Lame Excuses Against Choice

In a 13-10 vote, the New Hampshire Senate just rejected a school voucher program for elementary-aged children. I don't happen to think that vouchers are the ideal policy for introducing market education in most states, but the excuses that folks were tossing around in the "Live Free or Die" state just don't cut it. According to The Union Leader,

The school voucher measure lost... after [a] debate centered on the wisdom of taking money from public schools and the constitutionality of both sending taxpayer funds to religious schools and funding the voucher system with a cigarette tax that applied only to some manufacturers....

Sen. Clifton Below, D-Lebanon, was among the majority in killing the voucher bill. He said the bill “was a choice to step away from public education . . . and to pretend like we can do public education on the cheap.”

Note to Sen. Below: we're not doin' a great job of public education right now, on the expensive. Of the 27 member nations in the Organization for Cooperation and Development, the United States ranks number one in per-pupil spending at the K-12 level, coming in around $10,000. Toward the end of that pricey public education, our high-school seniors also rank near the bottom of the international heap, usually behind every other industrialized country. (We do beat Cyprus and South Africa. Hooray! I guess.)

The thing is, The Netherlands has had a national voucher program for nearly 90 years, it is only an average spender, and its students kick the asses of those in most other countries, including ours.

Huh. Spend less, get more.

Nah, "public education on the cheap" is a really bad idea. Let's just keep dumping $10K a year into our craptastic education monopoly. That'll show 'em.

Posted by Andrew Coulson at May 8, 2004 03:01 PM | TrackBack