Say Anything Blog

Grand Forks Herald editor Tom Dennis has a post up about the importance of the just-passed school vouchers legislation in Utah.  He says that we in states that have school funding issues (like North Dakota, for instance) should be watching Utah to see what the outcome of their program is.  Obviously, if things go well in Utah there’s no reason why that success can’t be emulated elsewhere.  But one thing we should be careful is abandoning the idea of vouchers should the Utah “test run” not live up to expectations.

One reason for this caution is obvious.  There are some powerful political players, namely teachers unions and so-called “civil rights” groups, who have a serious monetary interest in seeing a voucher system fail.  They don’t want people to believe such a system will work, so they will pull all the strings they can to make the system look like a failure.  These groups have a lot of allies both in political office and in the media, and it will be a challenge to see through the smoke screen they produce.

Another, more important reason, to be cautious about tying the future of vouchers in America to Utah is the fact that Utah is, contrary to popular belief, not the only test case we can look to for evidence of school choice working.  I routinely point to a little-known, short-lived program in Florida that allowed parents with children in schools that failed to meet certain standards to send their kids to any school of their choosing on the taxpayer dime.  It worked wonders in a short amount of time, with test scores among minority students especially going through the roof, before it was shot down by a lawsuit from, you guessed it, the teacher’s union and civil rights groups.

But Florida isn’t the only example of school choice programs working.  There are international examples as well, and while many of the examples aren’t exactly like what Americans define as a voucher system they are all similar in one aspect: They allow parents more choice in education.  Rather than only subsidizing education done in state-run, centrally-controlled schools these other countries subsidize other options as well.  Australia, for instance, has long subsidized private schools based on enrollment and other needs.  The Netherlands basically funds private schools in amounts equivalent to what the public schools get, and countries like Belgium, Denmark, and France all subsidize private schools to one extent or another as well, often by tying education funding to the student rather than the institution.  But again, despite all the variance in these approaches to education funding, they all have two things in common.

1. As I’ve already mentioned, they allow each individual parent/student to have a real choice when it comes to education while still allowing the government to subsidize the expense of that education.
2. They put the students of the countries they’re practiced in ahead of American students.

That’s right.  Students from countries like Australia, France, Belgium and The Netherlands routinely outperform American students on any given test, and the difference between those countries and America is not funding or any cultural deficiencies inherent to our society but rather the fact that those countries allow for choice in their subsidized education systems while our country does not.

So the bottom line of this issues is not whether or not the current system is broken.  Clearly it is, as evidenced by standardized test scores that are way too low despite ever increasing amounts of tax dollars thrown at education.  The bottom line is that the current system needs to allow parents to make more choices about schools.  The only question is how to allow those choices to happen.