The Voucher Left and a New Proposal

If you count all the K-12 students in the country participating in public or private school voucher programs the total number is 74,000 of the 52 million K-12 students, or about 0.14%. There are about 200,000 students in charter schools. Add these in and the fraction increases to 0.52%. In a recent Atlantic Monthly article, Matthew Miller uses this evidence to argue that the voucher debate is taking place only at the margins. The number of students involved makes it difficult to generalize about the effect of educational vouchers on a larger scale. At the same time, opponents of vouchers work to make sure that such programs never expand.

Miller traces the little known movement of the "voucher left." These are progressives who believe that vouchers are a means to address the funding inequities caused by the use of the property tax to fund education. John Coons, Stephen Sugarman, and William Clune studied educational performance and are convinced that much of the disparity in achievement between inner city schools and suburban schools is caused by funding disparities. Leaving aside pathological cases of mismanagement in places like Washington, DC and New York, NJ where spending is as high as in suburbia, but student achievement is still mired in the mud, the researchers were convinced that lack of resources were the key problem. In order to address these inequalities, while maintaining local control of schools, Coons et al. proposed the use of state-issued vouchers to equalize spending.

The apostle of the Right most responsible for Conservative support of vouchers is Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman. While recognizing the importance of an educated populace for both economic and political progress and thus the need to insure the education of all, Friedman saw no reason why the government had to actually run the schools. At the time of his original proposal, Friedman used the successful and popular GI Bill, that funded the post-secondary education of veterans after World War II, as a model of government financing of education and a mixed private and public delivery of education services.

The point of clash between Coons and Friedman, according to Miller, is whether a voucher program would leave poor or disabled students behind, while private schools skimmed the cream of the easiest to educate students.

Miller offers a compromise on vouchers, he believes will address the concerns of Conservatives and Liberals. His approach has received the grudging support of both Milton Friedman and Kweisi Mfume, the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In the hopeful words of Miller, "If leading Liberals are willing to question the support of the public school monopoly, and prominent Conservatives hear the call of justice, the voucher debate has a chance to move forward."

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