An End of Year Look at School Vouchers

In an end of the year article in City Journal, Marcus A. Winters celebrates 2011 as “The Year of the Voucher.”  After a decade of slow movement on expanding the voucher approach to school choice, Winters reports, suddenly 2011 saw legislatures in 12 states adopt voucher policies or expand existing programs, and the U.S. Congress saved the D.C. voucher program at the last minute.  This is good news for many families, especially those with low incomes, but I’d caution against seeing vouchers as the solution to educational shortcomings in the United States.

Vouchers and charter schools are two kinds of market-based approaches to schooling. Vouchers subsidize demand. Their purpose is to increase buying power among consumers of education (families) and give those consumers the power to choose among providers (schools). Charter schools subsidize supply. Their purpose is to increase the range of school types by funding institutions with competing strategies for education, with the idea that the consumers can then choose among many different providers. Both of these market-based approaches represent efforts to break down state monopolies on public schooling. State monopolies, choice advocates argue, have no motivation to provide high quality or varied goods to consumers. Just as the stores in the old Soviet Union were scantily stocked with inferior merchandise, so a monopolistic school system stocks its classrooms with shoddy curricular offerings and mediocre teaching.

The poor in this market perspective suffer the greatest damage because they are most subject to monopoly.  Higher-income families can opt out of low-performing schools by moving to other school districts, by enrolling in private or parochial schools, or by home-schooling. In effect, then, our present public school system is a competitive market for those who have sufficient resources, but a monopoly for the disadvantaged.

I cautiously support vouchers (and charters) as ways of improving schooling for some families in some places. But I don’t have as much faith in them as Winters and other choice advocates. This is because, although I do see schools as competitive markets, I think most exponents of school reform of all varieties misunderstand just what kind markets they are. Specifically, voucher and charter advocates tend to describe students at different times as consumers of schooling and as products of schooling. But students (and the families and communities from which they come) are also, very importantly producers of schooling.  The quality of a school depends, more than anything else, on the efforts and dedication of the students, who bring their capacity to learn to the school from their families and communities. Each student shares whatever capacity for learning he or she brings to the school with all other students. For this reason, when parents have the opportunity to seek a good school what they really want is a school with highly motivated, well-prepared students who will create a desirable environment for their own children. By giving low-income families choice through vouchers or some other kind of subsidy, we essentially offer ambitious, committed poor families a chance to escape from concentrations of bad students.

Ironically, even market-based subsidies can worsen the problem of education by encouraging misplaced accountability. If we maintain that students don’t learn because their schools are failing them, we are preserving the myth that students succeed or fail because of something that systems or policies give them or don’t give them. By adhering to the illusion that everyone can and will achieve some accepted level of learning if only officialdom gives them the right program, we move responsibility away from the social structures that primarily shape children.  It will probably help some people in 2012 if there are voucher programs in more places, and those programs won’t be worse than the present system. But let’s hope in 2012 we can get away from the idea that tinkering with the education industry can enable schools to crank out the right kinds of products.

Teach for America and The New Orleans Educational Experiment

Today’s (12/27/2011) New Orleans Times Picayune includes a front-page article on John White, recently appointed superintendant of the city’s Recovery School District (RSD) and a prospective head of the State Department of Education, and Kira Orange-Jones, head of the New Orleans Teach for America office and newly elected representative to the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE). Both are alumni of the Teach for America program, which is prominent in the New Orleans school reform effort.  The newspaper asks whether New Orleans and its state are entering the “era of Teach For America.”

Although I have previously expressed skepticism about the amount of improvement we can expect in New Orleans schools, rising test scores provide some tentative empirical evidence that the city’s abysmal schools have shown somewhat better results under the reform regime that has transformed a majority of the city’s schools into charter schools and brought Teach for America volunteers into heavy participation in the school system.  Somewhat reluctantly, I favor both charter schools and Teach for America. I favor the former because they do tend to offer a wider range of educational choices to families and freedom of action and flexibility to individual schools. I favor Teach for America, and programs like it, because I don’t believe that our current credentialization bureaucracy does a very good job of selecting and educating teachers, because I don’t think that certification has any necessary connection to good teaching, and because I see enthusiasm as generally more productive than years in the classroom, which can lead to burnout as often as knowhow.

I say that I reluctantly support these kinds of endeavors, though, because in their present form they are contrary to the ideal of local community control over education.  Although the organizations behind some of the charter schools are located in the city, the schools are often heavily dependent on outside reformers.  Teach For America is a kind of domestic Peace Corps, aimed at bringing volunteers into low-income districts to provide the quality of teaching those districts are presumably unable to supply themselves.  Mr. White and Ms. Orange-Jones, as products of Teach For America, exemplify the missionary spirit of this corps.  I have no doubt that they packed substantial quantities of idealism, intelligence, and dedication in their carpet bags, but neither resided in New Orleans before coming here to take up their reforming appointments.

The New Orleans experiment in public education, in fact, emerges from an external takeover of the school system. In 2003, the state legislature passed a bill mandating that the state take direction of consistently failing schools away from the locally elected school boards. The bill was clearly aimed at New Orleans, since most of the failing schools in the state were here and most of the schools in the city were failing.  This legal coup had good justification. The schools in New Orleans were some of the worst in the country, and the incompetence of the school board was exceeded only by the corruption that landed former Orleans Parish School Board President Ellenese Brooks-Simms in prison in 2007. Ms. Brooks-Simms was the twenty-third Orleans Parish school board official convicted for malfeasance in office since 2003.

I do not believe that the inept and sometimes criminal school board made New Orleans schools so awful, although it certainly did not help.  The relationship between a bad elected body and bad educational institutions was what statisticians call “spurious.”  The underlying cause behind both was a community that had become deeply dysfunctional.  As I argued in my 2002 book, A Troubled Dream: The Promise and Failure of School Desegregation in Louisiana, the problems of New Orleans were not simply due to poverty, but to a type of poverty that has become prevalent in other areas of the United States, especially in central cities.  This is an anomic poverty, characterized by the collapse of basic social institutions, most notably the family. Sky-rocketing murder rates give testimony to the city’s Hobbesian chaos. Over the past few decades, New Orleans has become a city that simply does not work.

The state takeover and the assumption of control by outside reformers were essentially acts of guardianship.  Guardians take over the affairs of those who are judged incompetent to run their own lives.  I think we need to recognize this fact as people debate the post-Hurricane future of the city. To attempt to re-create the New Orleans that existed on the eve of the storm would be to strive to return to civic failure.

Can outside direction bring a city to healthy independence? In fairness to the Recovery School District, its officials do generally say that they eventually intend to return the schools to a new and reformed Orleans Parish School Board. I am concerned that the tutelage will simply cultivate civic dependence, while continuing to undermine fundamental social institutions by maintaining a large part of the population as anomic wards of the state.  But given the current state of social decay, I do not see a good alternative.