Clark Neily, senior attorney with the Institute for Justice, presented his case at the Levin College of Law on Sept. 29, for why the public school system should incorporate vouchers to permit parents more latitude in school choice. Neily’s presentation was followed by commentary from UF Law professor Lyrissa Lidsky.

“The unifying theme for all of this...is basically the idea that the government should stay out of people’s lives as much as possible and people should have as much of a choice in how they go about their lives as they can,” Neily explained.

Lidsky spoke both as a scholar and as a parent of school-aged children and explained that the origins of school vouchers and school choice emerged in the Southern states post-civil rights movement as a means to hinder desegregation, functioning even in the 1990s as a mechanism for “white flight.”

Neily said that at present, however, school vouchers stand for “nothing more than the idea that every parent, regardless of their means, should have the ability to have some measure of choice of which school their child attends.”

He also hopes that a voucher system could bridge the divide among economic classes.

“There’s no other issue that more profoundly divides the haves and have-nots in our country than school choice,” he said.

The two main methods of achieving school choice currently are moving to a district with a reputation for quality schools, or withdrawing entirely from the public school system by enrolling children in private school. Neily said that both of these methods are more readily available to wealthy parents, and thereby place lower-income parents and their children at a disadvantage.

Neily also sought to dispel the notion that the public school system inadequately funded, but instead portrayed public schools as in constant search of superfluous funding.

“No matter what guise you put it in…any proposal you hear from the public school establishment comes down to more money,” he said. Federally-funded programs such as No Child Left Behind have provided channels through which public schools may receive funds, but Neily calls such programs “wildly unconstitutional” and “wildly ineffective.”

Vouchers have been challenged in many states as violating The Establishment Clause of the United States Constitution, as well as conflicting with state statutes barring government finances from being paid to religious organizations, since many of the private schools that parents choose are affiliated with a particular faith. Neily cited a 2002 case, Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, in which the Supreme Court “tossed out the establishment [clause] challenge.”

Lidsky agreed with Neily that “something has to be done” about public schools, but warned that “the devil is in the details with the voucher program.” She went on to predict that if vouchers became more widespread than they currently are, the entire public school system may be at risk of collapse and schools with stellar reputations that achieve such status by excluding some students, would suffer a drop in their high-performing status if they were given less freedom to deny enrollment to some students.

Neily concluded the question and answer session by remarking that “our public school system can be likened to The Titanic: it’s sinking,” then added diplomatically that “reasonable people can differ about how to address the issues we have in public schools. I don’t think that reasonable people can disagree that we have a crisis.”