The voucher program was handily voted down yesterday and still proponents of vouchers are not recognizing the problems in the bill, their marketing, and their entire approach to the situation. It is this lack of an ability to admit fault that caused it to be such a landslide defeat even with the pro-voucher side spending more money than the opposition. Here is a number of key points that they need to own up to.
1. Look at the areas that were the most adamantly against vouchers. It was the majority of Utah counties that don’t have a private school for sometimes hundreds of miles. In no flier or advertisement did I see any appeal to this huge group of people that in the end were shown NO REASON to vote for vouchers. I heard some say that they believed that with vouchers it would probably help build private schools in these areas, but there was no proof or plan to make this happen. By ignoring this group of people and instead focusing on a small group of people along the Wasatch front they doomed this from the start. You will rarely win a vote by asking a large group of people to pay for another group of people with no proof or plan of ever making any of that money available to them. Try sometime to pass a bill in Utah County to pay for a side road in Salt Lake County with no plans to spend any of the money in roads in Utah County. Yeh, that wouldn’t pass.
2. Failure to recognize that this is not a step in the direction of a free market education system. The voucher program is still an education subsidy the same as public schools. Jordy is a great guy, but most of his quotes point to this being about a free market system. Like I explained earlier, the vouchers are scaled like the free lunch program. The vast majority of people getting voucher money would be getting much more than they ever paid in, just like public schools. Vouchers do not allow you to spend your money how you want, in most cases it just lets you spend others money how you want. It also takes away any control the actual people paying for the majority of the vouchers had over where their money is spent. Were we to return everyone’s property tax and have them school their children with that money then you are talking a true free market in line with all of the quotes Jordy mentions. For apartment dwellers with no property tax, they would essentially get 0 money for school. Vouchers are in no way, shape or form moving closer to a free market system. It is still a redistribution of income just without many of the ways for the people getting money taken from to know where their money is going.
3. The proponents of vouchers never decided if they were pro-public schooling, or anti public schools. One ad would defend the vouchers as not hurting public schools when the next would attack public schools. People see through this as just trying to pander to get your vote. I suggest those blogging on vouchers look back at their entries and see they were doing this exact thing. If you are trying to convince someone that your program won’t hurt public schools, don’t in the next breath tear into public schools as wrong and say that you don’t believe we should have public school.
I am all for private schooling, and I hope that a better plan will be constructed for building out and giving incentives to people to build out private schools across the state. This needs to go back to the drawing board and I hope people come to grips with the problems that were inherit in the bill itself and the marketing of it. Until they do, nothing good will be done because they will just stay angry at the world not admitting that there are common sense reasons not to have voted for this. When you approach something from the perspective that everyone that voted against you is dumb then you will get yourself nowhere. Frankly, it is insulting that so many believe that the only way you could have disagreed with vouchers is if you were ignorant or believed lies. I can see the reasons people voted for vouchers and I respect them, I’m not seeing that same respect back, just a lot of name calling.
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