With the coming of the new year, we're going to have a new U.S. secretary of education. We hope we'll also have a new chance to move ahead on the commitment that President Bush and the governors made at the Education Summit last year. But there are some troubling signs that we may be in for a regression to the bad, old days of Ronald Reagan, William Bennett and private school choice.
Lamar Alexander, the president's nominee for education secretary, is not one of these signs - he's a promising choice for the job. As governor of Tennessee, he demonstrated his belief in the importance of public education. And as chairman of the National Governors' Association, he was the first to bring the governors together in an effort to improve the nation's schools.
But though Lamar Alexander is identified with the cause of furthering public education, we're hearing rumors that there is about to be a change in course. According to these rumors, the administration is going to turn its back on public education in favor of some kind of choice or voucher system that would allow parents to use public school funds to pay for private schools. I hope that's not true -- not only because such a system would shift attention and resources from improving public schools but also because it wouldn't give people the kind of choice they imagine.
In principle, choice is a fine thing, Americans cherish their freedom to choose where they want to live, what church they will worship in, what stores they will patronize. And public school choice, which allows students to choose the public school that they want to attend, has worked well in some places. But schemes that allow public funds to pay for education in private schools are a different beast all together; they give the real choice to the schools, not to the parents or kids.
Supporters of these schemes hold out glittering promises. They tell parents that their kids won't be limited to public schools. They'll be able to choose "the best," just the way the rich folks do. And parents won't even have to pay; that will be the taxpayers' responsibility.
So people get the idea that picking a school will be something like shopping at Macy's with a big, fat gift certificate. They'll find lots of different brands, colors, sizes and prices -- and they'll choose exactly what they want. But the kind of school choice that we're hearing about now will be more like applying to join a private country club than shopping at Macy's.
Private country clubs don't accept you merely because you have filled out an application form and can pay the fees. A club that needs more warm bodies might be happy to get money on the barrel. But in an exclusive club, the membership committee will ask itself how you'll fit in with the crowd that already belongs. And if they any doubts, they'll probably decide that it's not worth the risk of losing a bunch of old members to get one new member. You can choose a country club, but the real choice is the club's.
That's how admission to private school works, and that's how it would continue to work, even if these schools got public funds. Private schools set their own admissions policies, and they admit or reject students who apply on the basis of these policies. Excellent schools ( and the supply is limited) are very selective; mediocre and lousy ones are not. But whatever their quality, the schools are the ones that do the choosing.
So people who are dazzled by the idea of private school choice need to get rid of the notion that they would necessarily be able to choose the school their children attended. Private schools would continue to select their students just the way they always have. Only now, taxpayers, instead of parents, would be footing the bill. And private schools would continue operating just the way they always have. If the public didn't like something about it -- well, they'd have no more say than they do over country clubs.
Supporters of private-school choice schemes also like to talk about how their proposal would bring the benefits of the free market system to our schools. Interestingly, most businesses have devoted their attentions to improving public schools rather than working for private schools choice. They know that the public schools have worked well throughout most of our nation's history and could be made to do so again. And even though public education now needs a radical overhaul, businessmen know, too, that restructuring an institution is a better bet than trashing it altogether and starting again.
We hear that private school choice will be a panacea, but our experience with complex human institutions should warn us to be skeptical about such claims. There are always unanticipated consequences, some of them very unpleasant. Who foresaw that health insurance, which was supposed to help people stay healthy, also would create a disastrous inflation in health care cost? And, who knew that welfare, designed to help poor people get on their feet, also would encourage welfare dependency and the growth of single-parent families?
President Bush has selected a good man to carry forward the agenda he and the governors established with the national education goals. But the president also ought to re-read the goals he helped write. The last time I checked, private school choice was not among them.