Vouchers are not school choice. They privatize public funds and are open to fraud | Opinion

The most important policy the Idaho Legislature is considering this year is described by proponents as “school choice.”

We are not opposed to school choice. School choice is a good thing.

We’ve had it in Idaho for several decades. Public charter schools and options like Idaho Virtual Academy are school choice. Homeschooling is a choice. Private school is a choice. Families already have the choice to pursue any of these options.

What proponents of school vouchers want is not school choice. What they want is a means of redirecting taxpayer dollars into a privatized education system. That would be a disastrous direction for the state to go.

Voucher backers like to describe their policies with phrases like “money follows the child” or “fund students not systems.” These phrases can be rather misleading.

Do vouchers simply allow the taxes that each family pays to be devoted to their own student’s education? Not at all. According to Census data, more than two-thirds of Idaho households have no school-age children. Nonetheless, they pay taxes to educate their neighbors’ children.

Education of the next generation is a collective project, one for which students’ families pay only a portion.

There’s no problem with sharing the burden this way because everyone in the state has an interest in well-educated children — including the general health of the society, informed political participation, a future workforce and limiting future expenditures on incarceration, among other interests.

The founders of the state of Idaho recognized this collective interest quite explicitly.

“The stability of a republican form of government depending mainly upon the intelligence of the people, it shall be the duty of the legislature of Idaho, to establish and maintain a general, uniform and thorough system of public, free common schools,” reads the Idaho Constitution.

Note that the Constitution requires maintaining this free system of public schools available to all. It does not require that the public fund every school system anyone comes up with.

Because, unlike a public school system, a voucher system is ripe for fraud and abuse. That’s especially true in the case of proposals like Senate Bill 1038, which has no mechanism for state oversight.

When Arizona audited its voucher program, it found about $700,000 in taxpayer money had been spent on things like beauty supplies, movies, music and other things that had nothing to do with education, as the Arizona Republic reported in 2018. A 2022 investigation by Oklahoma Watch and Frontier of that state’s voucher system found $500,000 in COVID relief funds had been spent on TVs, gaming consoles and Christmas trees, among other things.

But that’s small-ball fraud.

What the voucher system would do is create an entitlement program. And if there’s a lesson from the long history of the federal government’s entitlement programs, it’s this: The main risk of fraud doesn’t come from the wrong people getting benefits, but from providers willing to defraud the system in order to pocket large amounts of public funds. And in states that have implemented voucher systems with little oversight, cases of large-scale voucher embezzlement abound.

So even if you implement a voucher program that doesn’t require intense surveillance of voucher recipients in the first place, you will end up with one that does include oversight after taxpayers realize that bad actors are taking them for a ride.

So the alternatives are simple. If you want taxpayer dollars, that comes with accountability — testing to monitor students’ progress, outside reviews, curriculum standards, etc.

But if instead you want true independence, you have to be actually independent — both in terms of outcomes and finance. Homeschoolers can decide on their own curriculum, evaluate their students on their own terms, and generally operate free of government interference. The same is true of private and religious schools.

The price of that independence is a lack of taxpayer support.

This actually isn’t a very controversial position among those most committed to independent schooling, many of whom are aligned with public school advocates in vehemently opposing vouchers.

Lawmakers should listen to them and vote down SB 1038.