This is a response to an article by Washington Post education reporter and columnist Jay Mathews.
I am tired of all the tortured arguments against vouchers like the ones presented by Jay Matthews.
According to Mr. Matthews the only reason its ok for a single mom in DC to use a school voucher to send her child to Nannie Helen Burroughs School is because he can’t really think of an argument against vouchers that doesn’t leave him feeling guilty and deceitful.
Forget about the fact that every person should have the freedom to choose any school that works for their child. Forget the fact that monopolies never work, particularly in urban education. Forget the fact that all the serious evidence points to positive results for children who receive vouchers. And forget the fact that a good deal of the newer research shows that local public schools improve when exposed to the competition arising from children using vouchers to go to private schools.
The simple story here is that we have tried almost everything in the world to improve public schooling but nothing has really worked. Graduation rates are terrible (and often way underreported), teacher morale is low, spending is at an all time high and test scores remain essentially flat. There are some success stories but they are few and far between. We have put billions of taxpayer dollars into the public school system and there is no appreciable improvement.
Mr. Matthews knows all this and still said that vouchers are just too risky and inconvenient. Give me a break. What’s really risky is taking on the public school establishment and demanding that it change, and what’s totally inconvenient is knowing that this is really the only way to improve education for all the children in American, not just the child that now goes to Nannie Helen Burroughs
Robert Enlow is the Executive Director of the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation.