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Comment by Pulcinella | Hacker News Reader

Government entities use taxpayer money to fund legal action (and pretty much everything else they do) all the time. I am not a lawyer but I believe it is called “administrative law” and is completely normal. To think so otherwise is completely ahistorical and incorrect.

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"Government entities use taxpayer money..."

Individual people - government employees - decided to do this.

They decided to use taxpayer funds (that were specifically allocated for educating students) to finance legal action aimed at preventing parents from choosing which schools would receive taxpayer funding to educate their children.

In other words, government employees spent public education money on litigation designed to keep money flowing into their own pockets, rather than allowing those funds to follow students to whatever educational environment their families determined would best serve them.

There's an argument to be made that maintaining the integrity of the school district is, in fact, serving the education of the students.

Parents probably care more about the education of their children, than government employees do. I think those parents can be trusted to know what is "serving the education of the students".

And plenty of parents don't.

What are you gonna do about the ones that don't care?

Have a well-funded school system that exists no matter what to give their children at least something.

Of course it’s individual people. The political entity they work for obviously has no will of its own. It is terribly unsurprising to me that people tasked with a job by the government would do what they can to best carry out that job.

Are you scandalized when a city and the county it is in sue each other and the transportation department over who has responsibilities for what sections of road and how much money who should get rather than letting the citizens who drive on those roads decide? Where do you draw the line for what money the government decides how to spend and what money individuals should decide how to spend?

"It is terribly unsurprising to me that people tasked with a job by the government would do what they can to best carry out that job."

Right, but the government tasked school district employees with educating kids who enroll in government-run schools. The legislature explicitly created a voucher scheme, and it's unclear why school district employees would think it was their job to prevent this from happening.

Declining enrollment and pulled funding can destroy the ability of a district to carry out the mission tasked to it by the government. This is not just hypothetical. The rural, conservative school district I used to work for (and may, many like them as pointed out in the article) and the families that rely on them do not like school vouchers, even if they otherwise support everything else that politician does. If too many students unenroll and utilize school vouchers, the whole district could collapse due to lack of funding and screw over all the remaining students.

This is compounded by the fact that vouchers often pull out more funding that the government otherwise would provide to the district for that student. This is mentioned in the article as well. e.g. the state pays the district $5k a year per student, but pulls $8k a year for a student that uses a voucher.

Also, in a lot of these rural areas there are no other good options anyway besides the school district. It’s either the district, a scammy online charter school, a scammy fly-by-night charter school, or homeschooling.

"This is compounded by the fact that vouchers often pull out more funding that the government otherwise would provide to the district for that student."

Can you please help me understand the "This is compounded" part here?

In other words, a private school gets more money from a student’s voucher than a district gets from having that same student enrolled. The voucher doesn’t just move the same amount of money around. A voucher pulls more money from education funding than then enrolling a student in a public school does.

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