MONOPOLY MONEY

Willing to do a deal on school vouchers (E.J. DIONNE, July 25, 2003, Houston Chronicle)

Like many Americans, I struggle with the voucher question. I admire public school teachers and support unions. My late mother taught in public schools and so, early in her career, did my sister. They cared passionately about the kids in their classrooms. The often-maligned teachers' unions have fought to bring up the pay of a profession whose importance to our future is not matched by the compensation its members receive.

But it should also bother us that liberals who send their kids to private schools would tell poor parents who want their children to escape failing public schools: "Sorry, our principles require your kids to stay right where they are."

For years, I have argued with my friends in the teachers' unions that they should support voucher experiments. Doing so would prove that they are on the side of the poor kids they teach. And if their unions are so certain that vouchers will fail, why not allow experiments that in all likelihood will prove that vouchers are no substitute for fixing the public schools?

Listen to Kati Haycock, director of The Education Trust, a group dedicated to the proposition that poor and minority kids deserve much better teaching.

Vouchers, she says, are "a sideline, a marginal issue." Vouchers could help some inner-city kids get "tickets into Catholic schools" and those kids would be "better off, though not hugely better off." The problem, she says, is that "there's not a lot of excess capacity" in Catholic schools or "in the non-Catholic school sector, and no excess capacity in the really high-end, independent schools."

In any event, Haycock adds, "tony private schools don't want to submit to the requirements that policy-makers are attaching to voucher programs." Not to mention that tony schools cost more than most voucher programs would provide.

And the notion that vouchers would create a large supply of new schools is nonsense.

At the end of the day the fight over vouchers really comes down to the Democrats' fear of the teachers' unions and of money going to religious schools and to Republicans' fear of black kids invading the white suburban schools of their constituents, but Mr. Dionne brings up one other key difference: Democrats, despite Bill Clinton's best efforts, don't really believe in free markets. Mr. Dionne really doesn't believe that turning millions of parents and kids into informed education consumers would bring pressures to bear that would result in better educational opportunities. He truly believes that a government monopoly--or near-monopoly--is necessary and good. That idea seems to be contradicted by the 20th Century. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 26, 2003 1:18 PM