Promises Kept: Essays from my 2003 Campaign
Why Vouchers Would Harm Our Schools
There are those who look at the challenges facing public schools and search for a simple solution. Rather than the hard work of focusing on programs to improve, staff to train, and schools to run they take an ideological position they argue will magically fix the problem. Some in the debate about schools think school vouchers are such a solution. Rather than have a school district fund schools, a voucher system gives parents a check spendable at whatever school a parent chooses and the student is admitted to. The school district is charged for the voucher.
On the face of it, vouchers sound like free money to parents. Vouchers typically can be used at public or private schools. Parents get to allocate the resources. The elegant packaging is the idea of competition. Faced with the threat of losing students and vouchers, voucher proponents argue that schools will compete and improve in order to hold onto their students. Schools, they say, are just another service like restaurants, coffee houses, or banks.
Admittedly, the experience deregulating electricity has probably made this a less attractive argument in California than it was two years ago. Energy deregulation was supposed to use competition to make the electricity market work better and sell cheaper. We all know that it didn't happen as planned. Also, the California legislature has gone on record opposing school vouchers. But, we have seen how quickly a radical new education budget proposal can be introduced in Sacramento .
Vouchers have two fundamental flaws. One, no additional money enters the system. In the current environment, voucher money out of public schools is a pure loss to the public school system. The second fundamental flaw is that for Palo Alto vouchers will not work to improve quality or lower costs.
It is worth taking the time to look at the evidence from careful studies of voucher systems in the U. S. and around the world. The conclusion is quite clear. There is no convincing evidence that schools improve under vouchers. Rather, there is substantial evidence that school quality does not improve, costs are not necessarily reduced, and the likely harm is to the least well-off students.
Voucher experiments provide educational economists with the data possible to test the impact of vouchers on children and school districts. In the United States there have been important tests in Milwaukee , Cleveland , and Florida . Smaller tests have occurred in New York City , Dayton Ohio and Washington D.C. Internationally, there have been country-wide experiments in Chile and New Zealand .
A summary of these experiments was presented in the Fall 2002 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, a respected publication of the American Economics Association. Economist Helen Ladd of Duke highlighted the following conclusions:
- In the Milwaukee voucher system, which did not allow voucher use at religious schools, there were small improvements in math and none in reading for minority students that transferred using vouchers.
- In the Dayton, Washington, and New York City voucher experiments, which allowed a wider use of vouchers including parochial schools, there was very little or no evidence of improved test scores. In districts that did show improvement, they were smaller than the impact of reduced class size.
- Poorly performing schools may improve when faced with the threat of losing students, but the evidence is mixed. In Chile , the overall effect for most schools is negative. A school suffering defections of students has a difficult time recapturing students and may sink even lower in performance.
- Cost savings are hard to detect, and the fully measured cost (including subsidies from churches, etc.) may even be higher in private schools.
- International studies reinforce the finding of little or no benefit or cost reduction from a large-scale voucher system.
Now consider the realities of Palo Alto. Private schools in the Bay Area are very expensive.
The relatively cheaper parochial schools of the East Coast are rare. For example, tuition at neighboring private Castilleja is over twenty thousand dollars a year. Even a highly funded voucher system would still leave a parent paying more than $10,000 per year per child. While some in our community can afford that, most cannot. Vouchers in Palo Alto would be a tax on the school district to subsidize the choices of the very well-to-do.
Another pragmatic question is the impact of vouchers on Palo Alto housing prices. Empirical evidence cited by Ladd supports the conventional wisdom that good schools raise the prices of houses in a school district. As vouchers decouple schools from where you live, it would push housing prices in Palo Alto lower.
Palo Alto public schools and housing prices would almost certainly be harmed by a voucher system. Like any educational reform package, we should ask for the evidence that a change will actually improve schools and make our children's education better. Too often the "sales job" for some educational change tempts supporters to say it must work because it sounds so good. What the experience with vouchers shows is that reality need not be so tidy. Education is such a critical issue that we should be doubly careful about untried and untested changes. We must look to the evidence that the change will actually make our public schools in Palo Alto better.
- Camille Townsend (with information provided by Ward Hanson, Ph.D. in Economics and Stanford faculty)