The School Choice Paradox

What’s wrong with the national school choice movement?

Today, after 40 years of pro-voucher activism, only about 30,000 non-special-education students nationwide attend private schools using school vouchers. So far this year only one state (Colorado) has passed vouchers, despite a much awaited and celebrated Supreme Court decision in June of last year.

Vouchers Should Be Easy

The dismal political performance of the voucher movement is paradoxical because getting voters and elected officials to support vouchers should be easy, the political equivalent of kicking a can down a hill. It should be much easier than tax and expenditure limitations, say, or term limits. Here are some reasons:

• Opinion surveys consistently show majority and super-majority support by the public, including (and especially) among minorities.
• Diversity and choice in education have deep roots in American history and the American Creed.
• We can point to extensive international experience, where government and private schools often compete on more even footing.
• Privatization of other services is so common and successful experts speak of “the rule of two”: The public sector generally spends twice as much as the private sector to deliver the same service.
• Stagnant (at best) student achievement and falling productivity in the public schools should weaken public support for the public school monopoly.
• Higher achievement, productivity, and parental satisfaction with private schools and schools of choice should boost public support for school choice.
• The Catholic Church supports vouchers nationally, at the state level, and sometimes locally.
• A growing for-profit K-12 education industry is able to lobby for school choice.

Obstacles to Success …

Why hasn’t an idea so popular and robust been translated into public policy on a wider scale? The obstacles are familiar:

• Powerful teacher unions conspire with public school administrators and school board members to oppose reforms that would make them accountable to parents and taxpayers.
• Business owners recognize that reforms they finance that improve public schools would benefit competitors as well, and so choose not to invest.
• Some of the most richly funded liberal advocacy groups in the world oppose vouchers, including Americans for the Separation of Church and State, People for the American Way, and the American Civil Liberties Union.
• Voucher opponents tap into anti-Catholic bigotry, which is perhaps difficult to see or measure but often emerges as a major chord in the other side’s music.
• Division inside the school choice movement among homeschoolers, the Religious Right, libertarians, conservatives, and liberals has split political campaigns such as those in Michigan and California.

… Or Just Excuses?

Obstacles to vouchers certainly exist, but I wonder if they haven’t morphed over the years into excuses rather than explanations. There are some reasons for doubt:

• Union opposition hasn’t stopped privatization from spreading in other areas of government, or in other countries. In fact, union leaders in most countries support vouchers.
• The free-rider problem hasn’t kept business leaders and philanthropists from spending more than $500 million so far on private scholarship programs and billions a year trying to fix specific problems with government schools.
• Liberal advocacy groups are probably at their weakest level in 30 years. They couldn’t stop welfare reform or the war in Iraq. They can’t get the Kyoto Protocol or national health insurance passed.
• Fewer than half of private schools now are Catholic, and nearly half their students aren’t Catholic. Surely anti-Catholic bigots have noticed this trend and realize vouchers would accelerate it.
• Divisions among advocates of school choice may slow us down and make the movement less efficient, but how much of our differences are just inside baseball? Education is a responsibility of state and local governments, so a variety of reform ideas and tactics is entirely appropriate.

The Real Reason We Fail

There must be another, deeper explanation for our failure to translate a good idea into public policy. I think I know what it is. People don’t understand capitalism, and people fear what they do not understand.

At its root, the campaign for parental choice in education is about relying on capitalism to educate our kids. Many advocates of school choice frame their cases in terms of social justice, fairness, or efficiency instead of profits, prices, and property rights. They can hardly be blamed for this. Every focus group and survey says “social justice” is more popular than “profits.”

By using slippery values-based language to make the case for vouchers, we gain a momentary boost in public support for “school choice.” But we pay for this by neglecting to say, or deliberately not saying, we want to replace a government monopoly with private competitive markets for schooling. When our opponents reveal this to be our true agenda, the voting public is surprised and fearful. Support for school choice plummets.

Who is explaining and defending why capitalism can be trusted to operate safe and effective schools for kids? Milton Friedman and Gary Becker, and more recently Caroline M. Hoxby, John Merrifield, and precious few others. More often, advocates of school choice run away from any arguments that rely on economics or defending capitalism. They don’t want to take on the burden of having to educate the public about “capitalism” as well as persuade them to support “choice.”

The disappointing political record for vouchers and even tuition tax credits proves they are wrong.

How We Can Win

Opponents of school choice demonize vouchers by tapping public confusion about and fear of competition, profits, and prices. The anti-choice campaign is really a thinly veiled anti-capitalism campaign. To counter this, we must educate millions of Americans about what capitalism is, how it works, and why it should be trusted to educate our kids.

The solution is not to go back to the arguments and rhetoric that failed in the past. There is a place in the school choice movement for “communications strategies” that aim to connect vouchers to “psycho-social consequences” and broadly held values. But such strategies will fail if we do not also teach parents and voters what the institutions of capitalism are, how the price system works, and how a spontaneous order can be more efficient and more just than a deliberately planned economy.

The Heartland Institute has always made economics and explanations of capitalism an important part of its publications on school choice and vouchers, and we will continue doing so. School Reform News, our national newspaper reaching some 45,000 people each month, frequently features this sort of analysis (side-by-side, admittedly, with pictures and stories that appeal to people’s values as well as their reasoning).

Next month, Heartland will release Let’s Put Parents Back in Charge! a 96-page booklet by Herbert Walberg and me that makes the case for vouchers in part by explaining and defending capitalism. It will be the first effort to join these two subjects between the covers of one book since Milton Friedman proposed vouchers in Capitalism and Freedom back in 1962. A much longer and more scholarly book by the same authors, Education & Capitalism, will be published by the Hoover Institution Press later this year.

Defending capitalism while advocating school choice, I admit, may not be appropriate in every occasion and arena. Some people can be won over by appeals to values alone. But concerns rooted in public confusion and fear over capitalism flow just beneath the surface of the debate, and they won’t go away if we simply ignore them. More likely, if unanswered they will sweep away what little progress we have made in the past 40 years.