I've resisted commenting on Megan McArdle's recent foray into pro-voucher blogging, because Matt Yglesias and Kevin Drum have been doing an admirable job making the basic relevant points, but I wanted to highlight a few points from a slightly different angle. Referring to poor performance of schools serving disadvantaged urban students, Megan writes:
I have a novel approach to solving this problem: I propose we . . . pay schools on the basis of their ability to educate these children. I plan to call this system something nifty and new-economy, like . . . a market. That has an edgy, new-millenial kind of feel, doesn't it? I think it's the juxtaposition of the hard-edged k and t sounds with the soft, sensuous labials of the first syllable.
The trouble is that the market alone isn't adequate to address the problems she sees in public education.
Kevin and Matt both raised this issue of accountability and quality. As anyone who loves the critically acclaimed but criminally underviewed Veronica Mars or Friday Night Lights knows, market success is not always synonymous with product quality. There are good reasons to believe that markets alone, in the absence of good information and public accountability, won't allocate children and resources to the schools that do the best job educating them. When public funds are used for public education, there is a public oversight responsibility to ensure that the schools receiving those funds—private, charter, public, what-have-you—meet basic standards of safety, quality, and student performance. That requires a public oversight role—some kind of quality-based entry barrier for participating schools, some kind of test-based accountability for student performance, the ability to prevent schools that consistently produce poor results from accepting voucher students—that most voucher proposals, in practice, lack. This kind of accountability isn't just about ensuring the public interest, though: It's also critical to provide parents with the kind of high-quality, comparable information they need to make good, informed choices among educational options. In the absence of such information the market won't be effective.
There's actually a basic contradiction in Megan's argument: Paying schools based on their ability to educate children is not the same as a market. There's no guarantee, for the reasons mentioned above, that a market would result in schools getting paid based on their ability to educate children. And it's certainly possible to imagine a financing scheme within the existing public school system that allocates resources to schools based on student performance. The latter would be an example of injecting market incentives into the educational system without actually creating a market. But there are obvious moral/practical complications to such a scheme because, in practice, it would exacerbate economic inequities and take resources away from schools that actually need additional support to help them improve. Performance incentives alone don't work when people in a school honestly don't know how to improve their student performance. When that's the case—as the experience of NCLB reauthorization suggests it is in many places—you need to either build the capacity of existing organizations or create new ones to replace them that do have capacity.
Which brings me to what I think is really the more significant limitation of voucher proposals: Vouchers are all about allocation of children amongst spaces in existing schools and do almost nothing to expand the supply of high-quality options. Spaces in existing schools are inequitable allocated, with poor kids having much less access to good schools. But more basically, the problem is that there's a severe shortage of high-performing schools in the geographic areas in which disadvantaged kids tend to be concentrated. Any serious approach to improving education for disadvantaged youngsters needs to create a lot more good schools in the places where these kids are. But vouchers just tinker in the margins of getting poor kids into the limited space available in decent (and sometimes not so decent) private schools that do already exist. Megan at one point paraphrases Matt's argument as "Therefore maybe we can muck around with charters, but don't go crazy!" But in terms of potential to radically change the educational system and options available to poor kids, charters are actually a much more radical approach than vouchers.
Some voucher proponents claim that making vouchers available will create market incentives that expand the supply of high-quality schools in these communities, but there's not really evidence to bear that out. In some of the places where vouchers exist, new schools have sprung up, but many of them have been shady operations that did a poor job educating kids, had financial improprieties, and/or went out of business. There's a basic economic problem here: As the experience of EMOs that have struggled to make a profit operating charter and contract schools shows, it's just really hard to make any kind of profit educating disadvantaged kids; people whose primary interest is profit are much better advised to pursue other avenues.
When it comes to creating new high-quality options for disadvantaged kids, the charter school movement seems to hold much more promise than vouchers. Even there, though, there are significant obstacles to building quality new schools at a scale sufficient to impact outcomes for a significant number of disadvantaged children. Partly, this is because of artificial barriers created by state policy: State charter school caps, inequitable funding, zoning and other regulatory limits, etc. But it's also simply the case that building new schools is incredibly difficult, that making them good is even more so, and that ensuring quality at any kind of scale is even harder. Getting there is going to require identifying and developing new sources of high quality human capital, building new organizations that are able to support new high-quality schools in new ways, etc. The charter movement is doing some of this. Philanthropists have played a key role in starting to build this infrastructure, but government has been an important player, too: The federal charter schools program is a key source of start-up funding for charter schools. And getting to the point where all disadvantaged kids have access to a high-quality school is going to require a much more concerted government effort to support and incentivize individuals and organizations to create and run these schools.
Just cutting poor parents a check for a few thousand dollars and sending them on their way--as most voucher proponents recommend--isn't going to cut it, and proposals to do that, without ensuring public accountability for schools, and without accompanying efforts to dramatically expand the supply of good schools that are available to poor parents, would be every bit as much of an abdication of society's responsibility to these kids as what's happening now.
I've gone on long enough, but two more points:
More tangentially, this entire exchange started out with a discussion about similarities and differences between health care and education and why the left and center-left embrace seemingly different policy prescriptions in the two fields. I find comparisons of health and education policies fascinating and wish there was more cross-talk between the sectors. This interview I did with Sir Michael Barber, the architect of Tony Blair's education reforms who has also played a key role in driving reforms to the NHS there, gets into some of the similarities and differences in ways that are very relevant to this conversation, and I strongly encourage everyone to read it.
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