I very rarely get angry about politics. But every time I see some middle class parent prattling about vouchers "destroying" the public schools by "cherry picking" the best students, when they've made damn sure that their own precious little cherries have been plucked out of the failing school systems, I seethe with barely controllable inward rage. It is the vilest hypocrisy on display in American politics today.
Vilest? In the age of Dick Cheney, Larry Craig, et al.? More to the point--from a policy standpoint, I'm very supportive of giving parents more educational choices within a public school context. I think charter schools are clearly the right way to do this, not vouchers, but at the same time I believe that while some voucher supporters really do want to destroy public education by privatizing the schools, others really do want to help desperately disadvantaged kids get a decent education. It's not a simple issue, and if you're going to take a voucher away from a low-income mother who chose to put her child in a better private school, you'd better have a damn good alternative lined up for her. Not some hypothetical set of principles or general wish that she wasn't poor, but another, better school, today.
But to say that any well-off parent who exercises school choice by moving to the suburbs has a moral obligation to support vouchers--and is a vile hypocrite if they oppose vouchers--is silly. Voucherizing a whole city like DC wouldn't work. There aren't enough good private schools to teach all those students in the short run, and--more importantly--there wouldn't be enough in the long run. Look at how the private sector provides other services to low-income communities. Not banks, but check cashing outlets and pawn shops. Not decent grocery stores (much less Whole Foods), but convenience stores. The only sit-down restaurant in all of Ward 7 in DC is a Denny's. A Denny's. Why does anyone believe education would be any different? Particularly since--unlike with banks, grocery stores and restaurants--low-income kids don't just need parity, they need something better than what non-poor kids receive.
Well, one might respond, we there are good schools in the suburbs--lets send them there. Leaving aside the obvious massive logistical and political challenges that would entail, that's still a bad solution. Well-functioning communities need local schools that interact with and support the institutions and people around them. Why is it so hard to imagine that we could improve education for city students by building them good public schools where they live? This failure of imagination is also where Ezra falls short, when he says:
...white parents fleeing pockets of poverty is not an argument for school vouchers. What they're fleeing is the poverty -- which, at a certain density, dissolves just about any school.
No, no, no. I know lots of white, relatively affluent parents, here in DC, who are trying to figure out where to educate their young children. They're not fleeing poverty, they're fleeing bad public schools. It's not that they don't want their kids to grow up around other children of different races or income--heck, they'd like that, they're DC liberals for goodness sake. But their higher priority is a safe, quality education, which the city schools do not provide.
Moreover, this idea that poverty inevitably "dissolves" schools just isn't true. There are good charter schools in DC within walking distance of the U Street neighborhoods where the "new blogging elite"--to use Ezra's term($) for people like Megan and himself**--tend to live and socialize. Most of the children in these schools are minorities and qualify for the federal free lunch program. I challenge Ezra to spend an hour, or a day, or however long in one of those schools and then explain how poverty invariably "dissolves" anything.
The single biggest education-related failure of the contemporary left--and the folks like Ezra who write at The American Prospect are guiltier than most--is a willful refusal to recognize that while poverty matters, schools matter too, and some schools are much better than others. Since they're generally smart folks, I can only assume that this refusal is purposful and a function of the fact that they see good schools for poor children as compromising some larger narrative or effort aimed at reducing the number of poor children in the first place. For the sake of future generations, I hope they succeed, but I wish they weren't making education worse for this generation in the meantime.
**UPDATE 1: Ezra notes here that this quote was taken out of context and wasn't intended, as I state above, as a self-aggrandizing label for himself and his friends. My bad.
UPDATE 2: Dana Goldstein offers some thoughtful comments here, and points out that TAP's range of work on education is more intellectually diverse than I imply. She says:
What I would like to see is public school choice that regionalizes education in such a way as to encourage kids from more affluent families to attend high quality public magnet and public charter schools in nearby poorer neighborhoods or cities. This provides a good, close-to-home education for poor kids and integrates schools without having to wait for concentrated poverty and wealth to be wiped off the map. It also encourages average or under-performing urban schools to catch up with better specimens within their system, and provides them with models for success.
That seems reasonable.
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