As a homeschooler and a Libertarian I am engaged in the school voucher debate quite frequently. While I am not wholly against their use as a temporary measure to break the government monopoly on education (which is, by the way, one of the ten planks of communism...might want to make a note of that for future consideration), I am concerned about the wholesale implementation of such a measure.

You see, as a homeschooler, my first concern is that, with government money comes government oversight. And this is as proper as it is disquieting. You see, we ask that the government be responsible for spending our money wisely, and they can't do that if they can't answer the questions as to where the money goes.

My second concern is tied to the first: the potential for fraud (because of the potential for fraud, government oversight would be proper). Let me use a tangible example. School vouchers in Wisconsin, a state that uses them for private schools, offer about $5,000 (out of the $8,000 the state allocates) per child. As a father with three children of appropriate age, I could therefore receive up to $15,000 for the education of those children. I would, of course, need to provide proof of these expenditures, but that wouldn't be hard to do. Let me give you a real life example of an organization that did exactly that on the organizational level in the state of Wisconsin.

This organization, a well known for profit educational enterprise, started a non profit "charter school" organization within the state. Under state Open Enrollment laws, anyone in the state was eligible to participate. $3,000 remained within the student's home district, and all students registering from outside the district came with $5,000 for the district that was operating the charter school. Because this was an online charter school, no classrooms were needed.

In this scenario, the district operating the charter school retained $1,500 for teacher salaries and workspace. The nonprofit group that headed up the charter school was only responsible for providing curriculum and materials. They provided a laptop computer for each student, and a software based educational curriculum. This is where it gets fun.

You see, the computer was the school's, not the students. Because of their size, it is reasonable to assume they received a substantial discount on these computers, which would be used for multiple years of education. The laptop they planned on providing had a retail value of about $1200, and came with a 3 year warranty, so it is reasonable to assume they would be using the same computer for three years. This puts the cost of providing the computer at about $400 per year. Figuring for loss by families that left the program but failed to return the computers, let's figure it out to about $500 per year.

The curriculum they were using was available at a retail price of $600 per year. This means this organization had an initial outlay of about $1800 (probably less, with the computer discount), with an average expenditure of about $1100 per student per year. And they were receiving $3500 (the nonprofit was, of course, making NO money off of this, as they purchased the materials from the "for profit" parent organization). That's a pretty hefty markup, any way you slice it.

Now, even if I were to be reasonable and assume that part of that $2400 profit was used for other materials, there's still a HUGE gap that they never reconciled, even when pressed to do so by the state assembly (the charter was rubber stamped because of a number of state assemblymen and women who had enrolled their children in the program).

Vouchers may be a temporary solution to fix the educational system. But they bring with them long term problems, and will likely lead to bigger, rather than smaller, government. A solution that offers far more promise would be to get the government out of the business of education in the first place.