Goldwater Institute: Vouchers on Steroids for Everyone!

by David Safier

Arizona's new vouchers on steroids — Education Empowerment Accounts (SB1553) — are the Goldwater Institute's bold new idea made law. They're the first of their kind in the country, a brilliant and diabolical concoction designed to take the "public" out of public education and turn free market education into a three ring circus. Buyer Parents beware!

The basic idea, which I explained in depth in an earlier post, is to put the cost of a child's education into a state-run savings account which the parents can dip into to buy nearly any kind of educational experience or equipment — private schooling, tutoring, "educational therapy," AP and SAT tests, store-bought curriculum, you name it. What the parents don't spend each year rolls forward to be spent later, even, if some is left at the end of K-12 schooling, for college tuition. It's a seductive idea, but if educated parents salivate at the thought of being able to tailor their children's learning experiences on the government's dime, profiteering hucksters are positively drooling at the endless possibilities for big bucks to be made on shoddy educational goods and services sold to unwitting parent/consumers.

The current version is only for students with learning disabilities, but that's just sticking the elephant's trunk into the public school tent. Supporters have been very clear: the eventual goal is to go Full Elephant and turn this into a universal voucher program.

Now the Goldwater Institute has said just that in a short policy brief linking to a longer pdf: A Custom Education for Every Child: The Promise of Online Learning and Education Savings Accounts. Expect an expansion of today's Education Empowerment Accounts to be pushed by G.I. and Republican legislators, here and in other states, in coming years.

The actual G.I. paper is a mess. To make the Voucher on Steroids idea sound high tech, the paper conflates online learning and the new vouchers. In fact, online learning, which has moved from its infancy to an overglandular adolescence which shows definite possibilities for maturation but is still experimental and only partially successful, is already very much a part of public education. No need for vouchers to partake in online education. You can find it in school districts and charter schools. But G.I. knows if it talks about its idea as Vouchers, admitting most people will use the funds to pay for private school tuition, that would raise people's visceral objection to the idea.

One thing the paper brings up it probably shouldn't have mentioned is the natural tendency for parents to look for the cheapest possible education so they can roll the money in their savings accounts forward. Imagine, if you will, the hucksters saying, "For only $3,000, we will give your child a prep school education which will ready him/her for the Ivy League." The paper makes seeking out cheap education sound like a good thing, but anyone who knows anything about education will spot the minefields in this approach. Money won't assure a good education, but lack of money is nearly a 100% guarantee of poor quality educational goods and services.