…The right choice

National Review, Sept 15, 1997 by Ramesh Ponnaru

MR. Trowbridge is right: school vouchers do significantly increase the risk of government regulations that would impair the autonomy and effectiveness of private and parochial schools. What's more, conservatives cannot in principle object to putting conditions on government aid. They have supported conditions in controversies over welfare, arts funding, and abortion counseling. And they were correct to do so: surely the government may properly specify the purposes for which it intends to disburse public funds.

It's true, as proponents vigorously assert, that school vouchers are a slightly different case, because in conception they are supposed to be merely a rebate to parents who are relieving the public sector of an obligation. In the rough-and-tumble of political debate, however, it's hard to see this distinction swaying many legislators. Who pays the piper calls the tune.

Trowbridge is also right to expect to increase tuition at private and parochial schools. That's what has happened in higher education, where the Federal Government's college loans and grants are a rough approximation of a voucher plan. Colleges have raised their prices and lowered their standards to soak up the free money. There's no reason to expect that schools would be immune to state-induced sector inflation.

In addition, voucher advocates tend to use egalitarian arguments that ought to be disconcerting to conservatives. They say that if President Clinton can send his daughter to a private school, poor parents ought to have the same option. Some advocates have even welcomed school-funding equalization lawsuits and desegregation orders, seeing in them openings for school choice. But the Clintons can afford a lot of things that other people can't. If conservatives can't agree whether vouchers are a good idea, they should at least agree that they aren't worth endorsing collectivism for.

For these reasons and others, many thoughtful traditionalists and libertarians have become opponents of vouchers. In addition to Mr. Trowbridge, Pat Buchanan, Maggie Gallagher, Michael Horowitz, Douglas Dewey, Joseph Sobran, Llewellyn Rockwell, Dwight Lee, and Sheldon Richman have argued against them. Their view is gaining ground among Christian conservative activists. Timothy Lamer of the Media Research Center is, in his spare time, an indefatigable anti-voucher polemicist. "I oppose it both as an evangelical who doesn't want to be taxed to support the propagation of religious views I don't hold and as a conservative who is concerned about private-school regulation," he says, and the late Al Shanker, head of the American Federation of Teachers, once devoted a column to publicize Lamer's arguments.

Most of the right-wing critics of school choice, and some of the supporters, think that the ultimate goal should be the complete, or almost complete, separation of school and state. They make the case that ideally, government should be involved in neither the direct provision nor the funding of education. Separationists who favor school choice call it "a step in the right direction." But critics are right to question whether vouchers would really move us closer to a pure regime of educational freedom. They would weaken a powerful statist lobby, the teachers unions, but would add the private schools and their existing patrons to the constituency for higher government spending on education.

At this point the patient reader may reasonably ask, since I've conceded Mr. Trowbridge's arguments against vouchers, why do I nonetheless support them? Partly it's because maintaining a system that keeps 89 per cent of students in public schools seems too high a price to pay to preserve a small enclave of complete educational freedom. More importantly, it's because the current system is a bigger problem for that enclave than the anti-voucherites seem to realize.

One of those critics, Jeffrey Tucker, came close to the problem when explaining in these pages (March 1, 1993) how vouchers could hook schools on government aid: "Private schools do not have to take vouchers, of course. But by refusing them, a school subjects itself to unfair competition from subsidized schools." True enough. A moment's reflection, however, should make it clear that private schools are already subjected to "unfair competition from subsidized schools" -- namely, the public schools.

It's a perverse competition, in which the rules are stacked against the alternatives that are safer, educationally superior, and less expensive. The public schools have a guaranteed source of funding that does not depend heavily on parental satisfaction. Property taxes that finance them are deductible against federal income taxes, unlike private-school tuition. By pumping more money into supplier markets (for teachers or textbooks), the public-school monopoly inflates prices in those markets and makes it more expensive for private schools to operate. Private schools generally can't keep up with public-school salaries, for example, even though they devote a larger proportion of their budgets to payrolls.