Offering Educational Choices
The fundamental problem is that most parents don't have a choice about where their kids go to school. Except for a small minority who choose to pay for private or parochial schools,parents don't have any alternatives. In effect,public schools have a monopoly on affordable primary and secondary education. They haven't improved because they don't have to. If most parents ands tudents had a choice, public schools would compete for students,just as stores compete for buyers. The resulting competition would create a situation that rewards schools that are doing a good job,while forcing the rest to change -- or go out of business.
What Should be Done?
Low- and middle-income parents should receive a publicly funded voucher which they could use to send their kids to any accredited school,public, private, or religious. Make the voucher's value comparable to the cost of a public school education, and insist that participating schools accept it as full payment for tuition. Create more charter schools within the public school system that are licensed and financed with taxpayer dollars but operated independently from ordinary public schools. Because they would have more room to experiment, charter schools would help break the public school monopoly and provide effective alternatives.Promote competition by eliminating red tape, including barriers to the opening of for-profit schools and rules that prevent public schools from hiring companies or colleges to provide instructional services.Permit parents the widest possible choice among public schools.
Arguments For This Approach
This would provide the radical change needed to reward good schools, and put pressure on bad ones to change. Increased competition among schools is the most promising way to improve them. Because parents would choose the school that is best suited to their children's needs, this is the best way of ensuring a good fit between kids and the schools they attend. A voucher system, or charter schools, would provide particular benefits to students in central city schools who currently have few options. School choice plans would give average Americans an option that wealthy families have long enjoyed.
Arguments Against This Approach
Schools, whether public or private, are only as good as their teachers. Improving education, then, means hiring better teachers and more of them -- not shifting students from one school to another. This approach offers no plan for improving schools, just a risky promise that schools will improve thanks to the magic of competition. Private and religious schools would skim off the best students, leaving demoralized public schools to deal with the hard cases. In effect, providing vouchers would siphon funds away from the public schools, making them even less able to meet the needs of the students they serve. Parents don't have the information they need to make a knowledgeable decision about what schools are best matched to the needs of their kids. Permitting parents to used publicly funded vouchers to send their kids to parochial schools would violate the principle of separating church and state. A major purpose of public education has always been to bring students from different backgrounds together, and provide them with a common education. Under a voucher system, kids from different religions, races, and nationalities are likely to go off to different schools and we would lose any sense of a common community.
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