(This article courtesy of the Arlington Catholic Herald.)
Do education vouchers work or don’t they? The answer to questions of that sort pretty obviously depends on what standard you choose to use in deciding whether vouchers — or, for that matter, anything else — can be said to “work.” By any reasonable standard, then, education vouchers do work.
Is your standard the academic performance of children who use vouchers to move from public to nonpublic schools? The studies show that academic performance by these kids improves. The efforts sometimes made to explain this away — by saying, for example, that voucher children are motivated (some kind of crime?) — only serve to call attention to that fact.
Even so, it seems to me a mistake to make improved academic performance the principal criterion of vouchers’ success. The fundamental purpose of education vouchers is simply this: to give parents and children a meaningful choice of schools. By that measure, vouchers cannot help but succeed.
That is no small thing for people who worry about fairness.
Seventy-six years ago, the Supreme Court was called upon to decide a case (Pierce vs. Society of Sisters) involving an Oregon law pushed through the state legislature by anti-Catholic bigots pursuing the sleazy goal of shutting down private and parochial schools if they could.
Not surprisingly, the court found this profoundly anti-democratic law unconstitutional. And, in doing so, it delivered this stirring pronouncement:
“The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the state to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only. The child is not the mere creature of the state; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right coupled with the high duty to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.”
Very good. But up to now government for the most part has neglected to put the flesh of economic empowerment on this framework of noble principle. No small part of the blame for that resides with the Supreme Court itself, which back in the 1960s and 1970s went to considerable lengths to throw obscurely reasoned constitutional roadblocks in the way of government aid to parochial schools.
Vouchers are the latest attempt to deal with this problem. At the present time there are three voucher programs in the United States — in Cleveland, Milwaukee and Florida — allowing parents and children to choose church schools. The programs among them involve 14,000 children, hardly the threat to the survival of public schools of which the public education establishment so often speaks.
As the circumstances of the Cleveland case make clear, vouchers have largely become an inner-city phenomenon cherished by parents who are desperate to have their children escape failing public schools. Diane Ravitch, a longtime leader in school reform, says this makes them “a civil rights issue for a new generation of African American activists.”
That is highly welcome news. But it should not be forgotten that, along with civil rights, education vouchers also involve a fundamental issue of parental rights. As the Supreme Court so memorably observed in the Pierce case of 1925, “the child is not the mere creature of the state.” Maybe the justices will finally get around to putting that principle to work. Better late than never, after all.
