ARTICLES

To Have Good Fries, You Need Good Potatoes

Will Vouchers Bring School Choice, or a Chain?

By Christopher Zehnder

Many school reform advocates hailed the United States Supreme Court's decision in July that school vouchers were not unconstitutional. In their decision, the justices said that a Cleveland, Ohio program that allows the families of needy children to spend publicly funded vouchers at the schools of their choice, including religious schools, did not violate the "establishment" clause of the First Amendment. The court's decision settles the question whether such school vouchers could withstand the test of constitutionality and so opens the door to voucher programs across the country.

Not all school reformers, however, think vouchers are such a good thing. Marshall Fritz of Fresno, who heads the Separation of School and State Alliance, thinks vouchers a very bad thing, indeed. As the name of his organization indicates, Fritz, a Catholic, wants to see an eventual end to all government control and financing of schooling. Parents, says a proclamation Fritz asks supporters to sign, "have both the responsibility and the right to provide for an education for their children." State financed schools -- even those that are "well funded and staffed with talented, caring teachers -- cannot address the differing expectations parents hold for their children, and ... assumption by government of parents' financial responsibility and consequent undermining of their authority leads to weaker families and social decline."

By extending government funding to private schools, school vouchers, said Fritz, will lead to government control of private schools. They will make private schools the "lookalikes" of government schools. This will happen, says Fritz, in two ways. One will be through increasing government regulation (either through legislation or court order) of what private schools can teach and not teach. For instance, said Fritz, the government may decide that private schools that receive vouchers "can't teach hate, and we define hate this week as saying that homosexual behavior is abnormal." Voucher-funded private schools will therefore have to say that homosexuality "is all right, or at least not mention it."

The other way vouchers will make private schools more like government schools, said Fritz, is by undermining parental responsibility. "If you have 88 percent of children in government schools," said Fritz, "that means you have 12 percent who are not on government financing. The parents of the 12 percent are independent and responsible. [With the voucher], that will shrink down to probably two percent -- the very rich and the very stubborn."

Too, "private schools work," said Fritz, in part because they choose a better brand of parent. "If you are making French fries, you want to have control over the potatoes; if you start getting a lot of rotten potatoes (even if you have perfect oil temperature, perfect salting, perfect timing), your French fries will stink. Today, private schools have a big barrier to parents who don't care, and it's called, you pay the tuition. So the guy who says, 'hell, I'd rather have a beer than pay the tuition,' keeps his kid in government school. But the guy who will work a second job, who will sacrifice to get his kid into a private school -- he really cares. There's an automatic filter. Now, imagine if anyone can walk in and say, 'hey, you're just down the block. Here's my voucher,' and the admissions office doesn't have the sacrifice thing going to distinguish the weak from the strong parents (and weak parents have rougher kids, if parenting makes any difference) -- what will happen?"

The Cleveland and Milwaukee voucher systems (much touted by voucher advocates) don't help this problem, said Fritz. Both, he said, "require a lottery, if there are more children who are applying for a particular private school than there are seats. So, if an atheist applies for the third grade seat for his kid at a local Lutheran school and a Lutheran in the parish applies for the same seat for his kid, you have to draw straws. The school can't say it prefers the Lutheran kid who wants a Lutheran education."

George Clowes of the Heartland Institute of Chicago disagrees with Marshall Fritz's grim prognostications of vouchers. The Heartland Institute, said Clowes, is a "free market-oriented think tank" that produces policy studies on school reform, healthcare reform, and on environment and climate issues. "We support the idea of school vouchers as the solution for generating competition in the education marketplace as the means to improve the quality of education in this country," said Clowes.

"I think everyone is entitled to vouchers," said Clowes. "Most state constitutions say the state is obligated to provide a free education and the only question is, how much authority should the parent have over where the funds are directed for that education? If you look at higher education and, for example, at the GI bill, at Pell Grants, then you see that the individual who receives the funds is able to direct where those funds are spent. The only decision or screening the government has to make is, is this a qualified individual? And is this a qualified institution where they want to spend it at? Beyond that, there is very little regulation."

Clowes thinks the possibility of government regulation of private schools exists with or without vouchers. "Whether we have vouchers or not, every citizen should be concerned about government regulation," said Clowes. "Receiving funds from taxpayers does not turn an institution into a public school or public body. The clearest example of that is the Social Security program. The money is collected for a specific purpose the same way that property tax dollars are. Instead of giving the funds to institutions that look after the needs of seniors and deciding what forms of recreation, clothing, food and so on the seniors have, the funds go directly to the seniors. But just because the seniors spend those dollars at the grocery store, the racetrack or wherever, doesn't make the receiving entity subject to additional government regulation."

Clowes admitted that under a voucher system private schools may have to adopt the admissions standards of government schools. "The public schools," he said, "will think that we need to have the private schools play by the same rules that we play by. I agree, but I think that, like the public schools, private schools should be able to discriminate on the basis on how well the child is doing academically or on whether the child is a troublemaker and send them to a special school. [Students coming to private schools] won't have to say they believe in the mission of the school, but they do have to go along with it. So if you go to a Catholic school, it's only reasonable that you sit in on the religious instruction. That is no different than what the public schools are doing. The public schools are saying, 'in order to get into a magnet school, these are the kinds of test scores that we want from you.' 'You can't get into this school because you've been a troublemaker.' They claim they take everyone, but they don't."

The voucher, said Clowes, "can function as a shield" against government regulation. "Look at the decisions that the Wisconsin Supreme Court made about the Milwaukee voucher program -- [the court said] that the regulations and whatever process and checks the state put into the law were sufficient for [the voucher system] to be accountable. One of the criteria the Supreme Court used was whether the regulations or laws that allow some kind of relationship of a government or a citizen with a religious institution creates excessive entanglement between the government and the religious institution. I know some people will say that vouchers are entanglement just because the money is going from the government, even if through the parent, to a religious institution. The courts don't view it that way but say adding additional rules, regulations, and so on, constitutes excessive entanglement. You can use the voucher as a shield to say, well, you can't put those additional regulations in place because they will then produce excessive entanglement."

But Clowes agreed that vouchers might increase the likelihood of government regulation of private schools. That court rulings might be favorable to school freedom "doesn't get away from the fact that, as Thomas Jefferson said, the natural order of things is for government to advance and for citizens' interests to retreat," said Clowes. "Everyone ought to make sure that the only regulations that the government puts in place are the ones that are absolutely necessary. We have to move ahead on a system that is just for everyone, and it's not going to be perfect any more than capitalism is perfect; its not going to be easy to run and its going to require a lot of vigilance."

Clowes thinks that vigilance will come from private school organizations that will be founded because of the voucher. Citizens, he said "would certainly be more vigilant if there were a larger private school organization. If you look at the private school industry right now, it consists largely of religious schools. And it's done, not for money or profit, but for a specific mission; therefore it's done at very low cost. If you compare it to an industry that is for-profit -- a for-profit industry has a chamber of commerce type organization that looks after its interests. You would see that kind of thing happening as you got more for-profit and not-for-profit organizations involved in delivering education."

Marshall Fritz agrees that private school groups might protest government restrictions. "They'll howl like mad, but it won't do anything," he said. "It will be a court ruling. It will be some Jerry Brown-era judge that does this thing. How much howling has there been on abortion? How many coyotes howl at the moon? It doesn't seem to change its course very much."

Though he agrees that courts and legislatures could place restrictions on private schools with or without vouchers, Fritz says "they would have a hard time finding any reason to do it now. But once there's money going to the schools, people are going to demand accountability. Look at Jesse Helms and the NEA. He didn't like pieces like 'Piss Christ,' so he said, 'if you're spending my money on art, I don't want to see any 'Piss Christs' -- and it's a perfectly legitimate statement. We have a whole bunch of secularists who will be saying, 'if you are going to use my money to teach those Catholic kids, I don't want them to be taught to hate fornication!'"

And once the court lays down the law, said Fritz, parents and schools will acquiesce. "You will have parents," said Fritz, "who used to pay $9,000 a year to have three kids in the school. The voucher comes in with four thousand for each kid. Now the school's got $12,000 for three kids. All the teachers get a big raise. The family now has a nicer car, a better home. Now the rule comes down that the school cannot teach chastity -- how many of those couples are going to say, 'we are going to go back to our original lifestyle'? How many of those teachers are going to say, 'cut my income back by four or five thousand a year'? They won't say that. What they will say is, 'look, we'll give lip service to saying fornication is okay, but we'll wink when we teach it and say chastity is really better, or we'll teach chastity at home and at church. We'll compartmentalize just the way government schools have compartmentalized. If they don't do that, if they reject the voucher, then someone else is going to open up a school right down the street; he'll accept the voucher and [the school which has rejected the voucher] will lose half the parents the first year, easily. Imagine what happens to a school when it loses half its income and half its students."

But, as George Clowes noted, strings have not been attached to other government aid programs -- for another instance, little is required of colleges whose students receive federal guaranteed student loans. Fritz, though, thinks that restrictions will likely come with time -- even though it be a long time. "If you jump off a hundred story building, and pass the 85th floor, and someone shouts to you, 'how's it going?' you can answer, 'so far so good!' Time there is so short that we all know what is going to happen. Gravity is inexorable. But 'time' with such things as government regulation sometimes takes 50 years."

But despite the dangers, Clowes and other voucher advocates see vouchers as the only way to decentralize education and improve public schools. Clowes' colleague at the Heartland Institute, Joe Bast, even thinks vouchers could lead to Marshall Fritz's cherished goal -- the separation of school and state. "Obviously the voucher mechanism itself separates school and state to the extent that it reduces the number of schools that are being owned and operated by the state," said Bast. "There is a clear degree of separation that vouchers make possible that the current system doesn't. The question is, does the separation become less over time? I think the dynamic would be just the opposite. According to the opinion polls, approximately 60 percent of parents would choose private schools for their kids if they didn't have to pay private school tuition and their taxes. So if the voucher system achieves that, over a period of time, about 60 percent of parents would be putting their kids in private schools; 40 percent would be left behind in public schools. I think that significantly changes the public dynamics of who supports funding of what kind of schooling. More parents would be in favor of protecting the autonomy of private schools than of protecting the existing public schools. Vouchers will defund the advocates of the status quo and fund the advocates of private education and deregulation. They truly change the dynamics."

Though Bast, like Fritz, favors complete government deregulation of schools, he thinks it an unrealistic goal. "The average person is always going to believe that some regulation is necessary," said Bast. "We've never had a completely laissez faire education system and I don't think that we ever will. But we don't want to leave the schools socialist until we can persuade a majority of the population to become anarchists. I really think that's what Marshall Fritz is saying; it's an all or nothing thing. If there is any risk of regulation following vouchers, then we shouldn't do it. We should wait until everybody is convinced that there should be total separation of school and state. Well, I wish we could achieve that universal awareness of the truth, but we're not anywhere near it. I can't see that we are making any progress toward it and we can't not reform the schools waiting for that society wide ah-ha experience to happen."

Fritz said he doesn't want to persuade anyone to become anarchist; he believes in a role for government, but thinks it has no role in education. The duty to educate, he thinks, belongs to parents, not the state. But what of the charge that he is unrealistic? "That's what they told Wilberforce, that getting rid of slavery was unrealistic," said Fritz. "His critics said, 'why don't we try to get some sort of transport reforms so that slaves are treated more nicely in the middle passage?' There were people who were, you know, the slavery nicer crowd. They said, 'we've had slavery for over 1,000 years; what makes you think that we can get rid of it?' I think you can respond, 'well, we don't know the timing, but we're pretty sure that God did not intend that men be slaves to one another.'" Though complete deregulation of schools seems impossible, Fritz said, "the impossible happens all the time. Who, in 1988, would have believed that in a year the Berlin Wall would fall? I don't know whether it's two years or two decades; I don't know what' s going to be the triggering event; but the other thing I do know is that we won't get to the ultimate goal of complete government deregulation of schools if we don't hold the banner high."

"I'm very much a gradualist," continued Fritz. "I think the most important thing we're doing is helping people, who haven't yet decided to put their children in home schooling or private schooling, to draw more clearly the contrast between government schooling and private schooling. As that contrast becomes more clear, and they see the harm the government schools are doing their children, we are going to move to more and more people going outside the system. It's a gradual approach where the system will shrink to such an extent that the government schools will have to throw in the towel."

On the moral level, Fritz thinks it a good thing that most parents have to shoulder the task of educating their children. "At least a third of this population has the money to send their children to private school without undue sacrifice, and another third has the capacity to do it with serious sacrifice," said Fritz. Vouchers won't help the fact that "parents are making bad choices. They are choosing to send their children to schools where their beliefs are being undermined. They are choosing to spend their money on other things. But who says you have to live in that big of a house and drive that size of car?"

Most parents today, said Fritz, "do not suffer from a lack of choice in schooling, but from a lack of responsibility."

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