How Not to Be a Hypocrite

“I don’t think that works. The idea that vouchers won’t work rests on an empirical claim—the school doesn’t make a difference—that you are falsifying your belief in by pulling your kids out of it.”

I was persuaded by the original argument of this post. However, this is a really good point. Hmm.

> I do not oppose targeted voucher schemes for poor
> children, because even though I think they will
> not do much good, they might do some, and I doubt
> that they do much harm.

Look at the Kansas City and St. Louis county-wide desegregation plans, which essentially gave parents in those two school districts free choice to send their children to any one of the 30 or so suburban districts. There was no physical voucher but the overall effect was the same as a voucher.

In both cases the final result was the same: the top 25% students in the city district transferred to the best suburban districts, and the city districts which had been on a downhill slide then utterly imploded destroying any hope for the remaining 75%.

Cranky

Good. Here’s the thought (not mine, but the one in the block quote): vouchers make very little difference to how well the least advantaged kids are educated (not, note, no difference at all). This is because the voucher schools are hardly any better than the schools that the kids are being drawn away from (for those kids — I add this because the questions is never “is the school good” but “is the school good for this kid”). There could be a number of reasons for this, including that schools with very high concentrations of relatively poor kids are almost always not very good because we really don’t know how to run such schools). If I were moving my kid out of the urban school into the voucher school then I might be indicating that I don’t really believe that claim, but I’m not even sure of that: I could think that it makes a big enough difference to be worth it as long as only a few people do it. But, anyway, that’s not usually what is happening — your beef is really with people who are pulling their kids out of inner city schools into non-voucher schools (usually suburban public schools). I could quite well believe that things would improve dramatically with a voucher program that drew low-income inner city kids into suburban public schools (there are, in fact, a number of such choice programs, but I don’t know the research on their outcomes).

(I should add that where I live (and, in fact, in general) the situation is not one of people pulling their kids from inner city schools into other schools, but of people choosing (though the housing market) among suburban schools most of which are ‘better’ than inner city schools, and still objecting to vouchers which allow poor parents to choose among schools none of which are as ‘god’ as those we get to choose among).

On the larger point, I don’t see the hypocrisy. As a parent, one has a particular duty to one’s own children. As a citizen, one has a duty to children in general.

And it’s silly to say that the claim “voucher schemes don’t work” is equivalent to “schools don’t make a difference.” It might be that the parents whose children would most benefit from switching schools, are least likely to take advantage of a voucher system. It might be that practical barriers will prevent poor parents from using vouchers in to access schools in wealthier areas. It might be that removing children with the most active and engaged parents from poor schools will harm the remaining children more than it helps the children moving. It might be that the politics of vouchers will result in reduced resources for public schools in poor areas. In fact, I suspect all of the above are true.

McArdle argues that if I were to spend my own money on my own children to send them to private school – I don’t, by the way, my boys attend an ethnically and economically diverse public school – but if I chose to spend my own money on my own children, I would be hypocritical if I did not advocate distributing tax dollars so that other parents could spend public money on their children.

It doesn’t work that way. I have a personal loyalty to my own children and I can spend my own money to advance their individual interests. McArdle agrees with that, surely.

But I have no interest in advancing the interests of any particular poor child. I do have a very strong interest in society’s provision of an education to all children, but I have no interest in any particular child.

I do believe that leaving only the poorest of the poor in public schools would degrade the quality of those schools and would result a large numbers of children receiving virtually no education at all. I do not want public funds spent in a way that would lead to that result.

So there is no hypocrisy in my doing all I can to advance my own child’s interest by sending him to private school, while at the same time opposing the use of public funds to advance the interests of some individual poor children over the interests of other poor children.

Surely a libertarian can understand that, assuming the libertarian is acting in good faith. Private funds may be spent for private purposes; public funds must be spent for public purposes. What is hypocritical about that?

On the other hand, if the libertarian’s true goal is to direct public funds to support the Catholic Church while weakening public employees’ unions, perhaps she can’t understand it. And perhaps, in the usual right wing way, she will attack the good faith of those who do.

“The idea that vouchers won’t work rests on an empirical claim—the school doesn’t make a difference—that you are falsifying your belief in by pulling your kids out of it.”

not at all what the original post argued. not even close.

it said: “Voucher schemes really make very little difference to how well the least advantaged children are educated”

that’s a claim about whether a large-scale social program makes a population-level difference. across school districts, across cities, all around the country.

and it’s a claim about whether voucher-schemes can make a difference to the kind of schools that *will* exist if the scheme is put into practice.

my decision about my own kids is a reflection of local knowledge about *these* kids, *these* schools, that already exist *right now*. the two issues are on completely different levels of aggregation, and differ as the actual (schools available to me now) differs from the possible (schools that might be available under a voucher scheme).

of course, given the schools that are available to my kids, these kids in this situation, i believe that it makes a difference that they go to this school rather than that. my opting-out proves i believe that.

but the voucher scheme is claiming something very different–that it will create new schools (or make old schools qualitatively different), and new schooling-options.

there’s really just nothing to the claim in #1–it’s apples and oranges.

any of these parents, if they had to stay in the city for some weird reason, would know to find a parochial school to send their kids to.

This is one of those trademark McArdle “facts” with no basis in reality. I live in New York; I know lots of educated, middle-class parents of school-age children; and without exception they send them to public schools.

And it’s silly to say that the claim “voucher schemes don’t work” is equivalent to “schools don’t make a difference.”

Yeah, this is begging the question. Leaving a ‘failing’ inner city school for a nice suburban school district is a different thing than leaving a ‘failing’ inner city school for the private school some bright spark founded to take advantage of voucher money next door. You can say that it’s unjust to provide opportunities for your own children that aren’t available to all, and I’d agree with you. But it’s not hypocritical to say “Nice suburban schools are superior to ‘failing’ inner city schools, so I, having the choice, will send my children to the former rather than the latter. Unstable for-profit low-cost private schools in high-poverty areas are unlikely to be superior to the ‘failing’ schools in those areas, so I do not support voucher programs that will make it more likely that students will end up attending such schools.”

Even if we can’t save all of them, why not save some?

Yes, this is the best argument for vouchers. If you start from the premise that most poor kids in America are going to get horribly inadequate educations and there’s nothing we can do about that, then it become sensible to talk about how we rescue the talented (or lucky) few.

But if you think our goal should be to provide a decent education for all kids, vouchers have no place in the discussion.

Lemuel, means test them. I support that. Rich parents don’t need help from the government. Problem solved. All the major voucher programs currently operating work this way.

New York is slightly anomalous . . . there are ways to get your kid through the system. (I went to public school through 5th grade.) But that’s not really true in DC; affluent parents here feel it’s leave, or private school. But they require an enormous amount of effort from the parents. Moreover, the dirty secret of New York public schools is the way that connected parents, particularly in Manhattan, manage to divert vastly disproportionate amounts of money, district resources, and good teachers to their schools. The parents who aren’t connected get left in the disaster schools in Brooklyn and the Bronx. Manhattan is increasingly turning into a wealthy public school district tucked inside a failing urban system.

At the very least, you have to have a rule—as in any system of public third-party payment, e.g. Medicaid and Medicare—of no supplemental charges. The voucher has to be accepted as full payment.

Is this just a claim that you are making about voucher systems, or is it intended to be a more general claim?

I’m just curious b/c I think it might be true for vouchers, but I wouldn’t like it if it were the rule for a universal government provided health insurance program.

“As a parent, one has a particular duty to one’s own children. As a citizen, one has a duty to children in general.”

I see it similarly. Kind of a collective action problem: you’re asking a parent to pay a very high individual/family price, for a very diffuse and far-off benefit to “society” in general.

Collective action problems of coordination famously require a governmental solution. I wouldn’t call it hypocritical to, say, continue fishing the commons to your individual benefit while supporting the governmental regulation of the fishing grounds.

Say one lived in a super-high crime area, and felt he needed a gun for protection. But at the same time, he wished there was gun control so no one had guns. It would be asking a person to pay a high individual price to forgo the gun for consistency of political beliefs and personal actions.

> ardinal O’Connor offered to take 100,000 of the
> worst off kids out of New York City public
> schools, and voucher opponents went ape.

Maybe they were around Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s. Those programs always start out with great fanfare. They finish pretty well too: after the parochial schools weed out the incorrigible and unteachable and send them back to the public schools. Which is something they did for their own flock as well: the threat of being “sent down to public school” was there and was used – even after levels of administrative and parental psychological and physical coercion were applied that would never be allowed in charter schools today much less public schools.

Fortunately for my motivated classmates and me it turned out that the religious schools were good preparation for admission to Notre Dame but not necessary any better preparation for life.

Cranky

I wouldn’t like it if it were the rule for a universal government provided health insurance program.

You don’t have to like it, but that’s the way Medicaid, Medicare and similar programs work. A hospital cannot legally demand additional payments from a patient who is covered by one of those programs.

23 — It’s not inconsistent! Saying, “I believe that the situation should be such that no one has guns,” entails actions to bring such a state of affairs about — and in most cases, people have no significant actions that they can take, on their own, to bring about such major changes. Acting like this person can help bring this particular change about simply by forgoing having a gun is still caught in the model of social systems as nothing but the aggregate of individual choices. Voluntarily renouncing a gun doesn’t contribute to a situation where the government coersively deprives people of guns! At all!

I don’t understand why “we can’t save every single kid” is supposed to be a devastating rebuttal. Would it be okay if we just saved 15%?

You don’t have to like it, but that’s the way Medicaid, Medicare and similar programs work. A hospital cannot legally demand additional payments from a patient who is covered by one of those programs.

I can see reasons why Medicare might want to do this, but its not clear to me why this should always be the rule for such programs. Is this a kind of means-testing? Would it not apply anymore if we were not concerned with means-testing? What if everyone was provided health care, but if you wanted to spend some of your own money, you could get slightly better care. Why would you require forfeiture of the government provided stipend in that case?

If you make a small number better off, and a large number worse off, then you’re not doing good. As I said on your blog, I’m not opposed to anything calling itself a voucher program in principle, I just haven’t seen one convincingly described that sounds as if it would do more good than harm on a large scale.

(Also, if you’re setting up a program that “can’t save every single kid”, because there aren’t enough decent schools to exit to, aren’t the parents of the kids who exit through vouchers, leaving other kids suffering behind in the ‘failing’ schools, just as loathsome as the hypocrites at 11D who made you angry?)

I don’t think Megan needs to fight the battle on the grounds of dreadful hypocrisy. There are, doubtless, some constellation of beliefs that will avoid contradiction here.

That said it seems that if you believe that:

1)the government should pay for education
2) that your own children benefit from you, their parent, being able to choose what school they attend,

you should also support
3) policies that give greater choice in schooling to poorer families.

Vouchers are surely such a policy. One could believe, however, that vouchers are an inferior policy for providing choice in education, and oppose them for that reason. It would be interesting to know more about what superior mechanisms of choice are proposed by voucher opponents. Do the voucher opponents on this thread support the aggressive expansion of charter schools?

baa-

I think you will find very few people on this thread who oppose allowing school choice across district lines, altho the details (particularly the effect on school funding) do matter. Certainly choice between public school districts is a strictly superior option to vouchers.

baa-

Also, your condition (2), on the benefits of school choice for one’s own children, may well be based on a starting point that local schools are inadequate. Which one may well take as given from the personal standpoint but not from the policy standpoint. Personally, in my ideal world everyone would go to their local public school, all of which would provide a similar quality of education.

38: I’d argue that ‘more choice’ isn’t the most meaningful of concepts in this context. Geographical limitations on the length of commute are going to mean that any household’s school options are quite limited, particularly for a family without the economic resources to move frequently. So no one’s possibly going to have a choice between all the schools in the state — they’re limited to maybe a dozen or so they could practically get their kids to.

The issue is making sure that those choices are acceptable, not that there are more of them — a choice between two decent schools is distinctly preferable to a choice between a dozen bad ones.

The short answer to watson aname’s question is that we do move resources between schools — in a completely perverse way. Because of local funding, and now through NCLB and other “accountability” measures, we give the least money and least-qualified teachers to the highest-need schools. Vouchers, of course, typically move resources as well as students, and in the same perverse direction.

46: Sure, but I meant has anyone attempted seriously to do this in the non-perverse direction.

Certainly choice between public school districts is a strictly superior option to vouchers.

Why do you say this? My general thought would be that more options = better. There is a real and legitimate concern that certain school systems are broken. Poor management, a working environment that cannot attract good teachers, etc. The goal of expanding the scope of choice is to enable students to exit these systems. If the concern about vouchers is a) parents will be fooled by poor quality schools or b) parents will chose schools which indoctrinate children in some bad way, it seems like one could try to fix these problems via regulation.

‘more choice’ isn’t the most meaningful of concepts in this context. Geographical limitations on the length of commute are going to mean that any household’s school options are quite limited

All the more so if you can’t start charter schools or voucher schools in easily commutable areas! I quite agree that 2 good choices beats 12 bad ones. I am less sure that 2 bad choices beats 12 bad choices. I certainly have a background assumption, however, that more choice and competition can lead to better outcomes. Generically, when faced with a monopoly that’s providing poor service, my inclination is to break the monopoly, not try to improve it. If you don’t have that predisposition, then I can see how you would come to another conclusion on education.

If I believe (as I do) that choice is in fact marginal to the issue of what reforms would actually produce the outcome desired in 3). I don’t see why anyone should focus on choice.

Sure. If you think choice doesn’t matter, then you won’t focus on it. But then you should be basically fine with a system that randomizes your kid into any public school district — because parental choice of school system doesn’t matter. I think this position is held by very few Americans. Certainly, it isn’t the position of many Americans who spend a lot of time shopping school districts when they choose what house to buy.

Also, if you have a moment, I’d be interested to hear the reason for your opposition to charters…

The “choice” rhetoric presupposes that certain schools will always be abyssmal. In principle, at least, it does not seem a priori impossible to improve the worst schools. Taking funding away from them as “punishment” does not seem to be a very good way of achieving that. But my general sense is that voucher advocates don’t really care about people in poor schools in aggregate — at most, they would commit to the notion that people who might do well meritocratically should be rescued from bad schools. By definition, that’s always going to be a small minority, leaving the rest to suffer in the school they have “chosen.”

It would be interesting to know more about what superior mechanisms of choice are proposed by voucher opponents.

Here is a description of the school choice in the sf school system:

http://www.reason.com/news/show/33293.html

Things are not as rosy as the article makes them out to be, but it is a good faith effort to allow for school choice.

As a practical matter, poor kids do get preferences, but this is opposed by middle class parents’ better ability to game the system.

Lemuel,

Do you agree that in general choice and competition leads to better outcomes? If so, then you’ll want, all things being equal, to replace a system of limited choice with more choice. And I’m certainly not committed to the view that the main reason suburban schools in wealthy districts are better than schools in urban districts is because the former are more subject to customer exit. I do believe. however, that most institutions provide better service when the customer can exit. Again, I am struggling for the reasons you think allowing choice between publics is better than allowing choice between publics and privates.

JoeO,

Thanks for the link.

Adam,

The rationale for increasing choice does not require that some schools are irredeemably broken. One could support more choice simply because a) you believer that fear of losing “customers” will improve performance or b) because you believe different children will thrive under different educational structures and that parents are, on average better placed to know this than anyone else. Of course, if it *is* true that some schools are irredeemably broken, that would provide another good argument for choice.

baa, I totally reject the logic of (a) — we need to get past this idolatry of a “business” model for every aspect of society. In this particular case, as with NCLB, it leads to the perverse result of punishing school districts that have more resource-intensive populations.

It seems to me that (b) can be achieved just fine by a normal “monopoly” school district with individual magnet schools.

baa (and others),
here’s the earlier thread with a link to my paper, and some rather good comments and criticisms:

https://crookedtimber.org/2006/11/15/educational-equality-and-the-varieties-of-school-choice/

Thanks Harry. I suspect that this is one of these questions about what’s likely to fail more frequently: the market or government. When both look like imperfect solutions, I am inclined to empower people to try both. The mix of private and public colleges + government student loans works OK in the US, but of course that’s an inexact analogy to primary education.

Timothy, education is hard to measure, but it’s not so hard to measure that if your kid were in a grammar school in East New York, you wouldn’t be able to clearly tell the difference between that and the school she’s currently in. Differences between affluent public school districts may be subtle, but the differences between parochial schools in New York, and its imploding schools, are not.

Harry, that was directed at LizardBreath, who seems to be telling me that I’m only allowed to have vouchers if they make every single student better off, which is silly; there is no policy that makes every single person better off, or we wouldn’t have to fight about it.

More broadly, you’re flipping arguments here. If those kids shouldn’t be allowed to leave, yours shouldn’t either; if yours should be, they should be. One or the other. There is no moral calculus I can come up with that ratifies the ability of affluent parents to exit, but not less affluent parents–that gives the worse off students the greatest responsibility for helping the worst off.

Seems to me that I should support vouchers if I have reason to believe that they will do more good than harm. You have given me no reason to believe that. I’m not sure what the correct word is for failing to accept an unsupported assertion, but I’m pretty sure that “hypocrite” is not it.

New Zealand? … none of whom are the descendants of slaves or have lived through Jim Crow

Harry B – slavery was common amongst pre-European Maori. So there are people in NZ who are the descendants of slaves.

The institutions were of course very different – Maori slaves were not being shipped distances anything like black slaves were. There wasn’t the same racial aspect either. But there was slavery.

On Jim Crow laws, clearly NZ did not have laws like the Jim Crow laws, though Maori were originally denied state welfare benefits and one can argue about the democratic levels of the Maori roll pre-reform. We also had repression of culture by government schools, land grabs, etc. NZ has its own social problems.

Note, I am part Maori.

> Also, your condition (2), on the benefits of
> school choice for one’s own children, may well
> be based on a starting point that local schools
> are inadequate.

Ezra Klein uses the number 90. That being the percentage of US children who attend public schools.

And I will add to that that the vast majority of people in the US do not live in inner cities: they live in suburbs. And the vast majority of them are happy with their own school district (although always a bit worried about that “other” district across the highway…)

Cranky

Still curious to know what type of school Ms. McArdle’s children attend. Or that she attended.

Thanks tracy w, and I apologise, because of course I know about the way the Maori have been treated. I shouldn’t have written that.

Megan — What you are assuming is that people with that choice available to them think that it should be available to them (they have a right to it). Now, baa has gently reminded me that my views about these things are not entirely in the mainstream in the US, so maybe it is, in fact, fair enough for you to make that assumption. Its not something I think — that is, I think that the schooling system as a whole should be designed to ensure roughly equal quality of education for all children (under a constraint that family life be allowed to thrive), and it seems to me compatible with this that no-one has much choice over where to send their kids. IN practice, of course, I realise that the wealthy will always have choice, and I think the right response to this is acombination of levelling the wealth and improving the quality of schooling for poor kids (in fact by doing what watson aname suggests — I’ll post on this in a coulpe of weeks…perhaps) so that the wealthy are indifferent where their kids go to school. But the point is this — I don;t think choice should be available to me. It is, and given that it is I think that my special obligation to ensure that my kid gets an ok education entitles me to use it. But its completely consistent with that to think that extending choice more broadly would either make things worse or would get in the way of making things much better.

BUT, I concede, that my quite radical views about equality are not widely shared, even among voucher opponents, and it might be more fair of you than I thought (before baa called me on it) to impute views quite unlike mine to your opponents. Not fair to the people in Laura’s thread, mark you, who seemed to me to be arguing in good faith and with a real willingness to be persuaded.

Harry, that was directed at LizardBreath, who seems to be telling me that I’m only allowed to have vouchers if they make every single student better off, which is silly; there is no policy that makes every single person better off, or we wouldn’t have to fight about it.

No. I was telling you that you could only have vouchers if you had a convincing argument that they would make more people better off than they made worse off, and I haven’t seen that argument — you would have to make it with regard to the details of a specific voucher program.

Generally, I’m with Harry. I’d like an education of meaningfully equal quality available to everyone. “More choice” only gets us there if the “choices” available to poor people are literally the same choices availably to rich people, including St. Grottlesex. If you’re giving poor people “more choice”, but not the same choices that affluent people get, that’s not going to get us to equality — I think a much more productive route is increasing quality across the public education system, and decreasing economic segregation within that system.

Lizardbreath,

Two points

1) one question here is how vouchers are alleged to be making people worse off. If the mechanism is that vouchers make bad schools worse because good students with active parents select out, then it seems this is exactly the argument that irritated McArdle. Right now we have a system where virtually every middle-class parent already selects out. There are failing schools in the system — and these are not schools where many (in some cases, any) middle-class parents send their kids. The question then would be: why have a publicly-funded system designed to provide less choice to poor parents? Why should poor parents bear all of the burden of ‘improving’ the least advantaged schools? Is there another mechanism by which vouchers are alleged to do damage? (defunding, I suppose, but this could be covered by guaranteeing support of fixed-costs to publics for some long (10 year?) period post voucher introduction)

2. I’d like an education of meaningfully equal quality available to everyone. “More choice” only gets us there if the “choices” available to poor people are literally the same choices availably to rich people, including St. Grottlesex. If you’re giving poor people “more choice”, but not the same choices that affluent people get, that’s not going to get us to equality

This seems like too high a bar. I can imagine some policy X which massively improves education of the bottom quartile of students, but still doesn’t make that education as good as Groton. Surely you wouldn’t oppose reducing class sizes in public schools just because Groton had even smaller classes, right? So complete equality seems like a red herring. The question is whether increasing a poor parent’s choice is beneficial. Here, I don’t think we have great data. But I get the sense that even if we did, you’d still oppose vouchers. So, thought experiment. Let us imagine that we get lots of confirmation of Caroline Hoxby’s studies, and even run experiments showing that voucher systems usually out-perform public provision systems in our preferred metrics. (test scores, parent satisfaction, college attendence, whatever) Would you then support a voucher system?

> If the mechanism is that vouchers make bad
> schools worse because good students with active
> parents select out, then it seems this is exactly
> the argument that irritated McArdle.

If that were the only mechanism, but it is one of about five that have been discussed in this thread, at Ezra Klein’s site, Matthew Ygleisas’, Washington Monthly (Drum), etc. It is a strawman that Ms. McArdle likes to flamethrower though.

Cranky

LB,

First, sorry for missing that sentence. My bad. I guess I am reading you as hostile to *experimenting* with vouchers. Right now, we really don’t have conclusive data. I think I am correctly summarizing the limited US experience as a) no major effects on test scores, b) improved parent satisfaction. To me, that’s enough to embark on more extensive voucher experiments. Again, that’s because I have a strong background assumption that diversity of models and competition between them is helpful.

People keep on telling you, but you don’t seem to be hearing, that ‘more choice’ is not a useful metric for improvement.

Different people are saying different things. There are two questions here. 1) is “more choice” valuable in itself, 2) is “more choice” valuable instrumentally. I tend to believe both are true. More choices are good because kids are different and it’s not one-model-fits all. More choices are also good because competition between models will improve quality. You (I think) hold at most that the second could be true, and are worried that adding options could have negative results. I get that this is your position. But many people who aren’t you act as if they believe both 1 and 2 — they shop schools for their kids, they select neighborhoods based on schooling, they believe that even within their own family, two siblings may have different needs, and select different schools for them, they talk about wanting schools which are more responsive to parents. I suppose there’s some way to interpret these facts so that it doesn’t amount to an endorsement of having more options, but it seems that this will be a strained interpretation. Right now in the US we have a publicly-funded system where school choice exists: some people have more choices, some people have fewer, or none. Right now this choice is managed through the real estate market. I would prefer to handle school choice through the school system.

80: I’m not, in fact, hostile to experimentation with vouchers, and I’d like to see school quality delinked from the real estate market as much as possible. Handling ‘school choice through the school system’, in allowing students to attend whichever public schools they wish to the extent the logistics can be worked out, sounds like a fine idea to me.

I’ve got a lot of worries about a system that heavily relies on vouchers. It seems to have a real potential for directing poor kids into for-profit low-cost private schools, and those don’t have a great record compared to public schools, as far as I know; school quality, for a school without a long history or a trusted organization in charge, is very difficult to judge before you’ve actually enrolled your children there, and then moving them is quite difficult. On that basis, I’m likely to be hard to convince, but that doesn’t mean I’m opposed to experimentation.

Without passing judgement on the charge of hypocrisy in this instance–I don’t know enough about the US situation to really understand the foregoing discussion so apologies if the following isn’t relevant–I think the basic problem with Megan’s argument is that shouting “hypocrite!” is not a knockdown argument. It shows that someone’s principles are inconsistent with his actions. If justified it could mean that his principles are wrong, or his actions are, or both.

Now I do think this diminishes any credibility which he might have in attacking the actions of others. If someone pulls his kids out of the system, and at the same time fumes at others for doing so (as a violation of principle), then I think it is difficult to take him seriously. But the case we are talking about is different and while the inconsistency does not speak well of the person stating the principle, I don’t think it tells us much about the validity of the principle being appealed to.

I have to disagree a little with some of the arguments put in response to it, though, for example with Adam when he says–

Calling the parents in question hypocrites is like calling me a hypocrite because I believe in a strong welfare state to come closer to eliminating poverty and homelessness, yet don’t empty my pockets to every homeless person who solicits me.

because it does seem to me that hypocrisy could be in this example, or at least in similar examples. If I really think that severe poverty is a terrible thing and I am in a personal position to easily do something about it, then why don’t I? Probably, “empt[ing] my pockets to every homeless person who solicits me” would be taking things too far, but it seems to me that nearly all of us should be doing a lot more than we do, if we believe what we say we believe.

Likewise I think something has been missed in the discussion above about the person who wishes for a world with no guns but who still carries a gun. If carrying a gun is really necessary to ensure his personal safety then he has a right to carry it. But supposing it’s not (Cian only says that he “feels” it is necessary) then it seems reasonable to ask him why he doesn’t take steps which are open to him personally to improve the situation–in however small a way–by his lights, and not carrying a gun himself looks like one of them.

Adam’s response, that not carrying a gun yourself is not a “significant action” doesn’t cut it with me. The gun-owner has two avenues to him: campaigning for collective action and taking unilateral action and it’s a toss up between one voice in a large debate, or one person acting in a crowd. In neither case is his personal contribution going to be “significant” in Adam’s sense, it appears.

> I agree that information barriers and
> switching costs are problems, but they
> seem like ones that are surmountable.

For all the talk of “abandoning” children in universal public schools and the immorality of such alleged action, what percentage/how many generations of children are voucher proponents willing to sacrifice to get private voucher schools up and running? The legend is that 80% of small businesses fail – do you have any reason to believe that it woudl be different for an 800% expansion of private schools? If not why not? If so, what happens to the kids in 5th grade when it is found that their K-4 education was a failure?

Cranky

1) The government should pay for and regulate to ensure a pretty good education for all children

3) I should support whatever mechanisms and reforms will result in it providing the same for children whose parents are less advantaged than I am.

Harry,

I would add another argument (one I hold, but you may not hold)

1b. The government’s regulation of schooling should be to the extent possible neutral among various concepts of what good schooling includes and excludes. (In the areas of discipline, curriculum, socialization, etc.)

Add this argument, and I think something fairly voucher-like is required.

> In a charter or voucher system, we can use such
> methods as are useful in public schools, but add
> the additional mechanism that if parents are
> worried up front about the risk of education
> failure, or become worried in the course of
> education about failure, they have the option of
> selecting a different school. It could be that
> charter schools and vouchers schools are more
>likely to fail to educate than are the current
> publics.

Then there is a solution readily available: the Kansas City/St. Louis program. After 10 years of kicking and screaming most of the school districts, administrators, and teachers (of the receiving schools) admitted they liked the program and the taxpayers (for the most part) admitted they didn’t care. No vouchers, no tax increases, no changes to the existing (very successful) public school systems. A little more equity in state educational funding wouldn’t hurt (my sister’s district had to make up the difference between the state-formula payments and their standard expenditure, but it turned out to be not that bad in reality) but isn’t strictly necessary.

Those children from the failing districts who could be saved, were, and by Megan’s Logic those who were left behind weren’t any worse off. But such programs require busing children of a funny different color into suburbs dominated by the Radical Right…

Cranky

Cranky–I’m not familiar with the Kansas City/St Louis program–could you give us just a bit more info. (A link would be fine.)

Cranky, it sounds like you believe the top 25% have an obligation to stay within the public system, and in particular, to stay within bad schools within the public system, because that increases overall educational quality. Have I got you right?

“But Megan, it is empirically true that when we have tried vouchers, they have had very limited benefits for the kids using them.”

Very little benefit isn’t ‘no benefit’, and as the voucher systems studied had very little marginal cost, there you go.

Furthermore, the “very limited benefit” was in contrast to the schools they left on a year to year basis, BUT the old school improved too. There may be other things that did that, but it may also be that (as with almost every area where you allow competition) competition spurred improvement in the former monopoly. That is a good thing even if the voucher schools don’t end up being better than the then-improved public schools.

“Yes, this is the best argument for vouchers. If you start from the premise that most poor kids in America are going to get horribly inadequate educations and there’s nothing we can do about that, then it become sensible to talk about how we rescue the talented (or lucky) few.

But if you think our goal should be to provide a decent education for all kids, vouchers have no place in the discussion.”

This would make more sense if we hadn’t already had 30 years of the teacher’s unions and voucher opponents with nearly total control of the schools. Their methods have been tried. This isn’t 1960, where expenditures were below the industrialized average. This is 2007 where we have some of the most expensive per-pupil teaching in the world, under almost complete government control, and it isn’t very good.

Lizardbreath: “If you make a small number better off, and a large number worse off, then you’re not doing good. As I said on your blog, I’m not opposed to anything calling itself a voucher program in principle, I just haven’t seen one convincingly described that sounds as if it would do more good than harm on a large scale.”

I don’t think people can use the studies which say that vouchers don’t make students better off AND also argue that they are going to ‘ruin’ public schools. I’m not totally sure that is what you are doing, so I’m springing off your comment rather than making an accusation.

> This would make more sense if we hadn’t
> already had 30 years of the teacher’s unions
> and voucher opponents with nearly total control
> of the schools.

And the vast majority of US parents **are satisfied with their local public schools**. The majority of Americans DO NOT live in central-city Detroit or any central city.

Cranky

“If Megan feels so strongly about space going to waste at parochial schools, she should set up scholarships funded by her libertarian allies (people at Q and O, for example, are always talking about the importance of private charity as a substitute for public funding) to fund the transfer of students from the public school to the private school.”

Great point. Except they do.

Some of the biggest tries with voucher systems have been through private-donation funding. (Strongly resisted by the teachers unions naturally).

“And the vast majority of US parents are satisfied with their local public schools. The majority of Americans DO NOT live in central-city Detroit or any central city.”

So they wouldn’t use vouchers right? So we wouldn’t be causing ‘problems’ in THOSE students or THOSE schools because they are already fine, right?

That isn’t an argument against vouchers. That is just saying that vouchers won’t be successful because most people won’t bother using them. It is directly contradictory to most of the other forms of argument going on in this thread. This may be a problem with arguing with multiple people on a thread, but isn’t it interesting the Megan is being asked to defend vouchers both because so many people will use them that they will ruin everything, and because no one will use them?

The National Education Association has asked its members and has attempted to organize a more general boycott of Wal-Mart for the anti-public education activities of John Walton in founding the Children’s Scholarship Fund

Got a link? I did some googling, and all I could find was a couple of articles quoting someone saying that some members of the NEA had called for such a boycott.

105: Yeah, but it’s about opposition to Wal-Mart’s political support for vouchers (there’s something that may be a reference to the provision of privately funded vouchers, but the objection stated is that they were part of an effort to create political pressure for publicly funded vouchers). Opposition to publicly funded vouchers, and to those who advocate for them by whatever tactics, is a political position, isn’t the same thing as a blanket opposition to scholarships.

(Also, the bulk of the information there is about Wal-Mart’s anti-union activities against it’s own employees. That page is one union supporting workers in their attempts to organize a non-union workplace, rather than something primarily addressing voucher issues.)

I haven’t been able to find primary sources with the NEA, only lots of newspaper editorial references to it. I don’t know what that is worth.

France provides public aide to private schools, if I’m not mistaken.