> I'm aware of wealthy families wanting the voucher to throw toward private schools (they were never going to send their kids to public schools regardless).
The people rich enough to pay for private school tuition without any government subsidy have their own neighborhoods with their own school districts, where everyone else in the district is also that rich and sends their kids to private school and the property taxes are correspondingly less or spent on other things. They've already solved it for themselves.
The people who want school vouchers are the people who want to get into those schools but don't have the money to pay for it after the government takes it from them in property taxes and refuses to let them use it for anything other than sending their kids to a bad school district.
> Then there are the conservatives that dislike public schools because the teachers are in a union, or they believe teachers are liberals, or that they indoctrinate their kids into anit-Capitlist thinking, etc....
These are just specific examples of things that cause a school district to be low quality, e.g. when unions prevent bad teachers from being fired, and cause parents to want a way out of the broken system for their kids.
> Or was it the de-leveraging of the banks, credit default swaps, derivatives and other shady practices by Wall Street?
Recall that all of those things were justified on the basis of "increasing liquidity" etc., i.e. making it easier to own a home, and that their consequence was "give mortgages to everybody regardless of whether they can afford it" because if the bank was going to sell the mortgage to someone else as a derivative or use a CDS then they didn't care if the borrower could pay it back.