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Limits Of Vouchers Exposed
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Limits Of Vouchers Exposed
Not All Students Can Switch To Private Schools. What Happens To Those Left Behind?
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by Helen F. Ladd and Edward B. Fiske
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The push for school vouchers is on a roll. George W. Bush has made them an issue in his campaign. Initiatives to permit publicly funded vouchers are on the November ballots in California and Michigan.
Paul Peterson of Harvard University recently released data from a two-year study showing improved test scores for low-income African American students in three cities who received privately financed vouchers to move from public to private schools. Last week Robert Reich, the former secretary of labor whose liberal credentials are spotless, crossed into enemy territory, endorsing a voucher plan in the Wall Street Journal.
Voucher proponents have seized on the Harvard studies as evidence that, as one of them, Chester Finn, put it, "school vouchers dramatically raise test scores for blacks." The obvious next step, they say, is to use public funds to expand vouchers at public expense and make the black-white score gap a thing of the past.
But before we succumb to this latest silver bullet for saving American schools (remember open classrooms and the New Math?), it may be wise to consider a few holes in the case for large-scale publicly funded vouchers.
There is little intuitive reason to question evidence that the academic performance of African American voucher recipients improved. Indeed, it would be strange if students who transferred to a school of their choice did not improve their test scores.
The problems come if you seek to move a small, successful program to scale, expecting that what worked for the few will work for the many. First, voucher programs for private schools will always be limited because there are not enough classrooms to make them universal. What happens when the current, limited excess capacity in parochial and private schools gets used up? Building new classrooms or schools on the scale needed is costly.
Voucher proponents claim that educational entrepreneurs will enter the marketplace and set up schools to meet the new demand. There is no evidence that this will happen. Problems associated with capital costs already are deterring the spread of charter schools.
Second, when you talk about vouchers as a means to narrow the black-white test score gap, you have to think about two groups of African American students, not just one. The fortunate students who receive the vouchers are presumably better off. But what about the less-lucky students who are left behind?
The U.S. experience provides little or no evidence on this question, because experience with vouchers is so limited. But another country provides solid evidence: New Zealand.
Since the early 1990s, New Zealand has run its education system under rules that allow parents to choose the school that their child will attend and that force schools to compete for students in an educational marketplace. Funding essentially follows the student to the school of choice, including parochial schools. Reich accurately described New Zealand's system as the "closest thing we've seen to a national school-voucher experiment."
New Zealand has the population of a medium-sized American state, social and cultural traditions similar to ours, and, perhaps most important for purposes of comparison, a substantial urban minority population, many of whom are economically disadvantaged.
New Zealand's quasi-voucher system benefited many students, including many Maori and Pacific Island families who joined white families in fleeing troubled schools.
But there is another side of the story. New Zealand's approach had a devastating effect on the schools and the students left behind. Schools that found themselves "losers" in the competitive marketplace ended up with larger concentrations of difficult-to-educate students. Loss of enrollment led to loss of teaching positions, which made it even more difficult to attract high-quality teachers.
Committed as it was to free-market principles, the New Zealand government tried for several years to ignore this trend. By the end of the decade, however, it became politically impossible to avoid responsibility for the students in the troubled schools. The government is now struggling to repair the damage.
The lesson from New Zealand is not that vouchers are inherently wrong. One can hardly argue, morally or otherwise, that low-income minority parents who want more for their children should be held hostage in dysfunctional urban districts that middle-class whites can flee. The mistake comes in believing that providing vouchers to allow some students to escape bad schools will improve the system as a whole or even all members of a targeted group. Given the limited capacity in existing U.S. private and parochial schools to absorb new students, most students will continue to be served by traditional public schools. Any responsible voucher plan must thus have a Part B that addresses the challenges of the students and schools left behind - challenges that will be exacerbated by the exodus of students and teachers thanks to vouchers.
Edward B. Fiske is an education consultant. Helen F. Ladd is a professor at Duke University. Their book, "When Schools Compete: A Cautionary Tale", has been published by Brookings Institution Press.
Copyright 2000 Philadelphia Newspapers Inc
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