(To read Part 1 of Mr. Keyes' column, please click on “Vouchers—for the Right Reasons” in the upper left-hand corner.)
The voucher movement has arisen chiefly in response to this dilemma, as parents around the country have demanded that the financial sacrifice they make in tax dollars for the sake of education correspond in some way to the high goals they have for the education of their children.
The failure of political efforts to pass voucher systems in the last couple of decades has produced an incrementalist approach from some conservatives, namely to try pilot programs that target the poor, racial minorities, and failing schools. This has the virtues of attracting some liberal support, costing less, and perhaps breaking through the judicial barriers to vouchers. Indeed, rising parental support for vouchers among inner-city parents has been a powerful success for the movement. But the focus on vouchers as a solution for the failure of public education to teach the basics of literacy to underprivileged kids has come at the price of neglecting the primary reason for the movement. The history of American education shows that the primary reason for vouchers is not disparity of results according to race or income, or simply low test scores, but rather the moral content, or lack thereof, imposed by contemporary public education in defiance of the moral aspirations of American parents for their children.
Similarly, privatization efforts, or education-for-profit plans, though innovative and less costly, may involve the same moral ambiguities, remoteness from parents, and close connection to the educrat establishment of liberal ideologues and teachers unions. The existing schools are not just badly managed, and therefore perhaps to be saved by a CEO from the business world. More importantly, they have lost their connection to our civic and moral roots – something a CEO may or may not know much about. It is not at all clear that education “contractors” will understand or respect the danger presented by the moral deficit in modern public education, or that a system of such providers in close connection to the existing governmental educational establishment will offer the choices that are needed.
In the recent campaign, President-elect Bush offered a voucher program at the federal level. It featured testing, setting minimal standards, and then cutting off Title One funds to schools with a three year record of unsatisfactory progress towards meeting these standards. Since the direct funding of primary education is constitutionally beyond the authority of the feds, one might argue that Bush was offering all he really could. Even so, the proposal attracted the ire of the left, and it looks like Rod Paige, the new Secretary of Education, won't push hard for it anyway.
This may not be too bad a thing, for several reasons. Federal funds imply federal standards and controls of some sort. Such governmental tentacles are to be feared, as some moral conservative opponents of vouchers have pointed out. Yet a nation of citizens who really intend to retain supervision over their children’s education will need, at some point, to recall that government money is really their own, and that the terms of its use are subject to the people’s Constitutional will, not the bureaucrat’s prejudice. Critics of a federal voucher program may be right in pointing out, however, that taming the feds is harder than taming city hall. A voucher program that represents a local alternative to the local public school is much less likely to enmesh private or home schoolers in dictatorial bureaucratic control than is a national federal grant program.
Moreover, targeting on the poor or failing districts obscures the moral issue, as I noted above. While it is true that the parents in such districts are more at the mercy of the ideologues in the teachers’ union than are parents in better neighborhoods, this argument was not prominent in arguments for the Bush plan. Secretary-designate Paige seems likely to have a knack for cracking the whip over failing public schools to make them teach reading more effectively, which would eliminate the Bush argument for school choice altogether.
The voucher movement, fittingly enough, will have to succeed without direct support from Washington. It remains the responsibility of a free citizenry to fashion in its local educational efforts, as in our political life generally, the effective unity of rightly diverse communities. Ultimately, the very notion of public education cannot be sustained unless the perverse federal misunderstanding of the First Amendment is abandoned and the possibility of real moral formation in public schools is restored. In the meantime, we must work to ensure that parents who are unable in good conscience send their children to the local government school are not obliged to pay twice for the education of those children. Apart from the continued tyrannical interventions of the federal judiciary, this will remain a local, or at most a statewide, battle.
If we entertain low expectations for Washington’s help in the moral and civic education of our children, even in a GOP Administration, we will be forced to reach down into our reserves of political and moral will do the job ourselves. That could be an education in itself, for conservatives and indeed, all Americans. Fighting for vouchers – for the right reason – remains a key assignment of all Americans who seek to defend the unalienable right of parents to the moral and material liberty they need if they are to fulfill before God their responsibility to form the souls of their children.
