OK, here's the thing: I understand why poor black parents are demanding vouchers and school choice. If I had a kid, I can imagine that I might want to yank them out of the Chicago public schools, many of which are not the best; if I had a kid in an inner city New York City school, I'd be desperate to get them out, if only to stop them from assuming that the police state is the norm. (It might be misguided, but nobody should grow up that way.) The fact that students who use vouchers to get into private schools are very successful shouldn't be a surprise; you get smaller classes, more attention -- really, the only surprise would be if they somehow did much much worse than before. But one of the stated points for voucher proponents is that having to compete for students forces public schools to improve. And frankly, I don't see how that can be. The only way public schools can improve is to reduce class size, build and repair school physical facilities, attract better and more competent teachers, allow and encourage innovative methods of teaching ... and only the last can possibly be done without increasing money spent on schools and the public education system, sometimes quite drastic increases.
Yet vouchers themselves bleed money from the state. Additionally, the ultimate school choice isn't the parents' about where their child goes; the choice rests with the private school as to whether or not they take the student. The private school's response when they decline to accept some students, quite reasonably, is twofold: first, students who have been in low-performing private schools are simply not ready or able to cope with the demands of the private school; second, they can only take so many people, ready or not, before sheer numbers begin to compromise the quality of the education for all.
The other aspect of vouchers as school choice is that, quite frequently, there isn't any. For example, in my general neighborhood, one of the yup-and-coming neighborhoods in Chicago, there is, I believe, really only one private school of any stripe, and it's a charter school, the Octavio Paz Charter School, which sits inside Our Lady of Precious Blood Catholic Church. (There's Ignatius College Prep nearby, to be sure, but it is, in fact, what the name implies, a rigorous and demanding college prep school and not a general high school; if you've been in a low performing public school and shift to Ignatius, you're likely to have a very hard time making the transition.) This highlights the choices, or lack thereof, confronting people: it's quite likely to be a Catholic parochial school, since they're the only organization in the country besides the state that has ever made that sort of systematic educational outreach effort, or nothing at all. As the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel editorial above notes and this case in Ohio highlights, vouchers for religious schools seem, in some cases, to be operating as direct subsidies to religion more than as simple tuition aid, dragging Church/State separation issues into the mix.
I've no idea what the solution to the problem is. It's quite easy to say "Improve the public schools!" but the fact is, we seem to lack the political will to do so. It's easier to simply desert the schools and leave them to those who have no choice. (What we're going to do when we run out of relatively altruistic teachers willing to teach in dilapidated cesspits of buildings, I'm sure I don't know. Given the declining numbers of people going into teaching, however, I expect we'll find out in a decade or two.) And it's easy for me to sit on the outside and pick when I've no direct stake in the outcome -- no kids and no likelihood of any. (And, as I said, the plain fact is that at the moment, at least, I do have the fiscal flexibility that would allow me to either move to the 'burbs or to keep my kid out of the public schools in the first place.)
Copyright © 2001, Iain Jackson, after-words.org
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12/19/2001: vive la france
12/19/2001: princess, redux
12/19/2001: yemen and rumsfeld
12/18/2001: you're NOT in the army now
12/18/2001: interesting donation
12/18/2001: shame on winn dixie, indeed
12/18/2001: saudi princess
12/17/2001: new resolve
12/17/2001: a victim of the attack ... yeah, right
12/17/2001: polluters ho!