When discussing school choice, a phrase you hear a lot is some version of ‘the money should follow the student’ (as opposed to being allocated to a school). This is often followed by assurances that not every family will take advantage of whatever program is being proposed, so it won’t lead to the destruction of the public school system.
But trying to mix the direct funding of students with the direct funding of schools is a recipe for bankruptcy. You still have to fund the schools, so funding the students creates an additional burden to be placed on taxpayers. And experience has shown that somehow, the fewer students we ask a public school to educate, the more money that school seems to require.
Funding students directly makes sense only if you’re not funding schools directly. You have to choose one or the other.
Whatever short-term problems making this switch (from funding schools to funding students) might create, it is the only route to addressing the worst feature of the current model, which is forcing the poor to subsidize the rich.
When we’re funding a school, it’s available to any student who happens to live in the district that operates the school. So if you live in that district, and you have school-age children, you get a fantastic discount on any increases in funding to that school.
How fantastic? If you’re shouldering 1% of the cost of a district (and the figure for nearly everyone is considerably smaller than that), you’re effectively buying $100 bills for $1 each. How many would you buy at that price?
If you have a six-figure income, that purchase is being subsidized by people who are clipping coupons and skipping meals to make sure they can afford their property taxes. There’s really just one word for that: perverse.
But when we’re funding a student, we’re suddenly able to ask a question we couldn’t ask before: Does this student need funding? That is, could his parents afford to foot the bill, or a substantial part of the bill, for educating him? If the answer is yes, then they should be doing that, and not extorting handouts from people who are worse off than they are.
That is, any sane ‘money follows student’ model would include means testing.
Note that this is the approach that we take with other kinds of welfare. First, we figure out who needs help, and how much; and second, we help them by giving them money that they can use to purchase — from private providers — what they can’t afford on their own.
The current school funding model skips that crucial first step, and always will as long as we continue to confuse providing education with producing it, something we don’t do with other kinds of welfare:
When some people can’t afford housing, government doesn’t build houses for everyone. It provides housing payments to people who need them.
When some people can’t afford heat, the government doesn’t create refineries to provide heating oil for free to everyone. It provides fuel payments to people who need them.
When some people can’t afford food, the government doesn’t operate farms to provide food for free to everyone. It provides food stamps and other payments to people who need them.
And so on. Where other kinds of welfare are concerned, we seem to be clear on a couple of basic truths. First, in order to provide something to people who can’t afford it, government need not (and should not) produce that thing. Second, using taxes to provide welfare to people who don’t need it is not a sustainable long-term strategy.
Why do we forget these when it comes to education?
There’s an old saying that if voting could change anything, it would be illegal. A cynical person might say that there is something similar going on with schools: Any kind of reform that would enable people to think more clearly about schools wouldn’t be allowed by the people who run the schools — which is why we need to shift our focus from funding schools to funding students.
