For Florida's Children

The state of Florida, already at the top of the Left's lump-of-coal list, just chalked up another "naughty" mark in the Left's scorecard. The (evil, Republican-dominated) State House voted 83-27 to pass a school choice bill. The (evil, Republican-dominated) State Senate passed it 26-12. The (evil, Republican, worse-than-Trump) Governor Ron DeSantis signed it.

The bill expands the current voucher program, allowing parents to send their kids to the school of their choice, including private schools, with some of the tax money their government takes from them for education funding. It also makes some provisions for the home-schooled.

While the usual suspects whine about this being a handout to people who can already afford to pay both school taxes and private tuition, the reality is that it's a well-deserved stab at the heart of the public education monopoly. One of the few monopolies the Left not only tolerates but actually embraces, the public education racket has been failing students for half a century as its cabal of left-leaning pols and cynically self-serving union bosses prioritize teachers over kids.

It's not quite backpack funding, per my first perusal, but it's close. One might wonder why the Left would oppose it, given how its favorite uncle, Senator Bernie Sanders, has long extolled the Nordic system of governance, which includes fully-vouchered school choice. One might wonder, that is, until one realizes that Bernie promises Nordic outcomes without enacting Nordic policies, which makes him either inexcusably ignorant or a con artist.

It's long been one of the Left's dirty secrets that they love when people of means pull their kids out of the public school system, because that reduces the number of students without reducing the tax money collected for the system. When parents get to say "I want my tax dollars spent on educating my child the way I want," they turn apoplectic. It's their OPM, their system, and "their" kids. Snake-oil-saleswoman-par-excellence Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently railed against a parental transparency bill that just passed the U.S. House, calling the informing of parents about their kids' education "fascist." Look in the mirror if you want to see a real fascist, AOC...

The Left has tipped its hand before on this, informing us that they don't believe parents should have a say in how or what their kids are taught. School choice gives parents some power to reject that affront.

Their squawks, squeals, yaps, and yelps aside, school choice is a winner for all but those who deserve to lose. It introduces competitive pressure where there was none. It tells teachers, principals, and administrators "do better by our kids, or we'll take them elsewhere." It unleashes market forces on a system that's been free of them for decades, and offers a chance at improving what's been in steady decline since the 1960s despite* a tripling in per-student spending.

Some libertarian purists will piss and moan (yeah, here's my shocked face) that it's still coercive taxation and a government-run system, and they do have a point in that the government still sets standards and requirements that limit the degree of choice parents will have, but such folks are "perfect-is-the-enemy-of-the-good" malcontents, and don't get that a century-old system doesn't get fixed in one fell swoop. The Great Man, Milton Friedman, was a staunch advocate of school choice, and he and his wife founded an organization that has been espousing it for decades. He proposed school choice and vouchers way back in 1955, and believed they represented a good first step in correcting the problems born of government-monopoly education.

There are now 14 states that have some form of school choice, but only 4 of them to offer the broad "universal" form. There's growing pressure on the others to follow suit, and this reminds me of the right-to-carry movement that first caught national attention when Florida enacted its shall-issue laws in 1987. That movement grew to encompass 42 states, and its successor, the Constitutional Carry movement, has reached 25 states. School choice may be the next rights-restoration movement to sweep the nation, and it deserves our full support.

We often hear the refrain "for the children" from the Left when they want to impose some new restriction or spend some more of Other People's Money. Perhaps it's time we challenge their resistance to school choice on those grounds. The education system is supposed to serve its customers, i.e. those children, not simply be a workfare program for its employees.