Allow Parents to Choose

Parental choice in education today is officially discouraged. Parents who choose private schools for their children forfeit the public funds collected to educate their children, including tax dollars they themselves pay. Parents who send their children to public schools are given either no choice or a choice among only a few similar schools governed by the same school district authorities, none of which may be satisfying to them.

Parents Have the Legal Right to Choose

Parents in the U.S. can properly assert the right, recognized by long tradition and law, to direct the education of their children (Skillen 1993). Some legal experts place the right of parents to control the schooling of their children at the foundation of all other civil liberties (Arons 1997; McCarthy et al. 1981).

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925) that “the fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the state to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only. 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 Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002), the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Cleveland’s school voucher program, with the majority writing, “in keeping with an unbroken line of decisions rejecting challenges to similar programs, we hold that the program does not offend the Establishment Clause.”

Parents Can Be Trusted to Choose Wisely

The current system of school finance is based on the notion that “local government agents make better school assignments for individual children they have never met than would the family, even were the family to be supported by professional counseling” (Coons and Sugarman 1978 rev. 1999, 47). But this is patently untrue. Parents are more likely to know their children’s individual needs and concerns, and they have much stronger incentives to choose the right schools for their children than bureaucrats do. Parents usually care deeply about their children and may anticipate having to rely on them in their old age (Bast and Walberg 2004).
Surveys reveal parents typically rank schools the same way experts do, indicating they have sufficient information to make informed choices (Solmon 2003; Hoxby 2001). Surveys also show most parents who choose independent schools do so on the basis of academic quality rather than athletics, convenience, or other considerations less indicative of a school’s quality (Witte 2000).

Parental Choice in Education Is Spreading

Giving public funds to consumers in the form of vouchers is not a radical idea. Existing voucher programs include food stamps, low-income housing vouchers, the GI Bill and Pell Grants for college students, federal day-care grants, and Social Security (Savas 2000). Social Security, for example, distributes about $700 billion annually to millions of seniors to spend as they wish. The seniors spend their retirement tax dollars on the goods and services of their choice, including donating some to charities, churches, temples, and mosques.

Using vouchers to fund schools is also no longer a radical or untried idea. School voucher and scholarship tax credit programs are operating in 12 states and the District of Columbia, serving nearly 200,000 children (Alliance for School Choice 2011). Participation in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program has grown from 341 students in the 1990–91 school year to approximately 20,000 in 2010–11.
Public support for expanding school choice is strong. The 2004 Phi Delta Kappa International/Gallup Poll found 57 percent of parents with children now attending public schools would send them to private schools if vouchers were available (Clowes 2004b). A 2010 survey of registered voters in six states found 64 percent would favor tax credit scholarships versus 24 percent who oppose such a system, and 65 percent would favor school vouchers while 28 percent would oppose the idea (DiPerna 2010).

Recommended reading: John E. Coons and Stephen D. Sugarman, “Amid Perplexity, Who Should Decide?” in Education by Choice: The Case for Family Control (Troy, NY: Educator’s International Press, Inc., 1999), www.schoolreform-news.org/article/15845.