School Choice: The Case for Vouchers

The United States faces a host of economic and ethical domestic issues today, and at the heart of all of them is poverty.  Some people are poor because they are sick.  Others are poor because they lack initiative, itself often a consequence of the structural violence of poverty that among other things makes them pessimistic about the future and whether they’ll even be alive to experience it. Why give up today’s pleasures for precarious tomorrows? Most people are poor because they lack the skills to find and keep jobs that pay living wages.  Americans should declare and fight a new War Against Poverty, and their primary weapon should be making better education accessible to all.

Our public school system is failing too many students, not in terms of grades but in terms of achievements.  Too many teachers are too lazy or fearful to give students D’s and F’s.  Instead, the system supports advancing pupils all the way through high school when they can’t even read at an 8^th Grade level.  The blame shouldn’t fall on teachers as individuals.  The problem starts with a culture that talks about “self esteem” as if it’s given to children with “We’re All Winners” stickers instead of earned through hard work.  It continues with the failure of parents to teach their children values. How can we fault teachers for failing to give students adequate math skills when much of their time is spent trying to make their classrooms quiet and safe?

Our private sector discriminates against the poor.  It does so by allocating scarce goods and services based on incomes and prices.  Our public sector also discriminates against the poor.  It does so by not making school choice the law of the land.

School vouchers are a good tool to advance educational opportunity at the early levels where research shows we get the most bang for the buck.  Vouchers are patronizing in the sense that they try to control parental spending rather than just raising incomes, but there are plenty of good precedents for this kind of guide to expenditures.  Food stamps, subsidized heating and housing, sub-prime mortgages, and health-insurance vouchers spring immediately to mind.

In the case of education, vouchers have the other salutary effect of encouraging good competition – the kind that improves quality.  Public schools in low-income areas without voucher and scholarship programs have a virtual monopoly in their market. Children either attend them or drop out.  Incentives for innovation and other improvements are muted.

For most of the 21^st Century, Congress has been discussing school choice.  Their first debates over “No Children Left Behind” (NCLB) occurred in 2001.  The house voted 273 against, 155 for, an amendment to give students scholarships so they’d no longer be trapped in schools that were both high in danger and low in academic performance.  The Senate rejected another pilot program for scholarships with a vote of 58 against, 41 for. Both amendments would have passed if Congressmen who sent their own children to private schools voted to make this choice a possibility for people without their privileges.

Six years later, Congressmen were sending their children to private schools at more than four times the national rate. Their higher than average salaries – $165,200 a year – meant that they could afford this extra expense.  The low quality of D.C. public schools also explains the statistics – 37% of our House Reps and 45% of our Senators in the 110th Congress chose private over public education for their children.

Liberal Democrats Teddy Kennedy and Hillary Clinton were among those who enrolled their own children in private schools.  How can we blame them or any other politicians for wanting the best education they can afford for their children?  We can’t. What we can – and should – criticize them for is not supporting government programs to give the less financially fortunate similar choices.  Kennedy and Clinton we amongst those most ardently opposed to expanding educational opportunities for other children. Kennedy even led an anti-voucher rally in 2004.

Concerns articulated by some politicians are that parents don’t know best for their children, that support for funding public education will wane as more of the population opts out of the system, and that public schools will do worse and worse as the “better” children and their more ambitious parents abandon them.  The first is appallingly arrogant.  It is also properly a slippery slope that should lead to places none of us would be openly willing to go: needing a license to become a parent.  The other two focus on possible costs and ignore definite benefits.  They also underline the hypocrisy of many Congressmen who preach one thing and practice another.  How with these views can they justify pulling their own children out of the system?  “Taking advantage of the system while working to fix it?”  Well, then, why not let those of lesser means take this same advantage while the work gets honestly and vigorously started continues with this energy?

The 2004 event that inspired Kennedy’s rally began a year earlier with the passage of “The D.C. Choice Incentive Act of 2003” (H.R. 2673), which passed by only one vote (209-208).  The vote was partisan, with only 3 Democrats in favor and only 15 Republicans against the new program.  The Senate then approved the program, 64 to 28, as part of an omnibus spending bill, H.R. 2673.  The first federally funded voucher program, it was helping more than 1,800 students by 2007.  Coming from families with average incomes of $21,100, they were able to attend any of 66 participating private schools in D.C. because of the “Washington D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program.”

No longer.  When President Obama signed his $450 billion spending bill last December, he effectively dismantled the program.  Like members of Congress, President Obama has the salary and private wealth to choose private education over public, and he made this choice for his two daughters.  How dare he — and so many other elected representatives making the same decision today – deny it to parents in lower economic classes?  The unspoken explanation probably starts with this fact: the teachers union is the single largest contributor to federal-level political campaigns in America.