School Choice For Whom?

 

“School choice” — one of the great political buzz words of the 1990s — is, unfortunately, not only still with us, but thanks to President Bush’s education plan and the recent Supreme Court decision, here to stay. Yet, if the truth were told, all parents have school choice right now —just like they have car choice, clothes choice, sports choice, and food choice. What parents really mean, however, is: I don’t have a choice where to spend other people’s money on my child’s education.

Both proponents and opponents of school choice agree on one thing: the decline of the public school system in America. This decline of the public school system over the past thirty years has fueled the demand for school choice. There are a number of factors that have contributed to this decline.

First of all, the most dangerous place in America, for students and teachers, is fast becoming the local public school. Whereas the big problems in school in the old days used to be talking, running in line, and chewing gum, the problems now are vandalism, assault, and murder. The situation has gotten so bad that each new school shooting raises the enrollment at private schools.

But even without the increasing number of school shootings, parents have other valid concerns about public education besides the safety of their children. The main problem with public education is that it is failing miserably at its main purpose: education in the basic skills needed for work or college.

We have plenty of teaching about diversity, multiculturalism, political correctness, the environment, and safe sex,  but not enough teaching about history, geography, math, science, and English. It is no secret that SAT and other test scores have been in decline for decades.

The average high school student is not only not ready for college, some are functionally illiterate. According to a new report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the literacy rate of U.S. high school graduates was the worst of eighteen countries surveyed — behind seventeenth-ranked Poland.

A number of solutions have been proposed for the woes of the public school system. More money is usually viewed as the panacea to right all the wrongs of public education. At election time, every politician, no matter what his party, claims that we need to spend more money on education. And people buy into it every time.

The main reason the lottery was passed in my state of Florida and other states is because it was presented as a way to increase funding for education. In fact, many cities and counties will vote themselves a tax increase if it is pawned off as helping the children get a better education.

But the more money we spend on education each year, the lower test scores plummet. Other subtle ways of petitioning for more money are cries for more teachers, smaller class sizes, and new school facilities.

Back when the last census was taken, radio ads portrayed students convening in a closet because there were not enough classrooms to meet in. The idea being that this is what would happen to your children if you didn’t fill out your census form.

Two other ideas that have been instituted to remedy the public education problem are charter schools and privatization. Charter schools are public schools that operate with less restrictions than those that apply to traditional public schools. They exercise increased autonomy in exchange for greater accountability for academic results.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, about 1,800 charter schools are in operation in thirty-four states. The privatization of some public schools has also been undertaken. This involves contracting out with a private corporation to manage the school.

The leading provider of this service is Edison Schools, which currently operates over 100 public schools around the country. These measures, by their very nature, only benefit a small percentage of students. But the main problem with these schools is that they are still public schools, financed by taxpayers who themselves have no choice in the matter.

But by far the most popular proposed solution is not to improve the public schools at all. It is to provide parents with a choice of where they want their children to go to school — which in most cases will be a private school. The mantra of “school choice” is repeated endlessly by its proponents, as if parents don’t have a choice right now of where they can send their children to school.

The way school choice is to be carried out is the voucher system. The idea behind vouchers is that the Federal government should provide a voucher for each school-age child worth enough money to fund the child’s education. Parents would have the “choice” of which school to spend the voucher. The school would then redeem the voucher for payment from the federal government. In other words: vouchers are a subsidy to private industry, courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer.

But rather than being viewed as another income transfer and corporate welfare program, vouchers have garnered the support of many Conservatives and Libertarians who would otherwise be outraged if taxpayer money flowed anywhere but education.

Republicans who only recently talked about abolishing the federal department of education now support increased government funding of education through vouchers. Heavy hitters like Bill Bennett, Jack Kemp, and Lamar Alexander have been enlisted on the voucher bandwagon. The Milton & Rose Friedman Foundation is pushing vouchers under the guise of “educational choice.”

Because of the doleful condition of the public school system, and the opposition of the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, and local teachers unions to any kind of school choice, many ardent defenders of the free market have latched on to the school choice movement.

Why should a child be forced to attend a drug-laden, crime-fraught school? Should he not be able to choose a better school where he can learn in a safe environment? These emotional appeals are swaying far too many Conservatives and Libertarians to forsake the priceless principles of free markets and limited government for a voucher from the federal leviathan. Like the abortionists’ use of the word choice, the concept of school choice is promoted under the guise of “liberty and justice for all.”

There are a number of problems with school choice vouchers.

First of all, the state does not give without taking something in return: It always controls what it subsidizes. After accepting public money, private schools are no longer responsible to parents but to government. Therefore, vouchers will destroy private schools and destroy the identity of sectarian schools.

Second, vouchers will make private schools inefficient. Without vouchers, private schools must compete for business in the free market. If every private school was on the government dole, the incentive to keep costs down would be greatly diminished.

Third, vouchers will put many private schools out of business. This will happen in two ways. Schools that refuse to accept vouchers may find a shortage of paying customers. Schools forced to accept vouchers (can a restaurant refuse to serve anyone?) may choose to close their doors rather than fall under government control.

Fourth, “good” suburban public schools (and property values) will be ruined because vouchers effectively eliminate school districts. If parents have the choice to send their child to any school then “good” suburban public schools would have to accept all comers.

Fifth, vouchers increase the dependency of people on government. This is exactly how politicians get reelected.

There is one redeeming thing about vouchers: they are an admission by government that its public schools are a failure.

The real issue here is not school choice but the role of the state in education. But if we are to have government funding of education through a voucher system, there are some groups that will have no school choice no matter what type of plan is enacted by the government.

The first group of people that will have no school choice under a voucher system are those who wish to enroll their children in a religious school. The liberal cry of separation of church and state will ensure that vouchers will not be valid at genuinely religious schools.

But beyond this, there are other reasons why most religious schools will be off limits to voucher recipients. Religious schools, by their very nature, are highly discriminatory. This is not necessarily bad, but simply means that they believe in private property and freedom of association.

For example, Catholic schools generally hire Catholics, just as Protestant schools generally hire Protestants. The same is true of Jews, Muslims, and any other religious denomination. White church schools generally hire whites; black church schools generally hire blacks.

Gays are generally not asked to join the faculty of Christian schools. Affirmative action, diversity, and political correctness are not high on the agenda at most Christian schools: education is. Many religious schools only admit adherents to their own particular faith. Any religious school that refused to compromise its values would be denied vouchers. The temptation would be great to give in to government demands — meager at first, like all government regulations, but then highly intrusive.

Another group of people that will have no school choice under a voucher system are the religious — whether they be Catholic, Protestant, Jew, or Muslim. Religious instruction is the core of the curriculum at the vast majority of religious schools.

Yet, with a voucher system, the members of each religious group would be subsidizing the indoctrination of each other’s children. Catholics will be paying for children to be taught that no one should pray to Mary, Protestants will be paying for children to be taught the primacy of the pope, Jews will be paying for children to be taught that Jesus Christ is the Messiah, and Muslims will be paying for children to be taught that Mohammed was a false prophet.

And what about the irreligious? No atheist, agnostic, or humanist wants to pay for children to be taught that God exists and the Bible is the word of God. To say that any school which receives a child’s voucher should not be allowed to criticize other religions merely proves that vouchers will destroy the identity of sectarian schools.

A third group of people that will have no school choice under a voucher system are those who  would send their children to a non-traditional private school. Although a non-traditional private school can take many forms, there is one thing that the majority of them have in common: they are not officially approved by the government.

If someone wanted to set up a school that only admitted a certain class, gender, sexual orientation, or race of people it would not be considered an approved school to receive vouchers. All school choice initiatives appearing on state ballots in recent years specifically limit vouchers to approved schools.

For a school to be acceptable, it would have to meet certain academic standards set up by the state. The length of the school year and school day would be subject to state approval. The curriculum and textbooks would be tightly controlled by the state.

And not only the school, the teachers would also have to be recognized by the state. Those not certified as having the proper degrees from state-recognized colleges would be denied employment if the school wanted to be on the government approved list of schools that can accept vouchers. And naturally, once a voucher program was established, there is a greater chance that state control would grow tighter with each passing school year.

Another group of people that will have no school choice under a voucher system are homeschoolers. Homeschooling is the ultimate in non-traditional schooling because the education of the child is custom tailored to the child as an individual according to the ideological bent of the parent.

This is directly opposite to state schooling in which all children, no matter what their race, intelligence, or religion, are educated to conform to the state. Parents who wished to homeschool their children would fare even worse under a voucher system than if they sent their children to a non-traditional private school.

Most parents who homeschool do not have a degree from a state-recognized college or university, are not certified teachers, and do not have the money for all the recommended textbooks to establish an elaborate curriculum. And God forbid that they should use the Bible as one of the textbooks!

This is not to say that children taught under these conditions would receive an inferior education — to the contrary —study after study has shown that homeschooled children are always far above those educated solely in public schools.

Homeschooled children are routinely finalists in the national spelling bee. So in addition to paying taxes for the support of public schools, parents who homeschool would have to purchase books, videos, software, and supplies without a voucher to pay for them.

The fifth, and most important, group of people that will have no school choice under a voucher system are the taxpayers who pay for the privilege of school choice that others would have.

The giving to parents of an educational voucher for each school-age child to spend at the school of their choice only comes from one source: the taxpayers. Thus, vouchers amount to a double tax: the taxpayer foots the bill for both public and private schools.

Vouchers are what Lew Rockwell, president of the free market Mises Institute, terms “fresh money.” Tax money spent on educational vouchers does not come out of tax money spent for traditional schooling. Couples with no children who spend thousands of dollars to educate the children of others will now have to cough up even more money.

Local communities are not taxed to feed and clothe all of the children collectively, but they are taxed to educate them. If it would be unthinkable to directly tax citizens of a community to feed and clothe all of the children of parents in the community (although it is done indirectly through food stamps and welfare programs), then why is it acceptable to tax the citizens at large to educate the children of some?

Writing in support of vouchers in Christianity Today, Stephen Carter argues that “poor children should not be fated to follow a narrow educational path. A just nation would make available to them as broad a range of educational alternatives as wealthier children see.”

But what is this reasoning but redistributionist egalitarianism? Should poor children be provided with vouchers for luxury cars, condos, and meals at expensive restaurants? Why not? It’s not their fault that they don’t have a broad range of alternatives when it comes to transportation, housing, and meals. Why is education treated differently?

So if not school choice, what should be done to improve the education of children in America? Ideally, of course, the state should get out of the education business altogether. The wholesale dismantling of the government education monopoly would be a welcome sight, beginning with the abolishing of the Federal Department of Education.

The real issue that should be behind school choice is freedom: freedom to educate one’s children however it is seen fit, and freedom from being forced to educate the children of others — not the freedom to force others to pay for educating one’s children.

Realistically, however, although unfortunately, no one expects education to ever be entirely private and without some government control, but there are some things that can be done. First, parents should be able to opt out of the public school system altogether and spend their tax money on the education of their children as they see fit.

The theory behind the government education monopoly is that government knows best rather than father knows best. If parents had to pay for their child’s education they would be more careful about what their children were being taught. Adults with no children could voluntarily support or not support schools of their choosing.

Second, every facet of federal control over education should be turned over to the states. Most state constitutions, unlike the U.S. constitution, have provisions for the public education of children. This is less than ideal, but certainly much preferred to the federal leviathan. And third, private schools should be just that: private — privately financed,  privately controlled, privately operated, and privately accountable.

The paean of “school choice” should be seen for just what it is: a government program to fix another failed government program. But as is usually the case, government is the problem, not the solution. In spite of much Conservative and Libertarian support that vouchers have, they are merely another transfer payment from the “rich” to the poor — an income redistribution scheme just like food stamps, medicaid, AFDC, and yes, the funding of public education.

So when it comes to the education of your children — just say no to vouchers.