Schools of Thought

The school choice movement is divided over tactics and faces enormous establishment resistance. But it may still get what it wants.

Rick Henderson from the January 1997 issue

(Page 3 of 5)

Lee first made his case in an article for the July 1986 Freeman. He considers vouchers "another entitlement program that may be better than the status quo, but only marginally so." In the early stages of a voucher campaign, he thinks "a groundswell of support will develop for the basic idea. Then the details will be taken over by organized interest groups." For example, teachers' unions might insist that only schools hiring certified teachers could receive vouchers or that no teachers could lose their jobs in a district that implements vouchers.

Meanwhile, he says, "the general public will say, 'Good, that's done,' and concern themselves with other things. By that time, the organized interest groups would have taken over the process." Lee uses a surfing analogy. "My fear," he says, "is that long before we get to the beach, [the education establishment] will take charge of this surfboard and will guide it in their own direction."

Friedman knows the danger. To realize his vision, he writes, "it is essential that no conditions be attached to the acceptance of vouchers that interfere with the freedom of private enterprises to experiment, to explore and to innovate." He concedes that the teachers' unions and their allies will be irresistibly tempted to impose new regulations on voucher-accepting schools. "There is no air-tight defense against that," he says. "It is a real and present danger."

But the public choice perspective could cut both ways. Private schools and their customers form an organized interest group, too, defending schools against new regulations. And they're likely to have statutory help. Proposition 174, the unsuccessful 1993 California universal-voucher initiative, included provisions freezing current school regulations and requiring a supermajority vote by education officials before any new regulations could be added. Several states that permit charter schools have similarly imposed a regulatory freeze or even exempted charter schools from many regulations.

Additionally, voucher programs will be implemented and administered by local or state officials, one jurisdiction at a time. It will take years, if not decades, for vouchers to spread across the country. If regulators in one location overreach, watchdogs in other areas can alert local private school supporters. And public interest groups like the Institute for Justice would eagerly contest any new regulatory burdens that may be imposed. Clint Bolick pledges that the institute would dash to the courthouse door to sue any educational officials who try to circumvent these regulatory freezes. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

If you doubt the effectiveness of the feedback loops that exist among independent schoolers, recall the 1993 federal education bill. A provision that could have forced all teachers to obtain government certification--including those parents who home school their children--caused an immediate uproar. Advocates of home schooling tied up Capitol Hill switchboards with hundreds of thousands of phone calls. Within a matter of days, a bill that normally would have sailed through the House on a voice vote lost, 424 to 1.

Political Obstacles and Opportunities

As voucher advocates and opponents debate and litigate, vouchers continue to face major political obstacles. California's Proposition 174, which the Friedmans endorsed, would have provided vouchers valued at $2,600 (about one-third the state's per-pupil expenditure) to students who left public schools and attended private schools. The initiative lost by a 70�30 margin. Its major opponents--aside from teachers' union activists--were suburban parents. Subsequent attempts to qualify less-stringent voucher initiatives on the Golden State's ballot have failed. Similar initiatives in Oregon and Washington lost, as did school choice legislation in Pennsylvania.

This should not be surprising. As then�Manhattan Institute analyst John Miller pointed out in a 1993 Wall Street Journal column, the political constituency for school choice appears limited to free market and religious ideologues, the inner-city poor, and people who are already educating their children privately. Suburban parents, who cast more votes than all of these groups combined, have treated vouchers with indifference or hostility.

Suburbanites lack sympathy for several reasons: Many consider the quality of local schools one of the primary factors in deciding where they will live--in many cases paying more for real estate to get better schools. These suburban communities often have few public services other than schools, so they see their property taxes (and real-estate prices) as de facto tuitions; they don't want poor kids whose parents haven't paid those taxes to enroll in their schools for "free." And there may be racially charged motivations at play. For whatever reason, suburbanites seem to prefer pressuring school-board members, administrators, and teachers to get results rather than embracing such procedural reforms as school choice.

In addition, notes Janet Beales, until recently an education-policy analyst with the Reason Foundation, there are cultural obstacles to overcome. Tens of thousands of public-school teachers are doing a wonderful job; hundreds of thousands of parents and students have a terrific relationship with them. That's a big reason there's little groundswell outside the inner cities for such sweeping reforms as vouchers.

Even though performance levels in the government schools continue to plummet, there has been no massive flight to private schools, except in those urban areas with tax-funded vouchers or private scholarship programs. About 88 percent of students attend public schools, a figure that has changed little in decades. Dwight Lee says that when he wrote his 1986 Freeman article, "I thought by now maybe 25 percent [of students] would be in private schools. The numbers have stayed pretty much the same."

Are Vouchers Necessary?

Vouchers may not win often at the ballot box or in the state legislature. To date, only 4,000 students in two cities receive means-tested vouchers, and a few hundred students in Vermont attend private schools at taxpayer expense. But vouchers may be as useful as a threat to the education establishment as they'd be as a full-blown policy. The process of publicizing the failures of the school monopoly--and of offering a tested alternative--seems to be forcing unions and their establishment allies to grudgingly give ground and accept less-sweeping reforms. Consider:

Milwaukee gets a lot of attention because nearly 2,000 low-income students there are getting tuition vouchers. But Clint Bolick points out that there's little controversy over the city's decision to pay the private-school tuitions of almost 3,000 difficult-to-educate students--more than in the controversial voucher program.

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