A REAL REPUBLICAN EDUCATION FUNDING PLAN
By Edward C. Mosca
How about an education funding plan that gets the supreme court out of the education arena and improves the quality of education? Here it is. Every family gets a voucher of $3,500 for each child in the household who is eligible to attend preschool through high school. And the family gets to use it at the school, public or private, of its choice.
According to the latest data from the state Department of Education, there are about 230,000 students attending public and private schools from preschool through high school. That makes the cost of the plan about $805 million, which is about what the education funding system for the 2004-2005 school year costs. But instead of state funding being distributed to school districts based on historic enrollment, the funding would follow the student to the school of his or her choice.
This plan would require leaving the state property tax in place. But unless a constitutional amendment is passed overruling the tax holdings of the Claremont decisions, any education funding plan will require a broad-based tax.
For example, the cost of Rep. Fred King’s plan is approximately $900 million, but only $460 million, or little more than one-half, is funded with state taxes. The rest is paid for with local property taxes, which the supreme court has ruled is unconstitutional. The numbers for the Lynch plan are even worse, as only about one-quarter of its cost is paid for with state taxes. Which means that both the King and Lynch plans, as well as any combination of the two, would be struck down by the supreme court.
As long as we are stuck with a state property tax, why not spend it in a manner that does the most good? A voucher funding plan is the ultimate in local control. By having state funding follow the student, parents will have more meaningful educational options for their children. And this will improve the quality of education by making the system more competitive. Rather than being captives, students and parents would become consumers. As a result, the state funding that a school receives would better reflect the quality and effectiveness of its educational program.
But would a voucher funding plan pass muster under Claremont? The revenue side obviously would. Unlike the Lynch and King plans, which use local property taxes to varying degrees to pay for the cost of an adequate education, all of the cost of an adequate education would be paid for with state taxes.
With respect to the spending side, Claremont says that the state has a duty to "provide sufficient funds for each school district to furnish a constitutionally adequate education to every child" in the public schools. This voucher funding plan would provide virtually the same amount of base funding per student attending public schools as the current law, which sets the per student cost of an adequate education in 2005-2006 at $3,580.
Some on the conservative side of the political spectrum may be uncomfortable with supporting this approach on the ground that it represents an acceptance of the judicial activism of the Claremont decisions. But obviously what the supreme court had in mind when it wrote Claremont were an income tax and more centralized control of public education, not school choice. From a policy perspective, a voucher funding plan is antithetical to Claremont. And it wouldn’t foreclose a constitutional amendment or other measures to redress Claremont.
But what a voucher funding plan would do is to limit the supreme court’s ability to act as the state’s supreme school board. For example, if the court were to rule that the constitution required that reading be taught using the whole language method or that abstinence only sex education was constitutionally inadequate, parents who disagreed would be in a much better position to move their children to private schools and escape the court’s bad policy choices.
The ideal voucher funding plan would include religious schools. Unfortunately, there is a widespread belief in Concord that vouchers for religious schools are unconstitutional. They also are unpopular in Concord. A constitutional amendment that would have clarified that vouchers can be used at religious schools recently lost by a vote of 225 to 123 in the House. So, under the theory that the possibility of half a loaf is better than the probability of none, the better course, at this time, would be to leave religious schools out of any voucher funding plan.
Mr. Mosca is an attorney practicing in New Hampshire.
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Posted April 19, 2005
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