Straight talk on school choice
Let me state up front that I am an unadulterated supporter of competition in publicly funded education, better known as school choice.
However, having said this, I think the Florida Supreme Court correctly struck down Governor Jeb Bush's Opportunity Scholarships - a voucher program for students attending failing public schools - as contrary to Florida's constitution.
The Florida constitution calls for “a uniform, efficient, safe, secure and high-quality system of free public schools.” The 5-2 decision held that Bush's voucher program “diverts public dollars into separate private systems parallel to and in competition with the free public schools that are the sole means set out in the Constitution for the state to provide for the education of Florida's children.”
Don't blame school vouchers for this constitutional defeat. Vouchers will ultimately save Florida's public education from the people who run it today and are running it into the ground. Instead blame the defeat on Florida's archaic state constitution. It clearly calls for “a uniform ... system of free public schools,” which publicly funded vouchers in private schools clearly are not.
Unfortunately, Indiana's constitution suffers the same malady. Our General Assembly is mandated to provide “a general and uniform system of Common Schools, wherein tuition shall be without charge, and equally open to all.” Just as in Florida, this wording is all that the Indiana Supreme Court would need to strike down most voucher legislation. This is why we should not rely on our courts to do a political job. It’s the legislature’s role to change our laws to make real educational improvements possible.
Indiana's constitution is nearly 190 years old, and so are its educational provisions. The idea of voucher education just turned 50 this year. We must bring our state constitution and political discussion up to date by focusing on the value of competition in education.
If competition provides accountability among competing merchants, mechanics and ministers in our society - which it does - then competition should be used to bring accountability to our public education system, also.
Accountability woefully lacks in Indiana’s government-run monopoly school systems. While our students are being taught how to pass the ISTEP test, students elsewhere are reading books, doing math exercises and learning foreign languages.
Yet school-choice opponents say accountability is not the issue, that school choice proponents like me are just hostile to public schools. This is how Howard Simon, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union for Florida, put it: “What fueled Opportunity Scholarships and other programs was not the inability of public schools to provide the needed programs but rather the opposition and hostility to public schools and the desire to create a competing school system.”
This is both silly and disingenuous. Most school choice advocates oppose neither public schools, which I attended, nor public funding of schools. Most of us are motivated strictly against the government monopoly of educators that run and control our public schools to the detriment of children and our society.
Even the most socially democratic of nations such as Belgium and Sweden give parents universal choice where to send their kids to school. These liberal systems, which educate children far better than ours does, prove that there is nothing inherently contradictory between providing public education and allowing educational choice and competition among educational providers.
These social welfare systems can teach American liberals that it is only through competition that excellence in public education can be achieved.
If we can all agree that competition is good and monopolies are bad, then our discussion should focus on how to infuse competition into publicly funded education and how to bust the government's bureaucratic education monopoly.
However, having said this, I think the Florida Supreme Court correctly struck down Governor Jeb Bush's Opportunity Scholarships - a voucher program for students attending failing public schools - as contrary to Florida's constitution.
The Florida constitution calls for “a uniform, efficient, safe, secure and high-quality system of free public schools.” The 5-2 decision held that Bush's voucher program “diverts public dollars into separate private systems parallel to and in competition with the free public schools that are the sole means set out in the Constitution for the state to provide for the education of Florida's children.”
Don't blame school vouchers for this constitutional defeat. Vouchers will ultimately save Florida's public education from the people who run it today and are running it into the ground. Instead blame the defeat on Florida's archaic state constitution. It clearly calls for “a uniform ... system of free public schools,” which publicly funded vouchers in private schools clearly are not.
Unfortunately, Indiana's constitution suffers the same malady. Our General Assembly is mandated to provide “a general and uniform system of Common Schools, wherein tuition shall be without charge, and equally open to all.” Just as in Florida, this wording is all that the Indiana Supreme Court would need to strike down most voucher legislation. This is why we should not rely on our courts to do a political job. It’s the legislature’s role to change our laws to make real educational improvements possible.
Indiana's constitution is nearly 190 years old, and so are its educational provisions. The idea of voucher education just turned 50 this year. We must bring our state constitution and political discussion up to date by focusing on the value of competition in education.
If competition provides accountability among competing merchants, mechanics and ministers in our society - which it does - then competition should be used to bring accountability to our public education system, also.
Accountability woefully lacks in Indiana’s government-run monopoly school systems. While our students are being taught how to pass the ISTEP test, students elsewhere are reading books, doing math exercises and learning foreign languages.
Yet school-choice opponents say accountability is not the issue, that school choice proponents like me are just hostile to public schools. This is how Howard Simon, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union for Florida, put it: “What fueled Opportunity Scholarships and other programs was not the inability of public schools to provide the needed programs but rather the opposition and hostility to public schools and the desire to create a competing school system.”
This is both silly and disingenuous. Most school choice advocates oppose neither public schools, which I attended, nor public funding of schools. Most of us are motivated strictly against the government monopoly of educators that run and control our public schools to the detriment of children and our society.
Even the most socially democratic of nations such as Belgium and Sweden give parents universal choice where to send their kids to school. These liberal systems, which educate children far better than ours does, prove that there is nothing inherently contradictory between providing public education and allowing educational choice and competition among educational providers.
These social welfare systems can teach American liberals that it is only through competition that excellence in public education can be achieved.
If we can all agree that competition is good and monopolies are bad, then our discussion should focus on how to infuse competition into publicly funded education and how to bust the government's bureaucratic education monopoly.
posted by Kurt St. Angelo at 6:42 AM
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