All schools are public

[PeterPaul]

Long, but worth it!


All Schools Are Public Schools
A case for state aid to private education and homeschooling parents

by Jason Boffetti



How We Got "Public" Schools


A not-so-radical proposal

With so many parents looking for alternatives to public schools, do we need to discard public education entirely? Of course not. Our goal is not to undermine faith in public schools but to question the premise that only publicly run schools serve the public good and therefore are entitled to public money. Instead, I offer a simple proposal: Let us treat all schools like public schools, for all good schools perform a public service.

At various times in world and American history, private schools have not only served the public good but have also received public money. And nobody thought this was unusual. In fact, for most of world history, parents believed educating their children was their private responsibility, and they received little or no public assistance. No one wants to return to such a system; tax-supported universal education has obvious advantages. But perhaps the time has come for parents to be more directly involved with education choice.

Rather than the usual hostility to alternatives, we need an approach that allows all parents to choose schools that best serve their needs. Such a system strikes many as a radical change. But it is not so radical as one might suppose. For example, everyone recognizes the yellow school bus. It is emblematic of the common experience in public education. But imagine if those same school buses picked up their precious cargo and, rather than stopping at one school, dropped children off at several schools: the local public school, the Montessori school, and the Jewish day-school. This happens in very few places in the United States. But it demonstrates how religious and secular nonpublic schools might be included in a reformed public education system that treats all schools as public schools, even if they are not publicly run.

We can learn from both the successes and failures of the past. Some of the world’s great civilizations have thrived under the assumption that education could be provided through a public/private partnership. And if we need reasons why America should allow private and religious schools to receive public aid, we can look into the not-so-distant past.



The history of “public” education

Civilization and education have always gone hand in hand, but not all great civilizations provided public education. In fact, some thrived without state education systems, and those that had provided public education have not been without flaws.

Almost all of what we know about one of the world’s first civilizations, Sumer, comes from its government records. The Sumerians did not value general literacy. Instead the Sumerian government trained scribes and priests for the state, demonstrating that public schools do not always provide for the common good, unless “the common good” is narrowly defined as politics.

Ancient Athens demonstrated that a world-transforming culture can rise from a society without public schools. Even though the Greeks believed education should provide universal public literacy and prepare good citizens, parents were largely responsible for paying tutors and did so under great social pressure. Of course, collective payment plans did exist. Some teachers drew their incomes from private endowments that were set up to provide for military orphans.[1] This was so successful that the Mediterranean region succumbed to the Greek language, the arts, religion, politics, and culture.

Everything that made Rome great was learned from the Greeks—and improved upon. Roman education was practical and effective where Greek education was idealistic. Both boys and girls were taught their three R’s, and they learned both Latin and Greek. And like the Greeks, education in the Roman Republic was privately funded. All but the poorest citizens could afford an education, which was often locally subsidized.

But during Rome’s imperial phase, only the wealthiest could afford a good education. In fact, the fall of Rome has been closely linked with the failure of Rome’s education system to prepare good local administrators. The lack of education was emblematic of its failure to advance the welfare of all its people. Even with enormous financial resources, the Roman Empire lacked the vision to create a education system worthy of its military and cultural success.

For four centuries, Greek and Roman wisdom survived through the efforts of the Catholic Church. After the fall of Rome, the Church created an education system that effectively reached even the poorest members of society. Parish-level education developed to ensure literate clergy, but the Church did not limit itself to that. By 853, an ecclesiastical council in Rome insisted that all parishes provide elementary instruction and that cathedrals provide education in the liberal arts.

Despite political and social disruption, cathedrals and monasteries were the sites for most of western Europe’s literary, artistic, and intellectual expression during the “Dark Ages.” Through teaching orders like the Benedictines, who boasted several thousand monasteries at their height, monasteries prepared boys for both secular and consecrated life and succeeded in giving Europe a common language (Latin) and culture. As Europe began to urbanize, more choices in “public” education developed, but it remained fundamentally religious in nature and privately funded by the Church or parents.

Free education for the poor was officially mandated by the Church at the Third Lateran Council (1179), which decreed that every cathedral must assign a master to teach boys too poor to pay the regular fee; parishes and monasteries also established free schools. With few exceptions, priests and brothers taught locally, and their salaries were frequently subsidized by towns. Private, independent schools reappeared in medieval Europe during this time, but they, too, were religious in nature and mission.

For several centuries through the Renaissance, most schools were religious in inspiration and Catholic in name, insofar as they were either run for the Church or by the Church and its priest. Nobody complained about church-state entanglements, because government was limited, in*efficient, and frequently far away. Families were more than happy to entrust their children’s minds to the same institution they trusted to save their souls. Local political authorities and the rising merchant class supported this system. In fact, religious-based education supplied the intellectual vehicle for the material progress of the Renaissance and modern Europe.



A struggle for control

A fundamental shift occurred in Europe around 1500. Local political author*ities began to look with suspicion on religious institutions and did not trust them—or any other private institutions—to provide the kind of education that would make their graduates loyal citizens. Jealous political authorities were quick to embrace education for its ideological potential. This shift away from parental rights to educate their children for the needs of the family toward the state’s desire to direct that education for its own ends still remains a tension in education.

Although many schools were run by churches up until 1700, they were increasingly monitored and often directed by the state. In Germany, schools run by the Lutheran church were made to serve political ends. In England, the situation was somewhat better. A two-fold system of state and independent schools developed. But Henry VIII outlawed Catholicism to punish his political enemies, thus closing the massive Catholic school system and depriving thousands of an education to serve his own political advantage.

From the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries; the wealthy in Europe could always afford formal education at a church-school, the municipal school, or they could hire private tutors. Only the churches remained committed to the idea that even the poorest should have access to an education. However, no system existed that could properly educate the middle class and poor for anything more than basic tasks.

In many histories, the rise of the nation-state is heralded as the beginning of truly universal education. However, had European history been different, the state might have viewed existing religious education as an ally in the fight for universal literacy rather than a threat to political authority. State-sponsored education launched a direct assault on its nearest competition, private religious education, rather than working together with existing schools for common goals.



National education

Not only were the early nation-states of Europe suspicious of religious and other private and independent institutions, they were organized on the principle that the best way to organize society is through central control and bureaucracy. Sociologist Max Weber famously describes this centralizing and bureaucratizing thrust as an inescapable element of modernity. The state quickly adopted oversight of education. Schools were no longer deemed creatures of local communities but were created by the state and for the state.

Curricula imposed by these early modern states stressed national and civic identity as German, or French, or English over one’s religious identity. The classical education pursued by the Catholic Church, which drew on Greek and Roman sources, was put aside in favor of more chauvinistic curricula. Emperor William II once said that German educators should be preparing “young Germans and not young Greeks or Romans.”[2] In a nationalist and modern education system, the religious components of education also disappear. Man is understood as primarily political and economic. In other words, we returned to Sumer.

Private and religious education did not disappear entirely; however, in every case where the state took on the project of providing education, private and religious options were driven out, and sometimes, as with France, very intentionally.

England held on to its voluntary education system longer than continental Europe. Well into the nineteenth century, the English preferred to leave education up to parents who could afford to pay and a multitude of charitable organizations to pay for those who couldn’t. Charitable groups established schools to serve the poor who worked England’s industrial factories. But as the government slowly created a school system for the working classes, charitable and religious schools virtually disappeared, leaving only the elite private schools that catered to the wealthy and well-born.

Developments in continental Europe took a more radical path. In France, Jacobin revolutionaries saw the Catholic Church as an obstacle to their revolutionary aims. So Catholic education was virtually outlawed and replaced with a radically nationalistic system. Francois Guizot, architect of France’s education system in the 1830s, wrote, “Government and society are no longer two distinct beings . . . . They are one and the same.” He sought to use teachers to promote nationally approved political values.

Likewise in Germany, education was taken out of the hands of the clergy and established as a state ministry in 1787. With the rise of German nationalism, devotion to the state became one of the prime values inculcated in the gymnasia of Prussia.

Historians of education often claim that the goal of universal education was not realized until government began to provide public education. The question remains, however, whether governments must also drive all alternatives or whether private and religious institutions should be included.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, most European countries began abandoning the idea of universal state-sponsored education in favor of flexible systems that fund religious and other private schools. The twentieth century taught us the failure of purely state-run systems since our experiences with Nazism and communism.

Indeed, the greatest triumphs of the last century in politics, culture, and the economy have largely resulted from decentralized control, innovation, and the freedom of individuals to make informed choices. And yet American public education still uses this outmoded model of bureaucratic organization. Education experts talk about federal intervention to set national standards and to finance public education. And they are unwilling to permit local communities to fund existing private schools that, by all accounts, do at least as good a job, and often better.

Yet things were not always this way in America. Public education ori*ginally developed without suspicion of religion and local decision-*making. Churches and towns cooperated to provide an education for all. It wasn’t long, however, before education experts from Europe made their way to the United States with the same hostility to anything other than “public” schools.



Education in early America

 

[PeterPaul]

If we try to imagine a future in which parents have a real choice, we need only look back to America’s colonial past, when government supported education (including religious education) without directly providing it. We have so narrowly conceived public education today that we forget that, to colonial Americans, “public” school meant any school open to the public, serving the public good, and receiving some form of public support. Their education system was very different from our own, but with this supposedly limited education, they conquered a continent.

It is often assumed that there was no formal or organized education before 1840 in the United States. This is flatly false. It is true there was no formalized public school system until then, but parents who wanted their children to receive an education had little trouble finding a school, or starting one with other parents, if one was needed.

Until the 1820s, the states and the national government limited their role in education to funding land grants and modest financial aid programs, frequently supporting religious schools. Indeed, direct state aid to religious schools was common in Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, South Carolina, Maryland, Delaware, Georgia, Tennessee, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois—as long as the funds were used to support education for the poor.[3] Parents who could afford it were expected to pay their fair share. And yet education was widely available in all settled portions of America by 1830, with the exception of Southern plantations.

On the frontiers, schools were built as soon as they were needed, generally without government help, and were financed by the donations of religious and civic groups. For example, German immigrants to colonial Pennsylvania created a system of German-speaking Lutheran schools that, by 1820, numbered 342 across the states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Jersey, and North Carolina. These schools were established to preserve cultural identity as much as to transmit Lutheranism. As the population migrated west and the common school began to the dominate in the East, Lutheran schools sprang up in the Midwest, numbering 408 for 26,455 students by 1871. Presbyterian schools were far less successful, because many Presbyterian leaders threw themselves behind Horace Mann’s “common school” idea. Dutch Calvinists, however, brought with them a memory of religious oppression by the state and created a school system that grew to 400 schools with 7000 students by the end of the nineteenth century.

Schools were not created or controlled by the states—let alone the federal government—but were the embodiment of what parents and their communities wanted for their children. As James Carper remarks, “These educational opportunities were due primarily to the efforts of parents, churches, voluntary associations, entrepreneurs, and communities. . . . With the exception of charity schooling, with its acculturative mission, most schools embodied the belief systems of their clientele. In sum, the structure of schooling reflected the ‘confessional pluralism’ of the time and public policy generally recognized and even encouraged diversity.”[4]

Northern states first experimented with public “district schools,” which were run by the local government and either charged tuition or relied on property taxes. The United States was slow to follow the European model. For the most part, government resisted the temptation to run schools even as it generously supported them financially at the request of its citizens. Throughout the colonial period, all schools, secular or religious, were considered “public” schools because they served the public good. Despite early attempts at a national education system by notable proponents like Benjamin Rush, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, local communities jealously guarded their schools and their prerogative to found them, recalling the observations of Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1820s that Americans had a talent for local and voluntary initiative.

Nineteenth-century Boston initiated the most ambitious, but perhaps unnecessary, reform. Horace Mann said that his common school movement was a response to an education crisis. But the 1817 census of Boston reported that education at public expense provided for some 2,300 of Boston’s students while private schools (both free and tuition-based) took in over 4,000, and that the hundreds of truant children that Mann worried about could have been easily accommodated at private schools at the public expense, as was already the case for many of the city’s poor. (Sadly, when the Boston school district took more direct control of education, it effectively drove out these modestly-priced private schools, leaving only the elite academies.)

Other American cities had similar experiences. In the early nineteenth century, New York City subsidized religious education—including Catholic schools—with public money to help provide a free education to the urban poor.[5] It was not until 1840 when a Protestant group calling itself the New York Free School Society received a monopoly on these public funds that public support of Catholic schools was all but eliminated.

Catholic education, the largest alternative to public schools today, started slowly in the United States. By 1840, there were at least 200 Catholic parish schools. About half of them were in Kentucky and Missouri, despite the fact that America’s eastern cities had larger concentrations of ethnic Catholics. The urban Catholic education boom in the late 1800s can be traced to the economic success and charitable inclinations of new immigrants, who proudly built schools as homage to their faith.

For decades then in our early republic, all schools were “public” schools. That is, they were built by local initiative and funded through a combination of charitable contributions, local government taxes, and the tuition parents believed it was their obligation to provide. Where there was a need, communities responded through collective action in cooperation with limited government. If the colonial education system was working, why do we have such a different public school system today?



Mann’s common school

Horace Mann started with the optimistic hope that the common school could provide a common educational experience to shape children into good American citizens. This is fine so far as it goes. All societies have a responsibility to transmit their culture to the next generation and leave society in a better condition. But Mann also believed that the virtues of good citizenship rest on a shared moral and religious foundation and that America’s religious and cultural diversity was the enemy of that unity; he sought to lessen diversity.

Despite attempts to paint him as a modern secularist, Mann’s vision for the common school was far from morally or religiously empty. He believed in limited moral and religious instruction in a common religious core so benign that no religious person would feel threatened by it. Not coincidentally, thought his opponents, the religious beliefs he taught were those of Mann and his fellow Unitarians.

Likewise, his beliefs about citizenship followed from the belief in an American civil religion. Like many American historians, he saw our political culture as a hybrid of biblical Christianity and enlightenment rationalism. From its Founding, our nation established a “civil religion” between these twin poles and sought to develop an education system to perpetuate it. Mann’s common school tried to reconcile those twin poles. He believed that the common school was an adequate replacement for the “sacred space” formerly reserved for the church.

Indeed, public schools from the mid-1800s until the middle of the twentieth century communicated that “common faith” so well that Sidney Mead has written, “Public schools in the United States took over one of the basic responsibilities that traditionally was always assumed by an established church. In this sense the public school system in the United States is its established church.”[6]

But the real myth, as Charles Glenn skillfully shows in his book, The Myth of the Common School, is that public education can adequately promote neutral religious values by papering over important distinctions. Some of the most spirited opposition to the common schools came understandably from religious quarters, demonstrating, as they do today, that some parents conscientiously object to being forced to imbibe the political and religious ends that are inherent in every kind of education.

Calvinists considered the common school teaching of “natural virtuousness” and the method of independent Bible study as direct assaults on their doctrinal beliefs. Catholics were opposed to it on the grounds that being forced to read from a Protestant Bible would corrupt young Catholics. As early as 1828, Bishop Fenwick of Baltimore recognized that “common school” education was a Protestant threat to children “by which their minds are poisoned as it were from their infancy.” But Bishop John Hughes of New York believed that the education was not sufficiently religious and said, “If you exclude all sects, you exclude Christianity. Take away the distinctive dogmas, of the Catholics, the Baptists, the Methodists, the Presbyterians, and so on, and you have nothing left but deism.”

In the pastoral letter of 1840, the American bishops admitted that they were satisfied to see common schools prosper but that the Church was “always better pleased to have a separate system of education for the children of our communion.”[7] Even by 1852, while the Church worldwide was calling for a reestablishment of Catholic education in the face of growing secularism, Catholics in America were not sufficiently numerous or wealthy to provide an alternative to the growing common school movement. By century’s end, however, increasingly successful Catholic immigrants began to construct the largest private alternative to public schools, without government aid.

The common school would not have become so effective without the mandatory attendance laws that most states passed at the end of the nineteenth century. Initially, there were good reasons for such laws, in the first place, to protect children from being overworked. Many children had to toil in factories and on the farm with little time for school because their families needed the money. Compulsory attendance laws, however, further engrained the idea that the state was the sole provider of education and had the right to sanction the kind of education that satisfied the state over the wishes of parents.

Nor should we underestimate the contributions of American edu*cation giant, John Dewey, in the first two decades of the twentieth century. His philosophy fundamentally reshaped American education, perhaps even more than Mann’s. Until then, even the local common school was thought of as an extension of the home. Dewey taught another gospel: Simply put, schools serve the community (either nation or city), not the needs and wishes of parents. This subtle shift transformed the role of teachers from being ser*vants of parents to servants of the state. Dewey’s philosophy of education transformed America’s teaching colleges and is universal today.

The “common school” ideal continues to enjoy strong support among the education establishment, sometimes for very self-interested reasons. Today teachers’ unions, like the powerful National Education Association (NEA), perpetuate a public monopoly on education, which has built up layer upon layer of bureaucratic apparatus. Federal agencies like the Department of Education, state departments of education, regional and city wide educational bodies, and PTAs, all keep public education from changing and react defensively to opening up the present system to alternatives that would not fall under their jurisdiction.



Time for change

In many ways, the failures of American public education today can be traced back to its failure to live up the highest ideals of its founder, Horace Mann, who was himself influenced by the educational philosophy of eighteenth-century nation-state builders. Mann’s system worked only as long as Americans agreed on a loosely Protestant civil religion. Public schools could do the job of moral education for citizenship in addition to fulfilling its academic goals. Today, however, public schools fail to live up to those ideals because educators no longer agree on which commonly shared values should be taught and are often at odds with what parents would desire for their children.

Perhaps it is too much to hope that we can agree on a common moral core, but it is not too much to expect that parents ought to be able to find schools that reflects their values. In that case, there are many good examples of private schools providing truly public education to parents willing to make the financial sacrifices to take advantage of them, and we will look at two examples of alternatives in the next chapter. In every way, private schools and the parents who use them contribute to the common and public good.

Alternatives to public schools can accommodate some of the basic tenets of the common school, general literacy and universal access, without assuming that government bureaucrats should direct our children’s educations. Therefore we should consider returning to that older notion of education that informed early colonial education: Parents have the right to direct the education of their children, and both public and private institutions can help reach that goal. In this way, we treat all schools as serving the common good as public schools.

end of chapter one...

 

[PeterPaul]

(cont..)

Private Schools, Public Good



Parents know best

When the Children’s Scholarship Fund made 40,000 partial tuition scholarships in 1999 to help low-income parents send their children to private schools, the fund had to turn away 1.2 million applicants. These parents aren’t waiting for education reform. They’re sending their children to schools that can deliver right away, because it’s no secret that without basic math skills, functional literacy, or solid work habits, their children will not grow up to find a good job.

It’s sad that these parents have to look so hard for good schools because the methods and benefits of such schools are no secret. Twenty years ago, the late Ronald Edmonds at Michigan State University released a study of high-performing/high-poverty schools that found that order and discipline are the keys to success.[1] In what amounts to the “Seven Habits of Highly Effective Schools,” he outlined the proven methods: high expectations, a principal who teaches teachers, a singularly motivated staff, safe and orderly classrooms, aggressive teaching of skills, parental involvement, and frequent testing. Combine these traits with small classes and small schools and you have a near-universal model for an effective learning environment. Public schools rarely do these things, but private and religious schools often do.

Parents want more than just good grades, too; they think moral instruction is important. So many parents send their children to private religious schools at their own expense or educate their children at home. In fact, almost all parents believe that their children need such instruction. More than 90 percent of parents believe that schools ought to try to instill the virtues of honesty and moral courage, apply the Golden Rule, teach children to accept people with different ethnic and religious backgrounds, and promote democracy. And 68 percent of parents want schools to teach sexual abstinence.[2]

Unfortunately, American public education has become allergic to this kind of instruction. Teaching right from wrong and moral excellence has been replaced with teaching social acceptance and a kind of moral equi*valency that says that no choice is better than another. Parents who want more serious moral instruction—the kind that was once generally available even in public schools—now have to find it elsewhere.

In this chapter, I will consider whether private alternatives are adequate substitutes for public schools and, therefore, whether they ought to receive public funding. To do so, I will look in-depth at two popular alternatives to public education—Catholic schools and home schooling—that show that good education doesn’t depend on big government budgets. Unfortunately, these private alternatives currently face both legal and financial threats since America’s education system has failed to accommodate parental choice in the form of vouchers and tax credits. If they disappear, parents will have even fewer choices in education. If we make these schools accessible to more students, however, parents of children in some of the worst schools will have a much brighter future.



Private Misconceptions

Critics usually claim that private schools have nothing to teach public schools and that they certainly should not qualify for public funding. These critics have imbibed three common misconceptions about private schools: that they cater to the rich, they are essentially unregulated, and they do not serve the public good. Private schools, they say, have nothing in common with public schools and should not be compared to them. Is this true?



The first misconception: Who benefits?

The first misconception is easily dispelled because private schools actually serve parents with modest incomes. Roughly 10 percent (or about six million) of our nation’s K-12 students attend private schools. Their parents can’t all be wealthy because only 2 percent of the population makes over $100,000 per year.

When we think about alternatives to public schools, our minds conjure up images of elite and very expensive prep schools. But this is not the typical private school. Most private schools, in fact, are religious schools (87 percent of all private educational institutions), and 78 percent of them charge less than $3,500 per year according to the National Center for Education Statistics (1997-1998 school year).

Perhaps voters would find it a little easier to consider allocating public funding to private education if they knew that the support goes to modestly priced schools. For one thing, public funding of private education would allow more children of all backgrounds, not more rich children, to attend private schools. While nonsectarian schools cost on average a little over $6,000 per year, religious schools average about $2,500.[3] Since religious schools tend to be more affordable, they would stand to benefit the most from education reforms such as vouchers and tax credits. A $1,500 voucher or scholarship puts a $3,000 tuition within reach of many parents. The experience of cities where public vouchers existed in 1999-2000 confirms this. Ninety-six percent of the participating schools in Cleveland and 92 percent in Milwaukee were religious, but the more expensive secular schools declined to accept voucher-bearing students.

Experience also shows that Catholic parochial, diocesan, and independent schools stand to gain the most from public funding. Like public schools, they take children when no one else will, and they represent as good a case study as we are likely to find to consider the effects of alter*natives to our present system. Catholic schools are generally affordable and that makes Catholic education the most likely options for many parents. A mere 2 percent of Catholic elementary schools charge more than $3,500 per year, and almost half of Catholic high schools charge less than $3,000. No one argues that the government must agree to cover the entire cost of a private education. Perhaps what opponents of choice really mean is that they reject public funding of Catholic and other religious schools in any way.



The second misconception: Accountability

Many assume that private schools currently function without any accountability to the government and possibly in an irresponsible manner. But all private schools report to parent-teacher school boards, boards of directors, and, in the case of Catholic schools, to their parish or diocese. Critics of private schools fail to see that private schools are in many ways more responsive to parents and more open to direct parental participation. Meanwhile, public schools have become more hierarchical, and public participation has been limited by the need to comply with elaborate state and federal legislation.

Surely any public funding of private schools would involve greater public accountability, but it should be noted that private schools are already regulated by state governments. Private schools must adhere to “minimum standards” for teacher certification, workplace safety, and, in some states, mandatory additions to the curriculum. The Department of Education website offers a useful summary of the various laws and regulations that apply to private schools in every state.[4] Some may find it surprising to learn that many states already have very explicit guidelines for regular testing and reporting for private schools.

There are limits to this regulation, however, because the Supreme Court has upheld the right of private school independence on the grounds that onerous regulation threatens parental rights to direct their children’s education. The truth may be that public schools, too, could use this same protection from political predation, which often weakens their ability to function and to respond to parental and other community input aimed at improvement.



The third misconception: Defining “private”

The distinction between public and private schools is a false one since there is no such thing as a “private” student. Some schools may be privately run and others publicly run, but all schools serve the public. The clearest distinction between them is how they are funded, and that is exactly what the movement for school choice seeks to change.

Indeed, the very fact that we regulate private schools at all shows that we already believe that private schools serve a public function and must have some degree of public accountability. If we are willing to go that far, we should go further and admit that private education serves the common good and therefore deserves a fair share of our common education funds.

Furthermore, private education performs an often ignored public service. Every year, private schools save public education $40 billion. For every student who attends a private school, the government saves $6,915, the average public school cost per pupil. Those resources are redirected to benefit present public school students. Catholic schools alone save the American taxpayer $15 billion.

Private schools, then, already provide a very public service. To support more private schools with public funding would only be to acknowledge the existing role they play in American education. This is an issue of basic fairness. If over a million parents in America believe that their public schools are failing them, they should not be forbidden by their economic circumstances from finding schools that work. They ought to be able to send their children to alternative schools, ones that serve the public, that are close at hand, and, as I argue below, that are often much better than the ones their children are trapped in.



The Catholic Case Study

If we are going to consider public financing of private schools, it is only fair that we ask these two questions: Can private schools fulfill their promise of an education better than existing public options? And do they even need or want the money?

Since private education is so diverse, we cannot answer these questions for all nonpublic schools. Catholic schools present the best case study among private alternatives because they match up fairly well statistically to public schools; Protestant religious schools, Montessori schools, and Jewish day-schools have less easily comparable student bodies. But much of what makes Catholic schools successful may be said of these schools as well. Furthermore, Catholic schools far outnumber any other single private school alternative. Catholic schools account for 30 percent of all private schools but nearly half of all private school students; they employ 40 percent of private school teachers.

Because Catholic schools operate under circumstances very similar to those of public schools, they offer a counterexample to many of the excuses public schools use for failure. Catholics schools have comparable class sizes, have teachers with equivalent levels of education, and draw 25 percent minority students compared with 33 percent in public schools, and yet they consistently out-perform public schools. How is this possible?



Academic success

Catholic schools get the job done in many ways besides academically.[5] Despite admitting most applicants, Catholic high schools graduate 97 percent of their students, compared with just over 50 percent in public schools. And it’s clearly not because academic standards are lower. In study after study, Catholic school students outperform their public school peers. The federal government uses a regular test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), to measure education performance across the country. Results from the 1996 NAEP show that fourth- and eighth-grade Catholic school students do better in math, science, reading, and social studies, and few fall behind in later years. Eighty-five percent of Catholic school students take the SAT compared with 33 percent in public schools.

But Catholic schools also receive much attention because of the results they also get in the inner city. For reasons I have already discussed, Catholic schools are often the only viable alternatives to failed public schools for inner-city parents. And inner-city dioceses make great financial sacrifices to keep these schools open, since they are often underfunded by their parishes. Dioceses often help parents financially, but most parents still pay about $1,000 per year for this lifeline, a sacrifice many deem well worth it.

Catholic schools achieve remarkable results. Minority students from low-income families score more than 150 points higher than their public and magnet school peers, according to a 1990 Rand Corporation study. The dropout rate among black Catholic school students is 5 percent, compared with 17 percent in public schools. Minority students who graduate from a Catholic high school are three times more likely to get a college diploma (25 percent compared with 8.5 percent of public school students). And it’s not just that smarter parents send their smarter students to Catholic schools, an effect called pre-selection. Economists David Figlio and Joe Stone of the University of Oregon have shown that for all blacks and Hispanics, regardless of other factors—especially for those living in urban areas—attending a Catholic school has profoundly positive academic benefits.[6]

 

[PeterPaul]

The positive benefits of alternatives to public education are most evident in Washington, D.C., whose public schools have the highest cost-per-pupil in the nation and one of the lowest graduation rates and student achievement levels, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. D.C. Catholic schools are fairly comparable to public schools: 51 percent of the students are non-Catholic, and 80 percent are black. And yet when education researcher Kirk Johnson compared math scores, he found that Catholic school fourth- and eighth-graders perform a whopping 72 percent better on average on math tests than their public school peers.[7] Out of all the other factors he weighed—higher income levels, two-parent families, the mother’s education level—attending a Catholic school made the greatest difference.

Catholic schools not only turn out better graduates, they also seem to help public schools do so. Harvard economist Caroline Hoxby discovered that when public schools are forced to compete with Catholic schools in parental choice programs, academic achievement rises in both.[8]

Public school defenders don’t even like to consider comparisons with Catholic schools. When Catholic schools participate in voucher programs, researchers believe they skew achievement results. They believe that there is something special about being religious that helps Catholic schools outperform public schools. So when they measure academic performance, among other things, they are loathe to compare the numbers with public schools. In other words, Catholic schools—by the mere fact of being Catholic—are regarded as having a competitive advantage that makes comparison to public schools seem unfair.

Social scientists have been busy trying to explain these differences. Some attribute better test scores to the fact that Catholic schools have more selective enrollment. However, the acceptance rate at Catholic schools averages 88 percent. While wealthier suburban schools can be more choosy because they frequently have waiting lists, inner-city school officials in Milwaukee, New York City, and Washington, D.C., say that they struggle to fill every seat in order to stay financially solvent. Therefore, if “cherry-picking” occurs, it is not primarily happening in the inner city where they must operate near full capacity.

Creating “social capital”

One of the most remarkable top-to-bottom studies of Catholic education makes the case that Catholic school students fare much better because they create “social capital” that pays academic dividends. Anthony Bryk, Valerie Lee, and Peter Holland have argued that academic success is a direct consequence of the sacrifices Catholic schools demand of parents—time, energy, and finances.[9] The Catholic tradition of religion and community—among Catholics and non-Catholics—builds intangible resources of support that positively effect student outcomes.

Public schools have something to learn from the success of Catholic schools, say these authors. By offering a single core curriculum to all students, placing a premium on community-shaping activities, maintaining decentralized and unbureaucratic decision-making, and promoting an inspirational faith agenda, Catholic schools bring the school community together for common purposes, which can only help promote success. No student is allowed to fall behind because every individual who has made a choice to be there is regarded as worthy of attention.

Although Catholic schools proudly point out their academic success, they have a more central mission. In addition to the academic and social benefits of Catholic education, the most important reason Catholic schools exist is to inculcate the moral and religious teachings of the Catholic faith. Success in this area would be very hard to judge, although we can measure some positive side effects. The Department of Education, for example, reports that Catholic schools have fewer problems with student discipline and school violence. Teachers in Catholic schools report greater job satisfaction than do public school teachers.

Catholic identity is somewhat intangible, and many argue about its exact components. One thing, however, is clear: Being Catholic makes a difference to the students, teachers, and parents, and they have a right to maintain their religious and social identity. Trying to force Catholic education to be anything but Catholic would do violence to the secret of its success.

Furthermore, the philosophy behind Catholic education is holistic; its religious curriculum cannot be separated from its secular coursework. Catholicism is present in everything from the crucifixes on the wall to the faithful Catholics drawn to teach there for considerably lower pay than they could get in public schools. Even though 13 percent of the students are non-Catholic—and that number approaches 80 percent in some schools in the inner cities, such as Washington, D.C. and Milwaukee—parents have chosen the schools because they teach discipline and the basic tenets of the Christian faith, which these parents believe are important to a good education. This is not religious coercion, but a conscious—and conscientious—embrace of religion.

Returning to the initial theme of this essay, the most important feature of Catholic education is that it demands active parental choice. Any parent who opts out of the public school system makes an act of personal will and often accepts financial sacrifice. This is one of the most salient aspects of Catholic education and other private alternatives. Parents may claim to choose to send their children to public school, but too often public school is more a default than a real choice. However, when parents take responsibility for the education of their children, they have made a decision to play a more active role. The consequence of this decision is nothing less than lifesaving in many instances.

James Traub, a writer for the New York Times, laments that what we have learned after decades of attempted school reform is that nothing short of a change in environment can save inner-city children.[10] The destructive environment of home-life and the city streets dooms the reform project from the very beginning. Traub has missed the point of sociologists like James Coleman, however, who argue good schools actually can create “social capital” by encouraging parents to participate in the life of the school. All the other public school reforms that have been tried focus on reforming the schools themselves, but nothing can substitute for requiring more from the parent, and Catholic schools try to do that—not perfectly, not in every case, but as a matter of religious principle, they require parents to be part of the solution.



Criticisms of Catholic education

No study of Catholic education’s greatest strength would be complete without exploring what many consider its greatest weakness: If Catholic education receives any public assistance, it will have to quiet its critics on these points.

The greatest single social critique of private education in general, and Catholic schools in particular, is that they isolate their students from a diverse society and instill social and religious prejudices. In short, the critics say, private education does not turn out good Americans. Graduates of Catholic schools, they add, are not prepared for American citi*zenship because they have not participated in the shared experience of public school, which models our common civic life. Indeed, if building an intense and self-contained community is part of the recipe for success, how can we not expect some degree of insularity in Catholic schools? If this criticism is correct, then alternatives to public education cannot hope for public support, since their critics will rightly argue that they undermine the very political and social system that supports them. But this critique is false.

Racial diversity. Critics quickly point to what they perceive as a racial bias in private education. In the American South, white families fled to private schools to avoid racial integration. This is hardly true of Catholic education. Recent data has shown that private education and particularly inner-city Catholic education is more racially integrated than public education, despite the fact—or some would argue because of it—that private education was largely immune to the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Private schools were not forced to integrate but appear to have done so anyway.

Although public schools in the aggregate educate a higher percentage of minority students, private schools are more evenly diverse; public schools are more likely to be virtually all-white or all-black without forced busing.[11] In fact, “private school students are twice as likely to be in these well-integrated classrooms than public school students.”[12] Perhaps more importantly, students in private schools are more likely to associate with members of different ethnic groups.[13] Opponents of vouchers argue that they will increase racial segregation, but schools that participated in the Milwaukee voucher program—mostly Catholic schools—turned out to be more diverse than the public schools.

Teaching citizenship. Opponents of school choice also argue that pub*lic schools “by their nature are better able both to educate many children and help them become good citizens.”[14] The facts don’t support this assertion either. In the latest set of scores (1999) from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, not a single grade level tested (fourth, eighth, or twelfth) in public schools received a passing grade for “proficiency” of civic knowledge.

The situation is better in private schools. David Campbell of Harvard University shows that students in secular schools, Catholic schools, and other religious schools volunteer more for civic service, score higher on civic knowledge tests, and are even more politically tolerant than public school students. Catholic school students are the most civically involved, while secular private school students are the most tolerant.

Building on the seminal work of Robert Putnam and James Coleman on “social capital,” Campbell speculates that Catholic schools create the “value community . . . of people who share a common belief system on at least one dimension” which builds trust and “leads to a virtuous circle of collective action.”[15] One can hardly think of a better foundation for public involvement. Private schools perhaps also tend toward patriotism in part because they feel they must compensate for their distinct nature.

Consider the part that Catholic schools have played for more than a century now integrating the children of new immigrants into the American fabric without suppressing their ethnicity. Catholic schools teach children the language and the social, cultural, and political ways of their new country within the familiar context of a common Catholic faith.

If anything, public schools seem to err on the side of multiculturalism, as though patriotism is nationalistic at best, jingoistic at worse. For example, some public schools have replaced the traditional Flag Day practice of honoring the Stars and Stripes with hanging flags representing the ancestry of each student. The temptation to heighten difference may well convince students that they have nothing in common except diversity—an obvious recipe for exacerbating existing racial, ethnic, and religious tensions. Parents who send their children to private school may actually be seeking a place where it is safe to be a patriotic American in a society that has come to favor, at most, a public ambivalence about such displays of national pride.

Catholic education is in every important respect a part of the American social fabric and should be treated as a vital national resource. Catholic education can claim alumni in the highest courts in the land and in the most modest occupations. Not only does it provide an education for its own religious flock, it has proved itself a life preserver for thousands of inner-city children drowning in failed public institutions.



Catholic schools in crisis?

Despite its benefits, the future of Catholic education is uncertain. It has been increasingly difficult to keep up with the rising costs of education and compete with the almost unlimited resources public schools command.

Since the 1970s, Catholic schools have been in crisis mode due to a per*sis*tent funding shortfall and declining enrollment. President Nixon even commissioned a national study of Catholic education to determine how it could be fixed, arguing that Catholic education was important to the national interest. Three decades later, finances remain very tight even as dioceses have been forced to close or consolidate schools for lack of funds. And competition with public-sector initiatives such as charter schools and interdistrict choice has increased in the past decade, making the problem worse.

Although religious education still accounts for 85 percent of all private schools, in terms of absolute numbers, Catholic education in America has been in decline over the past several decades. There has been little decline in private, religious education as a whole because the Catholic contraction has been cancelled out by the growth of Evangelical Christian schools. In 1970, Catholic schools accounted for 70 percent of private schools. Now they are just one-third—although about half of private school students are in Catholic schools. More telling, however, is the decline in Catholic participation in parochial education. In 1961, 54 percent of Catholic children attended parochial school for some or all of their education. Now the figure is just 20 percent.

 

[PeterPaul]

Fifty years ago, Catholic education could compete with public education because it was free, or nearly so. But that was at a time when teaching salaries and benefits were minimal because nearly all teachers were from religious orders. In 1920, only 8 percent of teachers were lay, and in 1960, just 26 percent were. Today, however, 93 percent of Catholic school teachers are lay, and they require larger salaries to support their families. Unless the Catholic Church sees a huge and unexpected increase in religious vocations—particularly among women, who once staffed a majority of Catholic school classrooms—it is likely that Catholic schools will have to raise tuition to close the yawning gap between Catholic and public school teachers’ salaries.



Reasons for the crisis

There are many explanations for decline in enrollment, but perhaps two are most salient. Many Catholic parents may not see the importance of a Catholic education, particularly when it comes with a high price tag. For example, in 1997, the Archdiocese of Chicago commissioned a study of its school system to determine how to boost enrollment. (The Chicago Archdiocese ran a $20 million school deficit in 1999 that was not covered by tuition and fund-raising.) But the late, Joseph Cardinal Bernadin was committed to keeping as many schools open as he could, even schools that were “in the red.”

The study showed that struggling schools, at the very least, needed to fill every available seat with tuition-paying students. Surprisingly, many inner-city parents, both Catholic and non-Catholic alike, did not know that Catholic education would only cost them $1,000 a year, with the diocese picking up the rest of the tab. When they learned the facts, many said they would eagerly pay to get their children out of the awful and dangerous public schools they were in. Suburban parents were more sanguine. Parents who believed in the importance of Catholic education already sent their children to Catholic schools. The rest of the parents did not think it would be worth the added expense because they felt that their suburban public school system was at least equal to, if not better than, the Catholic schools in terms of academics and amenities. In other words, the “Catholic” in Catholic education was not worth an extra $1,000 per year to them.

On the other hand, some Catholic parents cannot send their children to Catholic schools because there are none available. Dioceses have also failed to build schools as fast as populations have shifted from the city to the suburbs and from the Northeast to the South and West. The Catholic Church is not alone in this; public education is racing to build schools in places like Las Vegas and Los Angeles—where the districts builds as many as one school every six weeks!

Public school districts have no choice but to keep up, but dioceses can wait. As a result, in many places the demand exceeds the will and the money to build. Despite enormous public support, my own home diocese of Fall River, Massachusetts, for example, has declined to take on the debt to build a diocesan high school on Cape Cod where there are already six new elementary schools with waiting lists, and despite a pledge of $1 million from the parents.

Yet, there is reason to believe that decline in enrollment does not have to continue. The National Catholic Education Association (NCEA) reports that the situation has improved slightly. Enrollment has increased by 64,000 over the past decade. In 1999-2000, there was a net gain of 4,600 students for a current enrollment of 2,653,038 despite a net loss of thirty-six schools. Another reassuring trend is the number of parents who want their children to attend Catholic schools but can’t find an empty seat for them. Forty-three percent of Catholic schools have waiting lists. Increases in the West, Southwest, and Plains states largely reflect trends in population migration.[16] As dioceses respond to these migration trends, new schools may accommodate an eager pool of students.

But Catholic education will likely continue to struggle because public education provides a free and generally decent education for most American parents. Catholic education costs money. One can hardly blame parents in such circumstances for feeling that it’s unfair to pay twice for a child’s education. Like it or not, local property taxes are extracted for local schools and a seat is available for the student, whether or not that student chooses to use it. A fair system would allow parents a choice. Public funding for private schools would make all alternative schools more viable and empower parents to be involved in the education of their children. But even if the courts and the legislatures decided that the government could, in fact, fund private and religious education out of public tax dollars, the question becomes, should the schools take the money?



Do they want public money?

Faced with a financial crisis in the inner cities, Catholic education may have no other choice than to take government money if it were available. But if these schools accept government money, some believe the schools will be forced to behave more like public schools, their religious identity wilting under the threat of litigation and pressure to follow government standards.

Others believe that the threat to Catholic education is worth the risk, if the alternative is seeing children lose their last chance to get a good edu*cation. Brother Bob Smith, president of Messmer High School in Milwaukee, which receives public vouchers, believes that Catholics have a moral duty to find ways to keep their schools afloat in the inner city. Furthermore, Catholic schools would reject public funding if government regulation became too burdensome. Can Catholic schools receive government money and remain Catholic in more than name?

To answer this question, we would need a crystal ball. Someone will have to make a top-to-bottom review of how existing government aid programs have affected the content of Catholic schools. Have threats of lawsuits or fear over compliance eroded part of Catholic education’s unique identity? What kinds of books are purchased with government money? Are they more secular than before? How many schools let students opt out of religion class for fear of lawsuits? Does the content of health and sex-education classes accord with the Church’s teaching, or is it a tamer version of government programs? Do remedial or handicapped students receive a less holistic education because they receive instruction from non-Catholic teachers?

In the meantime, we know that Catholic schools do take government money and are better equipped than any other group of private schools to “interface” (for lack of a better word) with government bureaucracies. Catholic education has numerous public policy organizations—NCEA, sub-agencies of the United States Catholic Conference (USCC) and the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB), and the Education Department of every diocese and archdiocese in the country—that make sure Catholic schools are adequately and uniquely spoken for at every level of government: local, state, and federal.

These agencies believe that Catholic schools can navigate the shoals of government regulation and public accountability while keeping their distinct Catholic identity. Both the NCEA and the USCC have encouraged schools to assert their right to apply for federal money in the wake of the Agostini ruling (1997), which has considerably opened up federal money for parochial schools. In 1998, the USCC published “Making Federal Dollars Work,” which outlines the various kinds of federal aid Catholic schools might qualify for and describes administrative models that dioceses might adopt to best apply for and manage the new aid. The report encourages administrators to seek every dollar that the federal government makes available in Titles I through IV, and Title VI programs, and notes the shortfall in proportionate funding that Catholic schools have failed to claim.

Accepting federal aid for such things as remedial education, teacher training, books, and computers makes sense, especially considering that the dioceses that most often qualify for the aid are those with the greatest financial need and the greatest concentration of children who need the help. As a former chairman of the USCC’s Committee on Education wrote: “It is particularly difficult, with limited church resources, to provide the most current teacher training, the most advanced equipment, and the newest developments in educational programs without access to the federal programs which can help us attain this goal.”[17]

And these bodies have been school choice’s strongest advocates. The USCC stands behind the right of all parents “to choose the education they believe is best suited for their child, whether that is a public, private or religious school.” They know that not all choice programs are alike. Catholic school advocates recognize the ever-present danger of unintended con*sequences and the proverbial strings attached to federal dollars. Catholic schools could be forced to adopt civil rights laws that might make it impossible to prefer Catholic teachers. They could be asked to push all religious teaching to the end or beginning of the school day, or after hours, so that students could “opt out.” Choice programs might encourage or require teachers to unionize. They might force schools to offer health care that would include abortion procedures. Any number of measures could make a choice program unacceptable to Catholic schools and their defenders.

According to Church teaching, public funding of Catholic schools may be acceptable, even justly necessary, with certain proscriptions. The teachings on education laid out in the Second Vatican Council document Graviss*imum Educationis (“Declaration on Christian Education”) speak powerfully. Parents have a “solemn obligation to educate their offspring.” Nothing can substitute for the family, which is the “first school of those virtues which every society needs.”[18]

But the state has its obligation, too. Public education may not be run as a monopoly, but it has an obligation to provide for school choice and “see to it, out of concern for distributive justice, that public subsidies are allocated, in such a way that, when selecting schools for their children, parents are genuinely free to follow their consciences.”[19] The state should also accommodate the religious instruction of Catholic children who attend public school.[20] Just as the Catholic school contributes to the common secular good, the secular authority, in recognizing religious freedom and pluralism, must assist Catholic schools in promoting their sacred mission.

If the government decided tomorrow to take up its responsibility to help Catholic schools with its unique social service, there is nothing to stop Catholic education from accepting this help, provided it does not come with the strings that would hamper its success. In the meantime, Catholic schools will continue to offer an excellent education to children who would otherwise to forced to attend failing public schools.

 

[PeterPaul]

Home schooling

As Catholic education wrestles with the possibility that government funding may corrupt its religious mission, some parents reject the idea that there is any necessary public role in providing education. Home-schooling families believe that often parents themselves can provide the best education for their children, and all the statistics prove them right.

During the 1999-2000 school year, 1.7 million children (or roughly 3 percent of the school-age population) received their education at home. And they aren’t a quiet minority. Eleven percent of the 2000 national spelling bee’s contestants were home schooled, including its top three finishers. The winner had already placed second in the National Geography Bee the week before. When stumped on a particularly tough word, “emmetropia,” he claimed divine help: “I thought of God and it just popped into my head.”[21]

Not only do home schoolers excel at spelling, but they exceed the national average on the ACT assessment test in 2000 by almost two full points on a test scaled from one to thirty-six. They also go on to great success in college. A 1998-1999 study by the National Center for Home Education reports that home-schooled students were more likely than public or private Christian school graduates to hold positions of campus leadership in college.[22] For the past fifteen years, home schooling has been one of the fastest-growing alternatives to public school; the number of home schoolers has increased some 15 to 20 percent every year since 1985. The renaissance of home schooling revives a proud American tradition. For the past several decades, public suspicion of home schooling has declined, according to joint polling by Phi Delta Kappan and Gallup. In 1985, 73 percent of those polled thought it was a bad thing; in 1997, Americans appeared to be changing their minds: 57 percent disapproved of it.[23]

America has a tradition of home schooling that is unique among modern nations. While Europe was building nation-states and expanding its urban cities, Americans were moving further west, conquering a con*tinent, and bringing western culture with them in trunks on wagons and on horse-back. Among other lifesaving supplies were the ubiquitous McGuffey readers that taught generations of ambitious colonists the basics of an education. Many American presidents in the eighteenth century received at least some of their education in the home, most notably Abraham Lincoln who had received no formal education at all.

Three centuries of American pioneers educated their children in the home until they could build towns large enough to support a parson or schoolmaster. The bookish ones were sent back to the cities for a more extensive education, perhaps to return as a country doctor or lawyer, further contributing to the taming of the West. The rest learned enough to read and do arithmetic so that they could order seed and calico and manage a farm budget.

The recent resurgence in the home-schooling movement has become an international phenomenon but not without resistance. Parents throughout Europe, particularly in Germany, have begun home schooling though it remains prohibited. Even here in the United States, home schooling was not legal in all fifty states until 1993. Indeed, in 1980 it was illegal in thirty states.[24] Fortunately, this tradition that served parents and their children so well during the settling of our nation benefits today from protection by law.



Claiming the right to home school

Home schooling highlights several problems with mandatory public education. We all believe in universal literacy, but getting there is tricky, because parents bear primary responsibility for their children. The U.S. Constitution does not allow the federal government to oversee education, nor does it establish education as a right. State constitutions are more explicit, however, and by the beginning of the twentieth century, many states had adopted compulsory attendance laws and mandated the creation of public schools to see that education was available for every child.

Although all states require that parents provide some level of education for their children, Oregon went much further in the 1920s insisting that all parents—with some minor exceptions—send their children to public schools. The legislation tried to force parents who sent their children to parochial schools into public schools where they could receive a “proper” Protestant education. The Supreme Court stepped in to protect the rights of parents under the Fourteenth Amendment.

Justice James McReynolds put the matter firmly in the 1925 case Pierce v. Society of Sisters: “The child is not the mere creature of the state; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.” In this landmark case, the Court recognized the fundamental right of parents to determine their children’s education. The case continues to serve as the basis for the right to attend a private school and to home school to this day.



Academic results

While the state may have a vested interest in the education of its citizens, home-schooling families prove that state sponsorship is not necessary for excellence. Lawrence Rudner of the University of Maryland released the most comprehensive survey of 20,000 home schoolers in the spring of 1999. The results from the Iowa Test of Basic Skills confirmed several other previous studies of home schoolers, demonstrating that home schooling is no bar to high achievement. In fact, the students tested performed exceptionally well. The median score for every grade was typically in the 70th to 80th percentile. Students performed, on average, from first- to fourth-grade levels above their peers. SAT scores among lifetime home schoolers were significantly higher than all other students, public or private.[25] Boys did as well as girls. Although annual family incomes did account for some differences on the standardized tests, home schoolers from families that made less than $35,000 per year still averaged in the 70th percentile. Having a parent with teacher certification did not increase performance, and although parent education level did, children of less-educated parents did much better on the tests than their counterparts in public schools.[26]

Several studies of the emotional and social development of home schoolers demonstrate that, rather than being maladjusted—as is often the accusation—they have higher self-esteem and a greater sense of independence and are just as involved with extracurricular activities as their peers.[27] Judging by the anecdotal evidence, home schoolers do not lack for social contacts. Concentric circles of support groups; local, state, and federal associations; and activities such as national debate contests provide a network of social capital to bank on. Home school families often coordinate with private religious schools for athletics and specialty classes in the higher grades.

While none of this proves that home schooling is superior to every other method of education, it does prove that there is no reason to be suspicious. Considering that the average per-pupil cost in public schools was $6,915 in 1998-1999, home schooling has done public education a service by saving up to $12 billion for public schools. Parents who educate at home do so for just over $500 per year.



Legal challenges

Despite recent legislative and judicial successes, home-schooling families frequently operate under the skeptical gaze of state and local governing bodies. The Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), headed by attorney Michael Farris, was instrumental in helping “legalize” home schooling in every state over the last fifteen years. Today, HSLDA provides legal service to home-schooling families, helping them to comply with existing law and defending them in state and federal courts and legislatures.

Requirements for home-schooling families range widely from state to state. Most states require parents who home school to send their local school superintendent a letter of intent. A few states require that parents be teacher-certified, but many more require that a parent have at least a high school or college diploma or submit themselves or their children to regular standardized testing. Certification to teach only becomes a major issue for parents who hire a tutor or pool with other families to run home-schooling groups. Many states require that parents teach a basic set of subjects, which often includes courses on citizenship and American government. Since about half of those states don’t require record-keeping or reporting, however, these requirements amount to little more than sug*gestions. In principle, though, the states have the authority to regulate home schooling.

Given the regulations and threats of lawsuits and the time and money involved, one may ask why parents bother at all. Parents choose to home school for various reasons. Some do it for religious reasons, because they want to instill values they believe are missing from public education. Evangelical Christians constitute the largest group of home-schooling families; there are also associations for Jewish and Muslim parents.[28] But religious reasons aren’t the whole story. When Florida tracked home-schooling attitudes over ten years, it found that until 1994, the majority of parents home schooled for religious reasons. But by 1995, 43 percent cited dissatisfaction with the public school environment as their chief reason; fewer cited dissatisfaction with public instruction.

Some just believe they can do a better job than failing or merely adequate local public schools. In a new development, home schooling has become popular among American military families who do not want their child’s learning to be disrupted by frequent moves or transfers into lackluster school districts. At Andrew’s Air Force Base, just a stone’s throw from the U.S. Capitol, 10 percent of families home-educate and have started their own support groups.[29] Home schooling in military families allows parents the flexibility to work around the erratic schedule of one parent. When Dad or Mom returns on leave, work can wait while the family gets some time together.

Those who argue that parents aren’t qualified to teach their children should note that home-schooling parents are disproportionately better educated than the population as a whole: 88 percent of parents who home school have been educated beyond high school, versus 50 percent of the general population. One-quarter of home-schooling parents are certified teachers, though no state requires it except when they serve as professional tutors.[30]

Home-schooling families received a scare a several years ago when the omnibus education bill of 1994, H.R. 6, lumbered through Congress with new language that would have endangered home schools. The bill stated that local districts were responsible for ensuring that every teacher under their jurisdiction be certified. Since many local school districts believe that home-schooling parents are technically under their jurisdiction, this bill would have struck down every state law exempting home schooling parents from certification requirements. Rep. Dick Armey (R-TX) introduced an amendment to the bill to accommodate home-schooling families. After thousands of faxes and millions of calls (probably from home schoolers and their children taking a break from class), the amendment achieved a stunning victory, stunning at least those who underestimated the home-schooling movement.

But this incident stresses an important point: The public education establishment believes that home schooling only exists by their permission and at the discretion of the local school district. At any time, the current arrangement may be changed. While legislators may not force children into public schools, they may restrict and regulate nonpublic options to make those options less appealing and more difficult. In fact, former President Clinton publicly stated that there ought to be public, even federal regulation of home schooling to ensure that children really are learning. He argued against all available evidence that home schooling might constitute parental neglect and that this would be enough to merit greater state control.

 

[PeterPaul]

Home-schooling’s future

For now, the public education establishment tolerates home schooling because it poses no serious threat. Should home schooling approach 6 or 10 percent of the student population, however, one might expect its opponents may seek to regulate it out of existence. What can we learn from the experience of home schooling in America? Syndicated columnist Clarence Page put it best: “Parents matter. You don’t need to have a doctorate in education to instill in children an eagerness to learn. The best educational support systems begin at home.” Perhaps home schooling shows nothing more than that direct instruction is the best form of education. But home schooling also proves another important point: Good basic instruction outperforms supposedly sophisticated, professionalized schemes.

As long as parents are willing to sacrifice to educate at home through a parent or a tutor, home schooling provides an alternative to public schools that challenges the notion that education is all about money and professional teachers. In the meantime, we might ask, is it fair that an education that serves the child and the public so well be considered anything other than a “public” education? One way to affirm homeschooling would be to allow parents to deduct expenses related to educating their children from their taxes. We will consider such options further in the following chapter. But at the very least, homeschooling ought to be acknowledged and defended as in no way undermining the standards of excellence in education to which all parents aspire.



Conclusion

In nearly every way that matters, home schooling and Catholic schools compare favorably to public schools and teach public schools an important lesson. Not only do Catholic schools and home schools provide a better education at a lower cost, some of their greater success can be attributed to the social capital they build.

We cannot expect public schools to do exactly what these schools do, but they serve to remind public schools that resources cannot be the sole explanation for success or failure. Catholic schools integrate parents into the religious mission of the school and build a community that jump-starts learning. Nobody falls behind because everybody matters. Home schools build on familial love and sacrifice, which seem to matter more than professional accreditation or lavish resources.

Catholic schools and home schools generate enormous social capital that benefits us all. If we lost these valuable social assets, all Americans would be the poorer for it, but it would seem that these excellent educational alternatives cannot long endure if our present system remains hostile or refuses to grant some portion of public funds to the parents who use them.

Education costs have been rising faster than inflation. Many parents want, but cannot afford, these private alternatives. Frequently, home-schooling families make an enormous sacrifice by living on one income, and many inner-city families pay as much as one-fifth of their earnings to see that their children get the kind of education that will help them get a good job.

Forcing parents into failing public schools when there are good alternatives available does not fit with the American ideal of “liberty and justice for all.” If we truly believe that every American is entitled to a good education, we should allow parents to send children to any good school regardless of whether it meets in a church basement, a diocesan campus, or a living room. And we shouldn’t condemn them to poverty for exercising their right to that choice. Therefore, we should look for ways to relieve some of the financial burden in exercising this choice, which is the subject of the final chapter.

 

[PeterPaul]

Funding All Schools



A Better Way

The greatest challenge to treating all schools as public schools is finding an equitable way to fund them. Many believe that our system of paying for public education cannot be improved upon because it is elegantly simple and admirably egalitarian. It provides primary and secondary education (and beyond, if you include public colleges and universities) for all Americans, rich or poor, on an equal basis. It distributes the cost of that education over the course of our lifetimes through a combination of local property taxes, state income tax, and sales tax.

And yet, our present system of education funding has proven inflexible because it cannot accommodate the thousands of parents who use private schools and home school because they are justly dissatisfied with public education. As we have seen, many parents feel it is their duty as parents to take their children out of failing public schools and send them elsewhere, often at great personal expense. But our current financing system will not permit them to use even some of their own tax dollars for the schools they choose.

Part of the challenge in making a public argument for school choice is overcoming the common misconception that government money can only be used for common enterprises. Many taxpayers assume that public education implies public schools, not just public financing. But as we have seen in the previous chapter, good private schools provide real public services and deserve financial assistance.

While some voters may reject giving a lump sum of public money to private schools, this is only one of several options for treating all schools as public schools. In this final chapter, we will consider various funding options which would open education to more parental choice, not all of which depends on direct government subsidies. In addition to considering tax credits, tax deductions, vouchers, and education savings accounts, we will also consider programs that work through private initiative, like scholarships funds, which may also help low-income parents send their children to better schools.



The myth of a “free” education

Before we consider funding alternatives, we will have to put to rest a myth that many Americans believe about public schools. And unless we unmask it, we’ll never be ready for something better. We’re told by teachers’ unions and politicians that it’s our patriotic duty to support “free, public education.” We’re also told that the public school system we have is the only one worthy of a democratic society. Besides, we’re not supposed to complain about something we get for free. “Whatever the problems,” supporters say, “public schools are the best deal for the money.”

The myth of “free, public education” is just that—a myth. Public schools certainly aren’t free. At last count, the United States spent $285 billion a year on education, plus $100 billion more on school construction and maintenance. As sure as death and taxes, every American pays for this. And besides, all schools serve the public good. What makes some schools “private” is how they are funded, not whom they serve.

The problems of public financing of education are different from the problems of public schools. We could easily become sidetracked by questions of whether the hundreds of billions of education dollars are well-spent or whether public schools are as good as they used to be. But the real question is whether our system of public financing of education is the best and only way we can provide a decent education for all, not whether public schools are capable of doing a better job themselves, which we all assume they can.

Publicly funded education ought to be more responsive to parents. If parents aren’t happy with a school, they should be free to find a better one, even a private school. We’re used to money-back guarantees in the business world. Why not allow parents that same guarantee with public education?

Legal barriers constitute the biggest reason why parents cannot choose between all good, local schools. Even if parents agreed tomorrow that they ought to be allowed to send their children to any school with public money, the courts would have something to say about it. But parents should have something to say as well.



Legal Barriers to Full Choice

The courts object to public funding for nonpublic schools on two grounds. One, because they say that the government may not divert funds for the “private” purposes of private public education that it has raised for the “public” purpose of public schools. And two, because most private schools are religious, the courts have ruled that they may not receive public funding without breaching the First Amendment separation of church and state.

The first argument can more or less be dispensed with by the obvious argument that the essential purposes of all schools are public: They teach children how to function in society and prepare them for careers. In fact, many private schools appear to do better than public schools at these tasks.

But supporters of full choice in education have more trouble with the second argument. In order to see full choice in our lifetimes, religious education will have to overcome more than a century of court decisions and legislative initiatives that have been suspicious of, if not openly hostile to, direct public funding of religious schools. It is an inescapable fact that most private education is religious; therefore, public funding of secular schools alone would allow very few schools to benefit from public aid.



The reign of Blaine

The first obstacle to such aid comes at the state level. Many states still have nineteenth-century Blaine amendments to their constitutions that explicitly deny public aid to religious schools. Blaine amendments were the most visible sign of hostility to education options, and they developed in response to the rising immigrant population during and after the Civil War. Many raised the specter of a national crisis of ethnic fracturing. If free “common schools” were seen as the antidote to the as yet unassimilated new Americans, private schools—particularly Catholic schools—were believed to represent old-world resistance to “Americanization.”

A little historical perspective: President Grant supported a constitutional amendment, proposed by Representative James Blaine of Maine, that would have required all states to provide free public schools but would also be free of “any religious, atheistic, or pagan tenets.” These amendments forbade funding for “any religious sect or denomination.”[1]

Though the amendment failed to receive the necessary two-thirds in the Senate after a landslide victory in the House, it was subsequently enacted in many state constitutions, and each new state in the West was forced to adopt it before admission to the Union, particularly the Mormon state of Utah.

We might assume that our nation today is beyond this sort of bigotry, but the legacy of the Blaine Amendment persists. Thirty-seven states still have Blaine-like language in their constitutions. So even if federal courts decide that there is no constitutional barrier to such aid, many state courts may still claim one.

In fact, attempts to enact choice plans that include religious schools have recently been thwarted in several states because of these amendments. In the spring of 2000, Massachusetts’s attorney general blocked a school-choice program because of Massachusetts’s existing Blaine-like language. And in Michigan, supporters of school choice were forced to put a voucher initiative on the 2000 ballot, since that was the only constitutional way to allow public funding of religious schools. The referendum went down to defeat, which is not surprising because ballot initiatives rarely succeed without enormous popular support.



Separation of church and school?

Opponents of public aid to religious schools also argue that the Con*stitution’s First Amendment prohibits such aid on the grounds of separation of church and state in the establishment clause.[2] Indeed, this argument forms the basis for the Supreme Court’s rulings on this question over the past fifty years. In Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971), the Court struck down aid to religious schools in two states on three grounds that have become known as the three-prong “Lemon test” for all public aid to religious institutions: 1) The statutes must have a secular purpose, 2) they must neither advance or inhibit religion, and 3) they must not entail excessive government entanglements with religion.

The Court uses this test to determine which aid programs represent a breach of the First Amendment. The Court decided in Aguilar v. Felton (1985) that religious schools could not receive assistance for remedial instruction unless that help was provided off-premises because on-site aid gave the appearance of entanglement. Religious schools had to set up trailers so as not to run afoul of “the wall of separation,” as though religion might leak into remedial instruction should teachers be too close to crucifixes.

Since 1985, the Court has stepped back from that stricter reading of Lemon. In the 1997 decision, Agostini v. Felton, the Court reaffirmed that the establishment clause prohibits “government inculcation of belief,” but remedial aid provided on-site did not excessively entangle church and state. However, to the extent that one believes that any public aid to religious schools helps them inculcate belief, one is inclined to say that such schools should receive little or no aid on account of the First Amendment.

But two facts should give us pause. The sponsors of Blaine Amendments believed that amending state constitutions was necessary, implying that the First Amendment did not explicitly prohibit such funding. Furthermore, Australia’s First Amendment is identical to our own and yet Australia gives generous amounts of public money to private and religious schools. Even in France, with its aggressively anti-Catholic nineteenth century history and despite even stricter church and state separation than our own, religious schools also receive lavish state support.

Of course, some private schools do receive some state support, usually in the form of targeted federal or state programs for things like textbooks and remedial learning aid. Such indirect but program-targeted funding has become quite common. In a series of decisions over the past fifty years, the Supreme Court has ruled that public aid may flow directly to private schools in narrow cases for explicitly secular purposes.[3]

More recently, the Supreme Court held in Mitchell v. Helms (2000) that parochial schools in Louisiana may receive public funding for computers and any instruction related to them, because they do not have an explicitly religious purpose, though they may ultimately be used that way. Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority, stated that “nothing in the establishment clause requires the exclusion of pervasively religious schools from otherwise permissible aid programs.” In fact, when government aid “first passes through the hands (literally or figuratively) of numerous private citizens who are free to direct the aid elsewhere, the government has not provided any ‘support of religion.’”

Several other recent court rulings have opened the door to more complex indirect aid that goes beyond targeted remedial and emergency assistance. For example, the Supreme Court has approved tax credits for private education because they do not cause states to send money directly to religious institutions. The Supreme Court seems willing to concede the general principle that public money can fund religious schools, as long as schools are not singled out to receive the money because they are religious.

 

[PeterPaul]

The Contentious Voucher: A False Path?

Publicly financed, private-school vouchers represent perhaps the greatest constitutional test for the idea that the state ought to treat all schools as public schools. A voucher would allow parents to send children to any school, public or private, with a government check worth anywhere from $1,000 to $4,000. Proponents say vouchers are neutral toward religion because the parents choose, not the state; opponents see them as a vehicle for religious indoctrinization or, conversely, for the complete regulation of private education. Although vouchers have experienced great resistance from the courts and teachers’ unions, public opinion has moved toward an embrace of vouchers for nearly a decade now.

Phi Delta Kappan and the Gallup polling company have tracked public opinion on publicly funded private education.[4] From year to year the numbers fluctuate, but in 2000, 56 percent of respondents opposed the public funding of private education. But that’s not the whole story. When the question is worded differently, asking whether they would favor a system where parents could choose to send children “to any public, private or church-related school” at partial or full public expense, 45 percent approved of such a plan. When the word “vouchers” is used, approval/disapproval is almost equally divided. Unfortunately the 2000 poll stopped asking questions about tax credits and partial vouchers. But in 1999, 52 percent approved of a partial payment of private school tuition, 57 percent approved full tuition tax credits, and nearly two-thirds approved of a partial tuition tax credit for private or other church-related schools. But no matter what the system, 77 percent of those polled believe that schools receiving public aid should be “accountable” to the government “in the way public schools are.” Clearly, voters are not against the idea of treating all schools as public schools within certain limits.

So far, however, the U.S. Supreme Court has not ruled on the constitutionality of vouchers, though various lower courts have ruled for and against them. The Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld a state voucher program that gives aid to religious schools, while the Vermont and Maine Supreme Courts would not permit religious schools to participate in public voucher programs. In December 2000, a federal appeals court judge agreed with a lower court’s ruling, which called Cleveland’s voucher system unconstitutional because it “has the effect of advancing religion through government-supported religious indoctrination.” In Florida, a state judge held the state’s voucher system unconstitutional because the state must provide for public education and may not “farm out” responsibility to private schools. It is not certain that the U.S. Supreme Court will hear the Florida or Ohio cases, but it has refused to hear appeals from Wisconsin and Maine.

Vouchers have also suffered some recent political defeats that make some wonder whether they ought to be discarded altogether as a public funding option. During the 2000 election, two voucher initiatives were easily defeated in Michigan and California, both by similar seven to three margins. In Michigan, Proposal 1 would have allowed students attending poor-performing schools (only 38 schools in the whole state fit this category) to receive a $3,300 voucher to attend any secular or religious private school. Unfortunately, the ballot question also included provisions on teacher testing and language about how the voucher program might be expanded. These provisions confused voters and contributed to its defeat. California’s Proposition 38 would have given any parent a $4,000 voucher regardless of how good or bad their schools were. Silicon Valley mogul Timothy Draper led this maverick effort on behalf of vouchers despite the advice of many voucher supporters who told him that his plan was too radical to succeed and that he might damage the voucher movement.

At the very least, these recent defeats convinced voucher proponents that the Michigan and California strategies were flawed. No matter how popular vouchers appear, voters do not want radical change in education. Instead, voters support modest voucher plans targeted at the parents who need them most, those forced to send their children to the worst schools. If such plans look like a Trojan horse, support erodes. Perhaps vouchers will be more successful if they are used as a carrot for some parents and not as a stick for public schools. They should be fashioned to let parents opt out of public schools but without punishing public schools financially.

A national test of vouchers may have to wait a few years. Many believe that President George W. Bush does not have the support in the House and Senate to advance his national voucher program, and his new secretary of education, Rod Paige, while a supporter of school choice, only supports vouchers as a last resort. Someday, voters may be ready for vouchers, but perhaps not just yet. In the meantime, modest state and local programs in targeted locations may help persuade voters that vouchers are nothing to fear.



Promising parental rights

The debate over vouchers serves a very useful purpose: It highlights the fact that we no longer consider it the duty of all parents to make choices for their child’s education. If we want to treat all schools as public schools, we will need a return to the philosophical premise behind all good education: Parents should have complete control of a child’s education. This short-circuits arguments against public funding and school choice, since it accepts the notion that parents should determine what school is best for their children. And when they do, the state need not feel as though it is “favoring religion.” Rather than succumbing to a knee-jerk reaction that any aid to religion constitutes a breach of the separation of church and state, vouchers let parents decide what kind of education, secular or religious, is appropriate.

There is a powerful legal precedent in the United States that ought to be put to the use of publicly funded school choice. The Supreme Court still holds that it is a parent’s right to direct education. This right was affirmed eighty years ago and it is cited frequently in cases that relate to child welfare. In 1922, Oregon passed a law requiring all parents to send children aged eight to sixteen to public schools, a law aimed at destroying parochial education. The law was overturned by the Supreme Court in the landmark case Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925) in which the Court affirmed the right of private schools to exist and the right of parents to determine the means for educating their children. It affirmed that children were “not mere creatures of the state,” and therefore, the state could not claim to have an authority that undermined a parent’s choice of edu*cational options.

The Supreme Court seems unlikely to overturn this opinion any time soon, which is good news for school choice. In Troxel v. Granville (2000), in fact, the Court reaffirmed parental rights. The Court concluded that state laws that grant grandparents visitation rights to their grandchildren abrogate parental rights that are “perhaps the oldest of fundamental liberty interests recognized by the court.” The Constitution “does not permit a state to infringe on the fundamental right of parents to make child-rearing decisions simply because a state judge believes a ‘better’ decision could be made.” The consequences for education seem obvious. The state should not tell parents where to send their children to school even if it thinks they are making a poor choice. Indeed, the heart-rending story of the Cuban Elian Gonzalez illustrates how far the Court is willing to accommodate parental will, even when it means returning the child to a brutal com*munist regime.

If the courts applied this philosophy broadly, then full public funding of all schools would be a logical conclusion. Indeed such a conclusion would be in keeping with the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education (1956), which made it abundantly clear that no parent, no matter how poor, ought to be denied access to a good education for his or her child because of race or ability to afford one. And since many poor parents in the worst public schools can’t direct their child’s education in any real way, even when there are readily available private alternatives nearby, it is plain that school choice is a matter of social justice and legal equality for parents, who, through no fault of their own, cannot exercise their rights as parents.



Optimal Choice

Before we move on to the more realistic options that help parents send their children to nonpublic schools, imagine an “optimal choice plan,” a funding system that empowers parents to choose any school. If a parent decided that, for whatever reason, the local public school was inadequate, they could choose to go elsewhere. And rather than petitioning a state bureaucrat, who would assess whether the decision was appropriate, parents would simply fill out an enrollment form indicating the private school they have chosen instead. Having established a flat, per-student amount that represents each student’s share of public money—a “tuition” baseline—the local government would either write a check to the private school for the amount or issue a rebate to parents on property taxes (since most education funding is local). Parents would still be free to spend more or less at a private school, and any school could elect not to participate in the program to preserve its independence.

Such a system acknowledges that all schools in a community serve the public purpose of educating children, and that parents should not be forced to pay twice because they wish to exercise their rights. And yet, many parents would elect to keep their children in public schools, but because they would be in a position to know what their children’s education is worth, they would be more likely to see that the school spends their “tuition” wisely.

At least one school district tried to give parents choice like this. In 1998, the Southeast Delco School District in Pennsylvania faced a shortage of classroom space. The school board voted unanimously to allow parents to send their children to any school, public or private, in another school district, with a modest voucher. The $1.2 million program would have given $250 for each child in kindergarten, $500 for each child in grades one to eight, and $1,000 for each child in high school. Unfortunately, a county judge ruled that the school board had no authority to initiate such a plan. Though the board fell afoul of state law, there is no reason that a state could not recast its legal code for such purposes.

The advantage of this system is that the state and federal government would never be entangled in parental preferences. Parents who opt out would be on their own to find alternatives for the same or a better price; the state would have no interest in their choices. And all decisions would remain local rather than delegated to state and federal authorities.

 

[PeterPaul]

. . . with one major objection

Some object to such a system, however, because they argue that local public schools don’t just educate children, they build community. According to this view, publicly funded private education would splinter local community. For 150 years, the argument goes, we have provided for education in a neighborly fashion, linking us to the communities where we live. We have asked parents and neighbors to pay for schools, and by paying taxes on homes, we pay for the education of others. Even today almost half of this taxation is local.

But if public education could at one time be defended as a community-building enterprise, those times have changed. The decisions parent-teacher associations once made are now being made by executive councils. States now impose curricula on local schools. Regional planning boards, not town meetings, decide when to build new school buildings. And, increasingly, public funding for education comes from the state, not the local community. At last count, 45 cents of every education dollar came from local taxes, 48 cents from the state, and 7 cents from the federal government.[5] Fifty years ago, 70 percent of public financing education came from the local government.

If anything, schools have begun to alienate parents, students, and their neighbors. Cozy relationships between parents and teachers have disappeared in many places. Parents are frequently not informed of what is being taught in sex-ed class and, according to a recent court decision, may not even ask the school librarian what books their children are taking out. School health officials freely distribute condoms and other reproductive advice without parental consent. Never before have our social values been more fragmentary. We can’t even agree on whether students should be allowed to pray silently during school. No shift in funding for public education could harm communities more than these changes already have.

Of course, most parents will continue to use public schools and fear that any form of school choice will lead to a decrease in school funding locally. As a result, an optimal choice plan would likely meet up with great political resistance, because these parents fail to see that forcing parents of private school students to pay for an education that they don’t use is basically unfair, especially when the schools are of a poor quality. Since this self-interest runs very strong, parents who want more choice in education must consider more politically realistic options. Rather than using money already earmarked for public schools, there are some viable ways to help parents send their children to private schools that do not adversely affect public school budgets.



Tax Deductions and Credits

One of the simplest ways we can make alternative education more affordable is to let parents keep more of their own tax dollars. A few state legislatures have amended tax codes to allow savvy filers to reduce what they owe in much the same way homeowners deduct their mortgage payments and investors write off their stock-market losses. Since many parents go the extra mile for a child’s education—quite literally when they drive them to school—tax deductions and credits help them defray costs. Parents with children in private and public school may itemize education costs and deduct them from their taxes for expenses as diverse as driving their children to school, buying textbooks, paying for a tutor, sending them to a private school, and purchasing supplies connected with home schooling.

Not all tax reductions are alike. A tax deduction allows parents to reduce their taxable income by the amount of money they spend on allowable expenses such as tuition, travel, and books. Therefore, a family that is allowed to deduct up to $3,000 for educational expenses in a state with a 10 percent tax rate can save $300 in taxes. But tax credits save families money more directly. They allow parents to deduct expenses directly from the taxes they pay to the government and may entitle a family to a rebate check if they have overpaid.

A clear majority of Americans support such tax benefits. Indeed, they would go beyond the modest benefits currently available. In 1999, 57 percent of those polled in the annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup study of education trends said they would support a full-tuition tax credit for parents who sent their children to nonpublic schools, and 65 percent said they would support a partial-tuition tax credit.



Tax benefit reticence

Despite this public acceptance, very few states have enacted such laws, and none of the federal bills for such tax benefits have made it past a presidential veto. Just four states offer tax deductions or tax credits for educational expenses—Iowa, Minnesota, Arizona, and Illinois—and they have all been challenged on constitutional grounds despite the Supreme Court decision in Muller v. Allen (1983), which explicitly approves publicly funded tuition tax credits. But one state has paved the way for all the rest in legislation and court decisions.

Minnesota first legislated deductions and tax credits and still offers the most generous benefits. In 1955, it passed the first legislation allowing tax deductions of $50 for educational expenses. Today, parents may deduct up to $2,500 per child from gross income; the deduction covers tui*tion, textbooks, transportation, tutoring, computer software and hardware, and even summer camp. Families who earn less than $37,500 per year also qualify for Minnesota’s tax credit of $1,000 per child (up to a maximum of $2,000 per family) for the same items. If a family is owed a rebate, Minnesota will write a check for the difference. In 1998, 150,000 families took the deduction and another 38,500 received the tax credit.

Parents in Illinois will claim educational expenses on their tax returns for the first time in 2000 after the credits survived a court challenge. Illinois allows parents to take a tax credit of up to $500 for educational expenses. But they may only claim 25 percent of the expenses above the first $250. The state estimates that parents will save $50 to $60 million. Iowa recently increased its tax-credit maximum from $100 to $250 for all education expenses at public and private schools, which now include books and tuition.

Arizona’s tax credit works a bit differently. Rather than putting money back in parental pockets, the 1997 legislation allows taxpayers to take a $500 tax credit for donating money to a scholarship fund that helps students attend private religious and secular schools. The Arizona Education Association (AEA) felt this tax credit threatened public schools and filed suit, challenging its constitutionality. The AEA had already failed to stop the tax credits through a ballot initiative, because it could not find enough signatures. Affirming the importance of alternatives to public education, the Arizona Supreme Court upheld the legislation in January 1999 and stated that the tax credit “achieves a high degree of parity by making private schools more accessible and providing alternatives to public education.”[6] The Supreme Court has since declined to hear the case.

Antipathy to education tax deductions and credits remains strong in some quarters where animus against nonpublic schools is backed up by law. In many states, legislatures are prohibited by their constitutions and their courts from issuing tax deductions and credits, even for voluntary charitable con*tributions. By all accounts, Michigan has one of the strictest bans on public funding of private schools anywhere in the country, and voters there failed to pass a referendum in the 2000 election that, among other things, would have eliminated it. Despite this failure, proponents of school choice hope that movements to lift this restriction on public aid might find success in five other states (Florida, New York, Georgia, Montana, and Oklahoma) that do not permit any aid, direct or indirect, to religious schools.

Though the states and the courts are reluctant to give direct aid to religious schools, tax benefits do not entangle the state in the choices of parents and are obviously fair. Why should those who are happy with their public schools deny others the chance to be satisfied when the best choice happens to be a private school? Parents whose children do not use the public system should receive some financial relief.

One of the most common arguments against such plans is that they will hurt public education. Critics worry that tax credits give parents incentives to take their children out of public education; as a result, public education will worsen and maybe even collapse as tax dollars drain from public schools. But tax benefits do not take one penny from existing public school funding. These would be new government programs that will have to find their own money in the budget process. Critics of choice must get beyond the assumption that public schools are entitled to every new government dollar spent for education. And since most tax incentives are only partial payments, parents will still choose between a free education and one that costs $1,000 or more per year for each child. Most will stay put.

Besides, the government frequently encourages its citizens to support private social initiatives when they serve the public good, and none of these is more critical than education. Government encourages charitable giving, even though it also provides government welfare programs. Tax credits and deductions acknowledge that some people also prefer private educational institutions over public ones. Welfare reform is a good example of what school choice could become. We haven’t seen a dismantling of the welfare state. Instead, we’ve seen states get better at providing welfare to the neediest and let private organizations (often religious) provide assistance when they can do it best.

Just like private religious institutions that help the government provide welfare, private schools prefer these tax benefits because, compared to direct government aid, they promise the least government intrusion. There would be no need for new government regulation of private schools because the states already regulate what counts as a school for tax purposes, and courts have consistently held that states do not have the same legal responsibility over tax credits and deductions that might otherwise cause church/state entanglements. With credits and deductions, the government never has to get involved with the transfer of money or negotiation of price between the parent and the school, unlike vouchers.



The downside to deductions

Of course, no plan is perfect, and tax benefits have their own potential shortcomings. I will briefly cover some of their limitations.

Unequal benefits. Such plans do not benefit all parents equally. Judging from the plans already enacted, they favor low-income, but not poor, parents. Politicians are reluctant to grant these benefits to families that make over $40,000 per year because they are afraid to be accused of favoring the rich. And since poor families pay much less in taxes, the government may end up owing them money at the end of the year. States are reluctant to pay out benefits from what citizens have already paid in. In the end, only parents who make enough, but not too much, qualify for the tax benefits.

Driving up costs. Others worry that tax credits will only increase the cost of private education. Just as in higher education, every state and federal dollar that helps parents afford an education is offset by corresponding increases in tuition. If schools know that parents can pay $2,000 this year and receive a $1,000 tax credit, they believe parents will be able to pay $3,000 next year. There is evidence that this is already happening in Arizona, where tuition has begun to rise at private schools.

The nationalization of education. Still others believe that tax credits and deductions place decisions about education policy further away from parents and a bit more out of their control. By granting tax credits, state and federal governments increase their role in public education in general because even a tax refund counts as a government program in the budgeting process. And just as fast as they can be enacted, they can be removed, reduced, or modified when political pressure shifts. Once state and federal government assumed responsibility for more of the education dollar, they assumed a control that they will likely never give back. One can count on one hand the number of government programs that have been discontinued and returned to local political authority.

 

[PeterPaul]

Although a national tax credit for alternative education would be the least painful way to give tax relief for millions of parents who send their children to nonpublic schools, there are good practical reasons to fight for state tax credit legislation. For one thing, tuition varies state to state. Perhaps Ohio should be more generous than Oklahoma, and perhaps states with large numbers of urban poor and wealthy suburbs should have a progressive tax credit. The federal role in education has always been very small and probably should continue to be, since Washington is very far removed from local communities. But it is realistic to expect that the government’s role in education will increase as states attempt to fix inequities of funding between poorer and wealthier communities. Tax credits can help in this.

Before we give up entirely on a national role in alternatives to education funding, we might consider a recent tax proposal that would allow parents to save for their child’s education tax-free.



Educational Savings Accounts

What if parents could set aside hundreds of dollars every year, tax-free, for education expenses? Congress asked that same question about college savings, medical expenses, and retirement plans and successfully passed legislation for each. Educational savings accounts (ESA) would work like traditional IRAs, except that parents would be able to withdraw money from the account to pay for all manner of educational expenses. For several years now, Congress has considered plans that would allow parents to contribute up to $2,000 tax-free every year to a savings account. Parents could withdraw money for tutors, transportation, and tuition at nonpublic primary and secondary schools.

The program would expand ESAs, which may be used to shelter up to $500 per year tax-free for college expenses, to allow parents to use the money for public and private precollege education expenses, including tuition. But the Clinton administration vetoed such bills three times.

Like tax credits and deductions, ESAs are evenhanded and obviously just. Parents who want to contribute something extra to their children’s education should not be penalized by the tax code. As the late Senator Paul Coverdell, the leading proponent of expanding ESAs, argued: “Every segment of education in America will be a winner: public education, private education, home schooling. . . . These accounts will infuse new resources for which the government will not have to appropriate a dime.” It’s not clear, however, that they would work as well as intended.



Possible limitations of ESAs

Limited benefit. ESAs primarily encourage parents to save for college, and would probably not encourage them to spend more on alternatives to public school education since the tax benefits are much greater if the money is left in the account. If someone in the 28 percent bracket did not withdraw the money for five years, the tax savings (assuming a 6 percent return) would be $578; however, after ten years the savings would grow to $2,519. This is an incentive to save, not to spend, especially considering the rising costs of colleges.

Hassle. Despite the benefits, contributing to ESAs might strike the average parent as more trouble than they are worth. It’s one thing to save for retirement and watch happily as the money accrues for forty years, but it’s not as rewarding to merely draw down funds. Tax credits and de*ductions are significantly simpler for the average taxpayer because there would be no additional paperwork. By contrast, ESAs would require yearly contributions, fund management, and withdrawals from a special checking account. Like all proposals that make it a little easier and more publicly acceptable to promote alternative schools, however, ESAs should be given careful consideration.

Education tax benefits help make choices easier for parents without making the choice for them and without dismantling public education as we know it. Perhaps the challenge for the 10 to 20 percent of parents opting for alternatives to public schools would be enough to force some much-needed public school reforms. Without programs like tax credits, deductions, and ESAs, secular and religious private schools will need to raise their own money to make choice in education possible for more parents. Fortunately, new charitable help is on the way.



Charitable Giving and Fund-Raising

What if we decide there is no role for the state in nonpublic education? For many parents, that puts anything but public schools out of their financial reach unless they can receive some form of financial aid or charity. Catholic schools have done an exemplary job of providing very generous financial help to their poorer students and larger families. Many of these schools only ask parents to pay $500 to $1,500 for an education that costs the school twice that.

As we have already seen, without some new sources of charitable aid, it is unlikely that many of the schools that serve the neediest communities will be able to survive. Since Catholics have all but abandoned the cities for the suburbs, these schools can no longer depend on regular parish giving. And diocesan-level resources are already spread too thin among a number of vital social needs. Nonpublic schools today need new sources of charitable giving from a combination of sources: individuals, corporations, civic groups, and private scholarship funds.

Fortunately, the potential growth of charitable giving is enormous. During the past five years, the creation and expansion of Internet companies has created unexpected wealth and many thousands of new multi-millionaires—and a few billionaires. Just a small fraction of the $5 trillion made on the “dot-com” windfall could fund enough scholarships for every low-income child.

These new multimillionaires have just started giving their money to good causes. From 1998 to 1999, charitable giving rose 6.7 percent, now accounting for 2.1 percent of our gross domestic product. The American Association of Fund-Raising (AAFR) reported that in 1999, charitable donations reached $190 billion. Ten percent of that would fund a $1,500 scholarship for every child below the poverty line in America.[7]

AAFR’s chairman believes this windfall is not temporary but “the beginning of a new age of philanthropy.” The creation of this kind of wealth could spark one of the most philanthropic centuries in history. When overnight millionaires and 35-year-old retirees think about how they want to spend their retirement years, many may conclude that giving money away may make a very rewarding second career. There is every reason to believe that millions, perhaps billions, in charitable donations could pour into scholarship funds and directly into nonprofit, nonpublic schools.

The Internet may not only create billions of new charitable dollars, it may also have inspired a new way to raise money. Companies such as eBay show how to amass piles of money by pennies per transaction with high volumes. The same could be true of charitable giving. Charitable organizations could coax small donations from millions of people. During the 2000 primaries, Senator John McCain raised thousands of dollars because average citizens were willing to make small donations through the Internet.

The Internet boom has just started to impact school fund-raisers as well. The Washington Post has reported that many schools have begun to use “dot-com” companies to raise money for school trips, new books, even school renovations.[8] Companies like Schoolpop.com and SchoolCash.com eschew the typical candy or greeting-card drives in favor of allowing shoppers to designate 20 percent of the sale to a school.

If the future of alternative schools depends on new money and new ways to raise it, then the horizon has brightened with the advent of the Internet. But the most exciting story in philanthropy in the past decade has been the rise of the private scholarship funds. Millions of new dollars have come to the rescue of desperate schools and parents in some of the neediest places in America because a few philanthropic entrepreneurs have turned their attention to reforming education. Organizations like CEO America and the Children’s Scholarship Fund are giving low-income families the kind of education they want without government help.

 

[PeterPaul]

The private scholarship fund

Wealthy philanthropists have long lent their names to scholarships at all levels of education. But a new kind of scholarship fund has emerged with the explicit purpose of breaking up the public school monopoly at the primary and secondary levels. Some of the founders of these funds see private scholarships as a prod for education reform. If scholarship students experience significant academic improvement, they say, public schools will have to reform, and parents will clamor for full public vouchers. Other benefactors are committed to helping alternative schools in perpetuity. But they all believe that once parents get a taste for private or religious education, they will not want to go back.

Milwaukee’s district-wide school choice program provides the perfect example of how a private scholarship fund can reform education. After several years of a very successful private scholarship program called PAVE (Partners Advancing Values in Education) funded in part by the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation, the state of Wisconsin, under Governor Tommy Thompson, expanded the school choice program in Milwaukee to a full-scale voucher program.

Other private scholarships have had similar success. The School Choice Scholarship program in New York City provided 2,200 students with $11 million in scholarships in 1997. Though resistant to vouchers, the city has hired a new school chancellor, Harold Levy, who has decided to privatize the city’s worst fifty schools. And Virginia Gilder’s “A Brighter Choice Scholarship” gave parents in Albany’s worst public schools a $2,000 scholarship to select an alternative. The short-lived program has been credited with shaking public education in Albany out of its complacency, forcing at least one school, Giffen, which many scholarship recipients fled, to improve its academic performance.

If some scholarship funds see themselves as an audition for vouchers or a cattle prod for reform, others plan to help low-income families for the foreseeable future. The Children’s Scholarship Fund (CSF) is one such organization.

CSF started with the modest hope of helping 1,000 poor students trapped in some of the worst schools across the country attend private or religious schools. Entrepreneurs Ted Forstmann and John Walton began with $100 million to serve low-income families in forty-three cities and three states. The fund has become so popular, however, that it has expanded to supply 40,000 scholarships in all forty-eight contiguous states. By March 31, 1999, there were 1.25 million applications; 29 percent of all eligible parents in New York City, 33 percent in Washington, D.C., and 44 percent in Baltimore had applied for scholarships. Parents applied from every state and 90 percent of all counties in the United States. The CSF scholarships are a helping hand, not a handout. Parents are still expected to pay an average of $1,000; the partial scholarships on average provide $1,700 annually for four years.

So far, the effects of these private scholarships have been limited because many who qualify have been left out. Only one out of every thirty parents who apply receive help. Students who do win the private voucher lottery already appear to be reaping dividends. A team of researchers from Harvard University, the University of Wisconsin, and Georgetown University looked at the academic performance of 1,470 students in New York City, Dayton, Ohio, and the District of Columbia. What makes this study different from most was that the researchers studied students from families who had applied for a voucher—both those who received one and those who did not and returned to public schools. They found that even though all of these parents were motivated toward private education by virtue of applying, the average students who switched to the school of their choice with a scholarship scored six percentile points higher on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills than those who continued going to public schools.[9] Simply put: They proved that using a voucher to attend a private school improved academic performance, since the “motivated parent effect” was canceled out.

Now private scholarship funds are getting more ambitious and are asking the question, “What would happen to public schools if all private schools were filled to capacity with low-income students?” Another national scholarship fund, CEO America, with scholarship affiliates in forty cities nationwide, supported a ten-year scholarship program in the Edgewood School District in Texas. There is a scholarship for every low-income child who wants one, but only 700 of the district’s 13,000 eligible children left the public schools. The district responded by introducing intra-district choice and charter schools.

In perhaps the boldest move of all, Forstmann and Walton have taken on the city of New York, which has long resisted vouchers, yet has many Catholic schools willing and able to accommodate more students from some of the city’s worst schools. The CSF has vowed to provide a scholarship for every open seat in New York’s K-8 religious and other private schools—an estimated 7,500 new scholarships. This will ensure that no parochial school will close for lack of capacity.

Nearly every large American city has a private scholarship program affiliated with CEO America, and the number of these scholarship funds expand by ten more every year. They issue tickets to a better education to tens of thousands of parents who cannot afford to wait for school choice or education reform. Regardless of whether a public school gets better in response to competition, these children have an education system that works. But thousands more parents are on waiting lists. No one can know for sure if there will ever be enough money to help every parent who wants it, although scholarship funds hope so.

For millions of middle-income families, a private education still remains out of reach. Private scholarships offer triage within an education system in poor health. Generally, these programs have limited themselves to helping the very small percentage of children who qualify for the federal free-lunch program. For the poorest, charitable giving allows thousands of children to attend schools where it is safe to learn.

While there may not be enough charitable giving available to help every family send their children to the alternative school of their choice, scholarship funds prove that all schools serve the public good even when they do not receive public aid. It is highly, unlikely, however, that there will ever be enough private financial available to help every middle-class family send their children to a private school. The challenge ahead, then, for advocates of school choice will be to convince American voters that all schools and all parents ought to receive some assistance that ultimately rewards good private schools for their public service.

Yet all the funding options discussed here, from optimal choice to tax credits to scholarships, assume that parents will pay something, even if only something nominal, for that alternative education. Vouchers, tax credits, and deductions help parents help themselves with some modest public assistance. And private scholarships help parents with modest means by matching their financial sacrifices. These cooperative social efforts among individuals, schools, government, and philanthropists move us closer to a better way to fund education that matches the egalitarian goals of a “free, public education” without falling into the myth that education can truly be free, that is, without cost.



Conclusion

After nearly twenty years of arguing about it, our nation is poised to take a new and positive direction in education reform. The number of charter schools is at an all-time high and will likely grow. The recently formed Black Alliance for Educational Choice has been blitzing the print and television media with advertisements praising the three existing voucher programs. Education reform topped voters’ lists of concern in the 2000 election and President George W. Bush vows to encourage stricter state academic standards and to practice regular testing.

But one question remains unanswered: Will we tie one hand behind our backs and exclude private schools from the solution to our education crisis? President Bush will likely face tough opposition to his plan that would allow children in failing public schools to use a public voucher to attend any other school, public or private.

Treating all schools like public schools is not just a platitude—it’s a vital next step in education reform because school choice empowers parents most when they can freely choose among all of the best schools available. As we have seen, private education provides the best education in many of the very places where public schools have been the worst. And yet the state refuses to let parents choose the best local schools when they are not government-run, and therefore does not encourage poor-performing schools to improve.

School choice advocates realize that it is unrealistic for most parents to pay the entire amount for a child’s education out of their own pockets. And with education costs continuing to rise, that kind of “school choice” is out of range for most families. Without some form of public aid, few parents can afford these schools, and inner-city Catholic education will continue to disappear under the strain of rising costs. And yet, as we have seen, it was not long ago—even here in the United States—that “private schools” received state funding for their public purposes.

Treating all schools as public schools does not mean that we simply incorporate private schools into the public system, making them clones of what already exists. All the funding options I’ve discussed, from vouchers to optimal choice to tax credits to scholarships, simply help parents put home schooling and religious schools within their financial grasp while allowing schools to retain their unique and valuable identities. In so doing, we protect the idea that parents, not the state, hold the primary responsibility for directing education. No bureaucracy and no court should stand in the way of this basic human right. If parents want more math, more religion, or more language instruction in their child’s curriculum, they ought to be free to send their children to schools that offer them without financial penalty or state overregulation and intimidation.

The theme of this monograph, “All schools are public schools,” still maintains that education funding is a cooperative endeavor even as it affirms the fundamental rights of parents. Every one of the alternatives proposed here presumes that education is a social obligation. We have a duty to help all parents, especially those most in need, to provide the best education possible to their children. Opening school choice to all schools that serve the public good preserves our highest ideas of liberty and justice for all. A quality education should be available to every family on a fair and equal basis. And only when we treat all schools as public schools will we have an education system truly worthy of those ideals.

 

[ProCommunioneFacior]

PP,

Can you post a link to where you got this from? I would like to print it out and read it.

 

[Paul S]

Government funds always come with strings attached, and even if educational funding doesn't, I'm sure it would eventually, which means you either teach what the government wants you to teach and in the way it wants, or you don't get the money.

 

[Dream]

Government funds always come with strings attached, and even if educational funding doesn't, I'm sure it would eventually, which means you either teach what the government wants you to teach and in the way it wants, or you don't get the money.

Yes, that is why school vouchers are not a good idea. As soon as government money is going to pay tuition for private schools, the government now has a say in what those private schools can/have to teach.

 

[PeterPaul]

PP,

Can you post a link to where you got this from? I would like to print it out and read it.

Here you go buddy.

http://www.frinstitute.org/allschools1.html

 

[ProCommunioneFacior]

Thank you.