School Choice

It shouldn’t be controversial: Parents are responsible for seeing to it that their kids are educated, and they must decide how best to fulfill this responsibility. School personnel shuttling off children for abortions or secretively encouraging them to “identify” as the opposite sex are wrong. Teachers attempting to undermine parents’ authority and values are wrong. Parents choosing to homeschool, or to send their children to private schools or microschools or whatever, should be supported and not treated with suspicion.

“But what about abusive parents?” They exist. They must be stopped. Parental authority does not allow parents to torture, abuse, or neglect their children. But it is also worthwhile to ask what is “abusive”; teaching children that the Bible or the Quran is true is considered by some to be abusive. I believe that the Bible, not the Quran, is true, and I’d love for Muslims to convert to Christianity, but I would not consider a devout Muslim parent to be abusive simply for teaching the tenets of his faith. Further, a lot of lousy parenting is not bad enough to merit the use of the a-word, which can be stretched beyond all useful meaning and used to justify intervention when some other entity disagrees with the parent’s decisions.

Humans are sinners. The institutions they create will never be perfect, and the solutions they reach will have drawbacks. We should always consider these drawbacks and attempt to minimize harm, carefully, without causing more harm in our attempt to remedy the situation.

I’ve been considering this as the “school choice” movement strengthens, along with its rallying cry “Fund the kids, not the schools,” meaning that parents should be given the tax dollars that currently can be spent only on public schools; this money can then go to fund the parents’ choice of educational method for their children. This is a good movement. I wholeheartedly approve of parents being given more options to educate their children. Schools are there to serve the students, not the other way around, and it is a good public investment to support parents’ choices of schools by allowing tax dollars to be applied to homeschooling or private schools. However, there will be problems, and we should consider these as well.

The first issue is price inflation. Widespread government subsidies of private schools are likely to drive up the cost of private schools. Vouchers for kids from poor families seem like a no-brainer, and it’s difficult for me to believe that anyone bemoaning the way the system fails poor children wouldn’t support a means for them to escape dangerous, ineffective schools. Nevertheless, a look at the way college costs have escalated makes me very nervous that the same thing may happen to K-12 schools if parents are given budgets.

Another problem has probably already occurred to anyone who’s dealt with confusing tax issues, or trying to work out government-subsidized health insurance, or any other instance in which the government gives money to people. It’s a big, complicated bureaucracy prone to screwups, and a great deal of money is wasted in inefficient operation and inappropriate allocation of funds. How’d those COVID handouts for business go? Anyone think that the government is going to learn from its mistakes and–oh, I can’t even finish that sentence. Millions of dollars will be denied families who ought to have it, and be given to fakers and fraudsters.

We also know that government money comes with strings. Oh, you aren’t affirming your child’s new pronouns? You want to send them to a school that teaches that marriage is between one man and one woman? That’s a violation of federal principles; we can’t possibly fund that.

Finally, there are some terrible parents out there who will take money intended for their children’s education and use it to buy drugs, or Louis Vuitton gear, or something else. It happens, and it’s very difficult to implement a measure that prevents abuse while not creating endless hoops for families to jump through.

None of this means that the system doesn’t need to change, radically. In some districts, it’s hard to see how schools could do worse than they already do. Where’s the accountability for districts in which greater than 3/4 of the high school students read at elementary level? I’m a little tired of hearing that we need to give more money to schools that are serving their students so badly, then pointing to home factors as the big reason for their failure.

Oh, you mean parents are important to their children’s education? You don’t say.

Then let’s support them.