Whose Money Follows The Child?

"Let the money follow the child," say choicers repeatedly, but the more honest plea would be "Let your money follow my child."

But that's not how they present it. Take this quote from today's Washington Post piece:

“It’s the parents’ money to use as they see is best,” said Brian Hickey, executive director of the Catholic Conference of Ohio. “We don’t necessarily see it as taxpayer money.”

Or the other framing one encounters on the interwebs-- the "I just want to use my money to educate my child as I see fit" version. Corey DeAngelis, choice evangelist, argued in a speech that all families should be able to take "their dollars" to the school they choose. 

Except this is bunk. Let's take me as an example. I have two children in school. I pay roughly $1,000 a year in real estate tax. If you give me my $1,000 back, can I educate my boys with that money? Nope. There is no voucher state in which my money would not have to be supplemented with the tax dollars of my neighbors.

I've heard the counterargument-- the voucher represents a return on my real estate tax dollars over my entire lifetime. Let's check that math. I have a grand total of four children, and in my younger years I lived in places that carried a far lower tax burden, but let's pretend it has always been about $1,000. So let's assume that I pay $1,000/year for 55 years, for a grand total of $55,000. Would that cover 13 years of annual vouchers for 4 children? No, that would be about a little over $1,000/year. 

But hey-- I'm a guy living in a small town area that is technically part of Appalachia, where we have the kind of housing prices that the rest of you only dream of (seriously--if you have a small town bone in your body, you should move here). What if we checked other parts of the country?

Well, in North Carolina the average real estate ballpark tax bill is about $1,663. So that's not going to work much better.

In Texas the average property tax rate is 1.80%, so if you have a $350K house, you'd pay $6,300. That gets us closer to voucher money-- as long as you don't have too many kids. Of course that's an average, so some folks in less pricey housing would be paying way less. In Bandera County, a $150K house would yield $1,755 in real estate tax money. 

We could run numbers for a variety of locations, or we could make a common sense observation-- if the real estate tax money from parents was sufficient to fund the public school system, we wouldn't need to tax any non-parents, which is a point I fully expect non-parental taxpayers to bring up in voucher states in the not-too-distant future.

If this is just giving the parents back their own tax payments, then do non-parents get a real estate tax exemption? Once my kid graduates from high school, do I get to stop paying taxes? Are tax-paying parents given a limit to the number of children they actually get credit for? Where do the taxes paid on business real estate go in all this? 

The suggestion that vouchers are simply a means of giving parents back their own money to spend on education as they see fit--that's absurd. Our entire public education system is funded on the theory that everyone in the country benefits from sharing space with educated co-workers, neighbors, and pretty much everyone else we have to deal with. Everyone shares the cost. 

It's odd that so much of the voucher crowd is also the "taxation is theft" crowd, because voucher funding requires the voucher holders to take tax dollars from their neighbors while stripping those neighbors of any say in the kind of education those dollars will be spent on. That includes spending my neighbor's tax dollars on a school that would forbit, bar, eject, and demonize those neighbors and their children.

Your money should follow my child.

"Just give us back our tax money, and I'll get my kids the education I want and everyone else can get the kind of education they want," is top-grade bullshit. The only people who it even sort of works for is the folks living in very expensive houses. For everyone else, the end result is some kind of lower tier cheap crappy school--or getting your neighbors to chip in.

Your money should follow my child. 

Or maybe we could pool all our money and set up a system to take care of all the children.

Universal Vouchers and Privatization

A shift in Florida is being covered, but I'm not sure many folks really understand what's happening. 

Politico reported that Florida school choice programs have been "wildly successful," and both of those words are doing a megacrane's worth of lifting. More to the point, they are accepting the DeSantis definition of success, which is the replacement of a public school system with a privatized one.

“We need some big changes throughout the country,” DeSantis said Thursday evening at the Florida Homeschool Convention in Kissimmee. “Florida has shown a blueprint, and we really can be an engine for that as other states work to adopt a lot of the policies that we’ve done.”

Politico reported on this "success" in the context of many public school districts in Florida shuttering buildings due to dropping enrollment.

Let's acknowledge a couple of complexities here. First, the under-18 population is dropping everywhere in the country. Second, Florida's choice programs are exceptionally opaque, making it hard to know what, exactly, is happening, though there are indicators that, as in other states, a large number of voucher students never set foot in public school to begin with.

Florida's supremely underqualified choice-loving education commissioner Manny Diaz, Jr., says that all these closings are motivation for public schools. "But what they need to do is continue to innovate and provide programming that is attractive to parents so, on that open competition, they have the best option for those parents to choose."

Florida has long pursued the technique of draining resources and support from public schools, along with imposing a terrible testing system, doing their best to make charters and private schools look better by comparison. And in all fairness, it should be said that some Florida districts have shot themselves in the foot. 

The general trend in Florida has been to pursue Milton Friedman's dream of getting government out of the education business. And in that respect, Florida has been wildly successful.

But here's the important part.

Privatization is not just about privatizing the folks who get to provide education (or education-flavored products). It is about privatizing the responsibility for getting children an education.

Getting government out of education means ending the promise that every child in this country is entitled to a decent education. Regardless of zip code. Regardless of their parents' ability to support them. Regardless of whatever challenges they bring to the process. 

End that promise. Replace it with a free(ish) market. End the community responsibility for educating future citizens. Put the whole weight of that on their parents. End the oversight and accountability to the elected representatives of the taxpayers. Replace it with a "Well, the parents will sort that out. And if they don't, that's their own fault and their own problem."

This is billed as "freedom," and it is freedom of a sort, just like every citizen is "free" to get whatever means of transportation they can afford. You didn't want to depend on a badly used bicycle? You should have thought of that before you decided to be poor.

Except that it's not even that. To make the analogy more accurate, we'd need to imagine a country in which car dealers and bus companies could refuse to sell to you because you don't go to the right church or love the right people or because they just don't want to. 

Parents are free to pursue whatever education options they want for their children. Except that if the voucher won't cover the ever-increasing cost of that private school, and that other private school won't accept your child, and the neighborhood school that would have accepted your child no matter what is now closed. You could always start your own microschool, with a computer connection (hope you have internet) and some adult to hang out as a "coach." 

This is where universal vouchers fall right in line with other modern reform classics-- they propose to solve a problem that they absolutely do not solve.

Part of the pitch has been that poor families should have the same choices as wealthy families. Universal vouchers absolutely do not do that. Like any other sector of the free market, a privatized system provides plenty of great (and over-inflated, shiny) options for the wealthy, and lousy options for the not-so-wealthy. And it does it while chipping away at the one good option that the not-so-wealthy were promised-- a well-resourced public school.

Has the US public school system always lived up to the promise? Absolutely not. But canceling that promise and replacing it with the "freedom" at accept whatever lousy options the market deigns to deliver is not a step forward.

Reformsters have had a lot of success in convincing folks that education is a consumer good provided to families and not a human service provided for the benefit of the entire country. But the other undiscussed feature of the Florida plan is that it disenfranchises the community. It doesn't just say that educating children is no longer your responsibility; the Florida plan says that if you are a taxpayer with no children, you have no say, no power. And if anyone thinks that this won't eventually lead to shrinking voucher amounts, I have a bridge over some Florida swamplands to sell them.

We already know what this mostly looks like. It looks like our privatized health care system, where the people at the top get everything they need, and the people at the bottom skip medication and treatment and, periodically, die. But the health system just kind of grew that way, so nobody had to convince people to give up access to health care. Just periodically holler "No socialism! Freedom! Murica!" every time someone brings up single payer universal coverage. 

Universal vouchers, ironically, do not promise universal education for all students. The traditional public school system does. State by state we are being pu8shed to give up that system without ever having an honest conversation about what's really being proposed. 

OH: Vouchers for Jesus

I can vaguely remember a time when the Heritage Foundation didn't wear its conservative christianist heart on its sleeve, but those days seem gone.

Witness this latest award from Heritage. Their 2024 Innovation Prize winers include Their 2024 Innovation Prize winers include outfits like the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, The Claremont Institute, Feds for Freedom, Immigration Accountability Project, and the Center for Christian Virtue.

CCV is an Ohio organization that started out in 1983 as the Citizens for Community Values. 

The First Amendment ensures that people of all faiths are free to exercise their beliefs in their day-to-day lives. For Christians, this freedom is essential because our faith compels us to act – to seek the good of our neighbors and follow God’s word daily.

Yet throughout the country, laws are in place to restrict religious freedom, and to punish people of faith because of their beliefs. For this reason, protecting religious freedom is our top priority at CCV. 

I often think that ancient Christians would be baffled by what modern christianists consider "punishment" for their beliefs. The modern definition of punishment seems to be stuck on things like "not allowed to discriminate freely against people of whom we disapprove" and "not allowed to grab as much taxpayer money as we wish." 

As punishment goes historically, it seems like tame stuff. But CCV is there to stand up against it by pushing "lifesaving legislation, including bills to prohibit abortion at the moment a heartbeat is detected in an unborn child, expand Ohio’s school choice programs, and protect religious freedom."

CCV leadership include president Aaron Baer, a comms professional (Ohio University '09) from Arizona, where he was a policy advisor for the attorney general's office. He helped launch the Ohio Christian Education Network, most noted for successfully suing the Ohio health department for closing Christian schools during the pandemic. OCEN has its own executive director, Troy McIntosh, a private Christian school vet. 

CCV isn't particularly coy about where they stand on the whole public education thing, as they explain in their release about winning the Heritage award:

CCV will receive a $100,000 award to support its Education Restoration Initiative, addressing Ohio's academically broken and morally corrupt government-run education system. The award will expand CCV's Ohio Christian Education Network (OCEN) model, which helps churches operate full-time, in-person Christian schools Monday through Friday. CCV plans on leveraging Ohio's EdChoice program to offer a moral and quality education to students at little to no cost, especially to those below the federal poverty line. CCV intends to launch dozens of schools across Ohio and export this model to other states to serve and save children across the country.

 I'm not sure exactly when we shifted gears from simply alleging that public schools didn't educate very well to also accusing them of being morally corrupt. But Baer is sure that we have an "educational crisis" because "agenda-driven bureaucrats are pushing political ideologies in the classroom."

And Heritage is right there with him. Upon delivering the award, Heritage president Kevin Roberts declared:

So much of our nation's societal decay stems from our education system, and institutions like CCV are spearheading the effort to save our children and restore morality and sanity in our schools.

It's all a reminder that Ohio's voucher program is about replacing a public non-sectarian school system with one that is explicitly Christian, and to do it in a way that circumvents any actual national discussion about whether this is a good idea or not. But I guess a conversation like that would be punishment.