Free To Choose: A Personal Statement – Charter 5 : What’s Wrong with Our Schools? (4)

Let us consider briefly some possible problems with the voucher plan and some objections that have been raised to it.

(1) The church-state issue. If parents could use their vouchers to pay tuition at parochial schools, would that violate the First Amendment? Whether it does or not, is it desirable to adopt a policy that might strengthen the role of religious institutions in schooling? The Supreme Court has generally ruled against state laws pro- viding assistance to parents who send their children to parochial schools, although it has never had occasion to rule on a full- fledged voucher plan covering both public and nonpublic schools.

However it might rule on such a plan, it seems clear that the Court would accept a plan that excluded church-connected schools but applied to all other private and public schools. Such a re- 164 stricted plan would be far superior to the present system, and might not be much inferior to a wholly unrestricted plan. Schools now connected with churches could qualify by subdividing them- selves into two parts: a secular part reorganized as an independent school eligible for vouchers, and a religious part reorganized as an after-school or Sunday activity paid for directly by parents or church funds.

The constitutional issue will have to be settled by the courts.

But it is worth emphasizing that vouchers would go to parents, not to schools. Under the GI bills, veterans have been free to at- tend Catholic or other colleges and, so far as we know, no First Amendment issue has ever been raised. Recipients of Social Se- curity and welfare payments are free to buy food at church ba- zaars and even to contribute to the collection plate from their government subsidies, with no First Amendment question being asked.

Indeed, we believe that the penalty that is now imposed on parents who do not send their children to public schools violates the spirit of the First Amendment, whatever lawyers and judges may decide about the letter. Public schools teach religion, too— not a formal, theistic religion, but a set of values and beliefs that constitute a religion in all but name. The present arrangements abridge the religious freedom of parents who do not accept the religion taught by the public schools yet are forced to pay to have their children indoctrinated with it, and to pay still more to have their children escape indoctrination.

(2) Financial cost. A second objection to the voucher plan is that it would raise the total cost to taxpayers of schooling—be- cause of the cost of vouchers given for the roughly 10 percent of children who now attend parochial and other private schools.

That is a “problem” only to those who disregard the present dis- crimination against parents who send their children to nonpublic schools. Universal vouchers would end the inequity of using tax funds to school some children but not others.

In any event, there is a simple and straightforward solution: let the amount of the voucher be enough less than the current cost per public school child to keep total public expenditures the same.

The smaller amount spent in a private competitive school would What’s Wrong with Our Schools? 165 very likely provide a higher quality of schooling than the larger amount now spent in government schools. Witness the drastically lower cost per child in parochial schools. (The fact that elite, luxury schools charge high tuition is no counter argument, any more than the $12.25 charged by the “21″ Club for its Hamburger Twenty-One in 1979 meant that McDonald’s could not sell a hamburger profitably for 45 cents and a Big Mac for $1.05.) (3) The possibility of fraud. How can one make sure that the voucher is spent for schooling, not diverted to beer for papa and clothes for mama? The answer is that the voucher would have to be spent in an approved school or teaching establishment and could be redeemed for cash only by such schools. That would not prevent all fraud—perhaps in the forms of “kickbacks” to parents —but it should keep fraud to a tolerable level.

(4) The racial issue. Voucher plans were adopted for a time in a number of southern states to avoid integration. They were ruled unconstitutional. Discrimination under a voucher plan can be prevented at least as easily as in public schools by redeeming vouchers only from schools that do not discriminate. A more difficult problem has troubled some students of vouchers. That is the possibility that voluntary choice with vouchers might increase ra- cial and class separation in schools and thus exacerbate racial con- flict and foster an increasingly segregated and hierarchical society.

We believe that the voucher plan would have precisely the op- posite effect; it would moderate racial conflict and promote a society in which blacks and whites cooperate in joint objectives, while respecting each other’s separate rights and interests. Much objection to forced integration reflects not racism but more or less well-founded fears about the physical safety of children and the quality of their schooling. Integration has been most successful when it has resulted from choice, not coercion. Nonpublic schools, parochial and other, have often been in the forefront of the move toward integration.

Violence of the kind that has been rising in public schools is possible only because the victims are compelled to attend the schools that they do. Give them effective freedom to choose and students—black and white, poor and rich, North and South— would desert schools that could not maintain order. Discipline is 166 seldom a problem in private schools that train students as radio and television technicians, typists and secretaries, or for myriad other specialties.

Let schools specialize, as private schools would, and common interest would overcome bias of color and lead to more integration than now occurs. The integration would be real, not merely on paper.

The voucher scheme would eliminate the forced busing that a large majority of both blacks and whites object to. Busing would occur, and might indeed increase, but it would be voluntary—just as the busing of children to music and dance classes is today.

The failure of black leaders to espouse vouchers has long puz- zled us. Their constituents would benefit most. It would give them control over the schooling of their children, eliminate domination by both the city-wide politicians and, even more important, the entrenched educational bureaucracy. Black leaders frequently send their own children to private schools. Why do they not help others to do the same? Our tentative answer is that vouchers would also free the black man from domination by his own political leaders, who currently see control over schooling as a source of political patronage and power.

However, as the educational opportunities open to the mass of black children have continued to deteriorate, an increasing num- ber of black educators, columnists, and other community lead- ers have started to support vouchers. The Congress of Racial Equality has made the support of vouchers a major plank in its agenda.

(5) The economic class issue. The question that has perhaps divided students of vouchers more than any other is their likely effect on the social and economic class structure. Some have ar- gued that the great value of the public school has been as a melt- ing pot, in which rich and poor, native- and foreign-born, black and white have learned to live together. That image was and is largely true for small communities, but almost entirely false for large cities. There, the public school has fostered residential strati- fication, by tying the kind and cost of schooling to residential location. It is no accident that most of the country’s outstanding public schools are in high-income enclaves.

‘ What s Wrong with Our Schools? 167 Most children would still probably attend a neighborhood ele- mentary school under a voucher plan—indeed, perhaps more than now do because the plan would end forced busing. However, be- cause the voucher plan would tend to make residential areas more heterogeneous, the local schools serving any community might well be less homogeneous than they are now. Secondary schools would almost surely be less stratified. Schools defined by common interests—one stressing, say, the arts; another, the sciences; an- other, foreign languages—would attract students from a wide variety of residential areas. No doubt self-selection would still leave a large class element in the composition of the student bodies, but that element would be less than it is today.

One feature of the voucher plan that has aroused particular concern is the possibility that parents could and would “add on” to the vouchers. If the voucher were for, say, $1,500, a parent could add another $500 to it and send his child to a school charg- ing $2,000 tuition. Some fear that the result might be even wider differences in educational opportunities than now exist because low-income parents would not add to the amount of the voucher while middle-income and upper-income parents would supplement it extensively.

This fear has led several supporters of voucher plans to propose 1e Coons and Sugarman write that the freedom to add on private dollars makes the Friedman model unac- ceptable to many, including ourselves. . . . Families unable to add extra dollars would patronize those schools that charged no tuition above the voucher, while the wealthier would be free to distribute themselves among the more expensive schools. What is today merely a personal choice of the wealthy, secured entirely with private funds, would become an invidious privilege assisted by government. . . .

This offends a fundamental value commitment that any choice plan must secure equal family opportunity to attend any participating school.

Even under a choice plan which allowed tuition add-ons, poor fam- ilies might be better off than they are today. Friedman has argued as much. Nevertheless, however much it improved their education, con- scious government finance of economic segregation exceeds our tol- erance. If the Friedman scheme were the only politically viable ex- that “add-ons” be prohibited.