School Choice or Bigger Government?

A voucher is a wealth-transfer scheme that takes money from the haves and gives it to the have-nots... by the force of taxation. The name for that is welfare.

"Milwaukee's Reform Came Wrapped In Red Tape"

School vouchers have been sold as a winning way to give parents a choice of how to educate their kids. But vouchers may come with government strings attached.

At least, that's the lesson from Milwaukee's school choice program.
While no doubt a victory for voucher supporters, the ruling opens the door to something else: more government control over Milwaukee's private schools.

"Public controls do follow public money - not necessarily immediately, but eventually," said economist Estelle James, who has studied school choice.

Already, more than 300 pages of state and federal rules have been dropped on the program. Those rules govern admissions, eligibility, "religious activities," student rights, curriculum standards, teacher certification and accountability, among other things.

Sound familiar?

"They are going to look just like public schools," Milwaukee Public Schools Superintendent Alan Brown said of the private schools that take vouchers.

"The inability to pick and choose among students...is one of the reasons public schools are in trouble," said Lew Rockwell, director of the free-market Ludwig von Mises Institute. "Apply the same rule to private schools, and you go a long way toward making them carbon copies of the schools so many are anxious to flee."

Also, the voucher money doesn't go to kids of "middle-class people who actually pay the taxes that support the public schools," Rockwell said. Instead, it goes only to "those the government defines as 'poor.'"

That group already gets big subsidies for health care, housing, day care and food. "Vouchers represent not a shrinkage of this welfare state but an expansion, the equivalent of food stamps for private school," Rockwell said.

A former high-level U.S. Education Department official agrees.

"The schools that participate behave exactly as government schools do. They have no say over who they accept or reject - they lose control over their enrollment," the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told IBD.

Dan McKinley, head of Partners Advancing Values in Education - a pro-voucher group - also worries that the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction may try to push its luck.

The DPI is charged with overseeing the program and each school's random admission policy.

"DPI believes that every student entering a private school retains the same rights as a public school student," McKinley said.

While the DPI has been cooperative, he said, it has issued a "whole list of student rights that come mainly from federal statutes that the (voucher) schools are supposed to sign off on."

These rules forbid single-sex schools. The rules also include provisions for disabled kids, which some private schools may not be able to afford.

"The purpose of the choice program was not to make the private schools public schools," Fuller said.

Some--including Friedman --believe vouchers are just a half-step toward real reform. They ask: Why have government involved in education at all?

"A voucher is a wealth-transfer scheme that takes money from the haves and gives it to the have-nots...by the force of taxation," said Marshall Fritz, head of the Fresno, Calif.-based Separation of School & State Alliance. "The name for that is welfare. A free lunch is welfare. A free math lesson is welfare. Public housing is welfare. Public schooling is welfare."

Full article: https://mises.org/library/school-welfare