Government Schools Fear Competition

Government Schools Fear Competition

by Mark Luedtke

Because school voucher programs empower students to leave failing schools for quality schools, Ohio students and children across the country are getting better educations. Faced with new competition that government schools have never known, many failing schools have improved to stay competitive. Because of this success, Arizona, Rhode Island, Iowa, and Pennsylvania are expanding their school voucher programs. The Governor of New York has also proposed a school voucher program. In Cincinnati, the number of applications for Ohio's tiny school voucher program tripled for the upcoming school year. In Ohio and all around the country, parents and politicians recognize the value of school vouchers, but Governor Strickland wants to kill Ohio's successful program.

In an attempt to distract the public from the success of school voucher programs, critics inflame the debate by calling them George Bush's public funding of religion. According to these critics, Gov. Strickland is standing up for secularism. Invoking the specter of George Bush attacking the separation of church and state can always be counted on to incite the liberal base, but these critics are just desperate. Even Democrats in the states I mentioned above voted to expand the programs.

And for good reason. Every controlled study of school voucher programs shows that they improve student achievement. The Cato Institute reports that it costs about $10,500 a year for a public school to educate a student but only about $5,300 for a private school to educate a student. School voucher programs not only better educate children, they also save taxpayers money. Despite these facts, Gov. Strickland claims three reasons to kill the program.

First, he calls the program undemocratic. Do they still teach the difference between democracy and a constitutional republic in government schools? Since the Ohio budget including the school voucher program passed the Ohio House 97-0, his claim is specious. Maybe he means that under the current plan only a subset of students attending a failing school can get a voucher because Ohio's program provides far too few. If so, that's a reason to expand the program, not kill it.

Second, the governor incorrectly claims that private schools are not as accountable as government schools. It's because neither teachers' unions nor government schools employing them are accountable to parents that they poorly educate students at twice the price compared to private schools which are accountable to parents. Part of the success of school voucher programs is that they make even government schools accountable to parents by injecting competition into the system. If the government school fails to educate the students, parents will take the students, and the funds that come with them, to another school. School vouchers generate competition, empower parents to demand accountability, and breed success.

Third, Gov. Strickland claims vouchers undermine government schools, but that priority is wrong. The schools are not important; the education of our children is important. Who cares if school vouchers undermine the government schools as long as vouchers enable better education for our children at lower cost? Answering that question exposes the real motives behind the governor's plan to kill such a successful program. Governor Strickland is more concerned about the teachers' unions than Ohio's school-children, parents and taxpayers.

Ohio's urban school superintendents back the governor's plan to kill the school voucher program because they don't want to face competition. The urban school superintendents are blatantly admitting they cannot provide a comparable education at a similar price. Imagine if the CEO of a company told his stock holders that he couldn't make his company competitive. That CEO would be fired, and the directors would hire another CEO that had a plan to not only make the company competitive, but to surpass the competition. Only because government has a virtual monopoly on schools and teachers' unions are accountable to nobody can superintendents make such blatant admissions of failure without losing their jobs. Only in a government controlled monopoly can such failure continue with no consequences, so teachers' unions fight to keep their government controlled monopoly, and they paid Gov. Strickland well to support them against Ohio citizens.

Ohio should dramatically expand the school voucher program, not kill it. Since competition improves the schools, every school should face competition, not just failing schools. Since allowing school choice improves the quality of education for children, every parent should have the option to send their child to a better school, not just the parents of children in failing schools. We should communicate this sentiment to Gov. Strickland, but Dayton's voices don't carry as much weight in Columbus as they do around Dayton.

That's why we should take back control of our schools from the state and the federal governments. Why send taxes for schools to Columbus and Washington, have their bureaucracies siphon off a large percentage of our school taxes, and then send the reduced portion of our school funds back to us with directives and restrictions on how we educate our own children? It makes no sense. We should use our money for our children's education locally and tell the bureaucrats to keep their restrictions to themselves. Because they're our children in our community, we know better how to educate them than government bureaucrats. Children, communities, and all America will benefit if communities take back responsibility for educating their own children.