Twenty-five years ago, the possibility of fully validating and financially empowering parents to choose the schools their children attend was only a dream. It is my hope and belief that this dream is about to come true.
The Espinoza case now pending before the Supreme Court pertains to whether the Blaine Amendment in Montana’s state constitution can invalidate the state’s Scholarship Tax Credit on the basis of religion.
If the court rules that Blaine amendments (which were spawned in religious discrimination) can override the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the free exercise of religion will be profoundly damaged. No tax deductions or credits directly or indirectly related to any religiously affiliated organization, including colleges, could logically survive.
This case is far beyond and very different than the long-debated voucher approach. The source of voucher funding is appropriated public money, which brings constitutional and other challenges if religious schools are involved. The Scholarship Tax Credit (previously upheld in the Supreme Court), in contrast, authorizes taxpayers to claim a tax credit when they make private, voluntary contributions to charities that provide private scholarships for children.
Parents are then free to choose the school they deem best, religious or otherwise, for their child, and neither the school nor the parents have to fear intrusive government strings that come with government funding. Even the poorest child is now offered the opportunity that previously only children of wealthy parents could afford.
It is impossible to argue truthfully that the Scholarship Tax Credit is tantamount to taxpayer funding of religious education. First, the monies donated to private charities come from private individuals’ private money, not from public coffers. Second, the reduced revenue to the state as a result of any tax credits claimed is more than offset by reduced state expenditures, since the average cost of private tuition is approximately half the average cost of sending the same student to a public school.
Further, many of the private scholarships granted are only partial scholarships, with additional private dollars making up the difference. Consequently, the use of the Scholarship Tax Credit significantly reduces taxpayer burden rather than increasing it.
Scholarship Tax Credits do not fund an establishment of religion. The Blaine amendments absolutely do prohibit the free exercise thereof.
Since the first Scholarship Tax Credit legislation, identical to that which the Supreme Court now juxtaposes against Montana’s Blaine Amendment, was passed in Arizona in 1997, 17 additional states have embraced it.
The result has been that approximately one half-million scholarships have been received by K-12 children to attend the school of their parents’ choice in those states. It is the largest school choice mechanism in America.
If the 37 states with Blaine amendments are also able to adopt this approach to parental empowerment, millions of children could attend the school of their parents’ choice in the decades to come. Not only will it portend a brighter future for the children who do gain scholarships, but the resulting competitive excellence created in the system at large will also mean a brighter future for the tens of millions of who do not.
Daniel Webster said, “If we work upon marble, it will perish; if we work upon brass, time will efface it; if we rear temples, they will crumble into dust; but if we work upon immortal minds … if we impress on them with high principles, the just fear of God and love for their fellow-men, we engrave on those tablets something which no time can efface, and which will brighten and brighten to all eternity.”
So much of America’s future is at stake in this case. All of us intrinsically know that the spiritual, social, and academic principles inculcated into the hearts and minds of our children establish, more than any other mortal factor, the paradigm of the nation’s future.
Will we primarily trust often ideologically driven government bureaucracies … or parents, who love their children more than anything else on earth, to determine those principles?
It is a question of inexpressible gravity.
Trent Franks is a former U.S. congressman from Arizona and a former member of the Arizona House of Representatives. He was the author and leading proponent of the successful passage of the original Scholarship Tax Credit Bill in Arizona.
