The Florida Supreme Court knocked down vouchers yesterday. The ruling isn't based on First Amendment/religion grounds, but rather on a Florida state constitutional provision that requires the state government to provide "uniform" schooling. Problem is, the same type of language is found in many state constitutions. NYT Link. Excerpts:
The United States Supreme Court has ruled that the federal Constitution does not prohibit vouchers, but it also held last year that states were not obliged to finance religious education as well as secular education. Those actions left it to state courts to decide whether voucher programs were legal, and focused national attention on the battle over vouchers in Florida, which teachers' unions first challenged in 1999.
The Florida ruling cannot be appealed to the United States Supreme Court because no federal issues are involved, lawyers on both sides of the litigation said.
In its ruling, the Florida court cited an article in the State Constitution that says, "Adequate provision shall be made by law for a uniform, efficient, safe, secure and high quality system of free public schools." . . .
Since Wisconsin established the nation's first voucher program in Milwaukee in 1990, a handful of other states have followed suit, including Ohio, Colorado and Utah. In 2004, Congress enacted a voucher program for the District of Columbia.
Some of the state programs have come under legal challenge and the verdicts have been mixed. The Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld the Milwaukee program's constitutionality in 1998. The United States Supreme Court upheld the Ohio program in 2002. But in Colorado in 2004, the State Supreme Court upheld a lower court's decision that the state's newly enacted program would unconstitutionally strip local school boards of their control over education.
Vouchers are, in my opinion, the only effective way to break the irresponsible and government-imposed monopoly over education. If monopolies are bad (and as a society we've concluded they are, hence the existence of anti-trust laws), government-enforced monopolies in which money is extorted from citizens are especially bad.
Quite frankly, I can't think of any U.S. system with such a stranglehold over a service that can be--and prior to the mid-nineteenth century was--provided by the private sector. Actually, I should qualify that. The service can, for the most part, be provided by the private sector. I'm not sure what the private sector can do for the lowest ranks in the inner-city schools, unless we privatize the prison system.
I'm always surprised to find "conservatives" who support the radical public schools concept (by "radical," I mean the concept that private schools ought to be marginalized by taking money from private-schooling parents and given to the public schools). It goes against the idea of a free market and, indeed, freedom in general. Money taken is a freedom lost. The only way a person can support the radical concept of public schools is if he's so enamored with them that he decides all other principles--e.g., choice, the free market, the goodness of religion--must be subjugated to them.
I say this, incidentally, as a product of 13 years of public schooling (K-12). I had a good experience there, and I generally like the way my current public school district conducts affairs. But none of that makes it right.
