by Susan Ryan
A big educational issue has sprouted out from Ron Paul's and most recently Mitt Romney's campaign. School choice and tax credits.
IR posted this below addressing the Utah voucher referendum with a George Will commentary:
Teachers fight to stop Utah vouchers
I thought it was interesting that George Will (central Illinois native that he is) defied conservative logic with the assertion that every Utah voucher increases funds available for public education. If the public school was so bad that families want to leave it, why should there be increased funds? If he had contended that notion, I would have been satisfied. He didn't.
The Parent Choice in Education referendum failed despite Patrick Byrne's (Overstock.com CEO) megabuck contribution and campaign promoting vouchers. Byrne says he's tired of teaching basic skills to his workers at his Utah-based company. Who could blame him? In Edweek he says this below as well, which is the battle cry for educational advocates who are really concerned about educational equality:
Both his ventures overseas and in Utah seem to be about one thing: opportunity. He told me: If you care about racial inequality, then you should care about the opportunities that vouchers bring.
Despite the common and untrue mantra that homeschoolers are isolationists, I’ll note that we also care about educational opportunities in our communities. With homeschoolers’ wonderful autonomy still afforded in Illinois, I can still envision the truly conservative educational options available for families. That same freedom educated many of our greatest leaders, including Abraham Lincoln.
So can The Freeman editor and author of Separating School and State : How to Liberate America's Families, Sheldon Richman. He wrote an interesting editorial about the Utah voucher referendum loss:
The Goal Is Freedom: Ersatz School Choice
Richman says:
It may not look like a win for the cause of educational freedom, but in the long run it might be. That depends on what we do about it.
I doubt if Utahans rejected vouchers for the right -- that is, libertarian -- reasons. More likely, they did so either because they bought the union's argument that vouchers would drain the government schools' coffers (unfortunately, they wouldn't have) or because they feared who might turn up at the private suburban schools. Regardless, the voters' acceptance of vouchers would have jeopardized the private, relatively independent schools in the state. So I see Tuesday's ballot results as a dodging of the bullet.
Now there's a not so original, but good thought. Many homeschoolers tend to get that notion and aren't supportive of tax credits either. From Home Education Magazine's News Commentary:
H.R. 1056: Family Education Freedom Act of 2007
Illinois' Christian Liberty Academy wrote a piece on this too:
Position Paper on Government Subsidies for Home Education
Wisconsin homeschoolers took a Representative to task for a tax credit bill. Reasons are displayed on this faq sheet:
Questions and Answers About Education Tax Credits for Homeschoolers
Illinois offered up a tax credit to non-public schools and not surprisingly, that jeopardy has turned against homeschoolers in their lack of vigilance. Here's Mr. Richman's common sense concern accentuating what should have had private schooling families' attention here:
Unsurprisingly, governments tend to attach conditions to the money they give away. It is no rebuttal to say it's really the parents' money. For most -- but not all -- parents, that would be true (some would be subsidized), but the point is politically irrelevant. It would be seen as government or public money. And that means most people would find plausible the argument that the ultimate recipients of such money must be accountable. Accountable would mean accountable to the government's school bureaucracy.
Here's what's happened in Illinois. From Corn and Oil:
Homeschooling as a “Microtrend”
Illinois homeschoolers didn’t do the same as in Wisconsin.We now have a separate Home School educational tax credit form which takes us into the storm away from the non-public school umbrella. From the Public/Non-Public Publication 132 to the specialized Home School form. This shouldn’t have slipped by us anymore than any other home school legislation should have.
But it did, so where does this road paved with good intentions lead? Sheldon Richman says this about a fundamental issue:
which is this: government should not be in charge of educating our children. Why not? Because it's the government -- the institution that rests on the morally flawed premise that it is all right for politicians to take other people's money without their consent, interfere with their peaceful transactions, and exploit the weak. Why on earth would we want schools built on that foundation?
It is tempting to try to use government as a shortcut to freedom. Look how readily libertarians embrace medical marijuana and physician-assisted suicide, both of which, in the name of expanding choice, would further subordinate the individual to the Therapeutic State. So it would be with vouchers. (These days, government schools are undisguised agencies of the Therapeutic State.) Exactly how does luring nongovernment schools onto the plantation advance the separation of school and state?
There are no shortcuts to liberty.
