LOS ANGELES – A new “special report” from POLITICO finds that nearly $1 billion tax dollars are being used to pay student tuition at private schools, some of which are religious in nature and teach creationism instead of evolution.

The report is causing great angst among evolutionists who can’t bear the thought that taxpayer-subsidized school vouchers are being used to expose children to another theory of how the universe came into existence.

But Reason.com editor-in-chief Nick Gillespie isn’t among them.

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Gillespie writes that while he’s among the small minority of Americans who believe humans evolved with no help from God, he isn’t overly concerned that vouchers are being used to send kids to schools with a creationism-based science curriculum.

“As much as I believe in evolution, I believe even more strongly in school choice – especially for poor and underprivileged kids, who are the primary beneficiaries of the voucher programs discussed by POLITICO,” Gillespie writes.

He notes there is “much research” that shows school vouchers help “improve student outcomes and little that says vouchers diminish student outcomes.” And that matters much more to him than whether or not the schools teach some lessons that he might find objectionable.

“What else is new?” Gillespie writes. “ … Traditional public schools are never slow to teach things I find annoying (politicized environmentalism), useless (sports programs über alles), and flat-out wrong (colonial Virginians strutted about in body armor).”

He also pushes back against voucher critics and evolutionists who might contend that private religious schools are hurting students’ science abilities.

Traditional public schools “generally stink at teaching science, which explains the U.S.’s dismal rankings in global comparisons,” he writes. “According to the 2012 PISA assessments (the latest available), U.S. students ranked 23rd in science, sandwiched between Slovakia and Lithuania. You can’t blame that sad-sack showing on a handful of voucher kids at fundamentalist Bible schools.”

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Roughly 250,000 of the nation’s 55 million public school students benefit from a school voucher program.

According to Gillespie, the discomfort some Americans feel about school voucher programs is just the price of living in a pluralistic society.

“Ideally, none of us would be forced to subsidize lesson plans or schools with which we disagree – and nobody would be forced to pay for schools unless their kids were attending or they felt like making a gift,” he writes.

But until that day comes, Gillespie advises readers of POLITICO’s report to not get too “worked up over ‘hundreds of religious schools’ – compared with about 100,000 public schools in the country – using tax dollars to teach stupid stuff.

“Our outrage should be directed toward reforming an education establishment that has resolutely failed to raise math and reading scores of high school seniors at all over the past 40 years. That’s the real scandal.”

Despite our many political and religious differences, Gillespie’s position is one that most Americans should be able to support.