I'm a product of private schooling in the US and a parent of student. I'm very fortunate that the township we live in has a very well regarded public school system that my tax money pays for, but I choose the additional expense of sending my son to a private school.
The voucher system, in my opinion, is a great idea and wish it was more widespread in the US. Letting parents choose where and how a child is educated is much better than letting the government decide. Unfortunately it looked upon by many in the US as "unfair". Just because the money is channeled through the families doesn't mean the families all have the same options because of location, schedules, etc. The problem is where people draw the line on equality. But I digress.
As for private schools catering to parents beliefs, sure they do, but they are also universally accepted as better institutions for learning than the publicly funded schools in the US. A huge portion of their money coming from donations from alumni. Most private colleges make more from alumni donations (or corporate donations) than from tuition.
lastly, as for schools enforcing rules one rule breakers and people that "know" about infractions. The bottom line is, they don't want to get sued. Litigation is way out of hand and if some students know about an infraction, don't report it, and someone doing the infractions gets injured (physically, emotionally, whatever) and sues, the school will be found at fault because they didn't know. So punishing the non whislte blowers hopefully (from the schools perspective) encourages students policing eachother.
Sorry if I got up on a soapbox, just wading into the discussion fray.
TIL conflicting goals are very frustrating, but vodka in recyclable metal bottles is not !
Sorry, I thought we were talking about University level. If we're going to go into secondary schools, then that's an entirely different can of worms. I must say that thankfully, that atrocity known as the voucher system isn't wide-spread where I live. I'm a product of the California Public Education system, and proud of it. I've had a problem with private schools for years, and time has only increased my dislike of them. The voucher system, allows parents to take students from public schools that are perceived to be bad (note that how much a funding a school gets is based on their attendance. Take students away from a bad school, the funding dries up, and as a result the quality of education drops further), and put them in a school that is paid for by mommy and daddy. Well, and now by the government. The HS I graduated from is small, and always has been. The largest graduating class from that HS was 83 students. I had a graduating class of 15. That school has been on the verge of closing for years. It's only thanks to very inventive money expenditure that it's not. Now imagine if a bunch of parents were to use vouchers to take their kids to other schools (there's 1 public school in the town I live in, and 3 or 4 in the next town over, about 30min away). In large schools, the impact might not be that significant. In small schools, it is. And in school districts where funding is already a problem (which is most of them), even a large school district would feel the impact fairly quickly.
As for someone getting expelled from college for not turning in their roomates, I don't know what college that is. I have a hunch that the person getting expelled has other infractions on their record that we don't know about. Certainly I've never heard of a first offender getting expelled for not turning in their friends at any college in CA. I had friends that got caught at a dorm party in which there was underage drinking. One of my friends was drinking, but a couple weren't. The ones that were drinking got put on probation (basicly, if they were caught drinking again, they'd be expelled), while the ones that weren't drinking didn't get so much as a slap on the wrist. This was at Cal Poly Pomona (which is part of the CSU system). Heck, one of my roomates while I was there got caught smoking pot in the parking lot, and the school didn't take any action against him. He got the usual punishments for possession, but that's it.
Last bit (promise): Dodom, the 'bad rep' that US colleges have is actually rather funny to me. I just looked it up, and on 2 different "top 100 univiersities in the world" lists, nearly 1/2 the colleges listed are in the US. Granted, just under 1/2 of those are private, but even so, I don't see how you can claim that US colleges are any worse then colleges in other countries.
