of course the wealthier parent would take better advantage of it.  This is another Psuedo-libertarian/psuedo-conservative plan for the government to provide welfare to people who don't need it.

A true conservative would want to manage public education, keeping it mostly the same and find ways to improve it with out spending more money.  Their conservative nature would also want a program that is applied equally across race, income, and gender.

Even if the government placed certain restrictions on where the funding could be spent, the parents are still making the choice. Regardless of your misunderstanding of who chooses where the money is spent, I trust the parents to make the correct decisions on which school and methods work best for their children. You can continue to believe the bureaucrats know what is best for children, and I will continue to believe a parent is most capable of making those decisions. 

This would be the most desirable scenario for those people of less privilege. With our current system, they have no choice. They are forced to send their children to public schools. Under the system of choice, they can take their money out of the failing school and send their children to whichever school they desire. 

Please, spare me your discourse on ideology. I could not care less what a conservative would do. I do not advocate this stance because I am beholden to some ideology. My stance on this issue is based off of research. I studied numerous educational systems, and I chose the systems that I thought were the most effective. The system I advocate is similar to the educational systems of Sweden and the Netherlands. 

Sweden and the Netherlands have some consist of mostly homogenous regions with extremely low disparity of income and extremely good public transportation transportation, small difference of cost of living between regions, and smaller geography - which goes directly against the point of my argument that I underlined that you seem to have missed.  So I bolded it.

In a perfect world everyone would be able to send their kid to any school they liked.

We live in a world where many good administrators and teachers won't want to or aren't able to teach in poor neighborhoods or schools accessible to kids, whether public or private.  We live in a country where the schools with the poorest students get the lowest funding, and the kids wouldn't be able to get to another school even if they could afford it. 

The US isn't the Netherlands.

I'm not saying you are ideologically driven, I'm saying you've been sold a bill of goods by people who are.

The liberal side of me wants to say, well we should give the poor schools more money.  But the pragmatic side wins, schools are funded mostly geographically; some balance should be enacted but more needs to be done.  I say we fix the problems of the neighborhoods and the family structure with out too much government programs.

Of course there is a way to get the parents involved. Want the existing earned income credit?  You need to show up to parent teacher conferences (of course then they need to move the hours so parents can come when they can.)  A ticket will be signed by an administrator and filed with the tax return for children of school age.   The school transportation system of the district will be reimbursed by the federal government for transportation to the conference if parents need it.

Then the parents who already pay attention are rewarded in two ways, 1) they get the credit and 2) other kids that study with their kids will start performing better and not holding the kids of good parents back as much.

The cost is minimal: to run school buses along normal routes for a couple extra days per year.

Yes, the Dutch and Swedes are slightly different than the US. I am uncertain how ethnicity is pertinent? Even though the Dutch do have less disparity in regards to income, disparity still exists. What has been found is that the lower income students take advantage of the system by enrolling in a school of their choice. The private schools, whose students’ average incomes are lower than their public counterparts, achieve better scores than those with higher incomes. This system has benefited them greatly. 

I saw the underlined portion, and I simply ignored it. Transportation should not be a problem-especially for lower income parents. We could continue to use the current public bussing system. Instead of dropping the students off at the public school, we could drop the students off at the school of their choice. I know this seems as if it would be logistically difficult, but it is easily achieved in Michigan with low cost. In Michigan, we have what is called “intermediate school districts.” These are countywide or multiple-county school districts. They depart from a central location and complete a task that is tantamount to what I am proposing. 

“We live in a world where many good administrators and teachers won't want to or aren't able to teach in poor neighborhoods or schools accessible to kid” 

This is a challenge whether or not we allow parents the right to choose. There are, however, many examples of private schools, particularly Catholic schools, that have succeeded in the inner-cities. If the parents could choose to fund these schools and enroll their children there in lieu of the failing public schools, the lower income families would be empowered and able to rise out of the morass of the blighted inner city.

As I have demonstrated, I have not been “sold a bill of goods” by anyone. I have put much personal thought into this subject because I highly value education, and I desire to give low income families the same choice that high income families have readily available.