Trying To Explain Voucher Defeat

At this point, just about everybody has noticed that even states that embraced Trump rejected vouchers, that supposedly-really-popular ed reform that even the Boston Globe, no great supporter of public education, knows have always been rejected by voters. 

So how do voucherphiles explain their most recent defeat. A variety of theories have been floated on social media, all captured pretty well in a piece by Neal McClusky and Colleen Hroncich of the libertarian Cato Institute. 

I'll get to the meat of that argument in a moment, but let's start with the conclusion, because that's what really gets to the foundation of the pro-voucher argument:

Ultimately, education choices should not be based on majority rule.

This is, of course, a very libertarian argument--nobody should be able to make me do things I don't want to do. Here's the rest of the graph:

It is simply wrong to compel families to pay for, and de facto attend, government schools – places intended to do nothing less than shape human minds – that they find subpar, or even morally unacceptable, even if the majority is okay with them.

And yet, vouchers would compel families to pay for private schools that they find morally unacceptable or which would bar their own children from attending, and which allow no one--not the majority or anyone else-- a say in how public tax dollars are spent.

So perhaps the more complete version of the argument is this-- nobody should be able to make me do things I don't want to do, but I should be able to make them do things they don't want to do. And if I want their money to help me do the things I want to do, they should be made to give it to me. Or maybe it's "if I'm going to be forced to so something I don't want to do, then other people should be forced to do something I do want to do." Or maybe just "Other people shouldn't be able to make rules that bind me."

The libertarian argument has also run into the same argument since Milton Friedman was a pup and segregation academies were first conceived-- if the thing that some folks find "morally repugnant" is putting Black kids in classrooms with White kids, why should the country fund, support, or accept that? 

I sympathize with many libertarian ideas. I really do. I share the distrust of government-imposed solutions, and I still think some of the best features of the US system is those parts that protect us from majority rule's excesses. But when libertarians reject democracy (under the heading of majority rule), they rarely have much to offer in its place other than "might makes right," supplemented with "money makes might," and I remain unconvinced that it's an effective or useful system, unless, of course, you already possess a bunch of might. 

Private schools are a way for those with might and money to escape the democratically-operated system. Vouchers are a way to funnel public tax dollars into that system while pretending that we'll open great private school doors to one and all. But that pretense is just that-- a pretense. Voucher laws deliberately protect the ability of private schools to discriminate while also protecting their right to avoid any accountability to the taxpayers. 

But I've wandered off into their complaint about how things turned out. What do they offer as an explanation of why they turned out that way.

Colorado they explain away by pointing out that the proposed amendment was both redundant and a sloppy piece of writing that was such a mess, even school choice fans had trouble with it. That's a fair assessment; I don't know what legislative assistant inter n wrote that thing, but it was a disaster waiting to happen, or, as Kevin Welner (NEPC) put it, "It's really a 'full employment for lawyers' act." I suspect that almost nobody would have been happy if that amendment had passed. 

In Kentucky, the argument for the amendment was that it didn't actually create school choice, which is kind of like arguing that just because I want to pack your basement with explosives, that doesn't mean your house will be blown up. Kentucky saw multiple attempts to fund school choice shot down by their courts on the basis of constitutional language, and the amendment was clearly an attempt to remove that obstacle. Public education supporters, whose funding was equal to that of choice supporters, pushed back hard.

Likewise, the Nebraska measure was the result of a few years of trying to dodge the public in order to get vouchers up and running. Opponents outspent the voucherphiles, and those voucher fans want you to know that lots of money came from the teachers union.

In both cases, the on line explanation for the loss has been that voucher opponents used scare tactics and frightened the voters and did lots of posting and ads and campaigning and thereby snookered the voters, which I guess would be a more compelling argument if those same voters had not steadfastly ignored the huge amount of money and media thrown at them in an attempt to make them scared of Donald Trump in the White House. But in both states, Kamala Harris and school vouchers were both hammered. 

Voters did not believe that a Trump Presidency was a bad idea; they did believe that vouchers were a bad idea. Campaigning doesn't explain that, unless, I suppose, you think the anti-voucher campaigns were just so much better than the Harris campaign that they should be running future Democrat campaigns. 

Voucher supporters have tried a variety of pitches over the years, including "They're academically superior" (they aren't) and descending to the current "They're an escape from the woke evils of public schools" (#1 they aren't and #2 what does it say when you have to tear down your "competition" because trying to make yourself look better has failed). There's also "choice and freedom are just a better way to live" which I think is honest, but would carry more weight if they were railing against the real obstacles to choice-- cost, availability, and exclusionary practices of private schools. 

At some point, supporters of modern vouchers could stop trying to put different shades of lipstick on the same old pig. But they probably won't. The tactic of skipping over voters and taxpayers in order to hook up with some cooperative legislators has worked for them so far, and in states like Texas, they've still decided it would be easier to buy a legislature than convince voters. 

Kentucky has courts that can read its constitution. Nebraska let's citizens put laws up for referendum. Those two flukes forced voucher supporters to let the voters into the game. It's not a situation we're likely to see duplicated elsewhere, and there's no doubt that voucherphiles will keep trying to get past that whole pesky democracy thing. But because they're flukes, the Nebraska and Kentucky decisions are not likely harbingers of coming attractions. What they are is a reminder that across party lines, across demographic lines, across lines of race and class, voters don't like vouchers, and while voucherphiles can work around that fact, they can't just explain it away.