Washington — One of the greatest minds of the 20th century has,
in the early years of the 21st Century, been vindicated! In the
1950s Nobel-Prize winning economist Milton Friedman began arguing
for using vouchers to end the public school monopoly. I first read
his argument in Capitalism and Freedom, his classic
treatise on the free society and the limits of government published
in the early 1960s. Since then many of his economic ideas have
gained wide acceptance where once they were derided as antiques.
Even his prejudices in favor of limited government have gained
popularity. Yet for forty years vouchers have remained in limbo,
thanks to the alarums sounded by the school unions, the public
school bureaucracies, and assorted representatives of the bien
pensant.
Their most devastating argument has been that vouchers are
unconstitutional. Thus no further discussion was necessary. Aside
from Friedman’s ardor for debate (he has established a foundation
to promote vouchers) and that of a few like-minded advocates, the
discussion or possibly implementation of vouchers was stifled.
However, on June 27 in a decision that may be as historic as
Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court
decided that there is nothing unconstitutional about vouchers. Let
the test begin. Let free citizens with vouchers send their children
to the schools of their choice. Let us see if competition improves
the schools of the land, as Friedman has been predicting.
The Court’s decision (Zelman v.
Simmons-Harris) upheld Cleveland, Ohio’s plan to give poor
citizens government vouchers for tuition at any school enrolled in
the city’s voucher program, whether it be public, private, or
parochial. Opponents of the plan had argued that tax dollars spent
at parochial schools ran afoul of the Establishment Clause of the
Constitution, which opposes Congress’s establishment of a religion.
The argument is historically ignorant, but that has not stopped it
from being used for generations to oppose government monies seeping
into religious institutions and more recently to kill off voucher
programs.
I say it is a historically ignorant argument because when the
Constitution was drawn up some of the states already had
established religions. That is to say that state tax revenue was
flowing in places such as Virginia to an established church. In the
original thirteen colonies state taxes supported no fewer than
three religions, the Anglican, the Methodist, and the Dutch
Reformed. What the Constitution’s Establishment Clause was meant to
do was to oppose federal tax revenue establishing a national church
in America. By mangling the Founding Fathers’ intent, beginning in
the 1940s, so-called progressives and liberals have managed to
create the great and essentially phony controversy between the
separation of church and state. Just last week it led to the
absurdity of a court in San Francisco banning the Pledge of
Allegiance in school rooms because of the Pledge’s passage which
reads “One nation under God.”
Now, however, questions regarding the constitutionality of
school vouchers have been laid to rest. In his majority opinion
Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote that the Cleveland voucher
program was a “program of true private choice” because parents not
the government direct their tax-supported vouchers to schools.
Another argument, made by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, noted that
state money has been finding its way into religious institutions
for years, Pell grants to college students who go to religious
institutions, Medicaid payments to Catholic hospitals.
With the constitutionality of vouchers now established,
governments can get on with testing Friedman’s belief that vouchers
will create competition for the school system and in so doing
improve public schools through competition. Always the optimist
Friedman does not believe public schools have to be inferior
schools. In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where a school choice program was
launched years ago despite arguments against its constitutionality,
student test scores in all grades have risen even in public
schools. In Florida, where a newer school choice program has been
adopted, the number of failing public schools dropped from 78 in
the program’s first year to four a year later.
Vouchers still face challenges in some states. Thirty-seven
states still have nineteenth Century laws that forbid using tax
dollars in religious schools. Ironically these laws were
established not to “separate” church and state but more pointedly
to hobble Catholic immigration to the United States. The first was
passed in Massachusetts in 1854. It was a creation of that
bête noire of all good Liberals, the Know-Nothing
party, which had come to power promising to “Americanize America.”
Do the opponents of vouchers now join the side of the
Know-Nothings?
