India's School Choice Movement

India is pushing forward with a school choice campaign. They have noticed an increase in the quality of private schools and a decrease in the quality of the state run public schools. The article, "A Ticket to Better Education" sounds awfully familiar to the state of the education system in the U.S. Interesting...the U.S. is not the only place that seems to pump money into education with no positive upswing.
An excerpt from the Business.com article feels like something I could write about here! I suppose it is reassuring to know that people all around the world are thinking choice is needed.

You advocate school vouchers as part of the campaign. What are the advantages of these vouchers?
We started out four years ago trying to figure out how much money the government spends per child in government schools. No official figures were available. When we did our research, even while taking the official enrolment figures at face value (which are generally fudged), we were surprised by our discovery. The school education system seemed like a black hole where money was being heavily pumped, with no tangible results. With the amount that the government spends per child in cities like Delhi [Rs. 1,200 to Rs. 1,700] the child could be sent to extremely good schools. This reinforced our faith in the project. "Fund students, not schools," became our slogan to the government.

The vouchers provide not just choice to students but also equality of opportunity. With the vouchers, even poor parents have a choice about which school their children go to. If the parent does not like the school, she can take her child along with the voucher to another school. Under the voucher system, money follows the student. Schools — government or private — to get the voucher, have to compete and satisfy the poor parent. Parents decide and parents choose, not government bureaucracies.

Given their performance-based payment system, vouchers encourage competition among schools, thereby helping to improve the quality of education. We are convinced that the voucher system is the best way to improve the quality of education and bring about greater accountability in the public education system.