School Choice and Market Forces

It's SCOTUS season, and while we wait for the denouement of the Roe-Dobbs saga, the Court drops other decisions of consequence upon the American political landscape.

This week brought forth a decision in Carson v Makin, a case out of Maine. Since some school districts therein do not offer a public secondary school, the state offer a voucher program so that parents can send their kids to their local private school. The State limited those tuition payments to "nonsectarian" schools that were accredited by the New England Associa- tion of Schools and Colleges. The plaintiffs wanted to send their kids to an accredited Christian school that didn't qualify as "non-sectarian." The Court ruled, 6-3, that the "'nonsectarian' requirement violated the Free Exercise Clause and the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, as well as the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment."

The usual suspects proffered the usual plaints and caterwauls, I read the usual stuff about 'separation of Church and State,' and I saw the usual "I don't want my taxes paying for religious education." The taxes paid by the parents apparently don’t matter.

What they miss is that you don't have to be an advocate for religious education to appreciate this ruling, because it advances a broader principle: school choice.

There is no doubt that our existing monopolistic public education system under-serves its charges. We spend more and more per student, but produce no measurable improvement in outcome. The charts tell the tale.

The aforementioned usual suspects proffer the usual excuses. Among them is that rich parents send their kids to rich private schools, and leave the rest to lag and suffer. Appended onto that old narrative is the more recent "systemic racism" accusation, wherein the mere fact that black and brown kids underperform is proof of bias, bigotry, and institutionalized oppression.

As is so often the case, however, the narrative and the numbers don't match up. Not only has per-student public school spending nearly quadrupled in inflation-adjusted dollars in the past 60 years, there's evidence that per-student spending is substantially higher on the public side than on the private side.

That parents who send their kids to private schools still pay taxes into public education is an additional injustice. By paying into a system that they don't use, they benefit the kids who go to those public schools while paying out of pocket to educate their own.

We all know the real problem, of course. It's the entrenched public school industry - the unholy alliance between politicians, bureaucrats, and teachers' unions that pays lip service to the students, but in truth prioritizes teacher's ease and deflects failure. It can do this because it is a government-protected monopoly.

That monopoly is cracking. Charter schools - publicly funded schools that operate apart from entrenched systems - are proliferating, from fewer than 500 in 2000 to well over 7000 today. New Orleans, post-Katrina, implemented a school choice system, where students were not obligated to attend a particular school based on their home address. Various forms of school choice, such as voucher programs, are proliferating across the US.

The goal we libertarians (insofar as I can speak for the label) would like is a fully voucherized system like that found in Sweden (the great man, Milton Friedman, and his wife Rose were major advocates for school choice). That Nordic nation, often pointed at by progressives as how things should be here (though not really - they like the idea of a massive State machine but recoil at the actual workings there), has the equivalent of backpack funding, where a certain amount of money "follows" each student to whichever school the parents choose. That includes private schools, by the way.

This notion is such total anathema to the Left that it trots out countless straw men and outright lies in its defense of the status quo. Consider the hatchet job perpetrated by Slate against Sweden's school choice system in 2014, ably fisked by the Cato institute here. Meanwhile, the politicians and other bigwigs who stand screamingly against school choice hypocritically send their own kids to private schools.

Everywhere in our lives, competition motivates a drive to quality and spurs innovation. All around us, we see the positive results of producers responding to consumers' needs and wants. Our cars, our smart phones, and countless other goods and services we use every day get better every year because there are companies actively competing with each other. Yet, we are to believe that competition would actually make public education worse than it currently is?

Please.

If you hear such a claim, look at the claimant. Odds are high you'll find either a vested financial interest in the existing industry or a blind partisan loyalty to the party that it owns.

Fixing public education doesn't require more money or a handful of Best-and-Brightest to rewrite the pedagogical handbook. All it takes is getting government out of the way. Start by assigning principals to school buildings. Then, let those principals compete for students, each of whom comes with X dollars attached. The principals build their staffs, hire their teachers, and set their curricula. Let private schools compete for those same students. Those who offer good product will flourish, and others will copycat or wither. The students will be better served, the quality of education will increase, and the nation will be all the better for it.

Bad teachers, rather than being defended and salaried way beyond a proper "fire-by" date, will either have to become better or go into a different line of work. The current system, which values these dues-payers far more than the students they fail to teach, is an irredeemable disaster. If Carson v Makin accelerates school choice across the land, it could be a watershed moment in public education.

A footnote: This ruling doesn’t, as some might tendentiously argue, carve out an exception solely for Christian schools. Indeed, an amicus brief was filed jointly by the Council of Islamic Schools in North America and the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America. It affirms the right of parents to have some say in how and where their children are educated, and recognizes that they still have rights within the coercive taxation scheme that funds public education. Despite what the progressive education industry asserts, parents aren’t obligated to abandon their children to the whims of the self-styled Best-and-Brightest who want authority without accountability.

Another footnote: The NY Sun reports that the Maine Attorney General is so disappointed with this ruling that he may prefer eliminating the funding program entirely. How that would serve the high school students in areas without a public school option remains to be seen.

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Peter.