There is a common objection to voucher systems which you neglected to mention, which is that many people feel that their tax dollars shouldn’t support religious schools, and even that this would in some way violate the First Amendment. Personally, I no longer buy the constitutional argument, but this is something of a special case of a general issue.

It’s not entirely clear what qualifies as a “school” for these purposes. Can anyone who calls themself a school take voucher money? Do you have to have certain facilities or obtain some accredidation? Can homeschoolers just keep the money? What about “un-schoolers”?

I’m not asserting that these are insurmountable problems, but they are issues that make the WSVP not quite as simple as it might appear.

I skipped the religious schools issue because I think it’s a red herring; after all, no one objects to Federal Pell grants going to students at Notre Dame. I suspect that nobody’s really against vouchers because of the First Amendment issues; it’s just a pseudo-argument that people invoke when all the real objections have been addressed. But if you really care, fine: exclude religious schools. I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts that the teachers unions still fight vouchers tooth and nail.

As far as the definition of “school” goes, we can, as with the rest of the WSVP, simply piggyback on the status quo: use whatever method the government currently uses to accredit private schools. The point of the WSVP is to keep everything the same, except put control in the hands of parents. There are some details to work out, but it really is very simple.

The bottom line is that it’s fairly easy to construct a voucher program that meets every objection, but that many people would still oppose—either because of a vested interest in the status quo or because of a quasi-religious belief that the government should run the schools.

Michael, Long time no hear! Glad to see you haven’t lost the penchant for debates! Allow me to jump in for a second with some questions…

1) The arguments over school vouchers devolve into theological arguments because nobody on either side has posited a clear, objective mission for a compulsory education that justifies public funding! Is it for the children? Their parents? The citizenship? If it isn’t for the citizenship, why should the taxpayers subsidize ANY of it? If it is for the society, why should the parents (the real decision makers under the voucher program) get any more input into school policy than voters get in Senate floor rules? I think there are multiple possible stances on this issue, but what is your opinion?

2) If private management is really all that is necessary to improve schools, wouldn’t it be better to outsource public school administration (and possibly faculty) to private companies? That way you get all the discipline of private management while allowing tighter public control over curriculum (and thus avoid the parochial school issue), and possibly even get the unions to shut up (though I’m not optimistic on the last count). It works for prisons, why not schools?

3) Per-student funding of compulsory education varies greatly depending on how wealthy your municipality is. Question: in the poorer school districts, would the vouchers be worth enough to fund a quality education (judged by existing private school tuition in the area)? If not, what–if any–would you do about it?

4) Let’s say you implement WSVP nationwide, and private schools spring up all over. (There would have to be new ones; existing private schools can only absorb so much of the outflow from public schools.) Where will they get quality teachers? There is clearly a dearth of good teachers at the current pay level, and it cannot go up much higher as long as the schools are dependent on vouchers. If quality of teachers does not improve appreciably compared to public schooling, what exactly would vouchers achieve?

5) Putting on my mafioso hat for a second, I see fertile grounds here for gaming the system. Namely, I’d run a perfectly legit school that happens to…

a) Pamper the parents, who are the true decision makers (as long as they’re happy, the kids ain’t going nowhere)

b) Distract the kids with fun stuff like films, and do the education thing on the cheap (we do need to keep them in the classroom, and happy enough not to tattle on to their parents)

c) Monetize (<-verbed noun of the day!) the students by, say, embedding ads into lecture (“and now, the Spanish Inquisition…brought to you by Taco Bell!”)

The Harvard-bound types and their parents will see right through this charade, of course, but that isn’t my target segment–they’re too expensive to serve. Meanwhile, the rest of the nation isn’t Harvard-bound, and may easily fall for something like this because it’s easier and has more short-term satisfaction. In fact, management consultants will tell you to do precisely what I outlined above (isolate and pamper decision makers, cut costs, milk customers) if you’re running a for-profit business to an unsophisticated customer segment!

Yet…it’s putridly immoral, isn’t it? How would you put a stop to something like this in the real world?

And when you’re done putting all sorts of “if”s and “but”s and “except”s on your voucher, is it still a WSVP that puts parents in charge?

Hey Shimpei! It’s great to hear from you.

Let me clarify my position a bit. I don’t actually think the world’s simplest voucher program is the best way of achieving educational goals; it is mainly an intellectual exercise designed to expose the weaknesses in arguments against vouchers. That being said, I think it would be significantly better than the status quo.

1) Regardless of what you think the rationale is for public education, on what grounds could you reject the WSVP?

2) The WSVP would allow for precisely such outsourcing to develop organically if that’s what parents wanted, but I can’t think of any reason to impose the solution a priori.

3) This goes back to the raison d’être of the WSVP: it’s not designed to be optimal, it’s just designed to be both objectively better than the current system and also still objectionable to those who oppose vouchers (thereby exposing their hypocrisy). I agree that providing more money to poor people might be better, but it’s hard to see how providing them with exactly the same amount of money per capita that they currently receive could be worse than the status quo.

4) Again, the situation under the WSVP couldn’t be worse than the present system. People could simply send their kids to the current schools with the current teachers.

There is an interesting point here, though, namely the assumption that the principal problem in attracting quality teachers is pay. Speaking as someone who’s good at teaching, the main reason I wouldn’t take a job teaching in the public schools is not that the salaries are low, but that the way you get a high salary is to stay in the district for a long time. The most highly paid teachers actually make a great living, especially when you consider the high job security, first-rate health and pension benefits, relatively low hours, and extensive vacation time. If I could get that deal for myself within a few years of taking the job by proving my worth as an instructor, I might actually do it—but that’s not how you make the big bucks in teaching.

5) I find the Mafioso arguments amusing, but ultimately they are predicated on the assumption that the government is better at making decisions on behalf of children than their parents are—a proposition I find highly dubious. Even if you think that parents are easily duped, there are powerful incentives for them to get educated about education, so to speak. Not just colleges, but also employers, act as quality control agents.

There’s a deeper point here, which is that companies often have strong incentives to screw their customers—and yet, companies don’t, in fact, actually screw their customers (for the most part). Car companies, for example, have a strong incentive to make cars that break down quickly, so that people will buy new cars again soon. And yet, the reliability of cars has steadily increased over time. They also have an incentive to “monetize their customers” by putting advertisements on, say, the steering wheel—“Steering, now brought to you by Taco Bell!” And yet, I don’t think this has ever happened. What saves you from these terrible fates is competition—precisely what the current system doesn’t have in any meaningful form.

I could be wrong, but I don’t believe that governments actually do provide accreditation for private schools currently. My understanding was that this was done by private organizations. So, generalizing for a voucher system isn’t trivial. At a minimum you have to bless a set of accreditation organizations.

An alternative that maintains absolute simplicity is to just remove any requirements on a “school”, but at that point you might as well just give everyone a tax credit. Maybe that’s a good idea or maybe it’s not, but it’s a lot less clear than an argument about education in isolation.

Michael, As you correctly point out, the key assumption of the voucher program is that the parents know better than the local government. Anti-voucher activists would never say that out in the open because denigrating parents in America is about as politically suicidal as shouting racial epithets, but since I’m not an affected party to any of this, I’ll be an iconoclast and say it: no, parents don’t know best.

Given what I see today, I do not share your optimistic perspective on parents acting in the best interest for their children, at least on education. Parents already have a powerful incentive to “get educated about education” that are intrinsic to their need to care for (and be eventually cared by) their children. This need exists independently of vouchers–indeed, the voucher is just an alternative means to deliver on this need. Colleges and employes also already act as quality control agents, and this also has nothing to do with vouchers. If most parents really do care about education quality and feel underserved by the public school system, why is there not more grass-roots activity for school improvement (which could be either directed internally, toward boards of education, or by demanding school vouchers)?

As you know, I live in Japan right now, and while the public education here isn’t perfect either, it’s very difficult to argue with the output–isolated hinterland to Westernized country in 40 years, and then rebound from a bombed-out pile of rubble to economic world power in another 40 years, largely fueled by a well-educated populace, built against the peasant parents’ wishes that the kids would stay home and help till the fields. If they had respected the parents’ wisdom over the government’s, we’d be where Vietnam is today. It is an empirical evidence that government can work.

Now, it is also empirically true that the American public school system is run by the government, and it is not working in many places. Why is it not working? It is not because it’s run by the government! It is also not because of lack of competition! Finally, it is also not because parents know better than governments! The counterexample of Japan (and 19th c. Prussia, which provided a model for Japan) shows a case where none of the above is true and the model still worked. If you want to claim WSVP will objectively yield better results (for some definition of “better’), you will need to beak down your arguments into something less dogmatic and emprirical.

By the way, there are districts in which public schools still do function. These are usually wealthy districts whose residents can afford the money and time to do proper governing. (I happen to have attended one. They were some of the most smug people I’ve met, but they did provide quality education.) Why do they work, where others fail? What are the roadblocks and resources required in fixing failing schools so that they function more like working schools? Is that more or less onerous than the practical roadblocks and resources required in getting vouchers implemented and functioning? (“Implemented” and “functioning” are two independent concepts, of course. Public schools are already implemented, but functioning poorly.) I realize you are using vouchers as a thought exercise rather than a concrete action proposal, but in real life one would have to evaluate vouchers in this way. Have you ever gone down this line of reasoning and reached a conclusion?

Next, on the car analogy–at the risk of elaborating things you know already, the real reason Toyota makes durable, pleasant cars is so that you will come back for seconds. They spend good money to make you want to come back because it turns out to be cheaper than acquiring new customers. It is this cost differential that drives quality; saying “competition” drives quality is a bit oversimplifying things.

Now, the problem with using this analogy on school vouchers is that the school knows that students aren’t going to come back for seconds, and they aren’t equipped to know how good their “car” was until after they graduate! Well, actually, they will come back 20-30 years down the line when their own kids reach school age, but that is far too long in the future to discourage mafiosi who are inclined to run Stromboli academies in the first place. In the meantime, acquisition cost per head remains more or less fixed, and the income per head is exactly the same (voucher), so the only way I can increase my cut without moving upmarket is to slash cost, monetize students, and differentiate against competition by offering low-cost “benefits.”

So there you have it. Competition doesn’t drive quality, news at 11!

Now that I think about it, it is pretty bizarre; I can’t think of many other industries where economic incentives drives customer loyalty so badly. Real estate agents for apartment leases, maybe, but then again, their real customers are the landlords, not the tenants.

PS And lastly–WTH am I doing here at 3:30 in the morning?