Education Vouchers

by rrusczyk, Apr 13, 2010, 2:09 AM

I've always been somewhere between mystified and outright angry at "progressive" opposition to voucher programs. Education is extremely important (I think) to improving outcomes for the poor. We should be trying pretty much anything we can to improve education outcomes, and yet many progressives argue vehemently against voucher systems. I'm not sure why -- I've seen tons of their arguments, all of which sound like "I know better", which is rather unconvincing. (It's not hard to ascribe all sorts of cynical motives to those who are against vouchers (or for them), but that's the way it goes in the us-versus-them discussion that dominates political issues.)

I'm all for doing the experiment, and so, I think, are tons and tons of parents. This post does a pretty good job of voicing my exasperation with the progressive determination to see failure in voucher programs no matter what the outcome. Amongst the comments is this gem: Milton Friedman was asked to describe how voucher schools would teach students better than public schools. He said something to the effect “If I knew the answer to that I wouldn’t favor voucher schools, I’d just instruct public schools to teach that way.”

I'm not saying vouchers and charter schools are for sure the answer, and I don't think they're the silver bullet that solves everything in the way some of their proponents promise, but I'd sure like to see a lot more of them tried. Uniformity in approaches to education seems like a long-term societal loser to me, for sure. But of course, I have a pretty strong economic incentive for that idea to be more widely accepted

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I'm usually an advocate of the all-of-the-above approach, but I feel like vouchers just side-step the problem. I've been extraordinarily lucky to go to an excellent private school, which has done a great job with my education. Why does it succeed? I've basically come up with three reasons: Better teachers (which comes from better training and better accountability through lack of unionization), self-selected students, and smaller class sizes. It costs about 2.5 times as much per student as public school, and that mostly goes to said smaller class sizes, technology and facilities, and other miscellaneous extra expenditures - teachers are actually less-well-paid because they don't need to be certified. Vouchers give kids better teachers and smaller class sizes, but don't account for that cost (though I realize other schools are cheaper than mine). If you open the vouchers to anyone, you lose the advantage of self-selected students. If you keep the vouchers closed, you rob the public schools of all the best students, leading to a downward spiral of people fleeing the schools, leaving only those who can't afford to leave.

Disclaimer: I'm not an expert on this, and I haven't spent a huge amount of time thinking about it, so my opinions may be ill-founded.

by worthawholebean, Apr 13, 2010, 4:21 AM

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I keep hearing about this downward spiral, but I haven't seen anyone document it happening. A few people have even suggested that in practice, the opposite happened in the Milwaukee experiment Yglesias laments. Regardless, here's a thought experiment: suppose the downward spiral thing is true. Suppose further that vouchers improved outcomes (by whatever measure) by 15% for 80% of the students, and reduced outcomes by 15% for 20% of the students (the downward spiral). Is that a good trade? Probably. I'd also posit, in the "downward spiral" scenario, that the kids left in the system are starting from 0 and don't have much further downward to spiral. There would be a heavy selection bias in the alleged spiral towards the kids with the worst environments at home, and I'm not convinced that school alone can have a huge impact on many of them. For them, I think stronger intervention is likely needed at a societal level, and nothing but a radical re-thinking of education could possibly help them within the school system. Radical re-thinking of education can't happen in the public school system (and shouldn't be -- radical retooling should be done experimentally first, not on a large scale). But it can be done in a charter funded by vouchers... Sure 90% of them will fail miserably, and they'll disappear. But we'll learn something, eventually, from the other 10%.

by rrusczyk, Apr 13, 2010, 1:07 PM

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The only good argument I've heard against voucher is that money (especially government money) always comes with strings attached. It might not be immediate but if I got some of my tax dollars back in the form of vouchers to pay for AOPS it would only be a matter of time before various conditions would be attached to those voucher which would compel AOPS to conform or lose eligibility.

by djcordeiro, Apr 14, 2010, 11:54 PM

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FWIW, we'd be pretty likely to ignore whatever those requirements are and just forgo the money, as we have in deciding not to try to align our books to state/national so-called standards.

by rrusczyk, Apr 15, 2010, 3:14 PM

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hmm. I think a great deal of the benefit of the voucher program, isnt just sending a student into a place with better teachers, its sending a student into a place with better peers.

If a smart student is in a school where the greatest good to pursue is say, football/sex/mtv, he may be less motiveted to pursue education than in a school with peers who also value intelligence.

by kaiokan, May 3, 2010, 4:28 AM