The Voucher Trojan Horse

This article was published in the May issue of the Indianapolis PEace and Justice Journal.

The ads are slick. “Aim higher”, we’re told. “Give every child a chance.” “Pay teachers based on their performance, not on their seniority.” And so on… What we’re witnessing is the execution of a long-term radical conservative plan to privatize education in Indiana and the U.S.A.
Public education has been a cornerstone of American freedom and democracy since the beginning. A vibrant democracy requires an educated and aware citizenry able to engage in reasoned discussion of the issues facing the country. Democracy is incompatible with an educational system designed for the benefit of an elite few and leaving most of the rest in appalling ignorance. Public education has also been a cornerstone of the “American Dream”: America may be a highly unequal society, but at least Americans by and large believe in equal opportunities. Agreement is high that regardless of whether their parents are rich or poor, all children ought to be given the chance to get a quality primary and secondary education. Progressives would even say that a quality education is a basic human right, necessary for an effective “pursuit of happiness,” not a commodity like a car or fancy clothing. Thus, solid support for public education has long been a fact of American politics.
This posed a problem for radical conservative ideologues intent on privatizing education. How could they overcome America’s attachment to its public schools? The answer: steadily undermine support for public education by denigrating its quality. In Indiana, this started innocuously with ISTEP tests, ostensibly to check how much children are learning. This could have been positive: Schools are, after all, human organizations; some can bureaucratize and lose sight of their central mission. There is no guarantee that all public schools will always and forever provide quality education to our children. Accountability is useful and essential. But instead of providing nurturing help and assistance to improve public schools, the radical conservative plan involves authoritarian threats to cut funding to lagging schools, and more importantly plastering the front pages of newspapers with headlines reporting “Failing Schools!,” screaming about a “Crisis in Public Education!” and blaming teachers unions for their inflexibility. Having planted this seed, radical conservative ideologues then patiently waited for it to bear fruit. After two decades of repeatedly hearing about “failing schools,” the message sticks in people’s brain. Who could blame even progressive well intentioned parents for being skeptical about the quality of public schools, and thinking that the best way to give their children the best start in life is to send them to private schools?
Having weakened the foundation of support for public schools, the Trojan horse can now be brought in: vouchers. In principle, vouchers would not be a terrible idea. Not all schools can offer Chinese as a second language or advanced computer programming. Why then prevent an Indianapolis student from attending Perry Meridian rather than Southport high school (or vice versa) if only one of them offers specialized classes that interests him and there is room for him in either school? Petty rivalries regarding competitive sport rather than concern for students’ education is behind the long-standing restriction on student movement across districts. Since student needs are diverse and changing, innovation and differentiation could also be accommodated if public school administrators encouraged educational entrepreneurs to propose and start up publicly funded pilot projects and alternatives such as schools that emphasize project based learning, that offer a residential component, that are internet based, or that are adapted to special needs populations. Proponents of vouchers invariably point out that by freeing students to choose their school, opportunities for higher quality education would be opened up. This is a valid argument, and if vouchers meant nothing more than allowing students to attend any public school of their choice and thereby enticing public schools to innovate, excel, specialize and differentiate, there would be no cause for objection. Supporters of public education ought not to stand for uniformity, rigidity, mediocrity and literally old school pedagogy.
But radical conservative proponents of vouchers are not interested in improving education, at least not for all children. Their real objective is privatization. Ask any radical conservative voucher supporters whether they would accept a compromise that would make vouchers redeemable only in public schools. You’ll quickly find out that what they really care about is diverting public money to private schools; improving education is only a pretext. Vouchers represent the first privatization foot through public education’s door, the proverbial Trojan horse. Radical conservative ideologues have a long-term agenda; for now they’re willing to accept temporary caps on the number of vouchers and offer them only to lower income families. The point is to establish a precedent. Once public money starts flowing to private schools, both the caps and income-tests will be raised and eventually removed.
Now, one may ask, what’s wrong with private schools? Part of the answer is pretty obvious: private for-profit schools would make education take a back seat to the quest for profit. When education quality is merely a possible incidental by-product to a successful business, hiring good teachers becomes much less important than devising a good marketing campaign. You only have to look at how for-profit higher education companies like Kaplan, UTI, ITT Tech, etc… flood the airwaves with deceptive ads to get a glimpse of what for-profit K-12 education would look like. But what about private non-profit schools? Could there not be advantages to allowing non-profit educational entrepreneurs to nimbly deploy their initiative, unencumbered by the public school bureaucracy, to run schools that make use of the latest discoveries in cognitive science, and that are accessible not just to the rich but to everyone with a voucher? Could there not be advantages to having a pluralistic school system where linguistic, ethnic, religious, or other affinity communities could earmark their taxes toward non-profit schools dedicated to preserving the richness of our diversity? We cannot easily dismiss these arguments.
The problem with non-profit private schools is not their “privateness” per se. It comes from the way they are funded. Specifically, would they be allowed to charge tuition in excess of the voucher? If not, then access to these non-profit private schools would be democratic. Parents could look into several options, determine the best fit for their children and take their voucher there. But if a private school charges $15,000/year in tuition, a $4,500 voucher will not help a low income family enroll its children there. When private schools are allowed to charge any tuition above the voucher amount, access to these expensive private schools remains reserved for the wealthy elite. And as the voucher system spreads, instead of education conceived as a human right and a collective responsibility, we would get private education: everyone pays privately for whatever education they can afford for their children. At most, the poorest may for a time get a food-stamp-like voucher to help their children get a little education in the least expensive schools. And once education has been thoroughly privatized, even these vouchers could be discarded, having served their purpose.