Commentary The Case for 'Progressive' Vouchers
By Robert B. Reich. Mr. Reich, former secretary of labor, is professor of social and economic policy at Brandeis University. His next book, "The Future of Success," will be published in January by Alfred A. Knopf.
Education tops the list of Americans' concerns. But there's no agreement on what to do about it. The biggest emerging battle is between people who advocate school choice and those who want more money for schools. George W. Bush wants to give vouchers to poor kids in failing schools so they, and their parents, can shop for a better education.
But Al Gore says no way. He would prefer to spend $115 billion more on schools over the next 10 years, by contrast with the $13.5 billion over five years that Mr. Bush proposes. Joe Lieberman, who has sponsored legislation calling for experiments with vouchers for private schools, is now mute on the subject. Meanwhile, voucher plans in Cleveland and Florida are in the courts, and initiatives to authorize statewide voucher schemes will be on ballots this fall in California and Michigan.
Vouchers Work
The standoff between vouchers and money is predictable. It is also regrettable, because it prevents consideration of a most promising way to improve school performance -- giving kids "progressive" vouchers that are inversely related to the size of their family's income.
Evidence mounts that vouchers do work for kids who use them. A new study of students in New York, Washington and Dayton, Ohio -- conducted by researchers at Harvard, Georgetown and the University of Wisconsin -- found that after two years, the average performance of black students who switched to private schools was 6% higher than that of students who stayed behind in public schools.
So why not simply "voucherize" all education funding and let students and their parents select where they can get the best education? After all, that's what wealthy and upper-middle-class families do by choosing pricey homes in upscale towns with excellent public schools (in which case the "voucher" comes with the home), or by sending their kids to private schools. Voucher proponents, including a growing number of black parents, argue that poor kids should have the same advantage.
The biggest drawback to vouchers is that kids who are most troublesome, or whose parents couldn't care less or are overwhelmed with other problems, would almost certainly end up bunched together in the worst schools. Such schools would become even worse than they were before. After all, the increasing concentration of poor kids in America's poor schools has already compounded the problems these kids and those schools must deal with. Assuming that the kids who leave these schools take public money with them, the worst schools would end up with fewer resources per difficult child.
The new study also confirms the importance of school environment. The parents of voucher recipients noted the differences between their children's private schools and their former public schools, pointing out that there was less fighting, less destruction of property, and less racial conflict in the private schools than in the public schools their kids left behind.
Why is behavior better in private schools? For one thing, private schools enforce discipline in ways that public schools cannot. In particular, private schools can expel a child who seriously misbehaves. About 20% of the students in the study who were selected to attend private schools never completed the two years. It seems a fair guess that at least some of them were sent packing. But public schools must, by law, provide a public education to all.
The students drawn to private schools are also likely to be better behaved than those who remain in public schools. In the study I cite, most of the students already attending the private schools were from families who cared enough about their children to seek a good education for them, and who earned enough to afford one. By contrast, many inner-city public schools are comprised of students whose families are either unable to pay attention to their futures, or very poor, or both.
There is a powerful case for giving every possible advantage to better-behaved poor kids who are fortunate enough to have caring parents. School vouchers offer them an escape route from troublesome and unmotivated peers, negative peer influences and anarchic environments where teachers have to spend much of their time trying to maintain order. But it also means that school vouchers alone won't solve the problem of poor kids and lousy schools. Vouchers may just concentrate the problem further.
Almost a decade ago, New Zealand embarked on the closest thing we've seen to a national school-voucher experiment. Parents were given the right to choose the school their kids attended. This gave schools that attracted more applicants than they could accommodate great discretion over whom they accepted. The result: The best schools became even better, as they attracted the highest achievers. But the worst schools grew worse -- with ever-greater concentrations of difficult-to-teach students from impoverished homes. Vouchers -- with nothing more -- led to economic and social polarization.
But polarization already exists in the U.S. because of residential segregation by income, as well as the stark relationship between a community's tax base and the quality of its schools. Poor kids are more likely to attend underfunded schools than kids who aren't poor. Analysis from the National Center for Education Statistics shows that most poor students live in districts that spend less per student than their state's average. The Department of Education recently reported that much of the teaching in America's poorest schools is being done by teacher's aides without college degrees, rather than by qualified teachers.
The only way to begin to decouple poor kids from lousy schools is to give poor kids additional resources, along with vouchers enabling them and their parents to choose how to use them. Per-pupil public expenditures now average between $6,000 and $7,000 a year in the U.S. (with some states spending as much as $9,000, and others as little as $4,000). Ideally, a child from America's poorest 20% of families would receive a voucher worth between $10,000 and $12,000. Children from families in the next quintile would receive vouchers worth between $8,000 and $10,000. The vouchers could be used at any school that meets certain minimum standards, regardless of whether the school is now dubbed "public," "charter" or "private." (Leave aside, for now, the tricky First Amendment issue of public money for religious schools.)
What would be the likely result of such progressive vouchers? Schools already in easy geographic reach of poor kids would get an immediate infusion of billions of dollars they could use to upgrade physical plants, buy new textbooks, initiate after-school programs, and hire more and better teachers. But they would also have to compete with other schools nearby which thought they could put those sizable vouchers to even better educational use.
Even some suburban schools can be expected to enter the competition. The large vouchers would make it worthwhile to send vans to pick up and drop off groups of inner-city students. Although the most intensive competition would center on the best-behaved poor kids whose parents were most aggressive in seeking out good schools, the large vouchers would spur schools to recruit and retain more difficult children as well. Students, parents, and the schools they select would sign contracts for a minimum of two years, outlining their mutual objectives and responsibilities for meeting them.
Wealthier suburban schools would have even greater incentive to compete for students from poor families if the progressive voucher extended all the way up the income ladder. If children from families in the top 20% of income got vouchers of, say, $2,000 to $4,000 a year, schools in wealthier communities would make every effort to seek out enough $10,000 or $12,000 "vouchered" students in their region to meet their budgets.
The Challenge
Do you like the idea? Don't hold your breath. A progressive voucher system is a very long shot for now. For it to become a reality, we would need a substantial overhaul of the financing of public education. This would entail pooling local property taxes from both rich and poor communities (which the rich are likely to resist with no less intensity than they've opposed state schemes to better equalize educational spending) and dramatically increasing federal and state funding.
Teachers' unions may not look fondly upon the idea either, although it could result in higher salaries for good teachers. The largest challenge is to convince each side in the current education battle that they have only part of the answer, and their opponents have the other.