EFM and the North Star at Odds Over Education Reform

One of the big questions underlying all questions about education reform is this: since governments at all levels tax citizens to provide kindergarten through 12th-grade education, how shall the dollars be assigned to the task? The traditional status quo answer is offered in the policy by which all tax dollars dedicated to education are assigned only by state bureaucratic mechanisms and only to the state's own schools. This is what I call "educational finance monopoly," or EFM. Such a funding device imposes a financial penalty on anyone who chooses independent schools.

The primary alternative funding policy is for parents and guardians to be free to assign some or all of those K-12 tax dollars to the schools they think best for their children, thus reducing or eliminating the financial burden involved if they choose independent alternatives. And that is what I mean by parental freedom in education: school choice without financial penalty. This should be our North Star guiding education reform.

The correct target of educational reform when the issues of school choice and parental freedom are properly understood and properly portrayed, is EFM itself. EFM can be seen by most objective observers as intrinsically suspect because of what they already know about monopoly and about human nature.

The North Star that should guide school-choice advocates means (a) first determining how much money is appropriate for K-12 education, then (b) counting how many children are to be educated, and then dividing (a) by (b) and adjusting for appropriate handicaps and low-income needs in order to get the resultant number of dollars that should go to parents and guardians for each school-age child. Along with the dollars, one instruction should be sent to parents: Use these dollars most productively to pay for the education, governmental or independent, that you think best for the children in your care.

Lest you think such a simple formula is drastic or utopian, please know that this essentially describes such places as Australia, Holland, Belgium, and Denmark. Lest you think we must leave these shores for examples, it also essentially describes the spirit of the GI Bill. Lest you think we have only historical examples, this essentially describes the current theory underlying the tactics of Republican Governor Arne Carlson of Minnesota and Democratic Mayor John Norquist of Milwaukee.

This parental freedom model has the great virtue of being natural: it harnesses parent and guardian love rather than impeding it; it establishes a just relationship between what we expect of parents and what we encourage and enable them to do.

What lies ahead? There have been genuinely important, though partial, legislative enactments during the last four years. These have started to dismantle EFM and empower America's parents. Each of these events was tied to effective political and organizational work in the five jurisdictions—Arizona, Iowa, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin. Political advances are occurring elsewhere—in Florida, Illinois, Michigan, and Texas, to name but a few. In many other places, parental freedom as an alternative to EFM is taking on increased legitimacy and credibility as a subject fit for polite company. The June 10, 1998 Wisconsin Supreme Court decision upholding Milwaukee Parental Choice is an exceptionally useful decision, drawing on and synthesizing U.S. Supreme Court decisions in appealing and compelling ways that can be applied elsewhere.