(Note: In December, Reason magazine’s editors asked several
education writers to name the reforms necessary for improving American education and to identify the biggest obstacles to these reforms. One of these experts was Andrew J. Coulson, an adjunct scholar with the Mackinac Center. Following is Coulson’s response excerpted from the original article, "Let a Thousand Choices Bloom.")
Most necessary reform: Choice is a necessary but insufficient
condition for the creation of an education marketplace. The international and
historical evidence suggests that effective education markets rely on the
interaction of parental choice, direct parental payment, minimal regulation,
vigorous competition, and the profit motive.
To best serve the public’s needs and ideals, we must not only
create an education market, we must ensure universal access to it. Some
third-party financial assistance is therefore necessary, but it must be
minimized because it impedes the market’s effectiveness by relieving parents of
direct financial responsibility. It is also important to avoid compelling
taxpayers to fund instruction that violates their convictions, in order to avoid
social tensions over the content of schooling.
One policy most effectively advances these sometimes
competing goals: a combined personal/donation tax credit. First, parents with
school-aged children not enrolled in government schools should be eligible for
credits of up to several thousand dollars, whether they are home-schooling,
sending their children to private schools, or a combination of the two. This
will allow them to spend more of their own money on their children’s education.
Second, individuals and businesses that pay for the education of someone else’s
school-aged child (whether directly or by donating to a scholarship fund) should
be eligible for a credit.
In the case of scholarship donations, the credit should have
either no cap or a very generous cap. In the case of direct payments, it should
have the same cap as the personal-use credit claimable by parents. These credits
should be non-refundable, which is to say they should never result in a net
payment from state coffers to a taxpayer. They should be applicable to state and
local income and property taxes. (The Constitution gives the federal government
no role in education.)
Biggest obstacle: The greatest barrier to reform is that,
when it comes to education, Americans have lost sight of the distinction between
means and ends. Our state-run school system is no longer recognized as just one
possible tool for pursuing universal education; it has come to be misperceived
as an ultimate goal in and of itself. The term "public education" has come to
refer to both the institution of public schooling and the ideals that the
institution is meant to advance.
In George Orwell’s 1984, the state deliberately circumscribes
its citizens’ vocabulary to impede dissenting thought. The conflation of
educational means and ends in modern America produces a similar result. Many
Americans can no longer even imagine a world in which education is delivered
other than via a government monopoly. And criticisms of state schooling are
often misconstrued or misrepresented as attacks on the idea of universal access
to good schools.
Those with a vested interest in the status quo are so
effective in scuttling reforms because they leverage this equivocation between
means and ends. If it can be eradicated, or even mitigated, it will dramatically
advance the cause of educational excellence.
Andrew J. Coulson is the director of the Center for
Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute and an adjunct scholar with the
Mackinac Center for Public Policy. This article first appeared on www.Reason.com in December 2005.