I ran across Anne Wilson's blog for the first time yesterday and it quickly earned a spot on my regulars list. What really interested me was this post of her reservations regarding school choice. There are two posts that raise three issues, I'll respond to them seperately.

Issue One: Liberal Catholic Schools

Why is [the apparent liberal nature of Catholic schools] important? Normally this would be an internicene Catholic fight, between the "AmChurch" Catholics who disagree with the Roman Catholic Church's stated positions on birth control, abortion, women priests, authority of the Pope, on one hand, and those who see themselves as "traditional" Catholics who determinedly adhere to the catechism. However, when taxpayer funds are involved, what would normally be an internal religious disagreement will in one way or another spill over into public policy.

As I understand it, there is not a particularly intricate way that the money is dispensing the money for the voucher system's beneficiaries, therefore I do not accept the premise that the government is necessarily involved. I hope not. The whole point of vouchers is to get the government out from in the middle of education disputes. The point of vouchers is for the government to let the parents decide. If the parents don't want sex ed, they need to find a school where the policy is not to teach it or, at the very least, the school makes it available for students to opt out of it. Different schools will adopt different policies. It does sound like there is a definite problem here, but I don't know that this will force the governments involvement or even make it worse. It might heighten the tension or it might make them more transparent if they try to recruit voucherites whose parents want to know what the policies are.

There are two "litmus tests" coming up that will show the practical effects of this unfortunate intermingling of religion and state. The first will come when a voucher recipient's parents decide that they want to remove their child from Catholic parish school sex education. Perhaps this is not so problematic if the child is not a Catholic (which is often the case in inner-city parish schools.) More interesting - what will happen if that voucher student is also a parishioner, whose parents object to sex education on Catholic religious grounds? Will there be two policies for students receiving public funding: one for non-Catholic voucher students, and one for Catholics?


The litmus tests questions are interesting, but again, I'm not sure they inherently involve the government. Catholic schools now are rife with non-Catholics so I'm sure many of them have policies in place. The non-Catholics either are or are not expected to take part in certain classes. Parents ought to know that going in and can make their choices accordingly. If a parent insists that their child get sex ed. and none of the Catholic schools offer it, then they'll have to stick in public schools. If they insist on no sex ed and the Catholic schools all insist on it, they'll have to homeschool. However, in no cases are any organizations left worse off than they were before. Catholic schools that don't want the headaches will simply have the ability to opt out. Those that do have the ability to take them. Those who don't want their kids indoctrinated with Catholicism (liberal Jesuit or conservative Orthodox) will be stuck in the same public schools they've always been stuck in.

I would be opposed to any program that forced private schools to accept the voucherites. None of them, to date, do. That leaves a lot of lattitude for both sides to find a school that more suitably matches their desires.

Another acid test will come when parents attempt to get vouchers for schools that (unlike Catholic schools) are not generally open to those outside the faith community; which require interviews with the elders and testimonies of faith from at least one parent; which require that parents adhere to codes of personal behavior (like the Christian school that dismissed the "stripper mom's" child because mom wouldn't find other employment), and last but not least, schools that teach strict creationism and the "young earth" view.

This is certainly a more problematic issue. However, whether schools are allowed to pick and choose who they will let in (and stay in) based on their doctrines or whether they won't, I view it as being better than the current state of affairs. If it's constitutional I do believe that private schools out to be able to discriminate. It should no longer be of the governments concern. They are merely subcontracting the school to teach the child. I would leave it up to the courts to decide whether or not there are constitutional problems with that. There might be, in which case more schools will opt out of the whole program. That would not necessarily be a terrible thing as it would help keep the more cultish schools out from the public sphere. I'm not sure I know the answer of which is really better, but that sounds like a healthy debate, not a problem the likes of which cast a shadow on the whole enterprise.

Issue Two: Attaching Strings

While highly conservative, I am not a voucher supporter, mainly because I think funding private schools with tax money will produce the same pressure to conform to unacceptable government policies that's already occurred in private universities and in religiously-run hospitals.

She is orrect to say that the government might apply pressure to conform to things such as Title IX. They did in the "private universities" link (that I strongly recommend). However, throughout the entire story, he could have easily opted out and lost the students who were there because of student loans. What Anne is suggesting, in effect, is that those students shouldn't be allowed to go there anyway just in case they might tempt the administration to do something it shouldn't (like sign off on Title IX culpability) just to keep them. That is something that schools out to consider before signing in to a voucher program, but nonetheless it remains their choice whether to accept the students and the pressure or not to. I don't believe we should "protect" them from that choice.

SCOTUS ruled that the programs are constitutional *if* there is "choice" between non-religious and religious programs. This will inadvertently result in discrimination against poor *rural* schools. Private schools are thick on the ground in many urban areas, but rural areas have very few private schools of any kind, and the distances between them are often prohibitive. Thus the only option offered to many who literally *are* trapped in poor rural school districts is home schooling. Vouchers also have the potential, however, to make home schooling more onerous.

I would actually like the voucher program to extend to homeschoolers. Any and all regulations will only apply in contingence with the money. So if homeschoolers were included, they would start getting the voucher money for supplies. If the government starts saying that "Your home school only has male students since you only have sons. We therefore request that you recruit some neighborhood girls. While we're at it, get certified in every subject that you teach." the parents can just say no. They'll stop getting the money, and they'll be no worse off than when they started. More realistically homeschooling will never be included because it raises a lot of questions and is ripe for abuse ("Oh yeah, we're homeschooling... gimme the money ") and as much as I'd like it, it's not practical.

In all of the above cases, remember: No one is being forced to do anything. There has not been a program developed yet, and I doubt such a program would be constitutional, that would deny any school the ability to opt out of the program.

Issue Three: The Muslim Quandary

Finally, while the vast majority of private schools in urban areas are Catholic parochial schools, other religious schools will also qualify - private Muslim schools, for instance. To refuse to do so would constitute "discrimination." Personally, I do not want my tax dollars to go to fundamentalist Islamic schools where girls are made to wear hijab and Israel is blotted out on the map. Of course, one could say that the government should *regulate* these private schools so they don't blank out Israel, but that again leads to an undesirable interference into private education itself - one which will eventually have more consequence for Christian schools than the madrassahs.

This is a relatively new wrench in my worldview of vouchers. Previously, the best they could throw at me was "David Koresh school" but I will say now what I said then: If the Muslim schools are educating, then I don't have a problem with it. What if they are miseducating, you ask? I still have to say the same. If parents want their children to be miseducated, I believe that is their prerogative. I don't like my tax-dollars going to it any more than Anne does, but if that's the price I have to pay to break the public school monopoly, I'll still support it. If they are raising terrorists, we can shut them down on criminal matters (which is what we would do if they were privately funded, so that has nothing to do with the vouchers themselves and would not afflict other schools). A better option would be to limit the vouchers to only those schools that accept people of different religions. More orthodox religious schools (including muslim fanatics) would opt out and our hands would be clean in that regard.

What is most important here, when it comes to education, is that the public school system's monopoly is broken. This is more important than any education issue that I can think of. For every one that she brings up that it creates, it solves several tangental issues. Want prayer in school? Go to a religious school. Want god to be nowhere in site? Find a secular school. Want a school that has a traditional curriculum? Go for it. Want a school with a mushy-mushy feel-good curriculum? Those will form, too. She's right that rural kids won't benefit, and though I'm uncertain of what is the best way to help them, they won't be hurt.