Vouchsafe Me an Education

By Crispin Sartwell

Florida's Supreme Court recently struck down that state's pioneering school voucher program. The decision was bad law; the result will be bad policy.

    First, the law: The court held that the voucher program violates the article of the state constitution that states that "Adequate provision shall be made by law for a uniform, efficient, safe, secure and high-quality system of free public schools."

    Vouchers, according to the decision, divert "public dollars into separate private systems parallel to and in competition with the free public schools that are the sole means set out in the constitution for the state to provide for the education of Florida's children. This diversion not only reduces money available to the free schools, but also funds private schools that are not 'uniform' when compared with each other or the public system."

    This seems a bizarre reading of the constitutional provision, which can only plausibly be interpreted as saying that the state of Florida is obligated to provide a system of public education; the article says absolutely nothing about what programs outside a system of public education the state of Florida is permitted to fund.

    The court's interpretation entails that it is unconstitutional for the state of Florida to fund any educational program whatever outside of the public schools: training programs for its young employees, for example. Internships. Head Start. All of these, and for that matter all expenditures whatever of the state of Florida other than those spent in the public schools, divert money from the public schools.

   Of course, the state constitution itself makes absurd demands. It declares that the schools must be "uniform": an incredibly vague and obviously impossible standard. Indeed, since the voucher program only allowed students to leave schools rated as "failing," it could be argued that it was liable to increase the uniformity of education in the state. Unless "uniformity" simply means "uniformly public," the term can yield no argument against vouchers.

     If we take seriously the notion that the state is constitutionally required to provide "uniform, efficient, safe, secure and high-quality" schools, public education in Florida as a whole is entirely unconstitutional.

    Now the policy. In a January 8 editorial, the Los Angeles Times said this: "the only schools held accountable are the public ones. Voucher students in Florida take the same standardized tests as those in public schools, but those scores aren't made public. So private schools face no public penalty if their scores are poor. Parents are free to keep their children in such schools, of course, but should public money be spent to support a substandard education?"

      Let's unpack this a bit. First, both the American left and the American right continuously mumble the term "accountability." That seems to be the entire extent of their thinking about education; it's their sacred mumbo-jumbo, the claptrap they love more than life itself.

   "Accountability," here, does not mean assigning responsibility. It means a model of education which consists exclusively of preparing for and examining the results of standardized tests. Such tests are not merely or even primarily forms of assessment; they are the content and the purpose of American education.

     In effect, they turn American education into a national centralized bureaucracy. The people who compose the testing instruments and impose them are the national superintendents of schools. School districts have less and less autonomy. Schools have less and less autonomy. Teachers have less and less autonomy. Children have less and less autonomy. Every time you hear "accountability," that is what it means; that is all it means. Obviously, it doesn't mean accountable to parents or communities. It doesn't mean accountable for learning, for truth or creativity. It means accountable to a national bureaucracy for performance on standardized tests.

    It is telling that the Times points out that private school students are required to administer the same tests. This imposes a uniform curriculum and teaching methodology on all schools, public and private.

    You really need to understand this: the arguments being made against vouchers and for "accountability" entail that there should be no private possibilities for education whatever. They entail that cultural or community character and family or individual idiosyncrasy should be erased wherever they raise their untestable heads.

    What public housing was to the 1960s, a well-meaning (I suppose) but disastrous exercise in community destruction at the hands of the state, "accountable" public education is to our era: the merest Stalinism. The public housing of the sixties is being imploded all over the country, but the educational system is manufacturing its own validity: the next generation of bureaucrats will be start with the presumptions inculcated by their moronic forebears.

    We have achieved, with nearly unanimous enthusiasm, a flatly totalitarian system of education.