I support school choice.
This support isn’t merely rhetorical. Both of my sons attended charter schools at some point in their lives because, for one reason or another, they weren’t succeeding at the schools they were zoned for and they needed a change in scenery. In my youngest son’s case, the first charter school he was enrolled in wasn’t a good fit for him, either.
Then there’s me — I was briefly expelled from the elementary school I was zoned for when I was 6 years old due to various behavioral issues. The school district chose instead to send me to a different school so I’d be out of that particular teacher’s hair.
I bring all of this up because there’s an ideological argument for school choice. Competition, channeled through the invisible hand of the free market, always produces better outcomes than the dead hand of bureaucracy and central planning — which, in my experience, isn’t worth the electronic paper it’s typed on. The problem is that, in order for a market to function, it must have the power to answer two questions:
What do you want?
What are you willing to do to get it?
There was plenty of competition in the Soviet Union. A Soviet citizen picking an automobile, for example, could, in theory, choose from Ladas, Moskvitches, Volgas, Zaporozhets, Tavrias and ZiLs, to say nothing of the Tatras and Trabants made in fellow Warsaw Pact countries. Competition, however, did not increase the availability or the quality of Soviet automobiles, because competition only provides an answer to the first question — what do you want?
Without an answer to that second question, however — what are you willing to do to get it? — it was impossible for Soviet central planners to know which kinds of cars, or even which features installed in each car, Soviet citizens desired the most.
Similarly, government-led school choice is not a market. Every option costs the same, at least to the person doing the choosing. If you truly believe the free market solves all ills, or at least solves them better than any other available option, you’ll acknowledge that the best that can be hoped for through free public schools, free charter schools and functionally free private schools paid for through scholarships and vouchers is a replication of the Soviet consumer goods market, only applied to our children’s minds.
Ideology, then, isn’t why I support school choice.
The origin of my support is considerably more pragmatic. A school can be a good school overall but, for some reason or another, not be a good school for a specific child. Maybe the child and the teacher assigned to them that year have an irreconcilable personality conflict. Maybe the child is struggling to relate with their peers.
People, including children, are complicated and don’t always interact with each other in predictable or positive ways. Being able to change which school a child is enrolled in without requiring the child’s family to move gives parents, children and teachers a way to gracefully accommodate those moments of unpredictability.
Besides, some schools just aren’t very good. Note, however, that I’m not qualifying that statement to refer solely to public, charter or private schools.
All of this brings me to the latest bit of political grandstanding about Opportunity Scholarships, in which Gov. Joe Lombardo tried to strongarm a curiously full-time part of our ostensibly part-time citizen Legislature into diverting federal COVID relief funds into private school scholarships. It didn’t work, inasmuch as “working” is defined as “giving scholarships to students,” because the attempt was neither designed nor capable of working at that level. Democrats occupy a supermajority of the Interim Finance Committee’s seats and Democrats have gone on record on several occasions opposing any attempt to add flesh to the skeleton of education reform former Gov. Brian Sandoval tried to put together nearly a decade ago.
If you define “working” as highlighting an issue that Republicans and Democrats are going to scream at each other over the next couple of election cycles, on the other hand, go ahead and unfurl that “Mission Accomplished” banner.
The basic idea behind Opportunity Scholarships is they’re supposed to give families who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford private school for their children a chance to apply for scholarships for private schools for their children. It is, conceptually, an expansion of school choice — instead of only being able to pick among public schools within the local school district or among charter schools (which are also public schools, but under different management), why not give a few lucky parents a chance to enroll their children in a private school, too?
Opportunity Scholarships are something I’d be more interested in supporting if they were actually implemented pragmatically.
Pragmatically, there’s absolutely no reason for Opportunity Scholarships to be distributed through a series of competing nonprofit scholarship grant organizations. There’s absolutely nothing to compete over — either a student is eligible to receive a scholarship or they’re not.
Instead, so-called Scholarship Grant Organizations (SGOs) are competing against each other to receive a fixed amount of tax-deductible donations. That means the students and their families aren’t the customers — they’re the product. Consequently, families are now finding themselves losing eligibility for scholarships between one year to the next because there’s no guarantee that the SGO they received their scholarship from will receive the necessary donations to continue to fund their children’s education.
Additionally, as others have noted, outsourcing government functions to nonprofits doesn’t lead to more efficient delivery of necessary services. Instead, it merely adds another, less accountable layer between the government funding the service and the recipients of the service, one with no incentive to save the government money or deliver better service. The result is rampant inefficiency, waste and, in extreme cases, graft.
Pragmatically, there was also never any reason to attach fewer strings to the money given to private schools than the money given to public schools.
When Opportunity Scholarships were created, Republicans also passed a series of school accountability measures, which led to the creation of, among other programs, Zoom Schools, Victory Schools and Read By Grade 3. Each was designed to give our government more control over how public school districts spent the money received from the state’s purse by allocating categorical funds solely to the goals outlined in each program and then requiring school districts to report back on their progress toward those goals.
Considering how difficult it’s proving to be to push pay raises through the state’s two largest school districts, even after the state poured an additional $2.25 billion into educational funding, you can perhaps understand the administrative problem Republicans were trying to solve.
Because of the administrative headaches created by the overcategorization of educational funds, Democratic lawmakers largely abolished categorical funding and replaced it with the Pupil-Centered Funding Plan in 2021. Until that happened, there were 26 categories of grant funding available for public schools, each with very specific conditions and reporting requirements — conditions and reporting requirements that Opportunity Scholarship recipients have never been required to meet.
Finally, there’s no pragmatic reason for state money to be spent on subverting the state constitution.
Yes, I’m aware that in Carson v. Makin, the Supreme Court declared it was a violation of the First Amendment, on freedom of religion grounds, for states to prohibit distribution of school vouchers to private religious schools. Consequently, there’s a strong chance that sections 9 and 10 of Article 11 of our state constitution, which both prohibit public funding of religious schools and religious institutions more generally, potentially violate the Bill of Rights as they’re currently understood.
That ruling, however, was delivered in 2022 — seven years after the creation of the Opportunity Scholarship program. If you look at the list of schools receiving Opportunity Scholarships today, the overwhelming majority of the recipients are religious schools.
As I pointed out when the Supreme Court issued its ruling, there’s no constitutional requirement for states to issue vouchers or scholarships for private schools. If Nevada’s voters don’t want their tax dollars to go to religious schools, they can very easily choose to vote for candidates who promise to abolish the Opportunity Scholarship program.
Alternatively, if Nevada’s voters have grown comfortable with public funding of sectarian education, the solution is to amend the state constitution and remove the passages prohibiting public funding of sectarian schools and causes.
There are, however, several ideological reasons to build the Opportunity Scholarship program the way it was built.
If you assume donors, not parents or students or the public at large, should be able to choose who receives an Opportunity Scholarship in any given year, it makes sense to create a small group of nonprofit organizations that each compete to meet that desire for control.
If you further assume that private entities can be categorically trusted to have the public’s best interests at heart, even when there are no conditions attached to the money they’re receiving from the government, it makes sense to give them that money without requiring them to demonstrate it’s being used to adequately educate students.
If you additionally assume public funds should be used to fund sectarian purposes and want standing in court to challenge the state’s constitutional language to the contrary, taking some government money and giving it to your church’s school should do the trick.
Ideologically, Opportunity Scholarships make sense. Pragmatically, however, the program needs a radical overhaul over how it collects and distributes its funds so Nevada’s families can trust their children’s educational needs will be met each year.
Right now, there are only two reasons I can think of why a parent would trust their child’s education to a program designed to go up in organizational, fiscal or constitutional smoke. Either the parent believes introducing unneeded risk and uncertainty to their child’s education is worth the potential political gains or they’re being sold a bill of goods.
David Colborne ran for public office twice. He is now an IT manager, the father of two sons, and a weekly opinion columnist for The Nevada Independent. You can follow him on Mastodon @DColborne@techhub.social, on Bluesky @davidcolborne.bsky.social or email him at david@colbornemmx.com.
