Response to voucher distortions

Voucher myopia digs at the school choice proposal in Utah, but brings up the usual mythical arguments against school choice.

As a parent who sent our children to a private school for a while in Austin, I found the experience a complete rebuttal to tired argument of opponents of school choice.
(When we moved our kids into public schools, it only confirmed our experience.)

We found a school that could better educate our children at half the cost of a public school education, at only $3000 tuition. It served people who mainly of limited means. I found that even poor parents are motivated to make large sacrifices to educate their children, in some cases more motivated and self-sacrificing than well-to-do parents.

We also experienced a remarkably good education that was built on old-fashioned technology and teaching principles. The experience proved that effective learning has very little to do with the level of amenities in the school, such as how fancy the buildings are (the school buildings were not great, but the learning was 1-2 grades ahead of the best public schools in Austin); quality education has everything to do with how the teachers teach and more importantly how parents help motivate their children to learn. I learned that in reality, all schooling is homeschooling.

These parents who sent kids there did a double service to the community: They were sacrificing financially so that their children would have a better education, and they were saving the public schools from the $100,000 burden of taking a child through a K-12 education. We really are backwards in our thinking in not thanking or wanting more kids in private schools and less of a burden to taxpayer financed education.

In Utah, the proposed $3,000 parental voucher for education could and would indeed be used by the same kinds of parents willing to make some financial sacrifice to better their children's education. The idea that incentives only work if they are 100% is myth easily debunked by any 10% off sale. Incentives always work at the margin. There is competition today, with homeschooling and private schools being chosen even with the cost and inconvenience compared with just sending your child to public school.If 3% go to private school with no vouchers, each incremental subsidy would increase that amount. Choice and competition is limited by the financial advantage of public school subsidies, and as the playing field gets leveled more, that choice and competition will increase.

Any partial state subsidy will clearly give more educational choices to more parents, whether they are low-income parents able to spend $1,000 a year for a school that has $4,000 tuition, or spend $3,000 at a school charging $6,000, We are told "only" 14 percent of Utah schools are under $3,000 in tuition - well, that is still a choice available for some low-income parents for a no-cost education. Good luck finding even a single public school that will educate children that cheaply and yet have willing customers paying for it.

It is absurd to talk of vouchers "hurting" the public schools, as if students exist to serve schools. Schools should exist to serve students! And if vouchers provide choice for students that leads to more effective education, then it is a good thing.

Thus the bizarre conclusion:
"While vouchers will not hurt public education within the first five years, they would needlessly be giving a government handout to these families at the expense of the average taxpayer."

Giving money for the express purpose of educating a child is "needlessly giving a government handout"? Yet that is the sole purpose for the hundreds of billions of dollars we spend on public education. Or is there some agenda besides educating children that drives the insistence on the inefficient, monopolistic school system.

"No matter how much voucher proponents claim the right of parents to use their tax money to choose where their child is educated, that money is not their own."

Education taxes are raised and spent for the ostensible benifit of the children, yet the children or their parents should have no right or claim on how it is used? That socialistic ethos leads to the unaccountable system we have today.

"Let's assume that the average private school is significantly better than the average public school. If I am middle-class, why should I subsidize a poorer family's child's opportunity to have an education far better than the one my child receives? "

So the 'logic' is that it is wiser for the middle-class to keep the poor locked into bad schools that cost twice as much to the taxpayers, than let the poor family get ahead? Apparently the win/win concept is lost on this man.

We know the way it ought to be: Schools should serve students, and the money spent on education should be focussed on what is best for the schoolchildren, not the 'system'; parents should have a choice and say in their children's education; the education system should have accountability, allow for competition, and not be a monopoly; and excellence should be the goal for all not just for some.

To be pro-school-choice is to be pro-school-children.