The Moral Imperative for School Choice: Parts VII-IX

This posting represents Parts VII-IX of the posting entitled The Moral Imperative for School Choice: The Complete Posting. It is the third of 3 new postings which will cover Parts I-III, Parts IV-VI, and Parts VII-IX, respectively, of the original posting.

Introduction

The encouraging school choice proposal by Cranston Mayor Steve Laffey, highlighted here, and the absurd response by Senator Chafee has led me to repost below an expanded version of a November 18, 2005 posting on the moral imperative for school choice.

Contrasting this week's posting with an earlier posting on this issue - also by Andrew and entitled Cranston’s and Rhode Island’s Need for a Sensible School Choice Program - shows how Mayor Laffey and other Cranston leaders have evolved their policy solution in recent months in response to a genuine problem. The comments section of that earlier posting is alive with a debate about two issues: Should children from Providence - where public schools are mediocre - have the right to attend better schools in Cranston and what effect does this have on education funding flows? These are two central questions underlying the school choice debate.

School choice is a moral imperative because the performance of our schools greatly influences whether (i) our children have a clean shot at living the American Dream; and, (ii) whether our country can maintain the strength of its economy via a well educated citizenry capable of competing successfully in an increasingly global economy.

To provide an indepth review of the school choice debate, this posting covers the final three of the nine total sections. Each section is identified below and you can proceed directly to it by clicking on the title of that individual section below:

VII. Irreversible Change has Begun

VIII. Elaborating on the Rationale for School Choice

IX. Why School Choice is a Moral Imperative

VII. IRREVERSIBLE CHANGE HAS BEGUN

In spite of the opposition, school choice is gathering momentum. Here is a list of key school choice programs. Another website offers these observations:

Six states--Florida, Maine, Ohio, Vermont, Utah and Wisconsin--and the District of Columbia now have state or district-funded scholarship programs for elementary and secondary students.

Six states offer tax credits or deductions for education expenses or contributions to scholarship programs.

Forty states and the District of Columbia have enacted charter school laws.

Fifteen states guarantee public school choice within or between districts. (Other states have choice programs that are optional for districts, target only specific populations, and/or require that parents pay tuition.)

In all 50 states, homeschooling is legal. As many as 2 million students are homeschooled nationwide.

The Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld the constitutionality of parental choice in education. In Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (June 27, 2002), the court ruled that Cleveland's voucher program, which includes religious schools, does not violate the Establishment Clause of the Constitution. In previous cases, the court turned away a challenge to Arizona's scholarship tax credit program and ruled in favor of Minnesota's education tax deduction.

This study expounds on this core argument: "Much of the debate over school choice has focused on the educational benefits it could bring. It can bring significant fiscal benefits as well."

Stay tuned to the latest school choice news on some of these important websites:

Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice
Cato Institute on Education
Alliance for School Choice
Heritage Foundation on Education
Thomas B. Fordham Foundation
Center for Education Reform
Mackinac Center for Public Policy
Heartland Institute on Education

If you want to dive more deeply into the debate, here are some education books in my personal library (besides Greene's book mentioned earlier) that I would recommend reading:

Koret Task Force: A Primer on America’s Schools
Politics, Markets and America’s Schools
Schools, Vouchers, and the American Public
Koret Task Force on Choice with Equity
Market Education: The Unknown History
Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform
The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945-1980
New Schools for a New Century: The Redesign of Urban Education
We Must Take Charge: Our Schools and Our Future
Charter Schools in Action: Renewing Public Education
Voucher Wars: Waging the Legal Battle over School Choice
Public Education: An Autopsy
The Teachers’ Unions: How the NEA and AFT Sabotage Reform and Hold Students, Parents, Teachers, and Taxpayers Hostage to Bureaucracy
Understanding the Teacher Union Contract: A Citizen’s Handbook
Betrayal: How Union Bosses Shake Down Their Members and Corrupt American Politics

VIII. ELABORATING ON THE RATIONALE FOR SCHOOL CHOICE

In an excellent and accessible way, Milton Friedman said this about school choice in the November 2005 issue of The School Advocate (not available on line):

...Government ownership and operation of schools alter fundamentally the way the industry is organized. In most industries, consumers are free to buy the product from anyone who offers it for sale, at a price mutually agree on. In the process, consumers determine how much is produced and by whom and producers have an incentive to satisfy their customers. These competitive private industries are organized from the bottom up...

In elementary and secondary education, government decides what is to be produced and who is to consume its products, generally assigning students to schools by their residence. The only recourse for dissatisfied parents is through political channels, changing their residence or forswearing the government subsidy and paying for their children's schooling twice, once in taxes and once in tuition...In short, this industry is organized from the top down...

...Top down organization work no better in the United States than it did in the Soviet Union or East Germany.

The prescription is clear. Change the organization of elementary and secondary schooling from top-down to bottom-up. Convert to a system in which parents choose the schools their children attend - or, more broadly, the educational services their children receive...Parents would pay for educational services with whatever subsidy they receive from the government plus whatever sum they want to add out of their own resources. Producers would be free to enter or leave the industry and would compete to attract students. As in other industries, such a competitive free market would lead to improvements in quality and reductions in cost.

The problem is how to get from here to there. That is where vouchers come in. They offer a means for a gradual transition from top-down to bottom-up. However, not just any voucher program will do. In particular, the kind of voucher programs that have been enacted so far will not...They are what I have called charity vouchers, not educational vouchers.

They have served their limited purpose well. The families that received them have benefited; the educational performance of the voucher schools has been better than of the government schools from which the voucher students came. And the educational performance of those government schools has improved...

An educational voucher of reasonable size, though less than the current government spending per student, that was available to all students regardless of income or race or religion and that did not prohibit add-ons or impose detailed regulations on start-up service providers, would end up helping the poor more than a charity voucher - not instantly, but after a brief period as competition did its work. Just as the breakup of the Ma Bell monopoly led to a revolution in communications, a breakup of the school monopoly would lead to a revolution in schooling.

There has been some progress toward charity vouchers but almost none toward educational vouchers. The reason, I believe, is that centralization, bureaucratization and unionization have enabled teachers' union leaders and educational administrators to gain effective control of government elementary and secondary schools. The union leaders and educational administrators rightly regard extended parental choice through vouchers and tax-funded scholarships as the major threat to their monopolistic control...

...the "voiceless," among whom are surely the residents of low-income areas in big cities, are clearly the main victims of the present schooling system and would be major beneficiaries of a more competitive educational system. Every poll shows them to be strongly in favor of vouchers...

Similarly, teachers in government schools, especially the more competent ones, would be among the major beneficiaries of a transition to an educational system dominated by competition and choice. Under the present system, not much more than half of the money spent on government schools goes to teachers in the classroom. The rest goes to administrators, advisors, consultants and the whole paraphernalia of non-teaching bureaucrats. In private schools, the bulk of the spending ends up in the classroom...

Public support for educational vouchers is growing. More and more states are considering proposals for vouchers or tax-funded scholarships. Pressure is building behind each of the 50 dams erected by the special interests. Most major public policy revolutions come only after a lengthy build-up of support. But when the break comes, what had been politically impossible quickly becomes politically inevitable. So it will be with the goal of a competitive free market education system compatible with our basic values.

IX. WHY SCHOOL CHOICE IS A MORAL IMPERATIVE

School choice - where parents, not the government, control educational decisions for their children - is the only reform that has the potential to make American public education great again.

A January 16 Wall Street Journal editorial (available for a fee) entitled He's Throwing Away My Dream: Today it's liberal Democrats who stand in the schoolhouse door notes:

...Teacher unions have their own answer to the collapse of public education in the inner cities: ship truckloads of money to poorer districts in the name of "social justice." But many Milwaukee parents aren't buying that. They have painfully learned that more money spent on a failed system does not produce better education. They want to make their own decisions about their children's future.

In the early battles over establishing the Milwaukee program, opponents backed down only when Milwaukee parents began comparing Bert Grover, then the state school superintendent, to George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door. The front lines of today's civil rights struggle are not in the South but in Milwaukee.

This is a moral crusade. Access to a quality education is the great equalizer in enabling all children to have a fair shot at living the American Dream. We cannot and will not continue to deny our children what is their birthright as citizens of this great land.