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As you wish, Concord (N.H.) Monitor.

Legislative proposals for school vouchers have come up again and should be shot down again. Vouchers rob public schools of badly needed money and, if the money is given to a religious institution, are unconstitutional. That hasn’t kept voucher proponents from trying.

Unconstitutional, eh? Rather than name names (i.e. Florida), the editorial staff declines to elaborate on which voucher programs have been struck down. Apparently they haven’t looked in Milwaukee, Cleveland, or Washington D.C. Or perhaps they prefer not to.

House and Senate voucher bills take different paths. The House route calls for giving $3,342, or 80 percent of a student’s allotment from the state’s education trust fund, to the parents of a child who chooses to attend a charter school, private school or public school in another district.

Since the child’s home school district would keep 20 percent of the money, the bill’s proponents argue that local schools will gain, not lose. But it doesn’t work that way. The fixed costs to run the school won’t change because a few students leave. The district will simply have to make do with less state aid, and the average cost of educating students in the district will rise.

The fixed costs per child will rise. But the money available to spend per pupil will also rise. Apparently the editorial staff seems to think the fixed costs per student will outpace the increase per student. Again, see Milwaukee and Cleveland. They’ve had vouchers for some time now, and amazingly, neither city’s public school system has suddenly turned to rubble.

The Senate bill calls for giving vouchers to public school parents whose children opt out of the system, but it calls them scholarships.

And shame on that bill for its misleading language!!!

The money for the vouchers would not come from the education trust fund but from other state sources, augmented, in theory, by contributions from companies that donate in exchange for a tax credit. But the tax credits are money the state won’t get – money other taxpayers will have to make up.

Oh, please. We’ve been here before. Goldwater weighed in on the Arizona program some time ago:

Although the state loses money when taxpayers use the credit, localities and the state save money when students who would have otherwise been educated at public expense switch to private school. The state lost $26.3 million in revenue through use of the credit in 2002. Yet the savings incurred by transferring students offset much of that loss, leaving the total revenue loss between $7.5 and $13.4 million.

As donations increase, it is likely that a greater portion of scholarships will be used by students newly transferring into private school from public school. Therefore, it is probable that future savings will fully offset the revenue loss, eventually saving taxpayers money.

Besides, if this is correct, the great state of New Hampshire’s single biggest expenditure is education. But to hear this paper tell it, this program could very well bankrupt schools across the state.

The Republican Party has made it its mission to get taxpayers to subsidize private and sectarian schools. It’s in the GOP’s 2005-06 state platform, which backs vouchers and says: "The so-called ‘Blaine Amendment’ should be repealed so as to end discrimination against religious schools."

The amendment, which was added to the constitutions of 37 states in the 1870s to prevent public money from going to parochial schools, may not have arisen from the noblest of sentiments. But it mirrors an earlier provision in the state constitution that says that "no person shall ever be compelled to pay towards the support of the schools of any sect or denomination."

The amendment does not discriminate. It separates church from state. Sectarian schools are free to educate students.

You can almost hear the Monitor kind of muttering that "noblest of sentiments" line before launching into another breathless denunciation of the voucher scholarship program. Here’s what the Monitor would rather you didn’t know about the so-called Blaine amendment.

Present in the constitutions of 37 states, the Blaine Amendments are the biggest legal barrier to school choice programs. States adopted these amendments during a wave of anti-Catholic prejudice in the late 1800’s. At the time, public schools were not secular as they are now, but taught Protestant religious doctrine. Large numbers of immigrants from non-Protestant countries such as Ireland and Italy objected to the one-sided subsidy that prevented them from sending their children to schools they had already paid for in good conscience.

State leaders rushed to adopt the restrictive Blaine Amendments to head off the possibility of programs that would subsidize Catholic education. Today, they prohibit any public voucher or scholarship program that includes religious schools, regardless of whether the programs are neutral and inclusive in nature, and regardless of the desire of any parent to choose a religious school.

Upshot: the Blaine amendments were not based on any high-minded notions of separation of church and state, but bald-faced anti-Catholic bigotry. When Blaine couldn’t get it through Congress, he made sure to get it on the state constitutions. (A Constrained Vision has more on the rather conflicted history of the Blaine Amendment.) And since the Monitor can’t be bothered to run a quick Google search, here’s more (page 4) on how the Supreme Court has ruled recently with respect to state Blaine amendments:

Not only are members of the U.S. Supreme Court showing increasing recognition that the state Blaine Amendments have a discriminatory pedigree, but the Court has decided a number of cases where it has refused to countenance states’ efforts to justify infringements on free speech/free exerciserights based on expansive interpretations of their Blaine Amendments. For example, in Widmar v. Vincent,7 the Court refused to let Missouri justify its denial of religious groups equal access to campus facilities at the University of Missouri on the basis of the Blaine Amendment and compelled support clauses in its state constitution. Similarly, in Rosenberger v. Rectors & Visitors of the University of Virginia,8 the Court refused to let Virginia justify its denial of student fee subsidies to a religious student publication on the basis of Virginia’s Blaine Amendment and compelled support language. Missouri and Virginia happen to be two states that, like Washington, have consistently interpreted their religion clauses expansively to restrict parental choice.

Bottom line: that Blaine amendment ain’t necessarily bulletproof.

The House bill purports to get around the constitution by saying that the vouchers may not provide more than an "incidental benefit"to a particular religion. But giving public money to a religious school, even if all of it truly is used for secular purposes, would free up money that could be used for religious purposes. It’s a shell game.

Voucher proponents say the scheme is legal because checks are made out to parents but delivered to the school of their choice. Parents would sign the checks over to the schools. That’s money laundering and sh

ouldn’t survive court scrutiny.

There’s just one problem: it already has survived court scrutiny. Let’s turn again to that last link. This time, page 5.

Much like their theory under the federal Establishment Clause, the opponents of parental choice programs argue that providing student assistance to families opting for a religious school for their children’s education is the equivalent of providing aid directly to the religious schools themselves. Although the Blaine Amendments were obviously designed to address direct aid to the schools themselves, which was, after all, what Catholics were requesting at the time the Blaine Amendment was created, the opponents of choice wish to extend the language to encompass money that incidentally reaches religious school coffers because parents have selected to spend their scholarships there.

The U.S. Supreme Court definitively rejected this theory under the Establishment Clause in Zelman, holding that where the scholarship program is religiously neutral, i.e., neither favoring nor disfavoring the choice of religious schools, and where the parents made a free and independent choice of a religious alternative for their children’s education, the aid is not to be treated the same as direct aid to the religious schools. Parental choice opponents hope that the state supreme courts will nonetheless adopt a broader construction of their states’ Blaine Amendments that will be more restrictive of parental choice than the federal Establishment Clause. The Institute for Justice’s counterargument is the same as under the Establishment Clause: scholarship/voucher programs aid families—not schools—and not one dime reaches a religious school but for the free and independent choice of a parent.

It feels like the Monitor wrote this in a historical vacuum, as though fifteen years worth of court cases haven’t been argued over these issues. Oh well. Moving right along…

The House scheme also raises the question of whether a check made out to a parent should be counted as income by the IRS. After all, if there are more students than there are vouchers, the lucky winners of the $3,342 checks are chosen by lottery, and lottery winnings, under the law, are taxable.

Is this some sort of joke? From the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, the definition of the word "lottery":

1 a : a drawing of lots in which prizes are distributed to the winners among persons buying a chance b : a drawing of lots used to decide something

2 : an event or affair whose outcome is or seems to be determined by chance

So let’s spell this out for the good folks at the Monitor who can’t seem to understand what is meant by "lottery"–see, they mean definition 1b, not 1a. Is that clear now?