The pitfalls posed by voucher system - school choice - Symposium - Column

Insight on the News, Jan 10, 1994 by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

If conservative Republicans continue to push "school choice" and vouchers, they will alienate their middle-class base, as the California debacle of Proposition 174 showed. The initiative was widely and rightly seen as an expensive, redistributionist welfare Program that threatened the autonomy of both Private schools and suburban public schools. In fact, the debate over vouchers is similar to the busing debate of the 1970s, pitting settled community schools against central authorities with imperialistic and egalitarian designs. By making these designs their domestic priority, Republicans will for go the chance to be the majority party.

The U.S. public education system has been in trouble for years, as the steady stream of students into private schools illustrates. But far from fixing what's wrong with Public schools, tax-funded vouchers for private schools and choice among public schools would make things much worse. Vouchers would bring private schools under strict government supervision, and choice would subtly but effectively erase the lines between school districts. Both would mean more government spending.

Vouchers and choice represent the worst kind of liberal program: something for nothing and a heavy dose of planned demographic upheaval. They would tax Middle Americans and ruin their institutions, to finance more social engineering. When Californians figured this out, they pushed Proposition 174 over the edge of the San Andreas Fault by a 2-1 margin.

Choice would deliberately weaken school district lines and local funding in an attempt to increase competition. Yet most suburbanites like their school districts. They serve as a partial insulation against central government officials intent on controlling communities. School districts are Part of a network of intermediating structures, praised by socoiologists Robert Nisbet and Charles Murray, that serve as buffers between families and the state.

In most of America, district lines are strictly enforced, much the way property lines used to be. District lines help determine where families live. The values of homes and land, as any real estate agent can testify, are affected by school district boundaries. Does the district have decent schools, smart kids and lots of parental involvement? Or are its schools characterized by crime, drugs and low achievement? Parents would be irresponsible not to ask these questions and make their decisions based on the answers.

Good parents are deeply involved in their children's education, in the PTA, the band boosters, the chess club, the tennis team. They know the teachers and the teachers know them. They put their own money and time into all sorts of extracurricular activities. Students wear their mascot with pride and sing the school song. They cheer for their team and boo the school across town. It is a natural and healthy micro-patriotism.

In the 1960s and the 1970s, liberals scoffed at such middle-class activities and sentiments. They argued that school districts were conspiracies of the well-to-do to separate themselves from the social Pathologies of the poor. Based on liberal hatred of self-contained, middle-class communities, meddling judges mandated busing and in general waged war on the natural tendency of people to want to live among their own socioeconomic group.

Forced busing was, of course, a disaster, and it generated a political explosion. The fallout lasted more than a decade and helped bring about a political revolution against the Democratic Party. It was one of those issues that conservatives had to mention only once to ride to victory.

How odd that the idea would be resurrected by conservatives, under the rubrics of free enterprise and competition. Most voters aren't fooled by the rhetoric, however. If any bill, be it busing or vouchers, threatens to weaken school district boundaries, Americans will revolt, as they have against choice. It's no wonder that liberals such as Washington Post columnist David Broder mourned the failure of the voucher initiative in California and chastised middle-class suburbanites as selfish.

In California, all the economically illiterate talk about introducing competition into public schooling didn't work either. Suburban voters, who are mostly happy with their schools, noted that the initiative would have forced all schools, even those rejecting vouchers, to open their enrollment to children "regardless of residence." It was a death sentence for Proposition 174.

In our increasingly collectivist America, there are few boundaries remaining - in manners, morals or property. Why not protect and defend those that have survived? Conservatives should be defending, not wrecking by central decree, the little platoons of civilization. Good fences, as the great conservative poet Robert Frost said, do indeed make good neighbors.

But what about competition among public schools? Rivalry works miracles when people are spending their own money on private enterprises. But there is a crucial difference with public schools. They are owned and run by the government. They don't operate on a profit-and-loss system of accounting. And they lack the incentive structure to respond efficiently to competitive pressures.