A School Voucher Program We Can All Live With

Nearly everyone agrees the educational system is broken. Nearly everyone (except for crazy people) wants our children to have a better education than they now get. Where we disagree is on how to accomplish better the goal of better education for our children. Enter the school voucher debate. There are many arguments against and for, but if the goal is truly better education for our children, then we shouldn’t let those with ulterior motives get in the way. I believe we can create a voucher program that addresses every legitimate concern out there. Here are some of those concerns, along with solutions for each one.

Problem: The public school voucher program will drain money from the schools that need it most.

Solution: Create a voucher program that doesn’t drain any money from public schools. That is, if a student opts to leave a public school, the public school continues to receive just as much funding as it did before.

Problem: The public school voucher program, marketed as a plan for the poor, is of most benefit to the wealthy since it subsidizes the private educations they’re already paying for.

Solution: Allow only the poor to receive vouchers.

Problem: Private institutions are not directly accountable for their actions. There is no way to ensure they will act responsibly.

Solution: Create a way to ensure they act responsibly. Namely, through standardized testing administered by a public establishments. If parents send their child to a private school and the child fails the standardized tests then the parents would not receive the voucher the next year and the child would be required to attend a public school once again. Parents would have an incentive to make sure their child studies harder in order to pass the tests, and the private schools would have the incentive to make sure the child does well so that they can continue receiving the voucher money.

Problem: Since most of the schools in the program are religious, government funding violates the 1st Amendment separation of church and state.

Solution: This is debatable. Since the voucher money could go to any school, whether religious or not, and since schools could teach any religion, it can’t be said that the money would definitely benefit any particular religion, or necessarily religion at all. Private schools can be run by Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, or atheists. I’d like to say that in the spirit of compromise and cooperation, let’s just say that vouchers can’t be used to purchase education from schools that teach adherence to a certain religion as part of their curriculum, but then it becomes necessary to ask who would judge whether a certain curriculum were promoting a certain religion or not. Such a system would seem to be inviting lawsuits from groups opposed to private schools, religion in general, or the voucher program, rendering the system a mess.

It is more realistic and seemingly constitutional to promote a system that allows voucher funds to be distributed to private institutions that may or may not teach religion, as long as no one religion is being favored by the government (including atheism here as a “religion”).

Problem: Public schools must accept everyone regardless of disabilities, test scores, religion, or other characteristics; private schools can show favoritism or discrimination in selecting students.

Solution: Then let’s make it illegal for schools that receive voucher funding to discriminate based on those criteria. Easy enough.

Problem: Public schools will become dumping grounds for the unwanted.

Solution: I suppose this is the same argument as brought up above and therefore could be solved the same way.

Problem: Private schools don’t do a better job of educating.

Solution: Standardized testing as described above addresses this issue.

And here are some further concerns, as opposed to problems, and responses.

Concern: Why should the public pay to send any children to private schools?

Response: This is the same question someone without children of public school age could ask. Why should I, who don’t have any children in school, pay for someone else’s child to go to school? If the answer is “Education of the general populace benefits even those who don’t have children” then whether or not that education is obtained through a public or a private school doesn’t seem to make a difference, all other things being equal.

Concern: Vouchers do not really save money.

Response: First, this is a technical question and without specific data no adequate response can be made. What evidence is there that existing voucher programs do not save money? If they are not saving money, are they costing more money? How much more? If those voucher programs were canceled would money be saved? How much?

Second, if they’re not saving money why aren’t they? Is it that vouchers are bad in general, or that this specific voucher program hasn’t been set up right? Has it been sabotaged or restricted in such a way that it’s destined to fail, or has it been given a fair chance to succeed or fail on its own merits?

Third, even if they’re not saving money, are the results worth the extra expenditure?
Concern: Vouchers are designed to end public education.

Response: Perhaps there are those who would like to see an end to publicly managed schools, but if this would be a bad thing then make that case, rather than assuming it’s a given.

Concern: School vouchers won’t work.

Response: People also said we couldn’t put a man on the moon, but it seems best to reserve judgment on an experiment until after the experiment has been performed. My concern is that the “experiment” might be tampered with in such a way as to make it fail, or that even if the experiment is successful that there might be those who deny the facts, just as there are those who say we never actually did put a man on the moon.

Concern: Voucher money will go to schools that brainwash kids to be conservative robots.

Response: That’s the same concern many parents have about what is happening at public schools, only replace the word “conservative” with “liberal”. No teacher can call themselves perfectly objective and unbiased. Vouchers merely give parents the choice to have their children exposed to one bias or another.