Vouchers Mask Hard-Core Problems of Public Schools

Over the years, voters in California, Colorado, Oregon, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere have rejected ballot measures to give parents taxpayer money to send their children to parochial or private schools. Yet, opinion polls continue to show growing support among parents, including minorities, for this school reform. Private voucher plans sponsored by wealthy donors have mushroomed in New York, San Antonio and other cities. In one of those ironic reversals that will bring wry smiles to the faces of future historians, deeply conservative Republicans stump for African American and Latino children in the poorest U.S. cities to receive public funds so the students can attend private schools, while liberal Democrats fight tooth and nail against vouchers in defense of civic values, a traditional conservative cause.

Will vouchers as a school reform ever go away? Will small voucher experiments in a few U.S. cities change the way schools operate? Will the changes satisfy voucher promoters? Is the debate over vouchers really one over ideology or better teaching and learning?

The U.S. Supreme Court decision last month to leave intact a Milwaukee program that gives low-income parents up to $4,900 per year for private or religious schools is the latest episode in three decades of conflict over choice in public schools. Liberals first proposed vouchers in the late 1960s as a way to reform big-city schools. There were no takers then. Ever since, and especially in the 1980s, when criticism of public schools, based on declining test scores, reached a crescendo, libertarians, religious groups and mainstream Republicans have coalesced to support vouchers as a remedy for inferior schooling.

Few bureaucrats or educators in big-city districts know how to turn around schools on a scale that would substantially alter the shocking statistics of low academic performance and community poverty. In these neighborhoods, poor parents, unlike their wealthy suburban counterparts, have no choice but to send their children to the local fortress-like school. These justifiably desperate parents welcome any reform that promises to salvage their sons and daughters from a savage, predictable cycle of bent lives. Students leaving public schools for private ones, champions of vouchers contend, will jolt public schools into taking strong action to improve education or put them out of business. Competition and choice, adds the argument, will rescue the current generation of children attending inner-city schools.

Both the hopes and fears generated by vouchers have prompted changes in public schools. Virtually every state now has established curricular standards. The federal government has set national goals and proposed a national test. Almost half the states have introduced high-school tests that students must pass to graduate. More than 30 states rate the quality of their schools, wholly or in part, on the basis of test scores. More and more states--New York, New Jersey and Kentucky, for example--have provisions on the books for hostile takeovers of schools that continually produce low test scores. Since 1991, almost 30 states have authorized private and public charter schools that offer some choice to parents unsatisfied with public schools. These concerted efforts to improve education stem in large measure from the acute threat of tax monies hemorrhaging into private schools through vouchers.

Ironically, as schools set higher standards and students perform better on tests, enthusiasm for vouchers will likely shrink. Currently, one in 10 schoolchildren attend private schools, and that percentage is unlikely to exceed 15% in a decade and 20% in a quarter century. The reason is simple enough: Critics of schools, including voucher enthusiasts, underestimate the difficulties of starting new schools. They overlook the high mortality rate of start-up businesses; after all, that is what a new private school would be.

In any case, upgrading standards and creating harder-edged accountability for students and school staffs will hardly satisfy either advocates or critics of vouchers. Promoters will see any changes as piecemeal, in no way challenging the monopolistic status of public schools. Critics will fuss about the fall of the wall separating church and state, the siphoning off of funds from public schools and the transformation of schooling into a commodity. The bottom line is that the public school system in 2025 will include far more choice than exists today, but that choice will remain predominantly public.

Whether this hybrid system will be an improvement on today’s public schools, especially in big cities, is anyone’s guess. The reason is twofold. First, vouchers are no guarantee that teaching and learning will improve. No voucher advocate has articulated how giving choice to a small percentage of poor parents will stimulate public-school educators to teach better, students to learn more and both to feel a commitment to a larger community. The relationships between teaching and learning, between children and teachers and among teachers, students and the community depend far more upon who the teachers are, what they do in class and how they do it than upon parents receiving a check in the mail for their kids’ schooling. Competition prods innovation in the marketplace, but the school and teacher, with their social and civic purposes, are not mere commodities subject to variations in supply and demand.

Second, what makes so many big-city schools awful places to learn goes well beyond their doors. The voucher “solution,” which offers individual children a chance to grab the brass ring, distracts attention from the deeper social and economic inequities that are at the root of unemployment, poor housing, crime and fractured communities.

The voucher debate over the last 25 years has affected public schools, though the effects are insufficient to quiet either promoters or detractors of the idea. Piecemeal changes will continue for the next few decades as the decentralized system of U.S. schooling becomes slightly less public and more private.

Beyond the statistics is a simple fact: The debate is not about better teaching or learning; it is about ideology and getting the edge politically. Unless the social purposes of schooling, teaching and learning, and the need to have citywide or regional solutions to the deeply embedded problems of urban schools are addressed, the ideological noise level over vouchers may abate, but hard-core issues will remain largely unaddressed.