<p>Translating from xiggi-speak: “Privatization” takes many forms. The most common these days are turning over failing public schools to private companies (non-profit or for-profit) to operate under management contracts, and awarding public charters and a per-pupil share of public school funding to schools established and run by private companies. However, some people, and most notably the Catholic church, would like to see public funding of education completely voucherized, so that kids could take their share of the public dollars to any accredited school, public or private, and make up the difference in tuition if the school did not accept the voucher as full payment. There have been experiments with limited voucherization to replace specific failing schools, but nothing approaching full voucherization anywhere, as far as I know.</p>
<p>A voucher system might or might not be accompanied by total or partial withdrawal of government from operating schools, turning them some or all over (or selling some) to private operators.</p>
<p>One of the things (hardly the only thing, but an important one) that leads people to support these ideas is the belief that it may be easier to blow the entire public education system up than to achieve meaningful reforms to the current system in the face of the union contracts and the political clout of the teachers’ unions.</p>