oundation report shows that 47 percent of those students lived less than two miles away from the school they were attending, while only ten percent lived more than ten miles away (Doerr 84). The majority of students who attend private schools live further than ten miles away from the school. The difference in cost for voucher students would obviously prove to be grand. For example, in St. Paul, Minnesota, the average annual cost of transporting a student is 120 dollars, while non-neighborhood, choice students raise the bill to 320 dollars annually (Doerr 86). The means for getting these students to school if they rely on the system may include anything from school or city buses, to taxi cabs. In fact, in Kansas City, Missouri, the city was known to have used up to 400 taxicabs a day to transport voucher students to and from school (Doerr 85). Private schools who would participate in the voucher policy would virtually eliminate the private school characteristics parents choose the school for (Lieberman 1993, 7). Private schools would be excluded from teaching religion (Lieberman 1993, 7) and with Catholic schools being the most rapidly growing private school (Lieberman 1989, 157), the voucher would prove helpless because the schools that would have their rights taken away as a private school would not want to participate. Edd Doerr says that private schools’ reason for being is to, “protect their youth from the diversity of contemporary American society,” in context with some of the text that is used to teach in private schools (67). However, that is the right of a private school with private funds coming in to support the school. The fact the parents can send their child to a school with students and faculty with similar values and beliefs (Lieberman 1989, 157) may be unrealistic but it is not the government’s place to decide what is right and wrong in a private institution of education. The need t...
