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Private school tuition programs take one of two forms: direct government payments to parents to subsidize tuition costs or programs that give individuals and businesses tax credits for education expenses or for donations to organizations that provide tuition assistance for students entering private schools. 

"Today institutions of higher education, public and private, remain largely segregated by race, religion and economic condition. White colleges and universities remain primarily white, Black institutions remain primarily black, and denominational institutions remain even more religiously identifiable. Such segregation is sanctified with tons of federal and state money in the forms of tuition vouchers, tax credits and government subsidized loans. The Obama administration has been largely foreclosed from remedying the situation for fear of offending powerful political forces representing the investors and private institutions. The higher education voucher/loan dilemma portends a probable scenario for the future of tuition vouchers and charter schools at the primary and secondary levels. Stiglitz quotes Alexis de Tocqueville who said that the main element of the "peculiar genius of American society" is "self-interest properly understood." The last two words, "properly understood," are the key, says Stiglitz. According to Stiglitz, everyone possesses self-interest in the "narrow sense." This "narrow sense" with regard to educational choice is usually exercised for reasons other than educational quality, the chief reasons being race, religion, economic and social status, and similarity with persons with comparable information, biases and prejudices. But Stiglitz interprets Tocqueville's "properly understood" to mean a much broader and more desirable and moral objective, that of "appreciating" and paying attention to everyone else's self-interest. In other words, the common welfare is, in fact, "a precondition for one's own ultimate well being."17 Such commonality in the advancement of the public good is lost by the narrow self-interest. School tuition vouchers and charter schools are the operational models for implementation of the "narrow self-interest." It is easy to recognize, but difficult to justify. "

The largest Arizona teachers' union and the state's school boards association filed suit this week over a new scholarship program that pays private school tuition for children with disabilities.

Striking university students in Québec are well into their 15th week of continuous protests. Their strike, which began primarily in opposition to student debt and the proposed 75% tuition hike, has since expanded to encompass wider critiques of both the university system itself and larger issues of austerity and neoliberal economic reform. Québec's hardline conservative premier, Jean Charest, several days ago pushed through a series of draconian anti-free-speech laws aimed at breaking the strike. Penalties run in the tens of thousands of dollars and up to 10 years in jail for those participating in or even promoting unpermitted protest actions; and even for protest marches that have been approved by the police, the sponsoring organization will be held liable for any and all illegal actions taken at or near the march. In a surprise to absolutely no one but Charest, these laws have not only rekindled student participation in the strike, but sparked an even greater outrage among the general population.

This CEP report provides updated information for policymakers and others about the status of publicly funded voucher programs and the findings of major voucher studies published since 2000. Other types of programs also subsidize private school tuition- including tuition tax credits, specialized vouchers for students with disabilities, "town tuition" programs for remote rural students, and privately funded vouchers-but in order to produce a succinct report focusing on the most controversial form of subsidy, we limited our review to publicly funded voucher programs for general education students.

Pennsylvania School Boards Association site on tuition vouchers.

The push for school choice cleared its first major legislative hurdle - but not its last - when the state Senate voted Wednesday to provide taxpayer-funded tuition vouchers for impoverished students in failing public schools.

"Some people, not surprisingly, weren't thrilled with my post titled "Welfare for the rich? Private school tax credit programs expanding." Here Kevin Welner, director of the National Education Policy Center, housed at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education, looks at the criticism and gives us a primer on private school tax credit programs, which he calls "neovouchers." He's the author of the 2008 book "NeoVouchers: The Emergence of Tuition Tax Credits for Private Schooling.""

At a time when government budgets at all levels are under enormous strain, families and businesses are struggling and federal agencies are facing dramatic across-the-board spending cuts, you would think lawmakers would be careful about spending public money. So it may surprise you to learn that in a growing number of states, legislators are setting aside public money to pay for private school tuition - and rich people are benefiting.

"School reformers this year had something of a banner year, moving ahead with key initiatives such as using standardized test scores to evaluate teachers, expanding charter schools and establishing voucher programs that permitted the use of public funds to be used to pay religious school tuition. But is any of this grounded in research? Here's a look at the year in ed research from Matthew Di Carlo, senior fellow at the non-profit Albert Shanker Institute, located in Washington, D.C. This post originally appeared on the institute's blog."

Over the objections of teachers' unions and many Democrats, Louisiana's Republican governor and GOP-controlled legislature have crafted one of the most exhaustive education overhauls of any state in the country, through measures that will dramatically expand families' access to public money to cover the costs of both private school tuition and individual courses offered by a menu of providers. A pair of bills championed by Gov. Bobby Jindal, which he is expected to sign into law, will expand a state-run private-school-voucher program beyond New Orleans to other academically struggling schools around the state, give superintendents and principals direct control over personnel decisions, and set much higher standards for awarding teachers tenure.

In his New York Times op-ed "Testing the Teachers" (April 19), David Brooks warns that "an atmosphere of grand fragility" hangs over America's colleges. The grandeur, he says, comes from the colleges' increased application rates, new facilities, and international reputation; the fragility, from increased tuition combined with uncertain results. What must we do? Hold colleges accountable for results-through value-added testing. That'll show who's teaching and who isn't!   Brooks is wrong. Accountability systems would drag down our colleges. The best would be made mediocre, and the worst would rise to mediocrity at most.

In 1988, Deborah Bial was working in a New York City after-school program when she ran into a former student, Lamont. He was a smart kid, a successful student who had won a scholarship to an elite college. But it hadn't worked out, and now he was back home in the Bronx. "I never would have dropped out of college if I had my posse with me," he told her. The next year Bial started the Posse Foundation. From her work with students around the city, she chose five New York City high school students who were clearly leaders - dynamic, intelligent, creative, resilient - but who might not have had the SAT scores to get into good schools. Vanderbilt University was willing to admit them all, tuition-free.  The students met regularly in their senior year of high school, through the summer, and at college. Surrounded by their posse, they all thrived. Today the Posse Foundation selects about 600 students a year, from eight different cities. They are grouped into posses of 10 students from the same city and go together to an elite college; about 40 colleges now participate in the program.

As the poor get poorer, and college tuitions keep rising, the media declare that no one without a B.A. qualifies for a living wage. Something's rotten in this proposition. It isn't that way in Finland, for example. Finland didn't do it overnight, but they built their education system around critical democratic habits: competence and trust. They didn't trade off one for the other. Looking for a trust-proof solution is the fragile error. David Remnick says it well in the March 12th New Yorker: Democracy, he writes: "At best, it's an ambition, a state of becoming," and "the fragility of democratic aspiration is a brutal fact of history." Every time we try an end-run around it we at best distract ourselves from useful next steps, and more often undermine our own aspirations.

The type of clothing worn in a family's home, the language spoken and other cultural markers could influence whether special-education students receive taxpayer-funded private-school tuition, under a bill passed last month by the New York state Legislature. Education officials would have to consider a student's "home environment and family background" when deciding the best setting for special-education children under the bill. Currently, decisions about private-school placement have generally been based on academics and the child's disability.

An electronic billboard on Business Route 6 in Dickson City flashes an image of smiling students and teachers. The advertisement for the Mid Valley School District promotes student achievement and district accomplishments. At $900 a month, officials hope it saves thousands in lost tuition. As online charter school enrollment continues to grow, public school districts across the region and state are facing competition like they never have before. When students leave public school districts, their state funding follows them to cyber schools. Districts are now advertising, holding recruitment nights and thinking about public relations.

In 2008, the Louisiana Legislature passed the Student Scholarships for Educational Excellence Program to provide tuition vouchers to low-income students in Orleans Parish to attend private and parochial schools or public schools outside of Orleans Parish.  The purpose was to give parents better, higher quality school options other than attending a failing school. Educate Now! analyzed the test scores for students in voucher schools and compared them to students in Recovery School District schools.

"Within one to two years, every independent school will cost more than $40,000," said one board member at a top school who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the school had not yet set tuition.

At the risk of bloggy immolation, I'm going to jump into the boiling water of ongoing debates over President Obama's few words on higher education in the 2012 State of the Union Address, wherein he said nothing of Pell Grant awards and yet talked about constructing new policies to make it easier to afford college, especially ones attempting to give institutions incentives to slow down tuition hikes. While I define neoliberalism here in fairly bold strokes, focusing on market rhetoric, public disinvestment, and inconsistencies between rhetoric and reality, this is a tentative judgment for someone who is not an intellectual historian. I am well aware that many terms of political economy are fuzzy or malleable, and my understanding of neoliberalism as a post-WW2 construct is tentative. Yet the term has some core uses in understanding how people talk about and use talk about markets.