Another objection is that $2,000 (or even the maximum voucher of $3,000) will not cover private school tuition, so the economically-disadvantaged won’t be helped. The average private school tuition in Utah is $4,000, so $3,000 will certainly help, and it will completely cover tuition in many private schools, particularly the schools that exist in lower-income areas.

Here are some numbers of interest: Total annual education spending in Utah clocks in at around $3.5 billion dollars. First-year cost of the voucher program is estimated at $9 million. Fully phased-in (after 13 years) annual cost of the voucher program is estimated (by voucher opponents) at about $70 million, which would mean that 35,000 students were taking advantage of it (out of a school-age population then of something in excess of 650,000), saving the taxpayers $262.5 million, for a net savings of about $190 million a year.

True, some of those 35,000 would be students whose parents would have sent them to private school anyway, which reduces the net savings somewhat. Total private school enrollment today is around 15,000. That number will also grow, so let’s use a number of 20,000 private school students 13 years from now. If we were to subtract out that 20,000 and project a diversion of only 15,000 students as a result of the voucher program, the savings would still be $112.5 million, or a net $42.5 million per year.

Sidebar: My recollection is that Utah has about 20,000 teachers. Those annual savings could mean more than $2,000 a year to those teachers. Alternatively, you could take the savings and hire 1,400 new teachers, reducing class sizes from 25 to 23. Per pupil expenditures would go up by $65. We’d still be last, nationally, but we’d be better off than we are now.

No doubt there will be some wealthy families that will take the $500 voucher to reduce the cost of Waterford from $13,000 a year to $12,500. Another sidebar: The argument is often made that this program will take from the poor and give to the rich, but that is obvious nonsense. The poor don’t pay taxes, particularly if they have children. The rich are already paying far more in taxes than they are ever going to be able to recoup with a $500 voucher. The program might take from the childless rich and give to the fecund rich, but the current system already does that. End sidebar. Far more numerous will be those stuck in the worst schools on the west side, who will be able to take a voucher of $3,000 and use it at a private school, increasing their range of choice and saving the rest of us money.

3. Those are the people at whom this program is aimed, those without the resources to exercise choice today. After all, if one is a millionaire, one can already send one’s children to private school if one wants to. But if one is trapped by economic status in an area of failing schools, one has few options. And the persisting gap between majority and minority achievement rates is one of the most glaring failings of the public schools. That gap would be worse were it not for a dropout rate that also impacts most heavily those of limited income.

The appeal of school choice is driving leadership at the national level to the minority community. Leading voucher proponents have included Polly Williams, Floyd Flake and Bernice Gates, leaders in their minority communities, and now the irreplaceable Howard Fuller, with his Black Alliance for Educational Opportunity.

In years past, many “liberals” recognized the advantages of school choice for minorities. Hubert Humphrey said “I favor the creation of a tax system where parents would be able to receive a tax credit when their children attend approved private schools.”

Pat Moynihan: “I do not think that the prospect of change in this area [education] is enhanced by the abandonment of pluralism and choice as liberal ideas and liberal values. If that happens it will present immense problems for a person such as myself who was deeply involved in this issue long before it was either conservative or liberal. And if it prevails only as a conservative cause, it will have been a great failure of American liberalism not to have seen the essentially liberal nature of this pluralist proposition.”

Cleveland Mayor Michael R. White (who is black, BTW): “We’ve got to stop having a knee-jerk opposition to school vouchers and charter schools… . For all the African-American officials that have come out against vouchers, you will never find my name.”

Robert B. Reich: “The only way to begin to decouple poor kids from lousy schools is to give poor kids additional resources, along with vouchers enabling them and their parents to choose how to use them.”

The Salt Lake Tribune supported school choice until a couple of years ago: “One way to [stop UEA bullying] would be to offer Utahns educational choice. Let state education subsidies accompany each child to whatever school the child happens to attend, regardless of whether that school is public, private or parochial.

“This way, UEA members will be focused on improving the schools in which they teach in order to keep children in them. This way, whatever resources come their way will be based on how well they teach, not their ability to bully.”

Democrats in Utah often argue that they are unfairly stigmatized as “liberal.” Here’s a chance for them to use a truly “liberal” issue to illustrate their case. But though Bill Orton favored school choice when he ran for governor, not a single Democrat in the legislature supported it (including Duane Bourdeaux, who sent his children to private school).

But aren’t private schools likely to be segregated? How can minority leaders and parents support that? It would be hard to find schools more segregated than Utah’s, but studies nationwide indicate that private schools are in fact more integrated, and that the behavior of their students is less racially-motivated. That is, they voluntarily mix more in lunch rooms and at recess.

And this might be a good time to address the “creaming” argument, that private schools will siphon off the best students, leaving the “dregs” for the public schools. After all, the public schools have to take everyone, and private schools can pick and choose.

Again, the facts don’t bear out this fear. While there are no doubt some “exclusive” private schools, private schools as a whole have a more diverse student body on any metric one could care to name, from race to economics to physical and mental handicaps and behavioral problems. The public school system already contracts with a number of private schools to educate students with certain mental and physical handicaps, and with certain behavioral problems. These arrangements constitute, by the way, a “voucher” program, just as the Carson Smith Scholarship program does.

Voucher opponents try to have this “creaming” argument both ways. Harvard researcher Caroline Hoxby has found that when choice is increased, academic performance goes up both for the students moving from public to private schools and for the students who remain in the public schools. Since these are aggregate numbers, she notes, some might try to argue (some in fact have) that the reason public school scores go up is not because the public schools improve, but because the worst students take advantage of choice and leave, causing the average of the remaining students to jump. Hoxby somewhat dryly notes that critics can make this “anti-creaming” argument if they want to.

4. Social tensions. My fourth reason for supporting school choice is really a derivative of the first: my belief that markets avoid social tensions in ways that politics cannot. Politics is a zero-sum game. When a decision is made politically, one side wins and one side loses. In markets, both sides win.

Translating that idea to education, consider “Investigations Math,” as implemented in Alpine School District. Some parents swear by it, others swear at it. But when the decision is made politically, one is either going to have it or not have it, and one side is going to win and the other side is going to lose. The bitterness of the battle has been prominently on display in recent years.

With school choice, both sets of parents can win. Those that want Investigations Math can have it; those that want Saxon math can have that. Tensions are lowered and civility can prevail.

The range of tension-inducing subjects is large (and growing) and frankly, I see school choice as the only way to avoid broad unrest and increasingly bitter political battles. Some of these are subject matter-related, such as mathematics and reading instruction methods; others are sex education, creationism v. evolution, drivers’ ed, the presence or absence of music (and whose music—-John Cage or Mozart?) and the arts (and which arts—-Vagina Monologues or Mark Twain Tonight?), vending machines and campus demonstrations.

Conclusion

In one sense, the majority of Utahns have had the best of both worlds for a long time. Education has been provided at taxpayer expense, and yet it has essentially been delivered by a relatively homogeneous school system closely mirroring the dominant socio-religious culture. That is less true today, and in my opinion less true than most members of that dominant socio-religious culture think.

In the final analysis, school vouchers are likely to have less of an impact than either side imagines. Right now, fewer than three percent of Utah’s school children are in private schools. The national average is 13 percent. No matter what happens, for the foreseeable future 90-plus percent of our children are going to be in the public schools. If we can use vouchers to effect some modest savings, and at the same time introduce some innovation through competition, it seems to me that we should do so, even if there is no immediate, measurable benefit to the vast majority of us.

For the children of the less fortunate, this is not a small matter.