Why Don’t They...

Enact Private School Vouchers?

There's been a rising tide of dissatisfaction with public schools over the past ten years or so, fostered in part by problems that are real, such as a huge gap between well-funded schools and poorly-funded ones, or sporadic bursts of violence, or claimed problems that get repeated a lot but are false, such as declining standards and "dumber kids".

Whenever there's a perceived problem where the solution can bring those with the solution lots of a) money b) power or c) both, people with solutions come out of the woodwork. That the solution may not address the problem, or addresses problems that don't exist, is to be expected.

The most common "solution" proposed is that of school vouchers to subsidize, in whole or in part, attendance at private schools.  The most common variation on this is that the state or federal government will provide vouchers of varying amounts to parents who want to take their kids out of public schools and put them in private schools.

Given that some public schools really are a mess, and that there is a belief that private schools do a better job of teaching, it's not surprising that this gets a lot of soft support. Unexamined, it seems like a good idea.  The supporters have done much to dress it up, referring to it as "school choice", which, like school prayer, already does exist, and like school prayer, means "we want the government to promote this for us".

And, as with school prayer schemes, there are problems. For instance, secular private schools cost, on average, one and a half times per student that elementary school does, and double per student at the high school level. Further, these costs usually do not include food, transportation, books or team activities. The reason the costs are higher is because most such schools are "for profit". Unlike public schools, they are expected to generate a return other than graduates.  The end result is that secular private schools can end up costing far more than public schools.

The problem with religious schools is the obvious constitutional problem of using tax dollars to support religion. Unless all students have equal access to schools representing all religions-an obviously impossible situation-then some religions are getting preferential treatment at taxpayer expense. That's a constitutional no-no.

Quite aside from the fact that many of the people who want government subsidy for Christian schools would be unamused at the idea of Jewish or Moslem facilities getting public funding, let alone aggressively atheistic schools that teach that all religious belief is nonsense, there's the fact that employers in many high paying fields would have to sort out what schools taught valid biology or archeology, and which taught creationism nonsense, and might just decide it's easier to not hire from voucher schools at all.

Most voucher programs are exclusionary. Some, like the one proposal Californians rejected in 1993, propose a voucher of $1,000 per student per year. For a school that charges $7,500 per year, this obviously is of little or no benefit to a family making less than the average income (a description that applies to most families with young children), but it is a nice little bonus for families where the income is about $75,000 a year. They can take the free money the tax payers have given them and spend it on a weekend at the beach, or something.

Others take the opposite tack, and exclude families where the income is above X amount. There are even some that purport to cover all the costs of private education for poor families. That's fine, as far as it goes, but if it became institutionalized, it would only be a matter of time before the wealthy decided that they were being discriminated again, and started murmuring darkly about "affirmative action" preferences. Don't laugh: it's not difficult to find members of one racial group who average $43,000 in annual income whining loudly about how they are being victimized by a group that averages $28,000 a year.

Finally, schools that accept public funds will have to be as accountable as public schools, and would have to meet standards set by the government. Taxpayers won't stand for financing some outfit that teaches that the heliocentric model of the solar system is a secular humanist myth. In short, you end up with Southern Baptist schools having to teach evolution in order to qualify for voucher funds, and for-profits losing the ability to refuse kids on the basis of race, gender, or intelligence, and you are back at ground zero, except that in the case of the seculars, you are paying a lot more.

Various voucher proposals have been tried in the midwest, and because of the problems listed above, one by one have been struck down by courts as being unfair, ineffective, or unconstitutional.

However, there is a method that the voucher people can take that will not put them in conflict with the constitution, and will not victimize anyone.

All voucher proposals are based on the notion that the taxpayers, through the government, should be funding them, just as they do public schools.

There's no reason why this should be so. If support for vouchers is as widespread as its advocates claim, then the primary reason given for government involvement in the first place - the economics of scale - should work just fine for vouchers on a non-governmental level.

Therefore, I propose that voucher advocates abandon all efforts to make vouchers a matter of public policy, and instead form a private corporation, through which funds for vouchers could be raised by either membership or subscription. Being a privately-held trust, this Voucher corporation would not have to grapple with sticky constitutional issues involving religion, and would not have to account to the public for each penny spent, the way public funding does.

They could solicit memberships/subscriptions/donations, and dispense funds to all children of members, or to all comers, depending on how successful they are in raising funds. If they could get just ten million subscribers, they could probably do it.

If you mention this to a right winger, you'll probably get a glare and sullen silence. But if he's honest, he'll admit that the fiscal considerations for why this might not work apply equally well to why public funding is disadvantageous. The only difference is that tax payers can't opt out when they see it's wasting their money.

Aside from the fact that the economics don't work -- just as they wouldn't for government-subsidized voucher schemes -- there's the fact that this private non-profit would still have to address the same problems that the rugged individualists supporting this school choice want government to solve for them:  such items as standardization of education that doesn't interfere with the stated belief of any member school, or how to uphold the right of any private school to reject any child for any reason while simultaneously seeing to it that said child still have equal opportunity to a quality education.  Finally, they have to assure the same quality education for the price of public schools.  Both have to have consistancy -- this is an area where the public schools -have- failed.

In short, private subscriptions means that voucher proponents have to address the problems raised by their solution, instead of just foisting it off on the government, and they don't like that.