Have they gotten better ? Last time I tried one , it really hurt the resolution of the screen and if you looked carefully you could see all the red blue and green refracting . <| sep |> It takes funding away from other students in the State who don ' t have the same opportunities as students with rich parents . This varies wildly by State and locale , but where I live , over 90 % of the school money for operations is local funding . I think they take advantage of Federal and State grants for stuff like computer lab grants , etc , but I pay out the nose in property taxes because of the schools . I don ' t even have kids . It makes the funding structure regressiveIf the school money was tied to kids directly , I fail to see how this could be considered regressive . Each head is worth the same to providers , and the methods to collect the taxes don ' t even need to change . removes govt . oversight and accountability from the school system . Because that ' s done a whole lot of good to date ? We have a lot of failing publicly run schools . The Dept of Education cannot point to any base metric in regards to student performance they have improved since their inception 40 years ago , despite steadily increasing expense and bureaucratic control since their inception . Also the percentage of school budget spent outside of the classroom is up because of the DoE . You are trying to defend some magical unicorn version of public schools , where everything actually works as promised . I don ' t blame you . The real thing is FAR harder to defend with any conviction . A charter surge nationwide will be corporate welfare reminiscent of the Medicare Part D Drug subsidies program was for the pharmaceutical and insurance businesses . 100 % correct . There is zero chance this passes anywhere without becoming a pork buffet of sorts . The people poised to take advantage are already doing that though . Plenty of people already engaged in various levels of regulatory capture . Textbook publishers come to mind as an easy example . This is near unavoidable in any case , including our current reality . So , no , it ' s not mostly local tax dollars from the neighborhood that fund a charter school . It would be where I live . It would be where these rich moms are . That ' s why people move to nice exurban communities in the first place , for the competently run and closely held schools . The money I pay the State and Federal government in taxes earmarked for education just goes to Cook county Chicago and environs schools , if it makes it past Springfield in the first place , and not down some rathole somewhere along the way to the classroom . Chicago Public Schools spends ~ 16 k per pupil with only 50 % from local sources . Their performance is terrible . My local district spends ~ 13 k per pupil with 90 % local funding , and is often rated the best public school district in the country , depending on the year and grading rubric used . A switch to a voucher based program would hardly affect the local situation . You might get more people trying for the local Catholic private school . That ' s about it . In Chicago though , it would give everyone the opportunity to jump ship out of whatever dumpster fire CPS has going on . For a 16 k check from the government attached to each kid , the parent can get a solid school . Private schools do it for less basically everywhere even today . It ' s not a stretch .