The Two Percent Solution by Miller Matthew

Author:Miller, Matthew
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2011-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

Profit is bad. Voucher foes act as if there were something venal about the profit motive when applied to schools. But public education is already big business. The $420 billion spent each year on k–12 schooling is openly lusted after by textbook publishers, test designers, building contractors, food and janitorial services, and software companies, to name only a few examples. This brings inevitable scandals—for example, the flap in California a few years ago over whether campaign contributions influenced a big textbook purchase. Like health care, defense, and other major public services, schools will always be partly about business; vouchers would simply change who controls the flow of cash. There’s no reason to think that the abuses under a voucher system would be worse than the abuses today.

Voucher foes make other unpersuasive claims. They say that vouchers will cream off the most talented children and the most active parents—a worry that seems acute primarily because today’s voucher plans remain tiny. They say that private schools will unfairly be able to avoid troublemaking kids by not admitting them—ignoring the fact that public districts themselves often send such kids to special schools of “last resort” (and that, in any event, vouchers are irrelevant to addressing the problem). They say the oversight that will follow public money will make private schools resemble public bureaucracies—ignoring the greater flexibility that most analysts say such schools will retain in hiring and firing, resource allocation, and curriculum design. Finally, voucher foes argue that it is crazy to subsidize more affluent parents who already pay for private school—a seemingly powerful charge until one recalls that such families are now paying twice for schools (once out of their pockets and once through their property taxes), and that vouchers offered only to poor families would avoid the problem entirely.

For their part, conservatives peddle just two hoaxes, but they’re big ones:

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