Vouching for public schools

The March issue of the Sam Adams Review, Boston University’s new right-wing publication, features several extreme and misinformed pieces of propaganda. Among the highly rhetorical and slanted analysis was College of Arts and Sciences senior Chris Coval’s well-written, but off-target, piece that argued private school voucher programs are a good idea and do not violate the separation between church and state.

Coval begins his discussion by making a fundamentally incorrect assumption — the assumption that the concern over the union of church and state is “the last remaining argument that stands in the way of implementing new school choice program.” This is untrue.

The primary reason private school vouchers are a bad idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the separation between church and state. School vouchers are a bad idea simply because they will drain money from failing school systems, which are in the most dire need of help. If a parent has the option of withdrawing tax dollars from a district which is already failing, the school will be sent further into crisis, leaving remaining students in an even worse situation.

Coval also argues voucher programs are intended to introduce an element of competition into the somewhat monopolistic public school system. He doesn’t fail to note that this same element of free-market competition can be achieved with a public school voucher system, but he notes that public schools would have no incentive to accept a voucher program because it typically offers less money per child than the school would ordinarily receive in tax dollars.

Here, he gets at another one of my arguments — the fact that most feasible private school voucher systems offer inadequate funding for most families and are, thus, unfair. Most voucher systems give families an education credit that is universal across income levels — for example, all families would be eligible for a $1,500 credit to send a child to a private school. But because private school tuition is so much more costly than the amount of the voucher, only the wealthier families would be able to afford to make up the difference in order to send their children to private school. This dilemma leaves children from low-income families behind in schools that receive increasingly less money from taxpayers and that are less able to attract good staff.

But even if a private school voucher program provided full tuition for the poorest families, it would still be unfair. Perhaps this system would benefit students whose parents had an interest in working with the system. But for those children whose parents are neglectful, abusive, disinterested or for immigrant or non-English speaking families who are unable to decipher the intricacies of the system, there would be no options. Public schools would become a destitute wasteland, as they would lack the funding which would be allocated to foot the bill of the top students’ tuition to private school. The students left behind would be further marginalized. Our public school system would turn into a breeding ground for a poverty-stricken underclass.

Yet even if the government worked out a way to provide for vouchers without touching the budget for public schools — even if the government somehow increased funding to public schools as they explored private school vouchers by, say, eliminating Defense Department contracts in Jesse Helms’ home district — even then, school vouchers would be unfair.

In many areas, the idea of “school choice” is a moot point because so few options exist that a student may essentially be forced to attend either a failing public school or a parochial school — most often, a Catholic school. One Ohio court recently shot down a private school voucher system for just this reason. Clearly, when students are forced to choose between an utterly unacceptable public school and a religious one, the government has effectively violated the separation between church and state.

Here we return to Coval’s first argument. He claims vouchers have a secular purpose because “they are intended to give poor children better educational opportunities.” He writes that schools that participate in private school voucher programs would be subject to “educational standards.” But what educational standards? Don’t private schools exist so that communities have the option to circumvent government “educational standards”? I can’t fathom a system where government money was used in schools where the government could not make stipulations for standards. But I also can’t fathom an America where private schools aren’t allowed to operate free of government interference.

Coval also correctly acknowledges the potential entanglement between church and state that would occur if the government stepped in to ask private schools to remove overtly religious activities from academics. He says this problem can be dealt with easily — “separate funds can be set up and common sense guidelines established.” I sure don’t want to see the government setting up “common sense guidelines” that ask Catholic schools to please remove Bible study from the curriculum, but this would be necessary to truly avoid the mixing of church and state. How ironic that this smacks of entanglement at the same time.

“I cannot image a more contentious system,” Coval writes, “than the current one in which parents and school boards fight over things like sex education, evolution vs. creationism and school prayer.” Perhaps a private school voucher system that coerces students to attend private and parochial schools would put an end to the contention. But I can’t imagine a system where students and parents lose their right to take part in these debates.