Wednesday, July 31, 2002
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Wednesday, July 31, 2002 |
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Choice: The ultimate school voucher plan By MONROE
ROARK
With the first day of school just around the corner, I think it's a perfect time to unveil what I like to call the Ultimate School Voucher Plan. It is, without a doubt, the fairest way to give every single child an opportunity for a first-class education while leaving the all-important choice of where to get that education up to the parents. Here's how it works. The Fayette County School System has a 2002-03 budget of just under $141 million and is expecting approximately 20,500 students this fall. For the sake of round numbers, let's say that if you add all of the Fayette County students in private schools or home schools, you have 22,000 children eligible to use the public schools and have a slice of the $141 million pie. That averages out to just over $6,400 per student (a positive mark for the Fayette school board, as many urban school districts spend much more than that per capita). Given these figures, how do you implement the Ultimate School Voucher Plan? It's quite simple. You give a $6,400 voucher to every student in the school district. No exceptions. No special consideration for income, race, gender or anything else. Every student has the same shot, and every parent gets to choose whether to find a private school or send his or her voucher right back into the public school. By doing this, the government has fulfilled its stated obligation of providing every student with an education. And the public school system, whether it has 20,000 students or 10,000, will have the same amount of funding per capita as it did before. Meanwhile, it is highly likely that every private school within driving distance will be filled to capacity and some parents would have money left over, since many private schools now do a fine job using about half the money per student as the public schools, with no government assistance. Putting money back in taxpayers' pockets what a novel idea. If you really want to be fair about it, take it one step further. Take all of the money budgeted for education in Georgia from the state and every school district and put it in one pot. Then utilize the Ultimate School Voucher Plan statewide. The long lamented gap between school districts in metropolitan areas and those in poorer rural areas would quickly close, as private school competition would enter markets that previously had no chance because the parents had no financial means to support it. And the public schools would be on a level playing field statewide, at a per capita budget close to what is now in Fayette. Over the next several years of the plan, one of two things would happen. Either the public schools would rise to meet the challenge of competition in the marketplace, resulting in improved performance everywhere and lower costs, or the public schools would go out of business. Either way, every student would still have a number of fine schools to choose from and an Ultimate School Voucher to shop with. If you're thinking that this plan sounds like it's from outer space, that is because you've been programmed by liberal politicians and educators' unions to think that vouchers would suck the life out of the public school system, financially and otherwise, and leave a group of poor students stuck in a hopeless situation with no way out. That is a lie. First of all, no proposed school voucher I've ever heard of in any district in the United States covers as much as half of what that district is spending per student. Do the math: If 20,000 students are spending $100 million ($5,000 per student) and 10,000 of them each get at $3,000 voucher and go to private schools (at a total cost of $30 million), the remaining 10,000 now have $70 million, or $7,000 per student. That program would actually be a windfall for the remaining students, and one is left to wonder in what type of school the anti-voucher crowd learned basic math and economics. The Establishment Clause argument doesn't fly here, either. Using a government voucher to send your child to a parochial school does not violate that statute any more than using a portion of one's Social Security check to support a church or religious practice. You see, the reason the Ultimate School Voucher Plan will never be implemented is that the voucher issue is not about economics or the Constitution. It's about control the government's wish to control how your tax dollars are spent and your right to educate your child as you see fit, or as you believe God would have you do it. Are some school systems, like Fayette's, doing a much better job that others? Sure they are. Is the government school system in this country as a whole doing the job? Not by a long shot. And will the government give parents the options they need and deserve anytime in the near future? Not a chance. Liberals insist that they are the group that promotes choice, but nothing could be further from the truth. They do not support choice regarding your right to bear arms. They do not support choice regarding your health care. They do not support choice regarding how you would fund your retirement. The only issue on which liberals wholeheartedly agree on the right to choose, it seems, is when it comes to killing your unborn children. So you will likely hear more in the coming months, especially during election season, about how school vouchers would do irreparable damage to the nation's education system, and politicians like Gov. Roy Barnes will placate the teachers' unions with their loud rhetoric, none of which is based on logic or fact. Meanwhile, millions of parents will continue to sacrifice and dig deep into their own pockets to provide educational alternatives for their children, taking comfort in the ever-widening gap in quality between schools with limitless government funds and those doing a far better job with much less. They will also continue to watch the largest portion of their hard-earned tax dollars fall into the coffers of a system that many of them stopped believing in a long time ago a system that in most of the country is riddled with idiotic overregulation, intolerable bureaucracies and insane political correctness. It's the American way.
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