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Education Priorities: Can Legislators Decide Better than Parents?

This article from the East Valley Tribune, http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/story/89390, headlined Bills aim to cut tech school aid published in the May 10, 2007 issue of the paper perfectly illustrates why Arizona needs school vouchers. The issue is education funding for vocational education in certain high schools. Some state legislators are looking to cut some vocational education funding in order to achieve budget objectives. The legislators are doing this as they prioritize various education and other spending proposals.

I have no objection to legislators cutting government spending, but this seems more a matter of deciding which programs to spend on rather than reducing overall spending. I have no particular knowledge of the value provided by the vocational education programs compared to other government education spending. However, I would suggest that this is the case with most legislators and for many taxpayers. In fact, for an individual student, the people probably best qualified to make this determination are his/her parents.

The notion that education priorities are better set in the state legislature or the state education department rather than by parents individually making decisions based on the needs of their children is obviously ridiculous. If you substitute food, health care, or clothing for education in the previous sentence, this point becomes even clearer. With voucher programs, the decisions about how to prioritize education spending on various programs would be directly made by parents of the students. Who can seriously assert that children are better off by having their parents delegate to the state legislature (or even a local school board) how education money for their children is spent rather than personally controlling the expenditures and/or hiring schools that they think best for their children?

If there are concerns about cost control in vocational schools, a voucher system will allow parents to shop for schools that will provide the best value for their children. This will encourage appropriate cost control while avoiding false economies that cause less money to be saved than the educational value lost. Private markets would establish reasonable cost/quality combinations that would provide the best value to students. The appropriate mix of education programs - college prep, vocational, or other options - would be provided based on what students and their parents preferred. This would not require any special involvement by the state government to establish funding priorities. Government decisions would be confined to just the overall spending level rather than funding particular programs.

When issues come up at the state legislature, the first instinct is often to decide what the best answer to the question at hand is. Unfortunately, this means that people have already accepted the assumption that government should be making the decision. If we really want what is best, though, we need to train ourselves to step back from the particular issues.

The first instinct of free citizens in a free society should be to ask why an issue should be decided by the state legislature in the first place instead of by voluntary, individual decisions by citizens.

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