Of course most parents would fight any fight to put their kids in a good school . People regularly go into borderline unsustainable debt to purchase a house in a neighborhood with good schools in America . There are a couple of practical problems , however , with solving this problem with vouches . Firstly , what is the root cause of the schools being bad in blighted urban areas ? Well , it makes sense to compare urban areas with good schools e . g . Boston and NYC with very , very bad schools Detroit , Philadelphia . There is a pretty common trend which is that the cities with good schools are located in states where the state itself is paying a large percentage of the student ' s cost of education . Those bad schools are in states with some of the lowest state contributions . So while the state is providing the same amount of money to each school , the local districts have to make up the rest of the money with local taxes . Of course inner city property values tend towards either very low poor residential or heinously high commercial downtown , living in those areas but for the most part it leaves the city school districts really , really short on cash . Short on cash means inadequate staff , dilapidated buildings and the necessity of relying on state actors i . e . inschool police forces to make up for nonnecessary staff e . g . guidance counselors , foreign language teachers , coaches for many sport which makes the environment quite confrontational . When you implement a voucher system , most of the parents from these schools are going to want to leave . This has its own challenges . Firstly , to get into the schools they want , they typically will have to win a lottery spot as most spots will be taken by the more affluent local children whose parents bought their way into the district . Secondly , they live really far away from these schools , and public transportation is pretty bad . That nice local school district out in West Chester will not be running its busses into downtown Philly . Additionally , that voucher takes money away from an already failing school system and leaves them with less money to deal with the kids whose parents couldn ' t make a voucher work or even worse just don ' t care . They have to do what all shrinking school districts , rich or poor , do , which is consolidate campuses and cut staff . So these schools get even worse . That ' s not even getting into a potential moral argument about whether some children deserve a betterworse education than others . Typically I think we ' d agreed that in the abstract all children deserve the same quality of schooling and chance to succeed in life but that ' s a separate argument . Also a separate argument is what happens if the vouchers go to charter or religious schools . Not everyone is ok with that either . Ultimately , if you really want to help those kids vouchers are counterproductive . While they fit neatly into a particular world view they have proven unsuccessful . While what HAS proven to work is investing in those schools and mixing children of all incomes together so that you get wealthier parents who have more resources and knowledge invested in improving the quality of the school their child goes to which actually raises the quality for all of the kids , without it being some sort of pure economic reallocation which just makes them bitter .