"Eager to Please, Bush Gets Facts Wrong," was the International Herald Tribune's headline about President Bush's misrepresentation of his voucher plan to a Catholic school audience in Philadelphia last week.
When the President told a sympathetic gathering about his plan -- which would give $1000 for tuition to students attending private or parochial schools -- he assured them several times that the program was not tied to income. He told a mother of eight that no families would be excluded from the program: "This program that we're talking about today, there is no means testing. A family like yours would be covered." But a means test is basic to the proposal the President calls the "centerpiece" of his domestic program. And as his aides later admitted, the vouchers would be available only to families earning under about $40,000.
The President also neglected to point out how limited the program is in scope. Though he compared it to the GI bill, which was available to all veterans, his program would make vouchers available to a very small percentage of students -- 500,000 in all. If all the eligible students in Philadelphia, where Mr. Bush was speaking, got a voucher, one-third of the funds for the entire country would be exhausted.
School choice sounds so simple, but it isn't. Even President Bush doesn't understand his own choice program. Recently, he proposed this $500-million, means-tested program that would give $1000 vouchers to 500,000 students -- some already in private and parochial schools and some in public schools -- to help pay their private school tuition. (Five-hundred-dollar vouchers could go to kids who stayed in public school though how this would work is a mystery.)
But in Philadelphia on Monday, President Bush seemed to promise the $1000 to all the kids currently in private schools, no matter what their family income. That would be a $4- to $5-billion program before a single cent went to students now in public schools. If a substantial number of public school students took advantage of the program, the cost would escalate by additional billions of dollars. This would be a huge infusion of federal dollars into education, but would it improve education? What are some of the likely consequences? How would parents exercise choice? There's no evidence that the President understands what his program would cost or that he has looked for answers to any of these questions about what choice would achieve.
A good place to find answers to these and other questions is the June 1992 issue of the journal Education Policy. The entire issue is devoted to articles by seven authors with differing views on school choice. I recommend it highly to those who want to go beyond simplistic slogans and political pronouncements.
One of the authors, John Witte, a political scientist who teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, provides a broad examination of "Public Subsidies for Private Schools." Witte, who favors careful experimentation with choice, offers an excellent review of the claim that private and parochial schools do a better job than public schools. Describing an influential study which concluded that private schools were superior because private school students were able to answer one or two more questions on a 115-item test than kids in public schools, Witte asks, "whether it makes sense to consider overturning our existing education system" for a gain as trivial as that. His review of research on the question concludes that "superior" private school results are minuscule and not worth taking seriously.
Another article, by Geoffrey Walford of Aston University, Birmingham, England, deals with "Educational Choice and Equity in Great Britain." Walford makes a number of important points. For example, he says that, unless you're in a baby-bust period where there are plenty of empty seats in schools, choice will result in a large number of applications for a small number of available seats. It is the schools, not the parents, that will get to choose.
Walford also talks about the effect school choice has had on "bad" schools in Great Britain and on the kids who still go there: "Well-motivated parents and children were able to opt out of local working-class schools because they saw them as undesirable, but by doing so, they ensured that their judgment was likely to become a reality for those children who remained."
When parents take their kids out of "bad" schools and send them to "good" schools, what criteria will they use to determine what is good and bad? Walford cites research that found "the positive factor mentioned most frequently (when not prompted) was that the child wanted to go to a particular school" -- and these were 10-year-olds making the choice. Parents were also asked "why they thought their child wanted to go to a particular school. The most important reason was simply that the child wished to go to the same school as his or her friends or relations. Other reasons give were the good sports facilities, its convenient location or because it was single sex. None mentioned academic reasons."
President Bush is trying to sweet-talk parents with his offers of public money to every child who wants to go to private or parochial school. He doesn't seem to know that the cost of vouchers would be astronomical or that there's not a shred of evidence they would improve education.