the battle over school choice

homewhat bush & gore saydiscussionhow bad is it?school choicemy state
interview: caroline m. hoxby

When people talk about a crisis in public education, what do you think the concern really is? Is it with our colleges and universities, or are we talking kindergarten through 12th grade?









I think the nice thing about having a policy where that's written in at the beginning is that everyone has an incentive to pay attention to what we would consider to be social goals, like racial integration--not just black parents, not just white parents, not just Hispanic parents--everyone has that in mind. Everyone has an incentive to send their kids to a school that's more integrated....

One of the other fears [of opponants to vouchers]--and, as an economist, you might be able to address this--is that in a voucher program, you're taking away financial resources from a failing public school, transferring them to the private sector and leaving the public school in even worse shape. What do you say to that?

That's a strange argument, in a way. Let me just go through the logic. Typical per pupil spending in the United States is about $7,500 a year. That's average per pupil spending in public schools in the United States. And, the typical voucher in the United States is under $2000 a year. So, let's just say that we had a public school system and a voucher program came into place, and it was a typical voucher program, let's say $2000, typical public school, $7,500. Even if the vouchers came completely out of the local public school district's budget, every time they lost a student, they'd be losing $2000, but they'd lose a whole student and $5,500 remains behind. Approximately every time you lose about 26-27 students, you've actually gained a free teacher, in some sense, in a typical public school in the United States. So, I think in terms of just the finances, it's not clear that this isn't really a win-win situation. It's not quite that simple, but you're not taking very much money out of the public schools when you take out a whole student....

Many of the voucher programs that we actually have in place, of course, in the United States, don't take the vouchers from the local school district budget. That, in fact, is the norm, to NOT take the money from the local school district's budget. In that case, of course, the local district's budget is pretty much protected and it has fewer students to take care of. So it can spend that budget on reducing class size, on having better arts and music teachers, having some sort of tutoring or remedial education, expanding some form of extra curricular activities. It can do whatever it thinks is best with the money....

If you could describe it from your point of view, what would an ideal voucher system look like?

That's complicated, actually. An ideal voucher system would, first of all, be universally available. I think that that's important, that it be universally available....It has to be available to every student in the district or I think it's not meaningful. If you only have it available to a very small group of students, then there's always the concern that some small group is going to remove themselves from the school district and leave behind a big group of students who don't get to benefit very much from the voucher plan. And most of the big benefits of vouchers are probably from generalized competition, as opposed to benefiting just the students who actually take advantage of the voucher. So you want it to be universally available.

That being said, the size of the voucher should depend, somewhat, on the goals that we talked about, like the racial integration of the school that the student is going to. Whether the school has, if it's a private school, ...selective admissions or whether it admits students by a lottery or on a first-come/first-served basis, which gives it much less opportunity to select students. So you would want to give a larger voucher to a school that doesn't have an opportunity to do selective admissions.

The voucher should, definitely, be means-tested. That means that very well off families would get a very small voucher, perhaps even no voucher, if they were really well off and that poor families would get a larger voucher. The voucher also has to take into account whether a student is disabled or costs more to educate in some way, because you want disabled students to have opportunities to make choices, and they're only going to be able to do that if the voucher's big enough to cover the cost of educating them. We want schools to feel that that child is a child that it needs to attract. And, so that's one of the things that you want to build into an ideal voucher program, too....



Let me ask you sort of the macro picture here. Here's Shaker Heights, which is an upper middle class community, solidly upper middle class. And people there, in general, seem to have quite an investment in the education of their children and are willing to tax themselves enormously to pay for a very good public school system....Just down the road is Cleveland, a school district that, at one point, was $150 million dollars or so in debt. Schools were falling apart and there didn't seem to be the economic ability to generate the funds that were necessary to repair those schools, repair them physically and repair the education in those schools. Isn't the sort of crux of this problem, or one of the fundamental cruxes of the problem in education, this tremendous disparity in income that people have?




Specifically, if you look at teacher salaries in the Cleveland public schools, they're far higher than in the Catholic schools. Catholic schools can't afford or aren't paying their teachers nearly the same.

...It's typical in the United States that private school teachers are paid about half of what public school teachers are paid. That's been what the ratio has been for quite some time....

If we've got these problems in K through 12, [and] we want to improve student performance, particularly in schools where students have been underserved, what should we be spending money on?


I think, as well, some of the things that we know about schools tell us how it is that choice would actually bring this about. For instance, we know that some teachers are just much more successful in educating students than other teachers. There are individual teachers who are just very good teachers and we can pick them out very easily in data. You can see that Mrs. Smith is just very good at teaching math year after year after year.

And what you want to have happen, is you want to have schools go after the Mrs. Smiths of this world, get them into teaching, keep them in teaching, make sure that they get the rewards that they need to stay in teaching. And, right now, schools don't have a very strong incentive to make sure that it's Mrs. Smith who's in the classroom and not someone else. And parents can usually pick out the best teachers. Many administrators can pick out their best teachers, but right now, the system doesn't have very many rewards for people who are the best teachers. I think that choice would put a tremendous amount of pressure on a school to reward its best teachers, because it would be attracting parents. It would be ensuring its own financial future by attracting parents. So that's one way in which choice puts pressure on a school to make the decisions that we think it ought to be making anyway....


We've also been in some--whatever you call them--alternative magnet schools, in other words, schools within the public system that have done the same thing. They say, ''We're going to have a science-based curriculum.'"'We're going to have a arts-based curriculum.'' And they usually have some terrific, very dedicated principal or administrator who has this vision and whose going to carry it through, no matter what the school bureaucracy has to say....But we've also had some of those people say, ''That's great because that's still within the public school system. We're not privatizing the system." And they prefer that.

I don't think it's an either/or situation. I think that the goal of school choice and school reform should be that every school in the United States is a school that's run by somebody who really cares about this enterprise and whose at good at it. And some of the schools are going to end up being private schools and many of them, probably the vast majority of them, in the foreseeable future, will end up being public schools.


Vouchers, in particular, are kind of a polarizing issue?

I think that people get more polarized about school choice issues than they should get polarized about them. I think that many of the benefits of school choice are understood by both people who are against and for state vouchers for charter schools. In particular, people tend to be pretty willing to recognize that there are probably some benefits from competition. I think that Americans have a good relationship with competition. We know that it has benefit. I think that people tend to get more polarized on issues related to the sorting of students among schools, racial integration being one example, but by no means the only example. And I think, a lot of the polarization is unnecessary because I think that these issues can be managed if people sit down at the table at the beginning of a school choice reform and write down their concerns and try to build them into the policy. And so, I think the polarization there is really unnecessary. I think that people should come to the table and design a good policy. That's the answer.

What about the church/state issue? ...We've talked to several people about this who are involved on opposite sides of the lawsuit in Cleveland, for instance, over the voucher program because in Cleveland, most of those students are going to Catholic schools. So the issue is, should tax payer money be spent to send a child to a religious school? What do you think about that?

I think that the church/state issue is actually overblown when it comes to school choice for the following reason. Right now we have small, essentially experimental school choice programs. If you only have 1,000 students or 2,000 students in a voucher program, particularly if it's privately funded, and it might not be around forever, what you're going to see happen is that people will go to the existing private schools when these vouchers show up. The vouchers are not big enough to allow someone to build a new private school and we don't know that they're going to be around long enough for someone to want to build new private schools. So, children take these vouchers to existing private schools.

It so happens that most of the existing private schools that are very inexpensive are parochial private schools in the United States. But, if we were to have a school voucher policy that was more universal or more general, and if the size of the voucher were to be somewhat larger, instead of being $1500 or $1000, it were to be something closer to per pupil spending in the United States, even if it were only 2/3 of per pupil spending in the United States, it would still be high enough so that what we would get would be private schools that were created to take students who have vouchers.

New private schools?

New private schools.

Not necessarily religious schools at all.

...My guess is that if we were to have much more universal vouchers, most of the private schools that would come into existence would not be religious private schools. That's just my guess. I don't think Americans are sufficiently religious so that they want to have their children in religious education and they're willing to pay any sort of price for it. If you were to have a voucher program, also, that said you get a bigger voucher if you send your child to a school that doesn't have religious content then you do if you send your child to a school with religious content, I guarantee a lot of parents would choose the larger voucher and take their kids to church on Sunday, or to the mosque, or to the synagogue.

...Do you, personally, have any feelings, pro or con, on this issue of whether, in Cleveland, a child should be allowed on a voucher to go to a Catholic school?

...I'm not a legal expert. I can't say whether this is the right separation of church and state. What I can say is that I think the fact that most of the people who are taking the vouchers are going to religious private schools is not indicative of of their being constrained to take religious private education. I think they have secular options, like the community schools. They have the magnet schools within the Cleveland public school system. They can stay in the regular Cleveland public schools--and this is just one of their options. So I think no one's being constrained to take religious education....

FRONTLINE ·  pbs online ·  wgbh

web site copyright 1995-2014 WGBH educational foundation