Home » About » Newsletters » September 1998
School Vouchers, Again
By Howard Simon
Executive Director, September 1998
What explains the emergence of school vouchers as such a prominent issue in the gubernatorial election between Buddy MacKay and Jeb Bush? After all, the issue of using tax dollars to support private and parochial schools has been debated in this country for decades.
But like an old song with a new beat, the voucher issue is back due more to politics and clever public relations than the needs of children.
School vouchers is an education reform proposal designed more by politicians, economic theorists, entrepreneurs and parochial school advocates than by school reformers. I doubt that a group of educators would have designed a program for the improvement of the public schools that involves facilitating their abandonment.
Proponents have repackaged school vouchers with clever and more appealing terms like "scholarships" and "parental choice." But that cannot obscure the fact that the irreducible element in all voucher schemes is the diversion of tax dollars to support religious institutions and your neighbor's choice of a religious education for their children.
The school voucher issue has also made a comeback thanks to years of advance work by public schools bashing. To listen to some critics one might believe that the entire mission of the public schools consists of inculcating political correctness, distributing condoms and promoting acceptance of homosexuality.
This November, Citizens for Excellence in Education, an organization of conservative Christian school board members, will unveil Rescue 2010, a national campaign to encourage 20 million Christian children to abandon the public schools for churchaffiliated schools.
It is sadly true that many public schools fail to meet the needs of the kids they are supposed to serve, too often for many students in rural America and the inner cities. But one is not an unwitting apologist for the public education system to question how these children will be better served by diverting funds and weakening the public schools in order to support the attendance of some students at private schools.
Most recently, vouchers have been repackaged as a civil rights issue: it's really about helping the poorest kids from the poorest most troubled school districts, not about helping parents who choose to send their children to churchaffiliated schools pay the tuition bills. But it is precisely these kids who will be hurt most by a weakened and abandoned public school system.
The real scam is the mantra of "parental choice." South Florida got a glimpse recently of how "parental choice" operates. Remember the 11 yearold girl with cerebral palsy in tears on the lawn of Miami's private Gulliver School because she was told that despite having paid the tuition she could not attend the school she and her parents had chosen? School officials said they could not accommodate her because of her disability. If private schools are free to reject students based not only on their ability to pay tuition, but their special education needs or even some discriminatory reason, then it is the private school not parents who have the power of "choice."
School reform must begin with the recognition that there is no real alternative to improving the neighborhood public school. Even if there were an unlimited number of vouchers, most parents because of convenience, lack of transportation or because they are not dissatisfied will choose the neighborhood public school for their children. And if the discussion is about improving education in America and not politically exploiting the disinformation campaign about the public schools, it would not be about vouchers. Instead, we would be discussing reducing class size, increasing student performance, improving technology, continued teacher training, increasing parental involvement in schools and their kids' lives and improving the physical environment of the schools.
Voters deserve more honesty and less euphemism in this election. Most private schools are sectarian churchaffiliated schools, and the effect of a voucher is to facilitate parochial education at public expense. The mission of parochial schools includes, as part of the educational process, training the next generation of adherents to their denomination. Though we are a richer and more diverse people because of the existence of parochial schools, the right to choose to send one's children to a churchaffiliated school does not include the right to have the taxpayers fund that choice.
In the Preamble to the Virginia Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, written before the adoption of the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights, a prescient Thomas Jefferson warned that "to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves, is sinful and tyrannical." Jefferson's admonition about religious tyranny are wise words still.
