Protect private schools from vouchers
Following the lead of Milton Friedman, conservatives have long touted a voucher system to increase competition in K-12 education, with the argument that it will allow parents to take their government school money wherever they choose. However, the common denominator of our public education system is that it runs on taxpayer dollars and is overseen by the politicians and bureaucrats in state capitols as well as Washington, D.C. Government vouchers will come with those same strings attached. The very thing that makes private schools and homeschooling a meaningful alternative to public education is the much greater degree of independence from political control.
Consider the experience of Bob Luddy in North Carolina. Luddy built CaptiveAire Systems from the ground up. As his business grew, he found that the available workforce was lacking in some of the basic skills he desired, driving him to take an interest in education policy. His attempts to enact reform in the public schools were thwarted, so he created a well-regarded charter school. However, even this success was not sufficient, as Luddy was still constrained by the requirements of the state in the operation of that school. He has since established Thales Acadamy, an inexpensive private school that features a systematic program of education and foregoes a lot of public school requirements, such as providing transportation, lunches, and special services.
Part of what allows Thales Acadamy to thrive is that it can restrict who it accepts, does not have the overhead of providing counselors and specialists, and it’s system of instruction allows for larger class sizes. Unlike private schools who have customers, public schools have constituents whom they are required to serve regardless of physical and mental disabilities, behavioral problems, or lack of parental interest and involvement. Public schools also labor under layers of local, state and federal regulations, restrictions, mandates, and bureaucracies. Schools operated by the government have a different mission than a private school that has the option to specialize in anything from providing a faith-based education to serving a particular category of special needs students to, as Thales Academy does, offering low-cost private education to large numbers of ordinary kids.
The false promise of vouchers is to provide these tailored options to all families on the taxpayer’s dime. The reason it’s false is that once private schools accept the Faustian bargain they become a de facto public school, subject to the ever-increasing suffocating regulation that we all know will come from the politicians controlling that government funding. As the noose of political interference tightens on previously autonomous private schools, others would see an opportunity to get on the gravy train, opening ‘schools’ that seek to do as little as possible in order to get those government vouchers. We’ve seen this with the way higher education has been subsidized by the federal government, with small technical and business schools all the way up to examples like the University of Phoenix clearly placing the educational result as a far lower priority than getting those taxpayer dollars.
If we want private schools to continue to be a viable alternative to public education the very last thing we want to do is put them under the control of politicians and bureaucrats who make decisions about children they will never meet in schools they will never visit. Creating so-called competition for public education by turning private schools into another kind of public school is like trying to improve the post office by throwing subsidies at FedEx and UPS. Instead, we might consider a real smaller government solution by taking control from federal and state governments and putting it back in the hands of our local school boards, and thus local citizens.
