Vouchers Are Not the Answer

The deadly shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, earlier this year has Americans once again focusing on the dangers of the gun-free zones known as public schools. And if it is not a shooting, then it is acts of violence by students against other students or teachers or bullying and harassment by students that result in other students committing suicide. An investigation by the Associated Press a few years ago uncovered roughly 17,000 reports of rapes or sexual assaults by students over a four-year period. And those numbers were just from official reports.

But it is not just to the physical body that public schools can be dangerous. For many years now, public schools have been hazardous to the minds of students as well due to their dumbing down of the curriculum and their promotion of socialism, relativism, diversity and inclusion, environmentalism, climate change, and political correctness. SAT scores have fallen, high schools have graduated functional illiterates, discipline and standards have gone by the wayside, teachers have been caught having sexual relationships with students, and school-based “health clinics” have given out birth control without parental consent.

To this can now be added the teaching of critical race theory and trangenderism, the allowing of boys masquerading as girls to use the girls’ restroom and play on girls’ sports teams, and the promotion of cancel culture and extreme wokeness. Earlier this year, a school district in Wisconsin accused three eighth-grade boys of sexual harassment and launched a Title IX investigation for referring to a classmate using the biologically correct pronoun “her” instead of the classmate’s preferred pronoun “them.”

Education and the state

There is no question that public education is a disaster, and for that reason alone should be abolished. But even if public schools were safe spaces, actually educated students, and didn’t promote progressive political, economic, and social policies, they should still be shuttered.

Education should be completely separated from the state — just like religion. Imagine if the national or state governments enacted laws taxing people to support churches, synagogues, and mosques that they might provide religious services and then mandated that parents send their children to one of them. People would be outraged, and rightly so. But it is just as much an illegitimate purpose of government to have anything to do with education.

Public schools maintain their existence by coercion (taxation) and compulsion (mandatory-attendance laws). They are first and foremost government schools. It is not the proper role of government to provide educational services any more than it is the proper role of government to provide pest-control services, landscaping services, manicure and pedicure services, hair-styling services, or car-repair services.

There is nothing special about the business of education that necessitates that the government be involved in it. If there is no constitutional right to receive basic necessities like housing, clothing, and food, then there is certainly no constitutional right to receive a government-provided or government-funded education.

In a free society, there would be no such thing as public schools because public education would not exist. All educational services would be privately provided and privately funded. All schools would be self-supporting. Not only would no American be forced to pay for the education of his own children, neither would he be forced to pay for the education of any other Americans or their children.

In a free society, parents would be the ones solely responsible for the education of their children, just as parents are now solely responsible for their children’s eating, drinking, clothing, lodging, potty training, health, entertainment, recreation, religious instruction, transportation, and disciplining. This doesn’t mean that they have to personally teach their children reading, writing, and arithmetic anymore than it means that parents must personally perform circus acts to entertain their children.

This means that on the federal level, there would be no student loans, Pell grants, research grants to colleges and universities, math and science initiatives, school breakfast or lunch programs, school-accreditation agencies, Head Start, Higher Education Act, Elementary and Secondary Education Act, Education for All Handicapped Children Act, special-education or bilingual-education or Title IX mandates, and no Department of Education. This is a no-brainer and has nothing to do with politics or ideology. There is simply nothing in the Constitution that authorizes the federal government to have anything to do with education.

But this also means that on the state and local level, there would be no public schools, charter schools, public-school teachers, state colleges or universities, teacher-education requirements, teacher licensing, teacher-certification standards, property taxes earmarked for public schools, truancy laws, truant officers, school boards, state boards of regents, regulation or accreditation of private, religious, or home schools, and no state departments of education.

The market for education would operate the same as any other market. Profit opportunities for entrepreneurs would abound. Competition would keep prices in check. Even now, the average cost per pupil in public schools is about twice that of private schools. With a free market in education, there would be endless variety in K-12 education, much like there is in colleges and universities today. Not only would there be for-profit and not-for-profit schools as well as religious and secular schools, there would also be schools that catered to particular religions, political viewpoints, ethnic groups, genders, socio-economic statuses, nationalities, or world views. Most school controversies over things like dress codes, prayer, head coverings, religion, sex education, and critical race theory would disappear if education were left up to the free market instead of the government.

Vouchers

But instead of calling for the wholesale elimination of government-provided and government-funded education, many conservatives and some libertarians advocate government-provided educational vouchers as the way to rescue children from dangerous and failing public schools and put them in private schools that will educate them instead of indoctrinate them. It has been over 30 years since Milwaukee began offering the nation’s first school vouchers to allow low-income children to use taxpayer money to attend private schools. Since that time, many cities and states have introduced a wide variety of voucher programs. According to the Education Commission of the States, “There are currently 27 voucher programs in 16 states and the District of Columbia.”

Voucher proponents were ecstatic earlier this year when the Tennessee Supreme Court and then the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in their favor on two “school choice” programs. In 2019, Tennessee enacted the Education Savings Account Pilot Program. Beginning with the 2020–2021 school year, it was to provide state scholarships worth up to $7,300 to families from Shelby County (Memphis) and Metro Nashville school districts to send their children to private schools. In addition to tuition, funds could also be used for textbooks, tutoring and therapy services, transportation to educational institutions or services, computer hardware and software, and school uniforms.

To be eligible, children would have to come from households earning less than 200 percent of the federal free lunch program (about $68,000 for a family of four), have attended a Tennessee public school during the prior school year or be newly eligible to do so, and be enrolled in a state-approved private school. About 68 percent of students in Memphis and Nashville were estimated to be eligible to receive a scholarship.

But in February of 2020, a lawsuit was filed against the program alleging inter alia that it violated the Tennessee Constitution’s “home rule” provision that restricts the legislature from targeting a particular county for legislation. In May of 2020, the county Chancery Court ruled that the ESA pilot program violated the provision, and in September of 2020, the Tennessee Court of Appeals agreed. This put a halt to the implementation of the program. In May of 2022, the state Supreme Court ruled against the “home rule” decision of the lower courts and sent the case back to the Chancery Court to deal with the other issues.

Because many of Maine’s school districts do not operate their own high schools, the state instituted a voucher program to pay for students to attend private schools in order that Maine children receive a free public education in accordance with the state constitution. The program stipulated that approved private schools must be nonsectarian, that is, not related to a religious organization. Three sets of parents who wanted their children to go to Christian schools sued in U.S. District Court, alleging that the program violated their First Amendment right to the free exercise of their religion. The court ruled against them, as did the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit.

The case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which, by a vote of 6–3 on June 21, reversed the ruling of the lower courts, holding that: “Maine’s ‘nonsectarian’ requirement for its otherwise generally available tuition assistance payments violates the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. Regardless of how the benefit and restriction are described, the program operates to identify and exclude otherwise eligible schools on the basis of their religious exercise.”

These decisions, and others like them in previous years, are viewed as a victories for “school choice.” But what is “school choice” but giving some Americans the choice of where to spend other Americans’ money? The people actually paying for “school choice” don’t have any choice in the matter at all. The whole concept of “school choice” is a misnomer. Before the government can issue a voucher to one American for education, it must first take money from another American.

The government — which has no money of its own — forcibly takes money from people (many of whom don’t even have any children) through compulsory taxation and uses it to pay for the education of other people’s children. Where is the choice in that? Why don’t the people paying the bill get a choice? Giving one group of Americans the choice of where to spend other Americans’ money to educate their children is immoral and unjust.

Vouchers are not what enables parents to have “school choice.” Parents throughout the United States have many choices right now when it comes to the education of their children: public schools, parochial schools, Montessori schools, Jewish schools, Christian schools, Muslim schools, independent private schools, private tutors, home-schooling, online schooling.

Parents can choose their children’s education right now just like they can choose their children’s food, drink, clothing, entertainment, recreation, and toys. There is right now no government entity at any level that is preventing or seeking to prevent any American parents from exercising choice in the matter of their children’s education. And certainly no educational institution is doing so on the private level. They all welcome the tuition payments.

Once vouchers for education are deemed to be acceptable, no reasonable or logical argument can be made against the government’s providing vouchers for other services. If education vouchers are legitimate, then how can vacation vouchers, entertainment vouchers, and recreation vouchers be labeled illegitimate? But those are not necessities like education, it is argued. Okay, then what about vouchers for food, housing, clothing, and medicine? Certainly, these things are more necessary than education.

It doesn’t matter if “school choice” produces good results. It doesn’t matter if “school choice” works. It doesn’t matter if “school choice is a way of giving families with modest incomes the same opportunities that have always existed for rich families,” as one libertarian commentator wrote earlier this year. There is nothing libertarian about government educational vouchers.

Not the answer

There are many reasons why vouchers are not the answer to the shortcomings, failings, and evils of public education.

Vouchers are not the answer because they will lead to increased government regulation of private schools.

Vouchers are not the answer because there is no such thing as a “right” to an education.

Vouchers are not the answer because they don’t separate education from the state.

Vouchers are not the answer because it is an illegitimate purpose of government to fund anyone’s education.

Vouchers are not the answer because they will lead to increased dependency on the government.

Vouchers are not the answer because no American should be forced to pay for the education of any other American or their children.

Vouchers are not the answer because it is the responsibility of parents to educate their children.

Vouchers are not the answer because they are not an intermediate step toward a free market in education.

Vouchers are not the answer because all educational services should be privately provided and funded.

Vouchers are not the answer because the free market can provide a wide range of educational services just like it can provide a wide range of other services.

Vouchers are not the answer because government spending on vouchers doesn’t necessarily mean that less is spent on public schools.

Vouchers are not the answer because the government shouldn’t subsidize private entities.

Vouchers are not the answer because the provision of education should not be any different from the provision of any other service on the free market.

Vouchers are not the answer because they are inferior to tuition tax credits.

Vouchers are not the answer because they come with government strings attached.

Vouchers are not the answer because there is nothing inherently special about the business of education that necessitates the government be involved in it.

Vouchers are not the answer because no one should have the “choice” of where to spend other people’s money.

Vouchers are not the answer because parents already have an abundance of choices as to how to educate their children.

Vouchers are not the answer because they will put many private schools out of business that refuse to accept them.

Vouchers are not the answer because they make private schools accountable to government instead of parents.

Vouchers are not the answer because they are a form of welfare.

Vouchers are not the answer because no one has the right to an education at the expense of someone else.

Vouchers are not the answer because they are only valid at state-approved private schools.

Vouchers are not the answer because the consumers of educational services should be the ones bearing the costs.

Vouchers are not the answer because they are not educational freedom.

Vouchers are not the answer because the answer to a flawed and illegitimate government program is never another government program.

Vouchers are not the answer because the government’s transferring taxpayer money to private schools is no different from the government’s transferring taxpayer money to any other business.

Vouchers are not the answer because the fact that some people don’t have the money to pay for their preferred education choice doesn’t justify the government’s forcing someone else to pay for it.

Vouchers are not the answer because they distort the marketplace by establishing a floor under which tuition will not go below.

Vouchers are not the answer because if it is not the business of government to fund public schools, then it is certainly not the business of government to fund private schools.

Vouchers are not the answer because when they are used for anything besides education, they are rightly denounced as an income-transfer program.

Ludwig von Mises had the answer many years ago in his book Liberalism: “There is, in fact, only one solution: the state, the government, the laws must not in any way concern themselves with schooling or education. Public funds must not be used for such purposes. The rearing and instruction of youth must be left entirely to parents and to private associations and institutions.”

This article was originally published in the September 2022 edition of Future of Freedom.

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