Totally Baffling Voucher Arguments
Matt is baffled by Megan’s argument for vouchers:
One needs to go back to what we know about educating poor children. One thing we know is that it’s very difficult. The schools that do a good job of educating poor kids tend to expend more resources than do schools that do a good job of educating middle class kids. We also know that there are many schools that produce good overall results but that nonetheless produce bad results with their poor children. We know that some urban public school systems do better than others. We know that the charter school movement has produced some successful models, but also that market demand can keep a healthy number of non-successful charter schools operating because parents do a less-than-perfect job of making school placement decisions on the basis of evidence about educational outcomes.If we’re concerned not about the “right” of exit (which already exists) but the practical ability to get a better education, then you need policies that increase the supply of schools that do a good job of educating poor children. Just handing a voucher to every family in DC that can manage to place a kid in a private school would be a nice subsidy to the parents at Sidwell and St. Albans and would presumably get some poor kids into better situations, but would still, in practice, leave most DC families right where they are today — with the “right” to send their kids elsewhere, but no practical ability to do so.
It seems blindingly obvious to me that “handing a voucher to every family in DC” is precisely the policy most likely to “increase the supply of schools that do a good job of educating poor children.” I mean look, in any other part of the economy, we have these people called “entrepreneurs” that see an unmet need, find a way to meet that need, attract paying customers, and thereby build a successful business. What makes entrepreneurship possible is a large pool of potential paying customers. The larger the potential market, the more entrepreneurs you’re likely to attract.
Now, educational entrepreneurs do exist. If Matt doesn’t believe me, he should visit and I’ll take him to a local Catholic school a toured a few months ago that’s successfully educating some of the poorest minority students in the St. Louis area. And he’s right—their per-pupil expenditures are fairly high, although if I recall correctly they’re not as astronomical as expenditures in city public schools. They’re able to survive because they’ve managed to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars in private donations. But running a private school for low-income kids is extremely difficult, because in addition to the ordinary problems of educating low-income kids, you have to also spend a lot of time wooing donors and organizing fundraisers. Which, I think, is one of the reasons such schools are few and far between.
Now, the number of such entrepreneurs is surely limited. Creating a new school, or serving as a teacher at a school serving low-income kids, is a stressful, harrowing job. So we shouldn’t expect vouchers to miraculously lead to the creation of good private school seats for all the poor children who want them. But a well-designed voucher program creates the opportunity for however many aspiring educational entrepreneurs do exist to create new schools for poor kids without having to worry about external fundraising.
The claim that vouchers would “leave most DC families right where they are today” rings hollow when absolutely no one is proposing anything that will work any better. Every reform proposal will result in most poor kids continuing to be trapped in bad public schools in the short term. Vouchers are likely to give more poor kids more opportunities more quickly than almost any other reform proposal under discussion.
“But a well-designed voucher program creates the opportunity for however many aspiring educational entrepreneurs do exist to create new schools for poor kids without having to worry about external fundraising.”
I just fundamentally don’t believe that there are enough people like those you describe to be able to do anything close to address the problem. The idea that dangling government money is going to start a new private school gold rush, I think, is very naive. If you’ve been through educational masters programs, if you’re in the private school culture, if you talk to the people who work in private schools (and their being candid), part of the appeal of working for a private school is precisely that you don’t have to teach troubled kids. In most of the country, private school teachers make less (sometimes significantly less) than public school teachers do, and with significantly worse job security. But they know the job will be easier, in many cases. I mean, look— I think there is a fundamental tension in the voucher movement between people who comment on policy writ large, like McArdle, who argues for widespread voucher programs which effectively replace (or start to replace) public schooling, and the on-the-ground pro-voucher movement of parents and private school industry advocates, who almost exclusively talk about small scale voucher programs for the few. And, to an extent, this is because many of the people in the voucher movement aren’t particularly interested in changing the system at large. They just want access to government money, whether for their child, as in the parents, or for their school. I’m sorry, but private schools aren’t chomping at the bit to educate poor, indigent children from the inner city. They just aren’t.
Also, I’m baffled at how vouchers can both “use market forces to improve educational quality” (which is the sort of vague claim made by voucher proponents all the time), but be made profitable by government expenditure. You can’t have both. Government expenditure can’t insulate private schools from the difficulty in making inner city private schools profitable while at the same time the mystery of “market forces” somehow magically improves the educational experience. This is another facet of the voucher movement which is troubling, the utterly vague notion of what mechanism is going to improve the academic performance of these kids.
“The claim that vouchers would ‘leave most DC families right where they are today’ rings hollow when absolutely no one is proposing anything that will work any better.”
As I have pointed out at both Matt Yglesias’s blog and McArdle’s, it is extremely difficult to assess the degree to which superior academic performance is the result of the selection difference between public and private schools. Private schools overwhelmingly exclude, through one mechanism or another, the most difficult to educate students. Public schools must educate these students. So when private schools brag about their academic performance, it’s inherently disingenuous. I have said before that it’s like only allowing in kids over a certain height, and bragging about how tall your student body is.
Now that in and of itself isn’t reason to throw out the voucher argument. But that kind of thing has to be analyzed quantitatively, those kind of differences have to be corrected for. What is extremely frustrating for me, in this debate, is the tendency to argue without evidence, and make claims such as “well it can’t get worse, so any change would be for the better.” This is not a sound or effective way to debate public policy. The degree to which the public schools fail or succeed matters. The degree to which private schools outperform public schools needs to be measured. Without that kind of information, you can’t effectively determine what is succeeding or failing. But time and time again, you see blanket assertions like “American public education is in crisis!” without any corroborating evidence. Time and time again you see statements like “Things can’t get worse, let’s try this change.” That attitude is deeply irresponsible, and it leaves us assured of not correctly assessing success or failure— and making the prospects for change where it is necessary that much more bleak.
— Freddie · Nov 1, 03:26 AM · #
Freddie, I don’t know how to reconcile your bald assertions with facts I’ve seen with my own eyes. There are, in fact, schools focused entirely on educating low-income minority students who are ready and willing to expand if given the opportunity to do so. I toured one of them here in St. Louis. So your statement that “private schools aren’t chomping at the bit to educate poor, indigent children from the inner city” is just false.
I guess your point is that not “enough” private schools are chomping at the bit to do that, which is vague enough to be unfalsifiable. It’s also at odds with the reality I’ve seen firsthand. In the one city where vouchers have actually been tried on a large scale, Milwaukee, we know for a fact that new schools have been created, existing private schools have been expanded, and the total number of kids being served has grown to over 17,000, or about a quarter of Milwaukee’s school children. I toured two of those schools last year: one was a brand-new high school focusing on lower-income black kids, the other was a Hispanic-focused grade school that had expanded from 200 to 900 kids over the last decade.
Of course, 26% isn’t 100%. There are still lots of kids in the public schools. But I don’t see how that’s an objection to vouchers per se. If on the margin, vouchers allow some kids to go to better schools than they otherwise would have attended, and the kids who don’t use the vouchers aren’t made worse off in the process, then the policy is a success. Whether 100 or 10,000 kids get the vouchers determines how big a benefit the program produces, not whether the program is beneficial. The fact that Milwaukee’s voucher program “only” helps 17,000 kids is hardly a reason to oppose the program.
— Tim Lee · Nov 1, 04:06 AM · #
I would say that the people who are suggesting this enormous shift in our system of education are the ones who must prove that there are indeed financial interests lining up for the job of starting schools in places like inner city Detroit. If we’re going to do this massive expansion of private schooling, before we devote public resources to that cause we had better be damn sure that there are in fact people willing to undertake that task. And, of course, that is an incredibly minor question compared to the operative one, whether they would in fact perform better than public schools.
You are left with your own bald assertion, that private school is better at educating than public school, and that — and this is one of the great ignored questions of the issue— the advantage is upwardly scalable to an enormous degree. This is taken as fact by voucher proponents without sufficient evidence.
The problems with our education system, I’d suggest, are really larger problems with our poverty stricken youth, endemic problems of economics, family dissolution, community stagnation, etc. There are some programs and government ventures that can be undertaken to at least begin to address these problems. Sadly, such ventures are passionately opposed in this country— by people of the same political stripe who support vouchers.
If you only extend vouchers to a few, and vouchers really do improve education for those few, you are only increasing the relative inequality of those left behind. And despite politician’s claims to the contrary, money for vouchers will be money lost for public schools. Voucher proponents like to cite numbers that suggest that it is cheaper per student to educate kids in private schools than public. But because of the shared costs and economies of scale used in educational funding, you can’t just subtract individual students and commensurately subtract the funding for those students. I was under the impression that conservatives were opposed to robbing Peter to pay Paul— now it’s robbing Peter’s kids to pay Paul’s kids.
— Freddie · Nov 1, 05:04 AM · #
“If we’re going to do this massive expansion of private schooling, before we devote public resources to that cause we had better be damn sure that there are in fact people willing to undertake that task.”
This doesn’t make any sense. If there aren’t enough private schools to meet the demand, all that will happen is some of the money earmarked for vouchers will go unspent and be available to be spent on some other program. That wouldn’t be a problem at all. So why would we need to “be damn sure” it won’t happen?
“You are left with your own bald assertion, that private school is better at educating than public school”
I don’t remember making that assertion. What I would say is that parents will, on the average, be better at choosing a school for their kids than an arbitrary district boundary. It may very well be that certain public schools are better than certain private schools, in which case most parents will choose to keep their kids in the public school.
The most voucher proponents have been able to say is that there’s no conclusive evidence that private schools outperform public schools. But that also suggests there’s no evidence they’re any worse. So why not let parents choose? They might know something about the schools that’s not captured in the data. And even if private schools really aren’t any better on average, the act of choosing is likely to give parents a greater sense of involvement in their kids’ education, which itself is an important part of educational success.
— Tim Lee · Nov 1, 12:32 PM · #
Freddie’s also worried about there actually being teachers who would want to teach these poor kids. Now, no doubt, all other things being equal most folks would want to teach students whose personal and family circumstances make them easier to teach – that seems pretty obvious. But (and this is just anecdotal, of course) I’m surrounded by public school teachers and educational consultant types who are in their field precisely because they think it’s the place where they can make the most difference for students in really bad situations. And I have no doubt that if they had the chance to create their own schools for such students, they’d do so in a heartbeat.
— Michael Simpson · Nov 1, 01:03 PM · #
Actually there are a lot of opportunities for consultants to start schools right now, if you know how to game the teaching fellowship networks to get the best access to funding. You just have to be willing to brave the bureaucracy involved, and that’s another post in itself.
And yeah, these “larger problems with our poverty stricken youth, endemic problems of economics, family dissolution, community stagnation” do complicate instruction. But do we allow schools to underperform under that disclaimer in the meantime? There are a number of high-performing schools working with low-income families that perform in these conditions. With “the same kids.”
Then again, “same kids” are a self-selecting pool. Parents will be better at choosing a school for their kids if they are aware that there is a choice and are motivated or can afford the time that goes into making that choice. And many do not have that awareness, nor are some willing to go to the extent that such a choice requires (filling out the application, interviews, sitting in with the child for part of the day, in certain cases home visits with principals/deans). If private schools aren’t willing to invest that kind of time in a scholarship kid, or if the parent feels uncomfortable interacting with the private school to advocate for his/her child, then the kid is unlikely to perform any better there than in the public system.
— Maureen · Nov 1, 01:21 PM · #
Not to be obnoxious, but a Catholic parish openning a school for poor youth is not entrepreneurship, a word that has passed its sell-by date. It’s an institution repeating what it’s done thousands of times before. Let’s look at the college level where we’ve had a have intermingling of private and public education. The good private universities largely emulate the good public ones. The ‘entrepreneurial’ colleges are the fly-by-night operations that just take money from the system. This is also what we saw when Milwaukee went to school choice. One ‘principal’ embezzeled over $750,000 from one of the schools. Quite the entrepreneurial lad.
I’m not even all that against vouchers. They amount to rearranging the chairs on the Titanic. Having my kids chair be where they could get a Catholic education wouldn’t bother me at all. But the idea that school choice is going to cure things is just fantasy.
— M.Z. Forrest · Nov 1, 03:20 PM · #
MZ, in this case the school was started about 5 years ago for the specific purpose of teaching poor black kids—which were 100 percent of their students. I got the impression that they’re largely autonomous from the Catholic hierarchy and raise most of their funds independently. So in this case I think the term “entrepreneur” fits pretty well.
— Tim Lee · Nov 2, 01:32 AM · #
Freddie: “What is extremely frustrating for me, in this debate, is the tendency to argue without evidence,”
I’ve looked over all of Megan’s comment threads on vouchers, and while you’ve posted many times, I don’t think you ever linked or even cited any source of evidence. Am I wrong?
— Stuart Buck · Nov 3, 10:22 PM · #