No, The Sliding Scale Won't Work For Vouchers

Thomas Arnett, senior fellow at the Christensen Institue, has an idea about how to make vouchers work better. It won't work. But watch how he almost gets it, and it's an instructive failure.

The Christensen Institute is all about the beauty of Disruptive Innovation, that whole process of kicking things over so you can Get Shit Done beloved by Silicon Valley dudes (many of whom have moved on from disrupting things to offering piles of monetary tribute to new the new President so that maybe he won't disrupt them). So they've been fans of the disruptive innovation of dismantling public education and innovatively selling off the pieces.

In "Bending the Arc od Innovation To Benefit All Students," Arnett is responding to a discussion between Derrell Bradford and Mike Petrilli about whether or not wealthy families should benefit from vouchers. Bradford said sure, for the practical reason that wealthy folks make good and powerful allies when you're trying to sell a policy to legislators (the only people to whom voucher policies are ever sold). Petrilli said that states should target lower income folks in the name of fiscal responsibility. 

But what Arnett is interested in is the idea, mentioned in passing, that vouchers could be based on a sliding scale. Arnett loves him some ESA vouchers, invoking the tired cliche of the 100-year-old outmoded school model. Reform stuff, he says, fails because it's incremental when what's needed is massive transformation--"new models of schooling outside established value networks." Yes, if we could just get everyone to drop their existing values and replace them with my existing values, the world would be a swell place.

ESAs, he thinks, could provide that clean break, based as they are on the model of handing people a stack of money and saying, "Okay, go find some education for your kid somewhere, somehow." He acknowledges that some ESA recipients will just gravitate back to the old ways, but maybe some would come up with cool new innovation. Unfortunately, his cited examples are microschools and hybrid programs, which are neither new nor innovative.

He now pauses to explain disruptive innovation, models that start "serving the fringes of a sector but eventually transform it." He cites examples Netflix and Amazon and Apple, all of which serve as excellent reminders that we are really talking about free market stuff, and that the free market will never ever display a commitment to providing quality service to all possible customers, and on that count alone, the free market is not qualified to take over societal services like education or health care.

But what about disruptive innovation in education? What would that look like?

They could look like microschools across a metro area forming a network that allows them to collectively offer experiences like team sports, band, theater, and school dances. They might be school sites that work like shopping malls, where independent course providers, tutoring centers, coding camps, makerspaces, and companies offering internships are all co-located to make it easy for students and families to assemble highly customized schooling experiences. Or imagine a single microschool expanding into a large franchise of schools across the country, thereby achieving the scale needed to systemize a model for helping any student—regardless of background—ace elite college admissions.

So, it looks like the free market. You know-- the market where everyone is free to buy either a brand new Lexus or a heavily used 2006 Kia. 

Now, Arnett is partway there with me on this. The disruption he cites, he notes, run on a motivation to pursue upscale customers who will pay a higher premium for a higher quality product.

In most markets, the more demanding customer tiers will pay a premium for higher-quality products.

Almost there...

But in education, there’s a problem with this pattern. Education’s “most demanding customers”—those with greater needs and more challenging circumstances—are often not those who can afford to pay higher prices for improved services.

Like students with special needs. If ESA policies "don't offer a premium" to those who handle these demanding students, the market will just walk on by, in search of more profitable business cases.  

That is as close as he's going approach Getting It. His idea is to make serving the more expensive-to-serve students, aka those with special needs, those from lower-income families, those that are more challenging. Because 

Without a mechanism that rewards schools for serving students with greater needs, we risk seeing a generation of new schooling models that only cater to students and families with inherent advantages. We’ll likely get models that are ever expanding the breadth, flexibility, and rigor of what they offer middle- and upper-income families while never tackling the expensive circumstances that make them hard for many lower-income students and families to take advantage of.

Which is, of course, exactly what we've got. And we don't have it, as he suggests, because we just stumbled into it by accident. In state after state, voucher laws have treated as sacrosanct the private school's right to operate without any interference or oversight by the state. That means that A) better private schools keep their right to discriminate as they wish for whatever reason and B) fly-by-night subprime pop-ups that exist only to cash in on vouchers can do a half-assed job without the state telling them to shape up ("market forces" will take care of them, we are promised). Exactly what he described is pretty much what we've got (though not much expanding of middle- and upper-income awesome offerings is happening), and we've got it on purpose.

The sliding scale that he proposes, with "market signals" that "motivate" providers by "tying higher funding to the ability to effectively serve students with higher needs" would require a couple of things. One is oversight and accountability (how else would we know who was effectively serving those students), and the other is money. And there's only one place to get the money, and that's from the people who have it. 

And there's the heart of his problem. We have plenty of hints about how people who have money feel about the government taking that money to better serve Other People's Children-- they don't much like it. That redistribution of wealth has been problematic since at least Brown v Board came down. The whole point for a whole bunch of school voucher supporters is to get rid of a system that requires them to pay to educate Those Peoples' Children and replace it with a system in which everyone's education is their own problem. 

Arnett is describing an education social safety net, and that's exactly what so many of his disruptive friends hate about the system we've got. He may want to see the "arc of innovation" bend in this direction, but many of his reformy colleagues would rather snap that arc into pieces before it bends an inch further.