School choice advocates want to bankrupt public education

Preventing known terrorists from toodling into a Vermont gun shop and picking up a piece might, if you follow the thread-thin trail of dubious logic, strip a fine upstanding conservative or — perish the thought — you yourself, of life, liberty or property without due process of law!

How is not made entirely clear, but Rob Roper is here to defend, with vigor, the rights of citizens as enshrined by the Bill of Rights. (“Vermont needs to expand school choice options,” Dec. 29, 2022)

So, you can imagine my shock and surprise when he skated clean over the First Amendment’s separation of church and state on his way to declaring Vermont needs to expand its school choice options.

Let’s be very clear on what “school choice” means. School choice is the privatization of the public school system. Stowe had a brief flirtation with privatizing public schools in a bid to avoid the level funding of public education, but cooler heads prevailed. Or perhaps the paperwork was onerous. There were several avoidance schemes floating around during that period, including faux tax bills, so my recollection might be a bit hazy.

However, we do have clarity on what political conservatives envision when they use the buzz words school choice. They mean to underfund local school systems until they collapse and all that’s left standing is for-profit enterprises or unsupervised church-based indoctrination.

School choice is the mechanism by which Missouri has underfunded, hamstrung and largely dismantled its rural schools, to the point where many districts have been reduced to gross understaffing and four-day weeks. The Missouri public school system has been demolished in the name of school choice by private enterprise and conservative Christian churches.

The arguments for school choice, how it was sold in Missouri and how it is being sold here by conservatives, includes an argument for the “efficiencies” offered by privatizing education. Roper, for example, claims privatizing public schools would save every Vermonter roughly $43 per month.

For perspective, that’s going to cover about 12 gallons of gas. In my car, at 30 mpg, that’s going to get me 360 miles. So, if I have to drive my kid 20 miles a day to a partially publicly funded private school that is lining some shareholder’s pockets, I can’t even get my precious offspring there for a week out of the month before the public school system becomes a much better bang for my household buck.

That big yellow bus at the end of the driveway, hauling my kid away to a nice public school, is going to look pretty darn attractive after a year of drilling a hole in my budget to buy gas, and a twice daily 40-minute commute in good weather — an hour and a half a day in the car, back and forth, that’s a profitable use of my time.

But Roper and his ilk want to gut those public schools of resources and funnel them to private and religious organizations. We know how well privatization has served students’ tertiary education, providing them with both worthless degrees and crushing debt, yet failing to give them the employment opportunities promised by the marketing literature and hype.

What might a religious education provide?

This past summer the conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court declared that if a state funds school choice programs and allows independent (private) schools to take part, then religious schools can ask for access to public funding as well.

Roper immediately claims this is a good thing. He is clearly pleased to think Rice Memorial and Christ the King, which he characterizes as “high-achieving schools,” will be able to accept students who might not otherwise be able to afford to pay private tuition.

It may be true these schools currently have enviable outcomes, but they are also religious schools, Catholic schools to be precise. I briefly attended Christ the King in Burlington and while I assume it offered an adequate education, it also had a grizzly crucified Christ nailed to the classroom wall and prints of a man with long blonde hair dressed in the traditional robe of the Arabian Peninsula as a representation of the son of God as classroom decor.

While we might hope such a school provided a solid grounding in the scientific method, and certainly anyone who aspired to attending a university more intellectually challenging than Liberty University, a religious school does not pretend to be an open and welcoming environment for atheists, agnostics or people of competing faiths. I have rather vivid memories of being lectured on the joys of being a nun by a nun, of daily prayers and the priest benignly visiting the classroom to quiz us on doctrine.

At 8, I thought becoming a nun was romantic and aspirational. At 9, I was in a public school. Apparently, my mother did not think, despite my father’s family tree that included both nuns and priests, that I was receiving a well-rounded education.

Catholic schools, madrasahs, Christian academies: these are all extensions of a religion. You have, under the First, the right to worship (or not) as you choose, the right to send your child to the affiliated school you choose. You can homeschool your kid. You can send your kid out of state, or even to Switzerland to be finished off like an Edwardian maiden preparing to make a grand alliance.

But to say tax dollars go with you is as reasonable as saying that I, who have never had need to call on the local fire department, should, upon the sale of my unsinged house, be refunded all that I’ve paid to support the fire department. Or that since I don’t have a child in school, I shouldn’t have to pay to fund the school.

That’s not how public services and public education work.

I’m surprised Roper, who is willing to defend the Bill of Rights so vigorously when it comes to the Second Amendment doesn’t lavish equal attention on the one that comes First.

Unless he admires states like Missouri, which squanders considerable legislative time and attention on the bare arms of its female legislators while neglecting the education of its rural students.

Tamara Burke and her family were longtime residents of Stowe, leaving the Garnache-Morrison Memorial Forest as a gift to the community. She and her husband, the sheep, and a riot of golden retrievers now call Craftsbury home. She continues to work in Stowe.