|
Refuting the Voucherites by Steven YatesMy article last weekend received an overwhelmingly favorable response, including a request for republication. A couple of responses, however, including an attack on my honesty by a "pro-voucher libertarian" circulating around the Internet, indicate to me that more needs to be said on the subject of libertarianism, vouchers, and where the money is coming from. Moreover, a few items that have crossed my desk since last week (one of them generously sent to me by a reader) indicate that my article only scratched the surface. First things first. I did not do enough to differentiate between the notions of state-funded vouchers and federally funded vouchers. The Zelman decision involved an instance of the former, not the latter. Nor did I say enough to indicate that the specifics of future voucher programs would have to be hammered out on a state-by-state basis. I assumed everybody knows this – although a handful of careless references to the federal government may have suggested otherwise. Now with that said, does anyone really believe that federal and state education departments operate in sealed-off, antiseptically closed universes, so that the federal government will have absolutely nothing to say about the dispensation of vouchers somewhere down the pike? Anyone who believes this, including "pro-voucher libertarians," I have for sale some oceanfront property in central Nebraska they might find very pleasant. State education departments receive federal money for a multitude of purposes, and with this federal money comes entangling regulations. Be this as it may, the quote from my article that set off my "pro-voucher libertarian" critic seems to have been the one from Charles Murray's book What It Means to Be a Libertarian. This is, in fact, a very strange little book, given its title. Murray (unlike "real" libertarians I am familiar with) sees education as a "federal function … a $3,000 unrestricted tuition voucher would be provided annually for each child attending elementary and secondary school – an expenditure of about $150 billion a year" (p . 37). And again: "Replace all existing federal programs with an unrestricted $3,000 school voucher per annum, per child" (p. 90). Now was Murray proposing a federal program or was he not? He isn't always clear. He is "prepared to accept government funding, though not government control, of education" (p. 96). Whether you can have the first without the second is a major issue – regardless of whether we are talking about state or federal. Moreover, the federal programs in existence are not necessarily limited to government schools. Consider: the U.S. Department of Education itself recently affirmed the federal government's
What is different about the voucher program decided in Zelman, however, is that the voucher goes directly to the parents and not to any school. However, in light of the recent avalanche of federal education legislation, especially Bush's No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, does this difference actually make a difference? House Education and Workforce Committee Chair John Boehner (R-OH) praised the Zelman ruling:
As well as the further expansion of federal involvement in education. President Bush has long been a voucher enthusiast, first on the campaign trail back in 2000 (he mainly used the less controversial phrase school choice) and more recently. He also favors a massive federal role in education. The original version of the No Child Left Behind Act, very possibly the largest federal education bill in U.S. history, contained a voucher provision that would have given students up to $1,500 in federal funds for private-school tuition. Congress got rid of this and replaced it (in the Senate) with a provision that would allow the same students to receive the same $1,500 for private tutoring or transportation to other public schools. Now, Bush has revived the idea for his 2003 budget:
The president proposes to give families up to $2,500 per child if they choose a private school rather than a failing neighborhood public school. No federal involvement in school choice? Tell me another one! Michael Lynch, writing in Reason, warned back in January of 2001, following the passage of No Child Left Behind: "Prepare yourself for a larger role for the federal government in education. And prepare yourself for federally funded vouchers for low-income students in failing schools." (Italics mine.) Former Libertarian Party presidential candidate Harry Browne has stated bluntly: "Vouchers will result in government control of private schools…. [A]nytime government money goes anywhere, there are strings attached. Vouchers would be used as a means of exerting federal control over private and parochial schools." Now let us just suppose that by a miracle of Biblical proportions, programs dispensing state-funded vouchers exclusively to parents in the future managed to remain free of federal oversight. Would this mean that private, religious schools would be able to maintain their distinct identities? The longest standing state-funded voucher program, in Milwaukee, has been in existence around 12 years. This program is the logical place to look for evidence of danger, and it is there. The Christian Law Association recently issued this statement identifying the problem:
In other words, if schools take money whose ultimate source is government – even at the state level – they must play by the state's rules. This was what Joe Loconte, William E. Simon Fellow in Religion and a Free Society, at the Heritage Foundation, warned back as 1999 in Policy Review, that Wisconsin "is not so much a model as it is an omen – a case study in how choice programs could become a Trojan horse for government meddling in private education." He observes that before the constitutionality of the voucher program in Milwaukee was upheld by the lower court, "opponents tried to saddle religious schools with a hodge-podge of federal and state regulations…." Andrew Coulson, author of the monumental study Market Education: The Unknown History, wrote:
Loconte quotes Greg Doyle of the ACLU: "Any [private] school that takes public funds ought to be required to do the things that public schools do." This is, in fact, the dominant mindset. Voucher advocate Charles Glenn of Boston University's educational policy department warned, "If we're not careful about … how voucher programs are designed, government will get its hands on these schools and in four or five years turn them into clones." Of course. Back in 1942, the Supreme Court ruled in Wickard v. Filburn that "It is hardly lack of due process for the government to regulate that which it subsidizes." Perhaps this is why Justice David Souter, in his dissenting opinion in Zelman, observed that
In this light, let us consider Lew Rockwell's "Voucher Socialism, which reports on the one program we haven't considered so far, down in Florida. Private schools there must, he writes, must (1) file huge and ongoing financial reports to the state (there is no privacy); (2) submit to all federal antidiscrimination laws (thus forcing single-sex schools participating in the program to change their admission policies, for example); (3) accept voucher students on a religious-neutral basis without regard to the student's past academic history; (4) only employ teachers with at least three years teaching experience in public or private schools; (5) accept as full tuition and fees the amount provided by the state for each student-price controls; (6) agree not to compel any student attending the private school on a voucher to profess a specific belief, pray or worship – no independent curriculum; (7) grant the government veto power over disciplinary procedures, so that no voucher student can be expelled for being a troublemaker. It does sound like socialism to me. Rockwell concludes: "So long as public money is involved, the government will always run the show." Very much contrary to Charles Murray and other pro-voucher utopians. Now my pro-voucher critic (and, therefore, perhaps others) may be ready to shout, But Yates, the voucher program in Ohio does not give money to any private school; it gives money to the parents and lets them use it to choose which school to send their children to. True – as I've noted. My response is twofold: (1) What matters is not who the money flows to, but where it is flowing from, and (2) It matters little whether it is flowing from state educrats or from federal educrats because of the web of entanglements between the two. We may also turn to voucher critic Douglas Dewey of the National Scholarship Center whose description of the long term effects of the G.I. Bill, Pell Grants, and guaranteed student loans on higher education might be instructive. After all, these, too, were granted to individuals, not institutions. (This should be helpful for several readers who emailed me wondering if the G.I. Bill created problems for the idea that vouchers would lead to government control over private schools.) The G.I. Bill was introduced in the mid-1940s. One of its long-term effects has been to increase the cost of higher education. The average annual tuition at a private college was $2,570 (in 1995 dollars). In 1995 it was $14,510. The average annual tuition at a public university was $820. In 1995 it was $2,982. In other words, subsidies increase cost. Colleges and universities, being aware of the easy-money factor, have had no qualms about regular tuition hikes. After all, huge fractions of student bodies on every public and on most private campuses are receiving government assistance of one form or another. Operating expenses likewise have skyrocketed, as layers and layers of administration have built up – with most administrators paid far better than most faculty members. Moreover, while there is no doubt that the G.I. Bill helped a lot of veterans attend college who would not otherwise have been able to, its other effect (along with the other forms of outside assistance) was the relatively sudden appearance on campuses of people who were not really college material. Academic standards began to drop in order to retain them; remedial education and underwater-basketweaving courses began to multiply. This was rationalized and called "democratization." Government at all levels, business and the media all agreed on a new myth: everybody ought to go to college. This came coupled with: everybody is owed a college education at public expense. The influx of students called for the hiring of new faculty. Many of those hired were not professor material. They sleepwalked through teaching careers without contributing to their disciplines beyond a dissertation or revising tests or lecture notes. (I was there, and I saw them.) This steady descent into the mediocrity of "democratization" left the universities wide open to the affirmative-action mindset, and, eventually, to political correctness and thought control. By the 1990s we had reached a point where departments had to answer to bureaucrats on multiple details of hiring decisions, listing women and minority applicants, for example, and explaining why they were not hired (again: I was there; I saw it). The risk of "noncompliance" is a federal lawsuit. As I observed last week, private colleges like Grove City College and Hillsdale College had to fight major court battles to remain free of federal entanglements, the upshot of which has been that no student of either can accept a single federal dollar. If this is not an edifice of federal control over almost all of higher education, then what is?! Douglas Dewey concludes: "The history of state and federal subsidy of postsecondary education has been one of declining quality at an escalating cost. Do we want private elementary and secondary education to follow the same path?" Incidentally, the increasing expense of higher education since the various federal voucher-style programs began in the 1940s has a parallel with the state-funded voucher programs. Expenses have actually increased, not decreased. According to the Center for Education Reform, since 1990 spending in the Milwaukee Public Schools has grown from $604.5 million to $968 million. Average per-pupil spending is up from $6,064 to $9,417; adjusted for enrollment growth, this is an increase of 43 percent. State aid to Milwaukee Public Schools has grown 55 percent during the years the voucher program has been in effect. A similar situation is developing in the newer program in Ohio. Since Cleveland's program began in 1996, general operating expenditures for public schools have gone up from $559.6 million to $662.6 million, with average per-pupil spending up from $7,970 to $8,814. This is not as big of an increase; but then again, that program is six years old and not 12 years old. Give it time. Finally, the prevalence of vouchers makes it easy for private secondary and elementary schools to raise tuition, just as colleges and universities have done. Why wouldn't they? Vouchers provide easy money. This could easily price private education out of the reach of parents who don't use the voucher. The point: government subsidies at any level allow costs to rise, and vouchers are one form of government subsidy. Follow the logic. The long and the short of it: vouchers are a snare and a delusion. They will bring a sense of short term freedom to choose followed by long term misery. There are some larger issues we should consider. The item sent to me by a reader I mentioned at the outset was a recent article by Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, a former Senior Policy Advisor at the US Department of Education who spent years gathering evidence of behavior modification programs and other components of planning for a completely centralized society being put into place in government schools. She went on to produce the meticulously documented The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America: A Chronological Paper Trail. In this article she observes how the dumbing down that has been the basic warp and woof of government schools will now be extended to private schools, once the latter begin accepting "vouchered" students in large numbers. This will include the destruction of their liberal arts curriculums in favor of school-to-work style vocational training, and the stripping away of both religious identity and sound moral education in favor of the prevailing multiculturalist relativism. It is true that nothing in the Zelman decision or in any law forces a private school to accept "vouchered" students. However, because of the ease of using a state-funded voucher, not just parents who refuse to use the voucher will find private education priced out of their reach, but those schools that refuse to accept "vouchered" students will find themselves unable to compete and with a choice between changing their policy or closing their doors. Douglas Dewey again:
In other words, in an environment in which the honest try to operate within the assumptions of free enterprise but have to compete with opportunists, the opportunists will win every time. The bad drives out the good. Thus according to Iserbyt, "school choice" offering vouchers is indeed a Trojan Horse, leading us toward "the socialist, corporate fascist, workforce training agenda for the global planned economy." This brings us to the New World Order. I have noticed that many libertarians want nothing to do with "conspiracy theories" of history, although I have documented both the existence and more specific goals of the superelites here and here, as well as connected it to specific United Nations confabs and agendas here and here. Plenty of others have written on the subject, usually with documentation so extensive as to convict skeptics of willful blindness. Anyone wishing to learn the truth about "reinventing government" may read this book (which has almost 400 endnotes). Finally, anyone wanting to study the real background of such movements as sustainable development and smart growth may go here (which, those who click on the link will see immediately, is on the UN's own website, not in any production of mine). The case for the reality of a longstanding, multigenerational scheme to build a highly centralized, global superstate (New World Order is just a convenient term for it) is better than the case for, say, Darwinian evolution. Of course, it follows from this that the federal government is not the only archenemy of individual freedom operating in this society. The federal government, in fact, doesn't have any money except for what is extracted by threat of force from taxpayers or simply given to it by special interests (especially financial ones) who want certain things done. One has to finger huge, tax-exempt foundations created through the financial empires of the Rockefellers, the Fords and the Carnegies. These empires have underwritten leftist and statist projects of all varieties to the tune of millions since their origin in the 1910s as means of income tax avoidance following the creation of the IRS. They represent what is sometimes called the "Eastern Establishment" and sometimes the "Anglo-American Establishment" (the name of an important book by Carroll Quigley, long time professor of international law and political history at Georgetown University who documented the operations of the various behind-the-scenes groups in great detail). There is not space here to recount the history of the efforts of "the Establishment" to gain control of all education in this society, public and private. That has been done elsewhere, in works such as Iserbyt's as well as in John Taylor Gatto's The Underground History of American Education and Beverly Eakman's The Cloning of the American Mind. There are also a few short summations. The upshot is that we simply cannot consider the voucher problem in the absence of the larger history both of government education itself, and of the perceived threat that private, religious schools (and home schooling) represent to the efforts underway to create an army of unthinking drones to service the global economy under a world government. After all, if one can control the education of the next generation, then one can control society – by having created a population who, like the "somatized" zombies in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, actually love their rulers! (And speaking of drugs, think of our educational system’s growing use of legal mind-altering substances such as Ritalin and Prozac!) Can anybody honestly review the full scope of the available material, much of it on the perpetrators' own web sites, and still believe that "the empire isn't going to strike back" and work to ensure that real, meaningful, long term parental choice soon becomes a choice between tweedle-dumb and tweedle-dumber? Let me get to the crux of the matter. A consistent libertarian cannot support the idea of parents accepting money from any government, federal or state or local, to send their children to a private school. Counterconsiderations may seem to indicate otherwise. It is true, for example, that by virtue of taxes all of us are paying for government schools (along with the rest of what the government does). Can't a voucher therefore be viewed as a kind of payback? Yes and no. A voucher provides a parent with an immediate choice – so long as no one looks at the Big Picture (a temptation government schools have been trying to "educate" out of us for the past 50 years). Others have suggested income tax credits instead of vouchers – so that ostensibly no government ever sees the money. Unfortunately, as with any government-designated dollar amount, the government does see the money, however indirectly. Bureaucrats will still demand "accountability," i.e., verification that what would have been tax dollars are spent in a certain way (probably through a tuition receipt – thus also creating a paper trail to the institution that issued the receipt). The only real solution is for parents to follow the leads being taken by Marshall Fritz, Rev. E. Ray Moore and others, and get their children out of government schools – and to do so without succumbing to the temptations of vouchers. All of this matters, because with the Zelman decision now made, a number of states are ready to move with voucher programs of their own: California, Texas, Colorado, Minnesota, Arizona, Indiana, Virginia and Utah. In Washington, D.C. itself, House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX) has introduced a bill that would award scholarship money to "needy families" in Washington. His bill would award them $5,000 per family. It sets aside money for 8,300 scholarships to be awarded during the next five years. It won the praise of Secretary of Education Paine who said, "It's my hope that a successful plan in Washington, D.C. will send a strong message to the rest of the country that school choice must be on the menu of options for improving our schools and leaving no child behind." There is that phrase again. Surely others besides myself have noticed that the difference between Republicans and Democrats regarding government involvement in education is illusory rather than real, and that Bush is pursuing a course almost indistinguishable from that pursued by Clinton. Carroll Quigley wrote in Tragedy and Hope that "the argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and politics…of the Right and…Left, is a foolish idea…the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can 'throw the rascals out' without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy…It should be possible, to replace one party with the other party which will pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policy." This obviously is intended to include federal education policy. (All italics mine.) To sum up: come on, folks, this is not rocket science. Government money is government money, and government money means government control. Libertarians who support tax-funded vouchers are living in a dream world. Moreover, we simply cannot look at this voucher situation in isolation from some of the huge (and well-funded!) movements of the past couple of decades: America 2000, Outcome-Based-Education, Goals 2000, School-To-Work, and now Bush's No Child Left Behind. Is anyone really so naive as to think that the federal government and other power-hungry elites will magically reverse a course established over several decades and suddenly allow parents "educational choice," no strings attached, with the key being the voucher? The voucher movement began with the best of intentions and the best of hopes, under the auspices of free market thought. Milton Friedman made the reasonable argument that the core problem with "public schools" is that they are a government-run monopoly. He proposed the tax-funded voucher as the solution. Government schools would then have to compete with private schools, and this would compel them to improve. However, statists have infiltrated the voucher movement. As I noted last weekend, more and more statists see vouchers as means of furthering welfarist egalitarianism, increasing educational spending and subjecting private schools to government control. Diane Ravitch observed last fall: "It is the equity version of the voucher movement, not the free-market model of Milton Friedman, that has taken root in the past decade." Think about it! I do not want to have write an article five to ten years from now, in the wake of a wrecked, diluted, dumbed-down system of private schools and a derailed home school movement, reminding you that you were warned! July 13, 2002
Copyright © 2002 LewRockwell.com
|
