The Movement Toward Vouchers

© Dr. Gary D. Lemmons, April 29, 2007 

The Georgia General Assembly took the first step toward the implementation of vouchers for the education of Georgia school children with the passage of Senate Bill 10, which will provide that parents of special needs children will be eligible to receive voucher to purchase special education services from private institutions should they deem the services provided by their local public schools to be inadequate.  It is clear to me that we are headed down the Interstate toward vouchers for all.

I continue to be amused at the rationale of my conservative friends that by the state government using its police power to compel citizens, who do not have children, to contribute to the cost of educating the children of those citizens who have chosen, via family planning or lust, to procreate somehow contributes to the development of personal responsibility and self-reliance on the part of those parents.

If we believe that personal responsibility and self-reliance are the desirable determiners by which children should be educated, we should be working toward the total privatization of education delivery institutions (schools) and the private financing (parent pay) for these educational experiences

If we believe that the state is responsible for financing the education of all children and providing the educational delivery institutions (schools) for this purpose, then the notion of parental choice centers only upon whether the parents choose to use that which is provided by the state or whether (at their own expense) to seek private instruction.  Now some will say that it is unfair to make parents, who choose private instruction for their children, to pay school taxes for the maintenance of public schools.  I would argue that it is no more unfair than to make that individual, who has never been a parent, to pay those same taxes.  It is their contribution to the common good of society.

The Georgia General Assembly, a string of Governors (competent and incompetent), the Georgia Department of Education, and other educational agencies have had it wrong for a century or more.  Education should not be funded on the basis of FTE (full-time equivalency) or the old ADA (average daily attendance).  Instead schools should be funded on the basis of WIT (what it takes) to operate a school.  In other words, equity in resources should be the goal.  An elementary school serving 1800 in Atlanta should have proportionally the same resources as an elementary school serving 350 students in northeast Georgia.

If we are truly determined to go the way of vouchers, let’s make this a truly free market driven school system.  Privatize all public schools.  Dissolve all local board of education.  Let each “school council”, which, by law, should already be in place in all public schools, form the first board of directors for each individual school.  Let each individual school decide what the curriculum will be, what extra-curricular services will be offered, what students will be served, how much it will cost to attend the school, and how students will be transported to and from the facility.  Let the state send a voucher to each parent in the amount of $9,000 (the current average expenditure for the education of a child in Georgia) and let the parents negotiate with their school of choice.  Now, that would be REAL school reform and REAL school choice.   

All of this has about as much chance of being embraced by society as the call for a national holiday honoring Fidel Castro!