Federal vouchers gave 1700 low-income DC students a chance to escape their failed public school system. Now the Democratic Congress is going to dash their hopes of a decent education and leave them at the mercy of ineffective and dangerous schools. The spending bill discontinues funding for the voucher program, which cost far less than putting pupils through DC public schools. 

Democrats are grimly determined to score political points at the expense of the disadvantaged children featured in a video appeal to Congress (see below). They just want to stay in their schools, and their youthful frankness is a standing rebuke to the commentary from so-called “progressive” organizations. According to Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United, “It’s about ideology. Some people just don’t like public schools and want to use vouchers to funnel public funds to religious and other private schools.” What about the children who live in fear of gang violence, who are condemned to academic failure by indifferent teachers and administration?

For the most party, they don’t have ideologies, and their problems with the existing institutions can’t be tritely dismissed as “just not liking public schools.” What are public schools for, if not giving children the best possible education in the best possible environment? The idea that we should jealously protect an ineffective institution by destroying the best alternative is purest ideological derangement.

Opponents of school choice argue that public school forces children to socialize with a cross-section of society and learn democratic values. In fact, a RAND Corporation study found that school choice moderately increases school integration. Denmark, a social democracy with an egalitarian tradition and fewer social problems than the US overall, has a long and honorable tradition of state funding for private education. Sweden introduced vouchers in 1992 to the strong approval of students and parents. These countries aren’t riven with social atomization or a profusion of wacky religious sects, and the Scandinavian model shows us what long-term school choice can look like. 

In the US, minority support for vouchers is strong. This isn’t because minority parents are confused about what is good for their children, or because they’re anti-state idealogues. Some research has found that minorities benefit the most from placement in voucher-funded private schools, but even a finding of no effect shouldn’t put voters off school choice- it’s a matter of personal freedom for parents, who have many good reasons for choosing as they do.

Public school proponents usually offer up the hoary trope that school choice “distracts from efforts to reform the public schools,” as if attention were a precious commodity not to be wasted on facts they dislike. This piece of stock rhetoric refuses to face the facts: parents won’t control over the schools as long as politicians pay the bills, and politicians simply don’t have the same incentives to care about education that parents do. If they can leave a vague impression of “having done something” about schools, that’s usually enough to get them re-elected.

It’s certainly not the case that public schools don’t get enough money. Although the DC school system spends more per pupil than any other system in the nation it regularly lags behind the nation in academic standards. Not all the money in the world can make up for the unique knowledge of a parent, which is why the school choice program is at least as good at educating students and does so with far less money.

School reformism is presumptuous because it assumes that bureaucrats can find “the answer” to a problem that is intensely personal. There is, in fact, a different answer for every child, and no reform can arrive at “the answer.” School choice advocates don’t assume that private schools are a universal solution, but they’re fairly certain that they aren’t symptoms of societal disintegration. If public schools are a great tradition worth preserving, students and parents will choose them over other options and they will survive well into an era of free choice. 

Instead of bluntly asserting that minority parents are wrong about what is good for their children, let’s empower them to make the best decision, as only they know how to do. Given a choice, parents who want the best for their childrens’ futures might choose private schools, but that’s purely up to them. It’s time to leave the private/public partisanship behind, and  leave American families free to choose.

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