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Vouchers are dead, long live vouchers
 Education vouchers – a scheme in which education is underwritten with government transfer payments to families instead of direct payments to schools – are an old idea. Adam Smith was their first modern exponent in the late 18th century and John Stuart Mill wrote about them approvingly in the mid-19th century. In the mid-20th century they gained widespread notoriety – if not popularity – when Rose and Milton Friedman extolled their virtues in their classic Capitalism and Freedom. By the late 1960’s, democratic socialist Christopher Jencks convinced the Johnson (and later Nixon) administrations to “experiment” with vouchers as a way to improve the education of poor and minority youngsters. Jencks kicked off his discussion with a New York Times Magazine piece titled, Private Schools for Black Children? arguing, presciently, that their interests were not served by the status quo. Shortly thereafter, the federal government’s War on Poverty included a voucher demonstration project in Alum Rock CA.
Modest in ambition if not in budget (many millions were poured into the project) the OEO (Office of Economic Opportunity) Voucher project drew upon the thinking of the best and brightest, including such future luminaries as Mike Smith (Deputy Secretary of Education in the Clinton administration), Bob Schwartz (President of Achieve.org), Henry Levin (then at Stanford, now at TC Columbia) Ted Sizer, founder of the Essential Schools movement, S. Francis Overlan, head of CSPP (the Center for the Study of Public Policy, founded by Jencks and company) and Mike Usdan, immediate past president of IEL (the Institute for Education Leadership).Impeccable research protocols were carried out by the RAND corporation, an organization determined to turn its defense savvy into domestic work of comparable importance. Indeed, RAND’s Steve Weiner pronounced the final word on the voucher program in his marvelously titled summary report Taking the Ouch out of Vouchers.
Truth be told, by the time the OEO voucher program was launched in 1970, it bore little resemblance to the original Jencks’ plan and none whatsoever to the Friedman plan. It was thoroughly domesticated. That took the “ouch” out. But it did look like something that is today all the rage: charter schools. To use lawyerly nomenclature, charter schools are “in, but not under” the public sector; they look and behave like a cross between public and private schools, incorporating – one hopes – the best of both. Interestingly, one of the most intense fears of charter school opponents was that they would siphon off the best and brightest from the remaining public schools. Not so, or so it seems so far. Preliminary evidence indicates that charter schools enroll a disproportionate number of disadvantaged youngsters, and that if any siphoning-off is going on, it is from low-cost (mostly Catholic) inner-city private schools. So much for prognostications about worst-case scenarios.
But what of vouchers in their pure (or purer) form? They remain an intensely debated idea and their constitutionality may soon be decided by the high court. (If I were a betting man, I would place my wager on the side of constitutionality. For an elegant discussion of the whole matter, see Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s timeless Public Interest essay What Do You Do When the Supreme Court is Wrong? His answer? Wait, because the Court’s most enduring practice is to reverse itself.)
But even more important than their constitutionality is their political viability. And after thirty years of writing, thinking and talking about vouchers (mea culpa, I ran the US OEO Voucher Demonstration program, and the first article I ever placed was about vouchers) I think they are a political non-starter, at least in a form that would make them recognizable in a global context. In this regard, one point in particular is telling. In almost all countries in the developed world (excepting only Italy, but including Sweden), vouchers are a fact of life. But they do not exist as a device to squeeze more out of the system, to increase efficiency, or to solve the problems of the disadvantaged or dispossessed. Vouchers in every other country are a response to religious differences and the widely held view that education should reflect, even amplify, those differences. Thus, in Holland, where 80 percent of the school age children attend private schools at state expense those schools are either Dutch Reformed (Calvinist) or Roman Catholic. (When last I inquired, there was one Jewish school in Holland and no Muslim schools).
Even liberal Denmark offers vouchers for religious (and ideological) dissenters.
The reason is not hard to fathom. In Europe church and state are not separate, and state sponsored education included compulsory devotional activities. Such was the case in this country until the 1840’s when the Irish schools were disestablished. (Not surprisingly, given their name, Irish schools were public schools for Roman Catholics; all the other public schools were protestant, which they remained until 1962 when school prayer was found to be unconstitutional.)
While it is true, as Al Shanker wryly observed, that so long as there are math tests students will be praying in school I see no likely scenario in which wholesale funding for religious schools emerges as a realistic public policy option. And if religious schools are not a part of the policy prescription, vouchers are a spent force. Truth be told the Catholic Bishops seem to recognize this and only half-heartedly support vouchers (or parochiaid, as it once was known.)
In this connection it is worth remembering a bit of recent history; the original ESEA (now up for yet another reauthorization) was enacted into law only because big-city Democrats (read Catholics) forced LBJ to support Title 1 funding for religious as well as public schools. And twenty years later, religious schools were excluded from Title 1, with nary a tear from the public schools that owed their largesse to them in the first place.
If my analysis is correct, we may soon be presented with an extraordinary spectacle: a US Supreme Court decision declaring vouchers constitutional but no (or only a few) takers. (There remains a vexing state constitutional issue: Blaine Amendments. They forbid any aid to non-public schools and most analysts see them as more restrictive than the US Constitution.)
What remains? As I have written elsewhere at greater length (see my PDK fastback #469, American Education in Prospect and Retrospect (at http://www.pdkintl.org/products/fblist.htm) and ED Week) technology vouchers are one way to skin the cat. In a nutshell, the issues are the old ones that motivate Uncle Sam, equity and access, and they can be sorted into three programmatic pieces:
- All American youngsters need modern hardware, i.e., a laptop or cheap dumb terminal (a Citrix™ solution, for example) that permits them to run productivity programs (word processing, spread sheets, presentation software and so on) and a browser for WEB access;
- They also need an ISP (internet service provider) and broadband for hjgh speed, ubiquitous WEB access;
- They need access to first rate academic content (as well as skill-building programs). As I’ve argued elsewhere, the e-rate program is ideally suited to underwrite these three objectives. Poor children – all Title 1 eligible, for example, no matter where they go to school, including religious schools and home schools – would receive either a computer outright or a computer voucher that they could redeem for an amount “not to exceed.” Kids with paper routes or other sources of income could top-up their computer voucher by adding peripherals they wanted or thought they needed (just like adults!)
So too ISP access. Subsidize access for the poor and near poor, wherever they go to school. Take a page from Lexus™ which gives law students free use of the service while in school; by such a simple expedient Lexus™ gains a customer for life.
Finally, the US Department of education could busily underwrite, through a standing grants competition, academic content creation on the supply side. It is important to note that such a competition would have to include for profit firms as well as non-profits as eligible bidders. on the demand side, academic content vouchers could be issued for all eligible students who could redeem them at the GPO, Borders, student book stores, or Amazon.com.
The last is as important as the first; there is no reason to give kids computers unless there is content to run on them. And high quality academic content, using the power of IT (not books on tape or language labs or education TV) is the frontier that when crossed can close the digital divide. Because technology is agnostic, such expedients have the happy effect of making the old voucher debate moot.
Denis P. Doyle
Issue 1.43, no. 19
11/2/2001
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