Another Silver Bullet for Schools

by: Eric Luedtke

Tue Jul 22, 2008 at 09:18 AM EDT

In a column criticizing Barack Obama's education policy, Chicagoan Steve Chapman has claimed that anyone who opposes vouchers is an 'enemy of change' in education. Because, apparently, vouchers are the only possible reform to public schools that can be made. One more in a long list of ridiculous assertions that one idea or another is the silver bullet of education reform.

Let's deal with one of Chapman's premises first:

Per-pupil spending, adjusted for inflation, has soared in the last four decades with no visible payoff.

Four decades ago, far too many minority kids and kids living in poverty were put into 'vocational' tracks, rather than college prep tracks. Four decades ago, very few schools in the country were confronting the challenge of teaching english language learners, something standard in schools today. And, something major that Chapman neglects to mention, four decades ago most schools didn't even make a reasonable attempt to accomodate students with special needs. Meeting the moral obligation and federal mandate to provide quality special education is alone responsible for a huge uptick in education spending. As to no visible payoff, the National Assessment of Educational Progress reports that both reading and math scores have increased since the early seventies, despite increasing challenges and demographic trends. In other words, Chapman's either too lazy to back up his assertions with research, or he lied.

Back to vouchers. Pundits and politicians have this fondness for proposing silver bullets that will solve all the problems of education. Most have been complete disasters. Vouchers is one of those, an attempt to apply a radical conservative ideology to a public good. To give you an idea of what I mean: Milton Friedman, the great conservative economist who wrote Capitalism and Freedom, not only proposed school vouchers, but argued that the Civil Rights Act is not necessary because market forces will end discrimination. I'm sure Rosa Parks would have been comforted to know that if she had not sat down on that bus, the free market would have eventually solved segregation for her.

More after the fold...

Anyway, some specific points about vouchers:

1. Vouchers can not possibly help the neediest students. Why? Because private schools, unlike public schools, get to decide who they accept. This means, among other things, that a school could use voucher money and only accept rich kids, that a school could reject all special education students, or that a school could choose only the highest performers and then claim the success of those students as their own success.

2. Vouchers reduce accountability. Private schools aren't subject to the same accountability measures as public schools. In many places where vouchers have been implemented, there is a separate, less stringent, system of accountability for schools that voucher students attend.

3. Vouchers are expensive. Places that have implemented vouchers have effectively had to create two school funding streams. Think of it as a financial commitment to an entirely new school system. In other words, those who support vouchers also support large tax increases, or large budget deficits.

4. Vouchers don't work. The research on voucher programs is fiercely debated, but the most neutral observers out there pretty much agree that, for the vast majority of students, vouchers don't improve the quality of education, nor does the competition force much change in public schools. There are, of course, exceptions, individual kids for whom the opportunity to choose their school through vouchers has made a huge difference. But...

5. Vouchers are not the only way to give families a choice. School choice can be provided within the context of public schools. I've written before (a long time ago, so I won't dig it up) about the school choice programs Montgomery County has created, the Down-County Consortium, the Northeast Consortium, and the Middle School Magnet Consortium. These programs allow students to pickwhich school they want to attend, and to pick schools with specialized elective that they either have an interest in or want to pursue a career in. For example, the Parkland Middle School program in Aerospace and Robotics Engineering has given middle schoolers a chance to take extremely advanced scientific courses at a young age. And this is in a community highly impacted by poverty.

6. Finally, vouchers are unpopular. Conservatives would have you believe that the only people who oppose vouchers are the teachers unions. This simply isn't true. Every time vouchers have appeared on the ballot since 1972, they have failed. And majorities in every public opinion poll oppose them. What's more:

Four in 10 of those supporters peel away when asked if they’d support vouchers “even if it meant less money for the public schools,” as critics charge. Given that outcome, support for vouchers falls to 23 percent and opposition rises to 70 percent.

Enough said.