THE SUPREME Court will be addressing a hot button issue this term: the constitutionality of vouchers. If the Court gets this one right, it will affirm vouchers as a constitutional alternative to traditional public education.
Liberals often cast vouchers as conservative ploys to drain public schools of funding they otherwise would be entitled to, and to transfer money to other less-needy private institutions. In this particular court case, the voucher would divert funding to a religious school, giving rise to questions of church-state separation. This concern is unfounded and the Court should give a green light to vouchers, which would coincide elegantly with smart public policy.
The only thing prohibited by the Constitution is the establishment of a state-endorsed religion. Through the Court's ruling in Lemon v. Kurtzman, this has come to mean that there can be no "excessive entanglement" of state and religion. A voucher used to attend a parochial school doesn't constitute such entanglement.
For there to be any "entanglement" between state and religion, there must at a minimum be a relationship between state and religion. But a family's decision about where to send its children to school has no bearing on that relationship. If it did, we'd hear front page news along the lines of: "Jones family decides to send kids to Baptist school; state religion now Southern Baptist." The decision an individual makes has no bearing on the way the public views the state-religion relationship. That such family decisions have any impact on church-state separation is a non-sensical proposition.
Furthermore, different families make different choices. This negates the possibility that one or even a few religions could be treated preferentially and therefore become "entangled" with the state's business. But what the Court would be in danger of doing should it deny vouchers on the ground that it would establish a state-religion relationship, is to create a state-supported secularism. If the state adopts a particular approach to religion - and secularism is one such approach - it is in violation of its own case law just as surely as if a national Anglican church were established.
An endorsement of secularism entails all the harms a state endorsement of religion might possess. It establishes a state-endorsed approach to religion that liberals are sympathetic to, which is why it can be expected that they would remain silent when the establishment of religious affiliation is to their liking. In short, a wrong decision could excessively entangle a secular approach to religion and state, which is unconstitutional. But that's just to say that vouchers are permissible constitutionally.
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Vouchers also are good policy. The common objection that vouchers deny public schools money doesn't stand scrutiny. It's only true if federal money gets spent on students. If that's not the case, then we need to open a discussion about the irresponsibility of public schools, which itself is a strong case for the issuance of vouchers.
Contrary to the opinions of many, vouchers logically cannot harm public schools. If a school does not get a portion of its federal funds because a student sends that money elsewhere, the school should be in no worse position, because they also lose the student on whom those funds would have been spent. In short, their federal revenues drop, but so do their costs. Granted this may mean such things as laying off teachers and decreasing the size of schools, but those resources can be displaced to where the vouchers are going anyway. And if this isn't true, if revenues fall but costs do not, that suggests that federal money is not going to students, but to other dollar vacuums within the school system.
But if schools are profit-maximizers, as liberals tend to suggest in saying that denying schools federal funds makes them worse, then denying sub-par schools funding is the only way to provide incentives for improvement. Thinking that a school would improve when it is consistently rewarded for its inadequate performance is like thinking that the way to correct a child's bad behavior is to increase his allowance. Those who oppose vouchers must view a school's budget as a better barometer for the quality of a school than its ability to educate students.
If the Court wants to be consistent and enable the creation of good policy, the decision it must make is clear.
(Jeffrey Eisenberg is a Cavalier Daily associate editor. He can be reached at jeisenberg@cavalierdaily.com.)
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