Federal dollars for private school...Why not?

This article talks about Bush's proposal to offer $300 million in federal funds (Pell Grants for Kids) for low-income families to send their children to private or religious schools. In other words, it's a voucher proposal.

One argument against voucher proposals is that they drain funding from urban schools in need of money, and that if NCLB had worked we wouldn't need private schools to compete with public schools. But the problem is that public schools ARE a mess, so instead of forcing low-income students to remain in these schools because they "need money" we need some sort of solution that addresses the problem. Forcing low-income students to remain in these schools to fund them is basically forcing them to suffer for the future students who "might" get a better education if we ever get our act together. If money was enough to improve these schools, the problem of public education would have been solved a long time ago!

Another argument that seems to come up with proposals like this is that it permits federal dollars to be spent on religious education. But what's wrong with that? In America, we seem to be so concerned with a separation between church and state, but perhaps the problem is not spending federal money on religion, it's spending federal money on only one religion to the exclusion of others. Perhaps there is nothing wrong with permitting parents to use federal vouchers to send their kids to religious schools as long as we permit them to send them to any religious schools. After all, our nation is founded on that kind of religious freedom. Instead of trying to pretend we have no values, we should celebrate the diversity of values, religious and otherwise, we have.

Check out Bush's proposal: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/29/washington/29educ.html?ref=education