text:
School voucher

A school voucher, also called an education voucher in a voucher system, is a certificate of government funding for students at schools chosen by themselves or their parents. Funding is usually for a particular year, term, or semester. In some countries, states, or local jurisdictions, the voucher can be used to cover or reimburse home schooling expenses. In some countries, vouchers only exist for tuition at private schools.

A 2017 review of the economics literature on school vouchers concluded that "the evidence to date is not sufficient to warrant recommending that vouchers be adopted on a widespread basis; however, multiple positive findings support continued exploration". A 2006 survey of members of the American Economic Association found that over two-thirds of economists support giving parents educational vouchers that can be used at both government-operated and private schools, and that support is greater if the vouchers are to be used by parents with low incomes or children in poorly performing schools.

History
When France lost the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871) many blamed the loss on its inferior military education system. Following this defeat, the French Assembly proposed a voucher that they hoped would improve schools by allowing students to seek out the best. This proposal never moved forward due to the reluctance of the French to subsidize religious education. Despite its failure, this proposal closely resembles voucher systems proposed and used today in many countries.

The oldest extant school voucher programs in the United States are the Town Tuitioning programs in Vermont and Maine, beginning in 1869 and 1873 respectively. Because some towns in these states operate neither local high schools nor elementary schools, students in these towns "are eligible for a voucher to attend [either] public schools in other towns or non-religious private schools. In these cases, the 'sending' towns pay tuition directly to the 'receiving' schools".

A system of educational vouchers was introduced in the Netherlands in 1917. Today, more than 70% of pupils attend privately run but publicly funded schools, mostly split along denominational lines.

Milton Friedman argued for the modern concept of vouchers in the 1950s, stating that competition would improve schools, cost less and yield superior educational outcomes. Friedman's reasoning in favor of vouchers gained additional attention in 1980 with the broadcast of his ten-part television series Free to Choose and the publication of its companion book of the same name (co-written with his wife Rose Friedman, who was also an economist). Episode 6 of the series and chapter 6 of the book were both entitled "What's Wrong with Our Schools", and asserted that permitting parents and students to use vouchers to choose their schools would expand freedom of choice and produce more well-educated students.

In some Southern states during the 1960s, school vouchers were used as a way to perpetuate segregation. In a few instances, public schools were closed outright and vouchers were issued to parents. The vouchers, known as tuition grants, in many cases, were only good at new, private and segregated schools, known as segregation academies.

Definitions
There are distinctions between different kinds of schools:
 * Charter schools are funded publicly
 * Education savings accounts (ESAs) allow parents to withdraw their children from public district or charter schools and receive a deposit of public funds into government-authorized savings accounts with restricted, but multiple, uses. Those funds, often distributed to families via debit card, can cover private school tuition and fees, online learning programs, private tutoring, community college costs, higher education expenses and other approved customized learning services and materials.
 * Education tax credit, tuition tax credit, or tax-credit scholarship: There are two types of education tax credits: personal use, and donation. Personal use tax credits are tax credits given to individual taxpayers for education expenditures made on behalf of their own children.  Donation tax credits are tax credits given to individual taxpayers or businesses who donate to non-profit organizations that give out private school scholarships.
 * Open enrollment is a system that allows parents to choose which public school their child attends instead of being assigned one, provided the school has not reached its maximum capacity number for students. The term "open enrollment" refers exclusively to the ability to choose between schools all of which are public schools. Open enrollment can be intradistrict (where the choice is between schools all of which are in the one public school district where the student's family lives) or interdistrict (where the student may choose a public school in which he or she is non-resident). As of 2023, 27 states have state policies permitting intradistrict open enrollment while 43 states have state policies permitting interdistrict open enrollment.
 * Private schools are funded privately, such as by tuition or donations.
 * Public schools are funded by taxes (except in the United Kingdom, where the term 'public school' refers to older private schools, and the equivalent term for tax-funded schools is 'state school')
 * School vouchers are subsidies given directly to parents for tuition at any school

Background
Education as a tool for human capital accumulation is often crucial to the development and progression of societies and thus governments have large incentives to continually intervene and improve public education. Additionally, education is often the tool with which societies instill a common set of values that underlie the basic norms of the society. Furthermore, there are positive externalities to society from education. These positive externalities can be in the form of reduced crime, more informed citizens and economic development, known as the neighborhood effect.

In terms of economic theory, families face a bundle of consumption choices that determine how much they will spend on education and private consumption. Any number of consumption bundles are available as long as they fit within the budget constraint. This means that any bundle of consumption of education and private consumption must not exceed budgetary constraints. Indifference curves represent the preferences of one good over another. The indifference curve determines how much education an individual will want to consume versus how much private consumption an individual will want to consume.

Government intervention in education typically takes two forms. The first approach can be broad, such as instituting charter schools, magnet schools, or for-profit schools and increasing competition. The second approach can be individually focused such as providing subsidies or loans for individuals to attend college or school vouchers for K-12.

Vouchers are typically instituted for two broad economic reasons. The first reason is consumer choice. A family can choose to where their child goes to school and pick the school that is closest to their preference of education provider.

The second reason vouchers are proposed is to increase market competition amongst schools. Similar to the free market theorem, vouchers are intended to make schools more competitive while lowering costs for schools and increasing the educational quality for consumers, the families.

Negative effects
Besides the general lack of results, critics of school vouchers argue that vouchers will lead to segregation. Empirical studies show that there is some evidence that school vouchers can lead to racial or income segregation. However, research on this topic is inconclusive, as there is also valid research that shows under certain circumstances, income and racial segregation can be reduced indirectly by increasing school choice.

Additionally, since school vouchers are funded by the government, the implementation could cause the funds for public schools to be reduced. Private-school vouchers affect government budgets through two channels: additional direct voucher expenditures, and public school cost savings from lower enrollments. Voucher programs would be paid for by the government's education budget, which would be subtracted from the public school's budget. This might affect the public school system by giving them less to spend and use for their student's education.

A 2018 study by Abdulkadiroğlu et al. found that disadvantaged students who won a lottery (the Louisiana Scholarship Program) to get vouchers to attend private schools had worse education outcomes than disadvantaged students who did not win vouchers: "LSP participation lowers math scores by 0.4 standard deviations and also reduces achievement in reading, science, and social studies. These effects may be due in part to selection of low-quality private schools into the program".

Positive effects
A 2021 meta-analysis by Shakeel et al., published in the journal  School Effectiveness and School Improvement, evaluated evidence from randomized controlled trials assessing "student-level math and reading test score effects of school vouchers internationally." After evaluating 21 studies addressing 11 different voucher programs, the meta-analysis authors found "moderate evidence of positive achievement impacts of private school vouchers, with substantial effect heterogeneity across programs and outcome years" as well as evidence suggesting that "voucher interventions may be cost-effective even for null achievement impacts." The study authors noted that future experimental studies might yield more facts on whether and how "long-term, scaled-up voucher interventions" affect student achievement.

Colombia
The PACES voucher program was established by the Colombian government in late 1991. It aimed to assist low-income households by distributing school vouchers to students living in neighborhoods situated in the two lowest socioeconomic strata. Between 1991 and 1997, the PACES program awarded 125,000 vouchers to lower-income secondary school students. Those vouchers were worth about US$190 in 1998, and data shows that matriculation fees and other monthly expenses incurred by voucher students attending private schools averaged about US$340 in 1998, so a majority of voucher recipients supplemented the voucher with personal funds. The students selected to be in the program were selected by lottery. The vouchers were able to be renewed annually, conditional on students achieving satisfactory academic success as indicated by scheduled grade promotion. The program also included incentives to study harder as well as widening schooling options. Empirical evidence showed that the program had some success. Joshua Angrist shows that after three years into the program, lottery winners were 15 percentage points more likely to attend private school and complete 0.1 more years of schooling, and were about 10 percentage points more likely to have finished the 8th grade. The study also reported that there were larger voucher effects for boys than for girls, especially in mathematics performance. The program did not have a significant impact on dropout rates. Angrist reports that lottery winners scored 0.2 standard deviations higher on standardized tests. The voucher program also reported some social effects. Lottery winners worked less on average than non-lottery winners. Angrist reports that this was correlated with a decreased likelihood to marry or cohabit as teenagers.

Chile
In 1981, Chile implemented a universal school voucher system for both elementary and secondary school students. As a result, over 1,000 private schools entered the market, and private enrollment increased by 20–40% by 1998, surpassing 50% in some urban areas. From 1981 to 1988, the private school enrollment rate in urban areas grew 11% more than the private school enrollment rate in rural areas. This change coincided with the transfer of public school administration from the central government to local municipalities. The financial value of a voucher did not depend on the income of the family receiving it, and the program allowed private voucher schools to be selective, while public schools had to accept and enroll every interested student. At the turn of the 21st century, student achievement in Chile was low compared to students in other nations based on international test scores. This disparity led to the Chilean government enacting substantial educational reforms in 2008, including major changes in the school voucher system.

The Chilean government passed the Preferential School Subsidy Law (SEP) in January 2008. This piece of legislation made the educational voucher system much more like the regulated compensatory model championed by Christopher Jencks. Under SEP, the voucher system was altered to take family incomes into account. The vouchers provided to "priority students" – those whose family income was in the lower than 40% of Chileans – were worth 50% more than those given to the families with higher income. Schools with larger numbers of priority students were eligible to receive per-student bonuses, the size of which was tied to the percentage of priority students in the student body. When SEP was started, it covered preschool to fourth grade, and an additional school year of coverage was added each subsequent year. Almost every public school chose to participate in SEP in 2008, as well as almost two-thirds of private subsidized elementary schools.

There were three important requirements attached to the program. The first requirement stipulated that participating schools could not charge fees to priority students, although private schools in the voucher system could do so for non-priority students. The second requirement ensured that schools could not select students based on their academic ability, nor expel them on academic grounds. The third requirement postulated that schools had to self-enroll themselves in an accountability system that ensured that schools were responsible for the use of financial resources and student test scores.

Europe
In most European countries, education for all primary and secondary schools is fully subsidized. In some countries (e.g., Belgium or France), parents are free to choose which school their child attends.

France
Parents can choose either a private school or a public school. Most private schools are under contract to the French government in which case the French government pays teachers' salaries and they are considered state employees. Other costs at private schools are paid through fees which are usually low. Schools under contract follow the French national curriculum. Some private schools are not under contract giving them more freedom to teach different curricula although the state still monitors educational standards. Teachers' salaries at private schools not 'under contract' are paid through fees that are therefore much higher than those under contract. About 20% of French schoolchildren attend private schools. Homeschooling is possible but restricted in France. Indeed, on October 2, 2022, Emmanuel Macron reinforced secularism by allowing homeschooling only under specific circumstances, such as for individuals with disabilities, high-level athletes or artists, or those belonging to nomadic communities, as part of measures to combat the spread of obscurantism in some families.

Ireland
Most schools in the Republic of Ireland are state-aided Catholic parish schools, established under diocesan patronage but with capital costs, teachers' salaries, and a fee per head paid to the school. These are given to the school regardless of whether or not it requires its students to pay fees. (Although fee-paying schools are in the minority, there has been much criticism over the state aid they receive. Opponents claim that the aid gives them an unfair advantage.)

There is a recent trend towards multi-denominational schools established by parents and organised as limited companies without share capital. Parents and students are free to choose their own schools. If a school fails to attract students, it immediately loses its fees and eventually loses its teaching posts, and teachers are moved to other schools that are attracting students. The system is perceived to have achieved very successful outcomes for most Irish children.

The 1995–97 "Rainbow Coalition" government, containing ministers from parties of the center-right and the left, introduced free third-level education to primary degree level. Critics charge that this has not increased the number of students from economically deprived backgrounds attending university. However, studies have shown that the removal of tuition fees at third level has increased the numbers of students overall and of students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Since the economic crisis of 2008, there has been extensive debate regarding the possible reintroduction of third-level fees.

Sweden
In Sweden, a system of school vouchers (called skolpeng) was introduced in 1992 at primary and secondary school level, enabling free choice among publicly run schools and privately run fristående skolor ("independent schools"). The voucher is paid with public funds from the local municipality (kommun) directly to a school based solely on its number of students. Both public schools and independent schools are funded the same way. Independent schools can be run by not-for-profit groups as well as by for-profit companies, but may not charge top-up fees or select students other than on a first-come, first-served basis. Over 10% of Swedish students were enrolled in independent schools in 2008 and the number is growing fast, leading the country to be viewed as a pioneer of the model.

Per Unckel, governor of Stockholm and former Minister of Education, has promoted the system, saying "Education is so important that you can't just leave it to one producer, because we know from monopoly systems that they do not fulfill all wishes." The Swedish system has been recommended to Barack Obama by some commentators, including the Pacific Research Institute, which has released a documentary called Not As Good As You Think: Myth of the Middle Class Schools, a movie depicting positive benefits for middle class schools resulting from Sweden's voucher programs.

A 2004 study concluded that school results in public schools improved due to increased competition. However, Per Thulberg, director general of the Swedish National Agency for Education, has said that the system "has not led to better results" and in the 2000s Sweden's ranking in the PISA league tables worsened. Though Rachel Wolf, director of the New Schools Network, has suggested that Sweden's education standards had slipped for reasons other than as a result of independent schools.

A 2015 study was able to show that "an increase in the share of independent school students improves average short‐ and long‐run outcomes, explained primarily by external effects (e.g., school competition)".

Hong Kong
A voucher system for children three to six years old who attend a non-profit kindergarten was implemented in Hong Kong in 2007. Each child will get HK$13,000 per year. The $13,000 subsidy will be separated into two parts: $10,000 is used to subsidize the school fee, and the remaining $3,000 is used for kindergarten teachers to pursue further education and obtain a certificate in education. Also, there are some restrictions on the voucher system. Parents can only choose non-profit schools with a yearly fee of less than $24,000. The government hoped that all kindergarten teachers can obtain an education certificate by the year 2011–12, at which point the subsidies are to be adjusted to $16,000 for each student, all of which will go toward the school fee.

Milton Friedman criticised the system, saying "I do not believe that CE Mr. Tsang's proposal is properly structured." He said that the whole point of a voucher system is to provide a competitive marketplace so should not be limited to non-profit kindergartens.

After protests by parents with children enrolled in for-profit kindergartens, the program was extended to children in for-profit kindergartens, but only for children enrolled in or before September 2007. The government will also provide up to HK$30,000 subsidy to for-profit kindergartens wanting to convert to non-profit.

Pakistan
In Pakistani Punjab, the Education Voucher Scheme (EVS) was introduced by Dr. Allah Bakhsh Malik, managing director and chief executive of the Punjab Education Foundation (PEF), especially in urban slums and the poorest of the poor in 2005. The initial study was sponsored by Open Society Institute New York USA. Professor Henry M. Levin extended pro-bono services for children of poor families from Punjab. To ensure educational justice and integration, the government must ensure that the poorest families have equal access to quality education. The voucher scheme was designed by the Teachers College, Columbia University, and the Open Society Institute. It aims to promote freedom of choice, efficiency, equity, and social cohesion.

A pilot project was started in 2006 in the urban slums of Sukhnehar, Lahore, where a survey showed that all households lived below the poverty line. Through the EVS, the foundation would deliver education vouchers to every household with children 5–16 years of age. The vouchers would be redeemable against tuition payments at participating private schools. In the pilot stage, 1,053 households were given an opportunity to send their children to a private school of their choice. The EVS makes its partner schools accountable to the parents rather than to the bureaucrats at the Ministry of Education. In the FAS program, every school principal has the choice to admit a student or not. However, in the EVS, a partner school cannot refuse a student if the student has a voucher, and the family has chosen that school. The partner schools are also accountable to the PEF: they are subject to periodic reviews of their student learning outcomes, additional private investments, and improvements in the working conditions of the teachers. The EVS provides an incentive to parents to send their children to school, and so it has become a source of competition among private schools seeking to join the program.

When it comes to the selection of schools, the following criteria are applied across the board: (i) The fee paid by the PEF to EVS partner schools is PKR 550 per child per month. Schools charging higher fees can also apply to the program, but they will not be paid more than PKR 1200, and they will not be entitled to charge the difference to students' families. (ii) Total school enrollment should be at least 50 children. (iii) The school should have adequate infrastructure and a good learning environment. (iv) EVS partner schools should be located within a half-kilometer radius of the residences of voucher holders. However, if the parents prefer a particular school farther away, the PEF will not object, provided that the school fulfills the EVS selection criteria. (v) The PEF advertises to stimulate the interest of potential partner schools. It then gives students at short-listed schools preliminary tests in selected subjects and conducts physical inspections of these schools. PEF offices display a list of all the EVS partner schools so that parents may consult it and choose a school for their children.

By now more than 500,000 students are benefiting from EVS and the program is being scaled up by financing from the Government of Punjab.

School voucher public policy in the United States
In the 1980s, the Reagan administration pushed for vouchers, as did the George W. Bush administration in the initial education reform proposals leading up to the No Child Left Behind Act. As of December 2016, 14 states had traditional school voucher programs. These states consist of: Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah, Vermont, and Wisconsin. The capital of the United States, Washington, D.C., also had operating school voucher programs as of December 2016. When including scholarship tax credits and education savings accounts – two alternatives to vouchers – there are 27 states plus the District of Columbia with private school choice programs. Most of these programs were offered to students in low-income families, low-performing schools, or students with disabilities. By 2014, the number participating in either vouchers or tax-credit scholarships increased to 250,000, a 30% increase from 2010, but still a small fraction compared to the 55 million in traditional schools.

In 1990, the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin's public schools implemented a program called the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program. Originally, this funded school vouchers for nonreligious, private institutions. It was, however, eventually expanded to include private, religious institutions after it saw success with nonreligious, private institutions. The 2006/07 school year marked the first time in Milwaukee that more than $100 million was paid in vouchers. Twenty-six percent of Milwaukee students will receive public funding to attend schools outside the traditional Milwaukee Public School system. In fact, if the voucher program alone were considered a school district, it would mark the sixth-largest district in Wisconsin. St. Anthony Catholic School, located on Milwaukee's south side, boasts 966 voucher students, meaning that it very likely receives more public money for general school support of a parochial elementary or high school than any before it in American history. A 2013 study of Milwaukee's program posited that the use of vouchers increased the probability that a student would graduate from high school, go to college, and stay in college. A 2015 paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that participation in Louisiana's voucher program "substantially reduces academic achievement" although that the result may be reflective of the poor quality of private schools in the program.

A recent analysis of the competitive effects of school vouchers in Florida suggests that more competition improves performance in the regular public schools.

The largest school voucher program in the United States is the Indiana Choice Scholarships program.

Opponents
The main critique of school vouchers and education tax credits is that they put public education in competition with private education, threatening to reduce and reallocate public school funding to private schools. Opponents question the belief that private schools are more efficient.

Public school teachers and teacher unions have also fought against school vouchers. In the United States, public school teacher unions, most notably the National Education Association (the largest labor union in the US), argue that school vouchers erode educational standards and reduce funding and that giving money to parents who choose to send their child to a religious or other school is unconstitutional. The latter issue was struck down by the Supreme Court case Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, which upheld Ohio's voucher plan in a 5–4 ruling. In contrast, the use of public-school funding for vouchers to private schools was disallowed by the Louisiana Supreme Court in 2013. The Louisiana Supreme Court did not declare vouchers unconstitutional, just the use of money earmarked for public schools via the Louisiana Constitution for funding Louisiana's voucher program. The National Education Association also points out that access to vouchers is just like "a chance in a lottery" where parents had to be lucky to get a space in this program. Since almost all students and their families would like to choose the best schools, those schools, as a result, quickly reach its maximum capacity number for students that state law permits. Those who did not get vouchers then have to compete again to look for some other less preferred and competitive schools or give up searching and go back to their assigned local schools. Jonathan Kozol, a prominent public school reform thinker and former public-school teacher called vouchers the "single worst, most dangerous idea to have entered education discourse in my adult life".

The National Education Association additionally argues that more money should go towards public education to help the schools struggling and improve the schools overall, instead of reducing the public school's fund to go towards school vouchers. Their argument claims that increasing that amount of money that goes towards public education would also increase the amount of resources put into public schools, therefore, improving the education. This argument made towards school vouchers reflects the way the organization values public education. For example, in an interview in May 2017 regarding Donald Trump's 2018 Budget Proposal, the organization's president, Lily Eskelsen García, claimed:

"We should invest in what makes schools great, the things that build curiosity and instill a love of learning. That is what every student deserves and what every parent wants for his or her child. It should not depend on how much their parents make, what language they speak at home, and certainly, not what neighborhood they live in." – National Education Association President Lily Eskelsen García.

Furthermore, there are multiple studies that support the arguments made by opponents of school vouchers. One of these studies, conducted by the Tulane University's Education Research Alliance, consists of observing the relationship between voucher programs and students' test scores. They found that students in the Louisiana voucher program initially had lower test scores, but after three years, their scores matched those of students who stayed in public schools from standardized test scores spanning from 2012 to 2015.

People who can benefit from vouchers may not know it. In April 2012, a bill passed in Louisiana that made vouchers available to low-income families whose children attended poorly ranked schools. A student whose household income was low (up to about $44,000 for a family of three) and who attended a school ranked "C", "D", or "F" could apply for vouchers to attend another. Of the estimated 380,000 eligible students during the school year when the bill was passed (2012/13), only 5,000 students knew about and applied for the vouchers, and accepted them.

In 2006, the United States Department of Education released a report concluding that average test scores for reading and mathematics, when adjusted for student and school characteristics, tend to be very similar among public schools and private schools. Private schools performed significantly better than public schools only if results were not adjusted for factors such as race, gender, and free or reduced-price lunch program eligibility. Other research questions assumptions that large improvements would result from a more comprehensive voucher system.

Given the limited budget for schools, it is claimed that a voucher system would weaken public schools while not providing enough money for people to attend private schools. 76% of the money given in Arizona's voucher program went to children already in private schools.

Some sources claim that public schools' higher per-pupil spending is due to having a higher proportion of students with behavioral, physical, and emotional problems since in the United States, public schools must by law accept any student regardless of race, gender, religion, disability, educational aptitude, and so forth, while private schools are not so bound. They argue that some, if not all, of the cost difference between public and private schools comes from "cream skimming", whereby the private schools select only those students who belong to a preferred group – whether economic, religious, educational aptitude level, or ethnicity – rather than from differences in administration. The result, it has been argued, is that a voucher system has led or would lead students who do not belong to the private schools' preferred groupings to become concentrated at public schools. However, of the ten state-run voucher programs in the United States at the beginning of 2011, four targeted low-income students, two targeted students in failing schools, and six targeted students with special needs. (Louisiana ran a single program targeting all three groups.)

It is also argued that voucher programs are often implemented without the necessary safeguards that prevent institutions from discriminating against marginalized communities. In the United States, as of 2016, there are currently no state laws that require voucher programs to not discriminate against marginalized communities. Further, while some voucher programs may explicitly be aimed at marginalized communities, this is not necessarily always the case. A common argument for school vouchers is that it allows for marginalized communities of color to be uplifted from poverty. Historically, however, data suggests that voucher programs have been used to further segregate Americans. Further, some data has shown that the effects of voucher programs such as the New York City School Choice Scholarship Program, are marginal when it comes to increasing student achievement.

Another argument against a school voucher system is its lack of accountability to taxpayers. In many states, members of a community's board of education are elected by voters. Similarly, a school budget faces a referendum. Meetings of the Board of Education must be announced in advance, and members of the public are permitted to voice their concerns directly to board members. By contrast, although vouchers may be used in private and religious schools, taxpayers cannot vote on budget issues, elect members of the board or even attend board meetings. Even voucher proponents acknowledge that decreased transparency and accountability for public funds are problematic features of the voucher system, and some have suggested a 'sliding scale' approach wherein oversight and accountability increase in proportion to the number of taxpayer dollars (in the form of vouchers) received by the private school.

Kevin Welner points out that vouchers funded through a convoluted tax credit system – a policy he calls "neovouchers" – present additional accountability concerns. With neovoucher systems, a taxpayer owing money to the state instead donates that money to a private, nonprofit organization. That organization then bundles donations and gives them to parents as vouchers to be used for private school tuition. The state then steps in and forgives (through a tax credit) some or all of the taxes that the donor has given to the organization. While conventional tax credit systems are structured to treat all private school participants equally, neovoucher systems effectively delegate to individual private taxpayers (those owing money to the state) the power to decide which private schools will benefit.

An example of a lack of accountability is the voucher situation in Louisiana. In 2012, Louisiana State Superintendent of Education John White selected private schools to receive vouchers, then tried to fabricate criteria (including site visits) after schools had already received approval letters. One school of note, New Living Word in Ruston, Louisiana, did not have sufficient facilities for the over 300 students White and the state board of education had approved. Following a voucher audit in 2013, New Living Word had overcharged the state $395,000. White referred to the incident as a "lone substantive issue". However, most voucher schools did not undergo a complete audit for not having a separate checking account for state voucher money.

According to Susanne Wiborg, an expert on comparative education, Sweden's voucher system introduced in 1992 has "augmented social and ethnic segregation, particularly in relation to schools in deprived areas".

Tax-credit scholarships which are in most part disbursed to current private school students or to families which made substantial donations to the scholarship fund, rather than to low-income students attempting to escape from failing schools, amount to nothing more than a mechanism to use public funds in the form of foregone taxes to support private, often religiously based, private schools.

Proponents
Proponents of school vouchers and education tax credit systems argue that those systems promote free market competition among both private and public schools by allowing parents and students to choose the school to use the vouchers. This choice available to parents' forces schools to perpetually improve to maintain enrollment. Thus, proponents argue that a voucher system increases school performance and accountability because it provides consumer sovereignty – allowing individuals to choose what product to buy, as opposed to a bureaucracy.

This argument is supported by studies such as "When Schools Compete: The Effects of Vouchers on Florida Public School Achievement" (Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, 2003), which concluded that public schools located near private schools that were eligible to accept voucher students made significantly more improvements than did similar schools not located near eligible private schools. Stanford's Caroline Hoxby, who has researched the systemic effects of school choice, determined that areas with greater residential school choice have consistently higher test scores at a lower per-pupil cost than areas with very few school districts. Hoxby studied the effects of vouchers in Milwaukee and of charter schools in Arizona and Michigan on nearby public schools. Public schools forced to compete made greater test-score gains than schools not faced with such competition, and that the so-called effect of cream skimming did not exist in any of the voucher districts examined. Hoxby's research has found that both private and public schools improved through the use of vouchers.

Similarly, it is argued that such competition has helped in higher education, with publicly funded universities directly competing with private universities for tuition money provided by the Government, such as the GI Bill and the Pell Grant in the United States. The Foundation for Educational Choice alleges that a school voucher plan "embodies exactly the same principle as the GI bills that provide for educational benefits to military veterans. The veteran gets a voucher good only for educational expense and he is completely free to choose the school at which he uses it, provided that it satisfies certain standards". The Pell Grant, a need-based aid, like the Voucher, can only be used for authorized school expenses at qualified schools, and, like the Pell, the money follows the student, for use against those authorized expenses (not all expenses are covered).

Proponents are encouraged by private school sector growth, as they believe that private schools are typically more efficient at achieving results at a much lower per-pupil cost than public schools. A CATO Institute study of public and private school per pupil spending in Phoenix, Los Angeles, D.C., Chicago, New York City, and Houston found that public schools spend 93% more than the estimated median private schools.

Proponents claim that institutions often are forced to operate more efficiently when they are made to compete and that any resulting job losses in the public sector would be offset by the increased demand for jobs in the private sector.

Friedrich von Hayek on the privatizing of education:

"As has been shown by Professor Milton Friedman (M. Friedman, The role of government in education, 1955), it would now be entirely practicable to defray the costs of general education out of the public purse without maintaining government schools, by giving the parents vouchers covering the cost of education of each child which they could hand over to schools of their choice. It may still be desirable that government directly provide schools in a few isolated communities where the number of children is too small (and the average cost of education therefore too high) for privately run schools. But with respect to the great majority of the population, it would undoubtedly be possible to leave the organization and management of education entirely to private efforts, with the government providing merely the basic finance and ensuring a minimum standard for all schools where the vouchers could be spent. (F. A. Hayek, in his 1960 book The Constitution of Liberty, section 24.3)"

Other notable supporters include New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, former Governor of South Carolina Mark Sanford, billionaire and American philanthropist John T. Walton, Former Mayor of Baltimore Kurt L. Schmoke, Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and John McCain. A random survey of 210 Ph.D.-holding members of the American Economic Association, found that over two-thirds of economists support giving parents educational vouchers that can be used at government-operated or privately operated schools, and that support is greater if the vouchers are to be used by parents with low-incomes or parents with children in poorly performing schools.

Another prominent proponent of the voucher system was Apple co-founder and CEO, Steve Jobs, who said:

"The problem is bureaucracy. I'm one of these people who believes the best thing we could ever do is go to the full voucher system.

I have a 17-year-old daughter who went to a private school for a few years before high school. This private school is the best school I've seen in my life. It was judged one of the 100 best schools in America. It was phenomenal. The tuition was $5,500 a year, which is a lot of money for most parents. But the teachers were paid less than public school teachers – so it's not about money at the teacher level. I asked the state treasurer that year what California pays on average to send kids to school, and I believe it was $4,400. While there are not many parents who could come up with $5,500 a year, there are many who could come up with $1,000 a year.

If we gave vouchers to parents for $4,400 a year, schools would be starting right and left. People would get out of college and say, 'Let's start a school.'"

As a practical matter, proponents note, most U.S. programs only offer poor families the same choice more affluent families already have, by providing them with the means to leave a failing school and attend one where the child can get an education. Because public schools are funded on a per-pupil basis, the money simply follows the child, but the cost to taxpayers is less because the voucher generally is less than the actual cost.

In addition, they say, the comparisons of public and private schools on average are meaningless. Vouchers usually are used by children in failing schools, so they can hardly be worse off even if the parents fail to choose a better school. Also, focusing on the effect on public school suggests that is more important than the education of children.

Some proponents of school vouchers, including the Sutherland Institute and many supporters of the Utah voucher effort, see it as a remedy for the negative cultural impact caused by underperforming public schools, which falls disproportionately on demographic minorities. During the run-up to the November referendum election, Sutherland issued a controversial publication: Voucher, Vows, & Vexations. Sutherland called the publication an important review of the history of education in Utah, while critics just called it revisionist history. Sutherland then released a companion article in a law journal as part of an academic conference about school choice.

EdChoice, founded by Milton and Rose Friedman in 1996, is a non-profit organization that promotes universal school vouchers and other forms of school choice. In defense of vouchers, it cites empirical research showing that students who were randomly assigned to receive vouchers had higher academic outcomes than students who applied for vouchers but lost a random lottery and did not receive them; and that vouchers improve academic outcomes at public schools, reduce racial segregation, deliver better services to special education students, and do not drain money from public schools.

EdChoice also argues that education funding should belong to children, not a specific school type or building. Their purpose for the argument is to try to argue that people should prioritize a student's education and their opportunity over making a specific type of school better. They also emphasize that if a family chooses a public school, the funds also go to that school. This would mean that it would also benefit those who value the public education system.

Legal challenges
The school voucher question in the United States also received a considerable amount of judicial review in the early 2000s.

A program launched in the city of Cleveland in 1995 and authorized by the state of Ohio was challenged in court on the grounds that it violated both the federal constitutional principle of separation of church and state and the guarantee of religious liberty in the Ohio Constitution. These claims were rejected by the Ohio Supreme Court, but the federal claims were upheld by the local federal district court and by the Sixth Circuit appeals court. The fact that nearly all of the families using vouchers attended Catholic schools in the Cleveland area was cited in the decisions.

This was later reversed in 2002 in a landmark case before the US Supreme Court, Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, in which the divided court, in a 5–4 decision, ruled the Ohio school voucher plan constitutional and removed any constitutional barriers to similar voucher plans in the future, with conservative justices Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O'Connor, William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas in the majority.

Chief Justice William Rehnquist, writing for the majority, stated that "The incidental advancement of a religious mission, or the perceived endorsement of a religious message, is reasonably attributable to the individual aid recipients, not the government, whose role ends with the disbursement of benefits." The Supreme Court ruled that the Ohio program did not violate the Establishment Clause, because it passed a five-part test developed by the Court in this case, titled the Private Choice Test.

Dissenting opinions included Justice Stevens's, who wrote "...the voluntary character of the private choice to prefer a parochial education over an education in the public school system seems to me quite irrelevant to the question whether the government's choice to pay for religious indoctrination is constitutionally permissible" and Justice Souter's, whose opinion questioned how the Court could keep Everson v. Board of Education on as precedent and decide this case in the way they did, feeling it was contradictory.

In 2006, the Florida Supreme Court struck down legislation known as the Florida Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP), which would have implemented a system of school vouchers in Florida. The court ruled that the OSP violated article IX, section 1(a) of the Florida Constitution: "Adequate provision shall be made by law for a uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high-quality system of free public schools." This decision was criticized by Clark Neily, Institute for Justice senior attorney and legal counsel to Pensacola families using Florida Opportunity Scholarships, as "educational policymaking".

Political support
Political support for school vouchers in the United States is mixed. On the left/right spectrum, conservatives are more likely to support vouchers. Some state legislatures have enacted voucher laws. In New Mexico, then-Republican Gary Johnson made school voucher provision the major issue of his second term as governor. The federal government provided a voucher program for 7,500 residents of Washington, D.C., called the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. The program operated until in early March 2009, when congressional Democrats moved to close down the program and remove children from their voucher-funded school places at the end of the 2009/10 school year under the $410 billion Omnibus Appropriations Act of 2009 which, as of March 7 had passed the House and was pending in the Senate. The Obama administration stated that it preferred to allow children already enrolled in the program to finish their schooling while closing the program to new entrants. However, its preference on this matter was not strong enough to prevent the president from signing the bill.

Whether or not the public generally supports vouchers is debatable. Majorities seem to favor improving existing schools over providing vouchers, yet as many as 40% of those surveyed admit that they do not know enough to form an opinion or do not understand the system of school vouchers.

In November 2000, a voucher system proposed by Tim Draper was placed on the California ballot as Proposition 38. It was unusual among school voucher proposals in that it required neither accreditation on the part of schools accepting vouchers, nor proof of need on the part of families applying for them; neither did it have any requirement that schools accept vouchers as payment-in-full, nor any other provision to guarantee a reduction in the real cost of private school tuition. The measure was defeated by a final percentage tally of 70.6 to 29.4.

A statewide universal school voucher system providing a maximum tuition subsidy of $3,000 was passed in Utah in 2007, but 62% of voters repealed it in a statewide referendum before it took effect. On April 27, 2011, Indiana passed a statewide voucher program, the largest in the U.S. It offers up to $4,500 to students with household incomes under $41,000, and lesser benefits to households with higher incomes. The vouchers can be used to fund a variety of education options outside the public school system. In March 2013, the Indiana Supreme Court found that the program does not violate the state constitution.

Trump's 2018 Budget
President Donald Trump proposed a 2018 budget that included $250 million for voucher initiatives, state-funded programs that pay for students to go to private school. This 2018 budget served the purpose of "Expanding school choice, ensuring more children have an equal opportunity to receive a great education, maintaining strong support for the Nation's most vulnerable students, simplifying funding for post-secondary education, continuing to build evidence around educational innovation, and eliminating or reducing Department programs consistent with the limited Federal role in education." The Budget reduced more than 30 programs that duplicated other programs; that were deemed ineffective; or that were more appropriately supported with state, local, or private funds. Another $1 billion was set aside for encouraging schools to adopt school choice-friendly policies.

Betsy DeVos, Trump's education secretary, is also an advocate for voucher programs and has argued that they would lead to better educational outcomes for students. Both Trump and DeVos proposed cutting the Education Department's budget by about $3.6 billion and spend more than $1 billion on private school vouchers and other school choice plans.

Regarding the purpose and importance of the budget, DeVos claimed:

"This budget makes an historic investment in America's students. President Trump is committed to ensuring the Department focuses on returning decision-making power back to the States, where it belongs, and on giving parents more control over their child's education. By refocusing the Department's funding priorities on supporting students, we can usher in a new era of creativity and ingenuity and lay a new foundation for American greatness. – Betsy DeVos, U.S. Secretary of Education"

Teaching creationism instead of evolution
Some private religious schools in voucher programs teach creationism instead of the theory of evolution, including religious schools that teach religious theology side by side with or in place of science. Over 300 schools in the U.S. have been documented as teaching creationism and receiving taxpayer money. A strict definition of state-funded religious education was narrowly deemed constitutional in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002). At least 35 states have passed various Blaine Amendments restricting or prohibiting public funding of religious education. However, Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue (2020) ruled that it is unconstitutional to disqualify all religious schools from receiving public funds that other private schools are eligible to get.

title: School voucher


text:
E. B. White

Elwyn Brooks White (July 11, 1899 – October 1, 1985) was an American writer. He was the author of several highly popular books for children, including Stuart Little (1945), Charlotte's Web (1952), and The Trumpet of the Swan (1970).

In a 2012 survey of School Library Journal readers, Charlotte's Web was ranked first in their poll of the top one hundred children's novels. White also was a contributing editor to The New Yorker magazine and co-author of The Elements of Style, an English language style guide.

Early life and education
White was born in Mount Vernon, New York, the sixth and youngest child of Samuel Tilly White, the president of a piano firm, and Jessie Hart White, the daughter of Scottish-American painter William Hart. Elwyn's older brother Stanley Hart White, known as Stan, a professor of landscape architecture and the inventor of the vertical garden, taught E.B. White to read and explore the natural world.

While attending Cornell University, White was very briefly a private in the Student Army Training Corps (SATC). In early 1918, the War Department created the SATC to hasten the training of soldiers for the war in Europe. Students continued to take college courses while training for the army. Unlike the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC), SATC students were required to live and take all meals on campus and adhered to a strict military schedule of study and training. They also required a pass to go off campus on weekends. Following the end of World War I, the SATC program was disbanded in December 1918, and White did not serve with the active armed forces.

In 1921, White graduated from Cornell University with a Bachelor of Arts degree. At Cornell, he obtained the nickname "Andy", where tradition confers that moniker on any male student whose surname is White after Cornell co-founder Andrew Dickson White. He worked as editor of The Cornell Daily Sun with classmate Allison Danzig, who later became a sportswriter for The New York Times. As a Cornell University student, White was a member of Aleph Samach, Quill and Dagger, and Phi Gamma Delta fraternity.

Career
After graduating from Cornell, White went to work for the United Press, later United Press International, and the American Legion News Service in 1921 and 1922. From September 1922 to June 1923, he was a cub reporter for The Seattle Times. On one occasion, when White was stuck writing a story, a Times editor said, "Just say the words."

White was fired from the Times and later wrote for the rival Seattle Post-Intelligencer before a stint in Alaska on a fireboat. He then worked for almost two years with the Frank Seaman advertising agency as a production assistant and copywriter before returning to New York City in 1924.

In 1925, after The New Yorker was founded, White began submitting manuscripts to the magazine. Katharine Angell, the literary editor, recommended to editor-in-chief and founder Harold Ross that White be hired as a staff writer. However, it took months to convince White to attend a meeting at the office and additional weeks to convince him to work on the premises. He eventually agreed to work in the office on Thursdays.

White published his first article for The New Yorker in 1925, then joined the staff in 1927, and continued to write for the magazine for nearly six decades. Best recognized for his essays and unsigned "Notes and Comment" pieces, he gradually became the magazine's most important contributor. From the beginning to the end of his career at The New Yorker, he frequently provided what the magazine calls "Newsbreaks", which were short, witty comments on oddly worded printed items from many sources, under various categories, such as "Block That Metaphor." He also was a columnist for Harper's Magazine from 1938 to 1943.

In 1949, White published Here Is New York, a short book based on an article he had been commissioned to write for Holiday. Editor Ted Patrick approached White about writing the essay, telling him it would be fun. "Writing is never 'fun'", White replied. That article reflects the writer's appreciation of a city that provides its residents with both "the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy." It concludes with a dark note touching on the forces that could destroy the city that he loved. This prescient "love letter" to the city was re-published in 1999 on his centennial with an introduction by his stepson, Roger Angell.

In 1959, White edited and updated The Elements of Style. This handbook of grammatical and stylistic guidance for writers of American English was first written and published in 1918 by William Strunk Jr., one of White's professors at Cornell. White's reworking of the book was extremely well received, and later editions followed in 1972, 1979, and 1999. Maira Kalman illustrated an edition in 2005. That same year, Nico Muhly, a New York City composer, premiered a short opera based on the book. The volume is a standard tool for students and writers and remains required reading in many composition classes. The complete history of The Elements of Style is detailed in Mark Garvey's Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White's The Elements of Style.

In 1978, White was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize, citing "his letters, essays and the full body of his work". He also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963 and honorary memberships in a variety of literary societies throughout the United States. The 1973 Oscar-nominated Canadian animated short The Family That Dwelt Apart was narrated by White and was based on his short story of the same name.

Children's books
In the late 1930s, White turned his hand to children's fiction on behalf of a niece, Janice Hart White. His first children's book, Stuart Little, was published in 1945, and Charlotte's Web followed in 1952. Stuart Little initially received a lukewarm welcome from the literary community. However, both books went on to receive high acclaim, and Charlotte's Web won a Newbery Honor from the American Library Association, though it lost out on winning the Newbery Medal to Secret of the Andes by Ann Nolan Clark.

White received the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal from the U.S. professional children's librarians in 1970. It recognized his "substantial and lasting contributions to children's literature." That year, he was also the U.S. nominee and eventual runner-up for the biennial Hans Christian Andersen Award, as he was again in 1976. Also, in 1970, White's third children's novel was published, The Trumpet of the Swan. In 1973 it won the Sequoyah Award from Oklahoma and the William Allen White Award from Kansas, both selected by students voting for their favorite book of the year. In 2012, the School Library Journal sponsored a survey of readers, which identified Charlotte's Web as the best children's novel ("fictional title for readers 8–12" years old). The librarian who conducted it said, "It is impossible to conduct a poll of this sort and expect [White's novel] to be anywhere but #1."

Awards and honors

 * 1953 Newbery Honor for Charlotte's Web
 * 1960 American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal
 * 1963 Presidential Medal of Freedom
 * 1970 Laura Ingalls Wilder Award
 * 1971 National Medal for Literature
 * 1977 L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award, Letters of E.B. White
 * 1978 Pulitzer Prize Special Citation for Letters

Personal life
White was shy around women, claiming he had "too small a heart, too large a pen". But in 1929, after an affair that led to Katharine Angell's divorce, she and White were married. They had a son, Joel White, a naval architect and boat builder, who later owned Brooklin Boat Yard in Brooklin, Maine. Katharine's son from her first marriage, Roger Angell, spent decades as a fiction editor for The New Yorker and was well known as the magazine's baseball writer.

In her foreword to Charlotte's Web, Kate DiCamillo quotes White as saying, "All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world." White also loved animals, farms and farming implements, seasons, and weather formats.

James Thurber described White as a quiet man who disliked publicity and who, during his time at The New Yorker, would slip out of his office via the fire escape to a nearby branch of Schrafft's to avoid visitors he didn't know: "Most of us, out of a politeness made up of faint curiosity and profound resignation, go out to meet the smiling stranger with a gesture of surrender and a fixed grin, but White has always taken to the fire escape. He has avoided the Man in the Reception Room as he has avoided the interviewer, the photographer, the microphone, the rostrum, the literary tea, and the Stork Club. His life is his own. He is the only writer of prominence I know of who could walk through the Algonquin lobby or between the tables at Jack and Charlie's and be recognized only by his friends."

Death
Later in life, White developed Alzheimer's disease. He died on October 1, 1985, at his farm home in North Brooklin, Maine. He is buried in the Brooklin Cemetery beside Katharine, who died in 1977.

Legacy
The E.B. White Read Aloud Award is given by The Association of Booksellers for Children (ABC) to honor books that its membership feel embodies the universal read-aloud standards that E.B. White's works created.

Books

 * Less than Nothing, or, The Life and Times of Sterling Finny (1927)
 * Ho Hum: Newsbreaks from The New Yorker (1931). Intro by E. B. White, and much of the text as well.
 * Alice Through the Cellophane, John Day (1933)
 * Every Day Is Saturday, Harper (1934)
 * Farewell to Model T (1936, G P Putnam's Sons) - originally published under pseudonym Lee Strout White as Farewell, My Lovely! (1936, The New Yorker) collaboration with Richard L. Strout
 * The Fox of Peapack, and other poems (1938, Harper)
 * Quo Vadimus: or The Case for the Bicycle, Harper (1938)
 * A Subtreasury of American Humor (1941). Co-edited with Katherine S. White.
 * One Man's Meat (1942): A collection of his columns from Harper's Magazine
 * The Wild Flag: Editorials from The New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters (1943)
 * Stuart Little (1945)
 * Here Is New York (1949)
 * Charlotte's Web (1952)
 * The Second Tree from the Corner (1954)
 * The Elements of Style (by William Strunk Jr. in 1918, revised and expanded by White in 1959)
 * The Points of My Compass (1962) - letters
 * The Trumpet of the Swan (1970)
 * Letters of E. B. White (1976)
 * Essays of E. B. White (1977)
 * Poems and Sketches of E. B. White (1981)
 * Writings from The New Yorker 1925-1976 (1990, HarperCollins, ed. Rebecca M. Dale)
 * Farewell to Model T / From Sea to Shining Sea (2003, Little Bookroom)
 * In the Words of E. B. White (2011)
 * An E. B. White Reader. Edited by William W. Watt and Robert W. Bradford.
 * In the Words of E. B. White (2011)
 * An E. B. White Reader. Edited by William W. Watt and Robert W. Bradford.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: E. B. White


text:
Evangelist (Latter Day Saints)

In the Latter Day Saint movement, an evangelist is an ordained office of the ministry. In some denominations of the movement, an evangelist is referred to as a patriarch. However, the latter term was deprecated by the Community of Christ after the church began ordaining women to the priesthood. Other denominations, such as The Church of Jesus Christ (Bickertonite), have an evangelist position independent of the original "patriarch" office instituted movement founder Joseph Smith.

Early Latter Day Saint movement
The first use of the term "evangelist" in Latter Day Saint theology were mainly consistent with how the term is used by Protestants and Catholics.

In 1833, Joseph Smith introduced the new office of patriarch, to which he ordained his father. The elder Smith was given the "keys of the patriarchal Priesthood over the kingdom of God on earth", the same power said to be held by the Biblical patriarchs, which included the power to give blessings upon one's posterity. The elder Smith, however, was also called to give patriarchal blessings to the fatherless within the church, and the church as a whole, a calling he passed onto his eldest surviving son Hyrum Smith prior to his death. Hyrum himself was killed in 1844 along with Joseph, resulting in a succession crisis that broke the Latter Day Saint movement into multiple denominations.

It is not known who first identified the term "evangelist" with the office of patriarch. However, in an 1835 church publication, W. W. Phelps stated,

 * "[W]ho is not desirous of receiving a father's or an evangelist's blessing? Who can read the ancient patriarchal blessings, recorded in the bible, for the benefit of the church, without a heart filled with joy ... ?"

In 1839, Joseph Smith equated an evangelist with the office of patriarch, stating that "an Evangelist is a Patriarch".

The necessity of an evangelist in the church organization has been reinforced repeatedly, based on the passage in Ephesians 4:11, which states, "And he gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers". In 1834, while writing what he called the "principles of salvation", prominent early Latter Day Saint Oliver Cowdery stated that:

 * "We do not believe that he ever had a church on earth without revealing himself to that church: consequently, there were apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers, in the same."

Joseph Smith echoed Cowdery's statement in 1842, in a letter to a Chicago newspaper editor outlining the church's basic beliefs. Smith said that his religion "believe[s] in the same organization that existed in the primitive church, viz: apostles, prophets, pastors, teachers, evangelists".

Community of Christ
In the Community of Christ, which was formerly known as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (RLDS Church), an evangelist is an office in the Melchizedec Order of the priesthood.

An evangelist-patriarch's primary responsibility was to provide special blessings to members of the church; these blessings were considered one of the eight sacraments in the RLDS Church. The local evangelist-patriarchs of the church were governed by an individual with church-wide authority known as the Presiding Patriarch.

In 1984, when the first women began to be ordained to the office of evangelist-patriarch, the RLDS Church changed the title of the evangelist-patriarchs to simply "evangelist". Similarly, it changed the title of the Presiding Patriarch to the "Presiding Evangelist". To be an evangelist, a person must also be a high priest of the Melchizedec Order of the priesthood.

The primary duty of an evangelist in the Community of Christ remains the giving of sacramental "evangelist's blessings"; it is for this reason that evangelists are often referred to as "ministers of blessing". Ideally, an evangelist is free from administrative responsibilities in the church in order to allow them to be fully responsive to the Holy Spirit. The blessings—which are given by the laying on of hands—provide counsel and advice and confer spiritual blessings upon the recipient(s). Not only individuals, but also couples, families, households, groups and congregations may receive an evangelist's blessing. Any person, including nonmembers, eight years of age or older can receive a blessing, although the blessing is rarely offered for someone who has not reached adolescence. A recipient may receive multiple evangelist's blessings in their life. Evangelist's blessings may or may not be recorded. If it is recorded in written form, a copy is stored in the church archives at Independence, Missouri.

All evangelists belong to the Order of Evangelists, which is led by the Presiding Evangelist (currently Jane M. Gardner, since 2016).

The Church of Jesus Christ (Bickertonite)
In The Church of Jesus Christ (Bickertonite), the prescribed duties of an evangelist are to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ to every nation, kindred, language, and people. An evangelist is part of the Quorum of Seventy Evangelists.

Quorum of Seventy Evangelists
The Quorum of Seventy Evangelists is responsible for management of the International Missionary Programs of the church and assists Regions of the church with their individual Domestic Missionary Programs. The Quorum of Seventy oversees the activities of its Missionary Operating Committees to ensure the fulfilling of Christ’s commandment to take the gospel to the entire world.

In 2007, the officers of the Quorum of Seventy Evangelists were:

 * Evangelist Eugene Perri, President
 * Evangelist Alex Gentile, Vice-President
 * Evangelist Jeffrey Giannetti, Secretary

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
In the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), an evangelist is considered to be an office of the Melchizedek priesthood. However, the term "evangelist" is rarely used for this position; instead, the church has retained the term "patriarch", the term most commonly used by Joseph Smith.

The most prominent reference to the term "evangelist" in the LDS Church's literature is found in its "Articles of Faith", derived from the Wentworth letter—a statement by Smith in 1842 to a Chicago newspaper editor—that the church believes in "the same organization that existed in the primitive church", including "evangelists". Smith taught that "an Evangelist is an Patriarch".

title: Evangelist (Latter Day Saints)


text:
Elegiac couplet

The elegiac couplet is a poetic form used by Greek lyric poets for a variety of themes usually of smaller scale than the epic. Roman poets, particularly Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid, adopted the same form in Latin many years later. As with the English heroic couplet, each pair of lines usually makes sense on its own, while forming part of a larger work.

Each couplet consists of a dactylic hexameter verse followed by a dactylic pentameter verse. The following is a graphic representation of its scansion:

– uu | – uu | – uu | – uu | – uu | – x – uu | – uu | –  || – uu | – uu | – – is one long syllable, u one short syllable,  uu  is one long or two short syllables, and x is one long or one short syllable (anceps).

The form was felt by the ancients to contrast the rising action of the first verse with a falling quality in the second. The sentiment is summarized in a line from Ovid's Amores I.1.27 Sex mihi surgat opus numeris, in quinque residat—"Let my work rise in six steps, fall back in five." The effect is illustrated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge as:
 * In the hexameter rises the fountain's silvery column,
 * In the pentameter aye falling in melody back.

translating Friedrich Schiller,
 * Im Hexameter steigt des Springquells silberne Säule,
 * Im Pentameter drauf fällt sie melodisch herab.

Greek origins
The elegiac couplet is presumed to be the oldest Greek form of epodic poetry (a form where a later verse is sung in response or comment to a previous one). Scholars, who even in the past did not know who created it, theorize the form was originally used in Ionian dirges, with the name "elegy" derived from the Greek ε, λεγε ε, λεγε—"Woe, cry woe, cry!" Hence, the form was used initially for funeral songs, typically accompanied by an aulos, a double-reed wind instrument. Archilochus expanded use of the form to treat other themes, such as war, travel, and homespun philosophy. Between Archilochus and other imitators, the verse form became a common poetic vehicle for conveying any strong emotion.

At the end of the 7th century BCE, Mimnermus of Colophon struck on the innovation of using the verse for erotic poetry. He composed several elegies celebrating his love for the flute girl Nanno, and though fragmentary today, his poetry was clearly influential in the later Roman development of the form. Propertius, to cite one example, notes Plus in amore valet Mimnermi versus Homero—"The verse of Mimnermus is stronger in love than Homer".

The form continued to be popular throughout the Greek period and treated a number of different themes. Tyrtaeus composed elegies on a war theme, apparently for a Spartan audience. Theognis of Megara vented himself in couplets as an embittered aristocrat in a time of social change. Popular leaders were writers of elegies—Solon the lawgiver of Athens composed on political and ethical subjects—and even Plato and Aristotle dabbled with the meter.

A famous example of an elegiac couplet is the epitaph composed by Simonides of Ceos which Herodotus says was inscribed on a stone to commemorate those who died at the battle of Thermopylae in 490 BC:

 * ὦ ξεῖν᾿, ἀγγέλλειν Λακεδαιμονίοις ὅτι τῇδε
 * κείμεθα τοῖς κείνων ῥήμασι πειθόμενοι. (Book VII, 228)

 * "O stranger, tell the Spartans that in this place
 * we lie, obeying their commands"

Cicero translates it as follows (Tusc. Disp. 1.42.101), also using an elegiac couplet:

 * dīc hospes Spartae, nōs t(ē) hīc vīdisse iacentēs,
 * dum sānctīs patriae lēgibus obsequimur.

 * "Say, stranger, in Sparta that you saw us lying here
 * while we obey the sacred laws of our fatherland"

By the Hellenistic period, the Library of Alexandria made elegy its favorite and most highly developed form. They preferred the briefer style associated with elegy in contrast to the lengthier epic forms, and made it the singular medium for short epigrams. The founder of this school was Philitas of Cos. He was eclipsed only by the school's most admired exponent, Callimachus; their learned character and intricate art would have a heavy influence on the Romans.

Roman elegy
Like many Greek forms, elegy was adapted by the Romans for their own literature. The fragments of Ennius contain a few couplets, but it is the elegists of the mid-to-late first century BCE who are most commonly associated with the distinctive Roman form of the elegiac couplet. Catullus, the first of these, is an invaluable link between the Alexandrine school and the subsequent elegies of Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid. He shows a familiarity with the usual Alexandrine style of terse epigram and a wealth of mythological learning, as in his 66th poem, Coma Berenices, a direct translation of Callimachus' Lock of Berenice. His 85th poem is famous:

To read it correctly it is necessary to take account of the three elisions:

– u  u| –    –|  –   u u|–    – | –  u  u|  – x Od'et a|mo. Qua|r'id faci|am, for|tasse re|quiris? – uu  |  –   uu| – ||  –  u u  | –   u u|– Nescio, | sed fie|ri || senti'et | excruci|or.

Cornelius Gallus, an important statesman of this period, was also regarded by the ancients as a great elegist, but, except for a few lines, his work has been lost.

Elegy in the Augustan Age
The form reached its zenith with the collections of Tibullus and Propertius and several collections of Ovid (the Amores, Ars Amatoria, Heroides, Tristia, and Epistulae ex Ponto). The vogue of elegy during this time is seen in the so-called 3rd and 4th books of Tibullus. Many poems in these books were clearly not written by Tibullus but by others, perhaps part of a circle under Tibullus' patron Messalla. Notable in this collection are the poems of Sulpicia, thought to be the only surviving work by a Classical Latin female poet. The six elegiac poems of Lygdamus in the collection are thought by some to be an anonymous early work by Ovid, though other scholars attribute them to an imitator of Ovid who may have lived in a much later period.

Through these poets—and in comparison with the earlier Catullus—it is possible to trace specific characteristics and evolutionary patterns in the Roman form of the verse:

 * The Roman authors often write about their own love affairs. In contrast to their Greek originals, these poets are characters in his own stories, and write about love in a highly subjective way.
 * The form began to be applied to new themes beyond the traditional love, loss, and other "strong emotion" verse. Propertius uses it to relate aetiological or "origin" myths such as the origins of Rome (IV.1) and the Temple of Apollo on the Palatine Hill (IV.6).  Ovid's Heroides—though at first glance fictitious love letters—are described by Ovid himself as a new literary form, and can be read as character studies of famous heroines from mythology.   Ovid's Fasti is a lengthy elegiac poem on the first six months of the Roman calendar.
 * The Romans adopted the Alexandrine habit of concealing the name of their beloved in the poem with a pseudonym. Catullus' Lesbia is notorious as the pseudonym of Clodia.  But as the form developed, this habit becomes more artificial; Tibullus' Delia and Propertius' Cynthia, while likely real people, lack something of the specificity seen in Lesbia, while Ovid's Corinna is often considered a mere literary device.
 * The poets become extremely strict with pentameters. For example:
 * There is a trend toward the clear separation of the pentameter halves. Catullus, for example, allows an elision across the caesura in 18 cases, a rare occurrence in the later poets (Ovid, for example, never does this).
 * The pentameter begins to show a semi-regular "leonine" rhyme between the two halves of the verse, e.g. Tib. I.1–2, where the culti ending the first half of the pentameter rhymes with the soli closing the verse:
 * dīvitiās alius fulvō sibi congerat aurō
 * et teneat cultī iūgera multa solī
 * "Let another man pile up riches for himself with yellow gold
 * and hold many acres of cultivated land"
 * While Catullus shows this rhyme in about 1 in 5 couplets, the later elegists use it more frequently. Propertius II.34, for example, has the rhyme in nearly half its pentameters.  Rhyming between adjacent lines and even in the two halves of the hexameter is also observed, more than would be expected by chance alone.
 * Unlike Catullus, later poets show a definite trend toward ending the pentameter with a two-syllable word. In Catullus the proportion of disyllabic endings is 39%, not dissimilar to Greek practice; in Propertius book 1, this rises to 61%; but in the last two books endings other than a disyllabic word are very rare. In Tibullus book 1 the figure is 93%. Ovid has no exceptions to the disyllabic ending in his Amores, and only a few exceptions in his later work.

 * The hexameter follows the usual rhetorical trends of the dactylic hexameter in this age. If anything, the elegists are even more interested in verbal effects like alliteration and assonance.
 * Overall there is a tendency to make the elegiac couplet increasingly dactylic. In Catullus the proportion of dactylic feet (not counting the verse endings, which do not vary) is about 37%; this rises to 45% in Propertius books 2 and 3; and in Ovid's Ars Amatoria it rises as high as 57%.

Post-Augustan writers
Although no classical poet wrote collections of love elegies after Ovid, the verse retained its popularity as a vehicle for popular occasional poetry. Elegiac verses appear, for example, in Petronius' Satyricon, and Martial's Epigrams uses it for many witty stand-alone couplets and for longer pieces. The trend continues through the remainder of the empire; short elegies appear in Apuleius's story of Cupid and Psyche and in the minor writings of Ausonius.

Medieval elegy
After the fall of the empire, one writer who produced elegiac verse was Maximianus. Various Christian writers also adopted the form; Venantius Fortunatus wrote some of his hymns in the meter, while later Alcuin and the Venerable Bede dabbled in the verse. The form also remained popular among the educated classes for gravestone epitaphs; many such epitaphs can be found in European cathedrals.

De tribus puellis is an example of a Latin fabliau, a genre of comedy which employed elegiac couplets in imitation of Ovid. The medieval theorist John of Garland wrote that "all comedy is elegy, but the reverse is not true." Medieval Latin had a developed comedic genre known as elegiac comedy. Sometimes narrative, sometimes dramatic, it deviated from ancient practice because, as Ian Thompson writes, "no ancient drama would ever have been written in elegiacs."

Renaissance and modern period
With the Renaissance, more skilled writers interested in the revival of Roman culture attempted to recapture the spirit of the Augustan writers. The Dutch Latinist Johannes Secundus, for example, included Catullus-inspired love elegies in his Liber Basiorum, while the English poet John Milton wrote several lengthy elegies throughout his career. This trend continued down through the Recent Latin writers, whose close study of their Augustan counterparts reflects their general attempts to apply the cultural and literary forms of the ancient world to contemporary themes.

title: Elegiac couplet


text:
Era

An era is a span of time defined for the purposes of chronology or historiography, as in the regnal eras in the history of a given monarchy, a calendar era used for a given calendar, or the geological eras defined for the history of Earth.

Comparable terms are epoch, age, period, saeculum, aeon (Greek aion) and Sanskrit yuga.

Etymology
The word has been in use in English since 1615, and is derived from Late Latin aera "an era or epoch from which time is reckoned," probably identical to Latin æra "counters used for calculation," plural of æs "brass, money".

The Latin word use in chronology seems to have begun in 5th century Visigothic Spain, where it appears in the History of Isidore of Seville, and in later texts. The Spanish era is calculated from 38 BC, Before Christ, perhaps because of a tax (cfr. indiction) levied in that year, or due to a miscalculation of the Battle of Actium, which occurred in 31 BC.

Like epoch, "era" in English originally meant "the starting point of an age"; the meaning "system of chronological notation" is c. 1646; that of "historical period" is 1741.

Use in chronology
In chronology, an "era" is the highest level for the organization of the measurement of time. A "calendar era" indicates a span of many years which are numbered beginning at a specific reference date (epoch), which often marks the origin of a political state or cosmology, dynasty, ruler, the birth of a leader, or another significant historical or mythological event; it is generally called after its focus accordingly as in "Victorian era".

Geological era
In large-scale natural science, there is need for another time perspective, independent from human activity, and indeed spanning a far longer period (mainly prehistoric), where "geologic era" refers to well-defined time spans. The next-larger division of geologic time is the eon. The Phanerozoic Eon, for example, is subdivided into eras. There are currently three eras defined in the Phanerozoic; the following table lists them from youngest to oldest (BP is an abbreviation for "before present"). The older Proterozoic and Archean eons are also divided into eras.

Cosmological era
For periods in the history of the universe, the term "epoch" is typically preferred, but "era" is used e.g. of the "Stelliferous Era".

Calendar eras
Calendar eras count the years since a particular date (epoch), often one with religious significance. Anno mundi (year of the world) refers to a group of calendar eras based on a calculation of the age of the world, assuming it was created as described in the Book of Genesis. In Jewish religious contexts one of the versions is still used, and many Eastern Orthodox religious calendars used another version until 1728. Hebrew year 5772 AM began at sunset on 28 September 2011 and ended on 16 September 2012. In the Western church, Anno Domini (AD also written CE), counting the years since the birth of Jesus on traditional calculations, was always dominant.

The Islamic calendar, which also has variants, counts years from the Hijra or emigration of the Islamic prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina, which occurred in 622 AD. The Islamic year is some days shorter than 365; January 2012 fell in 1433 AH ("After Hijra").

For a time ranging from 1872 to the Second World War, the Japanese used the imperial year system (kōki), counting from the year when the legendary Emperor Jimmu founded Japan, which occurred in 660 BC.

Many Buddhist calendars count from the death of the Buddha, which according to the most commonly used calculations was in 545–543 BCE or 483 BCE. Dates are given as "BE" for "Buddhist Era"; 2000 AD was 2543 BE in the Thai solar calendar.

Other calendar eras of the past counted from political events, such as the Seleucid era and the Ancient Roman ab urbe condita ("AUC"), counting from the foundation of the city.

Regnal eras
The word era also denotes the units used under a different, more arbitrary system where time is not represented as an endless continuum with a single reference year, but each unit starts counting from one again as if time starts again. The use of regnal years is a rather impractical system, and a challenge for historians if a single piece of the historical chronology is missing, and often reflects the preponderance in public life of an absolute ruler in many ancient cultures. Such traditions sometimes outlive the political power of the throne, and may even be based on mythological events or rulers who may not have existed (for example Rome numbering from the rule of Romulus and Remus). In a manner of speaking the use of the supposed date of the birth of Christ as a base year is a form of an era.

In East Asia, each emperor's reign may be subdivided into several reign periods, each being treated as a new era. The name of each was a motto or slogan chosen by the emperor. Different East Asian countries utilized slightly different systems, notably:

 * Chinese eras
 * Japanese era
 * Korean eras
 * Vietnamese eras

A similar practice survived in the United Kingdom until quite recently, but only for formal official writings: in daily life the ordinary year A.D. has been used for a long time, but Acts of Parliament were dated according to the years of the reign of the current monarch, so that "61 & 62 Vict c. 37" refers to the Local Government (Ireland) Act 1898 passed in the session of Parliament in the 61st/62nd year of the reign of Queen Victoria.

Historiography
"Era" can be used to refer to well-defined periods in historiography, such as the Roman era, Elizabethan era, Victorian era, etc. Use of the term for more recent periods or topical history might include Soviet era, and "musical eras" in the history of modern popular music, such as the "big band era", "disco era", etc.

title: Era