Let’s ask a straightforward question:
Why should we spend tax money on education?
The New Hampshire Constitution gives one possible answer:
Education is essential to the preservation of a free government.
The New Hampshire Supreme Court gave an expanded version of this answer:
Every educable child should have the opportunity to acquire the knowledge and learning necessary to participate intelligently in the political, economic, and social systems of a free government.
None of those words got in there by accident, especially the words opportunity and necessary.
First, any child who has a computer or a smartphone, and an internet connection, has the opportunity to learn anything that anyone has ever known; and has people lined up around the globe who would love to help him learn anything he wants to learn, often for free or at a nominal cost.
Giving tax-funded assistance to the parents of a child who already has these things — whether in the form of an EFA, or in the form of subsidized day care — is gratuitous, and not the sort of thing that a free government ought to be doing.
Second, if some knowledge or learning is necessary, it had better be mandatory. (If it’s not important enough to be mandatory, then it can hardly be necessary, can it?)
Giving tax-funded assistance to the parents of a child without any assurance that it will be spent on knowledge or learning that is necessary is also gratuitous, and also not the sort of thing that a free government ought to be doing.
So really, the question that we need to constantly ask where both EFAs and tax-funded schools are concerned, before spending money on something, is:
In which of the particular systems of a free government — political, economic, or social — will the student be unable to participate intelligently, if this expenditure is not made?
And if the answer is ‘none of these’, then the expenditure should not be made. Period.
That is, instead of saying,
We don’t hold schools to this standard, so we shouldn’t hold EFAs to it either,
we should say,
We should hold all tax-funded spending on education, in whatever form it might take, to this standard.