The Fight over School Vouchers

SolitaryRoad.com

Website owner:  James Miller

[ Home ] [ Up ] [ Info ] [ Mail ]

The following is from Thomas Sowell. Compassion Versus Guilt. pp. 190 - 192

_____________________________________________________________________________

The Fight over School Vouchers

Now that a new effort is being made in Congress to provide school vouchers for low-income children, the education establishment is responding with the old smokescreens and evasions.

First of all, they claim that the public schools are improving, and deserve "another chance" before we experiment with vouchers. Unfortunately, that "improvement" consists of regaining only a fraction of the vast decline in test scores that has taken place over the past quarter of a century.

The national goal for 1990, set by the U.S. Department of Education, is to raise the Scholastic Aptitude Test scores up to where they were back in 1972. No one is optimistic enough to hope that the scores will rise to where they were in 1963, at least not any time soon. Maybe in the twenty-first century.

For a long time, the education establishment denied that any decline in standards was taking place. Grades were rising while scores were falling and there was much pious talk about this being "the brightest and the best" generation of students ever.

Test scores aren't everything, they say. In fact they said it a lot when the facts became widely known. But if you judged by how well the students could think, the situation was even more disastrous. Teaching at UCLA—where students are above average—during the 1970s, I often wondered what they could possibly have been doing for 12 years of schooling before reaching college. Even many bright students had no conception of systematic logical thinking.

In a debate on education (scheduled to be broadcast the first two weekends of May on "Firing Line"), the head of California's public education system, Bill Honig, repeatedly called for "another chance" for the public school system before trying vouchers. But vouchers and the public school system are not mutually exclusive. The public schools have never been denied a chance to do better, nor will they be. What a voucher system would do is give them an incentive as well as a chance.

Attempts to depict vouchers as a dangerous experiment ignore the fact that freedom of choice already exists in vast areas of American life. It is the public school monopoly which is an exception. It is "another chance" to continue as an unopposed monopoly that the education establishment is really asking for.

Much is made of the fact that the public schools in the past Americanized generations of immigrants. So did the Catholic schools, which Irish, Polish, and other immigrants attended. Are Irish Americans or Polish Americans any less American today?

Under all the honeyed words and hokey propaganda, this is yet another of those age-old battles over power. If there is any universal lesson in history, it is that those with power always resist letting others have freedom. In the public school monopoly, money as well as power are at stake.

A self-serving bureaucracy with iron-clad tenure can be expected to fight tooth and nail against having to compete with private schools that offer a better product at about half the cost per student. Do not be surprised if some low blows are thrown in such a contest.

One low blow is the claim that it will cost some enormous amount to have vouchers. In reality, when students go from a high-cost system, like the public schools, to a lower cost system, like the private schools, the costs to the country go down, not up. Most private schools are not Andover or Exeter, just as most public schools are not Beverly Hills High School.

Another low blow is the claim that the public school system will be "destroyed," and we will be risking everything on an untried private system. For this to happen, there would need to be an immediate and vast exodus from public schools, a boarding up of schools all across the country, and a quick sale of buildings and grounds. This scenario insults everyone's intelligence.

Parents are not about to yank their children out of well-functioning public schools just because there are vouchers, nor could private schools accommodate them all immediately if they tried to. As with everything else, some parents would choose different schools—both public and private—and some would leave their children where they are. Some private schools would expand and some new ones would be created. But it all takes time and there is nothing irreversible about any of the decisions made.

The building of apartments has not caused single-family houses to disappear. Both are still being built everyday. Nor has the manufacturing of sports clothes caused suits to become extinct. More books than ever are being produced today, despite the availability of television, movies, and other media.

When the education establishment runs around like Chicken Little yelling that the sky will fall if vouchers become available, they betray either an ignorance of free competition or a contempt for the intelligence of other people.

—April 17, 1986

_____________________________________________________________________________

31 May 2024