The premise of Education Freedom Accounts (EFAs) is that some kids are trapped in schools that aren’t serving them, so they should be able to escape.
But the idea can’t be to facilitate the breakout by creating a dependency that lasts for years afterward.
The idea can’t be to get them to kick heroin by getting them hooked on methadone.
Honestly, my concern is less about who gets the money, and more about how long they get the money. That is, I’d say: Go ahead and give EFAs to anyone who wants them, even if they don’t really need the money. But only for two years.
Two years is more than enough time to help a kid get started on the path to being able to educate himself no matter what his situation is.
A kid who can read and calculate and think, who can organize and follow a plan to learn something, can get an education even in a crappy public school. We know this because occasionally a kid from an awful school like Newport will manage to get into a first-tier university — not because of the school, but in spite of it. It is, as mathematicians like to say, an existence proof.
(And a kid who can only read, can read about how to do all those other things.)
And that’s what the money should be used for. Not for lessons in ballet, or horse riding, or painting, or welding. Not to pay someone to teach a student particular content (and pray that he actually learns something — just like the like pay-and-pray model we use in schools).
The money should be used to help each EFA student become the kind of person who can learn whatever content he wants, whenever he wants, for the rest of his life — without having to extort money from his fellow citizens in order to do that.
And two years is long enough for parents to set up an alternative plan by making use of the rapidly increasing number of non-tax-funded education options that are available to them.
All of which is to say, it’s nice if EFAs can free some students from having to attend awful public schools. But it’s essential that EFAs can free taxpayers from having to provide blatantly unconstitutional support to those students.
Ruth Ward et Rick Ladd removenda sunt
