Abiola finds a gem of a story on the lengths to which parents will go to educate their kids. I would advise seriously against it as it only exacerbates the domestic problem, but I understand. My youngest brother was a member of the ABC program. We sent him from California to Minnesota for highschool. My youngest sister was similarly bussed 60 miles a day round trip in elementary school. So our family understands the downsides of this kind of separation, as well as the upside of avoiding the domestic nightmare of ghetto ed.
I have long been an opponent of vouchers based on my understanding of two fundamental rules.
#1. Vouchers are inflationary. (increases demand)
I think the first rule is underscored by the thing that Abiola mentions, the high amounts of money spent per pupil in American public schools is not increasing the amount of valuable education that is being put into kids' heads.
The classic argument about capitalism says if you put three people on an island with an equal amount of money, after a month one of them will be rich. Some people are just better skilled at using money to their advantage. These people are already buying the best education they can for their kids. Putting more money into the system only accelerates this process.
#2. Vouchers don't fix supply.
No new schools are created by voucher money. The same schools which are considered better without it will now be inundated by new applications.
The bad schools will empty. The good schools will fill. Will the good schools expand? Will these expanded good schools be as good?
The idea that vouchers encourage is to make everyone see the city's public and private schools as a whole. The implications of this must be followed up. You still have a finite number of students and a finite number of teachers & facilities. The problem is a poor distribution of the good resources and teachers along racial, class and geographic lines. Voucher proponents readily acknowledge this, but they haven't followed through to logical conclusions. It is not singularly the money of parents that created this skewed distribution. So redistribution of money won't solve the problem, not that vouchers even approach the difference in skew. Remember, everybody gets vouchers, not just poor urban ethnics.
Additionally, paying teachers higher salaries don't make them better teachers. Public school districts have yet to demonstrate to me that they are capable of hiring better qualified (read more & advanced degrees from higher quality colleges) to impart valuable knowledge on kids. This is a business solution to a non-business problem. If highschools were modeled more closely to those institutions of higher learning we know are the best, we would be closer to solving the problem.
I have a number of ideas that I think ought to be considered.
One.
Principals should not be teachers who got burned out on teaching and decide to go for the higher salary instead. They should be administrators who intend to be the best managers possible.
Two.
Highschools should be campuses. They should be open long before and long after school hours. Their libraries and athletic facilities should be open into the evenings and after dark. There should be more jobs available to provide community services through highschool facilities. Auditoriums should host regular events. Day care centers should be located on or near campus. Today's teens should have to think twice about a choice of going to the mall or to campus on the weekend.
Three.
Bus teachers, not kids. The burden of educating children falls to parents but also to teachers. This is rather obvious, but why is it that teachers aren't rotated through schools? Is it because local schools are run so very differently? If so, re-emphasize Point One. Is it because commuting is arduous? Not quite so arduous on adults who drive their own cars as on children who ride busses.
Four.
Decentralize. Schools are unmanageable because districts are too large to act in time. Everyone acknowledges this.
Going back to Africa for a bit of Old School education for the kids is an appealing idea. For a globalist like myself, I like it just as much as going to India for dentistry, as many of my Desi friends do. But as a citizen and a parent, I can't have it. Our problem isn't money, it's structural.
Posted by mbowen at September 10, 2003 10:49 AM | TrackBackI look forward to those links, and I'd like to see more supply and demand arguments for schools. Yet I still believe that vouchers only add liquidity to a market of educational consumption. That does nothing to spur investment for the heavy lifting of infrastructure and new facilities.
Here in Los Angeles, the charter movement is going strong and magnet schools are a success. But the charter movement is taking public schools out of broad accountability and into smaller accountability. That's good. It's local control in action, but it masks the fact that these are already built up schools, and they didn't require voucher money to make that change.
I think we have to admit that there is a strong government responsibility for public school infrastructure. In California, we've shifted the burden off of property taxpayers, and into bonds. It's a long and involved process for school districts to buy the land and plan the logistics to meet low class size & transportation requirements. Until we got Roy Rohmer here, we hadn't had a new highschool built since 1977! We were even closing parochial highschools back then. The real estate issue alone makes the economic problem much larger than vouchers can handle.
For better or worse, we have complicated rules about school facilities. We cannot simply convert abandoned shopping centers.
Here are the stats for Palisades Charter School, which was one of the best highschools in the big district. Note the years of experience of the teachers.
Posted by: Cobb at September 10, 2003 04:59 PM
Ah, but there's a gigantic hole in one of your arguments against vouchers:
"#2. Vouchers don't fix supply.
No new schools are created by voucher money. The same schools which are considered better without it will now be inundated by new applications."
You assume that there won't be any long-run supply response, which is very clearly not the case. The market for schools can be expected to act like that for housing*: to be sure, in the short term there'll be a supply problem, but unless politicians make it difficult for new schools to start up, the market will certainly respond to demand. I should know - my mother runs a school in Nigeria, and I went to a private, for-profit elementary school that was started barely five years before I gained entry. If we poor African types could do that much, why can't enterprising Americans do a lot better?
One more thing worth pointing out is that vouchers may seem radical to a lot of Americans, but in Europe they're nothing new; for instance, in the Netherlands, pretty much everyone goes to privately run but voucher-funded schools, and Dutch educational attainments are certainly nothing to be sniffed at. If the Eurosocialists can abide by vouchers, why can't Americans?
*I also can't help but point out that the shift from provision of public housing (i.e. "Projects") to the use of government housing vouchers has been an unqualified success, based on the various econometric studies that have been done to date. I'll try to put up links to some of these reports when I get the chance.
Posted by: Abiola Lapite at September 10, 2003 04:24 PM