The State Education Monopoly
Last week Utah passed a school voucher bill, making it the first state to take a real step towards ending the state monopoly in primary education. This story only just now came to my attention, and it seems to be getting remarkably little news coverage. Andrew Coulson has some interesting commentary on the difficulties Utah’s program will face going forward.
I don’t know the details of how Utah’s voucher program will operate with respect to parochial schools, but people are already queuing up to file lawsuits. This is unfortunate. People (like myself) who support the separation of church and state need to start working with the school vouchers movement rather than against it. Using public tax money to fund religious indoctrination is rightly unconstitutional, but I think that carefully written school voucher legislation should be able to minimize this problem without completely excluding parochial schools.
In any case, it’s high time that we owned up to the fact that America has a second-rate primary education system. The performance of American students in math and science is consistently appalling. Ending the state monopoly in primary education will allow selective market forces to act on schools — the same forces which, for example, relentlessly drive down the price/performance ratio of computer hardware. Computers get cheaper and faster every year, while our schools improve little if they improve at all. If we want change, all we have to do is give parents the freedom to choose which school they send their children to.
Anyone who opposes a free market in education owes America’s children a serious alternative proposal to improve the miserable performance of our schools. Otherwise, we are doomed to a future where computers become smarter, people become dumber, and we’re all forced to listen to techno.
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