IDEOLOGY UBER ALLES :

The Other Case Against Vouchers : Forget church and state. Vouchers are bad for a gazillion secular reasons. (Adam B. Kushner, 7.10.02, American Prospect)

To begin with, the stipends that most voucher programs grant their students aren't enough to pay for a good private school. Florida's program offers about $4,000 for students, for example, while Ohio's offers $2,250. Although vouchers won't pay for the best secular private schools, they generally do pay for inexpensive, inner-city parochial schools -- which explains why so many vouchers go to religious schools. Pushing public-school students toward a religious education may not be against the law, but it certainly is bad education policy. Some parents argue it grants them choice, but a choice between a failing public school and a mediocre parochial school is an unenviable one. [...]

Conservative economists claim that schools will materialize to cater to these students [those not accepted by or unable to afford current private schools], in accordance with basic supply-and-demand market principles. But schools designed to accept voucher-students will inevitably be profit-making ventures. These voucher mills would be forced to put revenue drives and cost-cutting ahead of education, just like any other for-profit organization. [...]

And still, there are other reasons to be skeptical of vouchers. For instance, they undermine the teaching of pluralism because voucher users will naturally gravitate toward schools that represent their own demographic. In fact, The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University recently found that 48 percent of black students in Catholic schools and 44 percent in other religious schools encounter a heavily segregated educational experience, meaning that fewer than 10 percent of students in their schools are white. While public schools have used busing programs for years to desegregate the schools, religious institutions have been unable to overcome the patterns of residential segregation. The situation is likely to worsen with the promulgation of vouchers.

So let's see if we have this straight : Mr. Kushner seems to think that parents would not prefer that their children get at least mediocre educations, instead of the non-educations they are sentenced to now. Of course, if this were the case they wouldn't use the vouchers in the first place and we'd not see black mothers in Cleveland and Milwaukee sobbing joyfully after the Supreme Court approved the vouchers their children use.

He also thinks that profit making ventures don't actually produce a worthwhile product--in this case educated students--but instead just cut costs and
cook the books. Tell it to all the companies that are belly up now because they thought similarly. Of course there will be private schools that are poorly run and that cut corners, but like Enron and Global Crossing and other businesses that thought they could outwit the market, it will catch up to them. This makes them completely different from public schools which can be, and have been, run badly for decades on end. And if all of this does not alleviate Mr. Kushner's concern, let parents insist that the private schools they send their kids to be not-for-profit. In fact, let the folks at American Prospect and the NAACP and the NEA open schools of their own. Privatizing education does not have to mean turning it into the kind of rough-and-tumble market we have in say the dot.com industry. Choice means just that, choice among many different opitions--some public, some private, some parochial, some for profit, some not. Let the good succeed and the bad wither away.

His third point, about pluralism, seems premised on a belief that "diversity" in the educational experience is more important than the quality of the education itself. This brings us back to those parents we mentioned to begin with--suppose you offered them a choice of getting a crappy education in a thoroughly diverse school or a decent education in a homogenous one, which do you think they'd choose? Which would you choose for your child? Which would Mr. Kushner choose for his child? Are we talking about educating kids here or are we talking about serving the Left's political ideology? If the latter, fine, but let's explain this to black parents, that we're perfectly willing to leave your child ignorant in order to protect union sinecures, deny money to religious schools, prevent anyone from making a profit on education, and realize our integration fetish. This will at least let American blacks now what the true priorities are of their supposed allies in the Democratic Party. And, guess what, as has too often been the case in America, black kids come last.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 11, 2002 9:48 AM