Speakout Columns
School choice isn’t enough
Jan 31, 2008 2:48 PM
Instructional reform is the key to better schools.
I began writing about school choice in City Journal more than a decade ago. I believed then (as I still believe) that giving tuition vouchers to poor inner-city students stuck in lousy public schools was a civil rights imperative. Starting in the 1980s, major empirical studies by sociologist James Coleman and other scholars showed that urban Catholic schools were better than public schools at educating the poor, despite spending far less per student. Among the reasons for this superiority: most Catholic educators still believed in a coherent, content-based curriculum, and they enforced order in the classroom. It seemed immoral to keep disadvantaged kids locked up in dismal, future-darkening public schools when vouchers could send them to high-performing Catholic ones — especially when middle-class parents enjoyed education options galore for their children.
But like other reformers, I also believed that vouchers would force the public schools to improve or lose their student “customers.” Since competition worked in other areas, wouldn’t it lead to progress in education, too? Maybe Catholic schools’ success with voucher students would even encourage public schools to exchange the failed “progressive education” approaches used in most classrooms for the pedagogy that made the Catholic institutions so effective.
“Choice is a panacea,” argued education scholars John Chubb and Terry Moe in their influential 1990 book, “Politics, Markets and America’s Schools.” For a time, I thought so, too. Looking back from today’s vantage point, it is clear that the school choice movement has been very good for the disadvantaged. Public and privately funded voucher programs have liberated hundreds of thousands of poor minority children from failing public schools. The movement has also reshaped the education debate. Not only vouchers, but also charter schools, tuition tax credits, mayoral control, and other reforms are now on the table as alternatives to bureaucratic, special-interest-choked big-city school systems.
Yet social-change movements need to be attentive to the facts on the ground. Recent developments in both public and Catholic schools suggest that markets in education may not be a panacea — and that we should reexamine the direction of school reform.
One such development: taxpayer-funded voucher programs for poor children, long considered by many of us to be the most promising of education reforms, have hit a wall. In 2002, after a decade of organizing by school choice activists, only two programs existed: one in Milwaukee, the other in Cleveland, allowing 17,000 poor students to attend private (mostly Catholic) schools. That year, in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, the Supreme Court ruled that limited voucher programs involving religious schools were compatible with the First Amendment’s establishment clause. The 5–4 decision seemed like school choice’s Magna Carta. But the legal victory has led to few real gains. Today, fewer than 25,000 students — compared with a nationwide public school enrollment of 50 million — receive tax-funded vouchers, with a tiny Washington, D.C., program joining those of the other two cities.
Voucher proposals defeated
Proposals for voucher programs have suffered five straight crushing defeats in state referenda — most recently in Utah, by a margin of 62 percent to 38 percent. After each loss, school choice groups blamed the lobbying money poured into the states by teachers’ unions, the deceptive ads run by voucher foes, and sometimes even voters’ commitment to their children. When the Utah results came in, the principal funder of the pro-voucher side, businessman Patrick Byrne, opined that the voters failed “a statewide IQ test” and that they “don’t care enough about their kids.” If vouchers can’t pass voter scrutiny in conservative Utah, though, how probable is it that they will do so anywhere else? And denouncing voters doesn’t seem like a smart way to revive the voucher cause.
Voucher prospects have also dimmed because of the Catholic schools’ deepening financial crisis. Without an abundant supply of good, low-cost urban Catholic schools to receive voucher students, voucher programs will have a hard time getting off the ground, let alone succeeding. But cash-strapped Catholic Church officials are closing the Church’s inner-city schools at an accelerating rate. With just one Catholic high school left in all of Detroit, for instance, where would the city’s disadvantaged students use vouchers even if they had them?
Even more discouraging, vouchers may not be enough to save the Catholic schools that are voucher students’ main destination. Archbishop Donald Wuerl of Washington, D.C., recently announced plans to close seven of the district’s 28 remaining Catholic schools, all of which are receiving aid from federally funded tuition vouchers, unless the D.C. public school system agreed to take them over and convert them into charter schools. In Milwaukee, several Catholic schools have also closed, or face the threat of closing, despite boosting enrollments with voucher kids.
During the 15 years since the first voucher program got under way in Milwaukee, university researchers have extensively scrutinized the dynamics of school choice and the effect of competition on public schools. The preponderance of studies have shown clear benefits, both academically and otherwise, for the voucher kids. It’s gratifying that the research confirms the moral and civil rights argument for vouchers.
Competition not helping
But sadly — and this is a second development that reformers must face up to — the evidence is pretty meager that competition from vouchers is making public schools better. When I reported on the Milwaukee voucher experiment in 1999, some early indicators suggested that competition was having just that effect. Members of Milwaukee’s school board, for example, said that voucher schools had prompted new reforms in the public school system, including modifying the seniority provisions of the teachers’ contract and allowing principals more discretion in hiring. A few public schools began offering phonics-based reading instruction in the early grades, the method used in neighboring Catholic schools. Milwaukee public schools’ test scores also improved — and did so most dramatically in those schools under the greatest threat of losing students to vouchers, according to a study by Harvard economist Caroline Hoxby.
Unfortunately, the gains fizzled. Fifteen years into the most expansive school choice program tried in any urban school district in the country, Milwaukee’s public schools still suffer from low achievement and miserable graduation rates, with test scores flattening in recent years. Violence and disorder throughout the system seem as serious as ever. Most voucher students are still benefiting, true; but no “Milwaukee miracle,” no transformation of the public schools, has taken place. One of the Milwaukee voucher program’s founders, African-American educator Howard Fuller, recently told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “I think that any honest assessment would have to say that there hasn’t been the deep, wholesale improvement in MPS [Milwaukee Public Schools] that we would have thought.” And the lead author of one of the Milwaukee voucher studies, Harvard political scientist Paul Peterson, told me: “The research on school choice programs clearly shows that low-income students benefit academically. It’s less clear that the presence of choice in a community motivates public schools to improve.”
What should we do about these new realities? Obviously, private scholarship programs ought to keep helping poor families find alternatives to failing public schools. And we can still hope that some legislature, somewhere in America, will vote for another voucher plan, or generous tuition tax credits, before more Catholic schools close. But does the school choice movement have a realistic Plan B for the millions of urban students who will remain stuck in terrible public schools?
According to Hoxby and Peterson, perhaps the two most respected school choice
