Reply #123: Vouchers are a Trojan Horse

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Like any "reform," a good quick way to judge programs to reform American public education is to see who's pushing them. Vouchers (and "school choice") are being pushed by people who hate public education, because it's where children are taught to share, taught that religion is a matter of opinion but science is a matter of fact, taught that the U.S. hasn't always been history's hero, and taught that races, religions, and lifestyles other than one's own are entitled to respect. I'm not trying to characterize everyone who is presently for vouchers or school choice, only the S.O.B.s who got the ball rolling.

Anyone who has ever taught in the public schools will understand how dependent any school is on its community of concerned parents. A certain percentage of parents (varies from school to school and district to district) range from apathetic to actively hostile to education for their children. The children of these parents tend to be behavior problems, academic problems, etc. On the other hand, you have the informed parents who care and support their children's education. These parents and their children are school leaders. Nothing good ever gets done without them.

Now, begin by starving the public schools for funds for a couple of decades. Use junk logic and junk science to pretend that money doesn't improve education, that smaller classes don't matter, etc. Then trump up a case that the public schools are failing. Be sure to include statistics on ESL students and handicapped students that weren't even counted in your comparison period of the 50s and 60s. Standard propaganda techniques geared to specific communities will get the concerned parents up in arms about their children's education. Then present vouchers or school choice as the only possible solution and watch their desperation solve your problems.

So where's the harm? Voucher/school choice proponents say that only enough money to education one student is taken away for each student that is taken away. But that assumes that you can just hire and fire teachers and expand or contract the school building based on changes in the enrollment. If you can educate 1,000 students for $1.5 million per year, does that mean you can educate one for $1,500?

But worse than that is the fact that the students/parents who will leave the underperforming schools are the ones that are needed the most desperately, the ones who care. It doesn't matter whether they go to private schools or "better" public schools, what they leave behind will be a hopeless mess, with plenty of students still in it. They might as well put bars in the windows and hire guards instead of teachers. Vouchers or school choice won't get rid of the "bad" schools because all of the students (by law) will have to go somewhere, and the "good" schools won't be able to magically absorb all of them. And they won't want to, not if they want to remain "good" schools (what makes a good school good is mostly the motivation of the students and the parents, regardless of socioeconomic class). So this just redistributes the students by tier, and consigns large numbers of them to inevitable academic failure.

I've heard vouchers described as a program to rescue students off a sinking ship. It's more like a program to rescue a handful of students of a ship that MIGHT sink, and then scuttle the ship in deep ocean with the rest of the students on board. Big appeal to lovers of elitism. The tragic thing is that parents tend to think of their own children as among the few "saved" and other people's children among the many drowned.

I mean no disrespect to people who deplore the tendency of voucher programs to get around the separation of church and state or to undo desegregation. Those are valid concerns. I merely wish to point out that the danger of vouchers is both larger and more fundamental than just that. Even voucher/school choice programs which are nonsectarian and preserve racial integration are still disastrous for the reasons noted above.