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| Image from The Center for Education Reform |
Which on its face is ridiculous. When given the option black parents have voted with their feet - sending their children to the schools of their choice outside of their neighborhood. And their children have for the most part been thriving. I am therefore pleased to report the following from JNS:
In 2021, 19 states enacted 32 new or expanded educational choice programs, according to Bedrick. (Jason Bedrick, is an education policy research fellow at the Heritage Foundation) That number not only overshadowed prior years, but the programs were larger in scope. West Virginia passed the first publicly funded, universal education savings account program that year.
What this means for Jewish education is incalculable. It is no secret that the conundrum of unbearable and increasingly high tuition combined with increasing cost of providing a quality education in both religious and secular studies - and the lack of sufficient funding to do that is a problem that keeps getting worse every year. Parents are ‘taxed’ to the hilt by these tuitions which are based on the cost per child to educate them. For typical Orthodox Jewish parents that have 4 or 5 children (or more) full tuition might exceed their pre-tax income! There is no way the typical parent can afford that.
Schools therefore provide substantial financial assistance based on need. Making up the budgetary shortfall is rarely achieved. There is just so much money they can raise. And the gap between what parents can afford to pay and what a school needs to provide a top notch education keeps widening every year.
School choice can go a long way towards alleviating this problem. It will allow parents the choice to send their children to a religious school in part - with funds provided by the government. Thus reducing their tuition burden and the schools fundraising burden,
Some will argue that school choice as it pertains to religious schools violates the seperation clause of the First Amendment. But if I understand correctly vouchers that enable choice will cover only the secular curriculum. Which is (or should be) substantially equivalent to what public schools teach.
Ahh… but the naysayers will claim that even the secular side of religious school cannot escape religious bias. Thus still making it a church-state issue. But I would dispute that. Core subjects like English, math, and science have no religious elements to them. There is nothing religious about algebra, geometry, chemistry, physics, and biology.
The typical counter to that is in teaching the Theory of Evolution as the origin of species. I see no problem with teaching that. The students will be well grounded in the religious perspective on that theory during the religious studies portion of the day. The part of day that will not be financed by vouchers.
And then there is the flip side of this that makes school choice even more important. The indoctrination of cultural values that are not in concert with the values of religious parents. As noted by the following:
(Jason Bedrick ) told JNS that 2021 was a big year for school choice because during the COVID pandemic, parents got the chance to see on Zoom what their children were learning on a daily basis. Depending on the age of students, that might have included instruction related to critical race theory or Black Lives Matter; transgender policies governing bathroom use; and “social transitioning,” or using different names and pronouns for children without informing their parents.
That teachers unions have been against school choice only means they believe teachers will somehow be negatively affected. A lot of public school jobs will be eliminated – since more children will be attending private and parochial schools.
But that tells me that these unions are more concerned about the teachers than they are about the children they are supposed to educate.
Furthermore, I don’t think that a massive loss of teaching jobs will necessarily be the result of a school choice policy anyway. The number of children that need to be educated will remain the same. Requiring the same number of teachers. The only difference being that they will also be teaching in private and parochial schools instead of only in public schools. Their pay and benefits might not be the same. But they will not starve. And the better teachers might be paid more.
Private sector market forces will come into play rather than union determined pay scales not necessarily based on merit. It might even weed out the incompetent teachers currently protected by the union. At the end of the day there will be no great loss of jobs for truly qualified teachers. And the real winners will be parents and their children. Happy to see that many states are now seeing the wisdom in all that.
I am not surprised to see Agudah on board with this. I just hope they realize that parents that send their children to the schools they are fighting NYSED for would not be eligible for this policy at all.
