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Ronald Reagan’s religious convictions were crucial to his understanding of the world and performance as president, but few scholars have provided substantive analysis of his faith and its impact on his policies during his tenure in the White House. Although the circumstances of Reagan’s life and the seeming inconsistencies between his beliefs and his practices make his faith difficult to explain, it appears to have been genuine, very meaningful to him, and essential to his political philosophy. Reagan firmly believed and often declared that God intended America to be a beacon of hope, faith, freedom, and democracy — “a city on the hill”. Reagan was deeply influenced by his godly mother, Nelle, and raised in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). Reagan’s firm belief that God had a plan for his life was fortified by his survival of an assassination attempt in March 1981. In many addresses, proclamations, letters, and private conversations, Reagan stressed his faith in God and prayer, the inspiration of the Bible, and the divinity of Jesus. Numerous leaders of the religious right were troubled by his infrequent church attendance and his wife’s interest in astrology. Although historians debate the nature of Reagan’s personal faith, they concur that he used religious rhetoric, discussed religious themes, and spoke to religious groups more than any other 20th-century president. Religion played a very important role in Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign. Reagan’s personal life was not a paragon of evangelical piety, but his worldview was strongly shaped by his understanding of biblical teaching. His faith affected many of his policies, most notably his endeavors to curb abortion, pass a school prayer amendment, secure tuition tax credits, and oppose communism.

The appropriate governmental relationship with private education has been the subject of controversy for many years. Some argue that parents should be able to choose private or public schools for their children without financial sacrifice and that the limitations on public financial support for private schools should be eliminated. Others maintain that financial support for private education is an improper use of public funds, that aiding private schools is unconstitutional, and that aid to private schools could have undesirable social consequences. Even among those who endorse some private school support, there are major disagreements over what the limits should be, what forms of aid are desirable, and what should be expected of private schools that receive public support. The policy debate concerning federal aid for private schools has shifted during recent years. Where once it focused on including requirements for program services to private school students in federal education legislation, most of the current debate centers around new types of aid arrangements which would enhance educational choice. The impetus behind this refocused policy debate is threefold. First, the federal government is funding limited services to children attending private schools. The major federal elementary and secondary education programs include provisions requiring the equitable provision of services to eligible students attending private schools. As a result, there is now an established relationship between the federal government and private schools. Second, over the past few years there has been a significant increase in concern about the quality of American public education and the effect that a virtual public monopoly over education has on educational achievement. Third, the concern that without federal assistance private schools would disappear has subsided. As shown in the Erickson contribution to this volume, the latest available figures indicate that enrollments in private schools as a percentage of total elementary and secondary school enrollments have stabilized. This paper traces the evolution of the federal role in the area of private elementary and secondary education finance and examines critical issues that relate to the possible expansion of federal funding for private education.

The idea of compassionate conservatism was presented in the 2000 presidential campaign as a major innovation in Republican Party public philosophy. To the contrary, the idea was a rebranding of ideas that had been percolating among conservatives for over twenty years. Some version of compassionate conservatism continues to reemerge in Republican party politics for electoral reasons (the desire to reach out to women and racial minorities) and because of the attachment to the idea of the conservative policy apparatus. Experience shows, however, that support for the idea is thin, because of the absence of support among a powerful, mobilized party faction. Consequently, compassionate conservatism will be characterized by continual reemergence and subsequent disappointment.

The rising cost of publicly provided social services had led many analysts to conclude that government agencies are inefficient suppliers of services, both because they do not maximize output from existing resources and because they respond only very sluggishly to changes in the level and composition of demand. These analysts often couple this diagnosis with the prescription that private nonprofit organizations should play a larger role in delivering many social services. In debates over the wisdom of this type of reform, advocates often introduce statistical evidence on the comparative performance of public and private organizations, concluding as a rule that the performance of the private providers is superior. The central theme of this chapter is that much of the performance differences between public and private providers of social services stems from differences in the regulations they face, and the resulting differences in the characteristics of the clients they serve. The evidence in support of that conclusion presented here focuses on one social service, education. The reasons are twofold: The data on the determinants of performance in that sector are of relatively high quality and the issue of governmental policy toward private sector providers of educational services is currently a topic of much public interest. But, as I intend to show, the themes developed in the context of the education sector have relevance in other sectors as well, especially as one confronts the problem of designing an appropriate set of regulatory policies. A recent, highly publicized study reported that the education offered in private high schools is of higher average quality than the education offered in public high schools. The analysis in this section demonstrates that a large part of the observed quality difference is due to differences in the composition of student bodies, and that these differences stem to a significant extent from differences in the regulations pertaining to public and private schools.