Although I don’t agree that the risk is large enough to justify opposition to school-choice legislation, some free-marketeers properly express concern that voucher programs or even some kinds of tax credits could serve as an invitation to state governments to increase costly and counterproductive regulation of private education.
I happened to be looking today at a new report from the Friedman Foundation that ranks the 50 states according to how onerously they regulate private schools. North Carolina gets a poor grade (D), not that this should surprise anyone. We ought to be used to bad national marks by now.
What’s interesting, though, is that there appears to be no correlation between government aid to private schools and the regulatory burden. Of the top five choice states in the nation ? places where voucher or tax credit programs are large enough to enroll tens of thousands of students ? only Pennsylvania gets a truly bad grade, a D, in private-school regulation. School-choice pioneers such as Wisconsin (A-), Arizona (A-), and Florida (A) have some of the least-regulated private-school markets in the country. Ohio comes in roughly in the middle at C-.
That’s not to say that the potential risks of entangling private schools and the government aren’t real, and worth close attention. It’s just to say that with close attention by private educators, choice activists, and like-minded policymakers, would-be regulators can be rebuffed.
