Why DC Vouchers Don't Matter

President Obama wants to appropriate enough money to keep the DC voucher program going for the children currently enrolled. Good--this is the only ethical position to take. I know some Democrats in Congress wish the program had never been implemented, but that's the price of losing elections. Dragging low-income and minority students out of their schools just so the N.E.A. can score some petty political revenge would be inhumane and a political debacle besides.

That said, there's a strong element of artifice to this whole debate. The DC voucher program does not represent serious public policy. It was a P.R. move, a bone thrown by the previous administration to the privatization crowd it marginalized by supporting NCLB. The voucher dream (setting aside the obvious anti-labor agenda for the moment) has always been to introduce market dynamics to public education--to create new competition and provide incentives for innovators and entrepreneurs to bring energy and resources to the enterprise of educating students. 

The DC voucher program does none of these things. No new schools have been built as a result, no groundbreaking programs created, competition spurred, or innovators attracted. It's basically just an exercise in seeing what happens when you take a couple thousand students out of pretty bad schools and put them in a range of other schools that are, collectively, somewhat better. Answer: some of the students may be doing somewhat better! I think we already knew this. 

Remarkably, the DC voucher program is being taken seriously even as, right here in the same city, charter schools are actually creating the whole range of market responses that vouchers are not. Drive across the river and see the brand-new schools built by KIPP and SEED, which are just a part of the tens of millions of dollars of new investment in public education spurred by charters, a wave of new organizations and people coming to the nation's capital to educate disadvantaged students, along with many others who were here already, people who never would have been able to operate within the traditional public system. 

One could argue, I suppose, that if vouchers had been given to 17,000 students instead of 1,700, they would have had more impact. But I'm not so sure--I kind of doubt that Sidwell Friends and Georgetown Day would up and build annexes in Anacostia in response. In any event, why bother? DC charter schools are directly accountable to the public and specifically designed to serve urban students. Why would it be better to re-direct public funds to schools that are neither of those things?  

Yet the DC voucher debate is playing out on national television and has provoked a seemingly endless series of righteous editorials from the Washington Post. This seems to be the real purpose of school vouchers--giving people the opportunity to scramble for the moral high ground of defending disadvantaged youth. Many wealthy members of Congress send their children to private school! So does our wealthy President!  Outrage!  Hypocrisy revealed! Meanwhile, voucher opponents paint themselves as brave defenders of the education system, as if this was some crucial battle against the Wal-Martification of public schools. 

In that sense vouchers do have some utility--they separate people who are serious about education policy from people who aren't. The more you shout and carry on about them, the less you're paying attention to the issues that really matter.