School choice schism

Public Interest, Spring, 2002 by Myron Lieberman

THE school voucher movement in the United States has been divided over its goals and strategies ever since Milton Friedman first urged a voucher plan in 1956. Two recent pro-voucher books document and continue these arguments, and taken together are likely to influence the school-choice debate for years to come. The School Choice Wars, (+) authored by John M. Merrifield, a professor of economics at the University of Texas-San Antonio, is a free-market argument for vouchers accompanied by a withering critique of the school-choice movement. Schools, Vouchers, and the American Public, (++) by Terry M. Moe, professor of political science at Stanford, offers a political analysis of vouchers. These two books, which were written independently of each other, help to clarify many of the major issues dividing the voucher movement.

Schools, Vouchers, and the American Public is primarily an analysis of public opinion regarding vouchers. Moe examines attitudes toward vouchers broken down by several criteria, including race, economic and parental status, concern for equity, attitudes toward public and private schooling, and religious and political preferences. He attempts to go behind the polls to understand the dynamics of various demographic groups perceptions and identify what he considers the "enduring features" of popular attitudes toward vouchers. In the final analysis, Moe concludes that low-risk, small-scale voucher programs, accompanied by regulations to ensure accountability, equity, and fairness, are the most the American public is prepared to accept at the present time. While Moe expresses uncertainty as to whether there will eventually be movement toward vouchers for all children, it is clear that he is not a proponent of universal vouchers.

Throughout his book, Moe rejects the idea that the majority of Americans regard public education as a failure and are eagerly awaiting opportunities to transfer their children to private schools. (His research also shows that two-thirds of the American public has never even heard of vouchers.) Consequently, he believes that school choice cannot be achieved by attacking public education. The school-choice movement's failure to recognize this helps to explain its inability to enact voucher legislation. Moe also emphasizes that the hostility of teachers' unions to vouchers is impervious to the public-policy arguments for them. Union jobs, power, and prestige depend upon successful opposition to any version of school choice except public school choice. The absence of strong popular support for vouchers will make it harder for voucher proponents to overcome the opposition from the public school establishment and such allies as the National PTA, ACLU, AFL-CIO, NAACP and Anti-Defamation League.

MOE 's examination of the advantages and disadvantages of legislative and initiative routes to school choice is the first thoughtful analysis of this critical strategic issue. Although he makes a strong case for adopting the legislative route, his conclusion is not as persuasive as he might believe. Evidence suggests that initiatives may be appropriate in some states, legislation in others. Moe asserts that voucher initiatives have suffered losses even when the pro-voucher coalitions were better funded than the opposition, but his comparison of the resources available to the two camps overlooks such factors as concealed contributions, campaign facilities, and experience with voucher campaigns. Moe does have a valid point-the long succession of defeated voucher initiatives, many of which lost by large margins, suggests that a more tough-minded analysis of their prospects is needed. Yet such an analysis must take into account many issues that Moe does not discuss, including the growing involvement of big busine ss in the education market. This trend raises the prospect of new players with ample funding who can move quickly and preemptively on voucher issues and who have a strong economic interest in the success of their efforts.

Perhaps the most surprising feature of Schools, Vouchers and the American Public is Moe's apparent abandonment of the main thesis of his 1990 book, Politics, Markets, and America's Schools, co-authored by John Chubb, which argued that democratic control of schools was the most fundamental impediment to more effective schools. Moe now proposes to add democratic and bureaucratic controls to private as well as public schools, and argues that any school that accepts voucher students must also accept regulations to ensure fairness, equity, and accountability. It would be helpful to know why Moe has changed his mind on this issue.

IN The School Choice Wars, John Merrifield criticizes many of the same projects and arguments that Moe praises highly. Whereas Moe endorses the school-choice plans that emerged in the 1990s, Merrifield questions whether it should be considered progress that inner-city children now have the option of attending underfunded schools in poor physical condition, with low-paid teachers and a shortage of instructional materials. Merrifield also objects to those like Moe who refer to school-choice plans as "experiments." By using this term, he argues, school-choice proponents strengthen the opposition's argument that the case for school choice depends on the outcome of "experiments" that may go on for years and years.