For those of you who are shaky on what vouchers are, here’s a summary. The program centers around the idea that one has a right to the best education possible. It also assumes (rightly) that some schools are failing to provide adequate, let alone satisfactory, academic program. Thus, parents of students in these schools blame the schools for their child’s failure and insist that their child be able to attend “better” schools. Hence, the school voucher program. Given that every person must attend school up to a certain age by law (varies by state), the voucher program allows parents to take their money that would be used to pay for their failing school and use it to pay for their schooling elsewhere, public or private.
Before I get to vouchers, I want to challenge the idea that we have a “right” to the best education possible, or even a state-administered education at all. The constitution neglects to mention education. Thus, the responsibility falls on the individual states to decide what to do with education. In essence, states can decide to have nothing to do with education or everything to do with education, but it is their choice and it was never meant to be a federal issue. The point is that we are not guaranteed an education, or even a good education, by the constitution.
Federal involvement in schools, including legislature, court decisions, and the appointment of the Department of Education as a cabinet level position, has yet to reap any benefits. Schools have never rebounded to the level they were at in 1963 as demonstrated by SAT math and verbal scpuores (even after the test was renormed in 1995 to make scores higher). Students leaving our schools today also leave with less knowledge of our country and the values for which it stood. To make matters worse, instead of repealing the unsuccessful attempts the government as made at correcting American education, they reform, either with money, fancy laws that seem noble (No Child Left Behind), or with politicky phrases that lie and try to tell us that we are among the most (and best) educated people in the world. The point of all of this is to show that vouchers were just the next bad federal reform in line.
School vouchers will mark the end of private education (and more importantly, of Christian private education). It is verifiable by any recent study that private schools are better than public schools. While some may debate me on this issue, let it rest to say that students in private schools, at the very least, perform better on the SAT and ACT.[1] When vouchers become a national commodity, parents will opt their children out of “failing” public schools and into superior private schools. Private schools, having an influx of students, will have to, as the cliché puts it, expand or die. Expansion will come in the form of increased teaching staff and administrators, and most importantly, more facilities. To afford these facilities (outside a generous outside donation), private schools will need to obtain loans. As time goes on, more public schools will be abandoned for the promised land of private schools. Private schools will experience a short period of prosperity due to the increased number of schools and students attending them.
Here’s the lynchpin point: Eventually, enough people in power will not welcome the idea of allowing federal/state funds (which is what vouchers are) going into religiously affiliated schools because of its “obvious” breach of church and state.[2] So what will happen? In order to not have federal money going into private, religious institutions, legislators will force schools either to become secular (that is, no longer religiously affiliated) or not accept voucher money. No matter what happens, the schools lose. Either the schools denounce that in which they believe or they die since they would be unable to repay the loans they took out to expand (apart from generous donations).
Here are some counterarguments I know are floating out there:
1. When private, religious schools can no longer accept federal money while remaining true to their faith, they can simply raise the cost of tuition. This is exactly what the people behind vouchers want to happen. Vouchers, proclaiming the right to the best education, also proclaims that this best education also ought to be as cheap as possible. The rising cost of tuition will cause parents to move their children either back to public schools or to another, cheaper, private, voucher-accepting, secular school.
2. Another counterargument will claim that religious private schools can simply drop their religious affiliation but maintain their mode of operations, including expression of faith. The one who argues this point has too much faith in government. Trust me, when federal money pours into recently unaffiliated private schools, the government will earmark it in such a way that no expression of faith on school grounds will be permissible.
Even if these two counterarguments hold true, they still do not get at the overall purpose of vouchers: to make private schools public. It’s taking the better education of the few and giving it away to the many. And we obviously cannot and should not allow this to happen because public education in
Don’t believe me? Our schools today are full of disinterested students from disinterested and often broken families who have lost all sense of purpose in education (and life!) outside the future material wealth they will acquire as a result of them enduring thirteen years of school. Society demands young people of character in its workplaces but fails to acknowledge what exactly good character is. Schools promote a postmodern view of moral relativity, relying on programs such as Values Clarification, which shamelessly admits that there is no Right and that any student’s guess at Right is just as good as the teacher’s. Addicted to the dancing colors of the television and the Internet, students expect to be entertained and amused instead of being instructed in the great subjects of the past. This fact alone has led to an entire shift in educational philosophy from teacher-centered learning to student-discovery “learning.” Not only do students today “discover” their own morality, they also “discover” their own education. Since students are in charge of their own learning, they decide what they will allow themselves to learn based on how it will best serve them in the future, not how much it will better them as American citizens. So the student who wants to learn about the business world will tune out in Western Civilization class and the scientist-to-be will only study enough Shakespeare and Bunyan to perform adequately on the test.
I would almost be so bold as to suggest that all of the ailments of American education can be summarized in one word: Progress. Death to the past and present! We have learned all we need to learn from the past; now is the time to move forward! History isn’t applicable anymore. Only a handful of people ever need to know Mathematics, not me. What does someone writing a book hundreds of years ago have to say to me today; I’ll gather all I need to know from the TV and movies. The morality of my grandfather is not for me; I will create my own! Look at the previous paragraph and try to prove that progress is not tied to each and every of the listed failures of American compulsory schooling.
But that was all just a parenthesis to my main thesis, and that is this: If private schools become public, we will have lost all hope for American education. As just described, public schools have failed us. Why would we want to bring private schools, which are clearly superior, down to the level of public schools, which are failing and deteriorating? This is truly the establishment of equality in its cruelest form: if public schools cannot be made better, then the next best thing is to make private schools worse. And when private schools become increasingly public, its students will inevitably achieve (and become) like public school students.
Though not having done too much research on the matter, I would be inclined to suggest that we ought not to make all private schools public, but make all public schools private. Don’t charge a property tax and keep the government out of education. This means that the government will have to do a lot of repealing, but frankly, it would be quite easy.
There is much more to say on this matter, and I admittedly am not very organized in my argument, but I hope that this at least has made the reader think about the perils of school vouchers. I wish readers will comment on this matter, not so much on my proper bashing of public schools, but rather on the argument of vouchers killing private religious institutions in the long run.
As a postscript, I anticipate someone will point out that I (or they) graduated from public school and do not exhibit all the ill effects of public schools. True; not everyone leaves public school as a monster (massive use of hyperbole). I submit that the best way to combat the ugliness of public schools is with involved parents. In fact, parents ought to be more influential in their child’s education than the schools themselves…but that is another topic.
[1] Notice the phrase “at the very least.” Better performance on standardized tests is about the last thing I would care about in a school because those tests have a very utilitarian purpose. I use this argument simply because it is the easiest to prove and will enable me to proceed with my argument without the reader arguing that private schools are not necessarily superior to public schools.
[2] It is not a breach of Church and State. The Founding Fathers did not include this phrase in the constitution and allowing money to go into religiously affiliated schools does not constitute a breach of the federal “establishment of religion” clause. Those who think schools, public or private, can have nothing to do with religion should reexamine the constitution before making such a ridiculous claim.
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