Correspondence

Policy Review, Mar/Apr 1997

Values and Vouchers To the Editor:

Douglas Dewey's "An Echo, Not a Choice" (November-December 1996) brings a breath of fresh air to the debate over school vouchers. I once believed in vouchers when the only opponents I had to argue with were liberals. Their arguments were easy to refute. But it was conservative arguments like Dewey's that led me to oppose vouchers.

Although he focuses on the Christian case against vouchers, as a hardcore secularist I object as strongly as Dewey does to government-controlled schools teaching children "values." When I wrote a long paper for the Hoover Institution making the case for vouchers, I was never able to answer one question: "How do you have vouchers without government control?" I finally figured out the answer: You can't.

"Yes, but," I said to myself at the time, "vouchers have to be good. That's why unions oppose them." But the fact that the characters of many union leaders are questionable says nothing about whether their position on vouchers is right or wrong. Union leaders probably think that eating with clean hands is a good idea, too. Should I therefore quit washing my hands before dinner? Moreover, it makes sense that unions would oppose vouchers even if vouchers would solidify their power over private schools. Vouchers mean change, and most everybody, especially bureaucratic unions, hates change. Milton Friedman once pointed out that when income-tax withholding was introduced during World War II, its strongest opposition was from employees of the IRS.

David R. Henderson Research Associate, Hoover Institution Palo Alto, Calif.

To the Editor:

Douglas Dewey's provocative article drives home the point ignored by all education "reformers": Public education is socialist education, designed from its origins to displace the family and to serve the interests of the state. No adjustment of funding processes can undo that fundamental reality. "Voucher" and "tuition tax credit" schemes will only serve in the long run to subordinate religious and private schools to state ends.

I would add only one item to Dewey's list of policy prescriptions. The way for governments to help young families provide for the education of children is to offer massive tax relief, tied to the number and age of children in the family (and not their school status). Income-tax exemptions of $8,000 per child or tax credits of $1,800 per child would work at the federal and state levels. Per-child offsets against property tax could be provided at the local level.

Beyond this recognition of the special nature and social worth of children, let parents and markets determine the best methods of rearing the next generation. The results will be pleasantly surprising.

Allan C. Carlson President, Rockford Institute Rockford, III.

Social Workers' Welfare

To the Editor:

I am a social worker, a member of the National Association of Social Workers, and a subscriber to Policy Review, and I am anxious for my profession to give welfare reform a chance.

James L. Payne's "Absence of Judgment" (November-December 1996) is an excellent profile of the public face of social work in America today. It is a sobering commentary on the failure of social-work education and leadership that I learned more about social-work history and theory from his description of Octavia Hill, the l9th-century British social worker, and from Marvin Olasky's book, The Tragedy of American Compassion, than I did in graduate studies and 20 years of social-work practice.

Conservative social workers do exist. Many do not agree with the present positions of either political party, but all believe in human potential: They believe that clients are capable of selfhelp, that material assistance blocks self-sufficiency, and above all, that the client must have the right to fail. Some of us are convinced that welfare creates so many barriers to self-sufficiency that, taken as a whole, it is doing more harm than good and that the entire system should be terminated if it cannot be adequately reformed.

It is extremely difficult to raise this viewpoint within the assistance community, as it runs counter to the indoctrination social workers receive and challenges the self-interest of the established agencies. There is a great need for a forum where dissenters can fashion a truly constructive model of social assistance. Jack M. White Jr. Chevy Chase, Md.

To the Editor:

James Payne's knowledge of the social-work profession is skimpy, based on stereotypes generated in the news media, and infused by his own prejudices about the causes of poverty. Poverty is caused by a complex interaction between elements of personal inadequacy, social and economic dislocation, race and sex discrimination, and a host of combined psychological and sociological factors that pervade society. The suggestion that social work, as a profession, is the main obstacle to welfare reform is ludicrous.

Payne completely misrepresents who social workers are and what they do. He says they serve as everything from eligibility clerks in welfare offices to career counselors in high schools. There are virtually no professional social workers doing either of these things. Most eligibility workers are high school graduates without college degrees. High school guidance counselors have an educational and training background entirely different from that of professional social work.