School Choice, Religion
In the comments to a previous post, George W. raises a common concern regarding school choice schemes:
School-choice sounds great on paper, and I’d go along with it if there were strictly enforced standards for education content. Too often in this country it just boils down to keeping kids from learning about evolution and sex.
George is undoubtedly correct that many people support school vouchers precisely because they hope to obtain taxpayer money for schools which push religious doctrine on children. However, any legislation aiming to avoid this problem should be narrowly tailored to do so. The difficulty is that state-specified standards on education content are fundamentally at odds with the purpose of school choice.
The idea behind school choice is to create a marketplace of competing schools. This “competition” is a contest to discover the most effective methods for educating students. Schools which succeed in doing so will be copied, and failed methods will be discarded as parents move their children to more successful schools. Enacting state-specified standards destroys this virtuous cycle of innovation and emulation. Imagine what would happen if, for example, the state were to create a CPU design and demand that all manufacturers produce only that design. Innovation would be stopped dead in its tracks.
Here’s one concrete suggestion for how to allow school choice while not funding religious indoctrination. Simply specify that all voucher-receiving schools must be held to the same constitutionally derived standards of religious neutrality as public schools. Schools that violate this condition could be fined up to the amount of voucher funding they receive or, in the worst cases, be completely cut off from future funding. (As a practical matter, it might be necessary for such a law to explicitly give taxpayers standing to sue. Many courts have, to my mind, been strangely eager to restrict standing in an extremely narrow manner.)
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