Empty Promises on School Vouchers
But those promises were empty — so empty that the U.S. Department of Education actually sat silently on the study results while Congress debated the voucher program. It knew the results even back in the fall, while the Bush administration was still in charge. But apparently nobody in either the previous or the current administration thought the results were important enough for the public to know them until after it was too late.
Perhaps most frustrating, while voucher advocates have all the empirical evidence on their side in D.C., there is one weapon they don’t have that the advocates of all other voucher programs in the U.S. do. They don’t have a program that can credibly promise to improve performance in the government school monopoly.
Everywhere else in the country, vouchers improve public schools. That’s what the new results in Milwaukee found. That’s what 17 out of the 18 empirical studies on the question (including the new one in Milwaukee) have found — vouchers always improve public schools.
Except in Washington D.C., which is where that 18th study was conducted. In D.C., the voucher program was found to make no difference in public school outcomes.
Why? Because in order to get the program enacted, its sponsors had to design it so that that voucher success poses no systematic competitive threat to the government school monopoly, as it does in every other voucher program. The funding for the vouchers is appropriated separately from public school funding, and when students leave public schools with vouchers, a “hold harmless” clause kicks in and ensures that total public school funding doesn’t go down.
That means, on a per-student basis, the public schools are actually better off financially when students leave. So there’s no market pressure to improve performance and keep students.
That’s why the people who should be most embarrassed by the new study results in D.C., the teachers’ unions and patronage bureaucrats who have done so much to destroy the city’s public schools, aren’t worried. Vouchers, no vouchers — they win either way.
The real resistance to the D.C. voucher program is coming not from the local public schools, who aren’t much affected by the program, but from out-of-town politicians on Capitol Hill. The members of Congress threatening the program don’t care about what happens in D.C., but they do care how the city’s highly visible voucher program affects the issue in their home states.
The rest of the country is watching. If the politicians in Congress prove that they can get away with destroying the lives of 1,700 children while suppressing vital information showing that the program works, all in order to please their home-state unions, that sends a message to fifty statehouses. Conversely, if the word gets out about what’s happening and the program is restored, that sends the opposite message.
The D.C. program would be in danger now even if it didn’t have the unique problem of the “hold harmless” provision. But it wouldn’t be in as much danger, because then its advocates could have pointed to the prospect of improved public schools, but as things are, they can’t.
There’s a lesson here for the voucher movement nationwide. For twenty years, we’ve compromised our best vision of school choice in order to get programs enacted. We’ve accepted programs that are limited to small numbers of children, as in Milwaukee, instead of being open to all. We’ve accepted the “hold harmless” provision in D.C.
And those compromises may have been worth making, since they gave vouchers the opportunity to prove themselves in the real world. And prove themselves they have, as the evidence shows. We wouldn’t have this large body of consistently positive empirical evidence to point to if we didn’t have any voucher programs.
But now, the “demonstration” value of these narrowly limited, compromised programs has pretty much already been realized. Now, we’re starting to really see what people like Milton Friedman always warned about — that limited school choice is much more difficult to sustain in the long term, because it doesn’t produce as many benefits and it doesn’t distribute the benefits as widely. That’s important food for thought as the movement looks at its plans for the coming years.
This is a really simple issue. The Democrats, frankly, are racists on this one, though no one will call them on it. Barack Obama sends his girls to a pricey private school, but takes steps to make certain that those who can’t afford the $30K/year tuition don’t have the same opportunity. Some of his supporters actually call those who support vouchers racist, usually because of the devastation they’d supposedly inflict on the public school system and its teacher contingent, which is heavily minority. Interestingly, Ariana Huffington, last I heard, sends her kids to private school also, but advocates that those who can’t afford it should be forced to send their kids to public schools, even when the schools are failing. The whole thing is ridiculous, and incredibly hypocritical.
This is obscene. But the democrats can get away with it. They are doing the same thing in Colorado. Their governor and their party was wildly off in budget forecasting, and currently in the process of cutting budgets by about 61% for higher education. This is catastrophic. It means the higher ed system in Colorado will be sent back to the dark ages. Republicans in the state have offered reasonable solutions, but the democrats don’t want to go there for the same reason the national party can get away with this:
Democrats count on certain demographics voting for them no matter what. Academics and poor blacks will always vote for them, so why not hurt those demographics? Now it is unlikely that conservatives can make any immediate gains with academia (although one of my leftist colleagues frankly admitted the Republicans had better plans). PJ Media can send Joe the Plumber abroad. Why can’t you guys get some video of the families being hurt by this hypocrisy? They are out there and more than willing to talk. Make some good, fact based videos with the appropriate tear jerk interviews, and some great cuts of the children affected by this, and then make those videos viral. Market em to the Republicans for 2010. Minorities are open to thinking outside the box in this one. I know- I was a poor minority most of my life. Hispanics are especially open on these issues, but most blacks I have talked to are too. Get on it- Speak Truth to Power, as the cliche goes.
Silly you. Panic! The study mentions a number of times other factors that have gone into public school improvements. From the pages of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel you can find deeper more unbiased analysis. Many parties in the study are pro-voucher advocates. The odd racial comments here demonstrate either guilt for your own biases or an excuse to utter mindless rhetoric.
Not that I’m promoting my blog, but I have been writing about this for the last few years.
Do a search of my blog for “vouchers,” and all the relevant study details will come up. Yes my own comments are in there too, but are separate. Basically, schools have been improving anyway, regardless of competition, and the study researchers have said in the analysis, that no conclusion is certain.
As for the little problems most voucher advocates ignore, like for profit education and future escalating tuitions, good schools bad schools, no accountability and better students with concerned parents leaving the public schools for private, I would have to say the jury is still out.
Check out information, and the recommended educational blogs at my site that have also been following this on a more professional level.
http://democurmudgeon.blogspot.com
Teacher’s unions, large campaign contributors, are against vouchers; therefore, the Democrat Party is against vouchers. I wonder how many in Congress send their children to public schools.
Arroyo: answer: zero.
The parents who need the vouchers for their kids vote Democrats. Democrats are bad for my kids, but they promise my kids welfare payments when they can’t get a job dropping out from the public schools. They look after us when my husband lost his job. His factory closed, the employer couldn’t afford the union demands. But we are alright, we are getting our welfare checks on time.
The accountability lies with the parents and their ability to chose whichever school they will send their children to. If one of the voucher schools isn’t performing, the parents are in the position to see this first hand and will have the opportunity to correct this problem with the choice that vouchers gives them.
Vouchers would cause irreperable harm to the liberal control of education – think of unions and buerucracies. Moreover, vouchers would lead to a much better educated Americans and much more independent parents. Therefore, DNC will never allow vouchers.
Duncan just told this years recruits for vouchers that they no longer were going to get them.
I posted this question on Jay P. Greene’s blog.
It that legal? Didn’t Congress make the law on this? Aren’t those people legally allowed to take advantage of the program. Is the Secretary of Education allowed to just stop people from entering the program?
If he is allowed to do that, Congress would never have to kill the program anyway. He could just refuse to let any families take advantage of that.
Doesn’t Congress still make the laws in this country? I still don’t get it. If they want to kill the program with a new law let them kill it. I can’t see how Duncan can do this.
I am open to anyone explaining it to a simpleton like me.
William Bennet was correct. the election of odumbo was a direct result of public schooling.
Friedman was correct.the only route to a better educated populace is over the dead bodies of public schools and their cynical unions.
either public eduction is destroyed, or it will destroy the usa. public school products make this clear. period. end of story.
“When school children start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of school children.”
–AFT founder Albert Shanker