Universal Cash Deposits Will Ruin Private K-12 Like Universal Loans Did to College
America’s public education system needs reform, but the current solution proposed by Republican leaders butchers K-12’s independence and value in exchange for buying votes and attempting to lower enrollment in union-run public schools.
With American students losing two decades of progress in math and reading since 2020 and hateful identity politics running rampant, Republican leaders have begun promoting universal education savings accounts, or universal cash deposits, as a panacea for educational woes. While these funds can be spent on myriad educational items, they generally go towards private school tuition. Government handouts like this have only ever diminished the quality, increased the price, and allowed the government to control what they subsidize. School choice won’t be any different; Republicans ought to back charter schools instead.
In July of this year, Arizona passed a bill authorizing universal access to cash deposits of $6,500 per year per student outside of public K-12. Ironically, this bill coincided with conservative outrage over Biden’s universal loan forgiveness plan. While Republicans raged about how universal student loans produce spiraling tuition and declining college quality by enabling never-ending, quality-independent tuition hikes, they championed Arizona’s similar education subsidies as the salvation of K-12.
But if our nation’s long history of failed subsidies is any indication, universal cash deposits will ruin private K-12 — just like universal student loans did to college — by obliterating the incentive to rein in costs and maintain education quality. Rather than inventing subsidies that juice tuition and could be wielded to control curriculums, as was done in 1965 with the creation of cash-for-control federal K-12 funding, concerned Republicans should instead fight to reform the public school system that educates 91% of our nation’s students. This means promoting a charter, not union-run public school model and transitioning from corrupt federal funding that unions use to keep failing schools open and protect jobs at the expense of our most vulnerable students.
Private K-12 schools typically charge $2,541 less for tuition than the average public school spends per pupil ($14,891) — they keep costs down because they do not receive government funding, and can only spend what parents can afford to pay. In the aftermath of pandemic lockdowns, private K-12 already witnessed a 7 percent enrollment increase last year, leaving students facing enormous waitlists and rising tuition. Add in universal cash deposits, and tuition would skyrocket.
Even with enough seats, private schools would be incentivized to raise tuition by at least the universal cash deposit. A school with full enrollment can raise tuition by the whole cash deposit without taking an extra penny from students’ pockets — and as a result has no responsibility to spend that money wisely.
A 2016 study into educational subsidies confirms these expectations, concluding universal subsidies produce “price increases but no change in enrollment.” Even worse, every dollar of subsidies raises private school income by more than one dollar. In other words, tuition increases by more than the subsidy, leaving everyone worse off.
Economic disaster aside, universal cash deposits are likely to be used to control private schools. Though Arizona’s Republican-passed funds come with no strings attached, we would be naive to think state legislatures will remain in Republican hands forever. Democrats won’t hesitate to use these subsidies to control private schools and eliminate school choice for good, leaving parents with only government-controlled options.
It’s no coincidence our union schools began their decline in 1965, when Democrats established federal public K-12 funding in exchange for centralizing professional development for teachers and instructional materials for students (and thereby centralizing indoctrination by Department of Education bureaucrats). While federal funding tends to be roughly 7% of public K-12 budgets, this mostly goes towards low-income areas, where the funds prop up failing union schools in which test scores of poor children who receive federal support are no different from similar poor children who don’t — the money pads bureaucrats’ and unions’ numbers and budgets as low-income students are condemned to criminally terrible (and even criminal) educations.
Meanwhile, the charter schools next door provide students in poverty with the equivalent of an additional 59 days of learning in math and 44 days of learning in reading per year. Charter schools that use for-profit vendors to keep costs down get ⅓ less funding than union schools, or an average of just $9,897 per year, while having the highest classroom to administration spending ratios and longest class instruction among public schools, resulting in “more teaching and less bureaucracy.”
By shutting down union schools that consistently fail their students and allowing for more charter schools, we can revolutionize education access for vulnerable Americans while providing even more cost-effective education than private K-12. Sadly, Republican plans to subsidize private K-12 look past the successes of charter schools without heeding the story of every subsidy: compassionate reformers produce modest proposals that inevitably backfire on beneficiaries and are co-opted by the corrupt.
Instead of giving up on our public schools and bombing private K-12 with helicopter money, it’s time to double down charter schools and reduce federal and union public school control — otherwise, our party’s latest “education choice” vote-buying scheme will only destroy our private schools next.
