Thursday, September 9, 1999 in Wall Street Journal
By Ted Forstmann
Recently a federal judge in Cleveland snatched tuition vouchers away from 3,600 children the day before school started — only to restore the funding three days later in response to a public uproar. This reinforces what John Walton and I learned earlier this year when we gave 40,000 scholarships to low-income children: The demand for choice is overwhelming. The parents of 1.25 million low-income children applied for the scholarships, meaning that they were willing to pay an average of $1,000 annually for four years to participate in our program. That adds up to $5 billion that families of modest means were willing to spend to escape the education system in which they are trapped.
As the pressure for school choice continues to grow, we are bound to hear four categories of arguments in favor of the status quo. First there is the policy argument: Since 90% of children are in the public education system, we must “fix” that system — and fight choice, which will “destroy” the public schools. It’s true that 90% of children currently receive an education — or what passes for one — from the government. There is a word for a system that can command, indeed enforce, a 90% market share: monopoly. Monopolies invariably produce bad products at high prices, and the remedy in the U.S. has always been to encourage competition.
The second category of arguments against competition is historical: The U.S., we are led to believe, was founded upon a system of government-provided education; tinker with it, and you tinker with the underpinnings of our democracy. In reality, government-delivered education — a k a “public” education — wasn’t established until roughly a century after our country’s founding. The system it replaced — the system of education our country was founded upon — was characterized above all by diversity, competition and choice. Not only did this system produce some of the greatest Americans of our history, but the most basic measure of achievement — literacy — was very high, in many states higher than it is today.
Confronted with this fact, the opponents of competition will move on to their third major argument: civics. The free-market approach may have worked in a more homogeneous society, they argue, but in today’s diverse culture we need the government system to promote social harmony and teach civic values.
The reality is that, far from promoting social harmony, government education has fostered division and confrontation, time and again. Many 19th-century proponents of government education played upon widespread nativist fears and bigotry, raising doubts about the ability of immigrant parents, with their exotic religions and backgrounds, to make proper decisions about the education of their children. The proposed solution was to filter these foreign children through a standardized system. Conflict began immediately and continues to this day over what should be taught in this curriculum designed to fit all students. Today parents are divided over creationism, sex education, school prayer, religious holidays and values education. So why not simply enable parents to pick the education they want for their children?
Because, according to the fourth argument against choice, it is against the law. The same people who insist that the First Amendment prevents children from exercising their faith within the public system argue that it also prevents families from using a fraction of their own tax money in order to leave it. Since some children might flee to the inexpensive option of parochial schools, we’re told that this would represent an unconstitutional establishment of state religion. But of course the state isn’t establishing any religion; parents are simply choosing which school should get their money.
The irony is that so long as the current monopoly continues to shut out competition, religious schools will be the only option many families will be able to afford. A truly open, competitive environment would witness all kinds of new suppliers coming to the fore, which would result in the establishment of many secular schools. The possibilities are endless. Schools might be established by profit-making corporations, by cultural institutions such as fine arts or science museums, or by universities.
To refuse to let such potential suppliers compete with a government monopoly on a level playing field is not only wrong, it is senseless. We have seen what state-sponsored, government-run monopolies have produced in terms of cars like the Yugo or airlines like Aeroflot. There has never been an industry, a business or a product that competition has not improved. The product here is the child.
The last gasp in the government monopoly’s defense is to suggest that some families, particularly poor families, won’t make good decisions with regard to their children’s education. But that’s what freedom is all about, and here in America, we place our faith in freedom. Furthermore, I believe that most parents in America agree with me that the fundamental responsibility for their children’s education belongs to them, and not to politicians and bureaucrats or so-called experts.
Mr. Forstmann, senior partner at Forstmann Little & Co., is co-chairman and CEO of the Children’s Scholarship Fund.