- Many libertarians cannot contain their enthusiasm over
the Supreme Court's decision last Thursday in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris.
This 5-4 decision allows Cleveland, Ohio parents to use federal education
money, otherwise known as vouchers, to send their children to private (and
religiously-based) as well as public schools. It has been described as
a major victory for school choice. Some writers are even comparing this
decision to Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.
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- For example, Joseph Bast of the Chicago-based Heartland
Institute wrote: "This is a major victory for civil liberties and
for low-income families who are trapped in under-performing public schools.
From now on, school vouchers are now clearly the preferred way to improve
the quality of schools for all children. This decision is one of several
recent developments, among them Florida's first state-wide voucher plan
and Secretary of Education Rod Paige's advocacy of vouchers, showing the
growing momentum for the school choice movement. Government schools cannot
remain islands of centralized government control in a world of free markets
and private innovation. Change is coming, and not even teacher unions will
be able to block the door much longer."
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- Likewise, Clint Bolick, of the Washington-based Institute
for Justice and the author of a forthcoming book Voucher Wars to be published
early next year by the Cato Institute, stated that "[n]early half
a century ago, the U.S. Supreme Court made a sacred promise of equal educational
opportunities for all school children. On Thursday, June 27, it made good
on that promise." Bolick adds that the Court has "recognized
that school choice is not about establishing religion, but expanding educational
opportunities for children who need them desperately."
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- Libertarian enthusiasm for vouchers is not a new development.
A few years ago, in What It Means to Be a Libertarian, Charles Murray wrote:
"I side with those who are prepared to accept government funding.
Parents of every school-age child would be given a chit worth of a certain
sum of money that they could take to any school they wanted How big should
the voucher be? About $3,000 a year seems right, though the amount is open
to discussion. The point of the voucher is to give parents options. If
$3,000 turned out to be too low to achieve the desired effects, it could
be increased."
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- Murray's remarks are interesting, given their implications.
Let's do some quick arithmetic. With roughly 53.1 million school-age children,
suppose there was a voucher of $3,000 for each child. That would add $159.3
billion per year to the federal education budget and make it five times
what it is now! A libertarian who would expand instead of contract the
federal budget? Surely something is amiss here.
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- Libertarian philosopher Tibor R. Machan expresses a far
more cautious endorsement. In a forthcoming article he singles out the
notion that in a society characterized by ever-expansionist government
we achieve "a very minimal victory" given that the Supreme Court
was persuaded of the justice for parents of having "the state give
them (back?) some funds so as to pay instead for the private education
they select for their children." Professor Machan observes that the
one "vital favorable aspect of the court's decision is that citizens
will have an easier time to get out of the tyranny, the one-size-fits-all,
the indoctrination filled public education system." Despite inherent
faults in the voucher idea we should support it because "a small step
will have been taken toward removing the state from its position as the
sole word on history, civics, religion, biology, sex, marriage, social
science and what have you. The voucher programs, despite their marred nature,
encourage diversity, something that is much closer to what a free education
system would provide than what we have via public education. And they do
not prohibit going out a fully private educational alternative for those
who can afford being double billed."
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- Professor Machan is in effect saying, given that we must
choose between vouchers and complete government monopoly, let us choose
the lesser of two evils. Why does he see the nature of vouchers as "marred"?
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- He answers: "I recall way back in the 1970s there
were those who argued that any kind of voucher program is useless, indeed,
dangerous, because, among other things, getting private education supported
this way will have intolerable government strings attached. [O]nce the
government's fingers have touched the dough, it can then insist that certain
'standards' its bureaucrats lay down be followed. This, then, deprives
the private schools of their autonomy or independence, thus corrupting
them irreparably." Professor Machan appears to believe that this danger
is outweighed by the victory won in that parents can use government money
to send their children to private schools if they wish.
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- I beg to differ. The first rule of federal funding is
that with every dollar there are strings attached, and this is a much bigger
danger with vouchers than any of the above writers would have us believe.
It seems very odd to me that only Professor Machan seems to have noticed
this. Some of the strings may not be apparent at first; bureaucrats may
be inherently power-hungry, but rarely operate in an all-at-once fashion
(the initial effects on our paychecks of the progressive income tax instituted
in 1913 were negligible, after all). But eventually they do become apparent,
and then the problem Professor Machan identified becomes manifest. Educrats
are able to use the fact that the money is coming from the federal government
- i.e., from taxpayers - to assert control. Federal education money means
federal education control. Just ask leaders at colleges such as Hillsdale
and Grove City who had to fight major lawsuits to keep free of federal
interference; one of the upshots of these lawsuits is that no student attending
either can accept a single federal dollar - for anything.
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- Vouchers mean control. I fear this will become evident
should vouchers ever become established, in which case it will be too late.
There are warning signs now, if one is aware of them. The most recent School
Liberator (published by Marshall Fritz's Alliance for the Separation of
School and State) quoted Peoria, Ill. school board member John Day stating,
"If [a voucher proposal] does happen, educators want to ensure any
school receiving tax dollars must follow the same rules and be held accountable
to the state, including accepting any student and administering standardized
tests. Currently private schools do not have to do those things."
Day made no secret of what would be the goal of the educrat in a voucher-dominated
educational system: a power grab. "If public funds are to be used
to support private schools, then private schools should be held accountable
to the same laws and statutes that public schools must abide by."
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- We absolutely must realize that with government money
comes government control. Home school and private Christian school advocate
Rev. E. Ray Moore of the Exodus Mandate project, in his just-published
book Let My Children Go, makes this point forcefully in a section entitled
"Vouchering Toward Gomorrah." Rev. Moore argues that vouchers
threaten the autonomy of private Christian schools. Citing Marshall Fritz,
he singles out three problems with the voucher idea. First, vouchers help
trivialize private education by making it easier to obtain. "If parents
must work extra hours to send their children to a private school, this
sends the message that quality education is important to them." Education
should not be simply dropping Johnny off on the doorstep of a private school
instead of a government school. Second, private religious schools will
eventually be compelled to accept every student whose parents present the
voucher. Thus they lose control of their admissions policies and find themselves
facing many of the same troublesome students that subsist in the government
schools.
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- In the hands of the John Days of the educratic world,
they will soon lose control of their curriculums as well. Third, because
they do represent easy money coming from the government, vouchers have
more in common with welfare than their proponents recognize. Lew Rockwell,
author of the most important current article connecting vouchers with welfare,
wrote some time back, "Vouchers represent not a shrinkage of the welfare
state but an expansion, the equivalent of food stamps for private schools."
Rev. Moore accordingly refers to them as "school stamps." He
fears that if the voucher movement spreads and becomes established, parents
will come to expect vouchers. They will become just one more entitlement.
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- This will open the door to left-liberal control over
vouchers. Rev. Moore quotes Jonathan Rauch as having chastised his fellow
liberals back in 1997 for their opposition to vouchers. Rauch stated that
"[v]ouchers are a classic opportunity to equalize opportunity. Why
should the poor be denied more control over their most important means
of social advancement, when soccer moms and latte drinkers take for granted
that they can buy their way out of a school (or school district) that abuses
or annoys them. By embracing school choice liberals could at one stroke
emancipate the District's schoolchildren " This further illustrates
the welfarist nature of vouchers and shows how they mean a very short term
victory for "school choice" but are really a long-term instrument
of control that could well erode the independence and hence the effectiveness
of private schools.
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- Vouchers are indeed tempting. Easy money always is. Most
defenders of vouchers are sincere, I am sure. They believe they are doing
the right thing for parents and for children. But the case against vouchers
outweighs the case in their favor, which seems limited to Tibor Machan's
observation that vouchers offer a small island of choice in a vast sea
of government expansionism. This, however, is a rear-guard action against
the inevitable trend, which would be eventual federal control over all
forms of education in this country.
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- Government money is always trouble. First, it must come
from somewhere, and there are only two places it can come from: out of
all our pockets in the form of tax dollars, or from inflating the currency
and continuing to mortgage the country's future in the ever-expanding ocean
of debt. Second, whether the money goes to individuals in the form of direct
welfare handouts, to corporations in the form of "investments,"
or to parents as educational vouchers, it threatens to create more dependency
than we have now. Third, and most important, it will increase the spiral
of government control by extending this control to private schools. Eventually
it be impossible for parents to send their children to autonomous religion-based
schools. Sure as I am sitting here, once children are attending such schools
via vouchers, some atheist will challenge them on the grounds provided
by the First Amendment's separations clause. The case will again be fought
all the way to the Supreme Court, and this time the outcome might be very
different.
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- Let us stop the "school stamp" juggernaut while
we can, before we wake up one day and discover that federal educrats have
connived their way into the same control over private schools as they have
long had over so-called public ones - the result being that private schools
would be private in name only.
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- July 6, 2002
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- Steven Yates has a PhD in philosophy and is a Margaret
"Peg" Rowley Fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He is
the author of Civil Wrongs: What Went Wrong With Affirmative Action (ICS
Press, 1994), and numerous articles and reviews. At any given time he is
at work on any number of articles and book projects, including a science
fiction novel.
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- Copyright © 2002 LewRockwell.com >http://www.lewrockwell.com/yates/yates58.html
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