- Must
Tax Dollars Kill School Independence?
by Quentin L. Quade
Most of our favorite slogans contain real truth, no doubt. But, as is the way with slogans, they are often stated with an absoluteness belied by the facts. "You get what you pay for" comes to mind. The next time you hear that, ask yourself how frequently you hear of consumer fraud, shysterism, and the advantages of comparison shopping. There is truth in the slogan, but stated absolutely it is much more a hope than a reality.
Another slogan often proclaimed with unwarranted absoluteness, and one heard often in school choice discussions, is "He who pays the piper calls the tune." There are those who ask: "If tax dollars become available to buy private education, must not private education be corrupted thereby, perhaps even so corrupted as to vitiate entirely the reason for breaking the current educational finance monopoly? Might those tax dollars simply convert the independent schools into quasi-public ones, finally killing off what is left of the private sector?" Such inquiries are often followed by "After all, he who pays..."
Strange Bedfellows
This is a particularly interesting concern because, ironically enough,
it is expressed with equal vigor by two radically different sorts of people.
It is expressed by some who think of themselves as libertarians, distrustful
of government in all things; and it is expressed by some who might accurately
be described as statists, persons very accommodating of increased governmental
activity generally.
The statists want to counsel against vouchers no doubt for many reasons, but one they often give is that even student-carried aid should and would make the recipient schools part of the state network, and thus subservient, for example, to a state Department of Public Instruction, and thus finally indistinguishable from public schools. Therefore, "for their own sake," it is said, private schools and their proponents should not ask for voucher-type systems. One may wonder about the sincerity of such a position when it is announced by leaders of educational unions, the National Educational Association, and groups of that sort. For them, it could be simply a convenient scare tactic and smoke screen used to maintain their finance monopoly.
Be that as it may, the argument is much like, indeed essentially identical to, that of the libertarian-type who says, "He who pays the piper calls the tune." That person believes that any tax dollars, no matter the distribution method, will ultimately and inevitably become a vehicle for state dominance and loss of independent identity. Believing that, it is not surprising he reaches the same conclusion as the statist: private schools and their proponents should not ask for voucher-type programs.
Prudence and the Urgent Context
To both statist and concerned libertarian I respond as follows: in reaching your conclusion, you have managed to collapse and obliterate several crucial logical distinctions which, if restored, will collapse and obliterate your conclusion. Restored, they will make clear that we can find ways to break finance monopoly, install parents as decision-makers regarding finance distribution, and avoid state dominance.
As context, we must recall the severity of the present situation.
The symptoms of current American education difficulties are devastating.
The negative results ramify outward in many directions. The independent
sector is under great pressure, and the forces of educational finance monopoly
(EFM) are expanding their tentacles, and deepening their roots. We
are not talking about a small or slow problem which prudently might never
justify sharp departure from past practice. We are rather talking
about a profound and seductive problem which may well justify a dramatic
departure and even some degree of risk. To avoid it simply because
there is some risk involved would be a bit like not throwing a rope to
a drowning person for fear that that person may get blisters from clutching
the rope as he is pulled to safety, the blisters may become infected, and
the infection may become life-threatening. That displays a fundamental
lack of proportion in assessing degrees of risk and immediate vs remote
dangers. We can, indeed, must, work to save American education, even
if we recognize a bit of risk in doing so.
Distinctions Restored
But not much risk, I think. Let us start by making certain key distinctions
without which we and reason are lost. Let us distinguish between
ownership and assistance; between sponsorship and support; between managing
operations and assessing outcomes; and between laws and tendencies.
The first three distinctions invite us to see palpable differences on vital questions of control, definition, and essential character. The words and the ideas they represent express different realities in any common sense usage. Can they be abused? Can real differences be eroded? Can offered support become de facto sponsorship and control? Of course, if vigilance is not maintained. But that is the point of the fourth distinction, the distinction between tendencies and laws.
While ownership necessarily conveys control, latent or active, assistance of an independent entity need not convey control. I can freely choose to help a person or an agency and forego any control, or even influence over it. If it takes on a character I do not value, I can withdraw my support. If the thing I have supported is craven, or other-directed, it may let my action unduly influence its behavior, or it may take the occasion to reexamine itself and freely redefine. But in none of those eventualities has support become control. Thus the point about paying the piper and calling the tune: they tend to go together; they do not have to go together.
The distinction between managing operations and judging outcomes brings F.A. Hayek to mind. In Road to Serfdom we find him distinguishing rigorously and crucially between providing rules of the road, on the one hand, and telling people where to go, on the other. We find him distinguishing between "signposts and commanding people which road to take." These are realistic distinctions with special pertinence to educational choice vs finance monopoly.
If we bring this same rigor to bear on education policy, we will see a road with several forks or junctures, and we will be blind if we do not see the differences between the forks when we encounter them. Let us start at the beginning.
- * At the first fork
in the road we decide either to accept the need for government or that
we are truly anarchists.
* If we decide government is necessary, then we either accept that government can have a legitimate concern for education, for the social and personal welfare of the nation, or we deny it.
* If we accept some governmental concern for education, we will either provide tax dollars for it, or we will provide no tax dollars for it.
* If we provide tax dollars for it, we will stream all those dollars to the governmental schools through vehicles of monopoly financing (Hayek's telling people where to go), or we will disperse those public dollars via parents and their free acts of choice.
* If we choose to disperse, we can exercise in the dispersal great control of and intrusion in educational operations, or we can rely on parental judgment and results assessment, and very little prescription, as our dispersal technique (Hayek's establishing rules of the road, but letting the traveler decide his pathway). Dispersed spending at the state level would have a happy corollary effect: by diminishing the role of central state authorities, it would lessen federal capacity to intrude via such state agencies.
Reality Reinforcing
Reason
If despite such logical displays one still believes that these distinctions
are only lifeless abstractions that do not touch the central and dominating
realities of governmental funding, then let us consider certain very real
and lively historical cases. First, let us look at the United States
as it is. In 50 states we see a monopoly of educational finance producing
humanly-destructive results, the very results which have produced the crisis
of contemporary American education. This is not a speculative possibility
or tendency, but an overwhelming and urgent fact.
Second, we can look at Europe in which many countries have state-owned and supported schools, but within those school systems religious variety among them (there being no artificial church-state complications), providing the occasion for choice by parents. Even this is much different from and superior to what prevails in the United States, in my judgment. Third, if we look at Denmark, Sweden, or Australia, for example, we find direct tax aid to independent institutions; but not ownership, nor sponsorship, nor direction of those schools, which are free creations reflecting religious, cultural, and philosophical motivations and true parental freedom. This naturally encourages greatly variegated educational offerings with excellent educational results. The distinctions I have pointed to among these three existing alternatives are very substantial and undeniably real. And they are erroneously blurred by the adage "He who pays...."
Now, let us look at a fourth alternative. Let us call that the United States-I-hope-for. Alleged church-state entanglements in American constitutional tradition mean that the most likely method for achieving parental freedom in the United States is a scholarship or voucher system or a tax credit program which would not involve any direct tax dollars to schools, but would allow parents to allocate those dollars to the schools they choose for their children, with the dynamic and liberating results noted above. Not only foreign experiences show the wisdom of such choice. Precedents in our own experience abound. The GI Bill, which had no practical encumbrances, is a powerful precedent. In Wisconsin and in many other states, various tuition grant programs for colleges and universities exist and, again, have almost no encumbering and complicating character attaching to them. Pre-school voucher programs involving independent schools are common and not troublesome. Stepping outside the educational framework for a moment, if we look at the method of social security disbursement in the United States, we see a clear case of governmental dollars with no restrictions as to use. They are simply disbursed in the form of a check — a voucher, in effect. Thus, experience and logic coincide to make clear that the simple presence of tax-derived dollars does not inevitably corrupt. Everything depends on the method of their use.
Vigilant Good Judgment,
As In All Things
We can use fire without burning ourselves. We know that using electricity
in the United States will result in some unfortunate accidents in any given
year. But we are very unlikely to pull the plug on electricity.
We know that a system of private property will result in some hedonistic
excesses and some personal deprivations, and while we look for ways to
refine and limit such unhappy results, we steadfastly defend private property
as, on balance, the most humanly fulfilling economic formation.
If we break educational finance monopoly, and replace it with parental freedom, based on tax dollars following parental choice rather than a priori governmental assignment, we can fairly well predict that there will be occasional tensions between independent schools and the state sources of those tax dollars. We can predict that intrusiveness will threaten from time to time. But neither logic nor experience provide convincing reasons to believe that we must fall into the traps, succumb to the excess, and sacrifice the essential freedom of the independent sector. Indeed, a thoughtful voucher or scholarship program can enliven that independent sector, expand it, and in so doing provide at long last a comparative and competitive arena for state-owned schools.
There are a half-dozen major natural constituencies which, if alert, will join forces to break EFM in the several states, and to replace it with educational choice. It will be a sad irony if those who most distrust state activity miss this opportunity to help control and shrink the state educational leviathan, today's most extreme case of governmental monopoly and over-extension.
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