The state of Utah has just passed a landmark educational voucher program under which every family, depending on its income, will be reimbursed between $500 and $3,000 per child for annual tuition paid to the private school of their choice.
This will now give parents of modest means options that the well-to-do have long enjoyed. Their school-age children will no longer be a captive audience. Parents will be empowered as educational consumers, giving them choices and leverage consumers enjoy in all other spheres of our market economy. They'll be free to choose the educational model they believe best fits the unique needs of their children, and will be freed from the bureaucracy and politics of government-delivered education.
Predictably, the educratic establishment is in full counterattack. The Utah teachers' union has launched a campaign to repeal the new law. If that fails, they'll try their luck in court. Their resistance is bred of desperation.
First, the union's survival is at stake. Under a voucher system, education is still publicly financed through taxpayer dollars. That doesn't change. But what does is the union's monopoly to deliver publicly funded education exclusively in government schools. Under a voucher system, competition would bloom.
Second, there's the ideological opposition to competition and free choice in education. The educratic establishment - from administrators, to the teachers' colleges that staff the schools, to the unions that run them and the school boards they elect - is liberal to its core.
They covet their power to set the agenda, to dictate subject matter and educational techniques, to influence impressionable young minds and mold the next generation of liberal activists. They've turned their government schools into laboratories for social engineering, downgrading basic academics and old-fashioned notions of American exceptionalism, patriotism and individualism in favor of collectivism, political correctness, diversity, environmentalism, feminism, and delusional self-esteem. They have a death grip on these schools that they're loath to release.
As the United States falls further behind other nations in the math and science proficiency of students, and as the customer service rep on the other end of your telephone - somewhere in India - speaks better English than millions of American high school graduates, it's increasingly obvious that something's terribly wrong with public education in this country.
Yet educrats circle their wagons around the status quo. Tanya Clay House of the ultra-liberal People for the American Way recently declared, "We've never seen a shred of credible evidence that shows school vouchers actually help students learn. While all public schools must demonstrate success under No Child Left Behind, private schools are not held to the same level of accountability for their performance."
Nonsense. Private schools are held to account in the most effective way possible - they're accountable to their customers who are free to take their business elsewhere if they're not satisfied. All the evidence you need for vouchers is that parents who have used them to escape the government school monopoly fight to keep them.
Then, Clay House added this gem: "Every child deserves an excellent education, not just those who can get admitted to a private school." I wonder if she realizes how self-contradictory that statement is. She's acknowledging that private schools provide educational excellence and that kids who are stuck in government schools are denied that! Does she suppose that wealthy parents who pay a premium to send their kids to private schools (without "a shred of evidence that they help students learn") are stupid?
Celebrating passage of the Utah voucher law, Andrew Coulson of the Cato Institute wrote in The American Spectator: "Salt Lake City's legislation could very well become the domino that tips all other states into the camp of educational freedom." Wouldn't it be great if Colorado had the wisdom and courage to be next?
Mike Rosen's radio show airs daily from 9 a.m. to noon on 850 KOA. He can be reached by e-mail at mikerosen@850koa.com.
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