Skip to main content
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.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Enforce Georgia’s Election Laws in Senate Run-off Elections

There has been a lot of talk about people moving to Georgia to vote in the run-off election for the two US Senate races. Leftists are urging people to move to Georgia, register to vote there, cast votes for the Democrats, and then move back home. Republicans have been wringingtheir hands over this and contemplating whether they should fight fire with fire and consider doing the same thing even though it is illegal. While I am pleased that some Republicans are willing to fight hard against Democrat election stealing, most are simply wringing their hands in ignorance. The Georgia Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, has already suspended voter registration until after the run-off election for people moving into the state. I learned this by calling the Election Department of the Georgia Secretary of State Office. This should mostly take care of the problem of out of state voters moving in to affect the results of the run-off election. However, Georgia law only allows people register...

Trump Re-election Accountability Project: List of Legislators Who Can Vote for Trump Electors

These Republican legislators in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia hold the power to push the Trump/Pence ticket over the top. These states have Republican majorities in both houses of their legislatures. Their election procedures and integrity of their elections are in question. It appears that substantial Democrat corruption has provided enough illegal votes or suppressed enough Trump votes to give the appearance of a Biden victory. Legislatures have the power to choose the electors and should do so in these cases. If courts require evidence that was destroyed by the Democrats in order to correct the results, they might not act. Legislatures do not need that standard of evidence. Even if they just think there was corruption based on their experience as legislators and citizens, they are empowered to act. This is a safeguard against clever criminals who cover their tracks well. It will require almost all of the Republican legislators in these states to convene the...