Marriage is a special bond.

It is important and unique type of relationship between a man and a woman. It’s a relationship that deserves public recognition and protection.

That is the message communicated by an overwhelming majority of South Carolina voters who supported Amendment One, the Protection of Marriage Act in 2006.

Even those who opposed the amendment, roughly one in five voters across the state, were not all looking to diminish the public importance of the relationship as much as to expand the limits of who engages in it.

There is only one other type of relationship that elicits broader support and esteem in South Carolina: the relationship between parent and child.

For those, who like myself believe “rights” emanate from our creator, the parent-child relationship is founded upon a natural right of parents to rear their sons and daughters in ways consistent with their most deeply held and cherished beliefs.

Others understand the parent-child relationship more clearly in terms of a “duty.” A parent has a special obligation to provide a child with the resources and affections the child needs to develop into an autonomous person. The parent also has special duties to other adults with whom the grown child will one day share a socially, politically and culturally complex world. These obligations are based on the fact that the family, and the parent-child relationship as part of it, is the most effective way to achieve those goals.

If South Carolinians agree the parent-child relationship is so vital — and if educators insist parental engagement is key to student achievement — why do we have laws and policies that often work often against the relationship?

On one hand, South Carolina has compulsory school attendance laws for children. On the other hand, middle and low-income parents usually only have one way to meet this legal obligation: their local neighborhood public school.

Many parents reasonably believe that the local public school cannot provide their child with the type — or quality — of instruction and curriculum they require or deserve. Often the state’s own system of assessing and ranking public schools informs this belief. These parents hold that their parental rights (or duties) are being infringed upon.

They further argue that the ability of affluent families to make a real choice about where their children attend school results in educational inequality. They understand that such inequalities run counter to many of the public purposes that inspired the creation of universal public education in South Carolina.

Critics will argue that all parents (and all taxpayers), even those without children enrolled in public schools, enjoy the public benefits resulting from free and universal education. Public support for government schools, they claim, ensures an educated population that keeps our cherished political and economic systems working. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman called these benefits “neighborhood effects.”

Critics — most often public sector unions — miss the point.

The fact is private and independent schools across South Carolina also contribute to “neighborhood effects.” They produce many critically thinking and civic-minded citizens. They often do a better job and do it for dramatically less money than public schools, which are slated to spend $11,242 in public money per child this year. Many independent schools specifically serve low-income, minority, single parent, or special needs children.

Parents who have, or who want to have, children in private schools are not arguing that they shouldn’t pay taxes to support public education.

They are, instead, looking to understand why attendance laws and taxation for public education essentially force them to send their children to government administered neighborhood schools.

If engaged parents spend their own money, or receive charitable donations, to send their children to a private school or a different public school, why doesn’t the state recognize this as a case of the parent-child relationship working in the service of a public good? Why is the state unwilling to provide these parents with some relief for making education choices for themselves, rather than leaving such choices to school administrators and bureaucrats?

I have heard no convincing answer to that question.

That is why I, like so many other parents, am willing to pay my taxes to support public education, but I am left wondering why “public education” is taken to only mean one type of “public schools.”

Randy Page is president of South Carolinians for Responsible Government and a board member of the Palmetto Family Council.

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