Rabbi Melissa Weintraub is a Conservative rabbi and co-founder/co-director of Encounter, a nonprofit that brings together Jewish and Palestinian leaders in an effort to foster better understanding and, eventually, peace. She was named to Jewish Week’s “36 Under 36: The Next Wave of Jewish Innovators.”

Daniel Sieradski is the founder of Jewschool, a blog that covers everything from politics to religion to art from a Jewish perspective. It has 50,000 readers and contributors from 80 countries. He was named to Jewish Week’s “36 Under 36: The Next Wave of Jewish Innovators.”

Rabbi Avi Weiss is the senior rabbi at the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale in the Bronx, an Orthodox synagogue. He originated the idea of “open Orthodoxy” – a progressive form of Orthodoxy that would expand the sources for interpreting Jewish law, support the state of Israel, expand the role of women, embrace pluralism and engage […]

Rabbi Toba Spitzer is president of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association, the first openly gay woman to become its leader. She is the head rabbi at Congregation Dorshei Tzedek in West Newton, Mass.

Read a July 2, 2002, story from Beliefnet.com that examine the potential impact of vouchers on Muslim schools.

Listen to a Jan. 16, 2006, story from National Public Radio’s Morning Edition about the Florida Supreme Court ruling that the voucher program violates the state constitution and the difficulties the voucher movement faces.

Voucher critics said the U.S. government report “Comparing Private Schools and Public Schools Using Hierarchical Linear Modeling,” released on July 14, 2006, shows that private schools are not significantly outperforming public schools, while U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings discounted the study. The study examines math and reading scores of private and public school students.

On July 18, 2006, Republicans proposed a $100 million national school voucher program that would let low-income children in underperforming schools move to a different public school or a private school, including religious ones.

On May 7, 2013, The Supreme Court of Louisiana ruled that the state’s voucher system was unconstitutional. The court said that the money going towards the program and the private schools the vouchers are used towards should be used towards the public school system instead.