Debunking School Vouchers

School vouchers have been the conservative movement’s silver bullet for all that ails the American education system, which is plenty. But they’ve never made much sense to me because they require my money to be spent on schools that aren’t accountable to me.

Greg Anrig Jr. of the Century Foundation nails this contradiction in analyzing the smackdown of the Florida school vouchers program by that state’s Supreme Court.

Herewith excerpts from his commentary at TPMCafe:

These are not good times at conservative idea factories and their advocacy affiliates. They were humbled when Social Security privatization bit the dust. They were crushed when they lost the Dover, Pennsylvania intelligent design case. And now the Florida Supreme Court, bless them once again, has struck down Jeb Bush's signature school voucher plan.

Like Social Security privatization, the school voucher idea is unraveling because of a fundamental flaw that inherently prevents it in practice from fulfilling its theoretical promise. It's a flaw that lies at the heart of yesterday's ruling Florida and has become plainly evident in the nation's biggest voucher experiment in Milwaukee. That flaw is that vouchers require public funds to be spent on activities that lack public accountability.

. . . The whole purported appeal of vouchers as extolled by Milton Friedman and his many disciples . . .is that they are supposed to bypass government bureaucracies. Parents "empowered" with vouchers will on their own have the incentives to seek out the best schools for their children without any intervening public agencies. Competition will induce schools, like automakers or airlines, to innovate and demonstrate their superiority to attract customers. With no oversight from on high intruding in the virtuous cauldron of competition, better outcomes will inevitably emerge.

But how are parents supposed to discover good schools in the absence of any reliable, systematic source of information about them? How are the rest of us supposed to judge whether the experiment is working or not in the absence of any data? How can taxpayers be assured that the people running the schools aren't siphoning off some of the money if no accounting controls are in place? Obviously, greater degrees of oversight could be imposed - some smaller voucher programs require reporting of test scores, for example. But the whole theoretical reason for vouchers disintegrates if the private schools are subject to the same oversight and requirements as public schools.

. . . One of the great unresolved contradictions in the conservative movement's advocacy on education is the extent to which it is demanding that public schools adhere to rigid testing requirements under the No Child Left Behind Act while simultaneously promoting voucher systems that require no reporting at all from private schools about their performance.

. . . No one has yet demonstrated that they know how to make an urban school district succeed in this country. Voucher systems, because they lack accountability, were never going to be the answer. The Florida decision is a welcome step toward focusing on possibilities that offer hope, like public school choice own Chapter 220 program, which enables low-income urban students to attend suburban schools.