Three percent of Utah students currently attend private schools.
In the Netherlands, the figure is 75 percent. The difference? The
Dutch enacted their universal school voucher program in 1917, and
Utah’s passed just last week.
In a nail-biting 38-37 vote last week, Utah’s heavily Republican
House of Representatives passed the nation’s first universally
available school choice program. The Senate followed, by a vote of
19-10, and Governor Jon Huntsman signed the bill into law on
Monday. Under the program, every family in Utah will receive a
voucher worth between $3,000 per child (for the lowest income
families) and $500 (for those with the highest incomes). Parents
will be able to redeem these vouchers at whatever private school
they deem best for their kids.
Without a doubt, this is the most significant school choice
legislation ever passed in the United States. But before school
choice leaders start retiring or sending out their resumes, there
are several important caveats to keep in mind.
The maximum value of Utah’s school vouchers is only about half
of what the state’s public schools spend per pupil. This puts the
private sector at a considerable disadvantage, particularly in its
efforts to serve poorer families. In the Netherlands, all schools,
public and private, are equally funded by vouchers, producing a
level educational playing field.
One obvious effect of this financial discrimination against
parents who choose private schools is that fewer new schools will
be created. Fewer schools means less competition and fewer choices
for parents, consequently undermining the market forces that school
choice is meant to create.
The funding discrimination inherent in Utah’s voucher bill will
also limit research and development spending, and curtail the
ability of successful schools to pay for the expansion of their
operations. This could end up inhibiting innovation and the
dissemination of best practices.
Perhaps the biggest danger is that both supporters and critics
of Utah’s voucher program may expect too much, too soon. In other
nations that have adopted universal school choice programs — Chile
and Sweden, among others — it has taken at least five or ten years
for large numbers of new private schools to enter the marketplace,
and for the bad entrants to be separated from the good.
Part of the reason for that lag is that would-be school founders
are reluctant to move forward until they know that a new school
choice program rests on firm legal and political ground. And Utah’s
voucher bill is sure to be challenged.
Some opponents of the law have already conceded that it conforms
to the U.S. Constitution, based on the Supreme Court’s 2002
decision upholding Cleveland’s school voucher program. But state
courts are the new front line for voucher battles, and they have,
on occasion, proven fatal. Almost exactly one year ago, Florida’s
Supreme Court struck down that state’s small Opportunity
Scholarships voucher program on state constitutional grounds.
Utah, however, lacks the “uniformity clause” that formed the
basis for the Florida ruling. These clauses, which appear in the
constitutions of 15 states, stipulate that the public school system
must be “uniform.” Though Wisconsin’s supreme court did not find
the uniformity requirement in conflict with Milwaukee’s voucher
program, Florida’s justices took the view that it did. But Utah has
no uniformity clause, and the broader legal prospects for its bill
seem promising.
The greatest government threat to Utah’s voucher program is not
a sudden coup-de-grace from the court, but death by a
thousand regulatory cuts.
Historically, state regulation of education has tended to follow
state funding. The U.S. has some of the least regulated private
schools in the industrialized world, largely because it has not
offered those schools the government subsidies that are extended to
them in so many other nations. Though Utah’s voucher bill is
relatively free of such entanglements today, it will take eternal
vigilance to keep it so.
When the Dutch first enacted their national voucher program
nearly a century ago, it was minimally regulated. Today, the
government sets a national curriculum, controls teacher
certification, sets teachers’ salaries, decides when and where new
schools can open, forbids voucher-accepting schools from charging
tuition, and prohibits profit-making.
Because of all these regulations, the Dutch voucher program now
rates only 31 out of 100 on the Cato Education Market Index, which
measures how closely school systems resemble free markets. Utah’s
school voucher program receives an almost identical score due to a
combination of opposing factors: it imposes much less regulation on
voucher schools, but handicaps them by funding government schools
at twice the voucher amount.
But while the Utah voucher program won’t create a truly free
market, its score is still substantially higher than the state’s
current education market rating, which is brought low by Utah’s
miniscule private education sector and the lack of parental choice
and competition in its public school system.
In spite of these limitations, it would be difficult to
overestimate the significance of Utah’s school voucher program.
Salt Lake City’s legislation could very well become the domino that
tips all other states into the camp of educational freedom. Let’s
hope so.
