Today’s Daily Journal only reinforces the points that Roy Cordato made last week. Liberals ought to latch onto publicly funded vouchers, to wrest further control of all education; conservatives ought to avoid publicly funded vouchers like the plague. Public education’s sad record, one point of the story that appears today, should make it clear that education, whether it is necessary, obligatory, or superfluous, ought not to be controlled or administeredby the state–under any scheme or new arrangement one might imagine.
Like cars, sometimes a non-working system needs to be junked entirely. No new engines, new spending, new mechanics will do. Public education is just such a junker, albeit the current reality. That’s neither a necessary nor sufficient argument for its continued operation. A bad reality is not an inevitable reality. History affords ample evidence of same.
What is really troubling is the fact that public education apologists seek to ‘fix’ the acknowledged failures of the current reality by contaminating the private education stream, which is exactly what vouchers make possible. All it would take is for the authorities to require the state’s end of grade test to be given in schools that accept publicly funded vouchers?under the unimpeachable banner of ‘accountability,’? to end the independence of these schools. That’s why homeschoolers resisted being vacuumed into the state education oversight system, and flooded the Legislature with protests.
Government education tends always to further the ends of the state, not necessarily the parents, or the children in their charge. And there is no evidence that individuals are even served adequately by the state, particularly under a compulsory attendance system.
Roy is correct. What amounts to excusing the state’s incompetence (by any non-statist quality metric) is advocating false ‘freedom of choice’ (at someone else’s expense). Public vouchers, as every private school owner and operator knows, will enable the state to extend its influence beyond the current public schools, and override the choices and sacrifices of parents and administrators of students in non-state schools. Officially and unofficially school-choicers care nothing about the choices of parents who have placed their children in these non-public schools, and have said so. They want to ‘tear down the wall between private and public education’ (near the end of the article).
That is is why the arguments ought to fall out between liberals and conservatives in the way that Roy described. It’s way past the time for this populist but destructive politicking in education.