Economics and Education

Harry from Crooked Timber and Megan McArdle are debating school vouchers. Harry puts the issue in plain terms:

Are people who buy houses on school-quality grounds necessarily hypocritical if they also oppose vouchers?

His answer, of course, is no. People can be well intentioned in their attempts to reform the poorest urban schools while still seeking the best education for their own families. But McArdle argues that the very fact that upper middle class parents pull their kids out of bad schools in favor of better suburban or private schools proves her point. As she notes in the first comment:

Ah ha! You may say. But pulling those kids out makes the system worse for those who remain. But if this is true, it is doubly true of pulling out your own, more privileged and high performing children, and taking away your own, more privileged and high performing, contribution as a parent to keeping the school performing at a high level.

I think the debate over school vouchers is tremendously weird, but that mostly has to do with the fact that I attended high quality suburban public schools, and my own kid is doing the same, and it never seemed like anything other than dumb luck. There wasn't a lot of angst or decision-making. You enroll and away you go. So I may be blinded to my own privileged status in life (oh, the irony).

The other thing is that the schools in our area have an open choice program. As long as there are seats available you can enroll or child in the school of your choice, even if it's not your neighborhood school. You can also cross district lines if you want to. Again, I may be lucky.

But to me the central issue in all of this is economics: schools with wealthy, high-achieving, highly educated parents do well. Schools that don't have these things inevitably fail. Otherwise there would be no point in moving to the suburbs because ALL public schools would be bad. But a truly good suburban public school is essentially equal to a private school, so it really isn't about tuition, it's about parents and their ability to pay for a better school or a better house or both. Vouchers attempt to remedy the tuition problem, but can't do anything to fix the larger social ills.

So if the voucher people were really serious, shouldn't they also favor:

• Vouchers for parents to help them move to the nicer suburbs. Subsidized mortgages. Telecommuting schemes. Public transportation improvements.
• Vouchers for schools in poor neighborhoods to recruit high-quality students and their parents from the suburbs and private schools. Promise free college prep and state championship sports programs.
  
• Vouchers for poor neighborhoods to subsidize a living wage and raise the overall standard of living to the equivalent of the suburbs. If household incomes were raised to say, $75,000 across the board, then even the most blighted urban school becomes the equivalent of a middle class suburb.
  

But of course the answer would be no. No one would support this sort of plan. The voucher people are not in favor of some kind of crackpot socialist scheme. They're not interested in a Great Society style re-engineering of the social order. What they want is the destruction of the public school system and the privatization of suburban public schools. They hate the teachers union because it gives teachers autonomy. They hate paying taxes for things they can't control, and right now schools are something beyond their control. They hate listening to ideas and subject matter they can't control (which is why they invented the term "political correctness" and oppose advanced scientific ideas like evolution). Basically they hate the whole notion of "public" anything because it undermines the class system and the privileged station that the wealthy see themselves as entitled to.

So what you'll end up with is education for those who can afford it, hand outs for a few smart poor kids. Vouchers in the name of equality of access or equality of opportunity misstate the objective.