Letter to Editor, submitted to Deseret News Oct 20, 2007: Trust Legislature, Support Vouchers
Even the most informed among us do not have the luxury to study every issue to make well reasoned choices. The uninformed are even more likely to support the catchiest phrase. "Full of flaws," oh no, be scared. Try this principled gem: "The only thing we have to fear is..." Our founders knew that Statesmen should represent us with a mandate to study and make informed decisions. Our legislature and governor did just that, concluding that this is worth a try. They will correct flaws as they’re revealed. We must experiment or we’ll never find a better way. If you feel you don’t know enough to decide, then please refrain from second-guessing your own representatives!  “Have no fearâ€, and vote for vouchers! Don’t abandon the Republic for sound-bite Democracy, or education may be the least of our worries.
That was the letter. It’s really more about believing that a Republic is superior to a Democracy, in which decisions are made by the uninformed. Democracy is the de facto condition in America due to governance by poll, referendums, cowardly politicians, well funded sound bites, and by allowing every adult regardless of their morals or intellect to vote (which means those who have suppressed their concience or don’t know better will vote to put a gun to their more prosperous neighbor’s head and steal so they can have “free programs”). Recall the Greek democracy voted to kill Plato!Â
This is also much of the reason the Founding Fathers only wanted people with property to vote. The uninformed and easily swayed should not be running the country, and they’re easy to find because they rarely have any significant income or net worth.
Vouchers is about more than money, but it is also about money. I’m sure some publicly educated government accountant can show some way it could cost more money, but consider this:
- If for just $2000 we can tempt families to match, the schools keep $5000, the kid gets $4000, so overall education benefits at $9000 instead of $7000, with either the schools or taxpayers having $5000 they’d have otherwise had to use for that kid!
- Business is EXCELLENT at finding ways to make things both better and cheaper at the same time. Will it cost more? Maybe to an accountant. Will we get better value? YES!  Attatch the dollars to the kid instead of the district, and watch miracles begin to happen.Â
- Lasik would be far more expensive if insurance companies were the middle man, just as bureaucrats are.
- Airlines, phones – both better and cheaper once the government got out, but there were doomsday predictions!
- What about Pell Grants? Is this not public money that goes to a student who then decides where to go, even BYU? Have Pell Grants ruined the world yet or been determined unconstitutional?
The cookie commercial is a perfect example. Vouchers will result in a net savings to taxpayers. While our public system is our tradition and we all have fond memories, at the core it is fundamentally a socialist system. How we got here was largely accidental. Education is clearly in the public interest, so since we were levying taxes, it seemed natural to just put teachers on the government payroll.
There is a better way. Instead of paying teachers, pay parents if the parents want to be involved, and let them shop for where they think they’ll get what their kid needs. Most parents will settle on the neighborhood school, but more than a few have kids with special needs (both ends of the bell curve, behavioral problems, etc.), or they have educational goals that are important to the family (moral emphasis, American history emphasis, musical emphasis, science emphasis, whatever).Â
It is like hiring contractors, which the government does all the time and you should be glad they do. Government doesn’t pave the streets, but they raise money to do it. They don’t built missles, but they raise money to do it.
Our tradition of government operated schools has resulted in schools that:
Can’t discipline adequately;
Can’t get rid of the lazy or incompetent, but tenured 10% (you know you had some);
Can’t find desire to innovate and keep up with the modern world;
Can’t respond adequately to special needs of families not a few;
Can’t leave any child behind (i.e. must hold performers back to focus on those who still won’t read when they graduate);
Must pay the bottom 10% within 10% of the top 10%.Â
How about this? Keep the schools completely in tact and initially staffed with the same staff, but put the management roll to contractors. Then they can hire say retiring chemists or engineers who have no “certificate”, but do have a knack for teaching kids and desire to serve. Since BUSINESS must perform to renew their contract, they can also help those on white-collar welfare and hiding behind the union find their way over to Home Depot.Â
We’ve got to try something, and the other 49 expensive experiments prove that handing cash over to unionized government bureaucrats is also not a wise course. Let’s try vouchers anyway and see what we learn.