Vouchers & Public Education: An Exchange of Views
JENCKS, CHRISTOPHER & AREEN, JUDITH & MORGAN, RICHARD E. & DAVIES, DON & WILSON, JOHN OLIVER & GRIFFITHS, DANIEL E. & RAMONA, SISTER MARY & GOLD, MILTON J. & GARDNER, LEONARD & CARTON, AARON S. & LEKACHMAN, ROBERT
Education Report VOUCHERS & PUBLIC EDUCATION AN EXCHANGE OF VIEWS Christopher Jencks and Judith Areen Christopher Jencks is Director of Harvard's Center for the Study of Public Policy, which lost...
...Such a voucher system would be a regulatory nightmare...
...Regarding the liberals, Lekachman points out that if their goal is a greater egalitarianism, there are probably more promising schemes available than vouchers...
...It is unfortunate that most educators who have responded publicly to the proposal have fallen victim to hysteria and thereby weakened their case...
...I suppose the voucher approach amounts to a way of quietly "joining them...
...How can education be made a liberating force in human lives...
...Parents of all races, bound by common values and a desire for a good learning environment, have freely chosen to educate their children together...
...Thus the general dissatisfaction with public education is hardly surprising...
...As an egalitarian, I judge social and economic proposals according to their tendency to narrow or widen existing disparities of power, income and wealth...
...Even if one takes a mordant view of state legislators, it is important to remember that the most powerful single lobby in education is not the Birch Society or the Catholic Church but the National Educational Association (nea) and its state and local affiliates...
...I should like to consider an assumption underlying the voucher proposals, namely that diversity within our school system is desirable...
...The schools may have failed, but bond elections are not valid support to this conclusion...
...Indeed, I suspect that when its comes to education, liberal and conservative periods are figments of our imagination...
...It follows that the best way to avoid the separation enforced by housing patterns is to enable the minority-group and lower-income student to choose other than government-districted schools...
...American education has traditionally stood for freedom of choice, equality of opportunity, pluralism of ideas and values, excellence through competition, and the decentralization of control...
...Schools in English leas are educationally autonomous to a degree not comprehensible to Americans...
...Conservatives and liberals behave quite similarly in matters related to the education of their children...
...Like another of The New Leader's correspondents in that issue, my valued colleague and friend, Charles Hoffman, "I am extremely skeptical of the capacity of free-market mechanisms to solve complex so-ciocultural problems...
...Lekachman seems to be convinced that state legislators would prefer inequitably financed and highly segregated schools...
...As usual, I end reinforced in my original position...
...The English system incorporates the goals sought by voucher advocates and, in my estimation, is not open to the criticisms leveled by Lekachman...
...As for the charge that de facto racial segregation will result from ptg, statistics prove that it already exists in the public schools...
...For a free market, where supply and demand may balance each other, always holds out the promise that whatever one wants to buy will be available for purchase...
...His dissection of the five questions Christopher Jencks has raised is must reading for those who believe that lower education is to be saved by vouchers, "liberal" or "conservative...
...Judith Areen, a fellow at the center, heads its voucher study project...
...The response of the class revealed strongly held and extreme opinions...
...the white and the middle-class will end up in private and suburban "private-public" systems...
...The most frequently suggested alternatives are (1) force, (2) resocialization, or (3) a combination of the two "techniques" to "neutralize" the set of overlapping groups that we have been calling "the middle class...
...This says only the obvious...
...This is fundamental to the conservatives' position too, and even if they are wrong in applying the marketplace concept of free choice to this social problem, at least they are logically consistent...
...Lekachman, however, by pursuing a pure integrationist goal, will bring about the reverse of what he desires...
...reinforcement for the children of the parents' chosen or inherited lifestyle...
...To prevent a sudden boom in low-quality, profit-motivated schools, parents would be allowed to use their partial tuition certificates only in schools that have been operating for at least five years under existing state education department regulation...
...Lekachman holds out hope that if we successfully defend the ideal of the single, balanced public school, popular sentiment may swing again toward the concern for racial and economic equality of the Kennedy and early Johnson years...
...Yet all seem to owe allegiance to larger social communities that, while they have no specific geographic loci, nevertheless generate values and goals...
...Vouchers are now the only alternative to a painful status quo for the many parochial and nonsectarian private schools that will open this fall with empty desks and beds because of spiraling costs and an economic recession bearing hard on their upper-middle-class clientele...
...A majority of the Assembly, and perhaps a majority of the Senate (the vote will come in the fall) support a limited experiment with regulated vouchers in a few communities...
...Newer models are being explored that promise greater openness for pupils and teachers at all levels, from nursery school to the university...
...Perhaps it is beyond the wit of policy innovators and administrators to devise checks and incentives for a voucher plan that will result in significant racial and economic mixing...
...It was then extensively amended, both last year and this year, to make it more acceptable to various critics...
...If an Educational Voucher Agency (EVA) were also held directly responsible for every action that took place in every school cashing vouchers, it would have these same characteristics...
...If I read Morgan accurately, he views urban blacks as simply the latest group to be subjected to a familiar historical process—a position similar to that of Daniel Moynihan and Edward Banfield...
...The evidence is overwhelming that deprived and black youngsters are acceptable as long as they come in numbers and with upwardly mobile styles that do not seem to alter the "character" of the school...
...The headmaster selects students by whatever method he wishes to use...
...Those who assume that they are a superior breed and who label other Americans as bigots should try giving others the respect they demand for themselves...
...All we propose is to test such a system...
...The pressures Lekachman speaks of are unlikely to be much different in the future...
...Leonard Gardner Leonard Gardner is Professor of Education at the Stony Brook campus of the State University of New York...
...it is held directly responsible for everything that happens in the classroom...
...Dean Griffiths' and Sister Ramona's thoughtful observations arouse my usual skepticism about the distribution of benefits in plutocracies...
...have their constituencies of rich and poor, black and white, employe and entrepreneur...
...No less than society at large, the educational profession is unclear and divided about what it wants of the schools...
...ALTHOUGH HE COMES to the wrong conclusion, in my view, Robert Lekachman focuses attention on just the right issue at just the right time...
...Yet how else can we hope to get anything done...
...A case for the presence of a conspiracy to homogenize the American schools would be difficult to sustain...
...Moreover, ptg plans provide that in addition to receiving only a partial return of his contribution to the public treasury, the parent would have to make a further contribution of his own for the education of his child in a nongovernment school...
...For example, the Inner London Education Authority (ilea) serves 1,107 nursery, primary and secondary schools, including 360 special-agreement and aided schools, most of which are denominational...
...Neither Labor nor Tory governments have pushed very hard for comprehensive schools, limited the privileged situation of public and grammar schools, or otherwise diminished the class bias of British tradition...
...If, as I fear, the evas would ineluctably move toward a close supervision of the major teaching functions of their schools not very different from current relationships between public schools and boards of education, then most of the asserted benefits of voucher flexibility and diversity will be dispersed...
...The black and the deprived will be left with "their own" schools...
...the Federal government does occasionally push for centralization, yet it supports experimentation with a diversifying voucher scheme...
...if he wrote after those decisions were handed down, I am once again awed by his speed and fluency in composition...
...Bound by district lines, the public schools also perpetuate the grouping together of students from the middle and upper middle classes...
...The Mississippi Legislature, to take a nonrandom example, would certainly prefer an unregulated voucher system if the Supreme Court would allow it to establish one...
...My view is that radical restructuring of our school systems is long overdue, and that while the demand for vouchers is a symptom of the need, vouchers are not the cure...
...Saul Alinsky, for instance, maintains that the most fully integrated schools in the nation's urban areas are church-related institutions...
...Unless legislatures and courts bestir themselves in most unlikely ways (given what we have just observed about middle-class parents who are also class voters), present trends toward compartmentalization will proceed apace...
...Further, there is reason to believe that an unregulated voucher system would be unconstitutional...
...The overwhelming fact of American education, public and private, secular and religious, is the awesome standardization of the process—the only significant variation being the kind of social-class sensibility reflected in one school as opposed to another...
...New York State's Scholar Incentive Program has helped some poor students, but it has also spread benefits liberally to middle- and upper-income recipients...
...It is surprising to find government-supported schools so insecure that they predict 50 per cent or more of their students would leave them if they were free to do so...
...Accordingly, the danger of creating another unwieldy bureaucracy is not zero, but it is less than in most reform schemes...
...ROBERT LEKACHMAN has given us the most thorough and penetrating analysis of the voucher approach to education that I have read...
...Yet they certainly oppose changes in the status quo that seem likely to make the situation worse...
...Private schools will not be outlawed for everybody, nor will existing district, town, country, and state lines be ignored to create the vast public school districts which would be necessary in many places for racial and economic balance to be accomplished by court order...
...I believe there is a viable alternative to vouchers that has not been discussed in the United States...
...Indeed, the presumption against the success of generalized, regulated vouchers is so strong in my mind that nothing would convert me short of passage in a single state of a regulated, universal voucher scheme and its successful operation over a period of time...
...For example, is the egalitarian ideal well served by giving minority groups access to middle-class schools that function as social escalators, leaving both teacher and students stifled and frustrated in the process...
...Most refreshing is his understanding that although vouchers would encourage independent schools and sacrifice the preferred position of the public schools, they would not in themselves change the educational experience of children in the classroom...
...Enrollments and applications are watched carefully by the ilea administrators, who use the number of applications as a measure (though not the only one) of the effectiveness of a school...
...I do not believe this is likely...
...It would be a shame not to give vouchers a try...
...Restructuring, not the voucher plan, is the answer...
...Lekachman warns that we should not try to "do good by stealth," yet I often wonder whether there is any other way to do it...
...To turn to another aspect of Lekachman's article, a recent study by the Office of Education discredits his assumption that sums spent on the average student would be more than adequate for pupils of superior intelligence, while the disadvantaged require larger expenditures...
...On this exceedingly large issue, I make here only a single observation about the changing location of urban power...
...We do not, and neither should he...
...Robert Lekachman THE PARTICIPANTS in this discussion sort themselves into four groups...
...Still, we find in 1971 that we have not managed, despite our philosophic commitment and specific organizational plan, to offer an educational system that is heterogeneous enough to satisfy the diverse components of our society...
...I suppose the complexity is unavoidable, given the nature of all institutions, but some of it seems to result from the proponents' failure to be true to their own principles...
...universities encourage innovation and unique identities...
...At least their members would be free from the budgetary and construction afflictions that plague boards of education...
...the real educator, when faced with two unsound approaches, looks for viable alternatives...
...Most are opposed to racial discrimination and to schools that serve only a privileged minority...
...lies in their assumption that institutional disengagement will automatically lead to new educational ideas and practices...
...Still, it is hard to see how this can be avoided by clinging to the existing system...
...During a conservative period, free market vouchers stand a better chance than their liberal rivals...
...If Lekachman wrote his article before the Supreme Court ruled in June against the Pennsylvania and Rhode Island programs of aid to independent schools, he is to be congratulated for prescience...
...Furthermore, the argument that ptg would result in a mass exodus from the public schools is simply not supported by the facts: While the dollar value of the Scholar Incentive Award has risen, for example, enrollments in state and city universities have steadily increased...
...the way liberal and conservative impulses have converged on the voucher idea...
...Although I hope I am wrong on both of my major conclusions, I am not yet persuaded...
...The answers "both" and "some of each" or "neither" were not extensively advocated...
...Still, if such a system turns out to give a choice of schools—even if the middle class feels the choice is not sufficiently wide—it can be viable...
...In their zeal, opponents to the voucher scheme have boxed themselves into accepting the present public school system as the lesser of two evils...
...To meet these responsibilities, an eva would have to establish a variety of bureaucratic regulations, just as, say, the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) does...
...But the proof will be found in the experiment...
...We will be in a better position to assess whether the benefits of such a change in the governance of education is worth the risks inherent in its introduction...
...The middle class will indeed have the kinds of schools it wants...
...Our experience in working with state legislators and local school boards does not support this judgment...
...Lekachman properly asserts that "No one should expeot to do good by stealth...
...It is not fanciful to anticipate that relatively soon there will be black men or women in the city halls of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, even—pace Mayor Daley—Chicago...
...As Lekachman must surely recognize, though, there is a vital distinction between the kind of regulation practiced by the sec and the kind employed in a fully socialized economy...
...Berkeley may be eager to experiment with egalitarian vouchers...
...In my opinion, vouchering would not affect the actual "theater of operations" except in the negative ways described by Lekachman...
...Whether vouchers would alter anything is hard to know in advance, but it seems more likely to do so than simply increasing expenditures...
...I AGREE thoroughly with Robert Lekachman's assessment of the need for change in the schools, and with his criticisms of various voucher proposals that would only aggravate current educational problems...
...I realize that this smacks of (a) tokenism, (b) cultural imperialism, and (c) a galling "settling" for social change on middle-class terms...
...This latter function aside, we see no reason why the eva has to be very large at all...
...The educational invalidity of their position calls the motives of these spokesmen into serious question...
...Not the least of these are aid to private and parochial schools and teachers' demands for more say in what is to be taught...
...Obviously, vouchers are expected to replace a monolithic educational system with a diversity of systems...
...Vouchers are akin to the former...
...That is precisely what private schools under a voucher system can offer...
...Whatever educational program there is, the headmaster and teachers create—with minimal consultation of the school's board of governors, but monitoring by the authorities and Her Majesty's inspectors...
...Only in a ghetto is it possible for a school to represent a single social and geographic community...
...What we need is a thorough reexamination of all aspects of the problem, particularly the values and ends we want the educational system to further...
...It does have to formulate policy, police that policy, and provide a function not generally performed today—counseling of parents...
...Briefly, virtually all English schools are part of the Local Education Authority (lea) and are therefore supported by public funds...
...THE EDUCATIONAL voucher plan evidently poses a threat to public school administrators...
...Most large residential communities in the U.S...
...the more customary indictment has been a lack of coherence...
...Are liberal vouchers feasible...
...and the general problem of tailoring institutional forms to fit educational goals...
...Neither a traditional public school system nor a voucher system will be much better than the motives of the men who make its ground rules...
...Two or three generations ago the children of Irish, Italian and Jewish immigrants went to schools controlled by the dominant Anglo-Saxons...
...Many will go out of existence soon unless some government support begins to reach them...
...It is, after all, what happens in the classroom that is crucial...
...I argue only for a change to "not so fast...
...Although these groups do not call every shot, they exert great influence on most school legislation...
...They are confused about the existing public school system, skeptical about claims that more money will solve its problems, and in this sense perhaps "conservative...
...Since grants increase for professional and graduate training, Scholar Incentives particularly aid the nonpoor, who are disproportionately enrolled...
...Vast administrative districts are unpopular with everyone right now —black and white, hippie and straight...
...So the Mississippi Legislature maintains an inequitable educational system without the benefit of vouchers...
...I am not as convinced as Lekachman that a community will want an unregulated system...
...It would simply regulate schools, guaranteeing that parents knew what was going on in each one when they enrolled their child, and that all parents had a fair chance of getting their children into the school of their choice...
...The test will not be complete, of course, for it will be conducted in too few communities to be truly representative of the country...
...I am convinced that fundamental changes are necessary in the lives of children coming from the worst of our slums...
...Whether teaching in schools with a "normal" population or teaching children suffering special environmental handicaps, professional personnel must look to their knitting to develop more viable programs in the classroom...
...At the same time, every citizen would continue to contribute to a system of public schools, for the benefit of those who prefer their totally neutral environment...
...It passes probability that a group which at length has seized some of the levers of power will meekly surrender school budgets and school policies to every ideological and neighborhood group in sight, including swom enemies...
...We believe that vouchers should be tried, that there is a substantial probability that the regulated system will be satisfactory to the community, and that we need not and should not wait for a so-called "liberal political period" to initiate the experiment...
...But surely this is Dot enough...
...To begin with, a clarification of Deputy Commissioner Don Davies' remarks on superior children: In my article, I meant to identify children of intelligence higher than that of slow learners who might end up as rejects fit only for the public schools, not the category of "superior" children who, I do not doubt, are ill-served by most of the schools in which they are enrolled...
...In California, for instance, the Assembly recently passed ab 150, authorizing a voucher experiment in one or more school districts...
...Statistics show that public schools are least popular in the urban areas where the quality of facilities, teaching and methodology has remained stagnant or deteriorated...
...Elected boards frequently control personnel, curriculum and school policy, and are sometimes endowed with powers of taxation...
...If this principle were accepted, the eva would not have to operate schools nor would it be responsible for most of what took place in them...
...The appropriate moral seems to be first to let a society make up its mind what it wants from an institution and then to redesign the social machinery...
...Our researchers found that the gifted are often disadvantaged and handicapped in the average school—they show a greater degree of underachievement than other groups of exceptional children...
...Gifted youngsters also require resources comparable to other special students to be most productive...
...Suffice it to say that although the adoption of such a plan in the United States would take some doing, it would solve many problems...
...Sister Ramona moves me to quote from Leo Pfeffer's letter (NL, August 9): "I have yet to see a law providing for public support of benefits such as education, housing, hospitals, etc., that has not been written or applied primarily for the benefit of the middle and upper classes and to the detriment of those most in need of the services...
...Morgan, who takes as constant existing income and wealth distribution, favors free-market vouchers designed to increase the representation in good schools of black, lower-class, and lower-income youngsters—the traditional model of upward mobility...
...Morgan and I start from different premises and see different things in the social landscape...
...What this adds up to is the need for massive reeducation of the public, teachers and administrators...
...His analysis is also rich in insights that extend beyond the limits of his article...
...The head of the Islington Grammar School employs grades, test results and the recommendations of primary school headmasters...
...As far as they go, the actions of the California Legislature are encouraging, but without arguing the merits of my and Jencks' evaluation of state legislatures, I must emphasize the crucial distinction between demonstration projects and universal arrangements...
...John Oliver Wilson John Oliver Wilson is Director of the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation at the Office of Economic Opportunity in Washington...
...Parents have free choice of schools, given merely the restriction of the number of places in a school...
...The basic difficulty with the voucher scheme is that it views the free market as a source of value...
...The second argument is more speculative and, presumably, suggests that we not even experiment with a regulated system...
...Legislators needn't be monsters to represent the strong interests and prejudices of their predominantly middle-class constituents...
...The standard objection to ptg is that parents, and not the public treasury, should finance private and parochial schools...
...And perhaps it is not safe to assume the administrators of voucher programs (especially if they come to be mounted at the state level) will even want to bring this mixing about...
...If this is true then it would be better to look upon the voucher system not as a working plan for bureaucratic reorganization (Lekachman has shown us the serious problems with that) but as a sign of a new sentiment shared by liberals and conservatives alike...
...I think educational vouchers are worth a try...
...Although he has persuaded me that the liberal might well find himself working for ends which are the very opposite of what he intends, I do not think that the notions of free choice and egalitarianism articulated by either camp (as Lekachman defines them) are in themselves clear statements of purpose or adequate points of differentiation between the two groups...
...If a school is underenrolled, they take steps to improve its reputation...
...What would have been the result...
...to the intrusions of the Federal government...
...He may be right...
...I have no such shining confidence, though...
...The traditional response of American liberals to this prospect has been "good riddance...
...Space limitations compel me to comment only briefly on some of the other questions that have been raised...
...I take issue only with Lekachman's argument that the results of school bond elections evidence a lack of confidence in the public schools...
...Six Southern states have attempted to establish "tuition voucher programs," designed to avoid court-ordered dismantling of "dual" public school systems by channeling public funds to segregated private schools...
...The bill was initially drafted so as to allow a fairly wide range of regulated voucher systems...
...Teachers and administrators must also reassess their ways of looking at education...
...The children's house of the Israeli kibbutz may offer some kind of model, combining as it does professional care for children with opportunity for parental involvement and the interplay of love and affection between child and parent...
...But if skepticism about traditional liberal panaceas is to become a synonym for conservatism, then possibly we should all adopt the label...
...Robert Lekachman points up the internal inconsistencies of the various voucher proposals and urges us to consider the possible consequences of their implementation...
...Yet these same parents are substantial contributors to what is called the public treasury...
...Studies have found that the nonprofit private and parochial schools have been most successful in mixing students from different ethnic groups, social classes and income levels...
...The best we can hope for in a liberal swing (and this is not to suggest that it is a trivial hope) is more dough for those left behind in the urban (and increasingly the old suburban) school systems...
...The notion of a voucher that parents cannot supplement may be a bit more difficult to sell to a majority...
...The work being done in Milwaukee with very young children and their mothers indicates that there is some hope when efforts are made almost from birth on a scale of personnel assistance that is closer to the medical model than to that of traditional education...
...That is true enough...
...Far from increasing expenditures on rich students at the expense of poor children, ptg would equalize the present disparity by distributing funds on a sliding income scale...
...to the publishing houses' desire to consolidate the schools into a mass market...
...Whatever its methodological shortcomings, the Coleman Report powerfully suggests that racial and economic integration is functional to upward social mobility...
...The eva does not have to hire teachers, establish curriculum, maintain buildings, purchase school supplies, or assign principals...
...Richard E. Morgan Richard E. Morgan, Associate Professor of Government ot Bowdoin College, is the author of a forthcoming book on constitutional questions concerning aid to parochial schools...
...The first of these arguments is at least part of the focus of the Office of Economic Opportunity experiment...
...I think not...
...If only we could somehow get the kind of comprehensive, egalitarian school system Lekachman has in mind, it might make ours a better society...
...Since, as Jencks and I agree, free market vouchers will accentuate rather than diminish existing inequality, I conclude as I began: Despite their flaws, public schools at this time and in this place are by my criteria preferable to the only kind of voucher arrangement that stands a realistic prospect of general acceptance...
...In the increasingly gritty politics of cities and suburbs, voucher schemes (whatever the intentions of their sponsors) will almost unavoidably impress black politicians as just one more clever, white, middle-class device to advance white, middle-class interests...
...The Court, however, has barred unregulated vouchers designed to preserve segregation in the past, and it will probably continue to do so in the future...
...The governors of the latter have certain financial responsibilities for external repair and improvement of buildings, but all other costs are borne by the authority...
...Lekachman is rightly concerned about the likelihood that segregation would increase under a voucher scheme, but even if this eventuality could be guarded against, what can we reasonably hope to achieve...
...There are...
...This was no accident...
...This extra contribution, of course, would not be required of those parents sending their children to public schools...
...Integration is to be achieved by understanding the forces that produce ethnically, economically and culturally homogeneous schools, and then devising tactics that will bring about some substantial integration despite them...
...Given the present paucity of alternatives, the most minimal justification for experimenting with vouchers will suffice: We might as well try walking somewhere instead of simply standing where we are?not because the existing system is rotten and disserving all students (one of the shoddier cliches of the New Left), but because the system works very well for many yet very poorly for those who need help most...
...If the purposes of vouchers are to (1) give all people the choice of schools that only the rich now enjoy, and (2) create a competitive situation among schools and so raise the quality level, there is a simpler and more certain way of success than the voucher plan...
...Voucher experiments are not irrevocable commitments to a whole new "pluralistic" pattern of education for America, they are a way of finding out whether we want to go in that direction...
...Indeed, that in itself would appear to be an overriding issue...
...Blacks have even fought to prevent the closing of church-related schools in some cities...
...Although the experts continue to quarrel about the extent of social mobility, the arrangement obviously did work for substantial numbers of the more talented and more ambitious progeny of the poor...
...Indeed, their vision has been so clouded by passion that they have needlessly identified possible allies as enemies...
...Such a swing is profoundly to be desired, but would it make the balanced school any more acceptable to the middle classes...
...Lekachman observes that "Milton Friedman's simple [voucher] scheme has grown very complicated...
...Such observations are fair enough, yet the fact remains that new ground rules can substantially alter the way people do their jobs...
...The temptation in a debate of this kind is to say, "of course," and then pile "ifs" upon "assumings...
...Secondly, Lekachman argues that a regulated voucher system is politically impractical and therefore only an unregulated system could win support...
...Alternative voucher models can be tried with plenty of time for evaluation, debate and pulling back...
...This investment, however, presumably would be returned to the public in the form of taxes on the increased income earned during the careers of gifted persons...
...Certainly it will be argued that this is attributable to the homogeneity of the educational profession...
...Moreover, if the conservative position stems from the idea of free choice (or freedom of the marketplace), it is not at all clear what the liberal principle is...
...It seeks to establish the principle that what happens in a school is largely the business of the children, teachers and parents connected with that school, as well as others who would like to be connected with it—not of taxpayers, politicians or parents who prefer to send their children elsewhere...
...None of them attempted to eliminate restrictions proposed by the Office of Economic Opportunity...
...the crunch comes when the California Legislature tries to convert the noble experiment into an educational design for the state, as applicable to San Diego and Los Angeles as to Berkeley...
...The fact is, however, that the educational profession is composed of diverse elements...
...This does not mean they advocate compulsory busing to achieve integration, or other drastic changes in the status quo...
...Yet no matter how idealistic our motives may be, they are of no help so long as they remain inchoate...
...This is a rational and humane position in the abstract, but policy goals must be established in the concrete...
...for instance, no authority-wide syllabi, no grade-level courses of study and no authority-adopted textbooks...
...Daniel E. Griffiths Daniel E. Griffiths is Dean of the School of Education at New York University...
...And here we are at the heart of the matter...
...All the same, if the middle-class drive for special educational privileges remains strong, any eva in sincere search of racial and economic equity will inescapably be drawn more and more deeply into admissions, faculty selection, discipline, teaching technique, and curriculum...
...Granting that the market is a place for the free expression of individual values and tastes, the freedom of the consumer is rather limited when the available goods are essentially the same, and in no case especially desirable...
...On the other hand, applications far in excess of places are as indicative of high reputation in England as they are in the Ivy schools here...
...Somewhere in between are the advocates of experiments with demonstration voucher projects—among them several public officials—and those who, like Sister Mary Ramona and Daniel E. Griffiths, prefer other educational models to both public schools and vouchers...
...to the universities' hidebound preparation of teachers...
...I was especially struck with his remarks on diversity and its limitations...
...To refrain from acting until these underlying forces can be frontally attacked and overcome is, on close inspection, a counsel of despair...
...Toying with administrative gimmicks, no matter how well intentioned, will not meet the needs of these students...
...Few "compensatory" efforts have succeeded to date—basically because the intervention they provide is only minuscule in relation to the scope of the problem...
...Our children's schoolmates are thus in many ways strangers to them, and their teachers may well come from alien backgrounds...
...Don Davies Don Davies is Acting Deputy Commissioner for Development in the Office of Education at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in Washington...
...Changing even a few of the participants can also make a big difference...
...publishing houses compete with each other, and feel they are more responsive to national sentiments than they are productive of them...
...If a regulatory agency were to become as big and unwieldy as Lekachman suggests, I think most people would seriously question the value of the voucher concept...
...Aaron Carton's comments deserve an extended discussion of educational fundamentals that is impossible on this occasion...
...I agree entirely with Leonard Gardner that there is a fallacy in the "assumption that institutional disengagement will automatically lead to new educational ideas and practices...
...Thus vouchers might be a particularly useful way for moderate- and low-income parents to give their gifted children the specialized education they need...
...Nonetheless, two of his conclusions strike us as questionable...
...Sister Mary Ramona Sister Mary Ramona, C.S.J., is Director of Student Activities for the Catholic Schools, Diocese of Brooklyn...
...On this last point, at least, there is little difference between the blue-collar worker who wants tough discipline and the mother in the polka-dot pants suit who wants a Summerhill frolic for junior...
...In fact, the legislators with whom we have discussed vouchers over the past year are not such a bad lot...
...All the amendments imposed additional restrictions (e.g., with respect to racial integration) on voucher schools...
...Is its mission," I asked rather simple-mindedly, "to transmit the culture of the past or to reconstruct society and build a better future...
...There the more receptive of them learned middle-class values and skills...
...Nonetheless, I disagree with him...
...Lekachman may reply that California is atypical...
...I doubt it to the marrow of my bones...
...Throughout the world of literate peoples, centralized national control and organization of education tends to be typical...
...My own feeling is that attitudes, values and ideas have to change before institutional practices can be changed, rather than the reverse...
...state officials are concerned largely with maintaining standards...
...Educators worthy of the name are those who look for every means to encourage the search for creative learning environments, not those who seek a system providing uniformity of vision, neutrality in thinking, and monopoly in administration...
...TO THE LIST of probable disadvantages to the various voucher proposals summarized by Robert Lekachman, I would add the criticism that vouchers would be useful only if parents could choose among real options: How many communities have one or more excellent public or private schools that parents could select...
...By the same token, one can say that no political change ever matters because afterward the institutions of a society are still staffed by essentially the same people as before, working in the same buildings...
...It should be pointed out, too, that vouchers may prove an effective means for communities to express a vote of confidence for their schools as well as to indicate displeasure...
...FACED WITH an endless fashion show of educational fads that advertise themselves as innovations, wariness is not paranoia, as Ted Sizer of Harvard claims, it is prudence...
...My friendly sparring partner Richard E. Morgan proceeds from an acceptance of the United States as a conservative country to a search for politically acceptable means of mitigating the consequences for deprived groups...
...But quite apart from this judgment, I do not believe that the familiar process of middle-class socialization and cooptation of selected lower-class candidates is still viable...
...In the United States, however, a pluralistic commitment to "grassroots" control, to flexibility in the light of neighborhood problems and cultural norms, takes the form of locally organized school districts...
...The public must come to understand the problems involved in education of youngsters from disadvantaged backgrounds and recognize that the school model that is reasonably effective with children from normal homes is not financed or manned or equipped to deal with problems of severe environmental handicap...
...All six plans were deemed unconstitutional by the courts...
...Perhaps more important, though, is the fact that the voucher concept provides a setting in which examination of the role of diversity in the educational system may profitably take place...
...Possibly I exaggerated eva bureaucratic pitfalls...
...Three points are of special interest to me: the enormous complexity that has grown out of an ostensibly simple scheme...
...Despite its many shortcomings, the proposal still has a tantalizing appeal, signaling a renewed desire to do away with all that is banal and spiritually oppressive in the educational system...
...Elsewhere in the world, schools are generally seen as the source of a common and unifying experience that reflects and molds national character...
...The character of bureaucratic supervision depends on the political pressures involved...
...To wait for a change in the tide of middle-class attitudes about culture and class and race and education is to accept a continuation of current unhappy trends...
...In large cities and their surrounding suburbs, the boundaries of political entities often are totally irrelevant to the structure of economic activity and to the residential pattern...
...Where the child's environment is as negative as it is in some of our urban slums, we will ultimately have to face the issue of residential facilities...
...I do not think it is, and I am certain Lekachman does not think so...
...Attitudes about education of the family's young are largely independent of attitudes about the allocation of public resources to aid people whom the minister on Sunday calls "those less fortunate...
...Robert Lekachman, along with Albert Shanker of the United Federation of Teachers and others, has missed one of many possible alternatives by failing to distinguish between vouchers and Partial Tuition Grants (PTG) . The success of New York State's Scholar Incentive Program for college students has proved the feasibility of the ptg approach...
...Thus, before deciding whether Lekachman's assumption recommends itself as a guideline for action in the immediate future, it is necessary to answer an anterior question: Is it credible that any substantial number of white middle-class parents can be persuaded to accept this goal within, say, the average life expectancy of next September's first-grader...
...Many parents—a majority of them, I suppose—will demand equitable treatment in the admissions policies of schools supported with public funds, and would probably favor regulation...
...Any similar attempts, either in the North or the South, will certainly meet the same fate...
...Under these circumstances voucher schemes, particularly of the conservative style, seem very seductive...
...The aim of a voucher plan is precisely the opposite, however...
...And it is the distinction between the liberal and conservative incentives for the voucher scheme that is central to Lekachman's case...
...The agency that has already been set up to oversee the Scholar Incentive Award could be expanded, and academic registration and certification would continue to be administered by the existing state education department...
...If it were applied to elementary and secondary education, the potential dangers of total voucher schemes could be avoided...
...And if vouchers are tried at all, the nea can be counted on to fight for highly regulated systems, both at the state and the local level, simply because regulation is required to insure that the public schools (which have to take care of everyone) can compete on equal footing...
...Suppose that the recent increase in the New York state income tax, or the establishment of Pennsylvania and Connecticut state income taxes, had been subject to public referendum...
...ROBERT LEKACHMAN'S examination of educational vouchers (NL, July 12) is informative, factually accurate and reasonable...
...This is to incorporate certain aspects of English school organization into the American system...
...Since all inner London schools are in the authority (and the variety is great), what might be called a socialized voucher plan is in operation...
...The government, however, would not become entangled in supervision of private or parochial schools, beyond requiring them to comply with state certification regulations, nor would any new administrative bureaucracy be needed...
...Lekachman's argument for continued protection of the present public school system against any publicly subsidized option seems to rest on roughly the following assumption: The paramount goal of elementary and secondary educational policy in America in the 1970s should be to have as many children attending racially and socioeconomically balanced schools as is physically possible...
...Some weeks ago, in a class consisting mainly of practicing teachers and teacher trainees, I raised the question of the school's ultimate function...
...They have places open and would welcome paying customers...
...The intended comparison is between average youngsters and slow, difficult, or disturbed boys and girls upon whom more money should be spent...
...As Lekachman says, a city that turns to vouchers will still be using mostly the same buildings and teachers as before...
...AS I PERCEIVE them, the arguments which lead Robert Lekachman ultimately to reject the concept of a voucher system are: (1) A regulatory bureaucracy will become every bit as oppressive as any administrative bureaucracy, and (2) a regulated voucher system does not meet the interests of a majority of citizens, who will thus inevitably opt for the unregulated or "conservative" plan...
...If this is the case, the operational policy problem becomes how best to reduce and mitigate the inequalities of educational opportunity that, in a variety of ways, we shall have with us as far as we can see ahead...
...The conservative voucher provides an opportunity to flee from the problems of accommodation, while liberal vouchers are full of safeguards against such an escape?and that has been the focus of most discussion on the subject until now...
...To believe in that possibility requires overlooking the perfectly familiar, driving motives of parents with regard to their children's schools: status, the development of rudimentary literary and arithmetical skills, the encouragement of certain bourgeois virtues (punctuality, deference to authority figures, deferral of gratification) conducive to competitive success, perhaps a few cultural frills, and above all...
...Put bluntly, the barriers to upward mobility through the educational system can be high and uniformly difficult to scale, so that only a small supermotivated portion of the deprived surmount them, or we can build in some gaps and low places (styles come irresistibly to mind) so that a much larger fraction makes it...
...On the other hand, by strengthening experimental educational endeavors, ptg would promote the kind of diversity, innovation and competition that would lead to excellence for all the schools, public and private...
...at each point of the educational process middle-class interests conflict with egalitarian intention...
...Christopher Jencks' and Judith Areen's informative retort continues their defense of the feasibility of liberal vouchers...
...First, Lekachman argues that "the ultimate result of liberal vouchers may well turn out to be more rather than less bureaucratic supervision of the schools...
...The present educational bureaucracy actually operates the schools over which it exercises authority...
...But it will result in a concrete system that can be evaluated...
...Since under ptg the parent rather than the school is the recipient of returns on his taxes, there is no violation of church-state separation...
...no one is giving anyone what he wants...
...The claim that public schools would become schools of last resort will only prove true if their quality makes them so...
...Otherwise, a school must reflect an accommodation of values and goals...
...The fight is between an ungenerous white middle class, based in the suburbs and uneager to surrender a tithe of its privileges, and inner-city blacks increasingly militant in their pressures for membership in the American celebration...
...If, for example, the voucher scheme seeks its own justification in the conception of the free market, then its adherents are inconsistent in allowing the perpetuation of admissions requirements, a nonmarket regulating factor if there ever was one...
...Many Northern legislators can vote for a regulated voucher scheme in political safety so long as its acceptance and operation are voluntary on the part of a few, self-selected local jurisdictions...
...to the interference of authorities at the state level...
...But if these experiments increase racial or economic segregation, or lead to more general dissatisfaction with the schools, the California Legislature as now constituted is unlikely to approve an expansion or even a continuation of the experiment...
...It is ironic that American education should now be castigated for its homogeneity...
...I should not like even one bright ambitious kid to have to wait on our doing this...
...Will it in fact help to create low places in the barriers to equal opportunity and bring about the modest integrationist gains it "offers," which I have suggested should be the goal of educational policy...
...Whatever the merits of English educational arrangements, they have not generated anything resembling educational equity...
...The cliches of individualization have to be trais-lated into the actuality of practice...
...For the very reasons Lekachman has so eloquently identified, the middle class will prevail every time...
...Finally, the basic difficulty for both sides, as I see it...
...Parochial and private schools are, after all, resources in being...
...Milton J. Cold Milton J. Gold is Dean of Programs in Education at Hunter College of the City University of New York...
...but whether it has them with or without significant delegations of low-risk, low-cost upwardly mobile kids is up for grabs...
...Finally, vouchers are not a cure-all...
...As a result, a great range in educational programs is offered, and parents do have a real choice...
...Education Report VOUCHERS & PUBLIC EDUCATION AN EXCHANGE OF VIEWS Christopher Jencks and Judith Areen Christopher Jencks is Director of Harvard's Center for the Study of Public Policy, which lost year published the widely discussed Education Vouchers: A Report on Financing Elementary Education by Grants to Parents...
...ptg is designed to give the poor, the lower middle class and minority groups the same equality and freedom of choice reserved today for the affluent...
...Aaron S. Carton Aaron S. Carton is Associate Professor of Education at the Stony Brook campus of the State University of New York...
...Michael Young's argument that the nuclear family is the most powerful of conservative institutions is ultimately convincing...
...In addition, all ptg proposals have included requirements for adherence to Federal and state civil rights provisions, and state education departments have been given authority to stop funds to any school accused of noncompliance...
...Because the voters can say "no" to school issues alone, in times of economic recession the schools become the sole available target for the wrath of the people...
...THERE ARE other difficulties with his argument, too...
...There would be an income ceiling above which no grants would be awarded, and the poor could be specifically assisted by providing total tuition grants in cases of proven indigence...
...Still, concerns of the sort raised in Lekachman's analysis lead us to oppose the widespread adoption of any form of voucher system at this time...
...Assuming legislators are as bad a lot as Lekachman fears, they will find ways to maintain segregation and inequality with or without vouchers...
...the present public schools to the latter...
...To hope to put a stop to parents' status-seeking, maneuvering of their offspring's advantage in the "race of life," and projecting themselves (or their beaux ideals of themselves) onto their children is vain...
...In seeking diversity, voucher plans may be able to circumvent several of the social and political dilemmas that local boards, organized on a geographical basis, must contend with...
...I suspect that at the root of the liberal impulse is the belief that genuine innovation and improved education for all students will follow inevitably after the schools are freed from the bureaucratic restrictions of the educational establishment...
...I frankly don't know, but I want to find out...
...Although differentiation may exist, as in France and Germany, in a hierarchization on the basis of merit or social privilege, uniformity is by no means seen as a defect...
...WE OWE Robert Lekachman a debt of gratitude for opening the Pandora's box labeled "educational vouchers" and showing us that its contents are likely to do more harm than good...
...Certainly some vested interests and expectations would be created by the experiments, but they could surely be overcome if the results were not sufficiently encouraging...
...The inevitable consequences are close regulation, intense efforts to insure that nothing unforeseen will "cause trouble," and great conservatism toward proposals for change...
...It seems fruitless to talk of success for school programs that accommodate a child from the most disturbing circumstances for five or six hours a day and then return him to his deadening environment for the major part of his life experience...
...I happen to believe that American society is poisoned by inequality...
...No more than a handful of California legislators support an unregulated voucher system of the kind advocated by Milton Friedman and feared by Lekachman...
...The parent exercises his freedom to choose the type of education he wants for his child, and ptg insures that this freedom will not be the exclusive prerogative of the affluent...
...Yet, as Aaron Wildavsky has remarked in another context, "it does no good to propose measures that require nonexistent information, missing resources, and unobtainable agreement...
...Although the Office of Education and the Office of Economic Opportunity recognize the potential drawbacks to vouchers, we have supported small-scale, controlled pilot studies to substantiate or disprove our fears, rather than reject vouchers on the basis of unsubstantiated speculation about their possible consequences...
...We will not be required simply to speculate on what an eva will look like, or how a parent will act...
...The question remains: Is the voucher idea itself really workable...
...And, as is the case in any experiment, it will have unique, nonreplicable features...
...Demography has brought into office a growing number of black mayors...
...To cling to the ideal of the single, balanced, publicly funded school system, in the face of adamantine middle-class desires for educational results perceived as independent of or in conflict with racial and economic balance, is to risk increased inequity of opportunity...
Vol. 54 • September 1971 • No. 17
