In response to a small point about accountability for vouchers, Jeff Berkowitz responds:
I mean, Archpundit should ask himself who sets the accountability standards for computers. Well, I think Dell knows you can go to any one of a number of competitors. That fear of losing customers tends to make Dell pretty accountable. Same with cars, watches and indeed, blogs. The reason people like Jack Ryan favor school vouchers/school choice, especially for the inner cities, is that they want low income minorities to have similar, if not identical, market power and accountability to the market power and accountability that Cong. Jackson’s parents got by sending Jesse Jr. to St. Albans, that Speaker Mike Madigan and his wife got by sending Lisa Madigan to the Latin School, that Governor Blagojevich and Patti get by sending their daughter to a Montesouri school and that affluent suburbanites get, albeit to a lesser extent, by sending their kids to high priced public schools, with the cost of admission being the ability to live in the affluent neighborhood and pay the high property taxes, mortgages and rents.
The problem is the public school choice programs demonstrate that parents often don’t have the ability to tell between a good school and a poor school. One of the larger examples is the St. Louis voluntary transfer program that operated for over 10 years below capacity despite thousands of children going to substandard schools. The Saint Louis Public Schools is riddled with bad schools (I’ve been in many of them and evaluate test scores from some on a regular basis) and yet parents despite choices to go to excellent county schools, magnet schools and now some charter schools, continue to send their kids to neighborhood schools that are often failing.
The reality that no one wants to talk about in inner-city schools is that many of the parents don’t have the capacity to make informed decisions. This is actually true of more than inner-city districts, but in other districts proxies work marginally well and parents do okay. Parents suffer from abject poverty, drugs, families that are falling apart, irregular work schedules, neighborhood violence, family violence and low generally low level of education. Given many of these parents didn’t do well in school and most had bad experiences in school, what makes them capable of evaluating the quality of a school?
One argument is that this view is paternalistic, and it is to some degree, but it also is a reality of what goes on in inner-city education. Parents are often unable or incapable of making choices that are in the best educaitonal interest of their children.
This doesn’t mean you take away the choice, but that you regulate it with standards just as we do with public schools–though the current standards are silly and pointless. Public money=public accountability. If you are going to start up a school that is receiving public money there is no reason it shouldn’t meet standards set by the public sphere. We can allow some of those standards that are based on specifically being a public school such as faith be put to the side as long as children have a choice, but in terms of instruction and standards I’m at a loss as to why we shouldn’t enforce those standards.
The assumptions of the market assume that the information is equally and freely distributed. That isn’t the case in schools and even amongst middle class parents they often make choices that we wouldn’t describe as rational. One of the better examples is Gary Orfield’s research that points out that parents often choose whiter school districts than one’s with higher performance. That isn’t rational, but it is certainly a choice. It is doubtful that they are studying the test scores as much as using race as a proxy of quality.
Putting in a voucher system that relies solely on parental choice in what schools survive and what schools don’t is asking for Harold Hills to get in the business to take advantage of poor students already being taken advantage of in our society.
ArchPundit