Letters to the Editor of School Choices

I wish I could say that I am in support of school choice, but I can't. When my children were growing we gave up things to send our children to a private school, and didn't ask others to help us to do this. I resent
my tax dollars being used to bail out churches that need the help because those are the ones that are going to be seeking the status of
school choice. I really think this is going against the first amendment. It was important long ago to keep church and state separate and I think we must be aware of the importance of that now. I will fight to keep my
tax dollars from supporting religion of not my choosing. The higher courts can embellish it any way they want but its still the same thing.
And the fact that most of the ones that made this terrible decision were appointed by Tommy Thompson I'm sure helped.

I agree that it is best to avoid the compelled support of religious institutions, and I find it very difficult to understand how the Wisconsin Supreme Court could have sidestepped that state's explicit prohibition against it. Fortunately, there are ways to design school choice programs which avoid this problem entirely. A good begining would be to restrict government subsidization of schooling to those families who actually need financial assistance. Where the government doesn't fund schools, the issue of compelled support by taxpayers disappears. Some families do need assistance, of course, so the next step would be to provide taxpayers with a choice: to allow or not to allow their education taxes to be used for religious schooling. This could be done in a variety of ways, such as having a checkbox on a very simple tax form. In this way, religious schooling could be subsidized by those who do not object to it, while only secular schools would be subsidized by those who prefer that restriction. (There are also approaches to subsidizing the education of low-income families without involving the tax system at all, but they require more explanation than there is room for here).

If you would like to see these thoughts elaborated, I will be writing an analysis of the Wisconsin verdict discussing the compelled support issue in the next three to four weeks, and will announce it on the "What's New" page of this website.