Vouchers: The Cheap Way Out

In East Los Angeles, Harlem or South Side Chicago, ask a single mother with two children under age 10, who fears for their safety while going to school, if she would like to receive a $2,500 check for each child so she could send them to private school. How smart does one have to be to predict the answer? Pollsters report growing support for government-funded vouchers in inner cities where mostly Latinos and blacks go to school. For public officials, including Republican governors in Wisconsin, Ohio and California and some leaders in minority communities, these polls provide added proof that poor parents want school choice for their children.

What these leaders ignore is that such support for vouchers is another sign of the level of desperation of those left behind in core cities. What they ignore is that when voters are asked to choose or reject vouchers, time and again, in Washington, California and elsewhere, they say “no.” What they ignore are the instances of poor black, Latino and other minority parents working with staffs to achieve academic success in defiance of the stereotype of lousy inner-city schools.

Yet, critics assert often and loudly that public schools enrolling poor, largely minority students have utterly failed. Look at test scores, they say. Look at the violence in the schools. Look at the successful experimental programs in Cleveland and Milwaukee, where black parents receive state-funded vouchers. Thus, poor parents have the choice that more affluent parents have to send their children to private schools.

Such arguments are persuasive, even compelling, when one conceives of the problem of big-city schools and desperate single mothers in the narrow terms of individuals working harder to rescue themselves. But when one frames the problem in broader terms of past and present corporate and public policies creating joblessness and less tax monies, then debates over vouchers would steer a far different course. Sending checks to the poor would be seen for what it is: a perverse form of affirmative action for low-income blacks and Latinos that distracts public attention from the larger, far more expensive alternatives of reviving the economies and tax bases of inner cities to help the working poor and unemployed find better-paying, steady jobs and stronger fiscal support for public schooling.

How is advocating vouchers like affirmative action? In Milwaukee and Cleveland, school vouchers go to virtually all black and Latino parents. Public officials who cheered the University of California regents’ decision to abandon affirmative action in admissions policy, or the similar Hopwood decision for the University of Texas, often are the same officials who endorse vouchers. How ironic that opponents of affirmative action are more than willing to mail checks to minority parents to help their children escape neighborhood schools, yet turn around and reject using race or ethnicity as factors in admitting their older brothers and sisters to college.

Vouchers, supporters claim, would end the problems of big-city school bureaucracies, deteriorating facilities and uncaring teachers because single moms and underemployed parents would choose better schools, thereby injecting some much-needed competition into the school system. Left unsaid is that corporate lobbying of state and local governments for tax-abatement policies permitted large and small corporations to locate outside core cities, thus depriving minorities of good-paying jobs. Also ignored are public policies that make it more difficult for the poor to live in decent housing and obtain transportation to get to their jobs. Few champions of government-funded choice, of course, mention that vouchers, costing millions, are cheap compared with the billions required to fully fund schools serving the neediest.

In stumping for individual choice rather than collective action, voucher advocates have to paint all big-city schools with a tar brush of failure. Moreover, they say, these can never be saved. And they are right if the issue is defined in terms of rigid school bureaucracies needing a healthy dose of marketplace competition. But if the issue is broadened to include the need for public action to revive urban economies, while using available knowledge to improve ghetto schools, then solutions look very different.

Rather than debating the details of voucher plans, it would be better to focus on what can be done were the political will and financial resources committed to spurring public and corporate action in reviving core-city economies and schooling. Where that political will has been weak, federal and state judges, ruling in school-financing cases in New Jersey, Missouri and elsewhere, have ordered legislatures to step in and improve urban schools. They have mandated increased school spending consistent with the advice education experts and community activists have urged for decades. The knowledge of what to do to improve slum schools is available. It is, as it has been, expensive to make slum schools into child-saving institutions.

Invariably, courts and educators begin with full-day preschool and kindergartens for children. Court-ordered plans also include an array of health clinics and social services for poor parents and their children. They provide long-term programs to repair decaying school buildings.

Experts know what kind of education programs succeed with low-income minorities. They are small, rich in adult resources, combine medical and social services, have a cadre of energetic and determined staff working closely with equally committed parents, and take at least five years before results become evident. These are costly. Every city has its examples. Some are traditional schools in which children wear uniforms; others are non-traditional in which children call teachers by their first names. But all have been successful with poor children.

Calls for vouchers from governors and some minority leaders create the appearance of political will for funding programs that offer a few parents the chance to escape desperate situations. But “opportunity scholarships” and other voucher stand-ins are cheap means for avoiding the larger socioeconomic (and far more expensive) issues plaguing core cities and their schools. They are little more than well-heeled passengers on a yacht throwing a few life preservers to a crowd of drowning people as they sail past.