“Let them eat cake.” – origin unclear, though often misattributed to Marie Antoinette

If you are looking for a product of public education in Alabama, I am your man.

I attended Woodland High School from kindergarten through 12^th grade in the ye olde days before there was an official Woodland Elementary School. Both my parents were fixtures at the school with Mom being a Woodland alumna who spent her entire full-time career as an educator there and Dad teaching nearly 30 years there before both retired.

Perhaps not surprisingly, I even married into public education. My wife, her parents, her brother and his wife all either currently teach or formerly taught in public schools.

I share all these bona fides to tell you I have real concerns about the long-term future of public education in Alabama if House Bill 129, known as the CHOOSE Act, passes.

It creates specialized accounts for parents and guardians of school-aged children where parents can access up to $7,000 of state funds annually to spend on private school tuition and fees instead of the state providing funding for the student directly to a public school.

The most obvious immediate issue is when students leave public schools and take state funding with them, it leaves less for students in the public school system. Not only is there less money to fund paying for students’ educational and extracurricular activities, but also there will be fewer students altogether.

For schools with smaller student bodies already – particularly Wadley and Woodland – losing students to private schools will make it difficult to justify keeping them open no matter how high performing they are. School consolidation seems to be an inevitable fate.

Secondly, private schools do not have to accept students they do not want to accept. It is much easier for private schools to remove or not accept children with behavioral issues or even possibly those who struggle academically.

The only real option for these kids will be to attend a public school. With a larger ratio of low-achievement and behavior-problem students in public schools, this will only further push families who are even moderately invested in having their children receive a quality education into utilizing the private option, even when their preference might be to stay in a public school.

A third issue is this scenario is likely to create a religion-based education as the only option for an effective education in many places. While private schools do not have to be associated with religion, most of the private schools in Alabama are, and I would only expect that to continue.

I realize many of you reading this may not consider more religiously based schools to be a negative development as our current cultural debates rage over how to handle transgender students, pandemic educational policies, and even school curricula and textbooks.

However, there are issues of separation of church and state involved in this when we have taxpayer money – and this is everyone’s tax money, not just families with school-aged children – going to religion-focused schools.

Should someone create a school based on a kooky new religion or develop a school whose Christian values are values in name only, would you want your tax money to go to that school?

For families who emphasize high-quality education, getting their children into the best school possible might be a top priority. Ideally, a high-performing school will allow children to reach their full academic potential while lessening the potential of negative outside influences to which we are all susceptible in youth.

Assuming this all plays out as planned and everyone’s child graduates from Vanderbilt and becomes a brain surgeon, it still leaves us with the problem of those kids who are filtered into low-quality schools.

There is little understanding from those who benefitted from high-quality education about how the less educated have difficulty functioning in a society dominated by the highly educated.

There is contempt from those with a lower quality of education toward those who received a higher-quality education and little reason to participate productively in society when they have so much ground to make up to compete with those who were better educated from an early age.

The wedge that cleaves us is hammered a little deeper. One of the main benefits of my public education – which was a good one compared to many small, rural schools – was I got to know and can relate to people from a variety of backgrounds, income brackets and intellectual levels. That may have been the biggest benefit of my public education, and I would hate for future generations to lose this experience.