[ACPlayer]

High parental involvement in other countries is a combination of:

1. One working parent households. I dont have facts to back this up (so i could be wrong), but I do believe that in the US middle classes there are more two parent households than in asia, where women are still supposed to be homemakers.
2. A desire to move on up. A desire that is lost around here. Welfare, parental wealth (available for inheritance perhaps), parental drive for own careers, generally an easier life. Hardship makes for great desires and provides that fire in the belly thing.

If you don't want to read any of my posts about my experiences then at least glance at this article in todays NYT:

Again with the pouty thing!!? THanks for the link. Did they teach you in school not to draw conclusions from experiental data?

If you want to think about vouchers, consider not what the voucher (which is a transfer of tax dollars collected for a public school system to a private entity) does for the person who can "escape" but how it effects the children left behind in the schools that the money is supposedly intended for. It would make more sense to simply argue that the public schools should be closed down and the tax money not collected at all. Vouchers are a way to close the public schools down one step at a time, while building parochial madrasas (ok, perhaps I went a bit overboard with that the madrasas bit -- sue me [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]).

If you believe in publicly funded schools which are built on the basis that all children must have access to "free" schools then you cannot support vouchers and must work to fix the school system. if you dont think that all children must have access to "free" schools then just abolish the school system and be done with it. Dont take my property taxes that are collected to meet the first objective and then transfer that money to private and (especially) parochial schools.