Darby Isn’t Wrong to Oppose School Vouchers

Those arguing that an $8,000 government stipend for private school is capitalism need to rethink what capitalism really is.

The very act of granting billions of taxpayer money into the private school industry adds a rather anti-capitalist ingredient to the school voucher stew. That is, government largesse. Whenever the government injects money into a problem, the problem isn’t solved and more problems arise.

That $11,000 tuition charged at a Houston private school today will quickly become $19,000 after adding the government handout. It works like this every time!

When in the military, we had a housing stipend or allowance. When stationed at Andersen AFB in Guam as a single young officer, my housing allowance was $600 per month. Curiously, the cost to rent a place off-base was exactly $600 per bedroom. A four-bedroom rental house was $2,400 and this was in 1988! The landlords, like private school CFOs, will quickly adjust their pricing models to incorporate the government’s handout.

It could be worse that this. Gunning to grab that money could be under-funded private school startups that can fail, or outright crooks who will create private school startups to harvest the billions that will be spent on vouchers yet fail to educate Texas children. Then there may be a rush to home school children where some parents will pocket the cash while their child under the parent’s supervision (or non-supervision) plays Grand Theft Auto all day on an iPad. These are the moral risks of vouchers that no one is talking about.

On the other hand, there are voucher programs that seemingly work. The Wall Street Journal Opinion Page opined earlier this month that Indiana is expanding a voucher program that seems to work and has since 2011. The program is means-tested and requires the student to qualify for numerous prerequisites, such as be currently enrolled at a failing public school or to be a foster child. As of 2023, only 53,000 Indiana students qualified. The Indiana legislature passed a budget at the end of April that expands the state’s school voucher program where twice as many will qualify, the WSJ reported.

The call for vouchers by conservatives is a response to their perception that Texas public schools no longer share their values. Critical Race Theory and the concept of “equity” has permeated in the public education space for a few years. There are also moral concerns of how transgenderism and homosexuality are allegedly promoted in public schools. It may be. A concerned reader forwarded me a screenshot of a San Angelo ISD counselor with pronouns listed in the counselor’s email signature. In 2020, during the fight over renaming Lee Middle School, the San Angelo ISD administration designed a series of public forums that were branded with CRT terminology by calling the forums “Engaging Equity.”

What CRT is replacing is the behavior moderation that was a benefit of a common belief in a Christian worldview for the first 200 years after our country’s founding. For public schools, the common Christian worldview began to fizzle in 1962 when the Supreme Court ruled in Engel v. Vitale that school-sponsored prayer in public schools violated the First Amendment. Therefore, today, unable to reference Biblical truth, manmade and tyrannical concepts like CRT and “equity” have become the replacement to control behavior in the classroom.

We can agree that the toxic culture war — that prayer has been replaced with pronouns— is impacting our schools and Christian families feel threatened. But is creating a school voucher bureaucracy the answer?

Maybe it is, but not in the current form we are seeing from Austin. The WSJ praised the Republican tactic in Indiana that ushered in a very limited voucher program in 2011. Voters have experienced the success of limited vouchers and now are ready for more, so the new budget and law will double the number eligible this year.

Incremental change, the WSJ argued, is how the left took over everything. Maybe a limited voucher law is needed as a tactic for conservatives keep pushing forward with solutions to fix our broken public schools?

For Darby, however, even if he can be persuaded to support a limited voucher system, he will not if it threatens the survival of the Wall Hawks, or the survival in general of public school children throughout his district.

“Public schools are a repository for everybody … and the very lifeblood of our communities especially in rural Texas,” Darby said.

For conservatives, a better solution will be to work on fixing the culture in schools incrementally instead of wanting to completely destroy the public school system with an ambitious school voucher law.