The future of school choice - Education - school vouchers and educational tax credits

IN UPHOLDING the constitutionality of the Cleveland voucher program in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris in June, 2002, the Supreme Court affirmed that it hardly constitutes a government establishment of religion if religious schools are among the choices parents can freely make. By implication, government schools don't have an automatic claim on a child's education superior to the choice of his or her parents.

The constitutionality of a particular, and very successful, voucher program clears away a major roadblock to expanding freedom of choice in education. It is rekindling the debate about breaking up the government monopoly in schooling and giving parents and children new options. Vouchers are one way to do that, but so are tax credits, whose constitutionality also has been affirmed by court rulings. In the months and years to come, some states may adopt vouchers; others may opt for tax credits; and some may embrace both. Choice opponents such as the teacher unions--what we call the "send the cash, keep the change" crowd--are clearly on the defensive now, and that is big news for the country.

When Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman first advanced the concept of educational vouchers a half-century ago, he was a voice in the wilderness. Few people heard his call, and fewer still took Friedman seriously. The overwhelming majority of Americans had become accustomed to government assigning their children to public schools by virtue of their residence, and even when they were unhappy with the results, they rarely thought of "choice" as a solution. As the political power of teacher unions grew in the 1960s, it may have seemed to those in the nascent school choice movement that the odds against them were getting longer, not shorter.

Yet, ideas, as author Richard Weaver put it, have consequences. They can spur revolutions in the political, social, and economic landscape. They change the course of history. They bring down Berlin Walls and entire empires. They take the unmovable and move it.

A presidential commission awakened the nation in 1983 with this alarming declaration: "If an unfriendly power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war." A few years later, John Chubb and Terry Moe published a book, Politics, Markets and America's Schools, that put school choice on the frontlines. The choice movement took off, as think tanks, parent groups, and activist organizations devoted to it proliferated.

The empowerment and transformation of parents into active agents is the foundation of educational choice theory. It is a fact of life that, as human beings, we take a greater interest in things over which we have some power of discretion than in those we feel relatively helpless to affect. That is why many people spend more time shopping for the car they want--visiting dealership showrooms and comparing prices and features--than in picking the right schools for their children. For 100 years or more, governments have assigned our children to local public schools based upon where our homes are, and we pay for those schools whether or not we are able to choose an alternative. That is a strong financial incentive to stay put. The very nature of public, monopolistic bureaucracies is such that raising objections to what the government offers is frustrating, time-consuming, and often futile. However, when parents are able to say "no, thanks" with speed and ease, they can and will step up to the plate and behave like real consumers of education who are empowered to start shopping around.

Some parents shop around now. The very wealthy have always had school choice. For them, the price of admission to a good public school may be merely the cost of a moving van and a nice, big house. Or, because they can afford to, they will simply pay twice--once in private school tuition and then in taxes for the public system they can reject. A surprising number of poor, inner-city families opt for nonpublic alternatives, too, but only at enormous sacrifice. Sadly for millions of low-income Americans, education for their children means being stuck with failing and dangerous public schools that spend too much to achieve too little.

Some people say that, in an educational system that allows for parental choice, the more-thoughtful and involved parents may opt out of a particular school, leaving behind to languish in despair the children of less-caring parents. This ignores the synergy that happens when choice and competition are at work. We like to put it this way: It takes only a few patrons to leave the restaurant for the chef to get the message to improve the menu. In other words, choice benefits everybody, including those who choose not to employ it fully themselves. That is the magic that has made American free markets the envy of the world.

If Americans had done to the provision of food what they have allowed to happen with their schools, they would have government farms producing food for sale in government grocery stores. You would be assigned to one, and that is where you would have to buy your groceries. You could patronize a different store, but for the crime of wanting something better for your family, you would have to submit to the penalty of paying twice. Your assigned government store would get your money whether you shopped there or not. If you wanted to raise objections to what was offered on the shelves, you would have to wait until the next election, mount an expensive campaign, and cross your fingers. Or, you could line up at boring public meetings and have condescending government officials make you feel antisocial just for showing up. If that had been the way we organized our provision of food 100 years ago, a presidential commission would have since declared the results akin to an act of war by a hostile foreign power. An ever-expensive, seemingly intractable, national food crisis would fester. Americans, though, understood the potent power of competition and choice, left food to the marketplace, and became the best-fed people on the planet.