I remember a few months ago, In These times ran a "viewpoint" point advocating vouchers from a reader familiar with the Milwaukee vouchers program. If memory serves the author wrote for, "Rethinking Schools, " a lefty mag. Also The American Prospect ran a two part debate between Richard Rothstein, Peter Schrag and Edward Coons. http://www.prospect.org/webarchives/99-11/controversy/ Also, just visiting the site to get the URL, I see a new piece by Max, "Zillions o' Billions o' Trillions: Time to Liberate the Federal Budget, " http://www.prospect.org/columns/sawicky/sa000209.html
Michael Pugliese
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thanks mike, the check is in the mail.
Re: vouchers, one has to distinguish between gadgets and underlying political economy. The school system is not screwed up because it lacks vouchers or 'choice.' It is screwed up because under the U.S. federal system, education is under the purview of local government. Local government is organized to implement economic and racial segregation. Segregation serves the purpose of obstructing redistribution, and may even promote counter-redistribution (i.e., the exploitation of central cities by suburbs). You can't fix this with a gadget, however ingenious. It's about fundamental cultural and political institutions.
Vouchers arguably serve the cause of segregation at a higher level. Under present circumstances, there is some mixing by class and race within local jurisdictions. Vouchers could perfect sorting by race and class by removing the right of a family to use a local school. There would be no local schools. The face of vouchers now in their introductory stage is relatively benign. A mature voucher system could be quite different. Just as HMO's have ways to choose their their clientele, so do private schools.
The right-wing fears of regulation are hysterical. Regulation is a very weak reed to move local institutions like schools. I've been studying contracting, which is a more intense form of regulation than regulation itself, and contracting is exceedingly weak, even when the job in question is relatively straight-forward (unlike public education). The fear is founded on the use of cross-jurisdictional registration in vouchers *experiments* to dish the Democrats; it's been working well. Black support of vouchers, outside of assorted liberal elites, is very high.
These issues, including radical reforms, are worth raising because the dissatisfaction with public schools is sufficiently great to demand attention. Extant liberal solutions to the problem are mostly bullshit, but so are vouchers.
mbs