I want to talk plainly about money, because the people who oppose school choice never do. The Legislature has set aside about a billion dollars of public money a year to help families pay for private tuition and home schooling. That is a great deal of money. I am proud of every dollar of it.
Here is something the critics would call a scandal. I expect a good share of that money will go to families whose children were already in private school. They were paying the tuition before, and now they will get help with it. I cannot see the outrage in that. Those families made the right choice years ago, on their own dime. It seems to me a state ought to reward the people who were right first.
My father kept three horses, and the best saddle always went on the best horse. He was not being unfair to the other two. He was putting his money where it would do the most good. Nobody stood in the barn and complained that the lame mare deserved the new saddle more. A lame mare is not improved by leather.
I suppose the money has to come from somewhere, and I suppose somewhere is the public school down the road. I will not argue it. I will grant that the school my neighbors’ children attend will have a little less to work with. But public schools have always had a little less to work with. That is practically their tradition. They are good at making do, and I see no reason to take that skill away from them now.
I will make another admission, since we are being honest. I do not know how the money will be tracked, and I have not asked. When you send a check to a family you trust, you do not follow it to the bank. You trust them, and they trust you, and that trust is the whole arrangement. The families receiving this money are the kind of families I trust. They go to my church. They shop where I shop. Their children wave at me in the parking lot.
There is a word for spending public money on people you already know and like, and the critics have a mean version of it. I prefer the kinder word, which is community. A community looks after its own. It always has. The ones who are not its own have a school of their own, paid for by all of us, and they are welcome to it.
Some will say I have described a system that helps the people who need help least. I would put it another way. I have described a system that helps the people who will use it best. Those are not the same thing, and I think the difference matters.
That is why I am voting for the Republican for Senate this fall. As I understand it, the other side wants that money sent back to the public schools, and I would hate to see it taken from the families who are already using it so well.
It is a lot of money. I am glad it went to people like us.
D. M.