School vouchers are surprisingly simple in concept. For each school age child in your family, you get a voucher from the state to spend on their education at the local school of your choice. The amount of the voucher would be the current government budget for public education divided by the number of students enrolled. Sounds simple, even logical - it would inject a bit of free market economics into the educational process, theoretically breaking the overwhelming monopoly of control exercised by the big public school systems over educational quality and content.

Objections from the left: church-state separation is apparently threatened if we allow government funds to support the local Catholic grammar school or high school, for example.

I’m as suspicious of church-state collaboration as anyone you’re likely to find, but I just don’t see how church-state separation is threatened by education vouchers when parents are the one’s choosing the recipient institutions. The First Amendment prohibition against establishment of religion was drafted to prevent government (England being a negative example in the drafter’s eyes) from establishing a state religion (Anglicanism), particularly to the exclusion of others. So, the establishment clause is meant to ensure freedom from state establishment of religion - there is no provision for or any intent to interfere with individual support for religious institutions. In fact, the intent of the establishment clause is to ensure that the state does not interfere with such individual choices.

Atheism is as much an exercise of faith as traditional religion when you consider that atheists have an affirmative belief that God does not exist, where believers occupy the opposite end of the faith spectrum - both camps are strongly committed to their belief regarding the existence of God. The only truly neutral players in this intellectual space are agnostics who remain uncommitted with respect to the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent, yet overwhelmingly silent and inactive paranormal presence. Given the degree of faith required to be atheist, one could conclude that an exclusion of support for theistic education would be equivalent to an endorsement of atheism, something the establishment clause was specifically designed to prevent.

The current battleground surrounding evolution vs. creationism can therefore best be resolved by allowing parents to select an institution that tracks with their belief system. Public schools would leave theistic creationism out of the classroom, but parents could readily pursue an education on those principles on economically balanced ground.

The U.S. Supreme Court has adequately addressed the specific funding support fine point in Everson v. Board of Education, where it found funding that reimbursed parents for tuition spent on parochial education did not violate the establishment clause. Four justices dissented, so the 1947 case was no slam dunk and the decision remains controversial. Vouchers implement a sort of advance refund check, thus enabling families that can’t afford to pay and wait for reimbursement to make an economically unfettered educational choice at the beginning of the academic calendar. Consequently, there doesn’t appear to be any new constitutional threat here.

Setting aside the Anti-Defamation League’s constitutional concern regarding separation of church and state for the moment, it’s not difficult to find a teacher’s union with a ready objection. The National Education Association cites three objections, including the separation of church and state we just considered. Their other two objections are:

  • The Educational Case: “Student achievement ought to be the driving force behind education reform.” The NEA claims that Americans want consistent standards across the public and private school systems, though they cite no surveys reaching this conclusion.
  • The Social Case: “A voucher lottery is a terrible way to determine access to an education. True equity means the ability for every child to attend a good school in the neighborhood.” … “A pure voucher system would only encourage economic, racial, ethnic, and religious stratification in our society. America’s success has been built on our ability to unify our diverse populations.”

The last time I checked, Americans (people in general) want what’s best for their children, first and foremost. If they can accomplish that in a way that also has secondary social benefits without too much additional cost and inconvenience, they’ll often choose the alternative with the secondary benefit. However, the NEA would be wise not to confuse secondary social benefits with the paramount desire of parents to obtain the best education possible. If I were the NEA, I’d try to gather some statistics that support the argument that public schools offered a more diverse student population and that diversity somehow contributes to the value of public education. Short of such evidence, their ‘educational case’ is vacuous.

The social case they present apparently argues against two implementations of voucher systems - voucher lotteries and pure voucher systems. The latter being the distribution of a voucher per child to parents in the educational district (introduced above). I’m guessing that voucher lotteries refers to Washington D.C. and/or Teddy Forstmann and John Walton’s attempts to bring vouchers to districts where teacher’s unions have successfully lobbied against them.

Forstmann and Walton have set up a scholarship program for low income children, allocated based on competitive selection to 40,000 recipients nationwide. This isn’t really a voucher lottery, it’s a scholarship fund applicable to K-12 education. Perhaps the ‘threat’ here is that it will enable recipients to get a taste of private education and that’s the real evil from the NEA’s perspective. The D.C. lottery is federal money for children currently enrolled in low-performing schools. It does double political duty by offering a random sampling of students an escape hatch into private education while tweaking the management of flagging public schools in Washington D.C. for their poor performance.

The NEA apparently doesn’t appreciate anyone throwing a life preserver to students going down with the ship. Their high road call to social and educational sensibilities just doesn’t ring true - it violates Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (with which educators should be intimately familiar). School administrators want more money to improve the quality of schools and a voucher induced drain on the student population (actually measured in student-days) will reduce next year’s budget. The logical economic fallout is that some students’ parents will be able to augment the voucher with the extra cash necessary to pay tuition at a private school and the public school budget will lose the funds represented by the voucher. If that happens often enough, teachers are going to get laid off in the public schools and jobs will open up at private schools (which will need to expand to accept the new students). In Milwaukee (the longest running voucher system in the U.S.), private schools accept the voucher as full tuition, so no extra cash is needed.

I think this is where the objection arises - as a group, teachers would rather avoid competing for jobs at private schools. However, if the same student-teacher ratios apply at public and private schools, the number of jobs lost at public schools will be exactly equal to the number created in private ones. Perhaps more likely, private schools operating with fewer students per teacher will generate more jobs than the number originally lost in the public schools. You’d think teacher’s unions would be excited about that prospect. If we assume that unions vigorously represent their members’ interests, the problem can’t be the size of the job market, so the objection must be centered around the fear of re-entering the market and competing for open positions. Is that a valid objection to school vouchers?

It looks like a fairly simple case of civil service employees presently enjoying relative isolation from the vagaries of the job market, looking upon the demise of monopoly job security with trepidation. Teachers should look at the bright side - teaching jobs can’t be shipped overseas as call center and software jobs have done in the last decade or so. U.S. domestic steel, automotive, and electronics industries face international competition and have shed market share to smarter and/or more efficient Asian and European suppliers, but the market for teaching jobs is relatively stable with respect to the population of students.

Some perspective is useful here - sheltering the domestic U.S. automotive industry hasn’t saved it. Although General Motors had been strong until recently, the ascendancy of Honda and Toyota continues unabated while Chrysler performed so poorly that Daimler was willing to take a $30B loss to secure a divorce, Ford is on its way to becoming a penny stock, and former domestic high flyer GM lost 60% of it’s market value. Why are they doing so badly? Management would undoubtedly blame higher cost labor, but even if that is a factor, you can’t get away from the fact that GM was still betting the farm on high margin Sport-Utility-Vehicles, while watching oil rocket through $100/barrel. Asian and European automobile manufacturers have snatched strong stable (if not dominant) market positions from domestic U.S. manufacturers because their value oriented marketing and characteristically longer term market perspective is a more effective business strategy than the lower quality, more frequent model change strategy adopted by domestic manufacturers.

Given the foregoing, teachers in the United States who oppose school vouchers should be grateful for the market isolation they’ve enjoyed to date. The bottom line is that we live in a global economy and U.S. K-12 education is not competitive on the world stage. School vouchers empower consumers (students) and their proxies (parents) to exercise their selective preferences in what will someday be a diverse market for educational services.

School vouchers are a master stroke for acquainting the education industry with the realities of market economics, ultimately providing tremendous benefits to consumers and taxpayers, without any real threat to the establishment clause. The NEA’s objections are easily written off as self-serving union politics; while the motivation for the Anti-Defamation League’s objection remains obscure. If legislators took the same view (that market efficiency is best served by leveraging the most granular economic selection method available) with respect to taxation, replacing wealth and income taxes with consumption taxes would be a shoo in. If legislators are willing to make teachers swallow vouchers, they should not be able to deny that the same logic applies to putting ‘voluntary’ back into the taxation equation.