An expansive new voucher program, signed into Indiana law today, has been widely praised as a momentous victory for school choice and Gov. Mitch Daniels on the brink of his long-awaited presidential campaign announcement. In reality, the voucher program is a tactical victory for highly constrained choice won at the price of a broad strategic defeat for educational freedom.
To see why, consider the bill's regulations. Most people would agree there are some topics about which every child in this country should learn. Historical documents, for instance, that are vital for understanding our shared American heritage: the Federalist Papers, the Constitution, Thomas Paine's Common Sense, and Chief Seattle's 1852 letter to the United States government.
Chief Seattle was a great leader of native Americans in the Northwest, and this moving letter lays out the vast gulf between how his people and the "white" man viewed the land, not as a commodity to be bought and sold but a part of themselves, a sacred trust. Chief Seattle's letter is also a modern fabrication sprung from the pen of a screenwriter for a 1972 film about ecology.
And in Indiana, it is a legally protected historical document that public, and now voucher-accepting private schools, are required to have on hand for academic use by students.
The apocryphal Chief Seattle letter is merely an illustration of the dangers and absurdities of state-controlled curriculum. Private voucher schools will not only be forced to make this fabrication available to students, they are also prohibited from lowering a student's grade, if he should, for example, cite the letter as a primary source in the course of his school work.
Unfortunately, this is just the peak of the regulatory mountain being dropped on participating private schools. The legislation will greatly expand state regulation of and authority over participating private schools. It will force them to annually administer the Indiana Statewide Testing for Progress examination (ISTEP), and submit both ISTEP and other progress and performance data to the state. It will require the state to track and evaluate private schools according to state standards, and to align consequences with their performances. It establishes a lottery admissions requirement for over-subscribed schools that could interfere with their ability to determine admissions procedures and the character of the school.
Finally, it establishes extensive and detailed new curriculum and pedagogical requirements for participating private schools, including some requirements that are not currently a part of state accreditation. For instance, private schools must "provide good citizenship instruction that stresses the nature and importance of," among other items, "respecting authority," "respecting the property of others," respecting the student's parents and home," "respecting the student's self," and "respecting the rights of others to have their own views and religious beliefs." What does this mean for religious private schools teaching that one can only be saved by belief in Jesus Christ? Would a school wherein a teacher discusses the recent federal healthcare legislation violate the provision mandating respect for authority should she criticize the law, or perhaps violate a respect for property if she speaks favorably of the individual insurance mandate in that law?
Currently, less than 40 percent of all known private schools in Indiana are accredited by the state. The majority of private schools, in other words, are subject to very few restrictions on educational freedom.
Because participating schools will have a significant financial advantage over non-participating schools, lightly regulated schools will face increasing financial pressure to participate. Over time, many of those who refuse to submit to state control will be driven out of business by competition from the highly regulated, but voucher-funded schools.
In other words, the voucher program will not only expand state control over and homogenize participating schools by requiring adherence to a single state-designed test, evaluation, and curriculum, it will also cut into the market for non-accredited schools. The likely effect is a serious loss of education freedom and diversity of options in the medium-term and a near-total loss in the long term.
The voucher law places private schools under the supervision of the state Department of Education, making them accountable to career bureaucrats and political appointees for performance on government standards and curriculum. It is an authorization and framework of accountability to the state, rather than to parents and taxpayers directly. This is a strategic victory for opponents of educational freedom; all that's required is a downhill push for tighter control.
In our efforts to expand educational choice across the country, we can't lose sight of what makes that choice valuable; educational freedom and the diversity of choices it allows to develop. School choice is meaningless if all the choices are the same.
Adam B. Schaeffer, Ph.D., is a policy analyst at the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom
Core curriculum - I do not buy into the fear mongering on regs and oversight. Public educations is fraught with this nonsense, PLUS a political agenda. Tuscan school districts have Hispanic studies and in Cali they have gay history.
This was a job well done. We need vouchers in all 50 states.
As to the comment about the Cato institute representing the interests of only the wealthy- I must ask- why does everything have to be a conflict between classes? What is good for one economic group, whether poor, middle class or wealthy, if it is truly good for that group, is good for the other groups. Just as the school sytem is an antiquated remnant from the industrial revolution, so is the notion that the rich become rich by taking from everyone else. While there may be a handfull of exceptions, the majority of the wealthy do not take wealth from others as much as they create it.
The money supply is not finite. It can expand and contract. This is why, as the economy improves, inflation typically follows, as there is literally more money in existence than there was before, thus causing its value to go down.
Oh, the HORROR! Private schools want public money, but they don't want to be held accountable to the same public standards? We should just take the schools at their word that they're doing a good job, right? We should just assume that if a principal hires a teacher, he or she is a good teacher, right? If so, then those rules should apply to public schools as well.
Want public money? Follow public rules. No one is forcing a school to accept the funds. If they want full freedom, they can have it. They just can't have the money.
It's easy enough to check up on any school and see the results. If a private school doesn't educate their students, they go out of business. Not so for public schools. For instance, 70% of Wisconsin's public-schooled eighth graders cannot read at a proficient level.
"We should just assume that if a principal hires a teacher, he or she is a good teacher, right?"
Isn't that part of a principal's job? Do all public school principals have to have some government overseer come behind him and make sure he hires good people? Personally, I think we should privatize all K-12 education and give no vouchers. I hardly think is fair that I pay the local school system ever-higher property taxes to NOT educate someone else's kids.
The public school system in the US is broken. Of course it is not the teachers fault; nor the principals; nor the administrators. They are all nice people so The blame must lie with other people.
If so, explain to me why these private schools getting state taxpayer money shouldn't be ACCOUNTABLE for the money just like a public school.
Thought so.
If they don't like the restrictions, they don't have to take the money.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/37516042/
Also, since the standards that make up the rankings in your link are not listed, the rankings could be construed to be subjective and or worthless.
You do not explain who 'They' are in your post, however, in the link, the states with a high ranking are not the ones that 'they' want to reform.
Every country should have it's resident cult of anarchists.
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2) Anarchist, by definition, cannot have a cult.
If all schools are private and education made free market, think of what will happen over the long haul.
Rich people will STILL send their kids to the best schools, as everyone else who can will, RAISING THE DEMAND. That means some schools, those with the highest concentrations of kids from privileged backgrounds (thus more resources aside from school itself) will become too expensive for poor folks with vouchers, meaning they'll send their kids to some cheaper, lower demand schools.
At best, that's no change.
The difference is who is in control and for what motive? Corporations for training their own workers their way? Religious groups for training devotees?
The point of public education, the whole reason, is citizenship and a baseline... things that are only supported by public control. Without regulation, universal education becomes meaningless, a new way for companies to profit and interest groups to spread their voice.
The dream world "school choice" folks have of improved schools would require just the kind of regulation (not the same regulations necessarily) the author is complaining about.
These Libertarians may mean well, but their policy ideas will basically destroy education for most Americans.