"Because peers influence individual student results, the increase in segregation could drag down average results and increase the inequality in education outcomes."

If peer influence is determinative, then the current schooling system is highly biased against poor children. In Victoria, public schools service particular areas. So, in all likelihood, children from the poorer areas will go the same school. And, at the other end of the spectrum, children in affluent areas are already grouped together in their schools. The segregation the author is concerned about is already present in our current schooling system. Parents in the cathcment area of Glen Waverley High have little interest in private schools as they already have a successful public school. However, parents in the poorer suburbs have their children sent to the local public school, which is inevitably characterised by ill-disciplined and poorly motivcated students. Rather than allow the parents the choice of opting out of the local school, the author suggests giving the teachers more money.

The author spends a great deal of time discrediting the study of the Milwaukee school voucher program but neglects to mention the Harvard study of the New York School Choice Scholarship Program which found statistically significant improvements in test performance after only one year. Further, there was no consideration of Florida's program of attaching funding to test results and giving students in failing schools vouchers for private ones. No mention either of Sweden and Denmark which both have well-developed and highly successful voucher programs. The success and popularity of school choice in Scandinavia, the world's most celebrated social democracies, makes for an interesting contrast with the author's branding of school choice advocates as "right-wing". It seems that while all opponents of school choice are lefties, not all lefties are opponents of school choice.

On my reading the evidence is against vouchers as a method of improving eductaion or of aiding the disadvantaged.
However I obviously have only read the wrong research.
That is the rub.
Once upon a time research was controlled by guide lines of objectivity. This is still so in say Physics where even the followers of energy creation, passionate as they may be, are returned their boxes by facts.
Not quite so in social science though real efforts are made by researchers being completely objective often precludes looking at unmeasurable nuances.

The voucher sytem relates to shooliong not upbringing or early child care.

For example whilst poverty is a syndrome showing how vouchers might overcome the disadvantage of inadequate stimulation and later the often poorly equipped home (aspirations and books etc) for a child, is to some extent (unmeasurable? confounded) by the early training of the brain and the connections which are favoured.

It has been found that working on the feelings of people be it desire for conformity or patriotism or merely doing the best for the child is a very useful adjunct to selling.

Long ago the flatulence of desire was scaled by researchers as a tool that worked in selling, distorting the critical ability. A feature much used by politicians, the clergy and entrepreneurs in general.

Brilliant article, Andrew.
Everything I have read about vouchers leads me to believe that they only offer more choice to those who already have choice.
If we really want to give all parents choice - not just a privileged few - then we have to take choice away from schools. Otherwise we will still end up with the private and selective schools choosing whose vouchers they will accept, and whose vouchers they will not, and the public schools being left with the kids the private and selective schools don't want.
Once upon a time, we had an excellent, efficient, inexpensive schooling system that was not particularly segregated along class, ability or socio economic lines. It was a free, secular, compulsory, public school system that 90% of kids attended. Then we started fiddling with it and, despite excellent work by many public schools, it is now a shadow of its former self.
What's that Joni Mitchell song say; "You only know what you lost when its gone." Indeed.

enaj,
If I understand your post, you suggest we abolish all private schools. If this is the case, I challenge you to name a single industry that has improved as a result of removing competition and enforcing a monopoly. If a child is in a public school that is failing, why shouldn't his parents be able to move him to a better school? At the moment, this option is only availible to those who can afford to pay significant fees; under a voucher system, each and every parent would have a choice as to where their child went to school.

As to your claim that everything you have read leads you to believe school choice is bad, please give the following a look:
http://www.fraserinstitute.ca/shared/readmore.asp?sNav=pb&id=215

As I pointed out in my earlier post, Scandinavian Social Democracies - long the idols of the Australian left - have wholeheartedly embraced school choice. Their experience has been that school choice does not undermine equality and egalitarianism but reinforces it.

I am becoming increasingly old fashioned about things like school funding. Whatever happened to public funds being used to provide public goods and services? Why is any non-government school receiving public funds?

If things continue the way they seem to be heading, our public schools will become schools of last resort, the worst kind of safety net. And I don't think that's in anyone's best interests.

I don't care who owns the schools, so much, they can be publicly or privately owned, preferably a mixture of both, but they should all have to abide by the same obligations if they accept public funding.
If they don't accept public money, then, obviously, they only need have obligations to their customers.