How is it, the same people who decry and condemn big business, and corporate America, and huge CEO salaries as being unfair, greedy, monopolistic, and evil are the same people who become protectionists when it comes to the public school system, and the funding of public schools?
We rejected the formation of business monopolies in the late 1800’s, and we rejected the collusion they had engaged in to fix prices, making it virtually impossible for smaller businesses to compete. For better or worse, the Sherman Antitrust Act was passed to break up these monopolies and ensure that the smaller businesses would be able to compete alongside their more larger counterparts in a fairer, freer marketplace.
What does this have to do with public schools?
The public school system has itself become a monopoly, much in the same sense as the corporations of old; and with the creation of the Department of Education, under the Carter Administration, the federal government controls a vast percentage of the whole, and has the power, and political influence, to dictate policy, and the terms and conditions of how the most local of public school may be operated. The collusion, in this case, is performed not by slick businessmen in back rooms, but rather slick lawmakers in back rooms.
And in this analogy, the small businesses are the poor and middle class American families who are finding it next to impossible to compete with the public school system for a decent, quality education that is so easily, so readily available to the children of more well to do parents with the financial means to send them to any institution of their choosing.
Isn’t it time parents had their own version of a Sherman Antitrust Act? Isn’t time parents had real choice in education? Isn’t it time the public school system in America was confronted and challenged with real competition?
School vouchers are the equivalence of the Sherman Antitrust Act; they are a mechanism and a means, in the form of money, which gives parents real choice, real opportunity, and real control over there children’s education, and in particular - where their children will receive that education.
What’s wrong with that?
A school voucher can only be used for the purpose of helping pay for schooling. Other than that, it would be left to the discretion of each individual family who receives a voucher as to its actual use. Whether it will be put toward public or private, or even home schooling and parochial education, the purpose of vouchers is to make it easier, financially, for parents who feel their children are not receiving a quality education within the public school system - and there are many varying factors why that might be - to pull their children from these schools and place them in an alternative educational facility. This drastic measure is not done on a whim, but researched ad nauseam to find the right school worth the monetary investment. And why would any parent go to these lengths at all unless they have found something, somewhere within the school their children are attending that is harming their education?
The Department of Education, the Teachers Union, the Democrats all be damned!
Our children’s education is worth standing up and fighting for. Vouchers will infuse real competition in the education marketplace, and instill real fear in the hierarchy that controls the public school system, from the federal government on down to local administrations, who refuse - out of pompousness, to listen to our concerns. Whether vouchers make them listen or not, is irrelevant. Their real impact will be in securing a more competitive education for our children, and better equipping them for a future in which they will have a greater edge than their publicly schooled counterparts. And in the final analysis, isn’t that all that really matters?