POINT: School vouchers — helping disadvantaged children through school
Imagine for a moment that you are a single mother with three children living on your own in an inner-city neighborhood. You work full time and do your best to provide for your family. Life is hard, but you do your best, and though it be paycheck to paycheck, you keep on living.
Lately, you’ve noticed your children aren’t learning as fast as you did as a child. They don’t read at the same level as your sister’s kids who go to school in the suburbs. As any good mother would, you want to help your children. You’ve been alarmed that the state has recently designated your children’s school as a “failing” school, but you don’t have the money to move your child out of this school. You know how important a good education is for your children’s future, but you just can’t pay private school tuition on your salary.
Enter school vouchers. Under a vouchers program, people like this single mother receive funds from the government in the form of a voucher to help pay the cost of private school tuition to the private school of her choice. Thousands of children across the nation could benefit from these types of voucher programs. They give children a way out.
The effect a voucher program could have on America is far more profound than this. Vouchers free up a closed market, the market for public school dollars. The more of these programs that exist, and the freer it is for parents to move their children around, the more competitive this market gets.
As public and private schools are forced to compete for students (and hence money), there is a greater and greater incentive for schools to avoid the “failing” designation, or even (heaven forbid) to function well. Teachers would be forced to teach better, and states would be forced to pay their teachers more to keep them from leaving to teach at expanding private schools.
Not surprisingly, liberal groups have lined up against the idea. What is amazing, is that many groups oppose the measure even when vouchers may benefit the people they represent. One group that quickly comes to mind is the NAACP.
This group opposes vouchers even though many of its constituents support the idea. And as many of these failing public schools contain large numbers of minority students, it is amazing to me they can get away with this.
One of the chief complaints about voucher programs is that the money winds up going to religious schools. However, this summer, on it’s last day in session, the Supreme Court ruled in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris that as long as the choice about where the money goes is left up to parents and secular schools are allowed to participate, that voucher programs are constitutional. The key is that parents have the right to decide where their children are educated, and how.
And let’s face it: Whether or not my children are in the public school, I still pay for them to go there through the taxes I pay. If I can’t get my children a good education in the public schools, shouldn’t at least some of that money go toward providing them with that education elsewhere?
Other critics complain that these programs take money out of already underfunded public schools. This is a losing argument. Failing schools must be held accountable for their work. It is ridiculous to continue to give a school the same amount of money whether or not children are learning. Should we continue to throw good money after bad? Schools should be required to educate our children. That is their purpose, and if they’re not doing it, I think someone else should.
Gabriel White is a senior majoring in political science. Comments can be sent to him at gkw@cc.usu.edu.