I woke up thinking about schools and the school voucher system this morning. I've long been a fan of doing school vouchers. My reasoning started back in the late 80s when the schools were saying they didn't have nearly enough money. For several years in a row they said this, and then one year they got an increase in their annual budget. I thought the next year we wouldn't hear from them, but sure enough, the next year came around and they complained about not having enough money again, barely even acknowledging that we'd voted them an increase the previous year.
That started me thinking about how do we know how much money is enough for the schools. When I heard about school vouchers, I thought "what a great idea". That would help put market pressure on the schools to make sure that the money they get is spent productively. If schools had to compete for their students, I would have more confidence that the money they get is spent effectively, and I would be much more willing to put more money into the schools.
Here's a quick overview of how vouchers work, for those who haven't heard of them yet.
Right now, parents have three choices:
- Public schools, which are paid for by taxes
- Private schools, which parents have to pay for
- Home schooling, which parents have to run
There's not much competition between public and private schools because parents who decide to send their kids to private schools have to do so entirely of their own money, and they have to continue to pay the taxes to support the public schools, so the difference in cost is large.
Home schooling doesn't really figure into this discussion, but I included it here for completeness. Home schooling also doesn't provide much competition for public schools, mostly because there is a lot of work involved on the part of the parents, and because many parents fear they won't be able to provide an adequate education for their kids.
What vouchers do is give parents an option of taking the money that would have gone to a public school to educate their kids, and apply this to a private school. Basically, the government would give each parent a voucher, kind of like a food stamp, but for schools, and the parent could choose to spend it on whatever school they like. This would greatly reduce the difference in cost between public and private schools, and would give parents a lot more options on where they send their kids, providing more competition for the public school system, forcing them to make sure they spend their money effectively or risk losing all of their students, and their income.
Another side benefit is that it gives parents the ability to choose what kind of education to give their kids. For example, I think that kids should start learning a foreign language at a younger age than the schools typically teach, so if a school wanted my business, they might offer that in their curriculum.
Generally speaking, it seems that Republicans and private schools tend to favor school vouchers, and democrats and public schools tend not to favor them. I think Republicans tend to favor them because they get a lot of support from the churches, and churches often run private schools with a religiously oriented curriculum. I think democrats don't favor them because they more strongly support separation of church and state and want a more secular education system, and because they favor a more level education system between rich and poor neighborhoods.
By referring to republicans and democrats above, I'm mostly referring to the politicians themselves, not necessarily to the majority of voters. I don't think this is a big enough issue to cause people to align themselves with a party over it, so individuals within a party may differ greatly on this issue. I'm getting my information here:
http://www.issues2000.org/default.htmSo this morning I was thinking about it, and I thought of two major problems with the voucher system, but I think there may be solutions to them.
First, there's the level playing field problem. Parents would still be allowed to supplement their kids education by paying a little extra, or a lot extra, on top of the vouchers. This means that higher income parents would be able to buy their kids a better education than lower income parents. Actually, they still can, this would just make it easier, so more parents would do it, and more private schools would try to locate themselves in richer neighborhoods.
Of course, the land in richer neighborhoods is also more expensive, so some of the schools extra money would go into buying the land for the schools rather than providing a better education for the kids.
Being a democrat myself, I'm definitely in favor of a level education system, but not at the expense of a better education system overall. I think the voucher system would improve our whole education system, for richer and for poorer, it would just have a bigger impact on the richer neighborhoods. Also, even the current system isn't completely level because of factors outside the school system. Wealthier areas have more parent participation in the schools, and the parents place a higher level of importance on education, so their children see more value in education.
I also think there are other ways to level the education system, such as requiring all schools to enroll a certain percentage of lower income students, or by providing additional financial assistance to lower income families to apply to education.
A second problem is that parents may not have access to all of the information they need to decide which school is really best for their kids. The schools that will win this competition will be those with the best ads, not necessarily the best education. And, of course, the ads themselves are a waste of money from an education standpoint if we're trying to insure that our money is spent effectively for education purposes.
An obvious no-brainer here is that private schools will be required to be licensed, and will have to meet certain state/national requirements in order to receive voucher money. This means they will have to satisfy certain requirements in their curriculum, and their students will have to take standardized tests and report their results to the state. If these test results were made available to the public, parents could use these to help choose a school. Additionally, census data could be collected and correlated to which schools produced higher income graduates, or graduates with the longest lasting marriages, or whatever else that is easily measurable and that parents want to use as a criteria.
Of course, all of this is speculation. Once vouchers are put into effect, the current system will be perturbed in unexpected ways, and it's anyone's guess as to exactly what will happen. For this reason, although I would love to see vouchers happen where I live while my kids are still in school, this is probably unreasonable. It would be more prudent to try this system in a small area first, and then measure test scores to see what affect it has, if any. It would also probably be wise to try this in a school system that is already under-performing, since you don't want to risk breaking a system that's already working well. I would recommend Arkansas.
