School Vouchers Will Transform Education

In a country that insists on market-driven free enterprise solutions in virtually every aspect of life, it’s ironic that we continue to allow our schools to operate as state-run monopolies. But an increasing number of Americans are beginning to recognize this irony and want to do something about it.

They foresee a marketplace of competing, accredited educational alternatives, primarily funded with vouchers representing each pupil’s share of total education funding, as a viable alternative to the state-funded monopoly. Or, as former President George H.W. Bush once put it, they want to “Let the dollar follow the scholar.”

If properly explained, this seems like a sure winner at the ballot box. Having a choice in schools for one’s children would seem to be at least as important as having a choice of airlines, automobiles, or restaurants. In fact, along with religion and nutrition, education is one of the most fundamental resources that parents provide for their children. Chip Mellor, President and Founder of the Institute for Justice, goes further; he has defined the movement for parental choice in education as the civil rights issue of the 21st Century.

In our era of customization and product proliferation, the one-size-fits-all state monopoly we call “public education” seems like a costly and inefficient anachronism. Just to cite one example, the St. Louis City Public Schools currently spend an average of $11,600 per student per year. Local private school tuition there averages about $5,000.

This inconsistency is true to one degree or another for every state. Citing several recent studies, the renowned African-American economist at UCLA, Professor Thomas Sowell, noted that black students were two or three years behind in some public schools, and those schools were spending $10,000 to $15,000 per pupil. At the same time, private schools were available nearby for half to a third of that cost, with students reading at, or above, grade level.

An objective business mind would conclude that every state should want to give its children a better education at a lower price through parental freedom of choice. Yet, amazingly, the debate over this fundamental issue of freedom not only continues, but gets more contentious each day.

To understand this better, let’s look back at the history of the debate over school choice.

Back in the late 1950s, the National Education Association helped write the first federal education funding bill, the so-called Murray-Metcalfe Bill. It proposed taking tax dollars intended for children in all U.S. schools and sh... To read the full article, you must be a Trends Magazine Subscriber. To learn more, click here