Posted on: 07-07-2002 12:39
In his most recent column, Education Reform in the Abstract, E.J. Dionne Jr writes critically of school vouchers:
Vouchers have a chance to work in some of our older big cities because those cities have reasonably extensive systems of Catholic schools built by earlier generations of immigrants. Those systems are cheap enough that modest public expenditures can make them affordable. Cleveland's voucher system, approved by the court last week, gives low-income parents all of $2,250. In most private schools that amount would not even come close to covering costs.
And in impoverished school districts in rural America -- not to mention large stretches of the country outside the Northeast and Midwest -- alternative systems do not exist. Those who claim that vouchers would call forth a whole new system of private schools are relying on hopes and prayers, not data and experience.
Public charter schools are an excellent way of pushing reform. But as a friend involved in education research said recently, new schools have about the same failure rate as new restaurants. An exaggeration, perhaps, but his point is right: Starting a new school is very hard. To think alternative systems will pop up all over the country is to engage in utopian wishful thinking.
Nor do voucher advocates have an answer to the very inequality questions they raise. ...Consider a Census Bureau study in May. It found that New York and New Jersey spend more than $10,000 per public school pupil, while Mississippi and Tennessee spend a little more than $5,000. Even taking into account differences in the cost of living, which pair of states has the better chance of attracting the best new teachers? Vouchers won't help Mississippi or Tennessee solve this problem.
I like this essay because it hits all the points that can be made against vouchers, and it does so concisely and forcefully. However, before anyone takes Dionne's argument seriously, they should ask themselves some questions.
"To think alternative systems will pop up all over the country is to engage in utopian wishful thinking." Is this a line of reasoning that you would be comfortable applying elsewhere? Does the private sector fail to create alternative systems when the government stops doing a task? We are now 30 years deep into the era of deregulation, if it is failure, why has there not been a backlash against it? With the possible exception of the airline industry, isn't the American consumer happier with the quality of goods and service they now get than during the era of heavy regulation?
Would any of us be comfortable applying the same sentence to other countries? I'm thinking in particular of the ex-Communist countries. Would anyone be comfortable saying "To think alternative systems will pop up all over the country is to engage in utopian wishful thinking" when speaking of Russia? Has not the whole of Western civilization engaged in this utopian thinking since 1917, and do we not now generally consider ourselves to have won that particular argument?
Getting back to the heart of Dionne's argument, does the free market sometimes fail to provide services to poor rural areas? Absolutely. An example would be phone service. Early in the 1900s, during the Progressive Era, the Progressive Republicans commited this country to the principle of universal access to phone lines. It was clear that the free market would not be able to provide phone service in outlying areas, the infrastructure costs per customer ratio was too high. And so the universal access tax was imposed. With this subsidy, phone technology reached about 99% of the population. Nowadays there is no corner of America from which you can't make a call.
The same is also very likely true for schools: without a subsidy the market would fail poor rural areas. However, no one has ever suggested that schools shouldn't be subsidized. They are currently paid for entirely with a tax, and that will go on being true under a voucher system, just as it has gone on before. The goverment will provide what funds are needed.
One could argue that in some areas the government already fails to provide sufficient funds for education. Yes, but that is not an argument against vouchers. That is an argument for more funding of American education. Personally, additional funding is something I support. But the extra money, by itself, won't give America the kind of school system that it wants.
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