School selection or parental choice?

Stephen Pollard is often worth reading on education, though almost always wrong. Take his “latest post”:http://www.stephenpollard.net/001180.html (and article from Fabian Review) in which he attacks the British left’s skepticism about specialist schools. I’m on record as being skeptical about the particular version of specialization Pollard attacks, and also as favoring abolition of private and selective schools in the UK (not in the US), another position he attacks. I am also, unlike most people with my politics, a strong supporter of parental choice. But Pollard is not, it seems. He says that we should fund ‘whatever parents, not bureaucrats or politicians, want’. But he also wants schools (run, let me tell you, by government-funded bureaucrats) to be able to select students. So whose choice is decisive in where a kid goes to school? Not the parent’s choice, but the bureaucrat’s.

What makes his rant even stranger is that he is in favor of vouchers funding children attending private schools. If these schools get to select among the voucher applicants what choices does he imagine they will make? If parents can top-up the voucher with their own money, this will simply amount to a public subsidy of wealthy parents maintaining an elite exclusive space for their kids. If the voucher allows no top-up elite schools will select in only those students whose presence enhances their project of elite-formation. Why would they do otherwise?

Pollard assumes that selective and private schools are excellent. I’d like to see the evidence. The best existing study suggests that elite academic schools get academically oriented kids slightly better A-level results than state schools, despite spending more than twice as much per pupil and being able to cream off elite teachers. This might be a good deal for the very wealthy parents whose children attend these schools. But it hardly constitutes excellence. Many of these schools would look pretty bad if they had to labor under the budget constraints of state schools.

A final note. Pollard says that the left outside the UK advocates selection and specialization, and particularly identifies the US left. Not true. Even right-wing advocates of school choice tend to hesitate at the idea that school bureaucrats should get to allocate children to schools, and the few existing state-funded voucher programs target the poor and disallow selection. UK advocates of vouchers are systematically either dishonest or ignorant about the character of US voucher programs, which are far more carefully regulated than either their US opponents or their British advocates like to admit.