A Selective Voucher System: An Answer to Educational Inequality

John Stuart Mill, in his political essay On Liberty, asserts that "one of the most sacred duties" of becoming a parent, of choosing to bring a child into the world, is to give that child an education that allows him to prosper in his life- both in his relations with others and with himself (Mill, 104). Education has long been a topic of discussion that has been both heated and disputed. It is such because no one denies its importance and the vast majority of individuals care how the citizens of their country are being educated - even if they lack children themselves.

The education of children has an effect on all of us, for they are both our legacy and our future caretakers. In the United States, a large and extensive public school system has evolved in recent history. This school system is largely run by school boards which are elected by the general population of the area in which the school system at hand operates. The public school system receives its funding from taxation of those same individuals in its area in addition to revenue from other sections of the government. In short, however, the public school system is entirely accountable to governmental wishes and whims regarding how it is run. Distinct trends - largely geographical - regarding quality of education have arisen from studies of the public school system.

Educational quality is largely measured by a number of well know statistics: drop out percentages, percentile based test scores comparing students to one another, and literacy rates. It has been shown that public school systems in the inner-cities and urban areas, notoriously poorer areas, have consistently been among the worst school districts in the public school system. Some sort of amelioration for these poor performing schools is necessary. One such option, which is highly contentious, is the adaptation of school vouchers. Vouchers are sums of money handed out to parents with which they may use to pay tuition at any school they choose, private or public. There are many facets to vouchers and how they can be implemented, but done properly, they can be an effective way of both encouraging poor-performing districts to get back on their feet as well as immediately offering parents of children afflicted by these districts a potential way out. An examination of the controversies over school vouchers follows.

On June 27^th, 2002, the United States Supreme Court ruled on a school voucher case that took place in Cleavland, Ohio. The Cleavland public school district, one of the poorest performing in the nation, and implemented a policy that, among other things, gave parents the option of receiving a voucher from the government for partial private school tuition payment for their children if they so chose. Other options that the plan gave parents was the option of free tutors if their children remained in public school, and the option of sending their children to specialized community or charter schools which had autonomous school boards and, in the case of charter schools, a specific area of study focus - often vocational in nature. The issue before the supreme court, however, was that of the vouchers.

Opponents of the bill noted that parents who chose to receive the school vouchers by and large sent their children to schools with religious affiliations, and this was viewed as a breech in the establishment clause of the 1^st amendment of the constitution. Money, they argued, was going to support the establishment of religion because it was going from the taxes of the people into the private, religiously affiliated, schools via the vouchers that were being handed out. The Supreme Court ruled, justly, that this program was not unconstitutional. Chief Justice Rehnquist, in the opinion of the court, noted that no law was being created respecting the establishment of religion because governmental money was not being funneled directly into private schools.

It was given to the parents, if they chose to take it, and then the parents were given the choice of where to send their children. Accepting the vouchers were by no means compulsory. The question of whether or not the parents were being "coerced" into "sending their children to religious schools," it is noted in the Supreme Court decision, "must be answered by evaluating all options Ohio provides Cleavland schoolchildren, only one of which is to obtain a scholarship and then choose a religious school" (Zelman v. Simmons-Haris, 2). Indeed, in the Ohio program, the voucher program received the least amount of money in comparison to the other aspects of the program. J.S. Mill reflects, in On Liberty, "If the government would make up its mind to require for every child a good education, it might save itself the trouble of providing one. It might leave to parents to obtain the education where and how they pleased, and content itself with helping to pay the school fees of the poorer classes of children" (Mill, 104). The Ohio program, and vouchers for those who need them most, are a step in this direction. Granted, the separation of the public school system and the government is a fantastical notion at this point in the United States, but neither does that separation by necessity perpetuated the establishment of religion.

Another common objection to school vouchers is that it favors the rich or a specific subset of people. Any voucher system that comes into being must, like the Ohio program, be available only to those who are at, near, or below the poverty line. It is not our middle class and wealthy who need voucher assistance, it is the poor and those who have no choice as to where they may send their children. When no choice exists, no competition exists, and the poorest performing school systems have no incentive to better themselves - their students are going to keep coming and they are going to continue to receive funding for those students because their parents have no other option. Joseph Viteritti outlines a number of good necessities of a voucher program in his book Choosing Equality. First and foremost is that a voucher program must favor those in economic need. The most aid being available to those with the greatest need. Secondly, Viteritti argues that a doctrine of "full choice" must be adopted, as much as such a thing is possible. The choice regarding where to send their children should be the sole option of the parents, argues Viteritti, and participating schools would be required to accept students from any background using a lottery-based acceptance scheme if they had too many wishing to attend (Viterritti, 219-220).

A voucher program that emphasizes and, indeed, only seeks to give aid to those who need it the most will raise a whole new set of objections, however. One of these is that such a program will further doom the public school system in the inner-cities, as those schools will receive less and less funding as more parents take advantage of the voucher system. This argument seems logical on the surface, but there are two reasons why it is flawed. Firstly, from a strictly logical and objective perspective, schools receive money on a per-pupil basis for a reason. The reason is that in theory the more pupils a school has to educate, the more money it will require. Conversely, the fewer pupils, the less money, for less ought to be sufficient.

A public school, therefore, with declining attendance has no rational ground to stand on for further decreases in educational quality. Such a school should be wholly capable of downsizing its programs such that they are tailored to educating fewer students. It stands to reason that if students leave a school, that school should no longer need the money that accompanied that student. If they do, then it is likely a fault of cumbersome administration and poor budgeting. Secondly, objectors to the voucher system argue that the private sector is not large enough to support the infusion of students into private schools that would accompany vouchers. This is rejected based on basic principles of supply and demand. If vouchers come into play and there is a significant increase in demand for private schooling, private schools will increase in size and new schools will arise. Perhaps, even, private institutions will begin to buy out some of the present infrastructure of the public school system. Finally, opponents have argued that public school systems in the inner-city have always been underfunded and operate poorly because of their lack of funds. The relationship between funding and educational quality has, however, been seriously brought into question by a recent experiment with the Kansas City, MO city school district.

The State of Missouri (MO) and the district in Kansas City (KC) was ordered, in 1985, to spend "nearly $2 billion over the next 12 years" by a federal judge who believed that lack of funding was the reason for the dismal failings of that inner-city school district (Ciotti, 1). This enormous figure resulted in the KC, MO district catapulting from among the poorest in the nation to spending as much as $11,700 per pupil, which was "more money per pupil, on a cost of living adjusted basis, than any other of the 280 largest districts in the country" (Ciotti, 1). Paul Ciotti further reports some of the extravagances that were taken in the KC, MO school district. The district created nearly five dozen "magnet schools" which featured "such amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room; a robotics lab; professional quality recording, television, and animation studios; theaters; a planetarium; an arboretum, a zoo, and a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary; a two-floor library, art gallery, and film studio; a mock court with a judge's chamber and jury deliberation room; and a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability".

In addition to all of this, the district's computer science magnet had 900 computers, one for each student. The fencing team was coached by a former Olympic coach and took school funded field trips to Senegal and Mexico. "The ratio students was 12 or 13 to 1," and the school hired elementary level foreign language teachers from overseas (Ciotti, 3-4). This experiment had serious consequences on other school districts in Missouri. While the public district in KC, the inner-city district, had more money than it could handle, districts in rural and suburban areas were struggling to make ends meet. At the same time that the KC, MO district was spending $50,000 a month on transportation and field trips, the Springfield school district, a district of comparable size, had its budget cut by $4 million and had to fire 19 employees (Ciotti, 4). Most significantly, however, the funding had a zero effect on the standardized test scores of the KC, MO students throughout the entire experiment. The students continued to test well below average, and the district continued to be the most well funded in the country until the program was ceased in 1997.

The KC, MO experiment significantly bolsters the notion that competition is of far greater importance than funding for quality education. J.S. Mill said, "An education established and controlled by the State should only exist, if it exist at all, as one among many competing experiments, carried on for the purpose of example and stimulus to keep the others up to a certain standard of excellence" (Mill, 105). The State schools have little to no incentive to maintain a standard of excellence if they have no one to compete against, and they have even less incentive to do so if they are receiving all of the money they ask for. There is no extrinsic motivation, and such motivation is necessary for an atmosphere of excellence to develop. Vouchers would help to create such an atmosphere. It is evident that such an atmosphere already exists in the suburbs where parents already have the means to choose where to send their children. Public school districts that serve middle-class and wealthy Americans - those who can afford to send their children to private schools if they so choose - have a reputation for quality education. This is because they must provide a quality education, otherwise they will lose their students to private schools and consequently they will be forced to downsize, which is something that they could surely adapt to, but would not be desirable.

A final worry that those wary of vouchers have is that they will have real loopholes through which families who are well off will be able to subsidize the education of their children through vouchers. In the Cleavland district, for example, "27% of the first vouchers warded by the city went to students already enrolled in private schools"(Masci, 7). This is indeed a valid concern. The statistic, however, does not tell the whole story. It is entirely possible that those parents who were already sending their children to private schools before the voucher plan went into effect were doing so to the severe detriment of their own lifestyles or those of their children. In a district as poor as Cleavland was performing, it is not a long reach to assume that many parents would have worked the extra job, or sacrificed continued schooling for themselves, in order to afford to get their children into a school where they would actually receive a decent education.

Nevertheless, a voucher plan does need to emphasize those who need it the most. A benefits curve would suit it best, where those with the most schoolaged children and the least income would qualify for the greatest amount of benefits, and the benefits tapering off as number of children decreased, and income increased. No voucher program, however, should give private education away for free except in extreme circumstances, such as if a child is an orphan and parents are out of the picture. The responsibility of parents for education cannot be denied. J.S. Mill calls bringing a child "into existence without fair prospect of being able, not only to provide food for its body, but instruction and training for its mind" a "moral crime" against the child and against society.

Mill goes on further to say that if parents commit this crime, the State "ought to see it fulfilled at the charge, as far as possible, of the parent" (Mill, 104). The responsibility of the parents for the education of their children has a purpose in addition to the perfectly valid idealistic notion expressed above. A parent who pays, at least partially, for the education of his child expects a return on his payment. This forces the parent, if he cares about where is money goes, which is a relatively safe assumption, to get involved with the education of his child. It is safe and rational to conclude that in the majority of cases, the child of an involved parent will benefit far more from his or her education than will a child of a parent who is seemingly unconcerned. Vouchers can therefore be viewed as a crutch for those who need them. Education is important enough in our society to validate public funds being allocated in such a way, but it is important that while the goal of vouchers should be to provide parents with a choice of schools and other educational arrangements, parents still need to be held to whatever financial responsibility they can afford regarding their child's education. The parent must desire to see his child do well, and express that desire through tangible, financial, commitment. Society's role, through vouchers, is simply to see that that commitment not be unattainable or overbearing for those who wish to make it.

Vouchers of this nature will not solve all of the problems in education today. No program will. But they are a step in the right direction. A voucher program like the one outlined in this paper would still leave children of uncaring/unresponsive parents in dire straits and poor educational environments. The downtrodden public school system would not disappear overnight. Only those parents with the concern and, more importantly, initiative would be able to immediately get their children into better schools. But the public school systems would be forced to compensate and improve over time. In that way, less blessed children would benefit in the long-term. Perhaps even public school systems, seeing the necessity of parental involvement, would aspire to encourage such involvement without financial commitments; for, the public school system would remain and continue to be funded in much the similar way that it is now, but competition would bloom, and competition, voucher advocates believe, is the key to a quality education.

Bibliography

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