Vouchers and "school choice" remain political, not educational

Since today may turn out to be a bellwether day for so-called "school choice" advocates in South Carolina -- those who, for economic or ideological reasons, want to dismantle and privatize public education -- I thought it was instructive to review an article written by Kevin Carey, policy director of a D.C.-based think tank called Education Sector, published in the January edition of The Atlantic magazine.

Carey appropriately hangs the whole "school choice" movement on a foundation of profit motivation, buttressed by a well-orchestrated ideological agenda.

That school choice is valuable is beyond dispute. That's why there's a multi-billion dollar private school industry serving millions of students. And it's why there is a much larger system of school choice embedded in the American real estate market.

Carey finds the origin of the beast in a 1955 essay by Milton Friedman titled "The Role of Government in Education."

Friedman, as we all know, was enormously influential in shaping conservative economic thought. But it took a long time for his educational ideas to become embedded on one side of partisan lines. In the early 1970s, liberal education activists openly promoted the idea giving poor students Friedman-like vouchers in order to help them escape dysfunctional urban school systems.

But at the same time, the Republican party was in the midst of shifting toward a new brand of free-market, anti-government ideology. As Ronald Reagan was elected on a platform whose education planks were voucher-focused, school choice became an issue like abortion or gun control that people learn to be stridently for or against based on their larger party affiliation.

The fact that that the likely recipients of vouchers were either religious or non-unionized private schools made the divisions even more acute. For Republicans, vouchers were a way to be pro-God, pro-market and anti-labor all at the same time. This proved to be such a satisfying combination that many conservative politicians have never bothered to adopt any other discernible position on public education

No other "discernible position on public education." Isn't that strange?

The two most important responsibilities of any generation are to nurture and defend the next generation, until it is old and strong enough to fend for itself, and to sufficiently educate the next generation so it carries forward the best values and heritage of its forebears, and can think and act rationally in raising future generations.

The fact that three decades' worth of conservative leaders have formed no "discernible position" on the matter of public education beyond dismantling it and replacing it with a voucher scheme is tragic. Tragic, because other nations have suffered no similar impediment, and Diane Ravitch and others explain time and time again.

Carey's article veers often into the talking points of the right wing on the voucher question; it may be that in order to sculpt an independent or nonpartisan pose, he feels obligated to use the far-right's brush to paint public schools. But he points out accurately how vouchers have evolved as a political issue and as a policy in these 30 years.

Many conservatives have proved more interested in using vouchers as a political club than actually making them work on behalf of students. Students participating in the longest-lived and most well-studied voucher experiment, in Milwaukee, score no better on standardized tests than similar students who attended regular public schools.

Indeed, vouchers have become so tainted in discussion and practice that many conservatives now favor re-branded voucher programs that work through the tax code: Instead of getting a voucher for X amount of money to attend a private school, you get a "tuition tax credit" for X amount of money spent to attend a private school. A variation on the program was created in Arizona granting taxpayers a dollar-for-dollar credit for "donations" to private schools. This soon spawned a corrupt system of log-rolling wherein private school parents gave donations to schools on behalf of each other's children.

Isn't that clever? Under the Arizona plan, I can't get a tax credit for paying my own kid's private school tuition, but I can get the tax credit for paying yours, and you can get a credit for paying mine. I do your murder; you do mine! Criss-cross!

The legislation, moreover, required that donations be funneled through "non-profit" middleman organizations run by, incredibly, the very same state legislators who wrote the legislation in the first place. These selfless public servants then skimmed off some of the money to lease luxury cars for themselves, give jobs to relatives, and rent space from for-profit corporations they owned. Making free government money available with no oversight turns out to have some drawbacks.

I doubt that there would be any such hidden shenanigans to game the system in South Carolina.

We like to run our corrupt schemes right out in the open.

Indeed, both vouchers and tax credit programs suffer from the same underlying design flaw: they trust parental choice in a free market to, by itself, ensure that students will attend good schools.

What an admission. Voucher advocates frequently tar "educrats" for believing themselves superior to parents, when the wingers themselves have an elitist ax to grind.

Notably, even Milton Friedman thought this was a bad idea. That's why he proposed that vouchers be limited to "approved institutions." He didn't spell out how approval would work in much detail, but the smartest balance between flexibility and accountability looks very much like the process charter schools are subject to today.

Yet conservatives have continued to flog vouchers and tax credits for obviously partisan reasons.

And that's where we are in South Carolina, stuck in the same rut we've occupied for a generation.

As I enjoy reading the comments of readers, let me share a couple of responses to Carey's original article.

From Erik Vanderhoff:

There's a whole slew of other factors that charter schools and school choice don't even begin to address: Transportation. Parent investment. Special education. Supplemental services. Infrastructure. Limited space. The current trend simply accelerates schools in the direction pre-schools and colleges are going in: increased demand pricing out families of modest means, requiring them to beggar themselves. One of the dirtiest of secrets about current voucher programs is that the vouchers are often insufficient to meet tuition costs.

Mm. Lawmakers today are telling little Ray he can expect to take his voucher and enroll in Heathwood Hall, but as I've written before, little Ray and his mom may find themselves terribly surprised when the folks at Heathwood Hall inform them that their little ol' legislative voucher won't guarantee them enrollment, and wouldn't cover a week's worth of instruction if he was admitted.

Ulysses writes:

I HATE these articles purporting to throw light on the subject of "school choice", vouchers, charter schools and their relative performance, etc. PUBLIC SCHOOLS are simply UNDERFUNDED. Their teachers are underpaid, their academics under resourced, their physical infrastructures in decay, AS A RULE. Virtually ALL public school teachers in Chicago, spend their own money (to the tune of a few hundred dollars per year) to provide educational materials for their classrooms. The discussion stops and does not need to restart until this is not the case.

And Mark B predicts a sharp increase in private school tuition, a la higher education, once that tuition becomes subsidized with public dollars:

Pro-school choice people: If the private sector can compete in education, why is allowing a government option in medicine so horrible? Why not allow me to buy medicare instead of my hopelessly inflated private insurance? Government entities are bloated, unresponsive behemoths. So there's no threat there, right?

Now, to see what the future under school choice would look like, walk into a lecture hall in a private and then a public college. Both receive money from their home state in the form of scholarships and grants for the students. Now look at the class sizes. Imagine the same thing in public elementary schools.

And if you already send your child to private school, or want to, look at how college costs have risen at three times the rate of inflation. This is what would happen to private school tuition if it became subsidized like college tuition is.

For Twixlen, the issue comes down to first principles:

I don't think any government money - whether it be a school voucher or some other crediting system - should be extended to religion-based schools. It's basic separation of church and state.

I think vouchers and charters are killing the public education that exists, and that all of these patches (which ultimately don't provide a better education anyway), should be ended as programs.

Twiddly Dee takes issue with the premise of moral equivalence:

You've buried the lede! Amazing that a piece of this length spends so little time discussing the only salient issue: neither charter schools nor private school vouchers have ever been shown to produce statistically significant gains compared to public schools. And those that have can't be scaled or have sky-high attrition.

Vouchers and charter schools might be worth talking about, if they worked. But they don't work. Surely that's the most important point here.

Thoughtful readers. I wonder if our own state lawmakers invest this much consideration in the issue?

Cheap labor: Our children in their corporate context

Those curious about what happens to unskilled high school graduates in South Carolina -- and the choices made for them by corporate titans whose interest is the bottom line, the profit margin -- would do well to read Adam Davidson's "Making It in America," a feature in the current edition of "The Atlantic" magazine.

Davidson enjoyed his visit to Greenville and Easley -- "a largely charmless place, thick with chain restaurants and shopping centers" -- to meet 22-year-old Maddie Parlier at nearby Standard Motor Products.

The last time I visited the factory, Maddie was training a new worker. Teaching her to operate the machine took just under two minutes. Maddie then spent about 25 minutes showing her the various instructions Standard engineers have prepared to make certain that the machine operator doesn’t need to use her own judgment. “Always check your sheets,” Maddie says.

By the end of the day, the trainee will be as proficient at the laser welder as Maddie. This is why all assembly workers have roughly the same pay grade—known as Level 1—and are seen by management as largely interchangeable and fairly easy to replace. A Level 1 worker makes about $13 an hour, which is a little more than the average wage in this part of the country. The next category, Level 2, is defined by Standard as a worker who knows the machines well enough to set up the equipment and adjust it when things go wrong. The skilled machinists like Luke are Level 2s, and make about 50 percent more than Maddie does.

For Maddie to achieve her dreams—to own her own home, to take her family on vacation to the coast, to have enough saved up so her children can go to college—she’d need to become one of the advanced Level 2s. A decade ago, a smart, hard-working Level 1 might have persuaded management to provide on-the-job training in Level-2 skills. But these days, the gap between a Level 1 and a 2 is so wide that it doesn’t make financial sense for Standard to spend years training someone who might not be able to pick up the skills or might take that training to a competing factory.

A high school graduate with no college education, Parlier is classified as an unskilled "Level 1" worker whose job exists only because hiring unskilled Level 1 workers is still less expensive than buying electronic robot arms to do the task she does.

Davidson learns from factory manager Tony Scalzitti, Parlier's employer,

Tony explains that Maddie has a job for two reasons. First, when it comes to making fuel injectors, the company saves money and minimizes product damage by having both the precision and non-precision work done in the same place. Even if Mexican or Chinese workers could do Maddie’s job more cheaply, shipping fragile, half-finished parts to another country for processing would make no sense.

Second, Maddie is cheaper than a machine. It would be easy to buy a robotic arm that could take injector bodies and caps from a tray and place them precisely in a laser welder. Yet Standard would have to invest about $100,000 on the arm and a conveyance machine to bring parts to the welder and send them on to the next station. As is common in factories, Standard invests only in machinery that will earn back its cost within two years.

For Tony, it’s simple: Maddie makes less in two years than the machine would cost, so her job is safe—for now. If the robotic machines become a little cheaper, or if demand for fuel injectors goes up and Standard starts running three shifts, then investing in those robots might make sense.

“What worries people in factories is electronics, robots,” she tells me. “If you don’t know jack about computers and electronics, then you don’t have anything in this life anymore. One day, they’re not going to need people; the machines will take over. People like me, we’re not going to be around forever.”

This young South Carolinian has a job because she's cheaper than a machine.

Let's stand back and look at this in a larger context: South Carolina's children are seen by corporate employers as business expenses of various sizes. If the business expense is smaller than the cost of a machine, then our children are added to the payroll.

And what does being added to the payroll mean? Does it mean they have a career?

No, it means the corporation is spending the least amount of its profit margin to yield the greatest production value -- and in most cases, offering the least (or no) health insurance coverage, the least (or no) retirement benefit package, the least (or no) opportunity for education or advancement within the corporation, and the least (or no) freedom and autonomy in self-determination.

As an expense to the corporation, the cost of our children -- our most precious legacy in life, and the vessel into which we pour all of our resources -- is weighed against the cost of a machine to produce the same value to the corporation. When the moment arrives that a machine is cheaper than our children, thus yielding a greater profit to the corporation, our children will be abandoned.

How much is your child worth to its corporate assessor?

Davidson views Parlier, and those like her, in a historical context:

Productivity, in and of itself, is a remarkably good thing. Only through productivity growth can the average quality of human life improve. Because of higher agricultural productivity, we don’t all have to work in the fields to make enough food to eat. Because of higher industrial productivity, few of us need to work in factories to make the products we use.

In theory, productivity growth should help nearly everyone in a society. When one person can grow as much food or make as many car parts as 100 used to, prices should fall, which gives everyone in that society more purchasing power; we all become a little richer. In the economic models, the benefits of productivity growth should not go just to the rich owners of capital. As workers become more productive, they should be able to demand higher salaries.

Throughout much of the 20th century, simultaneous technological improvements in both agriculture and industry happened to create conditions that were favorable for people with less skill. The development of mass production allowed low-skilled farmers to move to the city, get a job in a factory, and produce remarkably high output. Typically, these workers made more money than they ever had on the farm, and eventually, some of their children were able to get enough education to find less-dreary work.

In that period of dramatic change, it was the highly skilled craftsperson who was more likely to suffer a permanent loss of wealth. Economists speak of the middle part of the 20th century as the “Great Compression,” the time when the income of the unskilled came closest to the income of the skilled.

The double shock we’re experiencing now—globalization and computer-aided industrial productivity—happens to have the opposite impact: income inequality is growing, as the rewards for being skilled grow and the opportunities for unskilled Americans diminish.

Bur Parlier is a person, not a historical fact, and the group of South Carolinians she represents makes up a large part of the state's population and workforce. So, can it be said that South Carolina and America, as a state and a government, have helped Parlier and her contemporaries in the workforce find meaningful careers, or that they have simply produced Parlier and her contemporaries as inexpensive options for corporate entities?

Davidson ponders it:

I went to South Carolina, and spent so much time with Maddie, precisely because these issues are so large and so overwhelming. I wanted to see how this shift affected regular people’s lives. I didn’t come away with a handy list of policies that would solve all the problems of unskilled workers, but I did note some principles that seem important to improving their situation.

It’s hard to imagine what set of circumstances would reverse recent trends and bring large numbers of jobs for unskilled laborers back to the U.S. Our efforts might be more fruitfully focused on getting Maddie the education she needs for a better shot at a decent living in the years to come. Subsidized job-training programs tend to be fairly popular among Democrats and Republicans, and certainly benefit some people. But these programs suffer from all the ills in our education system; opportunities go, disproportionately, to those who already have initiative, intelligence, and—not least—family support.

So those who have, get; those who have not, get not.

Sound familiar?

David Brooks, columnist for the New York Times, noticed Davidson's article and commented on Parlier's circumstance in a column last week. "A good attitude and hustle have taken Parlier as far as they can. It’s hard, given her situation, to acquire the skills she needs to realize the American dream," he writes.

Across America, millions of mothers can’t rise because they don’t have adequate support systems as they try to improve their skills. Tens of millions of children have poor life chances because they grow up in disorganized environments that make it hard to acquire the social, organizational and educational skills they will need to become productive workers.

I would prefer that Brooks concern himself more with helping young people become productive citizens than productive workers, as America is a nation of citizens, not just a generator of workers. But his emphasis on helping young people attain "social, organizational and educational skills" is spot-on.

Are we, as a state, doing what's necessary to ensure that our children become productive citizens?

Ponder that, then ask: Are we, as a state, doing what's necessary to ensure that our children become cheap workers?

What a symposium these two questions would make.