Naysayers Revive Voucher Proposals

School Administrator, Nov, 1996 by Nick Penning

Vouchers are back.

Thirty years ago the Illinois legislature, along with many others, debated something called "parochiaid." Now that word really describes what vouchers are all about. These public funds are not going to provide poor children with a "choice" between their public school and a nearby private school. Rather, the voucher mostly rewards parents who already have enrolled their youngsters in nonpublic schools with a grant that covers the cost of their tuition.

But Congress never plays straight with the issues. They send the message that "everybody knows public schools are failing." Complete balderdash and they know it. Congress quashed the Sandia Report, produced by the impartial Sandia Laboratory in 1991, which gave ample evidence of the success of public schooling. More recent studies by the National Assessment of Educational Progress indicate student reading scores are going up in public schools.

Off-Base Critics

Along come the naysayers. James Glassman, a commentator in The Washington Post, wrote in early September: "As schools open this week across the nation, millions of children will trudge back to classrooms marked by disorder, despair, and demoralized teaching. Kids are condemned to these terrible schools by their own governments." Glassman charges local governments with being racist and brutal in their treatment of students.

One has to wonder if critics such as Glassman and avid proponents of vouchers such as Paul Peterson and Jiangtao Du of Harvard and Jay Green of University of Houston (whose recent analysis of private school vouchers Glassman called "breathtaking"), have ever been inside a public school. Peterson and company issued an academic paper that stated, "Students enrolled in choice schools [in Milwaukee] for three or more years substantially outperform, on average, a comparable group of students attending Milwaukee public schools."

Jeffersonian Defense

John Witte of the University of Wisconsin faults Peterson for using an "inappropriate" medical experiment comparison that is "biased in favor of choice students. The method, to my knowledge, has never been used before in modeling education achievement." He adds: "Further bias is introduced because the research results focus on the purported success of third- and fourthyear choice students only. Attrition from the [Milwaukee choice experiment] was high, averaging 30 percent per year."

Witte goes on to say that "attrition was highest among students who had done significantly worse in private schools and whose parents were less involved in their child's education and were less satisfied with the private schools their children attended. Thus the surviving third- and fourthyear students are a very selective group.

So it's not surprising that a selective group--those skimmed off the top of a few public schools in a practice some call "creaming"--did better on assessment measures. And these students probably would have done better in their local public school, too.

As Thomas Jefferson said some 200 years ago when he and his colleagues were creating this unique democracy: "Above all things, I hope the education of the common people will be attended to; convinced that on this good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty."

A "free and appropriate education" was designed to protect the security of our democracy. It's time we put down the voucher concept for good and go about our real business of uplifting children for a better tomorrow.