The latest installment of “I Beg To Differ” is thoroughly unenlightening [“Should Public Dollars Fund Private Schools?” Jan. 7, Xpress]. The two contestants don’t engage with each other’s points; talking past each other appears to be built into the format. Bill Branyon writes at length about valid separation of church and state issues, but about little else. Carl Mumpower’s 10 points about the “deterioration of our public educational system” sound like they were taken from a Heritage Foundation pamphlet about anything objectionable about public education anywhere in the U.S. Where is the verifiable evidence of failings here in Western North Carolina, particularly in Buncombe and Henderson counties?
Branyon fails to make the most important point, for which Mumpower has no answer. In North Carolina, the private schools receiving public funds at most have to provide weak or minimal evidence of achievement, curriculum or even public safety screening of staff. Public schools, whatever one thinks of standardized testing, have to provide reams of data from which the public evaluates progress or deterioration.
The high-end private schools (like Carolina Day School) provide achievement data, but unless a student from a low-income family is already receiving a scholarship there, the voucher will not magically pay for the substantial tuition. Most of the private religious schools apparently trust parents’ faith in their effectiveness without providing any public information that would support Mumpower’s position. In addition, the Republican majorities in the General Assembly are engaging in the kind of blunt social engineering that Mumpower has claimed to vigorously oppose in the past. Public education is so well established as an American institution that it would be more conservative to offer ways to improve it than to undermine and disestablish it…