Leo Casey
The editorial page of the September 7 _Wall Street Journal_ held a surprise for its readers. In an unusual commentary, Robert Reich, former Clinton Secretary of Labor and co-founder of the liberal journal _The American Prospect_, put forward a "Case for 'Progressive' Vouchers." (The full text of this commentary is reproduced below). Arguing a position generally identified with the anti-public education and anti-labor political right, Reich proposed the adoption of a system of government vouchers which would supply families with as much as $12,000 a year to attend the private school of their choice.
There is no virtue in political conformity for its own sake, and if Reich made a compelling or even original case for this stance, one could laud his willingness to break with the strong anti-voucher consensus among progressive public officials and educators. But that, alas, is not the case, as I shall demonstrate below. And given his prominence as a national spokesperson for the liberal political community, Reich's commentary is bound to be widely read and quoted. The following day, for example, a _New York Times_ columnist with a history of pro-voucher boosterism, John Tierney, dedicated his entire to a celebration of Reich's "defection" to the voucher cause. It is important, therefore, to see just how empty, how lacking in real policy substance, Reich's commentary is.
"Vouchers Work," Just Not For Students
Reich begins his argument with the contention that there is a growing body of evidence that "vouchers work." He offers one piece of supporting evidence: a recent study, widely promoted by its authors in the mass media, which purports to show a substantial increase in academic achievement among African-American students attending private schools as a result of a voucher program. [This study, "Test-Score Effects of School Vouchers," can be found at hdc-www.harvard.edu/pepg/index.htm.] Quite simply, Reich has failed to do his homework here. The team of researchers which conducted this study were organized and led by Paul Peterson of Harvard's Program on Education Policy and Governance, a figure well-known in educational and public policy circles as a tireless and long-term advocate of school privatization and vouchers, and their work was financed by a bevy of conservative foundations dedicated to that same cause (the Bradley, Fordham, Olin and Milton Friedman foundations being the most prominent). The study is of three 'private' voucher programs, financed by wealthy conservatives for the express purpose of promoting school vouchers; the testing was undertaken and the data collected by those programs and the participating private schools, without any outside oversight or verification; and the Peterson team was given exclusive access to the process and its results. It is also noteworthy that the financing agency of one of the three programs being studied, the Walton Foundation, also funded the Peterson study, and that Sam Walton is one of a number of venture capitalists making large investments in education in the hope of cashing in on a wave of privatization and vouchers. All of this is akin, educational scholars have claimed, to having tobacco companies finance 'research' on the effects of smoking and automobile companies finance 'research' on the safety of their vehicles. Bottom line: this study was not conducted by scholars disinterested in the results, it was not funded by sources without an investment in the results, and it can not be independently validated by scholars who do not share the ideological investment of the Peterson team.
If Reich had taken the trouble to read the body of published research on school vouchers, he would have discovered that this was not the first pro-voucher study published by Peterson and his colleagues, and that there has been a rather passionate debate over the quality, objectivity and ethics of the Peterson work. (See "Researcher at Center of Storm Over Vouchers" in _Education Week_, August 5, 1998 and the debate within the pages of the professional journal of the American Political Science Association, _PS_, December 1999 and June 2000.) He would also have found that when scholars without an ideological axe to grind conducted scientifically valid studies of the voucher programs in Milwaukee and Cleveland, they found — in contrast to Peterson's published claims in both cases — that there was no evidence that voucher students who attended private schools performed at a higher academic level than those who remained in public schools; indeed, there was some evidence in Cleveland that the academic performance in the private schools was inferior in certain subjects. (See John F. Witte, "Achievement Effects of the Milwaukee Voucher Program" [dpls.dacc.wisc.edu/choice/aea97.html] and _The Market Approach to Education: An Analysis of America's First Voucher Program._ Princeton University Press, 1999.; Kim Metcalf, Et. Al. of Indiana University, "Evaluation of the Cleveland Scholarship Program.") In the latest report upon which Reich relies for his column, Peterson, Et. Al. tersely dismiss this record with the comment that "(d)isparate findings have emerged from these studies (of the Milwaukee and Cleveland voucher programs)."
Add to all of this the fact that Reich completely overlooks the small print of the Peterson study: while it highlights the gains of African-American students found in the data from this questionable process, it was still unable to find a similar gain for Latino/as, Asian-Americans or whites. One is left without any convincing evidence to support Reich's major contention, that vouchers work... except, perhaps, for those venture capitalists investing in education.
Educational Inequality, Vouchers and Reich's Progressive Solution
The problem with completely privatizing education through vouchers, Reich goes on to concede at the next point in his argument, is that it would exacerbate the great inequalities which already define American education. Public schools which are already underfunded would suffer further cuts in their operating budgets, leading to an inevitable decline in the quality of the education they provide; at the same time, vouchers would 'skim' off the better students with the more culturally savvy parents, leaving the educationally neediest students, the students most at risk for academic failure, heavily concentrated in the poorest financed and poorest quality schools. Indeed, Reich notes, this is exactly what happened in New Zealand, the one country that has embarked on a nationwide experiment with vouchers.
Here is where Reich introduces what he considers to be the 'progressive' element of his proposal: his vouchers would be differentially funded, with the poorest families receiving the largest sums (up to $12,000) and the wealthiest families receiving the smallest sums (as low as $2000). This would, Reich argues, provide a massive infusion of funds that would improve schools in areas of high poverty and, at the same time, create an incentive for the better private and suburban schools to recruit the poorest students. Either way, in a dramatically enriched local school or in a private or suburban alternative, schooling for the poor — which is the crux of the problems facing American education — will have been improved.
But no sooner than the reader's eye has passed over Reich's proposal for 'progressive' vouchers, then it finds his admonition that we should not "hold our breath" waiting for it to be enacted. It would require, he tells us, a complete overhaul of school financing, as well as a massive increase in federal funding to education. The truth be told, the type of financing reform which Reich proposes is even more unlikely than he suggests. He would reverse the pattern of expenditures, with the poorest students receiving the amount of money currently spent on the wealthiest, and the wealthiest receiving even less than the amount of money currently spent on the poorest. Far more modest attempts at educational finance reform, endeavors which simply sought to establish a greater degree of equity in expenditures between 'rich' and 'poor' school districts, have met with massive political and legal resistance. (David Goodman, "America's Newest Class War" in _Mother Jones_, September-October 1999. [www.motherjones.com/mother_jones/SO99/goodman.html].) It is hard to even imagine the conditions under which the Reich financing proposal could be politically viable in the United States. Given Reich's political acumen, he certainly knows this.
The most peculiar aspect of Reich's political logic here is that the issue of financing inequity and the underfunding of urban public schools lies at the root of the most serious problem in American education, that of the low performing schools which serve impoverished communities with large numbers of academically at risk students. Turning around a low performing school takes more than a substantial increase in resources — most obviously, the additional funds must be spent on crucial educational priorities, such as hiring, retaining and professionally supporting qualified, experienced teachers and lowering class sizes — but those resources are a necessary condition for that transformation. Only the invidious class politics of educational financing stand in the way of recognizing a common sense truth: that a school would need greater, rather than less, educational resources to be successful at educating students with greater educational needs.
Government could spend less on education than Reich's voucher scheme calls for, but considerably more than it currently does, and, so long as those funds were properly targeted and directed, provide a high quality education for every student in every public school. Let's take a look at New York State and City as a point of reference. The average school district in New York spends $9321 per pupil, about $1000 above the national average. However, New York ranks 48th out of 50 states in terms of funding equity: wealthy school districts spend much more (Scarsdale clocks in at $13,622 per pupil) and poor school districts much less (Jamestown manages $7993.) New York City, the largest school district in the state and the nation with over one million students, spends $8,171, more than a thousand dollars below the state average. Even this figure is deceptive: New York City has the highest concentration in the state of poor students and students with special needs such as limited English language proficiency and learning disabilities, and these students receive much more expensive educational services, thus skewing the average expenditure to the high side.
Without attempting to calculate with any specificity the increase in expenditure per pupil which would result from Reich's rather general financing proposal, and without addressing issues such as dedicated funds for special needs students, it is fairly clear that his scheme would increase the average New York City per pupil expenditure by a factor of as much as 33%. Considerably smaller increases in per pupil expenditures could allow its public schools to reduce class size to that of the wealthier, surrounding suburban school districts; current research shows that this is a much more cost effective and successful method of improving academic performance than vouchers. (See the summary of this research in Alex Molnar, "Small Classes, Not Vouchers, Increase Student Achievement." Keystone Research Center, Harrisburg, PA. 1998.) Considerably smaller increases in per pupil expenditures could allow its public schools to pay teacher salaries which were competitive with the surrounding suburbs, allowing it to recruit a fully licensed and certified teaching force. (Currently, close to 15% of New York City's educators, in the range of 10,000 teachers, are uncertified; suburban school districts have no uncertified teachers to speak of.)
Finally, as Reich notes in his commentary, school culture is also an important factor in the success of a school. Schools which experience a great deal of disruption and violence are not places conducive to learning. But one hardly needs vouchers and private schools to address that concern. Positive school climates exist in a synergistic relationship with the depth and quality of learning that goes on in a school, and the two must be approached in unison. Moreover, there must be more of a level playing field in codes of student conduct and discipline. Rather than accepting the fact that public schools have been put at a significant disadvantage in this area, through a combination of excessive litigation and bureaucratic overregulation developed in response to it, surely the point should be to restore some balance and sense between individual rights and the common good in all of our schools.
Conclusion
What, then, is Reich's purpose in proposing a voucher system dependent upon a reform in school financing which borders on sheer utopianism, leaving for the practical political world only the endorsement of vouchers by a leading liberal? Is he not providing fuel to a policy proposal which in the real world would only worsen the inequalities of American education, as he himself concedes? When it comes to vouchers and education, it is time for Reich to put some clothes on. Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --