Many people who support education vouchers, which would allow public dollars to follow students to private schools, do so out of the best of motives. They believe that competition with private schools would encourage excellence in the public schools. Other people are concerned about fairness. Well-to-do parents already have choice: They can either move to an area where the public schools have a good reputation or send their kids to private schools. But what about poor families whose kids are stuck in bad neighborhood schools? Why shouldn't they have choice, too?
It's hard to fault concerns like these, even if the evidence shows that vouchers would not encourage excellence or ensure a better education for poor children. But many vouchers supporters have an entirely different agenda. For them, it's less a matter of improving public education than of terminating government support for education, whether public or private. As these people see it, government shouldn't pay for education; that's up to the families that use education. Only children whose parents can't afford to pay should get any assistance.
This idea of ending government support of education altogether is not a paranoid fantasy. It's actually proposed in a collection of articles on private school choice that was put out by an organization called the Heartland Institute and distributed to state legislatures across the country. Most of the articles offer the kind of how-to advice you'd want if you were mounting a voucher campaign. But in one of the articles, "The Case for Voluntary Funding of Education," Myron Lieberman lays out reasons for ending all government financing of education, "either directly, as [the government] currently does, or even indirectly, as it would under a voucher plan" and offers strategies to achieve this goal.
Lieberman knows that the idea of stopping government funding of education altogether is too radical to win wide support: In fact, he thinks it would turn most people off "Incremental load shedding" is another story -- that is, gradually putting the functions of public education into private hands so that parents come to bear the entire cost of educating their children.
For instance, gifted and talented and remedial instruction could be eliminated and taken over, for children whose families who could pay, by for-profit learning centers. Athletic programs, for which fitness centers offer a substitute, could go, and why not foreign languages, too? Bit by bit, government would be financing less and individual families more of their children's education.
Why would people be willing for the government to stop funding school programs? They'd probably think it was happening for budgetary reasons. But, Lieberman says, they need not know the real reason for the drying up of government funding: "If a case can be made for withdrawing government support, there is not need to relate it to broader objectives, if any. This ambiguity," Lieberman says, "is one of the strengths of an incremental approach to load shedding."
All theses changes could be made, Lieberman points out, quietly and gradually. No complicated legislation would be necessary; there would be no need of "agreement...or public debate." Because gradual load shedding could be carried out without even raising the issue of privatization, Lieberman prefers it to vouchers as a technique for ending government support of education. Still, according to Lieberman's logic, although going directly to load shedding may be preferable, vouchers will get you there anyway.
Say the government institutes a voucher system, and the voucher is worth a little less than a child's education actually costs. When public schools lose funding to private schools and some students take their chits and leave the public system, some schools will close and some services or programs will be cut. The more cuts are made, the more the quality of public education will suffer and the more kids will leave. In the meantime, private schools will be free to charge whatever they think they can. Some parents will be able to pay a large supplement. Other will have to send their kids to schools that accept the vouchers as payment -- and since the voucher is pegged below the actual cost of educating a child, these schools will be pretty lousy.
Suppose, as costs rise, the government freezes the voucher. Over a period of time, it will cover a smaller and smaller percentage of school charges, so even private school parents who were originally helped by vouchers will be hit. And suppose, then, the government announces that, in the interests of economy, people making over a certain amount are not eligible for vouchers. Public support for education will be gone, except, of course, for the indigent, who will be cared for in the educational equivalent of charity wards.
Could this really happen? How many people are talking about getting rid of government support for education? The potential constituency, as Lieberman makes clear, is enormous: the majority of the population. Unmarried people, small, relatively well-off families, retirees -- some of these groups may now be on the voucher bandwagon but in the long run, Lieberman believes, they'll all think it is in their best interest to get rid of all tax support for education, whether public or private. If that happens -- well, it won't just be the people who depend on public education who'll be stuck.