Public schools and the ‘right of exit’
The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle has published a series of posts about school vouchers lately, and I’ve avoided weighing in because, frankly, I wrote about vouchers almost every day for six years and grew a little tired of it.
But Megan’s latest (and apparently, last) item on the subject is worth taking a moment to consider in more detail. After explaining her belief that the quality of kids’ education should take precedence over every other possible consideration, Megan offered a bottom line:
Now I’m done talking about vouchers. Either you agree that poor kids should be allowed to exit until the system works for them, or they don’t. My model of voucher beliefs predicts that people will get angry at me when I challenge their beliefs without changing their minds, and indeed, they are right. And myself, I’m too angry on the subject to do much good. The people saying that they want details before they’ll commit: look, obviously design matters. If you concede the right of exit, I’m happy to debate details. But until you do, it’s a waste of time.
I’ve seen voucher arguments for quite a while, some of which are more credible than others, but it’s hard to overstate how unpersuasive this is. Megan wants those concerned about this issue to concede a “right of exit.” Done; I’ll gladly do so. In fact, I’ll take this one step further — a “right of exit” already exists. It’s called “voluntarily enrolling kids in private schools.”
Indeed, that’s the funny thing about any public-private dynamic. Some people rely on public libraries to read books. Do they have a “right of exit”? Sure, they could go to Barnes & Noble and buy whatever they want. Some people rely on a public bus system to get transport them to where they want to go. Do they have a “right of exit”? Sure, they could go buy a car.
Of course, that’s not at all what Megan is talking about. She doesn’t really mean that kids should be “allowed to exit” the public school system — they already are allowed — she means taxpayers should subsidize an alternative system for those who don’t believe “the system works for them.”
That doesn’t stand up well to scrutiny.
Even at first blush, it’s an odd argument for a libertarian to make. If people don’t believe the public-bus system “works for them,” should they get car vouchers?
Let’s try a different example. If a family is struggling to afford healthcare, and they don’t believe the system “works for them,” should we offer them tax dollars to make whatever choice they want? I can’t say for sure, but I suspect Megan would decline.
But therein lies the point. In her series of posts, Megan suggests there should be a degree of social equality. She doesn’t hate public schools, she just wants kids to be able to leave the public system. Wealthy families and low-income families should have the same choice. If you disagree, then you’re necessarily hurting the poor.
That doesn’t make sense. Should wealthy families and low-income families have the same choices in healthcare? Housing? Nutrition? Transportation? No, Megan argues, just education. Hmm.
On a related note, Kevin Drum, who’s far more open to educational “experimentation” than I am, touched on the one point Megan seems unwilling to consider in detail: oversight.
If you’re going to receive taxpayer dollars, then you have to agree to taxpayer oversight. That means that NCLB applies to you. It means that minimum state curriculum requirements apply to you. It means that teacher union rules apply to you. It means you have a lot less authority to pick and choose which kids you’re willing to accept. And, yes, it means you can’t use taxpayer money to proselytize for whichever religion your board of directors happens to favor. Like it or not, that’s a no-no for public funds, especially when kids are involved.
But as near as I can tell, this is anathema to people who run private schools. They won’t accept any oversight, let alone the level of oversight that’s inevitable with any widespread voucher program.
And that’s when it really falls apart. When we give tax dollars to private schools with no oversight or accountability, the results are awful. As bad as regular ol’ public schools? Actually, worse.
So, what happens next in education policy? I think Matt Yglesias has the right idea.
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’s a shame Megan is “done talking about vouchers.” I was just starting to enjoy it.
Ah, another day, another 6 hours of the President listening to his G N F’N R albums in the Oval Office before he allows anybody to come in and tell him the day’s news.
Vouchers as a public education policy has and continues to be all about getting tuition relief for the rich who have already voluntarily exited our public schools. Look at the groups pushing vouchers. Would they volunteer to live next door to the “poor” people they say they speak for? -Kevo
Once again we just need to look at logistics to see the idea of giving people cash so they can “exit” public schools won’t work no matter how hard we click our heels together.
Let’s say a voucher system kicked in that allowed any child to go to any private school in the state. Public schools are built or built on to based on census figures because they know they’ll have to teach (process?) a certain number of students. Private schools usually have enrollment limits (in addition to testing requirements for applicants).
So what happens when a hundred kids show up at Private Day School, waving their vouchers? There’s no room for them, the school turns them away and those tax funded vouchers become worthless.
Let’s also remember the other thing voucher fans seem to conveniently forget: The vouchers would never come close to paying the entire cost of a private school tuition. What then?
As kevo noted, this is less to do with actually helping poor kids and more to do with rich folks not wanting to pay taxes to educate the hoi poloi they’ve tried so hard to avoid. Nothing more.
Wouldn’t this be labeled “socialized _____” by conservatives/libertarians if it were anything else?
Why isn’t this a bad thing to them, unless the ultimate goal is to eventually remove the vouchers once the public school system is bled to death (or drowned in the Norquistian “bathtub”)?
I agree with Mark D
In Ontario, we had our brand of Cons try to pull a fast one on us by arguing it was fairness to fund private religious schools, but they also included private schools. Didn’t work so well and the Cons pulled thumping defeat from the jaws of minority government victory. And I didn’t want to vote for the winning party either.
Should wealthy families and low-income families have the same choices in healthcare? Housing? Nutrition? Transportation? No, Megan argues, just education. Hmm.
Education is a different animal. Health care, too. Through education, low-income families have a means to become wealthy, though it make take a generation or two to achieve it.
I’m not arguing for vouchers, just that education and health care have a different standing among public services. That is, we’ve agreed as a society that public safety is the government’s job, and nearly all of us believe the same for education. A growing number of Americans are starting to view health care the same way. So there’s a reason to treat those differently.
On that note, let’s offer vouchers to anyone dissatisfied with how the US military provides national defense. I’m sure there are plenty of private contractors willing to take up the slack.
Wouldn’t this be labeled “socialized _____” by conservatives/libertarians if it were anything else?
It’s not socialized if it screws over a unionized workforce (teachers, education).
It’s socialized if it screws over a largely entrepenurial workforce (doctors, medicine).
It’s not the ‘schools’ in public schools that gives them hives, its the ‘public’.
“right to exit” sounds w-a-a-ay too much like “right to work,” which of course means giving employers the right to bust unions or prevent them in the first place.
Ooooh, something I can sink my teeth into….
I’ve mentioned before, I believe, that I homeschool my son due to a medical affliction that prevents him from attending public school.
In my realm, we refer to public school as “B&M” (brink and mortar).
The “school” my son is enrolled in is a public charter school—I won’t mention the name; this isn’t a chance to peddle a free advertisement for them—but the school is known as “a virtual academy.”
Here in Ohio, this particular “virtual school” is primarily computer-based, but a lot of the work is still done through books, writing exercises, and critical thinking processes. The school is required to meet Ohio Department of Education curriculum standards, it’s sponsored by a public-school district—again, here in Ohio, and not some out-of-state, brimstone-peddling cult of freakishness hiding behind a church/state, First Amendment issue. Courses and content are submitted annually for state review and approval/disapproval, and if something doesn’t pass muster, it has to be fixed before being used.
In short, it’s pretty much like public school—except that it’s at home.
When I enrolled my son in this online school, it transferred public monies destined for his B&M school to the online school—just as if he had simply transferred from one district to another. The funds do not go to a church, or a synagogue, or even to a nondenominational church entity.
I will concede “the right of exit” to McCardle only on the premise that any public funds are directed to a pedagogical entity that is under state supervision—either traditional public school, or a public-school-sponsored virtual school. Otherwise, my alternative to the “public transportation” metaphor is to tell those who want taxpayer monies for their “church school” thus:
You’ve got feet. Get off your fundamentalist couch and teach your bloated theocratic posterior to walk….
It seems that the Conservative idea of “unalienable rights” is more about citizens’ right to not work, to not have a free education, to not have health insurance.
As far as any inherent rights to “life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness”, the only one that seems to stick is for the unborn.
Perhaps I’m a child in this respect, but I cannot, for the life of me, understand why any human being would be reluctant to participate in the common good for all.
In my heart of hearts I always hold out hope for humankind to always rise to the highest level.
I am almost always disappointed, and those few occassions when I’m not I think of William Blake’s quote: “If the doors of perception where cleansed everything would appear to man as it is – infinite.”
The possibility is always there for us to collectively care for each other, and we almost always fail. Why?
Kevo wrote: “Vouchers as a public education policy has and continues to be all about getting tuition relief for the rich who have already voluntarily exited our public schools.”
I’ve always viewed vouchers in a more sinister manner, as an attempt to cripple that darn ‘socialist’ public education system by depleting it of funds – kind of like Bush’s social security ‘plan’ involved letting people take money out of a system that supports itself.
I get irritated with these right-wingers complaining about the failure of public schools because they act as if the public system is a failed experiment that never worked. This ticks me off because I went K-12 in my local public schools and am now a university professor. Evidently the system can work, and ‘failure’ has a lot to do with funding and societal conditions, problems that people never want to address.
A friend of mine once had a good criticism of the voucher program. He doesn’t have kids, and never will, but he still pays taxes for the school system. In principle, everyone pays because it’s supposed to be for the ‘common good’. If parents are allowed to opt out of what is really a societal responsibility, then he should be able to as well – we all should be able to.
If I do not find that the current war system works for me. Can I please have a “war voucher” so that I can go off and start my own defense system?
gg #14, your observation is related to mine. The sentiment of the voucher people is actually two-fold – get a subsidy for my private schooled child, and condemn the poor plebian institution to the garbage bin of socialism (that would actually be democratic socialism, but such distinction is lost upon the voucher people). Nice people these voucherheads! -Kevo
I agree vouchers are nothing more than a way to get middle or upper class kids into a private school. Here in GA the government recently started a voucher system to help kids w/special needs into private schools. My brother-in-law immediately applied for one & got it for my niece. He could have afforded the private school without it–but it would have required a bit of sacrifice. The way he gets the tuition free( or mostly free)–without having to cut back on anything. (My brother-in-law is also a Republican who doesn’t believe in government. One of these days I’m going to break down & ask why, if he doesn’t believe in government, does he take handouts from it?)
kevo wrote: “The sentiment of the voucher people is actually two-fold – get a subsidy for my private schooled child, and condemn the poor plebian institution to the garbage bin of socialism (that would actually be democratic socialism, but such distinction is lost upon the voucher people).”
Yeah, someone needs to explain to conservatives that a ‘win-win’ situation is one where both parties win something, not one where their side wins twice…
We had a quasi-voucher situation for my highschool. I grew up in rural VT and there was no public highschool in the area, only 2 near by private schools. The surrounding area was divided up so that if you lived in town A, the state would pick up your tuition to school 1 but not school 2 and vice versa. You still had the option to go to the other school, but you would then have to pay the tuition yourself. Being private schools allowed the highschools to get way with some stuff that public schools could not; for example no daily bus service (which is really annoying when both parents work and the school is 1/2 hour from where you live). I don’t recall any strict admission requirements, but I do recall some rare cases where kids were asked to not return the following year. Admission requirements may have been more difficult for dorm students. It’s an odd set up, I know, and I don’t think it would have worked if there was an option for another school in the area.
As for voucher programs when there is already a public highschool in place, it just seems like a ploy to drain money from the public system. As others have said, students already have a ‘right to exit’ assuming there is somewhere for them to go and they have the money. A better option for me (and I may be a bit naive in this belief) is to push the money into the public school system that would otherwise be spent on the voucher program. Fund the schools adequately so that they are better able to meet the needs of students. It has always bewildered me how my conservative/libertarian aquaitances can lament about how horrible a job public schools are doing and then turn right around and vote to not give the schools the necessary funding, because taxes will be increased.
‘Bizarro Robin Hood’ comes to mind. Like Haliburton and Blackwater, it’s taking money away from that evil Government and giving it to good Christian, Republican folk.
Everyone seems to think that vouchers are just an excuse to get free private School tuition for the Rich and middle class. But rich and middle class kids are not in failing schools anyway. Can anyone think of a good reason not to allow vouchers for the poor only? They are the ones in the failing schools. If there was money available for them someone would open new school options.
That is one of my all-time favorites.
Especially because the right-wingers love to use it on us. Say anything remotely critical of business, or consumer culture, or corporations, and they’ll throw it right back at you: “Well you’re pretty ungrateful! Without multinational corporations you wouldn’t have that computer, or that car, etc.” Their chests puff up and they start blustering and getting indignant (what is it about right-wingers so quickly and easily becoming indignant?).
So it’s always great fun to beat them up with their own bat.
This is the same Megan that decried “free roads” as a subsidy for drivers…
And you’re surprised when she says something silly about vouchers?
Steve, using your example, if the public transportation system doesn’t take one where one needs to go, one drives a car that drives on publicly-funded streets and federally funded highways. One isn’t required to drive a car manufactured or driven by the government. Ease of transportation is in the public interest. So is education. Try to differentiate between educating the public, which is a public interest and operating schools for the public, which is a public service which may or may not be delivered well. Subways don’t serve everyone, but since transportation is a public interest, we build roads, highways, subsize rail travel, air travel and other kinds of travel. If schools operated for the public don’t work, they should be closed or other means of educating the public should be available–including vouchers.