PJ Media

River,

you make a good point that the problem is not with the schools themselves, but with the student bodies and the culture and the social effeects. And you are right that this isn’t an argument against vouchers per se. But its also a problem that vouchers are not going to solve – there’s no reason to believe that the private version of these schools aren’t going to have computer theft and whatnot. You seem to think that if you offer vouchers to the student body at Thomas Jefferson High School in brookyln, they arent going to Dalton, or even LaSalle. They’re going to go to a school with roughly the same makeup as they had before, only with a different funding model, with the exception that a few of the richer people from other parts of East New York will be able to put their kids in a (slightly) better school, and a few of the poorer kids from other neighborhoods will join them. So rather than organize schools by geography – which is increasingly becoming segregated by income – they’ll just skip that step entirely and be segregated by income. Which, if you believe that America is a place that gives everyone a chance to stand on their own two feet, is quite depressing – particularly since African Americans are just starting to achieve gains relative to others in income, we reinforce the pernacious effects of past segregation.