School Vouchers and Resource Hoarding

I was revisiting a piece from just a couple of months ago in which I subjected myself to the Daily Wire's Betsy DeVos interview, and I noticed again the exchange that starts with this extraordinary quote from Michael Knowles, the interviewer.

This sounds like when Western civilization made sense, when our civilization was growing and thriving--this is how education was done. It wasn't big institutionalized one-size-fits-all public schools. Alexander the Great (going all the way back) Alexander the Great didn't go to a public school...he was tutored by Aristotle.

This was available to people who had privilege and means, he muses. Why can't we give that to everyone?

DeVos replies that we can, with vouchers. 

I talk a lot about how a voucherized education world would leave parents (and the general taxpaying public) unprotected in an unregulated market loaded with grifters and amateurs, but we also need to be aware of the other part of this dynamic.

DeVos et al like to talk about vouchers as if they create a level playing field for all parents and students, but of course they don't. DeVos and the other Betters of the world will take their kid's backpack full of cash and toss it onto the back of a dump truck full of more cash. There is no voucher in the world big enough to keep the DeVos family from hoarding all the Aristotles for themselves. 

Well, goes the DeVos theory, the poors can just pool their voucher money and try to hire their own Aristotle, or maybe set up some kind of microschool where some kids meet in someone's living room and all log on to Aristotle.com together (except it will be something else because that website is taken by an "industry leading political data, consulting and software" corporation. 

This whole "band together and hire some teachers" idea is not bad-- the group could band together, and then, I don't know, elect representatives who sat on a board to collect the tax money and make decisions about the "school" that they own together. Except that they wouldn't have the power to levy taxes or legally do all sorts of other stuff. Yes, DeVos is proposing a neutered school board--one that doesn't have the power to make a nuisance of itself or counter-balance the power and privilege of the Betters.

And those various solutions, from microschools to software to classes from maybe-qualified teachers in makeshift facilities are all solutions that the Betters would never accept for their own children.

See, there are lots of ways to view the call of DeVos et al for "education freedom," but one way is definitely to view it as a way for the Betters to disempower the competition, so that it's easier for them to grab all the best educational resources. Especially to be able to do so without the galling requirement to finance via taxes their own competition for those resources. 

Vouchers would enable resource hoarding. Does the current public system enable it in some places. It surely does, but vouchers do not offer anything like a solution.