Huckabee on School Choice

Huckabee's position on school choice appears to be the latest hot issue in the debate over whether Huckabee is "conservative" on anything other than moral issues. The anti-Huckabee right has taken to claiming that he "opposes school choice." Yet Huckabee has strong backing from homeschoolers and frequently says he strongly supports a parent's right to choose their child's education. So which is it?

Before I go any farther, a personal interest disclaimer: school choice is the main issue that first got me interested in politics. I am the product of 16 years of Christian education, and I have never been enrolled in a school financed by taxpayers. My parents sacrificed a lot to give us a faith-based education, even while living in a town with extraordinarily high property taxes to finance best-in-state, gold-plated local public schools. So naturally, they complained about paying twice for education, and I started following the school choice issue before I even entered high school. An essay I wrote in college on school choice landed me my first real job, and I've continued to be active on the issue ever since. So this means a lot to me.

On the other hand, my husband is the product of 20+ years of public education, and he feels it served him quite well, while enabling his parents to still retire early even while none of their four children who all have graduate degrees have ever incurred student loans. Today he is a public school teacher, though his main motivation for teaching in public school is that it pays nearly twice as much as private school would. But he's not a member of any teacher's union, and his experience teaching in the brave new world of "Standards of Learning"-focused education (i.e. the focus of teaching is now on getting the maximum number of students to pass a standardized test) has convinced him that's not what he wants for our children.

Clearly, public education serves some people very well, like my husband and his siblings. But it leaves a lot of families in the cold: residents of bad school districts, average students (nowadays) who slide by because they'll pass the test but there aren't any resources dedicated to challenging them to achieve their true potential, and families who believe that faith should be an integral part of the education experience... and numerous other categories.

So what's the solution? "School choice" is the obvious answer, which generically means allowing families to enroll their children in the school of their choice (or homeschooling) with some form of financial assistance to do so. But not all school choice programs are created equal.

Huckabee has been critical of certain voucher programs, which is the main reason his opponents have labeled him "anti-school choice." But consider why he doesn't support these voucher programs:

• Many voucher programs don't cover the full cost of educating a child, but they require participating schools to take the voucher as the only payment. What happens then? Just like hospitals: if the government (or insurance company) mandates you take certain customers and charge them less than your cost, you have to raise the prices for everyone else to recover your loss. That really hurts the middle class families who pay their own way and usually aren't eligible for the vouchers.
  
• Voucher dollars always come with significant government regulations attached. Many private schools, particularly Christian schools, do not want to participate because the voucher program would force them to water down their religious mission, conform their curriculum and hiring requirements to the state schools, and become more like the public schools they're trying to distinguish themselves from in a myriad of ways.
  
• Vouchers are perceived as undermining local public schools, largely because so far they're always enacted in limited districts with abysmal public schools. None of these programs are extensive enough to give every child in this bad district real choice, so they become a "lottery lifeboat" for some fortunate children while leaving the vast majority in horrible schools.
  
• Huckabee doesn't come out and say this, but vouchers have a terrible history in the South. They were used by many Southern states in the 1960s to defy racial integration orders from federal courts. Coming from Arkansas, the word "voucher" has the same kind of taint as "state's rights"--a potentially-good concept that was terribly misused not so long ago.

So what's a person to do who believes in school choice but takes off the rose-colored and sees some serious problems with vouchers? Exactly what Huckabee does: embrace tax credits as a "family-empowering" alternative to vouchers. When well-designed, tax credits can provide families at all income levels with school choice without the government regulations that accompany a check issued out of taxpayer funds.

And guess what? The Cato Institute, the very same free market think tank that slams Huckabee for raising taxes to build roads (because they think everything should be privatized) agrees that tax credits are much preferable over vouchers! One of their education analysts even published a 5-part series of articles on National Review Online a few months ago making this case (I highly recommend reading all of them: 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5). So, Rush Limbaugh, NRO, and all the rest, are you going to slam the Cato Institute as "liberal" or "in bed with the NEA" for being reticent about vouchers and preferring tax credits?

No, the real answer is this: Huckabee and Cato are wary of vouchers but support school choice, including private schools. These positions are not inherently contradictory. In fact, if you really want robust school choice and minimal government meddling in private schools, tax credits are the only way to go.