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Voucher discussions

Jenny D.’s recent posts on school choice have sparked a whole lot of discussion.  (Check out the threads for lots of interesting commentary.) 

We’re obviously just a bit late to this party, and it’s kind of hard to add a whole lot to what has already been said over there, but that obviously won’t stop us from trying!  A few observations in no particular order. 

First off, it seems like much of the discussion–especially in the first post–took place with no reference to places like Milwaukee and Washington D.C., where choice programs have been in place for years.  Many of the questions about distribution of vouchers, admission requirements, special ed issues have been addressed through some degree of experience.  Of course, not everybody is happy with the conclusions that have been reached–see Eduwonk’s response to Matt Ladner on Florida’s special ed vouchers.  (And why does he keep calling it Edpresso?  But we digress.)  It would be worthwhile to discuss what has already taken place in areas where voucher programs have been in place for a while, and what has been learned throught that experience. 

Another closely connected point is that there seems to be an assumption that school choice is an all-or-nothing deal.  Notwithstanding the hyperventilating on the part of some, the mainstream school choice movement is not seeking to simply shut down the public school system in favor of private enterprise.  This statement will probably infuriate the hard-core libertarians out there, but we’ll just come out and say it: the public school system is here to stay, and no form of school choice is going to change that. 

Which dovetails to our third point: the reason school choice won’t destroy public schools is because it hasn’t.  Fifteen years of vouchers in Milwaukee, and oddly enough the public school system hasn’t disintegrated.  As mentioned yesterday, school choice appears to have done Florida some good.  But it seems like some of the questions were framed along those lines.  We agree that hypotheticals are certainly valuable in the framework of a discussion, but at some point the exchange really does need to come back to reality. 

One last thought.  In that second post, Jenny posed this question:

If the public schools were, in your estimation, doing a good job educating kids in academics, would you want school choice? Why?

If McDonald’s is doing a good job feeding you, would you want to eat at Subway?  Why?  Maybe because of the virtues of competition?