Whose Money Follows The Child?
"Let the money follow the child," say choicers repeatedly, but the more honest plea would be "Let your money follow my child."
But that's not how they present it. Take this quote from today's Washington Post piece:
“It’s the parents’ money to use as they see is best,” said Brian Hickey, executive director of the Catholic Conference of Ohio. “We don’t necessarily see it as taxpayer money.”
Or the other framing one encounters on the interwebs-- the "I just want to use my money to educate my child as I see fit" version. Corey DeAngelis, choice evangelist, argued in a speech that all families should be able to take "their dollars" to the school they choose.
Except this is bunk. Let's take me as an example. I have two children in school. I pay roughly $1,000 a year in real estate tax. If you give me my $1,000 back, can I educate my boys with that money? Nope. There is no voucher state in which my money would not have to be supplemented with the tax dollars of my neighbors.
I've heard the counterargument-- the voucher represents a return on my real estate tax dollars over my entire lifetime. Let's check that math. I have a grand total of four children, and in my younger years I lived in places that carried a far lower tax burden, but let's pretend it has always been about $1,000. So let's assume that I pay $1,000/year for 55 years, for a grand total of $55,000. Would that cover 13 years of annual vouchers for 4 children? No, that would be about a little over $1,000/year.
But hey-- I'm a guy living in a small town area that is technically part of Appalachia, where we have the kind of housing prices that the rest of you only dream of (seriously--if you have a small town bone in your body, you should move here). What if we checked other parts of the country?
Well, in North Carolina the average real estate ballpark tax bill is about $1,663. So that's not going to work much better.
In Texas the average property tax rate is 1.80%, so if you have a $350K house, you'd pay $6,300. That gets us closer to voucher money-- as long as you don't have too many kids. Of course that's an average, so some folks in less pricey housing would be paying way less. In Bandera County, a $150K house would yield $1,755 in real estate tax money.
We could run numbers for a variety of locations, or we could make a common sense observation-- if the real estate tax money from parents was sufficient to fund the public school system, we wouldn't need to tax any non-parents, which is a point I fully expect non-parental taxpayers to bring up in voucher states in the not-too-distant future.
If this is just giving the parents back their own tax payments, then do non-parents get a real estate tax exemption? Once my kid graduates from high school, do I get to stop paying taxes? Are tax-paying parents given a limit to the number of children they actually get credit for? Where do the taxes paid on business real estate go in all this?
The suggestion that vouchers are simply a means of giving parents back their own money to spend on education as they see fit--that's absurd. Our entire public education system is funded on the theory that everyone in the country benefits from sharing space with educated co-workers, neighbors, and pretty much everyone else we have to deal with. Everyone shares the cost.
It's odd that so much of the voucher crowd is also the "taxation is theft" crowd, because voucher funding requires the voucher holders to take tax dollars from their neighbors while stripping those neighbors of any say in the kind of education those dollars will be spent on. That includes spending my neighbor's tax dollars on a school that would forbit, bar, eject, and demonize those neighbors and their children.
Your money should follow my child.
"Just give us back our tax money, and I'll get my kids the education I want and everyone else can get the kind of education they want," is top-grade bullshit. The only people who it even sort of works for is the folks living in very expensive houses. For everyone else, the end result is some kind of lower tier cheap crappy school--or getting your neighbors to chip in.
Your money should follow my child.
Or maybe we could pool all our money and set up a system to take care of all the children.
As a thought experiment that extends the voucher/privatization logic, suppose all of the school taxes were eliminated & replaced by a student loan program. We are already close to that in higher ed and can see who would be on board.
The politicians would be thrilled to hand out the tax cuts while creating profit opportunities for lenders and loan servicers. School operators would be able to freely adjust tuition to capture their preferred market and ROI. Note that ROI is not necessarily $ but could be numbers of disciples or indoctrinated minds.
With parents on the hook for repayment (along with students) they’ll be far more engaged. There’s motivation to ensure the school delivers good value for the $ and that their kids fully participate & don’t check out. It’s human nature to appreciate something you paid for vs something free. Teachers benefit from engaged students & spend less energy on those who just don’t want to be there.
Of course, as we learned during the pandemic, the daycare function of schools is probably even more important to parents than the education. That’s another business opportunity - low cost, no frills warehousing of kids with no interest in education & parents unwilling to invest in their learning.
Just to be clear, I’m not advocating this. Here is the real thought to chew on: in China, they have as many students just in their top 10% as we have in total.
I think that this is a big part of why that slogan of "getting your tax money back" hasn't been used in Florida, where vouchers are being very aggressively pushed. It's much more about, "empowering parents' choice" (at least in the political communication I've seen).
Also, I wouldn't think that reminding people of whose money is going toward vouchers would be a very effective way to push against them, because many of the people who this message might resonate with are going to be equally frustrated with their money going toward funding public school programs that they disagree with.