Let's Think Again About School Choice by Chris White

This morning I listened to an insightful interview regarding school choice in Oregon on our local talk-radio station.  The proposals and recommendations for reform are thoughtful and the need for reform bears out in simple numbers: the average cost for a public school student in Oregon is now $11K per year while private schools which generally offer the same or better education is $3-5K per year.  Add this to falling tax revenues due to a continuous recession and depressed home values and over $16B in unfunded liabilities to retired school teachers.  Obviously something will have to change, must change, if for no other reason than there will be no children in Oregon if people can’t afford to live and raise their families here.  And taxes figure into this at every level.  This is already happening in my part of the state where in nearby Ashland Oregon they have had to close two of their public schools because they simply don’t have enough children to fill them and are importing students from other districts, all the while the population of the city has been growing.  If young families can’t afford to live in a place, they won’t.  They’ll follow opportunity and options.

The idea of school choice makes sense.  This proposal for reform suggests that the public still fund education through taxes, but that the tax money follows the student rather than the school.  Instead of my taxes automatically going to the nearest school to address, they go into a pool that provides a voucher to school age children and their parents decide which school offers the best educational options for their child.  This might be a nearby grade school or it might be a religious school or a charter school or even home-schooling via a home-based curriculum or the internet.  In many cases this is going to take money out of the public system and give it to private schools but considering the fact that the parenting phase of a person’s life span is roughly 25-30 years, while the taxation phase of a person’s life extends an additional 50, most taxes a person pays towards education is to educate everyone else’s kids not their own.  It seems fairly equitable that during the parenting phase years, parents might have some options besides the school down the street.

While I’ve never been fond of the government controlling school curriculum (which is largely about social engineering through teaching relativistic values and secularism), I do think there does need to be a required core curriculum for all school options that centers on America’s history, form of government, and language.  While I know this statement should be more nuanced, what I am driving at is that every nation has a compelling interest in inculcating the values of citizenship in its young people.  This part of education should be the same for everyone no matter where they go to school.  Much of the rhetoric regarding today’s new immigrants is that they are not assimilating into the culture.  Such a curriculum in schools of all shapes would go a long way towards accomplishing this important goal as well.

I hope you’ll check out this web site: http://cascadepolicy.org