Education Advisory

[In 1986 Bob Hunter produced two articles on the topic of vouchers. In my site you should find both articles, Nov. 30/86 (below) and an earlier posting of the Dec. 03/86 article. I will be updating information on the topic and await any comments on recent advances you can contribute.]
North Shore News, Nov. 30, 1986

Bob Hunter Column: Strictly Personal

SOME READERS will be familiar with the work of West Vancouverite Tunya Audain, a founding member of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, who has been working for the past dozen years as a parent advocate, fighting the school system.
A charming lady with boundless positive energy, Tunya looks forward to a possible breakthrough in her long and so far fruitless struggle to see a voucher plan for education made available in B.C., at least, if not immediately across the rest of the country.
The idea of a vouch system isn’t particularly a left-wing or right-wing idea, although I’m sure most unionized teachers are no doubt hostile to the idea, just as the school boards themselves probably are–since vouchers would introduce an element of competition into the monopolistic public school system we have.
‘Vouchers do fit in quite nicely, though, Tunya notes, with the grassroots-is-beautiful musings of a certain garden columnist-turned-premier. Bill Vander Zalm mentioned the idea of vouchers several times during his election campaign.
Whether anything comes of it remains to be seen. Dave Barrett, after all, privately looked with favor on the voucher system back in 1973 during his brief sojourn as provincial Poo-Bah. It is hardly a new idea.
Yet it may well be one whose time has come.
In the U.S., the voucher scheme has been touted by the likes of Milton Friedman, who wrote in his 1983 book, Tyranny of The Status Quo:
“The fundamental reason for the deterioration of schooling is increasing centralization and bureaucratization … Professional educators–not parents or students–have increasingly decided what should be taught, how, by whom, and to whom. Monopoly and uniformity have replaced competition and diversity … Controls by producers have replaced control by consumers.”
He adds: “As parents have become more and more discouraged about the education of their children, support for the voucher plan has grown.” One effect would be “to give all parents greater control over their children’s schooling, similar to that which those of us in the upper-income classes now have.”
The case for vouchers has been made by rebel educator David Seeley, who writes: “Under a voucher system, instead of schools being accountable collectively through a political process, they would be accountable to each family individually, through the market process.
“Another virtue of the competitive system would be that parents would not have to remove their children from a school to make public educators notice them; the mere fact that they COULD move their children might keep school officials alert.”
The voucher concept has been applied in this country before, under the War Service Grants Act, to help returning war veterans complete their education.
If such a system were to be designed to help young people, parents could either be given a tax credit or a transfer payment could be made to the school of their choice.
Parents could therefore choose between public schools, independent schools, or they could help establish new schools of their own.
It costs roughly $3,500 a year to put a child through the public school system in B.C. The average teacher’s salary is $35,000. Some people think a voucher should be equal to the amount spent on a public school child. Others think $2,000 a year would be plenty.
The parents, in any event, could determine how they want that money spent. Options would quickly open which, right now, simply aren’t there. The meat grinder is still basically the meat grinder, despite the often heroic efforts of individual teachers.
Alternatively, parents might choose to invest in home-based computer systems and yank their kids from the public schools entirely.
As it is, you have a right to remove your kid from school so long as you arrange to teach him or her the core curriculum. The department of education can’t stop this, although officials all up and down the line discourage such a practice, since it diminishes their turf and creates what they perceive as an administrative hassle.
Which, of course, is the whole problem. It is a lot more troublesome to have to cope with individual educational desires than it is to impose a formula on a mass student body.
To which Tunya Audain says: tough!
Yet without some direct control over the ways educational funds are to be spent, individual parents will never be able to exercise anything more than the most vague degree of control over what happens in the classroom.
I like the voucher idea. It might just end the sense of alienation from schooling on the part of most parents which is almost as pervasive as the sense of helplessness you get stepping into a post office.
More on this.