On Friday the Supreme Court ruled that Indiana’s school voucher program, which is the largest school voucher program in the country, is constitutional. America’s presidential candidates should waste no time realizing the significance of this, not only as an educational issue, but also as an economic one.
Nearly all of America’s 50 states are facing budget deficits. Education spending, which consumes nearly 50% of many states’ budgets, is helping drive those deficits. And much of that spending is unnecessary. Public schools overpay administrators, purchase high-tech equipment that is rarely used and offer lavish perks to their employees. Like all monopolies, the American public school system is inefficient.
That’s why private Christian schools are able to operate at roughly 60% of the cost per student that public schools do. Because private Christian schools are so much more efficient than public schools, states would save money by implementing programs that pay for children to attend these schools instead of more expensive public ones. And according to countless academic studies and syntheses combining the results of all the existing studies on the topic, even after accounting for differences in race and socioeconomic status, Christian school students outperform their public school counterparts in both academic and behavioral measures.
In other words, the United States is spending almost twice as much on education as it needs to. Were it not for the fact that nearly all Americans are used to public school dominance, any fair-minded person would question whether the nation’s leaders possess a sufficient degree of common sense.
Meanwhile, many of our nation’s private schools have closed in recent years, while others face the dire prospect of closure. Sadly many of these closures are taking place in inner cities, where so many Christian schools have made a determined effort to make a difference in their communities. The percentage of American students attending public schools — 90 percent — is at an all-time high.
It’s surprising, then, that no major presidential candidate is running on the issue of school choice. A well-thought-out school choice program that includes the participation of private schools could be an excellent way of helping balance budgets all across the land while introducing competition that would encourage public schools to become stronger and giving parents the opportunity to send their children to schools that provide an atmosphere that is more drug-free and gang-free than those offered by public schools. School choice would be good for taxpayers and parents alike.
Dr. William Jeynes is a professor of education at California State University, Long Beach and a senior fellow at the Witherspoon Institute.