Vouchers & Public Education

...White as well as black parents would be insisting that new schools be constructed in racially mixed areas or, in their absence, on the boundaries separating whites and blacks...

...The occasion for voucher experiment is a liberal political period...

...The evas are themselves a supervisory authority parallel to existing school boards...

...In fact, wouldn't they be largely the same people...

...Suburbanites would agitate to have black, low-income pupils bused into their schools...

...The amounts schools received per voucher would be related to the progress made by each child during the school year...

...Education Report VOUCHERS & PUBLIC EDUCATION BY ROBERT LEKACHMAN Poverty programs put very little money into the hands of the poor because middle-class hands are so much more gifted at grasping money—they know better where it is, how to apply for it, how to divert it, how to concentrate it...

...The argument for imposing school taxes upon spinsters, bachelors, the superannuated, and the childless is, at its crassest, their interest in protecting their persons and property from the ignorant, the violent and the criminal...

...Its educational monument, Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, explicitly channels extra Federal funds to the poorer urban districts...

...If one reads such diverse assailants as Paul Goodman, Nat Hentoff...

...Parents could freely shop for the school they felt suited their child best, and alert entrepreneurs would widen the choices available by founding new schools better adjusted to the tastes of prospective customers...

...If this, by Dean Sizer's standards, makes me paranoid, I must prefer psychosis to Harvard-style realism...

...As with egalitarian vouchers, too, schools could solicit special funds from foundations, churches and Federal agencies...

...Jencks' prospectus for demonstration project experiments not only rewards schools that admit pupils who suffer from special problems (however ultimately defined), but charges the evas with distributing appropriate information to all parents about the characteristics of the various schools, and installs a partial lottery for admissions—at least 50 per cent of total enrollment...

...Rumsfeld's successor as oeo director, Frank Carlucci, is equally determined to spite the education establishment...

...These villains reject that magic Washington talisman, "the idea of accountability...

...Donald Rumsfeld, former Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) director and current Presidential counselor, condemns educationists who "fear experimentation because it may call into question their own dogmas and orthodoxies...

...Parents who fled the cities to escape the blacks and other urban afflictions complain of discovering schools which permit their children to major in drugs, sex and disruption...

...The following are the other major contenders: Unregulated compensatory model...

...Right now, any voucher plan that survives current discussion is all but certain to please Milton Friedman, Edward Banfield and the National Review a great deal more than it gratifies the political preferences of Christopher Jencks and myself...

...They perceive America, not entirely inaccurately, as a meritocracy...

...Family income depends upon the assumption of a high correlation between low income and special difficulties...

...But we believe that a voucher system which does not include these or equally effective safeguards would be worse than no voucher system at all...

...In short, like the free-market model, the egalitarian model will work to the disadvantage of poor, black, handicapped, retarded, and difficult children...

...Unregulated free markets in education will retard integration efforts where they are still being made...

...Starting with the voucher as a base, the more affluent parents could supplement it with additional sums designed to purchase superior education for their offspring...

...Accordingly, if one believes, as I do, that only essentially unregulated vouchers are politically viable, one must oppose liberal as well as conservative schemes...

...A major charm of conservative vouchers is the promise of dismantling overgrown educational bureaucracies and introducing unprecedented flexibility in the use of resources...

...THE CRITICISMS with which I began this inquiry continue to strike me as valid objections to conservative vouchers...

...Here it is only necessary to repeat Jencks' own warning: ". . . an unregulated voucher system would be the most serious setback for the education of disadvantaged children in the history of the United States...

...Because the public schools would end up more income-segregated than they already are, Jencks evaluates conservative vouchers as worse than existing arrangements...

...Although the complaints of middle-class suburbanites are predictably more numerous, what afflicts them most acutely is the status race...

...Jencks is concerned about five major questions raised by liberals objecting to vouchers in their pristine, free-market, conservative guise: Would vouchers increase de facto racial segregation...

...I freely absolve liberal vouchers, Jencks-style, from these charges, yet I discover other serious objections that are equally disabling...

...This plan focuses on accountability...

...As an application of free-market principle, the conservative case owes an intellectual debt to Adam Smith...

...In the 1970s the fragile bonds of social sympathy responsible for the passage of civil rights, antipoverty and aid-to-education statutes have loosened...

...At present the necessity of supporting public education limits this movement...

...But these are fantasies...

...Jencks defines his problem as the development of a voucher system that confronts these valid questions and yet preserves the merits of free choice in education...

...The public would do best for the poor, said Smith, "by establishing in every parish or district a little school, where children may be taught for a reward so moderate, that even a common laborer may afford it...

...To be sure, Friedman's plan is a departure in one significant respect from a completely free market: The public treasury rather than the parent finances the schools...

...Would an unregulated market for education increase expenditure upon rich children more than upon poor ones...

...Moreover, it will be up to each eva to admit or reject new schools seeking to be included in the voucher plan...

...Some suburban parents would insist on the opportunity to bus their own children to inner-city schools...

...This it can best do by excluding students with problems and concentrating admission on upper-middle-class, middle-class and exceptionally talented lower-class candidates...

...because, if he was wholly, or even principally paid by it, he would soon learn to neglect his business...

...What counts then is not whether a school is really "good," assuming a parent could tell, but its superiority over other schools as measured by the admissions selections of a very short list of elite colleges...

...Thus, in theory, poor parents would fare as well as rich ones in the hunt for superior educational opportunity...

...the schools will naturally enroll youngsters whom they judge will improve most rapidly...

...On the secondary levels, these schools are thought to be doing their job only when the alumni get into the best colleges...

...He wishes to take the monies now devoted to financing public schools and use them to support free choice by parents...

...For example, in the case of a family whose income was $5,000 eva might stipulate a 1.2 per cent ($60) assessment for enrolling a child in a school spending $1,000 per pupil...

...At the instance of the Office of Economic Opportunity, Jencks undertook to study possible voucher plans and propose an experimental demonstration project...

...This is Jencks' recurrent challenge, and his response is the regulated compensatory voucher...

...I taught this semester a class composed mostly of secondary school teachers...

...Schools would cash in the vouchers at the public treasury at rates publicly established...

...They are not...

...BUT BEFORE examining Jencks' preferred design, the regulated compensatory model, let's look briefly at the alternatives he rejects...

...Contemporary difficulties with the design of public education are related to a general conflict in American life between a tradition of egalitarianism which demands that every infant be given an equal chance to succeed, and an equally long-standing and usually more powerful preference for market solutions to social and educational as well as economic problems...

...They will increase existing disparities between the resources devoted to rich and poor children...

...In his 1962 manifesto, Capitalism and Freedom, that modern prophet of the free market Milton Friedman brought Adam Smith up to date...

...In 1969, only 44 per cent of new proposals were approved...

...Jencks' liberal voucher would be of equal value for all comers, and schools would be forbidden to set tuition charges higher than the voucher's dollar value...

...Friedman's proposal is dazzlingly simple...

...Conservatives understandably remain attached to the Friedman design for their vouchers...

...For even if the courts do not throw out vouchers as establishment of religion, there may be danger of a "series of bitter political struggles from which America has in the past been relatively exempt...

...that de facto racial segregation in Northern cities is paralleled by sedulously stratified income segregation in the suburbs...

...And if by some major miracle liberal vouchers were inaugurated, middle-class parents would place enormous pressure upon Voucher Authorities to influence the operation in favor of their own children, evas would either cave in or find their tasks radically redefined by legislatures responding to middle-class pressures...

...How preserve free choice and yet advance the interests of poor, black and difficult children...

...MY POINT is this...

...Increased school responsiveness to children's needs and parents' opinions would raise the quality of education for all, but again especially for the youngsters from low-income families...

...The schemes contain at least two innovative features...

...It regulates the educational marketplace more than most conservatives would like, and contains far more safeguards for the interests of disadvantaged children...

...During a conservative period, those who favor liberal goals are better off with the public schools than with any politically viable alternative...

...Edgar Z. Friedenberg, and Charles Silberman, or listens to school-age youngsters of one's own acquaintance, the customers, the children themselves, judge the schools more harshly than do the parents...

...Worse still, the test scores for measuring performance are suspect on two grounds: They reflect class bias, and they correlate very poorly with later success...

...only then do liberal vouchers represent a political possibility...

...in other words, there would be an incentive to do something about difficult as well as easy cases...

...As it does elsewhere, competition will promote educational efficiency in all varieties of schools...

...No one should expect to do good by stealth...

...No matter how much we try to change things it sometimes ends as merely a more complex, intricate, bizarre, and interesting version of what existed before...

...The overriding social fact is that most parents who favor vouchers do so for reasons quite different from any aspiration toward racial or economic integration...

...Granted the best of liberal auspices, I simply do not believe the scheme will end as anything other than some variant of free-market, conservative vouchers...

...the master being partly, but not wholly paid by the public...

...To say the least, Milton Friedman's simple scheme has grown very complicated...

...They would assign the voucher to the school of their choice—public, private, parochial, profit-making, or altruistic in organization...

...While new bureaucracies may be considered preferable to old ones on the ground that it takes time for the administrative arteries to harden, this is a fairly weak riposte to a serious defect of liberal vouchers...

...Better times may come...

...Equipped with ample evidence, many black parents perceive the public schools as tainted with white, middle-class elitism...

...We recognize that such restrictions will be considered undesirable by some people...

...They would place all parents on an equal footing as far as voucher values go, and the schools would be prohibited from charging tuition fees higher than the value of the voucher...

...In what follows I hope that I shall not be interpreted as unequivocally endorsing public education...

...Again, schools would be free to set tuition, but only on the condition that they offer scholarships to poor children...

...Compulsory private scholarship model...

...In Jencks' opinion, all these schemes are likely to deteriorate into versions of the unregulated free-market approach, largely because every school feels its resources are inadequate and is concerned about using them efficiently...

...Vouchers, Friedman contends, will not only stimulate experiment and diversity and match available supply to parental demand, they may also rescue the public school...

...If the schools retain control over admissions, they will try to make their own lives easier and their results more impressive by admitting intelligent, well-behaved pupils rather than the slow learners, the emotionally disturbed, and the potentially disruptive...

...American political life has generally been a volatile process...

...that those who fear that vouchers will convert urban public schools into dumping grounds for unwanted pupils fail to see this has already occurred...

...Each voucher issued to the parent of a poor child could be cashed in at the school of the parent's choice for more dollars than a voucher issued to a prosperous family...

...But it is quite probable that when most people talk of vouchers it is some variant of free markets in education they have in mind...

...Educational variety would be enhanced...

...In this respect, the achievement model suffers a special defect...

...He justifies this erosion of pure principle by reference to what economists call neighborhood effects...

...Even if for a time Voucher Authorities refused to buckle and legislatures failed to act, evas would need to devote so much of their resources to ferreting out evasions of their criteria that they would be able to do very little else...

...A properly regulated system, on the other hand, could inaugurate a new era of innovation and reform in American schools...

...In the Wealth of Nations, Smith maintained that "Were there no public institutions for education, no system, no science would be taught for which there was not some demand"—an outcome he believed entirely desirable...

...A second distinction, possibly of nearly equal importance, concerns admissions...

...Support for the public schools has always been weak, of course, among those Catholic, Lutheran and Jewish parents who enroll their children in parochial or day schools...

...And why should anybody's voucher plan, however decently designed, be likely to turn them into reality if it depends upon the very social opinions whose absence has generated these dreams...

...Rich as well as poor people would be urging municipal authorities to experiment with educational parks and school pairing...

...is quite different from other systems now being advocated...

...This is what being middle class means, just as a race means competition...

...The affirmative answers chorus from the mouths of men and women who share scarcely another opinion...

...The partial lottery compromises the sturdy determination of the middle class to get its youngsters into the "best" schools, while leaving open the possibility that the schools would administer the 50 per cent admissions left under their control in ways favoring students from middle-class families...

...That fact has registered itself in the rising tide of school bond proposals rejected in suburban polls...

...Jencks makes them responsible for disseminating meaningful information to parents about the quality of different schools, a task which almost demands that the evas continuously inspect and grade their schools, evas will administer the lotteries and presumably supervise even the admissions within school control, so as to guard against illegal racial discrimination...

...Under the circumstances, the preservation and strengthening of public education deserves the highest of liberal priorities...

...But if they are not, a special burden is imposed on the Voucher Authorities to see to it that they don't cut educational corners in the pursuit of higher profits...

...A short decade ago, suburban voters endorsed over 80 per cent of the school bond issues presented to them...

...As Dean Theodore Sizer of Harvard's School of Education would have it, "Given the condition of the schools that serve poor youngsters, it takes a depressing amount of paranoia to suggest that we should not even give the voucher plan a reasonable trial...

...Do the public schools stand in danger of becoming "schools of last resort," semi-penal institutions for youngsters nobody else wants...

...They refuse to raise property taxes sky-high to finance these enterprises...

...The amount might rise to 1.5 per cent of income ($75) if the chosen school expended $1,200 per child...

...Jencks identifies three major virtues of his proposal...

...Friedman proceeds from an ideological preference for universal freedom of consumer choice and some factual assumptions...

...One transfers to parents, in the form of vouchers that can be cashed in at any public, private or parochial school, the sums now devoted to educating their children in public schools...

...Vouchers come in two basic styles, conservative and liberal, with each displaying rather different advantages and defects...

...For each school-age child, parents would be issued a voucher...

...But unless and until public sentiment swings once again toward concern with racial and economic equality, liberals who cherish such aspirations are engaged in a holding operation, a desperate effort to preserve Kennedy-Johnson advances...

...Parents would be free to choose among schools whose per pupil costs were anything from present public school levels to several times that figure...

...Thus average and slightly below average pupils, blacks and whites, poor and rich, would get a shot at admission to the schools they or their parents prefer...

...If in 1971 the pressures toward integration and economic equality were powerful, there would be ample evidence of their operation upon public education...

...Add to this evas made up in good part of old school board members, not to mention the need for continuing to use existing physical plants, and one must wonder what would really be changing after all...

...Would the separation of church and state be endangered...

...Since some poor children are easy to teach and some rich ones exceedingly hard, a school would be inclined to select poor children of superior learning capacity and thereby earn just as much voucher credit and extra compensation as though it had accepted more demanding boys and girls...

...But growing resentment at being forced to pay for two school systems has something to do with school bond issue rejections...

...No doubt they would be tolerable if their functions were limited...

...No parent wants his child officially dubbed a behavior problem or a slow learner...

...Liberal vouchers owe most to Christopher Jencks, coauthor with David Riesman of The Academic Revolution and director of the Center for the Study of Public Policy in Cambridge...

...The vital difference is to be found in the requirement that the evas increase the schools' income according to the number of disadvantaged children they enroll...

...Given these "facts,' Friedman argues that the risks of doing something different are minimal and the possible gains enormous...

...There are two reasons why in the end liberal vouchers are almost as dubious a proposition as their conservative rivals...

...For some black parents, community control of local schools represents a last, desperate attempt to improve the life chances of their children...

...Under the spur of increased competition, public school administrators may take a new lease on life and improve their performance to the degree that will induce parents to enroll their children in public rather than private schools...

...Were parents relieved of their school taxes, the public schools would truly decay...

...In their bitter judgment, the schools' agents socialize black children into the acceptance of low estimates of their intellectual capacity and pessimistic predictions of their vocational prospects...

...Although such plans would grant parents in all economic situations vouchers of equal value, poor parents could afford to enroll their children only in schools whose tuition charge was no greater than the value of the voucher...

...In addition, each eva is charged with protecting unwanted children (admitted via the lotteries) from unfair suspension or expulsion...

...Poor parents would make even greater gains than affluent ones...

...Here is his own assessment of what he has wrought: "The voucher system outlined...

...In sum, Jencks' laudable efforts to protect the weak seem likely to emerge as an educational structure of supervision at least as annoying as current public school administrative hierarchies...

...Would the new teachers in the voucher schools be all that much better...

...Finally, is it really a good idea to give such rank educational amateurs as most parents are what amounts to a veto over the actions of the experts...

...Which children have the "special problems" entitling their schools to extra funds...

...As far as economic segregation is concerned, vouchers would inevitably worsen rather than improve the situation...

...Hence the compensatory in the label...

...Egalitarian vouchers, at first glance, are more attractive...

...When they moved out of the central cities, their choice of new homes was heavily influenced by the reputation of the local public schools...

...PHILIP SLATER IN The Pursuit of Loneliness HAVE THE public schools failed...

...Conservative, blue-collar parents resent the "permissiveness" of their children's teachers and the schools' failure to inculcate old-fashioned loyalties to the President, the police, official sexual morality, hard work, and country right or wrong...

...They seemed amazingly intelligent, enlightened and receptive to new ideas...

...Five tough issues...

...Achievement vouchers...

...Last January 20 he awarded preliminary planning grants to Indiana and California school districts interested in trying voucher schemes...

...The latter are familiar: that public education has lamentably failed either to integrate the races or democratize the experience of rich, middle-income and low-income children...

...But the ultimate result of liberal vouchers may well turn out to be more rather than less bureaucratic supervision of the schools...

...There is good reason for complexity...

...The liberal alternative tries to combine the benefits of vouchers with the promotion of a number of objectives high on standard liberal agenda...

...How much parents paid would depend upon the school's expenditure level and the parents' income...

...Everybody has an interest in a civilized society...

...They are almost by definition more difficult to teach and control than their luckier agemates, though, so the equal resources available to the public schools will prove inadequate to the education of these particular children...

...The size of the scholarships, the conditions of their tenure, and the mode of selection would be among the matters controlled by the evas...

...Closely inspected, however, this arrangement seems more likely to produce different results...

...My second criticism of liberal vouchers I esteem as the notion's real coup de grace...

...For similar reasons, erosion of the line separating church and state is likely to proceed less rapidly in the public than in the private schools...

...This is the brainchild of Professor John Coons...

...Who admires the public schools...

...Meanwhile, the same sums expended on teaching students of superior intelligence might be more than adequate...

...Where the public schools are not already last resorts for unwanted children, they will rapidly march toward that unpleasant status...

...With one highly significant difference, it is a version of the egalitarian voucher...

...In the present climate of opinion, a generalized voucher plan would not have a ghost of a chance to win politically if it remained faithful to Jencks' criteria: tuition ceilings, rewards for schools that educate difficult children, 50 per cent lotteries, plus effective supervision over publicity, admissions, suspension, and expulsion...

...But each school would be allowed to charge whatever tuition it wanted...

...I tend to agree with Jencks that profit-seeking schools should not per se be excluded...

...Since the Educational Voucher Authorities will be responsible for providing every child a place in some school, the rejects will land in public schools...

...I dare say I can complain as loudly of its defects as the next critic...

...Since the Harvards and the Yales cannot possibly admit all the middle-class youngsters who apply (and if they did, many of the reasons for going to Yale and Harvard would vanish), there exists an inchoate majority of middle-class parents whose opinion of the public school is likely to be low...

...The remainder of this essay is an effort to examine closely and unemotionally an idea condemned by its opponents for opening the way to the destruction of public education, and praised by its proponents for offering the best way to revitalize both public and private schools...

...At the least a well-articulated structure of law and judicial interpretation limits school racial segregation, and there is reasonable hope that sometime soon the Supreme Court will get around to outlawing some of the more blatant forms of de facto racial segregation in the North...

...No solution is entirely satisfactory...

...He dismisses totally free-market schemes because they would aggravate existing misallocations of resources between rich and poor children...

...No one should expect to convert conservative and elitist impulses into integrationist and egalitarian virtue...

...Standardized examinations like the Metropolitan Readiness Test are unpopular among black parents...

...That nobody knows what American education will become after the voucher revolution Friedman considers the strongest possible argument in its favor: Think, he cries, what the schools are like now...

...Admittedly, the children of the poor presented a special problem...

...As Jencks himself says of middle-class parents, "They want to send their children to school with other middle- or upper-middle-class children, and they see vouchers as an easy and apparently legitimate way to do this...

...Effort vouchers...

...Its 345 pages survey no fewer than 11 different voucher designs, ranging from unregulated free markets in educational services, through an egalitarian model, to Jencks' preferred candidate, the regulated compensatory plan...

...For a period during the 1960s egalitarianism displayed unwonted strength...

...It was in the public interest that they learn to read, write and count, yet it was important that the schoolmasters of the poor be placed in a state of wholesome insecurity...

...Now even the feds have joined the critical chorus...

...The second novelty is a bureaucratic invention, Educational Voucher Authorities (eva), charged with supervising the vouchers and the institutions they support...

...THE STANDS taken by Rumsfeld, Carlucci and Sizer reflect an increasing approval of vouchers as the preferred technique for transforming elementary and possibly secondary education...

...The free-market version that I take to be inevitable would promote existing tendencies of middle-class parents to enroll their offspring in urban private schools...

...I should like, though, to add a personal word...

...The Center's Education Vouchers: A Report on Financing Elementary Education by Grants to Parents, emerged in December 1970...

...Indeed, an unregulated voucher system would be the most serious setback for the education of disadvantaged children in the history of the United States...