The federal government finally got something right in its response to Hurricane Katrina when President Bush proposed a plan to help displaced students that included tuition vouchers. But as is always the case when someone comes up with an innovative plan to improve our children’s education, our nation’s educators and teachers unions were the first to oppose it.
The American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the nation’s largest teachers union, stated in a press release immediately following the president’s Sept. 15 speech, “We do not believe that the voucher plan in the Department of Education’s proposal is the right way … we urge Congress to work quickly toward solutions that fulfill the needs of students and the schools that serve them, rather than an ideological agenda.”
The National Education Association (NEA), the country’s largest organization for public school teachers, also denounced vouchers as fast as they could. In their statement issued the same day as the AFT’s, the NEA explained, “It is just simply not the time to open up a policy debate on vouchers. We should be focusing our efforts on meeting the needs of these students, not opening up a debate on vouchers.” I couldn’t agree more. Now is the time for teachers unions to stop carping about a policy they don’t like because it’s against their own selfish interests and to start cooperating with the administration’s efforts to help thousands of displaced students.
Before looking at the voucher plan as part of hurricane relief, let’s take a more general look at the debate on vouchers. The school voucher movement, part of a larger movement for school choice, began in the 1950s when Milton Friedman was the first economist to recommend that the government give parents money to pay for part or all of the tuition to send their children to private schools. Since then, various cities and states across the country have experimented with voucher programs.
Some advocates of school vouchers believe it’s the government’s responsibility to finance the best possible education for children, even if it is not received at a public school. Others claim that the cost of tuition at private schools prevents some families from exercising the right to educational choice and that it’s a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment to prevent low-income families from exercising this right.
Parents who want their children to get a religious education in addition to the education they would get at a public school feel that the government should pay for the non-religious part of their children’s education, just as it pays for secular education in public schools.
Lastly, followers of Friedman believe that a free marketplace for education without a government monopoly would foster the most efficient and highest-quality education. They feel that if public schools competed economically with private schools, both would be motivated to improve.
One of the most common arguments against vouchers is that they hurt public schools. If this is true, it’s really one of the best arguments in favor of vouchers. If private schools, once made affordable by vouchers, are so appealing that public schools can’t compete in the marketplace, we should rethink public education. And if public schools do give students the best education as teachers unions claim they do, they’ll have the opportunity to prove that by dominating a liberalized education market.
Opponents of school vouchers also whine about how using taxpayer dollars to pay for tuition to religious schools violates the separation of church and state, a legal principal that is found, um … nowhere, in the Constitution. Vouchers for religious private schools violate neither separation of church and state nor the Establishment Clause of the Constitution, which prevents Congress from establishing a national church. Still, some people oppose vouchers based on the claim that the government is promoting religion by funding these schools. This is ridiculous; the tuition vouchers are used mostly to pay for textbooks and materials, employees’ salaries, extracurricular activities and basic operating expenses. The government pays for the same exact thing for children who go to public school. Parents of children who go to private schools pay taxes too!
If parents of inner-city school children voluntarily choose to send their children to a religious or non-religious private school so they can get a better education, you’d think liberals could allow some of their taxes to be shifted from public education to tuition vouchers so that these parents could afford to make that choice. I guess the allegedly pro-choice party doesn’t really support choices that don’t involve the fate of a potential human life.
Returning to hurricane relief, here’s another gem from the NEA: “Vouchers do nothing to solve the problems created by Hurricane Katrina.” According to The Washington Post, out of the $1.9 billion Bush’s plan designates for students in kindergarten through 12th grade whose schools were destroyed, $488 million would be set aside for tuition vouchers for private schools. Parents of displaced students would be able to receive a voucher from the federal government of up to $7,500 per child for one year.
If private schools rebuild faster than public schools, or if it’s easier for parents to find private schools for their children, this plan gives them that opportunity. An unusually large proportion of children in New Orleans attended Catholic schools; vouchers would make it affordable for them to go to a similar school where the adjustment might be a little easier. I’m not an education professional like the members of the NEA, but it seems to me that vouchers help solve the problem.
When children displaced by the hurricane are settled back in school, the rest of the country should consider voucher programs. Due to its role in post-hurricane reconstruction, it’s appropriate for the federal government to issue vouchers in this case. Under normal circumstances, however, education policy is reserved to the states. It’s time to reopen the debate on school vouchers in the legislatures of all 50 states.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
