Here is my main complaint about vouchers, and likley ever will be. It has nothing to do with achievement, cost, or feasibility, and certainly nothing to do with public school choice.
Advocates of vouchers state that they do not care that the voucher process may destroy private schooling in the process; typically they judge the regulations to be “not too intrusive.” However, if I’m paying for that private school, I’ll be the judge of what’s “too intrusive.” Obvioiusly, reducing choice for me or others who make the decision to purchase non-government schooling (by even the threat of imposing requirements on private schools that receive tax-funded vouchers) is an acceptable tradeoff for these people. Of course it is–they don’t bear the cost.
The whole voucher idea is a false notion of choice, unless ones concept of choice extends to some in society, but not to all. If the choices of parents who both pay their taxes, and pay additionally to exit the government schools in favor of an alternative system are subverted by voucher plans, they deny me my choice in favor of theirs. Even even more so if private schools undergo any change whatsoever that is not entirely at the discretion of the schools or their patrons in the private education market.
In addition, those who cry “Choice!” or “Greater Good!” but only mean hitherto unavailable options for parents of public school students, exhibit their blatant streak of socialism. They frankly want others to pay, by force, for an option they are unwilling to make, or unable to make, voluntarily. Could they get away with this anywhere else?
Consider. If I am currently unwilling to budget transportation dollars sufficient to allow myself the purchase of a Lexus, am I denied a choice? No. What if there is just no way I could conceivably budget those funds? Still, no. We could argue about how necessary transportation is, and about the limited functionality of a basic model, but I doubt that would be persuasive in my effort to get ‘society’ to buy my Lexus for me.
I’m tired of education socialists crying choice (of what to do with everyone else’s dollars), while violating market principles in the name of an education market. If Heartland and the Friedman Foundation want to take this position (and they do, and I have debated this and know very well that the voucher route is seen as the ‘practical’ route to public education reform, and that I will not change that view), then I would at least request that advocates honestly call this pocket of socialism a ‘pocket of socialism,’ stop pretending it is a ‘market solution,’ and stop calling it a solution that promotes choice. Not my choice.
Alternatively, send me the money for my Lexus.
