In the past few months the idea of allowing parents to receive public money to send their children to private schools has resurfaced. Discussions in the Bush administration and a tax abatement program, authorized by Epson, NH town officials, for property owners who sponsor, a high school student's private education, brought the public funding of private school education back to life. Private-school choice is now gaining new support from minority politicians, university professors, and think tank residents. Williams sees private-school choice as a way for impoverished minorities trapped in inner cities to free themselves. Sister McNamee, president of the National Catholic Educational Association, views private-school choice as a stimulant for public schools to improve.
Conservative politicians continue to see it as the right of individuals to choose their own destiny.
Thus, as private-school choice becomes a plank in everyone's platform it loses its ideological identity as a conservative issue. The argument that private-school choice is fundamentally democratic is fallacious on several counts. First, private schools are not within the economic reach of all families. Only a very few families can afford such luxury. Second, there are only 25,000-plus private schools in America attended by fewer than 10 per cent of all school age children.