School Choice Slogans

PREVIEW:

Fund Students, Not Systems: This slogan is fundamentally flawed because every government program requires a system to fund, implement, enforce, and regulate. The Idaho Constitution actually requires the state to fund systems, including a “thorough system of public, free common schools.”

Don’t Want It, Don’t Take It: This slogan reveals that proponents believe it is acceptable for unfunded homeschool families to pay for multiple systems of education instead of just the one mandated by Idaho’s Constitution. In addition, legislatures in states that have passed school choice are capitalizing on the opportunity to add regulation to all homeschoolers, whether they take funding or not.

It’s My Tax Money: While it started out that way, ALL TAX dollars, once levied, belong to the state, and citizens collectively. Your personal tax liability does not fund the individual education of one student, whether they go to public school or receive school choice funding.

FULL FEATURE:

The School Choice movement is the master of the marketing slogan. Desperate parents are looking for an easy financial exit from an incompetent system that is perversely determined to indoctrinate their kids. These parents are told they should be able to take the money that “belongs to them” and choose the “education that is best for their child.” And yet, the proposed solution will place all students – public, private, parochial, and homeschooled – into one system. These pithy catch-phrases are designed to do one thing: obscure the reality that any publicly funded option will be controlled by the same government that produced, and broke, the public education system.

Let’s just start out by acknowledging that the term “school choice” is itself is a misleading slogan. It is already legal in every state in America to choose public school, private school, or to homeschool. We already have school choice. The movement’s use of the euphemism sounds benevolent, but it is pushing a dangerous agenda.

Let’s see if some of their other favorite slogans are fact or fantasy.

Fund Students, Not Systems (The Money Should Follow the Child)

Their most commonly repeated slogan is that our tax dollars should “fund students, not systems.” It is a bit ironic to expect that a system (government), which has to pass legislation (a system of laws) to fund (through a system of taxation), implement (through a system of departments), and regulate (through a system of enforcement) will somehow remove itself from the equation via supposedly altruistic school choice legislation.

The fact is, ALL TAX dollars, once levied, belong to the state and its citizens collectively. The power of the government to levy taxes is written into Idaho’s Constitution and how that money is spent is determined by the legislature. Taxpayers have a say in the allocation of those funds through their elected representatives, but those dollars no longer belong to them individually. Because taxpayers are rightfully concerned about the proper spending of public funds, they expect the state to exercise regulatory power over every dollar spent. These accountability measures are the system through which the government exercises control over everything it funds. It does not matter whether the money goes to roads, welfare, tax incentives, public works, or students, ALL public funding comes with regulation and enforcement by the system (government). “Funding students, not systems” is fundamentally flawed because it simply cannot exist in practice.

The dark consequence of “fund students, not systems” is that when public funding is made available for previously unfunded education options, a back door mechanism is created to control all private and homeschools. This happens without raising the ire of freedom-minded parents who would otherwise fight a direct attempt to regulate them! Regulation becomes simply a matter of “legal necessity” in the operation of school choice programs, rather than a blatant co-opting of the fundamental right of parents to educate their children. This is playing out right before our eyes in Arizona where the crowning achievement of universal school choice is actually bankrupting the state, necessitating tighter regulations. We see the system and taxpayers calling for accountability (another word for government control) in state after state that has passed school choice legislation (see here and here and here and here).

A variation on this slogan is, “The money should follow the child.” This fails to acknowledge the unbroken history of government control over every penny it spends. History testifies that school choice funding of private and homeschools creates a channel which allows the government access to our homes and private educational institutions.

In the past, Idaho homeschool families experienced the results of this kind of access. “For two years, school officials questioned […] the parents’ educational background, the curriculum they were using, their weekly, daily, and hourly schedule, their standards for measuring academic achievement, and even what their fire escape plan was in the event that they experienced a house fire. Were the families conducting regularly scheduled fire drills? School officials attempted to impose requirements on the physical place of instruction, which of course happened to be their private homes. Apparently, they needed to ensure that these homes met state safety regulations for public buildings.” Politics of Pie, by Linda Patchin, 2023. This intrusion on freedom took place even without the strings of state funding. It is logical to conclude that regulations attached to funding will lead to even more extreme oversight.

Worse, funding following the child gives organizations (and here) that push for regulation of all aspects of homeschooling, the actual means of achieving their goals. If you want to know what that would look like, read here.

To further discredit the slogan, the state of Idaho is outright constitutionally obligated to fund systems, particularly a general, uniform and thorough system of public, free common schools. Proponents of school choice like to interpret this as an obligation to fund all education options, but Idaho’s constitution explicitly states that the obligation extends only to a system of public schools.

Finally, school choice funding actually creates a system of public-private partnerships. This system combines private profit incentives with the government’s power to tax and regulate. This system of publicly funded private (business) interests would be highly motivated to protect and maintain its own existence. The end result would look like an Education Industrial Complex that would irrevocably change all forms of education, eradicating any independent school choice that operates outside of its control.

For a deeper dive into how “funding students” paves the way for UNESCO to consolidate power and bring all forms of education in line with their globalist agenda, check out The UNESCO Connection section of this series.

Don’t Want It, Don’t Take It

School Choice proponents suggest that homeschoolers who don’t want government money are not forced to take it and therefore wouldn’t be subject to regulatory oversight. This is a backhanded acknowledgement that funding comes with regulation, but they continue to turn a blind eye to the pattern of regulation that is unfolding in states that have enacted school choice legislation.

Legislators already confuse public-school-at-home students (those who participate in bridge programs like BrainTree, Harmony, Overture, HomeEd360, and others) and private homeschool students. Many don’t even know that publicly funded public school bridge programs exist in Idaho, let alone the fact that participants commonly misidentify themselves as homeschoolers when they, in fact, are fully enrolled in a public school.

To make matters worse, most school choice bills do not make a statutory distinction between funded and unfunded homeschools or even define what the “private” in private education means. The simplest solution for uninformed legislators is to lump them all together in statute. This ambiguity creates an opportunity for those looking to control previously unregulated homeschoolers. Even states whose school choice legislation created language to protect unfunded homeschoolers, that mirage of protection barely lasted a single legislative session. Recent legislation in West Virginia is a prime example of an attempt to capture privately funded homeschoolers in the same regulatory net as publicly funded students. This proposed legislation would have used eligibility for school choice funding as the means to regulate homeschoolers, whether or not they actually used school choice funding. Another example comes out of Oklahoma. Their tax credit bill was signed into law in May, 2023, on the promise of “no strings attached.” One year later, a bill was introduced that would require testing for private and homeschoolers taking that tax credit. It is currently (fall 2024) waiting in Oklahoma’s Appropriations and Budget Committee for the next legislative session. In Arkansas there is a movement to add a constitutional amendment that requires recipients of public funding for private or homeschool to meet the same standards as the public school system. We can’t ignore the fact that once school choice legislation is put in place, the heavy lifting has been done. It is then merely a matter of revising statute (as was attempted in West Virginia) to implement regulations on funded and unfunded alike. If they will break their promises to funded homeschoolers, why wouldn’t they break their promises to unfunded homeschoolers? “No strings attached” is quickly losing its meaning as the pressure for accountability grows.

In a final ironic twist, even as school choice proponents give lip service to the idea that families who don’t use the public school system should not be asked to fund it, this slogan reveals that they are actually asking families to pay for multiple systems of education instead of just one, even if they don’t use any system.

It’s My Tax Money

As already established above, once tax money leaves my hands, it stops being MY money and is never again designated for unregulated personal, private use. Even where taxes are used for programs that benefit a specific person, such as food stamps and welfare, how those dollars are spent is highly regulated. The mere ability for the government to attach regulations to the use of public money confirms that the money is NOT really my money..

Let’s apply school choice logic (flawed as it is) to a different example. Jane has decided she doesn’t like going to the tax-funded public park. After all, she doesn’t like the equipment, it is frequently broken, and there are always so many people there. So she applies for, and receives, “no-strings-attached” taxpayer money to build a private park in her backyard. No one else can access her private park, and, in fact, no one can verify that she even used that money for a park. This is what designating public dollars for personal use would look like if the same flawed school choice funding logic were applied to anything but education.

Now, let’s do a little math to see if an individual’s personal tax liability would even cover one child’s education costs. In Idaho, the state funds about $8,500/child/year for public education. Public education is funded primarily through property taxes. The median annual property tax bill in Idaho was $1,188 in 2022. Obviously, the average family’s property tax does not even begin to fund one year of public education for one child. In fact, if the average family had to fund 12 years of public education for just one child with only their own property tax, it would take 85 years. Clearly it isn’t only the parent’s taxes that are paying for their child’s education. In Idaho, a tax credit of $5,000 was proposed in 2023. Even though the amount is less than the cost of public education, it is still more than the tax liability of one family. So where does the extra money come from?

Whether school choice legislation is funded out of the education budget or the general fund, the money has to come from somewhere. It ultimately comes from every single taxpayer in the state – married, single, childless, or retired. When public schools experience a shortfall in funding, it is made up for by levying additional taxes. We should expect nothing different with a publicly funded system of private and homeschools in Idaho. The money spent on school choice programs requires everyone to pay for it through their taxes (see here and here) and redistributes taxpayer funds to the for-profit private system that is needed to administer and support school choice funding.

Once these slogans are critically examined, they begin to unravel.

SAY NO TO PUBLIC FUNDING OF PRIVATE AND HOMESCHOOLS!