Utah used to have educational freedom. Parents could choose to send their kids to any school in the state, regardless of zip code. Parents were free to choose:

A) Government controlled and regulated schools (public or charter), or 

B) Non-government controlled and regulated schools (private or home-based)

Choice B involves a trade-off—government doesn’t pay for these options, but parents have the freedom to choose exactly how and what they want their children to learn, without government oversight and regulation. 

School Choice legislation, HB 215, was pushed by special interests and passed by the state legislature in 2023.  Now parents will be able to receive government money in exchange for access to their children. Instead of creating more choice, this public-private partnership will ensure an education system that is even more top-heavy than before, with the power to make choices concentrated in the hands of government, outside parties, and the state’s approved vendors and eligible providers.

Some of the synonyms for school choice are vouchers, education scholarship accounts, backpack funding (data backpacks), empowerment accounts, “funding students not systems,” “money follows the child,” “anytime, anywhere learning,” “learner validated,” “personalized learning,” “competency based education,” and “flexible learning.”

In 2022, School Choice advocates and marketers promoted HB331, the HOPE Scholarship, at the Utah State legislature. Priced at $36 million, the scholarship bill failed to pass through the Republican-controlled legislature by a 22-53 vote.

The HOPE Scholarship was supported by Allison Sorensen’s Education Opportunity for Every Child, Utah Parents United, Libertas Institute, Americans for Prosperity, and Jeb Bush’s educational equity policy organization, ExcelInEd.

In 2023, the HOPE Scholarship was rebranded by Education Opportunity for Every Child as the Utah Fits All Scholarship. At the promised $8000 per student, the price tag for the Utah Fits All Scholarship would amount to approximately $5.2 billion if made available to all Utah’s 675,000 students.

No! School Choice programs are not conservative, and here’s why:

• School Choice programs do not limit government’s reach, they only expand it into the private spheres of homes and businesses through state-funded subsidies and state-controlled regulations. Government money always comes with strings attached. There has to be accountability for any public money spent.
• School Choice programs rob Peter to pay Paul. Families with multiple children stand to directly receive much more than the taxes they directly pay into the system. This will exponentially increase the price tag of the education system overall, resulting in higher taxes and a greater taxation burden on those with fixed incomes, those without school-age children, and independent homeschoolers who do not use government schools.
• School Choice programs alter free markets for the worse. Any time more government money gets injected into a market, it forever alters that market. Take higher education as an example. As government loans and grants have become more widely available to make post-secondary degrees more accessible, the cost of colleges and universities has only skyrocketed.  School choice programs will result in a similar price spike for private school tuition, curriculum, and education service providers.
  
  Also, private schools who don’t take School Choice money because they don’t want the regulations that come with it will have a hard time competing with private schools that do, likely resulting in their inability to continue to operate.
• School Choice programs require parents to use intrusive technology to collect accountability data on families and their students. The Utah Fits All Scholarship, for instance, requires parents to use a “digital wallet” to use their scholarship subsidy.

[School choice] will not result in lowering tuition costs. And how will competition happen once the mandates follow the money? Pretty soon the private schools will look just like the public schools.

I will give you an example. Indiana’s voucher program ended up creating all kinds of regulations on the private schools that were not there before, particularly the curriculum and the testing—which drives the style of teaching.

Indiana passed the first state-wide voucher program in the U.S. about 15 years ago. According to Adam Schaeffer, Policy Analyst, Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom (a conservative think tank):

“…[T]he voucher program will not only expand state control over and homogenize participating schools by requiring adherence to a single state-designed test, evaluation, and curriculum, it will also cut into the market for non-accredited (non-voucher) schools. The likely effect is a serious loss of education freedom and diversity of options in the medium-term and a near-total loss in the long term.

“The voucher law places private schools under the supervision of the state Department of Education, making them accountable to career bureaucrats and political appointees for performance on government standards and curriculum. It is an authorization and framework of accountability to the state, rather than to parents and taxpayers directly.”

David N. Cox

States like Indiana and Louisiana that started sending government funding into K-12 private schools a decade ago are now to the point where they sanction private schools for low test scores on state-standardized tests.

While we can point to some states that haven’t gone as far as Indiana and Louisiana, the fact is that, it’s only a matter of time. This is why Hillsdale College has stayed independent. They refuse to take Pell grants or any dime of government funding.

On the flip side, private schools like BYU have taken federal grants for tuition and research, and now parents are realizing just how steeped BYU is with Critical Race Theory curriculum.

JaKell Sullivan

When you get federal dollars to make sure your teachers are properly licensed and now you’ve wrapped home and private school into the mix of government accountability…. what will the outside-the-box education options be then?

How a “market” works is the private schools that don’t take state or federal funding will be more expensive and will struggle to stay afloat. It’s the same argument I made a decade ago about traditional math. When you have 38 states all adopting the same math puritan via Common Core, how long is there a market for traditional math programs? It declines rapidly over time. That’s why American Heritage is struggling because Saxon is no longer going to publish their non-Common Core versions of their math books. They don’t have to destroy it all at once. They put the structure in place and it falls of its own accord.

Similarly, because there will now be extra kids in the publicly funded system, there is no way taxation doesn’t increase over time. That means that those who don’t take the money to homeschool initially, may get to the point where they have no options. It’s a lot like Obama care and private health insurance. You used to be able to get good catastrophic coverage as a private individual for $500 a month for a family. Enter Obamacare, it’s now around $2000. But if you sign up on the government plan, you might only pay $300. At some point, you lose the ability to go it alone and that’s by design.

Wendy Hart

Homeschoolers face the same dangers as private schools. Once people see that homeschoolers are receiving thousands of dollars of public money, they will start demanding accountability for that money. I’ve seen them do it already.

Rhonda Hair

The Carson Smith Scholarship is a perfect example of how no “favors” from government go without punishment. I saw this first-hand when I worked for a private school in which administrators decided to accept students on the Carson Smith program. The deal was that any student with an IEP from the government system was eligible for a percentage of tuition at a private school. This meant that a student who had challenges (usually caused by faulty instruction at the government school) came to take a disproportionate amount of the teachers’ efforts while providing a fraction of the payment that the parents of other students made. I was glad to be able to help the child, but some Carson Smith-endowed parents (who were not paying anything personally) came with a rather entitled attitude.

The next blow was that the student would be tested every two years, and if the problems had been solved, the child and the school would lose the scholarship.

The final insult was that in order to have any Carson Smith students, our school was required to send a staff member, at their own expense or unpaid, to attend meetings with and to be counseled by government school officials, whose attitudes and ineptitudes I found, quite frankly, to be atrocious. Perhaps some parents should hear what jokes were had at their expense over their desire to have their children attend the schools they wanted. (I was the one to whom the duty was assigned.)

Marjohna Kathryn Madsen

Tooele School District has just dropped MyTechHigh (the homeschool funding option) & guess what it came down to? The test. Too many opt outs of those who utilize MyTechHigh through Tooele district & not enough “accountability,” so they can’t guarantee every student hits the goals made by the district. The district says it’s a flawed program to just give parents the freedom to choose how they spend those funds.

One thing I’ve heard proponents of the Hope Scholarship say when concerns about the testing requirement comes up, is it’s okay because parents can just opt out. Well, here we have Exhibit A as to why that argument will backfire if too many actually choose that “freedom of choice” option.

All I ask is that people spend some time listening to legislative discussions around education. The discussion is NEVER about tax money being “your money” that you should be free to do with as you please, no strings attached. It is ALWAYS about accountability. It is ALWAYS about data so they can make “data driven decisions.” This money will not be free from accountability measures. It will remove the choice we have now.

If you want freedom, use your own money (the money you have in your pocket, not the money people are mistakenly calling your money after it’s already been given to the government, otherwise known to policy makers as “public money”). If you want other people to have opportunities, donate directly to a private school so they can provide their own scholarships without getting the government involved.

Pamela Budge