Bayou Business Review,
The U.S. Justice Department is taking on Microsoft and Intel, charging them with monopolization. These two companies came by their leading market positions through their own innovations. Competition works to give us more choices, better quality and lower prices, but those who fear they can’t compete cry foul. Our Justice Department may be misguided, but trying to maintain a competitive society is no vice. Too bad the Clinton Administration and its Department of Education instead try to protect the education monopolies in this country.
Parents are at odds with one another on issues such as prayer in schools, sex education, and whether Salinger or Twain are in the library or the curriculum. There is even conflict, as we have seen in our area, over how to teach reading. But the reason that there is such conflict is that most parents have so little choice in their children’s education. In too many circumstances and for too many families there is either the public education establishment’s way or the highway.
The lack of choice by parents is also at the root of what is perceived by many parents as a lack of quality in public education. In a previous column I suggested that the declining share of school-age children in public schools in Louisiana, while the share of children in private schools, parochial schools, home schools and no schools (dropouts), continues to increase indicates that people are dissatisfied with our public schools. But if money were to flow away from schools that do not meet parents’ standards and flow to schools that do, as with a voucher system, all schools would begin to improve or risk being closed down.
The Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) is finally trying to give schools an incentive to improve. Under a system that is to go into place in a few years, schools that perform poorly, according to standards that BESE sets, risk losing part of their funding. The problem is that BESE’s standards may not be parents’ standards.
There are many arguments against going to a voucher system, but none hold water. One is that by money flowing away from public schools, public schools would be weakened. Another is that money going to parochial schools violates the separation of church and state. Yet another is that the rich would be helped, not the poor.
If money flows away from public schools each time a student goes elsewhere, the reason for the spending also goes elsewhere, then public schools will be harmed only to the extent that larger school systems are cheaper to operate than small ones, but that does not appear to be the case. If it were the case, we should not have local school districts at all, just one state school system.
The issue of separation of church and state with vouchers is quite ridiculous. A voucher is the same as money going to parents. Parents use the vouchers as they choose. If a church ran a food co-op, it could still take food stamps. Vouchers are no different. Besides, many church-run colleges and universities are able to get federal aid for their students.
If vouchers would only help the rich, why did the Clinton Administration fight Congress on giving vouchers to the poor in Washington, D.C.? Being poor means not having options. The truth is that vouchers open up options for the poor that the rich already have. To a very real extent, vouchers enrich the poor.
Lenny Bruce, the comedian of the 1950s and 1960s whose foul language on stage often put him before a judge (which is why I will keep the quote to myself), used the analogy of the difference between retailers and the phone company of his day to illustrate the difference between capitalism and communism. Bruce used the competition between Macy’s and Gimbell’s to illustrate the capitalist system, where people have the option to go to Gimbell’s if they don’t like what they’re offered at Macy’s. But communism, he suggested, is like the phone company back then. If he didn’t like the service, quality or prices from the phone company, what choice did he have but to end up "like a schmuck with a Dixie cup on a string." Too bad Lenny Bruce died before competition came to the phone industry.
For increasing numbers of Louisianians, our government-run monopoly public education system provides little better than a Dixie-cup-and-string education for our children. If we don’t demand competition in education, whether through vouchers or some other method, who are the schmucks?