Parental responsibility for education is crucial to the survival of republican government – a free people must teach its own young, not let them be formed by a government always tempted to produce servile subjects rather than free citizens.
Parental responsibility, of course, requires parental choice in schooling. Those with enough money already can – and often do – choose their children’s schools. But sadly, money frequently decides who can exercise the freedom to choose between private, religious or government schools.
Because many parents cannot afford that kind of choice, programs to provide financial support to parental school choice have been initiated around the country. This ought to make everyone happy.
But it has not. Last week the Supreme Court heard arguments as to whether or not government funds may constitutionally be used to allow parents to decide where their children attend school.
It is a crucial case which I hope, pray and expect will be decided the right way. Much is at stake. But the arguments are really quite simple, for those willing to reason it through.
Vouchers will help children and families, just as school choice has benefited those pursuing higher education. The educational benefit of choosing schools for reasons of instructional quality, instead of economic necessity, are obvious. Voucher programs also end the “double taxation” many families face – paying for public schools through their taxes, and yet also paying to send their children to non-public institutions.
Parental choice will also increase parental involvement. When parents think that education is the government’s business, they tend to leave it to the so-called professional educators. But having chosen a school, and personally directed the dollars that pay for their child’s attendance there, more parents will understand that their role in learning should not be passive. The natural motive to evaluate and assist a service we have chosen and purchased provides an important additional impetus for parental involvement.
Vouchers will broaden participation in access to quality education. After decades of national fretting about unequal access, sometimes with racial overtones that have nothing to do with education, will we reject this simple solution to the plight of those – particularly in the inner city – who simply do not have access to any but failed, monopolistic public-school systems?
One frequent argument against vouchers is they will harm public schools by drawing money and good students out of the public schools and into the private. I have predicted for years that this result would not occur because public schools would react favorably to competition by competing. Now I am pleased that scholarly research into actual voucher programs is showing this very result. Harvard Professor Dr. Caroline Hoxby conducted a study of the effect of Milwaukee’s voucher program on the public schools. Her conclusion was that “it’s amazing how much better the [public] schools that faced competition did,” than the public schools not facing such voucher-related competition. Dr. Hoxby’s research shows that competition from voucher programs does not harm public schools, it actually spurs them to significant improvement. With vouchers, everybody wins.
The issue before the Supreme Court is actually a claim that voucher programs violate the First Amendment, because some government money goes to faith-based schools. But since it is the parents who direct the money, not the government, the use of vouchers to attend religious schools is much more accurately seen as the free exercise of religion, not its establishment. The G.I. Bill does not constitute the “establishment” of religion, even if vets have been using their benefits at BYU and Notre Dame for a full half century. The forthcoming decision may put the more ridiculous versions of the fake “wall of separation” to rest even as it vindicates the right to educational choice.
Vouchers are increasingly a non-partisan issue, and that is a good thing. For school choice is a question of fundamental American principle – it is a Declaration question. The denial of school choice to American parents is government interference with our God-given duty to educate our children. The apparatus of government exists to secure the rights proclaimed by our Declaration, rights which have no meaning or source apart from our relation of duty before God. Government interference with the duty of parents to educate children according to their best understanding is profoundly illegitimate. It is the kind of abuse that, should it become serious, sustained, and intransigent, could even justify the attempt, in the words of the Declaration, “to alter or abolish” that government.
Thank God we are not near that point. We need only to pursue with principle and energy the recovery of our right to educate our children. Vouchers can be an important part of that recovery. And we should all hope that the Supreme Court sees past the liberal smoke on this issue, and clears our way back to educational liberty.