A Lesson In School Vouchers
By Tom Teepen, Syndicated Columnist
Cox Newspapers, Atlanta, GA
Ok, school vouchers are constitutional but so is pounding your toes with a hammer. Neither is a great idea.
Vouchers have been pitched by their fans as a surefire way to educate kids who some public schools-ant it is important to emphasize, only some-are failing to teach, but note of the several pilot programs so far has delivered.
That won`t stop the folks pushing the program. The game here is political, not educational.
Remember, vouchers got their first big push in the Republican Party, now the main engine of the voucher train, as a way to reward and hold blue-collar Catholics, traditionally Democratic, who had gone for Ronald Reagan and fundamentalist Protestants who at the time were becoming-and have since been regularized as-foot soldiers of the GOP.
That vouchers would be a boon to common, if no longer public, education was a late rationale for them.
Vouchers were and remain a second-hand way to bootleg big hunks to tax money to parochial schools and Christian academies where preacher-driven parents can hide their children from such secular horrors as evolution.
To justify vouchers, supporters have put it about that public schools are failing. Some are, mainly those charged with teaching the children who come to classes least prepared to learn, from backgrounds impoverished not only economically. Most public schools are teaching their students well.
Vouchers` largely conservative backers have a point when they argue that competition can help sharpen education methods, but competition is not only possible within public systems. It is darn near amuck in some-with magnet schools, charter schools, loosey-goosey alternative schools and straight-laced traditional models. Uniforms, no uniforms. Even, now, in some places, single-sex schools.
The public is sensibly not ga-ga about vouchers. There have been 23 state and local referenda on voucher proposals. Every one failed.
No matter. Ironically, it is voters and taxpayers who are now unlikely to get much choice in the matter. With the constitutionality issue settled, strong political forces are ready to storm school boards and state legislatures to create voucher systems.
What impends is a potentially huge new entitlement.
The beneficiaries of vouchers-private-school parents-will join ideological activists in pushing for vouchers. Wherever vouchers are adopted, the system is bound to attract more families with its subsidies. Indeed, that`s the very idea.
Additionally, more proprietors-whether religious or commercial-will be attracted into the scrum, widening the constituency that is ready to demand subsidy increases once the schools begin to jack up their tuitions, as vouchers will encourage them to do.
With every new turn of the spiral, public schools will be left with fewer resources, fewer top-notch teachers, fewer able students and more of the students who are hardest to teach and least attractive to admission officers and with the students whose parents can`t make up the shortfall between the voucher subsidy and private school tuition.
This, we are assured, will be really good for education.
