Provo Daily Herald Editorial

Vouchers support human potential

November 4, 2007

http://www.heraldextra.com/content/view/242367/

It is unfortunate that Referendum 1 is seen by some educators as a personal attack.

It is not. Utah's public schools actually do pretty well on average -- which is not to say that they are perfect. Do they fail to address the needs of some children? Of course, but this should surprise no one. In a $4.1 billion per year mega-system, with well over a half-million students, it's easy for the bureaucracy to lose sight of individual students.

Rest assured, however, that the parents of those students know who they are. They know that their children are people, not statistics to be swallowed by a public system that does pretty well on average.

Voucher opponents don't worry much about individuals. For them, it's all about group performance. Success, to them, means that Utah schools stack up well, on average, against the rest of the nation.

This attitude is stunning. It says that the system matters more than the individuals it is supposed to serve. And it is inconsistent with state law.

Under law, public schools are supposed to ensure "that each student departing the system will be prepared to achieve success in productive employment, further education, or both" and to provide classes that "aid and facilitate the acquisition of specified competencies on an individual basis wherein students are allowed to master and demonstrate competencies as fast as they are able." [Italics added]

These ideals, unfortunately, go unfulfilled in some cases. For various reasons, some kids don't thrive in public school. Everybody knows this.

But what to do about it? Here is where the battle lines are drawn. Voucher opponents believe that under-served kids are acceptable casualties in a war for the very survival of public education. That's why they're holding on so tight. If saving the monopoly means that some kids have to bite the dust, that's OK by them.

They are wrong, of course, but their panic is palpable. It is also misplaced.

It is simply unacceptable in a moral society to sacrifice individuals on the altar of group data. An individual child's intellect, which guides his entire life's trajectory, should never take a back seat to a statistical summary of the masses. As voucher opponents sing "all is pretty well" in the public school system, we remain concerned about those individual children for whom all is not so well.

Those children lie at the heart of the voucher controversy. For us, vouchers are not anti-public school; they are pro-human potential. They are not anti-system; they are for boosting some of God's children.

But now the opposition has raised such a ruckus that it's hard to stay focused on fundamentals. The questions they raise are not always honest.

We'll take some of the honest ones:

Is the encouragement of individual achievement a proper thing for government? Should government assist parents in their attempts to build the next generation? Absolutely yes on both counts.

Tuition assistance for a private school is one small way the state can help parents fulfill their stewardship -- part of which is to seek out a learning environment appropriate for each child. A voucher for school choice is fundamentally no different from an income tax deduction for each child in a family. Both programs recognize and support the family as an enterprise; both provide a little money to help parents nourish the next generation. The paperwork may be different, but the effect is the same.

Nor is this concept new. Government helps mold the social landscape in countless ways, often in education -- take the Federal Pell Grant program, for example, or the greatest school voucher program in history, the GI Bill, whose enormous effect on American society is indisputable. A military veteran could choose any school, public or private.

Opponents of Referendum 1 say that "their" tax dollars should not go to private entities (never mind that private school parents also pay taxes). We answer that government pays private entities all the time to accomplish public purposes, from highway construction to mental health services; from the support of private universities to air traffic control at the Provo airport.

Universal education is no different. Society's purpose is to educate the individual child; it doesn't matter who does the educating. And as long as education is compulsory under law, government is on the hook to pay for it.

Enter the Utah Legislature with a plan that gives parents a choice while increasing per-pupil dollars in public schools (without raising taxes). Perversely, the public school lobby doesn't like it, and the howl against the program has now swelled far out of proportion to the modest objective for which vouchers were designed.

Vouchers will not destroy the public school system. If they did, the Herald would be leading the howlers. Vouchers won't even erode public schools, in our view. They will help the public schools. They will increase per-pupil funding and create a little wiggle room to absorb a coming wave of growth.

Teachers will not lose their jobs; class sizes will not plummet.

Nor will innocent minds be corrupted by religious zealots in private schools that emphasize faith and morals. We note that large numbers of Utah high school students have not been destroyed by LDS seminary programs. These students get a double dose of academics and religion every school day.

Clearly, faith and morals are widely accepted in Utah as appropriate in a student's overall education. We see nothing wrong with moral instruction in a voucher school, provided that the school also delivers academics, which is the purpose of tax dollars.

In short, if voters approve vouchers on Tuesday, as we hope they will, we don't think much at all will change in the day-to-day life of the public schools.

While we might wish the answer to Utah's education puzzle were as simple as throwing money, it just isn't. True, Utah schools have less money per student than their counterparts in other states. True, Utah's class sizes are larger than elsewhere. But the "give us more money" approach is not as easy as it sounds. Where is the money going to come from?

Utah has some unique family and cultural characteristics that ought to be considered in a school funding analysis. Our large families are wonderful, but they come with costs, and many Utahns are stressed. Utah already leads the nation in the percent of the household tax bill that goes to education.

Consider some other stress points:

• Utah ranks No. 1 in percent of school-age population, under 18 (32.1 percent).

• Utah ranks No. 1 in percent of married-couple households with school-age children -- 36.1 percent, compared to 23.9 percent in the rest of the U.S.

• Utah's median household income ranks 15th at $45,726, but what is not measured is the reduction of disposable income as a result of high charitable giving.

We think Utah families are very good at balancing their priorities. So when the public education lobby demands large increases in per-pupil spending, we ask again: How do you get new money without unbalancing family budgets? We don't like the proposal of many voucher opponents -- just raise taxes.

A promising part of Utah's answer is found in vouchers. The Legislature has offered something extraordinary here, even if the law needs further refinements. Vouchers serve the public schools while empowering parents to fulfill their duty with respect to the educational needs of their children.

It's a win-win scenario. Instead of hitting taxpayers for upwards of $7,000 to educate a child in the public schools, the program caps the taxpayer contribution at $500 to $3,000. The difference -- thousands of dollars saved -- stays in the public system to make improvements.

Meanwhile, the voucher child still gets a quality education, with the load shifting to the private sector. We don't have difficulty with this equation, though Utah's vested interests do.

Are Utahns simply cheap and selfish when it comes to public school funding? Absolutely not. Contrary to the claims of organized labor and Utahns for Public Schools, Utah taxpayers already pay for education at a reasonable level when you adjust for the cultural factors. If the number of students in Utah households were adjusted to the national average, current funding per-pupil would jump 20 percent, roughly to the middle of the pack nationally.

That's an astonishing figure. It says that Utahns are generous even as they shoulder burdens greater than those of other Americans.

Our large families are wonderful, and we'll hang onto them, thank you very much. What we need is more creative solutions for the public schools. The Legislature has provided one, and Utahns should not lightly reject it.

• Vouchers support parents in making appropriate choices for their children.

• Vouchers cost a pittance -- four-tenths of 1 percent of the state outlay for K-12 education over 13 years. In subsequent years the cost would rise to maybe eight-tenths of 1 percent.

• Vouchers protect taxpayers by shifting future costs of school construction to the private sector.

• Vouchers are legal, according to America's highest courts. Just a few weeks ago in a New York case, public funding of private schools was upheld by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, whose decision was reviewed and validated by the U.S. Supreme Court.

We're sure Utah's public schools could perform better, a proposition that seems self-evident when 25 percent of high school seniors fail to pass the state's basic skills tests. But it's not fair to blame the schools entirely for such results; they wrestle with societal forces just like everyone else. They don't control all the variables.

That's why we think Tuesday's vote should not be viewed as a referendum on public schools. Vouchers do not, in themselves, reform public education. If the public schools need reform, that should happen on another day. Vouchers merely recognize the value of individual human beings by placing the interests of children and parents above the unfounded fears of an entrenched special interest.