Vouchers are a red herring; simply a political wedge issue. We are already funding charter schools and it is clear that they work. Anyone looking dispassionately at the data would be able to conclude that charter schools do just as well and just as poorly as regular public schools. Like public schools there are excellent ones which are among the best in the world and miserable ones which which fail as badly as the worst inner city school.
What we need to do as a country is downplay the political wedge issues and look carefully at what works. If we can start rationally looking beyond the distractors of economic status, religion and political ideology and focus on replicating those great examples of what great charter schools - and great public schools - do effectively, we can start solving the problems rather than digging ourselves a bigger hole....
