The Idea of an Essay, Volume 4

134 The Idea of an Essay: Volume 4 Turning now to the issue of finances in the voucher system, I believe the AFT is simply wrong on their claim that free choice is not cost-effective. Any system that is poorly implemented, as has been the case with their highlighted examples, runs the risk of being a financial woe. When free choice is properly implemented, however, the results are fiscally beneficial to both the individual and the state. A work done by Dr. John Merrifield and Dr. Michael R. Ford (2015) showed that adjustments as simple as eliminating waste and expanding participation in the Milwaukee voucher system has led to over 4 billion dollars in state savings and $200 more in per pupil funding. Additionally, even when vouchers don’t cover the full cost of tuition, people still tend to sign up for them. In Washington D.C., during 1997, vouchers only covered $1700 of a $4000 private school tuition (Cordell, 1998). Regardless of this, even low-income families took advantage of the opportunity to remove their children from failing schools in order to send them to more than 70 different schools that offered better education (Cordell, 1998). Milton Friedman (1975) showed that free choice was economically viable for three reasons. First, funding for public schools only benefits those parents who send their children there, but parents who send their children to private schools are essentially paying twice for education via taxes for public schools and tuition for private schools. Changing this method of payment to a free choice-based system eliminates this inequality. Second, opening the schools up to the free market would drive down the cost of tuition since there is no longer a need to compete against the government (an objective that has a historically poor win-loss ratio). Finally, as shown earlier, many parents are willing to accept a temporarily higher cost of education for the purpose of securing a better education for their children (Friedman, 1975). The facts show that free choice in education is financially viable and offers a better way of controlling fraud. The Academic Impact of Free Choice Education The NEA and AFT have made it very clear that they do not support vouchers not only for financial reasons but also for academic reasons. They postulate that either free choice fails to increase the academic successes of students, or it ends up actually hurting the academic results of students. The NEA cites a study done by the