More on School Choice in Utah

Thanks to Rick for posting about the Utah school-choice referendum next Tuesday.  I spoke last week at a very interesting conference, sponsored by the International Center for Law and Religion Studies at Brigham Young University, about the legal and policy aspects of the Utah program, which if it survives the referendum would be the nation's first universal voucher program -- i.e. aimed statewide rather than at failing public-school districts.  Although this feature makes the program less focused on the neediest families, it remains oriented toward the neediest, with the voucher amount graduated from $3,000 down to $500 as the family's income rises.  Ideally I would prefer a program focused even more on the poor, but this proposal still would do a lot for them and for the causes of religious and educational freedom.  The conference featured a great set of exchanges among political scientists on the empirical evidence concerning school choice's effect on educational performance (positive on a number of  indicators although no effect on some), parental satisfaction (unquestionably positive), and civic involvement (likely to be good given the overall good record of private schools on such factors).

Opponents of the program argued among other things that the $3,000 maximum would not nearly cover the tuition at many private schools, including several of the major Catholic schools (there are relatively few Catholic schools in Utah).  But the issue is always marginal effect, especially given the Church's proven willingness to subsidize the education of needy children.  And a friend who I saw on the visit, who teaches at one of the Catholic schools with a tuition around $7,000, noted that a number of modest-income kids already attend that school largely on scholarship aid and that more could be accepted if the state kicked in $3,000 per kid.

In my own presentation, I argued that although a universal school-choice program might be less compelling than one aimed at failing schools as a policy matter -- although I think both are still justified -- it actually should be even less subject to Establishment Clause challenge.  The Supreme Court's theory in approving vouchers in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002) was that if benefits are available to families on neutral terms, their use at a religious school is the family's own free choice, as long as there are "genuine secular alternatives."  In Zelman there was some dispute about the existence of genuine alternatives, given the horrible performance of the regular Cleveland public schools -- although the Court (rightly, I've argued) found more than sufficient alternatives in charter and magnet schools and public-school tutoring programs along with secular private schools.  Thus even in Zelman it was ultiamtely unpersuasive to claim that parents were pushed into religious schools (ones they might otherwise oppose) by the combination of vouchers and a failing public school system, since there were reforms in the public schools.  But any such claim of steering into religious schools is even weaker in the large majority of applications of a universal school-choice program, not limited to failing public-school districts -- since in most applications the regular public schools will be adequate and will unquestionably constitute genuine alternatives.

Tom B.