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Privatizing Education: The Politics of Vouchers By Sheila Suess Kennedy All political issues are driven by a combination of ideology and political calculation, Ms. Kennedy contends. Ultimately, Americans will have to decide whether an embrace of vouchers will further or erode the public interest -- a determination that depends on our collective understanding of where our public interest lies and of the role we see for government. Illustration © 2001 by John Berry |
ARGUMENTS about the education of the young are at least as old as Socrates. However, it is fair to suggest that the voucher debate that has erupted over the past few years is qualitatively different from many that preceded it. Rather than arguing about whether public schools are deficient and, if so, in what respects, and rather than debating the merits of one "reform" over another, opponents now take sides over whether America should continue to support a system of free, publicly controlled schools or whether government's educational role should be reduced to dispensing vouchers to families that enable them to "buy" educational services in the marketplace. It is a classic political confrontation, engaging partisan strategies and implicating political ideologies.
Politicians often refer to political campaigns as part "ground war" and part "air war." The ground war is the execution of political strategy, the coalition building and grassroots organizing, the polling and get-out-the-vote efforts. The air war -- so named because it occurs primarily via ads on the electronic media -- is the sum of the political messages, ideologies, and positions expressed in paid ads and other media coverage and in political oratory. Just as studying the air war alone will yield a misleading picture of a political campaign, focusing only on the publicly stated positions of voucher proponents and opponents will not adequately reflect the political realities involved.
Identifying the participants and agendas of the ground war is a necessary
framework for understanding the fundamental differences in political philosophy
that constitute the air war.
The Ground War: Partisans, Patronage, and the Constitution
The politics of liberal democracies is the politics of faction, as Madison clearly understood. Individuals have economic interests, social goals, and political and religious beliefs that are affected by public policies and so motivate political behavior. In order to appreciate the dynamics of the voucher ground war, it helps to identify some of the most prominent stakeholders and the interests they seek to advance, because, as John Witte has noted, "The battle over vouchers may have more to do with money and with the allocation of power than with education."1 Pro-voucher interest groups include:
Pro-market libertarians. These are the ideological proponents of vouchers, who genuinely believe that the state should have no control over education. They dismiss the need to transmit collective values, believing that the mission of schools is to prepare autonomous individuals to compete in the marketplace. Many pro-market libertarians see public schools as part of a New Deal expansive approach to government that they despise.
Business. Chambers of commerce and groups like CEO America are ideologically allied with pro-market libertarians. In general, they distrust government bureaucracies and believe that competition will always produce the best goods and services at the lowest price. Businesses also need well-trained workers, and to the extent that the public schools are not providing those workers, they want to identify and correct the problem. Finally, some businesses see market opportunities if vouchers become a reality. In Ohio, economic opportunism of this sort was evidently a key element in the adoption of both the voucher program and charter school legislation.2
The Christian Right. The cultural conservatives of the Christian Right make up one of the largest and most active blocs working for vouchers. Groups such as the Christian Coalition and Citizens for Excellence in Education (CEE) might at first blush seem very strange bedfellows for libertarians, with whom they share little ideological ground. And it is certainly true that their motives for supporting school choice have little to do with markets and much to do with their views on morality. Many believe, with Robert Simonds of CEE, that "atheism and many perverted forms of immorality are being forced upon all public school students, not just Christian students."3
Theodore Lowi has linked the politicization of the Christian Right to the nationalization of the Bill of Rights and especially to the application of the First Amendment to the states.4 Even a cursory reading of the literature of the Christian Right will confirm that anger with current establishment clause jurisprudence -- particularly rulings against officially sanctioned school prayer -- is the source of much of the Christian Right's support for school choice and hostility toward public schools.
The Catholic Church. The largest beneficiary of any wide-ranging voucher program would unquestionably be the Catholic schools, many of which are struggling financially. There are significantly more Catholic schools than any other category of nonpublic educational institutions. Under the voucher program in Cleveland alone -- although the Catholic schools are educating fewer children today than they were before the program began -- Catholic schools receive an additional $3.3 million per year, according to the Ohio Department of Education.5
On the anti-voucher side, the interest groups include:
The education establishment. The largest and most powerful bloc opposing vouchers is the education establishment itself. Public school teachers and administrators, as one might expect, are defensive of the public school system and critical of most school privatization initiatives, especially vouchers. The teacher unions in particular have a long history of political activism, a substantial amount of political clout, and a vested interest in the survival of the public school system.
Civil libertarians and church/state separationists. Organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Americans United for Separation of Church and State, People for the American Way, and Americans for Religious Liberty see vouchers as a frontal attack on the First Amendment -- part and parcel of a theocratic "values agenda" that includes support for school prayer and creationism as well as opposition to abortion and gay rights.
African American organizations. While voucher proponents have assiduously wooed inner-city blacks, major African American organizations remain firmly committed to integrated public schools. African American legislators and community leaders remain deeply suspicious of the racial motives of voucher proponents and the likely results of voucher programs.
But interest groups are not the only forces driving this debate. Just as abortion has become a Republican issue despite the fact that many Democrats are anti-choice, vouchers, too, have become a Republican issue. The groups most strongly opposed to vouchers represent important Democratic constituencies. Thus vouchers have become useful as a "wedge issue," with which Republicans can pursue a partisan strategy and at the same time avoid polarizing their supporters. Proposals to outlaw abortion, like proposals to adopt vouchers, were intended to appeal both to ethnic groups in the North, mostly Catholics (the so-called Reagan Democrats), and to Baptists in the South, two constituencies that otherwise agree on very little. But the abortion issue turned off significant numbers of Protestants who might otherwise have been Reagan Republicans. For a Republican Party increasingly divided between its libertarian and theocratic wings, vouchers offer an appeal that bridges, rather than widens, the divide. As William Blomquist notes:
In addition to appealing to middle- and working-class whites on a combination of values, self-interest, and racial orientations, vouchers work with the upper-class base of the Republican Party for ideological reasons. Vouchers would, it is said, promote a marketplace of competition in education, which would lead to better schooling at less cost. Thus college-educated Republican voters, who provide the base of party activists and financial contributors, can get behind vouchers too, because of the appeal to their ideological orientation toward marketplace and competition.6
Louis Mahern, an Indiana Democrat who favors vouchers, notes that they allow Republicans to appeal to lower-middle-class white resentments without overt racism and still offer something to inner-city African Americans. The resentments to which Mahern alludes are both economic and racial. Brian Vargus, a political science professor at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis and a well-known public opinion researcher, describes the targets of the appeal to white resentments: lower-middle-class people (mostly male) who lack a college education, who see themselves blocked in their careers by women and minorities, and whose attitudes provide "a classic example of disengagement from anything involving collective action."7 These are parents who lack the means to escape the public schools that have become increasingly diverse -- ethnically and even linguistically. Such observations are suggestive of the racial undercurrents of the voucher debate. Originally proposed as a way primarily to help poor, black families escape failing inner-city public schools, vouchers are now being promoted as subsidies to enable middle-class families to make choices they would have made on their own.
John Witte, an educational researcher who has evaluated the voucher program in Milwaukee and supports it, has nevertheless expressed concern that the Milwaukee experiment has led to more segregated schools than would have been the case without it:
Regardless of one's beliefs or hopes, the overwhelming social factor of the integration movement was white flight from our cities. It is difficult for me to see how a [wider] market model of choice would do anything but accelerate the growing balkanization of our schools and country. Whether that result will be class or racially motivated is in one sense irrelevant given the correlation between the two.8
A December 1999 investigative series in the Akron Beacon Journal focused on yet another aspect of the political ground war: the role of campaign contributions and political influence in producing legislation to benefit favored individuals and to cater to important constituencies.
In Ohio, Catholics make up 21% of the electorate and are a powerful lobbying force. While Catholics are traditionally thought of as leaning toward Democrats, a study found in the archives of Republican Gov. George Voinovich, who was instrumental in the passage of voucher legislation, argued that Catholics "could easily swing to the Republican side if the right bells were rung." Other documents disclosed close (and occasionally inappropriate) cooperation between the governor and the Catholic bishops on legal and legislative voucher strategies that would benefit the Catholic schools. As a result of that collaboration, one in three children sitting in a K-5 Catholic school in Cleveland today is using a state voucher.9
While the Beacon Journal charges that cooperation between the Catholic Church and holders of public office went beyond an acceptable political response to a valued voting constituency, its criticism of the role of the Church paled in comparison to the evidence it uncovered of cronyism and quid pro quo payoffs to campaign contributors. The individual who has reaped the largest financial benefit from voucher and charter legislation in Ohio is an Akron entrepreneur named David Brennan, whose company runs 11 schools that enroll 3,267 students and is projected to take in $16 million for the 1999-2000 academic year. Brennan made numerous significant political contributions to those who could advance his financial interests and later hired as his lobbyist the governor's assistant who had been most closely involved with the voucher issue and who had resigned from the governor's office just four days before Brennan hired him. Brennan's schools were created expressly to take advantage of the voucher program he had lobbied for. According to independent state evaluations, they have performed more poorly than other private schools in the program and more poorly than the public schools.10
To further complicate the conduct of the ground war, the voucher debate occurs in the context of an American system that is informed and controlled by basic constitutional principles of limited government and democratic accountability. There are thus constraints on the use of tax dollars that must necessarily factor into both the theoretical and practical politics of the voucher issue.
The most significant constitutional roadblock confronted by voucher advocates is the First Amendment doctrine of separation of church and state. The establishment clause of the First Amendment prohibits the use of tax dollars to support religious programs or institutions. The vast majority of private schools are religious schools, and, as we have seen in the Milwaukee and Cleveland experiments, any voucher program purporting to give students and their families significant "choice" must include pervasively sectarian institutions. In Cleveland, seven of every eight voucher recipients are enrolled in parochial -- overwhelmingly Catholic -- schools.11 Proponents argue that for constitutional purposes, vouchers should be considered similar to the GI Bill, which gave soldiers tuition money to spend at institutions of their choice. The claim is that, because the voucher goes to the parent and the parent decides where to spend it, any choice of a religious school is the choice of the individual and not the state. The voucher represents a return of the parent's tax dollars, for use as the parent sees fit, and thus loses its character as public money.
This is an ingenious argument, and it may well prevail. But constitutional scholars point to serious problems with it. The GI Bill is arguably a particular form of compensation to soldiers for services rendered; it is thus "their money" in a way that a voucher given to every school-age child is not. Similarly, the amount of a voucher bears no relationship to the amount of taxes paid and in many cases will simply represent a shift of monies from taxpayers who do not have school-age children to those who do (much as tax support of public education does now) and from taxpayers in rural areas with student populations insufficient to support multiple schools to taxpayers in urban areas (which is not currently the case in most states).
Even if the Supreme Court eventually upholds vouchers against establishment clause challenges, as Martha Minow, a Harvard law professor, has predicted,12 a number of constitutional issues will remain to be decided under both the First Amendment and state constitutions (many of which have stricter provisions for "separation" than does the First Amendment). Can schools receiving public funds discriminate against students or teachers or janitors, based upon race, religion, disability, or sexual orientation? Must schools accepting vouchers accord staff members and students some minimal levels of due process?
Perhaps the thorniest issues involve accountability for performance and fiscal management. If taxes paid by all citizens are to flow to private schools, lawmakers arguably have a fiduciary duty to ensure the proper application of those dollars. (Since the early 1990s, for example, more than 700 for-profit schools in the nation's higher education system have been removed from the federal loan program because of misuse of federal tax funds.) How shall "proper application" in the case of voucher schools be defined? In Ohio, some voucher schools were located in facilities that did not meet fire or other safety standards. John Witte points out that public schools must be accountable to the public that both uses the schools and pays for them, while private schools are primarily accountable to their clients.13 How will that distinction change under vouchers?
Privatization raises accountability issues different from those involved when government is providing services directly.14 Much of what critics call bureaucratic and governmental inefficiency is really what Russell Hardin calls "institutional design that encapsulates the self-interest of government officials" and what less tactful observers call safeguards against corruption.15 Oversight mechanisms and institutional checks and balances protect the public purse.
In Milwaukee's program, voucher schools are not subject to the state's open-meetings or open-records laws, need not hire certified teachers (or even teachers with college degrees), are not required to publicly divulge salaries or benefits of teachers, need not administer statewide achievement tests, and do not have to release test scores, attendance rates, or dropout rates to the public. This poses a classic privatization dilemma: if lawmakers impose too much regulatory red tape on participating schools, compliance costs will diminish the benefits a true market provides. Of course, without adequate information, neither taxpayers nor lawmakers will be able to evaluate an extremely expensive public initiative,16 and parents will have no meaningful basis for making the informed choices the program was intended to give them.
All these elements of the political ground war -- the factions, the partisan strategies, the constitutional and accountability debates -- are rooted in the historical and quintessentially American tension between individual rights and collective civic aspirations. The foregoing, necessarily sketchy, description of motives and tactics can be understood only as a manifestation of that enduring conflict.
The Air War: Political Philosophy and Public Education
Liberal democratic theory emphasizes the importance of the individual as an autonomous, rights-bearing being. Libertarian philosophy begins with the construct of a "social contract" by and among political equals. Independent persons knowingly and voluntarily trade certain of their rights and liberties for the promise that government will protect others. Because the state has an exclusive right to the use of coercive power, it is dangerous: the government that is powerful enough to protect is by definition powerful enough to oppress and exploit. Prudent people, recognizing this, will limit the reach of the state. "The theory of politics that emerges from the political literature of the pre-Revolutionary years rests on the belief that what lay behind every political scene, the ultimate explanation of every political controversy, was the disposition of power."17
Power, as Bernard Bailyn notes, was understood as compulsion by force. The central concern of the Bill of Rights was to protect the individual against the improper use of the coercive power of the state and the tyranny of the majority.
On the one hand, we cannot understand the American experience without understanding its libertarian roots; on the other hand, it is misleading to view American history only through the lens of radical individualism. Beginning with Aristotle, political theorists have described citizenship as first and foremost a sharing, a process of forming community around things held in common. This sharing and commonality have been as important to the American character as has our individualism. As Francis Kane has suggested, there are few public issues that do not presuppose a civic understanding of and broad agreement with a common purpose, a shared vision of the public good. This constant tension between notions of a public or common good and our commitment to the rights of the individual is a truism of constitutional law and political debate. As Kane notes,
The balancing of these two poles, at once repelling the state's unwarranted intrusion into the private lives of its citizens, and at the same time attracting those same citizens to the sweet joys and harsh sacrifices of community life, is what the American experiment is, in large measure, all about.18
In the last several years, renewed academic and popular concern about the health and importance of civil society and the communitarian "backlash" against the liberal democratic emphasis on individual rights have combined to focus attention on the importance Americans place on the public good and on the depth of our yearning for community.19 Robert Putnam of "Bowling Alone" fame and others have sparked a renewed interest in the importance of social capital: those features of social organization, such as networks, norms, and trust, that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit. In the face of an increasingly multicultural America, Stephen Macedo cautions:
Talk of diversity and difference too often proceeds without taking adequate account of the degree of moral convergence it takes to sustain a constitutional order that is liberal, democratic, and characterized by widespread bonds of civic friendship and cooperation.20
While civil libertarians caution against either/or communitarian formulations intended to justify a shift of power to the "collective,"21 many would nonetheless echo the sentiments John Haldane attributes to Aquinas:
Man stands in relation to society as a part to a whole; and every law is directed toward the establishment, maintenance, and improvement of the common good. The first is a familiar thesis of communitarianism -- the irreducibility of society as a unified substance that bestows a form of moral identity on its members. As a corrective to a radical corporatist reading, it is relevant to add that Aquinas also regards individual persons as complete substances. By implication, then, he rejects a dichotomy that bedevils current debates, that which regards persons as either parts of a greater whole -- society -- or else as preexisting individuals out of which society is formed. A way through lies in the direction of saying that persons are both wholes and parts -- wholes as selves, parts as social selves.22
Perhaps Will Kymlicka puts the issue most succinctly by asking the question: "What is the basis of social unity and political stability in a liberal state that contains significant ethnic [and, we might add, political and cultural] cleavages?"23 In many ways, Americans continue to struggle with the implications of Aristotle's original insight. If communities are created and sustained by the things we have in common, by mutual engagements that build social capital, then how do we transmit, support, and reinforce those essentials without infringing upon the liberties of individual citizens?
The balance we strike between the libertarian and communitarian ideals has both social and economic implications. Private property and a free-market economy are hallmarks of the individualism we protect; social welfare programs are concessions to the social capital/communitarian side of the equation.
Social capital cannot be categorized as a purely political or social phenomenon. It is also coming to be seen as a vital ingredient in economic development. There is mounting evidence that a "vigorous network of indigenous grassroots associations can be as essential to [economic] growth as physical investment, appropriate technology, or 'getting prices right.'"24 Social capital is thus a public good. Traditional economic theory suggests that public goods will be underprovided in a pure market economy. While pure public goods are rare, many pieces of the social infrastructure -- schools, parks, libraries -- have attributes of a public good. The central public policy implication of the idea of public goods is that the state must play a role in providing them. Joseph Stiglitz, senior vice president and chief economist for the World Bank, argues:
National public goods provide one of the central rationales for national collective action and for the role of government. Efficiency requires public provision, and to avoid the free rider problem, the provision must be supported by compulsory taxation.25
Voucher proponents will generally not dispute the classification of education as a public good and (save for the most ideological libertarians among them) do support a limited role for the state: the role of funder. Where they differ from proponents of a strong public education system is on the identity of the provider of those educational services. Proponents of privatization argue that the market can and should provide the educational services and that the government should enable individual families to purchase them. On a theoretical level, the voucher debate is one more instance of the tension between the libertarian insistence on market economics and individual choice and the communitarian preference for mechanisms to encourage social cohesion.
While most voucher proponents are not free-market libertarians, as the ground war demonstrates, the voucher movement began with the ideology of privatization, and it remains theoretically grounded there. In Shrinking the State, Harvey Feigenbaum, Jeffrey Hegin, and Chris Hamnett state that "privatization in the USA moved from an intellectual fringe to become a centerpiece in contemporary public policy debates" early in the Reagan years. They argue that privatization theory was an ideological redefinition and appropriation of nonpartisan, pragmatic practices that had long preceded it. They note that laissez-faire economics had become politically passé.
Unable to account for the rise and endurance of the welfare state, laissez-faire ideas had lost much of their capacity to explain, guide, and motivate. By applying economic principles to explain governmental behavior, the evolving theory of privatization provided a means to undercut the presumption that an expanded state reflected -- and could best carry out -- the pursuit of widely shared goals.26
John Chubb and Terry Moe were among the first and most influential advocates of school privatization. Their 1990 book, Politics, Markets, and America's Schools, argued that privatization was necessary to save schools from what they described as abysmal performance. The core of their theoretical argument is found in a sentence from their introductory chapter: "For reasons we will elaborate and document at length, the specific kinds of democratic institutions by which American public education has been governed for the last half-century appear to be incompatible with effective schooling."27
Although many commentators have challenged the data and methodology used by Chubb and Moe to paint their grim picture of America's schools,28 fewer have commented on their stated premise that "effective schooling" is to be measured by academic criteria only, that the "core academic mission" of our schools is to impart competency in the math, science, and language skills "so crucial to a future of sophisticated technology and international competition."29 That is, to the extent that schools are to provide a public good, privatization theory defines that good solely as achievement of a level of academic competence sufficient to sustain economic growth and make America competitive in the global marketplace.
Critics of educational privatization quarrel with this definition, arguing that before the state relinquishes control of the American educational apparatus, citizens must carefully consider the role schools are to play. If the "public good" requires more than the transmission of literacy and technical knowledge sufficient to support economic growth and individual self-sufficiency, if it requires instead the creation of a political community, a process of creating unum from our pluribus, then the utility of vouchers becomes problematic.
In 1996 the Twentieth Century Fund issued a report on school privatization, in which the authors noted that a voucher system, by giving funding directly to private individuals, means that "education ceases to be a collective public undertaking and becomes instead a private relationship between each family and its school. Schooling ceases to be part of the public sphere; no longer a public service, it becomes a consumable item."30
Voucher opponents such as Stephen Macedo argue that treating education as a "consumable" represents a significant break with the American civic tradition: "The last thing we should do, however, is to simply ignore or assume away the civic ambitions that have been at the core of public schooling from the beginning."31 And G. K. Chesterton wrote, in a famous 1902 essay, "America is the only nation in the world that is founded on creed." It is an observation that has been echoed many times since.
Ours was the first nation not to be based upon geography, ethnicity or conquest, but upon a theory of social organization. That theory -- that idea -- was incorporated in our constituent documents: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.32
In a diverse polity, knowledge of the creed and acceptance of the idea become the primary source of social cohesion. Traditionally, in America, the public schools have been the mechanism through which we have transmitted our creed. Benjamin Barber reminds us that "the 'public' in public schools means not just paid for by the public but procreative of the very idea of a public. Public schools are how a public -- a citizenry -- is forged."33
Barber defines the nature of the public good to be provided as an experiential one: not only must we be concerned with constitutional competence and civic literacy in an intellectual or pedagogical sense, he argues, but we must also provide environments that teach our young how to encounter, understand, and go beyond difference -- how to fashion American unity out of our incredible diversity. If we are to create and nourish social capital, we must demonstrate our commitment to equality by providing equal educational opportunity and our commitment to community by the process of learning together. Martha Minow would signal that commitment by ensuring that the common school remains the norm from which deviations are permitted.
Inculcation of the civic values of tolerance, equality, liberty, and democracy is defensible in a nation committed to and dependent upon these values. Schools that model these ideas are more likely to inculcate these values than schools departing from them. Such a model is best provided by the common public school, the school intended to afford children from all walks of life equal opportunities and a shared experience, even if a small percentage of families exercise their constitutionally protected right to elect religious or other private alternatives.34
The 19th-century crusade for common schools was, like America itself, an outgrowth of Enlightenment thought, particularly Enlightenment views about natural rights and political equality. Proponents of public schools stressed the need to produce educated citizens, to cement the fabric of the nation by ensuring that young people would share a common language, political culture, and set of values. Common schools would provide a civic infrastructure upon which would be built a polity with shared political traditions and beliefs. It was precisely this element of the public school mission that antagonized Catholics and others in the mid-19th century. "To a greater degree than many historical sources allow, some of the most basic and widely discussed conflicts around public schools have been the consequence of religious opposition to basic civic ideals."35
Clearly, the common school movement had economic roots as well: industrialization required a more literate workforce; urbanization required additional ways to supervise the young; immigrants required socialization. But it is equally important to note that "the animating ideology of the common school proclaimed that the public good could best be served by public, not private, education, because the moral and civic training of the young was the concern of all citizens, not just parents."36
At its intractable extremes, the voucher air war is a conflict between two long-standing elements of the American political tradition: our time-honored commitment to maximum personal choice and individual freedom on the one hand and our equally compelling belief in the importance of a common civic infrastructure and collective interests on the other. Debate over the voucher issue has become so contentious in large measure because it reflects these fundamentally opposed political philosophies.
All political issues are driven by a combination of ideology and political calculation. Ultimately, Americans will have to decide whether an embrace of vouchers will further or erode the public interest -- a determination that depends on our collective understanding of where our public interest lies and of the role we see for government.
The general ideology of privatization rests largely on a view of government as a provider of services for "customers" rather than as a shared enterprise of citizens.37 If government is, in fact, more than a serv-ice provider, if it is an important generator of social capital and an instrument of collective choice, then efforts at privatization will be measured by a different set of criteria.
In the persistent conflict between individual rights and the desire for community that has characterized our history, Americans have demonstrated a remarkable pragmatism. Despite occasional lurches to the left or right, we have clung to the liberal democratic ideal, refusing to embrace extremes of either libertarianism or collectivism.
In the continued absence of credible evidence that vouchers improve anything other than parental attitudes, and faced with a myriad of practical, fiscal, and constitutional concerns over their effects, it is debatable whether enthusiasm for vouchers as a new model for education will extend very far beyond their appeal to ideological libertarians and their undeniable utility as a wedge issue for conservative Republicans.
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