One of the ways defenders of the educational status quo oppose educational choice is by saying "There is no direct evidence that choice will improve American educational testing results."  In one ironic sense that is true, of course:  America's parents have not been permitted to have genuine educational freedom, and cannot therefore have "evidence" of its results.  Talk about self-fulfilling prophecies!  On the other hand, all the experience of nations with choice, and such American experiences as we can use by analogy, clearly indicate that parental choice encourages excellent educational performance.  When educational choice without financial penalty finally arrives in the United States, we can expect positive educational results to come quickly, especially in the nation's urban areas.

     But, even more importantly and in the meantime, many of choice's virtues can be seen clearly even before we are able to experience them.  Indeed, its natural attractions are so powerful and obvious that, in order to mount a logically-compelling educational argument against it, opponents would have to show what not even they pretend:  that choice actually hurts academic performance.  If it did no better than hold its own from a simply academic perspective, its other advantages would make it a clear winner.  If we think about American K-12 education, and the specific problems it is exhibiting, we will see that educational choice without financial penalty will have — necessarily will have — a tremendous positive impact.  To understand why, we need first to understand the prevailing policy which gives rise to so many educational difficulties.  That prevailing and destructive policy:  educational finance monopoly (EFM).  Let us look at EFM's essential character, and then examine just two of its numerous and inevitable ramifications.  We will realize in doing so that EFM and its unfortunate effects will be entirely erased by school choice.
 
 

The Essential Reality of EFM

     EFM is the enemy and opposite of educational choice without financial penalty.  Both are funding policies, not alternative educational models.  "Educational finance monopoly" describes the way we distribute tax dollars for K-12 education in the United States.  Such dollars go only to public schools and they go only via monopolistic bureaucratic structures, at state and district levels.

    The immediate educational effects of this are twofold:  the public schools sheltered by these monopolistic financing methods are deprived of the normal human incentives to excel; and parents who want to choose independent educational alternatives are forced to pay a large and often impossible financial penalty for such a choice.  The penalty:  paying ever-increasing taxes for the public schools and  ever-increasing tuition for any alternative selected.
 The negative implications of those two effects are inescapable:  the public schools, absent a comparative and competitive environment, tend to underproduce in terms of educational quality; personnel and program proliferation characteristically occur; vested interests grow up around the monopoly financing structures to ensure they remain intact; political alliances form for this purpose; poor educational performance in the artificially-protected public schools becomes the justification for increased funding; and, in the meantime, most independent schools, often performing superlatively, are under constant financial pressure and in constant peril.

     An obvious alternative to EFM is to place some or all of education-dedicated tax dollars in parents' hands, thus creating choice without financial penalty.  Inevitable positive impacts:  public schools, subject to comparison and competition under this new arrangement, will be stimulated to excel and to economize; independent options will be encouraged; family integrity will be strengthened because families will actively choose their child's educational environment, public or private.

     Seen from this perspective, many of the problems of contemporary American education are quite understandable:  they are not the fault of "public schools," nor personal failures of teachers and administrators.  They are the unsurprising result of a humanly destructive funding policy (EFM) which, once in place, naturally spawns other policies and structures injurious to educational quality and familial integrity.  Educational choice without financial penalty would automatically end the monopoly and its ill effects.  Public schools, seen as educational providers rather than protectors of vested interests, could only be improved by the new incentives to perform better.  This is what is meant when it is pointed out that public schools would be prime beneficiaries of educational choice.
 
 

EFM and Budgetary Irrationality

     One crucial, and inevitable, trait of EFM is that it leads to budgeting in a vacuum, a kind of financial irrationality.  In normal budgeting we know what we want, know what we have available to spend, and know the available alternatives and what they cost.  That gives us the chance of rational budgeting.  We naturally rebel against having just one monopolistic supplier, and we know why:  without comparison and competition, there is no way to determine the wisdom of an expenditure for goods and services.  Thus, monopoly breeds suspicion among consumers.

     And not without reason, for the same monopoly encourages unreal budgeting by those protected by it.  "Education" and "children" are good words, and educational budgets are often defended simply as having children's interest at heart.  Anyone questioning such proposals can expect to hear "he doesn't care for the kids."  The truth is, however, that one need not underappreciate children nor their education to question educational expenditures.  One may and should question those expenditures precisely because they are proposed in a vacuum, a framework in which comparison and competition do not exist, and over-burdened taxpayers routinely are asked to buy what they cannot evaluate.

     The central fact of EFM budgeting is that school budgets emerge from a system lacking normal restraints and competitive pressures.  Like the rest of us, school administrators and staff are not known for self-restraint, nor are the unions they represent.  "More" is their typical budget request, as one would expect.  School boards for the most part are expected to be cheerleaders, not serious challengers or generators of alternatives.  As the then-Superintendent of Public Instruction told a gathering of Wisconsin school board members, they are to be advocates for children, not taxpayers, not even children and taxpayers.  If they want to show concern for taxpayers, he said, let them join taxpayers' alliances! (Milwaukee Sentinel, January 21, 1993)  In many places the boards can set their own levy.  In such budgetary processes, one finds no mechanisms for ensuring effective and restrained expenditure nor for assuring taxpayers that their dollars are being well-spent.

     That is why educational referenda and bond issues often provoke meat-ax responses:  No!  The taxpayers are in no position to generate restrained alternatives, but they can say "no."  So can legislators, as those in Michigan made clear in 1993 when in frustration over educational funding they summarily dropped the property tax as the primary school-funding source.  Such actions do not necessarily mean too much was being asked for or spent on education.  Rather, they necessarily mean the citizens lost confidence in the budgeting vacuum created by EFM, a system which provides no comparison and no competition, and which too often justifies more expenditure by pointing to poorer performance.

     Now to turn the coin over:  educational choice without financial penalty will not necessarily reduce tax expenditures for education.  That depends on variables which can only be assessed in the actual process of budgeting.  But what choice will necessarily accomplish in educational budgeting is to create a context in which competition and comparison naturally occur.  Educational alternatives can be assessed rationally.  Schools which perform better for less will naturally be favored.  And taxpayer confidence can be restored because argument and restraint will be part of the budgeting process.

     Every specific educational choice proposal will have a different net financial effect.  Most can realistically promise to pay for themselves, even bring savings, by a combination of two factors:  each choice scholarship or voucher will be only a fraction of the amount spent on public school students; and some number of those public school students will migrate to less expensive private alternatives.  But the possibility of tax savings is not the essential financial difference between EFM and choice.  What is essential, what is undeniably true, is something else:  with EFM we are engaging in irrational budgeting in a vacuum, and only a utopian would expect good things to happen.  With choice we will have the chance to budget intelligently because we will have what we normally insist on in deciding a course of action:  comparison and competition among alternative means to the end.
 
 

EFM As Wedge Between Family and School

     I often refer to the results of educational finance monopoly (EFM) as "inevitable" or "inescapable."  Such terms are not used for dramatic effect.  They are used precisely because much of the indictment against EFM does not depend on statistical proofs, though such proofs are always welcome.  EFM is monopoly, after all, and it is indisputably true that monopolies, in providing services or goods, are inferior to freer systems in which people have choices.  That is why monopolies are routinely condemned, and freedom to choose is routinely sought.  A state's monopoly of definitive power via police and armed forces, enabling it to resolve social disputes and establish and defend a social order, is really the only praiseworthy monopoly.  Anarchism being the only alternative, state monopoly of ultimate power is praiseworthy because necessary.  And, even there, we recognize its potential for excess and, under democracy, we have learned how to restrain that excess by relying on competing political parties.  Apart from this unique area, monopoly is rightly seen as destructive of human welfare.  It exists in American educational funding, however, as a result of historical accidents.  Once in place, it naturally defends itself, but it is, in fact, indefensible.
 
     One of the worst inevitable results of the specific monopoly we call EFM is that it disrupts the natural relationship between family and school.  In a natural setting, the family, most dedicated to the child's welfare, chooses a school which conforms to and supports the family's sense of its nurturing responsibilities.  Those responsibilities include providing for the child's intellectual development and ethical formation.  In this sense, the school provides to the family vital services in an enlightened division of labor, and is seen as an extension of the family's care, not a supplanter of it.

     Equally important, when parents freely choose the child's school, public or private, in effect they form a moral contract with that school.  They accept its character and its conditions, and agree to work within that context.  This cooperative relationship is widely seen as one of the keys to successful education.  Thus, the act of choosing enables families to provide for their child a school framework compatible with their educational and ethical aspirations; and it creates a compelling basis for parental involvement, deemed vital to educational quality.

    What happens when "I choose" is replaced by EFM's "He has been assigned"?  There is no voluntary moral contract naturally binding home and school.  The schools thus created, necessarily, cannot try to provide an intellectual and moral climate reflecting particular families' values, for they are supposed to avoid "imposing" one set of values, especially religious values, on other children.  The "common school" in that situation gravitates toward a lowest-common-denominator ethic, both for instructional and behavioral purposes.  That, in turn, tends to develop a moral vacuum, and the vacuum is typically filled by the latest secular trends, e.g., the celebrated New York City school effort to legitimize same-sex "marriages."  Such trends are inevitably value-laden — they are ethical positions.  They simply have a source different from a specifically religious ethic.  Though said to be "not religious," they inevitably represent ethical positions imposed on the captive and unsuspecting school audience.  And they often have the effect of separating the child from the home's ethical norms.

    Thus, today's social diversity has this effect:  no imposed universal or common school can provide a suitable home for the diverse educational and ethical aspirations of America's families.  That which is primary, basic, and vital (families and children in their natural variety) is made to conform to that which is merely instrumental (one-size-fits all, monopoly-protected public schools).  That is another inescapable problem of EFM.  And educational choice without financial penalty undeniably provides a solution.  Free-to-choose parents will form natural moral contracts with schools, public or private.  Schools, public and private, will strive to make themselves attractive to those parents, not drive wedges between home and school.  The instrumental will serve the primary, as reasonable people expect.

     Educational finance monopoly can be identified as a primary cause of many of the educational ills presently afflicting the United States.  Knowing what we know of monopolies generally, this should surprise no one.  If eyes can be cleared, and fog dispelled, the corollary remedy will be equally obvious:  educational choice without financial penalty will break the monopoly and give parents and educators reasonable grounds for educational success.  Educational choice a panacea?  No!  It will not single-handedly solve all education-related problems, e.g., uneven resource availabilities, broken and dysfunctional families, both of which make the dream of a level playing field for all children difficult to achieve.  But educational choice a cure for much of what ails us, and an immediate solution to the destructive effects of EFM?  Yes, necessarily so!
 
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The Blum Center grants full permission for all of its documents to be copied, in part or in whole, to extend the reach of the Center's messages and information.  We appreciate it when our readers keep us apprised of state and national developments in the area of school choice, particularly legislative developments.  Any Blum Center documents not available on our web page may be obtained by contacting us by telephone, fax, or mail.  Virgil C. Blum Center for Parental Freedom in Education Brooks Hall, Room 209 Marquette University * P.O. Box 1881 * Milwaukee, WI 53201-1881 Phone: 414-288-7040* Fax: 414-288-3170 E-mail: blumcenter@vms.csd.mu.edu

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