A Wall Street Journal editorial urges President Obama to continue DC's school choice program, which, among other things, has provided the scholarships that allow two of Malia and Sasha's classmates at Sidwell Friends to attend the school. Meanwhile, the Heritage Foundation has put up this video with more student voices pleading with Obama to save their scholarships (via Greg Sisk):
I've written before on my feelings on the school vouchers debate, including my discomfort when wealthy White liberals box in students of color into schools they'd never dream of sending their own kids to. At the same time, I remain convinced that school choice is not a solution to the problem -- at best it is a stop gap measure that will help some kids, some times, but will do very little to resolve the bigger issues plaguing inner-city education. There is simply no way that "school choice" will provide a good education for every child, and frankly, it's not designed to. If it is an escape hatch, it is a very narrow one.
Now, I'll be honest -- at this point, I'm willing to support a stop-gap compared to just ignoring the problem. But my fear is that voucher advocates don't recognize that the policy is insufficient to get us where we want to go. Viewing vouchers as a panacea when that is clearly false, voucher advocates don't get broader systematic reform. That's its own problem, and one that worries me significantly.
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I don't think we're going to get school reform until public schools are the only option for everyone. There's just no reason for wealthier people to care about what happens to poorer people; fixing the schools has to be in the wealthier people's own self-interest for that to happen. You might think the necessity of an educated population to fill jobs would make it in their self-interest, but so long as other nations expend money on educating their best and brightest, and the U.S. welcomes those folks as immigrants, there's not really enough concern about ensuring that the poor kid who could be taking a slot in a graduate physics program is educated to be able to do that. I don't think we've ever faced a shortage of educated labor that we couldn't fill with immigration. Why spend the money and have poor kids competing with your kids? Pretty much the only self-interested reason to educate poor kids decently is to prevent their going into a life of crime and someday stealing your car. However, our massive prison system indicates that we've figured that just locking people up for long stretches is a reasonable substitute for education as crime prevention, although I doubt that it's cheaper given Constitutional constraints.
When you have a monopoly in place you don't need to adapt.
If public schools are the only option for people then the schools will have no motivation to change. You see this in the poorer areas where you have, for the most part, a public school system which is a monopoly. In richer areas where families have a choice to send their children to private schools the public schools are forced to adapt and improve their offerings and keep the teachers on their toes.
The purpose of vouchers is to give people who might otherwise not have an option an option for their children and force an otherwise unresponsive monopoly to respond with improvement or face not just a failure of the children they teach (which does not affect them much since there is no other option in a monopoly) but a failure in maintaining their jobs.
You see this in the poorer areas where you have, for the most part, a public school system which is a monopoly. In richer areas where families have a choice to send their children to private schools the public schools are forced to adapt and improve their offerings and keep the teachers on their toes.
Er, CC, have you ever noticed that in a system funded almost entirely by local property taxes, "in richer areas where families have a choice to send their children to private schools," the public schools have more money, a less difficult group of children to teach and more parental resources?
The only way you could claim a cause-effect relationship between the existence of other alternatives and the improvement of the public schools would be to add a private school where there had been none before, while holding all other factors constant, and then see if the public school improved.
Money has very little to do with the success of students.
I sent my kids to private schools and the amount of money spent per kid was and is far less than any in the region (Bergen County, NJ) and yet the academic achievements equal or surpass the vast majority of the school systems here.
The most important factor in the success of children is the involvement of parents. And that is regardless of their economic status.
As for your suggestion of an experiment of adding a private school and see if over time and with the loss of students public schools improve it appears you would agree to a robust voucher program to test your proposition.
Hold it. If parental involvement is the linchpin, then private schools are irrelevant. Private schools have nothing to do with whether parents are involved in their children's education or not.
But accepting the switch-a-roo:
"The search is for the one change that will cost the least and bring the best return. 'Changing parent values' is the ideal answer to this search because, if it were possible, it would cost nothing and, since it isn't really possible, it doesn't even need to be attempted." [Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities (New York: Harper, 1992), 136]
Talking about parental involvement doesn't get us anywhere as a proposal to reform urban school districts, because it's not something you can legislate. My parents were able to be quite involved in my education, but that's due in significant part to the fact that (a) one of them wasn't working and (b) both of them have graduate degrees. For the parents who aren't in that sort of situation (lets say, single working mother who was a high school drop out), "parental involvement" is much harder. But we still need to figure out some way to educate those kids, which means we need some actual policy ideas.
I sent my kids to private schools and the amount of money spent per kid was and is far less than any in the region (Bergen County, NJ) and yet the academic achievements equal or surpass the vast majority of the school systems here.
What percentage of the kids at your children's private school were ESL? What percentage were physically or mentally disabled? Sure, if you cherry pick out the kids who don't require any special help, you can do the job cheaper. And that's even before you get into parental involvement, parental educational attainment and parental attitudes toward education.
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