Politico
has a story hitting the webz that’s all about how publicly
funded school voucher programs allow students at “hundreds” of
religious schools to learn stupid stuff like “young Earth
creationism.”
Taxpayers in 14 states will bankroll nearly $1 billion this year
in tuition for private schools, including hundreds of religious
schools that teach Earth is less than 10,000 years old, Adam and
Eve strolled the garden with dinosaurs, and much of modern biology,
geology and cosmology is a web of lies.
Hundreds of religious schools! A billion
dollars! Note the slippage from billions
to hundreds at the very top of the
story. Forget also that we spent about $638 billion on
K-12 expenditures in 2009-2010, so $1 billion is
practically a rounding error. If you led with the fact that perhaps
thousands of students were being taught unscientific
theories in schools aided by tax dollars, well, that’s just not
that big a deal, is it?
I don’t believe in creationism – and I’m enough of a
smarter-than-thou secularist to know that evolution will proceed
apace regardless of the
78 percent of Americans who think that “God created humans in
their present form” or “Humans evolved, with God guiding.” In fact,
according to Gallup surveys, just 15 percent of agree that “Humans
evolved, but God had not part in the process.” Cheer up,
Darwinites, that’s up from just 9 percent back in 1982.
As the parent of two children who attend public schools (and as
a taxpayer who has contributed to public schools my entire working
life), I have long understood that schools funded with tax dollars
teach all sorts of stuff that is
objectionable, useless (sports
programs!), and
flat-out wrong. I also know that in both direct and indirect
ways tax dollars support religious schools whose theology I find
objectionable, useless, and flat-out wrong. This sort of support is
not limited to K-12 education, as Pell grants and guaranteed
student loans are widely used at religious colleges.
At the same time, there’s no question in my mind that school
vouchers are not simply
constitutionally sound but preferable to a traditional
top-down, centralized school system. Whatever else you can say
about school vouchers and other forms of school choice (such as
charter schools), they expand opportunites for parents and students
whose children are otherwise screwed. There is much research
documenting that vouchers improve
student outcomes and little that says vouchers diminish
student outcomes. Stephanie Simon, the author of
Politico‘s story about creationism and vouchers, quoted a
Brookings scholar in a piece last year
saying, “There’s no evidence that people are being harmed” via
voucher programs.
We live in a pluralistic society, one in which many different
types of people believe many different types of things. Ideally,
none of us would be forced to subsidize lifestyles, schools, or
decisions with which we disagree. Certainly it would be better to
separate school and the state, if only because as Marx, Hayek, and
anyone with half a brain understands, compulsory education tends to
reinforce the status quo and maintain the existing social order
rather than create critical thinkers.
But until we agree to get the state out of the education
business, I can’t get worked up over “hundrdeds of religious
schools” – there are about 100,000 public
schools in the country – using tax dollars to teach stupid
stuff.
Meet a typical voucher student in this 2009 Reason TV video
about the D.C. voucher program that was kneecapped by President
Obama, who sends his kids to private school:
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