One Choice Fan Taps The Breaks* On Vouchers

It's an interesting day when I agree with Checker Finn (at least a little bit). And Finn's piece today is kind of extraordinary.

Chester Finn Jr. (b. 1944) is one of the Old Guard of reformsterism, long-time cheese-in-chief of Fordham, VP of the Maryland Board of Education, frequent scolder of Kids These Days, champion of charter marketing, fellow at Stanford's right-tilted Hoover Institution, common core cheerleader, and a figure of standing in the whole AEI-Fordham axis of reforminess.

And this morning, in the Thomas B. Fordham website, he's expressing concern as he writes "Why I’m wary of universal education savings accounts."

As we've noted, the ESA brand of school voucher is having a moment, including the "universal" variety, and if you think you've noticed some problems with these, well--so has a guy who is well-ensconced in the school choice world.

Consider me wary, particularly of the free-swinging, almost-anything-goes version of universal ESAs. I’m a long-time advocate of school choice and, over the decades, have lauded many versions of it....

Yet I’ve also lived through enough school-choice enthusiasms to conclude that doing this right is not quite as simple as empowering parents. With three decades of experience with charter schools under the country’s belt, we’ve learned a few things. At least I have.

Here comes his list. And he's not wrong.

Start with the fact that even good parents often make dubious education choices, choices that ill-serve their kids in the long run.

Finn wishes parents would always choose schools that "maximize children's future prospects" by inculcating skills, knowledge and values. Yet parents choose for things like location and are "sometimes  beguiled by the claims and advertisements of shoddy schools in search of pupils." Yes, Mr. Finn, sometimes the free market involves a lot of scam artists and fraudsters using shady marketing to sell their shoddy wares. I am not sure how, exactly, a guy who has spent so much of his life claiming that market foirces would improve education has only just noticed this issue, but here we are.

We can (and should) push for more rights and decision-making for parents, but let’s not be naïve about what will result, much of it good for kids, but some not. Too many of today’s “schools of choice”—charter, private, and district-operated—have mediocre-to-awful outcomes and aren’t racking up solid gains, either, yet they’re full of kids whose parents selected them.

It's true. And there's more.

Sadly, we must also acknowledge that some kids have lousy, absent, or overwhelmed parents, some of them addicted, abusive, or simply oblivious. That’s why we have—for better and worse—Child Protective Services, the Milton S. Hershey School, and much more. Again, it’s important to empower parents and give them choices—but there needs to be suitable backup when parents don’t exist or can’t or won’t take responsible action. Mostly that means operating quality district public schools as the default for kids whose parents aren’t choosers.

I can tell you stories. Every teacher can tell you stories. But we'll come back to this in a moment.

Turning from demand to supply, we need to recognize that, when lots of money is floating around, some folks will grab for it by starting shoddy (but lucrative) schools, filling board and staff with friends and relatives, leasing a facility at exorbitant rates from themselves or their cousins, and deploying nothing that resembles a coherent curriculum. This potential hazard is well understood by sophisticated ESA supporters, but may not be clear to hyperventilating lawmakers. But they can reduce the risks by setting criteria for schools and insisting that whatever agency licenses them engages in due diligence and regular audits.

And Finn sees some other problems as well with the new universal brand:

the “windfall” effect when tax dollars are used to pay for private school tuitions that well-off parents (which does not include many private-school families) were already paying for on their own; the possibility that entrepreneurs will set up shop in wealthy areas where parents can “top up” the ESA dollars while ignoring communities with greater need for good education options; and the use of ESA dollars by parents to purchase things with, at best, a hazy relationship to K–12 education—tickets to amusement parks, trampolines, and such.

Yes. Accountability and oversight are necessary. Again, this comes from a guy who has for decades argued that the parental power of choosing with their feet is all the accountability that the market needs. But it's not, and it never has been. 

Now part of Finn's concern is that this unjudicious behavior threatens to damage the brand, to give the school choice movement a black eye. But I think there's more going on here.

Finn finds himself boxed into a corner where he has to acknowledge the need for oversight. He notes that public policy can't stop parents from making bad decisions, and he's absolutely right. But what policy can do is make sure that most of the available decisions are not bad ones. Even if you believe, like Finn and his marketeer crowd, that education is best understood as a commodity to be sold and marketed, that doesn't mean we do away with oversight. Nobody wants to shop in a supermarket where the food for sale may or may not be toxic. Nobody wants to buy cars knowing that the brakes may or may not work and the car may or may not blow up. 

I think there's something else going on here as well. 

The school choice movement has allied itself once again with people who have fundamentally different goals. The universal voucher crowd is not interested in school choice; they are the culture warriors, the CRT panic crowd, the christianist nationalists who want a school system of their own, a system that enshrines and inculcates their values and ideas and which collects plenty of tax dollars. They are happy to either "take back" the public system or dismantle it; either is fine. The legitimacy of a school (and a government) is, for them, based on how closely it hews to their ideas. They are not interested in choice, and they are not interested in preserving a public system that welcomes and supports all children in this country.

Finn-style old school choicers believe in choice. They believe in a free market and its ability to serve everyone what they want, with a public school system as a sort of safety net, a place for, as Finn puts it, those whose parents aren't choosers. Finn's free education market won't be for everyone; Mike Petrilli (Finn's successor at Fordham) once argued that charters and choice could be lifeboats to get "strivers" away from Those Other Students. It's a view of education that sees schools as a means of sorting students, a place where the cream can rise and the others can prepare to be useful meat widgets. 

For that vision to work, there have to be many schools of many types serving many different groups of students. That's not what the culture warriors want; they want one system, devoted to the One True Word, and the devil take the rest. 

Finn's vision, as he acknowledges in this piece, needs a marketplace that is not choked with junk and fraud (my impression, right or wrong, is that Finn always assumed that providers could be trusted to conduct themselves in a gentlemanly and upright manner and he's a bit put out that some folks have appeared to be willing to stoop to such unseemly behavior). The culture warrior iteration of vouchers brooks no oversight, because that would just involve the government stepping in to say that you can't teach your religious beliefs or discriminate freely against your long list of people against whom you must discriminate in order to fully practice your faith. 

There are many things not to like about Finn's vision, not the least of which is that it fails to explain how the safety net of a public system can be maintained while shoveling all that taxpayer money away from public schools and into all the various alternative systems you've set up. 

But ultimately what Finn describes in this piece is all the ways in which classic free market choicers and culture warriors disagree about what should come next in education policy. Finn would like a genteel shift to a well-ordered system of privatized choice and a public safety net for the leftovers. The culture warriors would like to burn everything down and build their own system. And in this alliance, it's the burn-it-down crowd that has the political power of the moment, and I'm curious to know just how much Finn understands that he has been setting up their arguments for decades. I mean, he may not like this mess, but he sure helped make it. We'll just have to wait and see how long the alliance lasts and when it finally breaks.

*Yes, I know. I was shooting for clever by using "breaks" to go with the breaks and cracks in the choice alliance. It has become clear that I missed clever and hit plain old misspelled. One more reminder that it's usually best to avoid being clever.