“Whence it becomes expedient for promoting the public happiness that those persons, whom nature hath endowed with genius and virtue, should be rendered by liberal education worthy to receive, and able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens... it is better that such be sought for and educated at the common expense of all...”
Thomas Jefferson - A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge

“I contemplate with sovereign reverence the act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,‘ thus building a wall of separation between church and state.”
Thomas Jefferson - Message to the Committee of the Danbury Baptist Association

The Sage of Monticello understood it clearly: there is a necessary relationship between personal liberty and the availability of a free public education for all, regardless of wealth or social class. Knowledge needs liberty in order to thrive, and a knowledgeable public is necessary to forestall endangerments to liberty.

The recent and regrettable decision by the United States Supreme Court, to uphold a decision supporting a private school voucher program in Cleveland, Ohio, is a two-tiered assault on liberty in the United States. The first tier is the obvious First Amendment violation of the establishment clause - so artfully described by Jefferson as a “wall of separation between church and state.” The second tier is the assault on the public schools. Private school voucher programs, used most often to publicly subsidize private and usually religious-based education, severely undermine the public school system in our republic.

Entropy in the public school system is widely believed to have begun with the property-tax revolts fashionable in the 1970’s. California, with its tradition of trend-setting in all matters cultural and political, led the way with Proposition 13 in 1978. Because of public schools’ dependence on local taxation, especially when tied into property values, there have been increasingly disturbing inequalities in the system and added resistance to reform. The American Class Divide, long taboo to mention in public discourse, is reinforced and growing larger. The poor and lower-middle class children are denied the education they deserve because their schools do not easily foster achievement and success, and the better-off get the best funding, the best facilities, and the most opportunities for their future. Upward social mobility, especially achieved through quality education, was long a staple of the “American Dream”, and is now passing into near-mythical status. Lowered expectations and the hope of “just getting by” have become an acceptable replacement for this fading ideal. This is intolerable.

This defeatist mentality has long been the biggest obstacle to real reform: “Throwing money at the schools solves nothing”, “We vote for tax increases and levies, but nothing has worked”, or “It’s the bungling of administrators, teachers, and the government”, all offered as evidence that a solution must lie elsewhere, and a radical one at that. With such an enormous problem pressing for an innovative solution, it is no wonder that the Right, driven by the zeal and commitment to its agenda by dedicated activists, has stepped forward with the private school voucher idea. If the bureaucrats will not allow public school choice, voucher zealots argue, then action will be taken to put your tax dollars to work and provide a better education for our poorer children. The problem has been diagnosed correctly: our poorer citizens deserve the best education that tax dollars can obtain. The use of private school vouchers, however, is by far the most damaging of all the proposed solutions for our public school problems and to the accompanying liberties needed for a healthy body politic.

It is curious, but not too surprising, that these proponents of the voucher idea are usually slash-and-burn anti-government zealots in the Grover Norquist mold. These are the same people who feverishly call for the privatization of everything short of the armed forces. Of course, the justification offered is a long-cherished mantra of the Right: schools should only be the province of the local government, and completely at their mercy for funding. Conservatives have long been pining for the abolition of the Department of Education, and failing to succeed in that mission, have done quite well now with the voucher idea. Now, with the courtesy of a compliant and reckless Supreme Court, voucher programs have unprecedented momentum to acquire acceptance in the mainstream, and all but render constitutional arguments against them moot.

Voucher advocates know what they are doing. They are confident that the public is unwavering in its faith in the ideal that a quality education should be universally attainable. Americans generally agree that a formal education is a requirement for material success. The proponents of vouchers expect to achieve their goals by appealing to the public’s sense of fairness, and by playing to our tradition of equal opportunity for all.

It is questionable that their motives are entirely benevolent towards the disadvantaged. If they are, it is a fine and effective Trojan Horse for their real goal of complete separation of federal involvement in the public schools, if not a complete dismantling of them.

There is also a question of how effective the vouchers are in bringing equity to education. If constitutional arguments against vouchers have been rendered useless in the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision, there is still the simple matter of practicality when vouchers are used. Just how much more in taxes will this cost the citizens in areas with voucher programs? Will they have the same options to vote against funding at the polls, by initiative? Can they vote down the voucher programs completely, achieving with democracy what the Supreme Court denied? With the issue of school vouchers, religion and politics do indeed make “strange bedfellows”. There has been an uneasy and very faint alliance of traditional civil libertarians from the Left, and the likes of none other than Pat Robertson on the far Right. Of course, the opposition to vouchers by most on the Christian Right avoids a constitutional tack, and goes straight for religious bigotry - they do not want their taxes to fund the education of poor Muslim students, or of any faith other than their own. This fear of theirs is especially pungent in America’s current climate regarding Muslims.

But most importantly, how does the possibility of more voucher programs being enacted bode for our personal liberties? Jefferson’s wall of separation works precisely because it guarantees the freedom of the conscience to worship or not worship as it sees fit. It guarantees that no American will be held in unequal regard because they do not worship the god of the majority. The wall works because it is good for the health of the government, good for the health of the people’s chosen church, and good for the health of the people who choose not to belong to a church at all. It is unfortunate that some proponents of vouchers choose to advocate them as a reaction to what they view as a hostile, secular public school system. Long lamenting the “removal of god” from our schools forty years ago, they stubbornly cling to their denial of the necessity of public education being secular, and therefore seek remedies with the utmost antagonism towards liberty. By undermining public schools, they still leave thousands of poor students in the lurch, their minds not reached, their dreams of success stillborn. The vicious cycle continues - the poorer a public school performs, the easier the justification to destroy it becomes. Defenders of public schools will be painted as apologists for bureaucrats, the teachers’ unions, and all manner of ungodliness.

The best way to defeat the increasing tyranny of private school voucher programs is to promote and strengthen public education. That is correct: throwing money at the problem. It is time to get past the usual objections, and acknowledge that top-heavy distribution of funds and horribly disproportionate local tax funding DO fail. None of those admissions of failure change the fact that not enough funding is provided. It works for the Pentagon. It can work for the schools. Similar enthusiasm for the funding and support of our schools is desperately needed. Justification for funding the military is based on maintaining the protection of our freedom. We must see our schools, too, as protectors of freedom. If our schools are seen any other way, what freedoms will there be left for our vaunted military to defend?

Laurin Suiter is a public high school social studies teacher in the state of Washington, re-entering the profession this Fall after four years of work in the private sector.

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