Utah brings competition to the public education monopoly

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Q. The state of Utah has just passed a landmark educational voucher program under which every family, depending on its income, will be reimbursed between $500 and $3,000 per child for annual tuition paid to the private school of their choice. This will now give parents of modest means options that the well-to-do have long enjoyed. Their school-age children will no longer be a captive audience. Parents will be empowered as educational consumers, giving them choices and leverage consumers enjoy in all other spheres of our market economy. They'll be free to choose the educational model they believe best fits the unique needs of their children, and will be freed from the bureaucracy and politics of government-delivered education. Predictably, the educratic establishment is in full counterattack. The Utah teachers' union has launched a campaign to repeal the new law. If that fails, they'll try their luck in court. Their resistance is bred of desperation. First, the union's survival is at stake. Under a voucher system, education is still publicly financed through taxpayer dollars. That doesn't change. But what does is the union's monopoly to deliver publicly funded education exclusively in government schools. Under a voucher system, competition would bloom. Second, there's the ideological opposition to competition and free choice in education. The educratic establishment - from administrators, to the teachers' colleges that staff the schools, to the unions that run them and the school boards they elect - is liberal to its core.

A. Agree. I've heard this argument for years, usually involving states where there are large urban populations. In the South, of course, the Fundies and their friends, want to subsidize "Christian" education or home schooling (although ver few students are actually home schooled). Here's the predictable result: the tuition of the private schools will do a fast creep to absorb the voucher subsidy. After all, the vouchers aren't going to create demand, and if I can afford to pay $10K or $15K to school my children now, with a $3K voucher I can afford to spend $13K. For a poor kid, it's no help at all. Even if the child in an inner city school wants to flee to ths suburbs, he/she has no way to get there. When a voucher experiment was tried in Miami, virtually all the adolescents who left the inner city for "better" schools returned to their old schools within a few months. (1) They felt out of place and uncomfortable. (2) The commute was devastating. What this will do is make the Mormon Church and the other churches in Utah that run schools a lot richer. Lord be praised!

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