The Attack on Utah's Voucher Program

Earlier this year, Utah passed its first in the nation universal voucher program. Not surprisingly, opponents of the measure are battling to have the law overturned. Mike Rosen, writing in the Rocky Mountain News in Colorado, reports on the efforts this way:

First, the union's survival is at stake. Under a voucher system, education is still publicly financed through taxpayer dollars. That doesn't change. But what does is the union's monopoly to deliver publicly funded education exclusively in government schools. Under a voucher system, competition would bloom.

Second, there's the ideological opposition to competition and free choice in education. The educratic establishment - from administrators, to the teachers' colleges that staff the schools, to the unions that run them and the school boards they elect - is liberal to its core.

They covet their power to set the agenda, to dictate subject matter and educational techniques, to influence impressionable young minds and mold the next generation of liberal activists. They've turned their government schools into laboratories for social engineering, downgrading basic academics and old-fashioned notions of American exceptionalism, patriotism and individualism in favor of collectivism, political correctness, diversity, environmentalism, feminism, and delusional self-esteem. They have a death grip on these schools that they're loath to release.

Now the reaction by teh education establishment is no surprise, after all, the decision is political and politics is a rough sport. But the lack of intelligence and the hypocrisy behind some of the claims offered in opposition to the program are simply startling:

Yet educrats circle their wagons around the status quo. Tanya Clay House of the ultra-liberal People for the American Way recently declared, "We've never seen a shred of credible evidence that shows school vouchers actually help students learn. While all public schools must demonstrate success under No Child Left Behind, private schools are not held to the same level of accountability for their performance."

Nonsense. Private schools are held to account in the most effective way possible - they're accountable to their customers who are free to take their business elsewhere if they're not satisfied. All the evidence you need for vouchers is that parents who have used them to escape the government school monopoly fight to keep them.

Then, Clay House added this gem: "Every child deserves an excellent education, not just those who can get admitted to a private school." I wonder if she realizes how self-contradictory that statement is. She's acknowledging that private schools provide educational excellence and that kids who are stuck in government schools are denied that! Does she suppose that wealthy parents who pay a premium to send their kids to private schools (without "a shred of evidence that they help students learn") are stupid?

I have long felt that market principles will force calcified education bureaucracies to change far faster than anything else. I suspect a plethora of private schools will spring up in Utah. Some will be hugely successful, some moderately so, but there will be no failures in the long term. In the short run, some schools won't work so well, but the market will force those to close. Over the long run, public schools will improve as well, although it may take longer for that to happen.

One of the features of the Utah law is that when a student leaves a public school for a private school, that public school will still get funds for that student for three years!! That money will increase per pupil spending in that school and oh, yeah, reduce class sizes (two of the Educracy favored goals). If that money is invested wisely (which could be an oxymoron in public schools) the improvement in public schools can match the performance of the private schools. After all, is that no the overall goal, to improve the public schools so that "no child is left behind."

What is striking to me is that the educrats don't seem to grasp these basic facts.